The Miracle of Social Networking ... In a Deer Blind

On Saturday night I found myself alone.  Oh, don’t feel sorry for me.  Are you kidding?  Being alone is one of the last luxuries when you’re a man.

I was at the ranch, where I’m told we have a rash of spikes this year, spreading their vile seed around like so much poison.  Spikes are undesirable deer that, if left unchecked, can start to dominate your deer herd’s gene pool.  So during the hunting season we’ve been encouraging folks to hunt spikes.  I haven’t shot a deer in years –  I’m a terrible deer hunter, mainly because you have to sit still and be quiet and I’m not good at either of those.   Plus I have terrible eyesight, bad hearing, and I’m scared of blood.  Yeah, we’ve got a real badass over here.  But nevertheless I have nothing better to do so I decide to go sit in a blind for a few hours on a Saturday evening and see what I can scare up.

I didn’t see a single deer, probably because I had allergies and kept sneezing.  But I ended up scaring up something better than a spike, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Here’s what our deer blinds look like.  My grandfather built them in the 60s, and they’ve held up remarkably well.  They look like outhouses.  They’ve been there so long that deer just walk by them without notice.

Things were looking up when I entered the blind and found that there wasn’t a pack of raccoons using it as an eff shack – always a risk.  No spiders or wasps either.  In fact, all I found was a nice old dusty bottle of The Famous Grouse scotch, and a couple of nested solo cups, the bottom of which wasn’t too dirty.  So I settled into the airplane seat (vintage seat from a 1950s DC 3/C47 airplane ….. yeah, my granddad was a true badass), poured myself a scotch into a plastic cup, neat, and sneezed.   The scotch was hot and burned going down the throat, but it was smooth and it gave me a warm feeling in my stomach.  Then I looked out the window to enjoy the nice sunset.  Ah, nature. 

That got boring pretty quickly.  I look down and, what is this? A stack of old magazines.  The Smithsonian?  Who the hell was reading The Smithsonian in a deer blind?  That’s sacrilege.  Ah, but behind that was a Playboy from June 2006.  I thumb through it – not for the pictures, naturally, but an interview with Shepard Smith catches my eye – and I think, “Wouldn’t it be funny to take a selfy pic of me reading the Playboy, and Tweet it out with the caption:  “Deer hunting is hard work.”  Haha, get it?  I funny, right?  So I tweeted it from my @beerbizdaily account.

Well, within five minutes I get a Tweet back from my friend Eva Conner, a beer distributor from Florida who also owns a modeling agency, Michele & Group.  She tells me that the cover girl is one of their models, Kara Monaco, and she includes Kara on the Tweet.  Then, five minutes after that, I get a Tweet from Kara herself, who was Playboy’s 2006 Playmate of the Year.   “Awesome! ;)” she said.   Yes, that’s “awesome” with an exclamation point and a winking happy face, which is practically an invitation to the Playboy mansion as her date. 

Kara Monaco

So to recap, I’m sitting in a deer blind in the middle of nowhere.  I come across an old Playboy.  Ten minutes later, I’m tweeting with the girl on the cover.  This, my friends, is the magic of this modern age of social media.   This would not have happened even two years ago.  Amazing.