To me, there’s nothing like getting up ahead of the sun on Thanksgiving morning, hiking deep into the woods and squatting in frozen silence to watch for a deer to kill with my rifle.

There’s nothing like it because I don’t do it. On Thanksgiving, I like to sleep until noon and the only thing I have a desire to kill is any person who tries to convince me that the Macy’s Day Parade is entertaining.

Or that turnips are edible.

Don’t get me wrong. Hunting is a fine tradition enjoyed by millions of people who are perfectly willing to sacrifice their fingers to the cold in order to blast an animal that can then be proudly displayed on the hoods of their cars.

Me, I quit the sport after two or three times in the woods many years ago. The people I went out with were just too damn serious about it and would not let me do the things I normally enjoy, such as smoking, blasting my boombox, practicing with cymbals, etc.

My hunting companions were always whisper-screaming at me in that hunting season tone, which is just slightly louder than the sound of clouds colliding in the sky.

“Stop whistling, moron! And douse yourself with this deer urine to mask that scent of Hai Karate and Boone’s Farm.”

Oddly, deer urine proved to be a more desirable scent than Hai Karate and I made it my regular cologne for many years.

Eventually, my friends stopped asking me to roam the woods with them and inserted me into a tree stand, clearly hoping I would freeze to death or get carried away by eagles.

What joy, the tree stand. There’s no room to pace, so you have to squat like some mystic in subzero meditation. Within three minutes, your core body temperature falls to two degrees. Your eyes scan the same patch of woods for so long, you eventually go mad and start seeing things around every tree.

“Guys! Hey guys! There’s a dinosaur over here! Do I shoot it? And hey, look! A clown juggling midgets! How cool!”

Why more people are not hauled out of tree stands in straitjackets, I’ll never know.

To the people I hunted with, I was a handicap. It was as though someone forced them to prowl the woods with bicycle horns strapped to their shoes or to carry guns that would eject comical flags with the word “BANG” when they were fired.

They were astounded by my lack of commitment, those game-seeking friends of mine. In the nightclubs, I was the perfect wing man, using bad pickup lines to flush out attractive females so that my buddies could make their plays.

But that prowess did not translate in the woods and my buddies lamented that I would never experience the awesome joy of dropping a deer. The kicker was this: Had I spotted a buck instead of a midget-juggling clown along the tree line, there is very little chance I would have shot it. I was not at risk of starving to death, after all, and if I wanted meat, I could get it at the butcher shop. No deer had ever openly insulted my mother and none owed me money.

I would have been more inclined to crawl down from the tree stand and befriend the deer, instituting an agreement upon which I would warn the animal of approaching hunters and he would agree to come to the city from time to time and smite my enemies with hearty kicks to their groins.

A moot point, all of it. Because I never saw a deer while hunting, although I saw many tree stumps that looked like deer after staring at them without blinking for three hours. Those stumps also looked like humpback whales, vacuum cleaners and Richard Nixon.

The forest is a strange place when you have time to let your mind wander.

I eventually quit the recreation altogether, though I still went to hunting camp each year. There, I was an essential part of the unit, responsible for drinking the last of the beer while everyone was out in the woods, creating fresh and filthy new jokes and asking, “Did you get anything?” every time those saps came back from the woods frozen and with big, fat nothing to show for it.

Ah, hunting memories. Although I don’t indulge in the sport, I admire those of you who do. There are few things as ancient within us as the battle of man versus beast, the quest for sustenance and survival.

Just don’t invite me out on Thanksgiving morning because I have other plans. I’m having dinner with a deer friend of mine who occasionally comes to the city to kick people in their groins. He’s a little bit Rambo, a little bit Bambi. I believe I will call him Rambi. Call me and I’ll sell you an ounce of his pee for five dollars.

Or should I say five bucks?

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can share your hunting hallucinations with him at [email protected].