I Just Needed To See in the Dark, Instead I Learned How to Kill Someone With a Flashlight

I was digging through some boxes in the garage yesterday and came across a flashlight. Cool, I though to myself, I need one of these that works. Not two days prior I had dropped something on the floor in the house. The place where I live is so damn dark it’s like you’re in the Arctic in summertime or the Antarctic in winter or the reverse compliment of those two things, all year round. The point is it’s dark as fuck no matter the time of day. Because it is so dark if you ever drop anything smaller than 3 inches or so it’s basically gone until it gets sucked up by the vacuum cleaner or eaten by a cat and “found” in the litterbox sometime later.

It looked really sturdy and nice (see picture above). To me it seemed like the rolls Royce of flashlights, I had never seen one as slick or that felt as substantial. Turns out it’s really more of a Lexus, pretty and expensive but not quite elite level. I would soon learn however that this particular flashlight was more than just a flashlight, it was a tactical flashlight.

At that moment however I was still just trying to figure out how to get it to turn on. I had put three brand new “D” batteries, the Arby’s Max roast beef of the battery world, in so I figured the thing was going to be bright. The previous batteries had leaked a little bit so first I had to clean out a some acid and corrosion but within minutes I was ready to illuminate the shit out of some darkness. I press the button and nothing.

Click, click, click,click..turn on damn you. A couple soft thwacks against the wall and then like an angel from heaven, illumination, whitish, strong, and clean. I think I let out a soft gasp. It was truly beautiful, a site to behold, and bright as fuck. At that point I figured I’m good. I have myself a working flashlight for the first time in a while, and it’s pretty sweet as an added bonus. I go to turn it off. Click. Huh? Its still on but now it’s like doing some pulsing thing turning on and off rapidly, click, now it’s pulsing faster, almost like a strobe light, for a second I have a flashback to my younger days as a club hopping asshole. Whoa this is nuts, click. Its off. The dimness of the house rushes back in. What the fuck was that all about?

Now the damn thing won’t turn back on no matter what I do but I’m so into the flashlight at this point I am determined to learn more. So like most would no doubt do, I get on my bike and peddle on over to the local library, hit the card catalog, find the appropriate section of reference using the convenient and self evident Dewey decimal system, God bless you Dewey, and then I’m off to the third floor reference stacks. Just kidding, I picked up my iPad and went to the ULINE webpage, found the flashlight in question, and read up on it.

Right away I figured out that it had a strobe light function (see above) though mine seemed to have two speeds, possibly a newer model? I was also a little bit uncomfortable holding it after reading the description. While accurate, 12 inch long, beefy size, is not exactly the most heteronormative way one might describe said flashlight. Putting my homophobia aside for a moment I grasped its long, thick, and hard shaft even tighter, then I relaxed my grip some and ran my fingers down its length, stroking it softly as I smiled to myself. Nothing gay about this thing, Nothing at all.

My heterosexuality sufficiently established I soldiered on. The ULINE website was fine but it did not really have much information aside from the most basic. In addition, despite now knowing more about my flashlight and its operation then any other flashlight I had ever owned by a long shot, it still wasn’t working right. It would only turn on about every five or sixth time I clicked the power button. Plus I had to constantly smack it up against something or unscrew the cylinder from the back, then screw it back in just right. Once again I felt my hetersoexuality threatened as smacking and screwing a beefy 12 inch shaft is not something I am normally into. At this point I knew exactly what I had to do, where I must go, Youtube, home of some of the most useful and useless instructional, cat, and cat instructional videos ever created.

When I did a search using the terms “broken ULINE tactical flashlight” I was amazed at the number of returned hits. Wow, I thought to myself, this is one popular flashlight, that has to be a good sign. Along with a myriad of options to choose from that promised “easy and quick” fixes for common tactical flashlight issues a large number of videos featured large, bearded, very white men in camouflage. They had titles like “How to use a Tactical Flashlight for Self Defense” , “How to use Threat Redirection with the Tactical Flashlight.’ and “Flashlight as Your Best Defense”. Intrigued I clicked through a few of them. It turns out that in addition to producing a mighty powerful beam of light the tactical flashlight makes one hell of a potent weapon. The model I had was said to be excellent for “busting skulls”, “breaking teeth”, and “crippling opponents”. Holy shit I realized, I now possess what might best be described as the Mona Lisa of severe damage inducing night banishing badassery. Feeling manlier by the second I watched a few more, and then even more after that. Over and over it went, all afternoon and into the early evening. In a few short hours I had listened to more insane white ragers talking about the imminent arrival of blue hatted UN interlopers and how we must defeat them, than in my entire career as a thrash metal mosh pit aficionado.

Some of the suggested techniques seemed reasonably easy and I might even remember one or two. The next time I am confronted in a alley by dark skinned immigrants with foreign sounding names and I have left my gun at home (note: this has never happened and I do not own any guns), I am not going to piss my pants, hand over my wallet, whimper like a girl, and offer to give each “the best blowjob of their life” if they just let me live. No sir, assuming I am carrying my ULINE tactical flashlight, I intend to charge straight toward the mother fuckers, its beefy 12 inch shaft pulsing in my hand as I double click the power button. Then with a scream of animal rage I shall proceed to bust skulls and knock out some teeth. Who’s sucking dick now asshole? Who is sucking dick now? The irony of the flashlight both literally banishing the darkness and punishing the darkie at the same time does not escape me. The phallic symbolism of it only adds to the sense of sweet justice. No doubt those immigrants come from some conservative country where sicko religious freaks and ball-less politicians rail against homosexuals with the support of the vast majority of their populace. Luckily in America we keep the homosexual bashing on the streets where it belongs, with the real Americans not some pinko commie judges in Washington D.C. like a bunch of fucking hijabs from Iran. Damn, did I just say that? Guess those videos must have really gotten to me.