The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Two men stood next to an end cap in the hunting aisle of Mills Fleet Farm. After a few minutes of looking at the duck calls on display, the men decided to open a few boxes and test them out, right there in the middle of the store. The men drew a series of quick breaths in and out, doing some sort of hyperventilation jig. Instantly, an orchestra of honking and quacking erupted, and the primal sounds of waterfowl burst throughout the entire store. After a few back and forth repetitions, the duo quickly turned into a duck quacking jam band. They listened intensively for the subtle differences between the duck calls, some of which had names like "The Bachelorette" and "The Smooth Talker." This one has more of a wet quack. That one had more toot than hoot. This one has a great warble. When they were done testing all of the duck calls, the two men casually strolled out of the hunting section like the whole episode never even happened.

I stood a few aisles over, the sound of a thousand angry birds ringing in my ears. The other Fleet Farm patrons hardly even noticed, though. Mills Fleet Farm is a store, after all, where a shopper can not only openly blast out some ear splitting duck calls, but purchase a shotgun, equine tapeworm paste, Levi jeans, and the biggest bucket of cheese puffs you've ever seen. Heck, there was another end cap that displayed 26 different varieties of Little Debbie snacks. That is freedom dipped in chocolate, glazed with caramel, shrink-wrapped, and put on a shelf.

Twice a year my family takes a pilgrimage (out of necessity) south down 35W to shop at the Mills Fleet Farm in Lakeville. I work a laborious blue collar job and have a habit of destroying my work clothes; the knees blown out of my Carhart pants, hooded sweatshirts and long underwear soiled beyond repair, and my work shoes developing an odor my wife likes to call "The Smell of Death." I often need replacements, and so, twice a year, Fleet Farm is my oasis.

After the two men left the hunting aisle, my son Murphy asked if we could try the duck calls. I said sure, but was somewhat leery because I am by no means a hunter. I picked up a duck call named "The Double Nasty." I blew into it with every ounce of breath in my lungs. I expected to hear a triumphant chortle of happy duck noises, just like the ones blasted out by the two men before me. But since I'm such a Citidiot, what I got instead was the sound of a wheezing asthmatic duck and that had possibly swallowed a kazoo. My son looked on with a dejected Charlie Brown face.

Luckily, my lame duck call moment dissipated when Murphy spotted the wall of deer lures behind us. There were chemical baits for sale that were used to attract bucks to an area for ease of hunting. The most popular product was labeled "Tink's Doe-in-the-Rut," a potion made from live whitetail doe in their estrous cycle. The picture on the box was a drawing of a buck with huge antlers that had his nose shoved up the backside of a female deer. To a four- year old boy (and his ignoramus father), there is nothing funnier than animals sniffing each other's crotches.

After I picked up a new pair of double kneed Carhart work pants and industrial strength work gloves, my family cruised the store. My wife found a product on display labeled "Anti Monkey Butt Powder." Sarah read the advertisement on the cardboard display, nodded her head in agreement with the information provided, and handed me a bottle of the guaranteed sweat-reducing powder.

"You have itchy Monkey Butt," she announced. What a sweetheart.

In the camouflage clothing section, we found some not-so-sexy camo lingerie. I picked a blaze orange silk nightie off the rack and mockingly gave it to her. Sarah looked seasick.

"Oh, come on," I said. "We can pretend I'm hunting you."

"Yuck," she replied. "Can I at least wear the green camo lingerie so I can hide from you?"

We wrapped up our shopping spree the same way we end every family shopping spree: in the toy aisle. Since we live in a super liberal south Minneapolis neighborhood, a place where you're considered a communist if you don't have a rain barrel hooked up to your house, the local toy stores usually only stock wooden toys that are handmade by Norwegian elves. But at Fleet Farm, my son got to look at "American Sportsman" action figures with names like "Bow Hunter Ann" and "Rifle Hunter Dan." The rugged figurines came with guns and daggers and plastic wild turkeys to shoot. We ended up buying the relatively safe, Nerf-style "suction tip blow gun" because after all, what boy wouldn't want that?

As we drove back to Minneapolis, we passed a parade of state and local police alongside menacing black SUVs. It was John McCain's motorcade, heading to a Lakeville rally (the one where a Lakeville woman called Barack Obama an Arab and a terrorist). On instinct, I rolled down my window and flipped John McCain's motorcade the finger.

Now, that's one bird call I can do.