Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Time Travel Tuesday

               Rockin' the short shorts and mullet, and almost certainly delinquent, somewhere in 1986

Because Throwback Thursday is just too routine...

An excerpt from a tongue-in-cheek, semi-autobiographical project I sometimes work on when the fancy strikes me. A little first-person memoir, a little travelogue, a little non-fiction socio-cultural observational reportage about a piscatorial subject near to my heart. Who knows, maybe someday I'll hammer it into a book proposal.


On the morning of April 21, 1986, a phone call was placed to the junior high school attendance office in Cretinous*, Oklahoma, a sleepy, forgettable little hamlet in which junked cars slowly rusting on cinder blocks were a much-admired measure of wealth; the kind of place where drinking beer from your front porch sofa while picking ticks off the dog and commenting on the olfactory and aural qualities of each others farts was the preferred means of entertainment on those evenings when professional wrestling wasn’t on the television.

But in addition to doing its part to produce America’s future Honey Boo Boo demographic, Cretinous, Oklahoma was also surrounded by innumerable ponds and small lakes teeming with a gluttonous, ill-tempered brute of a fish that, much like the anglers who pursued it, would eat absolutely anything it could fit into its maw. Said fish was the reason for the phone call to Cretinous Junior High that long-ago morning.

“Yes, hello, this is Chad Love’s father. I was just calling to let you know that Chad won’t be in school today. We’re attending his aunt’s funeral. Poor woman, she died in a tragic sheep-dipping accident. Chad’s quite distraught over it, she was his favorite aunt.”

A pause. Something being said on the other end of the line. “No, no, his grandmother was last week, God rest her soul, she never should have been allowed on the tractor. This week is his aunt. Yes, it has been a rough couple of weeks for all of us.  Yes, yes, thank you for the kind words, and Chad should be back to school tomorrow. Goodbye.”

My "father", who was two years my senior, and who had a preternaturally deep voice for a seventeen-year-old, hung up, turned to me and said, “OK, they bought it. Grab the rods and let’s get the hell outta here.”

Thus was the American educational system denied yet another day – in a long, long list of days - in the life of a lost and obsessed soul. I didn’t know it at the time, but that same basic pattern of subterfuge and avoidance of responsibility would be repeated endlessly throughout an adolescence and young adulthood spent almost entirely in the pursuit of scrounging gas money for whatever smoking wreck one of us happened to be driving at the time. We needed just enough to get us to the nearest body of water, and possibly back.

And while my lack of ambition, foresight, or concern for my future would, later in life, doom me to an existence of poverty and unrealized potential, I, of course, had no way of knowing that at the time, because I was young, stupid, and having too much fun. There were certainly worse ways to grow up.

*not its real name, but probably should be...



Monday, July 13, 2015

Yearly Rejection, 2015 Edition

                                                 I am not here. Nor will I be this fall...

Thank you for applying for the Controlled Hunts. Unfortunately, you have not been selected for a permit this year. If you feel you have reached this message in error, please return to the 'Search Page' and reenter your information.

NOTE: Information used on the 'Search Page' must match the data on the Controlled Hunts Application.

See you next year!
 

Sincerely,
Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation 


Well, shit. No Wichita Mountains wapiti for me this year. I was really hoping for some cheap elk meat. Or even expensive elk meat. Any elk meat, really. If I were a twit, I guess this is where I'd tack on some appropriate hashtag, like #oneunluckysumbitch, or maybe  #screwthisimmovingtomontana.




Saturday, July 4, 2015

'Merica...


I'm not much into Facebook/Instagram/Twitter memes, but I kinda liked this one. Happy 4th of July, fellow 'Mericans...

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Carptastic Glass



Still digging the Cabela's CGR, and still digging glass in general, perhaps because the first fly rod I ever picked up and caught (totally accidentally) a fish on, was the very glass-like original Fenwick HMG graphite six-weight that is still my all-time favorite rod.

I know it's crass, poser flyfishing hipsterism to proclaim love for both fiberglass and carp in the same paragraph, but besides the obvious fact that I'm a large, fleshy, unrepentant Oklahoma Bubba (which automatically disqualifies me from hipster flyfishing membership, anyway) I'm also just about the most bumbling, clueless, incompetent, untrendy, uncool wannabe fly angler you'll ever meet (I don't own a single piece of Simms gear or Howler Brothers clothing, seriously).

Oh, I try. I really do. I read the Drake, but I don't understand half the shit those bearded hippie weirdos are talking about, not really. And whenever I find myself in trendy, photogenic mountain towns on summer vacation, I seek out fly shops in which to skulk (I prefer the term "hang out"), hoping to pick up on the mannerisms, the patois, and the style of the modish, surfer-like flyfishing bros who all look just like the lead singer of some hairy indie folk group. I try to watch a few of the approximately 1.5 million earnest, slo-mo-infused flyfishing lifestyle films on Vimeo, but frankly, many of them bore the shit out of me because they're so derivative. And because I'm jealous.

So I'm really not trying to be "that way." Nope, I do have good, honest redneck excuses for both the glass and the carp love. I like the glass not because I'm trying to be pretentious, but because  I - a totally self-"taught" flycaster - suck so badly at casting that the forgiving nature of the glass tends to mask my casting atrocities. And it's cheap. At least the CGR is. I got mine for about $75 on sale. The 7/8 weight CGR  is on sale right now for $65, and I'm having a really hard time not buying one.

As for the carp, I live on the southern plains. I don't fish for carp because it's fashionable to fish for carp. I fish for carp because they're just about the only damn fish available to me, especially on our local rivers and ponds in the dead of summer. And because carp are awesome, of course. I'd still fish for them even if I didn't have to. Carp are, to me, a lot like Sriracha sauce: Yes, they both may be insufferably trendy, but just because they're trendy doesn't mean they're not still great. 

* All pejorative references to the Drake are purely tongue-in-cheek. It's a pretty cool rag, and one of the few mags to which I still subscribe, even though I'm way too damn old to get much of it.