Pointless griping as a coping mechanism for lack of fish

One of the trade-offs to living in cultural purgatory is the lack of a decent local newsstand. When Wal-Mart serves as your community's primary source of the printed word, well, it can't get much worse than that. Which is why I jump at the opportunity to perform menial and boring tasks if said tasks get me out of town and in the vicinity of a decent book store magazine rack.

Yesterday found me performing such an out-of-town task, and as luck would have it I was able to briefly stop and browse at a pretty good regional chain book store. I picked up a copy of The Drake, both the Pointing Dog and Retriever Journal and I scored a cheap used copy of Roy Tanami's Angling the World. No Gray's to be had, but I'll pick up a copy next week when I'm in ye olde home town.

But as I was looking over the hunting, fishing and shooting section of the newsstand I have to admit that, as a reader, I was overcome with a palpable sense of despondency and as a writer I was hit with a feeling of outright impending doom.

You see, when I decided to jump from newspapers to full-time freelancing, Iwanted to focus on hunting, fishing, conservation and environmental issues but I had grand and wildly unrealistic visions of being a hook-and-bullet version of  Bill Bryson, Edward Abbey, Paul Theroux, Ian Frazier, Vonnegut, Thompson, etc., sort of a literary mash-up of some of my favorite authors and long-form magazine journalists.

I know, I know,  it was painfully cliched. What writer doesn't have such dreams, right? But even back then most hook-and-bullet mags weren't interested in anything that strayed from formula, so honestly, I don't know what the hell I was thinking. Sports Afield did have that brief and promising Terry McDonnell-led period back in the 90s when the masthead read like a who's-who of literary figures, but then it went all X-games and Men's Journal on us and eventually died a quiet and temporary death. Besides, I was still in college back then and focused mainly on bass fishing and happy hour two-fers at the local dive.

So when I did start freelancing, all those returned self-addressed stamped envelopes (writing is the only endeavor I know of in which you are required to pay for the bearing of your own bad news...) containing the form letter rejections taught me that when you live hand-to-mouth you better be ambidextrous. So I did. I  became a general, hand-to-mouth freelancer: I wrote for regionals, worked as a stringer for newspapers, even spent a number of years as a reporter for People magazine (that experience deserves a blog post of its own...).

Writing has always been a precarious way to make a living. No surprise there. But it's even more so now, because looking at the newsstand  makes you realize the very best outdoor writing to be had  now is found not (with few exceptions) in magazines (which pay) but online, through e-zines, blogs and forums (which, by and large, don't).

Why? Who knows? There was a very good discussion on the Upland Journal forum a few months ago that explored the question of  is the current state of bird-hunting literature and journalism stuffy, formulaic, boring and (for lack of a better term) old man-centric and perhaps could do with a little more Drake-like writing, maybe a This is Fly treatment.

I would argue that not only could bird hunting do with a little more alternative energy, but that all hunting and fishing print mags need to start taking some cues from the gonzo, freethinking elements of the flyfishing publishing world. I want to see a This Is Fly, Fish and Game. I want to see, as Suburban Bushwacker  recently put it perfectly, a "McSweeney's Afield". I want to see a conventional tackle version of The Flyfish Journal.

As a reader, I want to see that attitude of experimentation and creativity and good writing carried over into the general-interest outdoor mags.

Will I ever see it? Probably not, because for whatever reason, most magazine editors, publishers and owners cannot seem to grasp this simple formula: Give the reader a compelling reason to spend five bucks on a magazine, and he/she/it will. Build a magazine on the radical assumption that your readers have a minimum threshold of intelligence, a minimum length of attention span and aren't frightened by the possibility of having to think about what they're reading.

Set a bar, because if you shoot for the least common denominator moron demographic, that's exactly what you'll end up with. And looking over the newsstand yesterday, I saw a lot of lowest common denominator.

Maybe I'm just being a crabby old bastard. Today I was hoping to regale reader(s) with a tale of my first white bass (sandbass to us Okies and other southern types) on the fly rod. But here I sit griping about magazines and watching the cold rain come down...