tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49722544016649666992024-03-17T22:04:04.536-05:00The Mallard of DiscontentWinging along at an altitude somewhere between the Bluebird of Happiness and the Chicken of Depression... random esoterica from writer Chad Love celebrating the joys of fishing, hunting, books, guns, gundogs, music, literature, travel, lonely places, wildness, history, art, misanthropy, scotch and the never-ending absurdity of life.Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.comBlogger496125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-84176605663307999072023-09-28T13:40:00.005-05:002023-09-28T13:46:40.436-05:00Back From the Dead, Sort Of...<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjQnR8P9UZc0ca7Mto4q_-AegjJ-fMHKK6WZdu1CHp0_4SfNPEZrW8eM9VkXJ7tvizx36rSoxZxtXAxx79O2vkNvkUuP3LyI3h06ab3we0IXJb9O22EviKzKAa2ES9f2Qfhsh06fYghW3fj21XosLw1AlQm0HlrpQvTo_n-YrypPNjttmoZjuVSOGFhUw/s4032/IMG_4826.heic" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjQnR8P9UZc0ca7Mto4q_-AegjJ-fMHKK6WZdu1CHp0_4SfNPEZrW8eM9VkXJ7tvizx36rSoxZxtXAxx79O2vkNvkUuP3LyI3h06ab3we0IXJb9O22EviKzKAa2ES9f2Qfhsh06fYghW3fj21XosLw1AlQm0HlrpQvTo_n-YrypPNjttmoZjuVSOGFhUw/w480-h640/IMG_4826.heic" width="480" /></a></div><br /><p>Wow, according to the date of my last post it has been over seven years since last I graced this blog with my dulcimer words. Quite a lot has occurred in that time, and I'm skeptical if anyone even still reads blogs, including me. I can't remember the last time I sat down and read an actual blog post. </p><p>Which is a shame. I fear I've missed a lot of good writing.</p><p>But times change, people change, reading habits change — or die altogether — and life moves on.</p><p>Sometimes, however, you want a little tickle of the past. Or you want to re-connect with old readers (however many there may still be) and let them know where they can find you these days.</p><p>Which is why I'm here. </p><p>If I'm honest, I'm not sure how often — if at all — I'll post here (maybe every now and then if I want to feel nostalgic and write something I know no one will see...) but just in case there were a few diehard holdouts who still have the old mallard on their blog roll, I did want to let you know that I have started writing for pleasure (and possibly future very small profit) over at <a href="https://chadlove.substack.com/">https://chadlove.substack.com/</a>.</p><p>I also have an Instagram account at <a href="https://www.instagram.com/dispatchesfromnowhere/">dispatchesfromnowhere</a> that I've had for a while now, and there's some pretty decent stuff on there, if I may brag a little. But I've been missing longer-form writing and so I am slowly trying to transition all my writing to Substack, which is better suited to that sort of wordsmithing.</p><p>My account/newsletter is free, so if you'd care to sign up I'd love to have you. Eventually, as I get back into the rhythm of writing for my own dime I may try out the subscription model, but for now I'm simply using it as a platform for my words, much like the steadfast old Mallard of Discontent did so well for so many years.</p><p>And if I'm writing to an empty audience and all I hear is the sound of my own voice echoing back to me, well, that's OK, too. </p><p>I always did love lonely places...</p>Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-69838103524010407622016-05-16T11:03:00.001-05:002016-05-16T11:04:30.387-05:00Migration...Yes, it really has been three months since last I blogged. I have, however, been working (sporadically, and with much gnashing of teeth and muttering of obscenities) on figuring out how I want to continue with the blog, if at all.<br />
<br />
The good news, for the three or four who still occasionally check in here, is that I'm not killing the blog. The bad news is, I am moving it to Wordpress, possibly changing the name, and tweaking it a bit, into more of an author website/blog, although in the beginning (at least until I figure out how to navigate and use Wordpress) it'll probably still look pretty much like your standard blog rather than an actual website.<br />
<br />
Why am I doing it? Well, for one I thought the blog was - if I'm honest - looking a bit stale and dated. In addition, the Blogger template, while stable and easy to use, has very little flexibility to change or modify the look or function of the blog. It's very limiting. Three, since writing and editing are how I sporadically pay the bills, I wanted a blog that would also serve as a decent-looking author website, or at least have the flexibility to incorporate those elements as I grow more comfortable with Wordpress.<br />
<br />
I'll admit, it's somewhat bittersweet thing for me, as I've met many interesting people thanks to this obscure little blog, and a few that have turned into good friends. But after seven years and 515-odd posts, I just thought it was time to try something a little different, on the surface if not in essence. <br />
<br />
My plan once I get the site up and running is to slowly start transferring some selected old content from here over to Wordpress. Once that's finished, I'll probably do one last blog post here to redirect users to the new site, and then leave it as a static site.<br />
<br />
I'm not quite ready for that, yet, but I'll keep you posted...Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-78905300553613107252016-02-17T03:56:00.002-06:002016-02-17T03:56:54.880-06:00Blog Changes...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghe1s6hf_l8aVPKrt_V4a5aNt1y0fmvdDgHFTleNUQqzpQdlZQnWgcKF_y55r3Ne9Lv4n0i2B9ZSAKaLQXJNFTDNlRrChzJrBflfgYfy9eIyzgOVC_cXbvtpWyazCkh-zOxYJ11ydGlKo/s1600/NASA_Mars_Rover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="512" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghe1s6hf_l8aVPKrt_V4a5aNt1y0fmvdDgHFTleNUQqzpQdlZQnWgcKF_y55r3Ne9Lv4n0i2B9ZSAKaLQXJNFTDNlRrChzJrBflfgYfy9eIyzgOVC_cXbvtpWyazCkh-zOxYJ11ydGlKo/s640/NASA_Mars_Rover.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
I feel a bit like one of those interplanetary probes that, after having long since been given up for lost, sends out a short blip to let mission control know I'm still kicking... <br />
I wouldn't blame anyone if they assumed the blog was dead and gone, but I promise it's not.<br />
It has, however, been a strange, busy, and topsy-turvy year for me, and I just haven't had the time, or - if I'm honest - the inclination to keep the blog up like I used to. Combine that with the fact that I've been messing around with all that other stuff (See above. Facebook, etc.) and the blog has, sadly, been left to suffer alone and forlorn (some of you have been keeping up with me on FB, and for that I thank you).<br />
However, I'm currently in the process of transitioning back into full-time freelancing (yep, I've been a corporate drone for the past year) and so the blog will be getting some much-needed attention, maybe even a mild redesign both in terms of looks and purpose.<br />
Stay tuned...it may be a bit uneven for a while as I get back into the swing of it and figure out just how and what, exactly, I want the blog to be (or even where I want it to be, in terms of platform/hosting) but we'll see where it goes. I can, however, tell you this much: even in its current sorry state, this blog is infinitely more enjoyable to me than trying to figure out how the hell Twitter or Instagram can help my career... Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-41017167215957083952015-10-28T22:07:00.000-05:002015-10-28T22:07:02.721-05:00A Guilty Admission...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJuBhz5StsDTT0K9PUQnpdOdZzF2v2EFhxwB7Mi2AWT4Ev48gJBQImrmuEyFi3KPZMTesmbUQwUvaGQfkFyHbKQmfX1AT6xGI-BwFE0yj-UOPdC_2fSTU3wWYhGR0Ht4kxLoUnMOq6n30/s1600/facebook_like_lie.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJuBhz5StsDTT0K9PUQnpdOdZzF2v2EFhxwB7Mi2AWT4Ev48gJBQImrmuEyFi3KPZMTesmbUQwUvaGQfkFyHbKQmfX1AT6xGI-BwFE0yj-UOPdC_2fSTU3wWYhGR0Ht4kxLoUnMOq6n30/s640/facebook_like_lie.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
I haven't updated the blog in the past month or so, not because I've been busy with life, or working on some forthcoming opus, or even because I've been too lazy to write anything. Nope, I haven't been updating the blog because, well, I've been messing around with Facebook. Yep, Facebook. Social media for old folks, my kid calls it. It's fairly embarrassing to admit, considering that I've long disdained the social media world, but several months ago, on a whim, I decided that I would deliberately start posting on Facebook, to see how I felt about the medium, to see how self-expression on Facebook compares to the relatively lonely process of self-expressing on a blog. Would I like it? Would I hate it? Would it give me an impetus to explore other forms of social media as writing platforms, or would I run screaming back to the relative peace and quiet of my own little world here?<br />
<br />
I approached it as an experiment, sort of a baby step evolution (for me, anyway) into the world of social media, which, for better or worse, is what so many writers seem to be embracing these days. <br />
So I held my nose, swallowed my pride, and started posting, and even sending friend requests to other people (something I'd never, ever done since my wife first convinced me to get a FB account years ago). <br />
<br />
The result? A resounding "meh"...<br />
<br />
It's OK, I guess. It's a useful news feed, and a good way to meet fellow writers and other interesting, like-minded folk, and I've read some good posts and had some good and stimulating conversations. I see its worth to a writer, to be visible on Facebook and other social media, but it's certainly not going to replace the solitary joy of sitting down and writing something strictly for yourself, with no expectations of likes or shares or comments. And that's what I've found posting on FB; that I tend to write things not so much for myself, but for attention, with an eye toward others' reaction and comment, rather than writing something simply because I want to. It is, I must admit, something of an exercise in narcissism and self-absorption, thinly disguised as witty self-expression. <br />
<br />
So will I stick with it? Eh, probably. It's still kind of fun, even with the knowledge that it is - at its core - mostly superficial, all flailing arms and indignant shouting (Look at me, damn it! See how smart and funny I am!), and I may even start exploring some of that mysterious "other" (Twitter, maybe?) but I also won't be shutting down the blog any time soon. I like the way the crickets chirp in the quiet, and the way you can hear the echoes of your own words. Facebook's not a place for that.<br />
<br />
And if you happen to be on Facebook, feel free to friend me. Why not? I don't actually know three-quarters of the people I'm friends with, anyway, so what the hell? Just send a message letting me know you're from the blog, so I don't mistake you for one of those random scam-vibe friend requests I seem to get a lot of. Who knew there were so many beautiful, sexy, scantily-clad young women interested in becoming my friend? Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-39915576243900416822015-09-04T15:21:00.000-05:002015-09-04T15:21:53.288-05:00Breaking the Silence<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
No, not the silence on this blog, but a different kind of silence. The silence you hear as you're sitting alone in the middle of the prairie on an early fall afternoon, measuring your insignificance against the passage of time and the whisper of the grass around you. That silence you don't want to break because it's telling you something. You're not sure what, you can't exactly put your finger on it, but whatever it is, it's important, fundamental, crucial. So you go on listening, even as a few dove start to fly overhead. That's what you're out here for, after all, but here you sit with a forgotten shotgun in your hand, lost in a language you can't speak but vaguely understand, and what it's saying is beautiful and ancient and right. So you let the dove land unscathed at the water's edge. You watch, you listen, and you find something of yourself in the silence.<br />
<br />
The day before, you hunted this same windmill with your son (which, incidentally, is when this photo was taken). You
didn't shoot near a limit then, and you're probably not going to shoot a limit
now (especially if you keep contemplating your naval) so why, you ask yourself, end this beautiful silence and the story it's etching within you, so soon, and for so
little in return? There's plenty of time before sunset.<br />
<br />
A few more dove come in, scratch around the croton and ragweed, then pigeon-toe down to the water's edge, where they join a lone spotted sandpiper tail-bobbing its way around the cracked mud. You sit there for longer than you should, listening to the grass, to your thoughts, to the distant shots of other, more pragmatic and eager hunters.<br />
<br />
It's a helluva thing, hunting the mid-life crisis, especially since you were once such an enthusiastic and dedicated killer. Some try to keep that passion going by pursuing bigger, fiercer, more exotic things by which to take the measure of themselves, but you're happy with the wind and the silence, and accepting of your slowly waning need to kill toward some arbitrary goal.<br />
<br />
But you also love to eat dove, and the silence (as well as the shots of other hunters) is now telling you that you'd better get your ass to shooting some birds if you want something for the grill. So you pick up the shotgun and break the silence. You always break the silence, eventually. You must, because it's what you are. You may no longer kill toward arbitrary goals, but a good meal is a pretty damn clearly defined one.<br />
Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-31860711022525221582015-08-14T09:25:00.000-05:002015-08-14T09:41:41.910-05:00Summer Hibernation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Brown Trout, Rocky Mountain National Park</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I've been on a bit of a summer hiatus the past two months, waiting out the heat that descends on the southern plains this time of year, the kind of heat that kills the desire to do anything outside and makes me think of permanent relocation to a place of cool waters and gorgeous fish. I haven't even been on the computer much, besides the normal work-related stuff. Haven't written anything, haven't read or commented on any of my regular blogs, haven't, in fact, done much of anything productive. Late-summer triple-digit temps just completely shut down my want-to gene. Want to write? Nope. Want to fish? Nope. Want to run the dogs? Nope. Want to cut firewood, mow the yard, work in the garden? Nope, nope, and nope. I loathe being indoors, but late summer in Oklahoma gives me the unwanted opportunity to feel like a fat, air-conditioned sausage.<br />
<br />
But August is slowly creaking past the tipping point, and fall is coming. I can feel it, even in the heat. Can't get here soon enough. I'm ready for birds and ducks and dogs and shotguns. I'm ready for dead leaves rustling in the moonlight. I'm ready for that primeval stirring of restlessness and contemplation. I'm ready to once again stay up late in October reading Bradbury and sipping Scotch while the cold wind blows against the window. I'm ready for the twilight whispering and dark magic of old and forgotten gods who still have a faint,vestigial tug welling up from the lost DNA of deep past. Autumn is an ancient tide that carries us back to a place and time and memory we long ago abandoned. August is the beach on which we sit while waiting for it to carry us out to sea once again.<br />
<br />
So here I sit, waiting, twiddling my thumbs, getting a sunburn and bitching about the heat. Hurry up, damn it. Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-42203291638425165422015-07-14T17:01:00.000-05:002015-07-14T17:43:06.788-05:00Time Travel Tuesday<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Rockin' the short shorts and mullet, and almost certainly delinquent, somewhere in 1986</i><br />
<br />
Because Throwback Thursday is just too routine...<br />
<br />
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. <br />
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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">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. </span></i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>
</i></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">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.</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>
</i></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">“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.” </span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>
</i></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">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. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, yes, thank you for the
kind words, and Chad should be back to school tomorrow. Goodbye.” </span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>
</i></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">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.” </span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>
</i></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">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. </span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>
</i></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">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.</span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">*not its real name, but probably should be... </span></i></span><br />
<br /></div>
<i>
</i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<i> </i>Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-32269813430852279332015-07-13T17:24:00.002-05:002015-07-13T17:26:25.074-05:00Yearly Rejection, 2015 Edition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3F16KqVn995kSVl4IW4z8Kudsj0IpPie14g4LmlNLlg5PlKQfj3SkcZZFLiLlKSnEcDqjNn6RXLh9fdxHmAsaW4eW-r9_CWHERgh6BTGw_qtErQkzn183cMtyUFJP2vxLAi6Fcq8Auf8/s1600/MG_7489-copy-1024x681.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3F16KqVn995kSVl4IW4z8Kudsj0IpPie14g4LmlNLlg5PlKQfj3SkcZZFLiLlKSnEcDqjNn6RXLh9fdxHmAsaW4eW-r9_CWHERgh6BTGw_qtErQkzn183cMtyUFJP2vxLAi6Fcq8Auf8/s640/MG_7489-copy-1024x681.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<span class="Data"> <i> I am not here. Nor will I be this fall...</i></span><i>
</i><br />
<br />
<i><span class="Data">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.<br /><br /> <b>NOTE:</b> Information used on
the <b>'Search Page'</b> must match the data on the Controlled Hunts Application.<br /><br />
See you next year!
<br /> </span></i><br />
<i><span class="Data">Sincerely,<br />
Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation </span></i><br />
<br />
<span class="Data">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</span><i><span class="Data">.</span></i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Data"><br /></span>Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-34544463818941452612015-07-04T15:03:00.000-05:002015-07-04T15:03:09.483-05:00'Merica...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDldJBl2fR88G2p9gzsf4HeWiQFQGxplIHondTVfo3Od_ClL8Xh_VIeV34rAiAqQbsm40vbIqCK41Ptivg362uaD0jtHO2PMABzr2gtP8oaeQJQ-CfbbMpVBoBRr3n-6ZlOsgQyXsl8gw/s1600/11659319_10152772864165904_8727617279366239810_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDldJBl2fR88G2p9gzsf4HeWiQFQGxplIHondTVfo3Od_ClL8Xh_VIeV34rAiAqQbsm40vbIqCK41Ptivg362uaD0jtHO2PMABzr2gtP8oaeQJQ-CfbbMpVBoBRr3n-6ZlOsgQyXsl8gw/s400/11659319_10152772864165904_8727617279366239810_n.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
I'm not much into Facebook/Instagram/Twitter memes, but I kinda liked this one. Happy 4th of July, fellow 'Mericans...Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-26700073866606588692015-07-01T23:01:00.000-05:002015-07-02T13:34:52.919-05:00Carptastic Glass<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOnHu4Oi_ifTwnWXqGBX-kRLqSvcFoVyk37-MW26YzQq3f2yrZV4KInqydkwGDctF6YmRK6YYl2Ip9WjqrIsDQf3EDby2Q3F_fEBdJLJN_sqObQPT8BFitEr8so5Zk8DIzrKQDIk95h7Y/s1600/carp3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOnHu4Oi_ifTwnWXqGBX-kRLqSvcFoVyk37-MW26YzQq3f2yrZV4KInqydkwGDctF6YmRK6YYl2Ip9WjqrIsDQf3EDby2Q3F_fEBdJLJN_sqObQPT8BFitEr8so5Zk8DIzrKQDIk95h7Y/s640/carp3.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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).<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
<i>* 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. </i>Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-44419352242566134222015-06-29T23:20:00.000-05:002015-06-29T23:28:42.220-05:00A Short Conversation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
The scene: an inner-city pawn shop, this past weekend. I am perusing the gun rack offerings, which go something like this: garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, Winchester Model 21, garbage, garbage, wait, whaaaa? I put my eyes into reverse. Is it? Holy shit, it is. Seeing something like that in a dump like this is kind of like walking into a strip joint and seeing Meryl Streep in a thong and pasties, grinding out a lap dance. It's undignified, and it just 'aint right. <br />
<br />
Me: "Uh, can I see that Winchester 21 right there?"<br />
<br />
The Clerk: "The whut?"<br />
<br />
Me: "The Model 21, right there, next to the Mossberg with the camo plastic stock."<br />
<br />
The Clerk: "You mean the double-barrel?"<br />
<br />
Me: "Yeah, the double-barrel."<br />
<br />
The clerk hands me the "double barrel", which is indeed a Winchester Model 21, standard grade, 12-gauge, 28-inch barrels, single trigger, beavertail forend, bright, shiny original-looking blueing, with just a bit of blue worn off the bottom of the action from being carried. It is tight, rust-free, with a serial number in the 29,000 range, which I believe makes it a late 50s vintage. It doesn't have the original pad, but other than that it's about as nice a 21 as you'll find anywhere, much less a place that advertises it cashes plasma checks. The price is high (by pawn shop standards), but well below what you'd expect of a Model 21. Well. Freaking. Below.<br />
<br />
I begin to sweat, and scheme. Wildly, desperately, recklessly.<br />
<br />
Me: "You mind if I take off the forend?"<br />
<br />
The Clerk: "What's a forend?"<br />
<br />
Me: "The wood thingy at the front."<br />
<br />
The Clerk: "You can do that?"<br />
<br />
I break the gun down. It's choked full/mod, and the internals look just as pristine and nice as the externals. By this time I'm sweating so badly I look like Albert Brooks in that scene from Broadcast News, because I know that I am very close to doing something very stupid and very irresponsible. Something that will undoubtedly cause much financial stress and marital turmoil. Something that's going to get me in a lot of trouble. Doesn't matter. I can feel the dark cloud of foolishness enveloping me.<br />
<br />
The Clerk: "We got layaway, you know. Hey man, you want a towel?"<br />
<br />
From where it comes I do not know, but at that moment a single sunbeam of reason manages to break through the cloud and flash - like a lighthouse warning a ship away from the shoals - a simple message that keeps repeating in my head: "If you do this, you are in deep shit. If you do this, you are in deep shit. If you do this, you are in deep shit."<br />
<br />
Without a word, I put the barrels back on, snap the forend into place, hand the gun back to the clerk, mumble a thank you, and literally flee the store. A triumph of reason, or divine intervention, I cannot say. All I know is that I'm still alive, still married, and still (barely) financially solvent. And still really want that gun.<br />
<br />
Is desire the root of all suffering? Yes, yes it is. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-84048944336967472962015-06-24T17:04:00.000-05:002015-06-24T17:04:01.397-05:00Moonlight Peregrinations<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i> Moonglow, storm, and windmill, Oklahoma panhandle</i><br />
<br />
<br />
I have always been a walker. When I was a child I would take long, rambling exploratory walks across the empty fields, open spaces, and forgotten little corners of patchwork wildness that has always defined that beautiful, enchanting and inevitably doomed transition zone between the developed and the soon-to-be. Even back then I found some vague, undefinable<i> rightness</i> in exploring lonely places, a palpable sense of detachment and distance from the rest of the world. I was a troubled kid, and rambling across the countryside offered me a form of solace that I didn't experience anywhere else, or by doing anything else.<br />
<br />
Being where other people weren't was just my thing, my comfort zone, whether I was fishing, hunting, catching critters, or just seeing what was beyond. And many of those walks were taken at night. For whatever reason, I never developed an irrational fear of the dark, and in fact roaming the fields at night, under the stars and the faint bands of the Milky Way only heightened that comforting sense that I was<i> here</i> and everyone and everything else in the world was <i>elsewhere, </i>and that was as it should be, if only for the moment.<br />
<br />
And I suppose that being where other people aren't is still very much my thing. I still take long, rambling walks whenever I get the chance, I still seek out lonely, forgotten places from which to ponder Life and Other Stuff, and I still regard humanity - despite all its seething, chaotic, amazing diversity and its endless wonder - as something to be taken in small, measured doses, lest it drive you batshit.<br />
<br />
Apparently, however, long walks in the dark aren't solely my thing. While reading Helen Macdonald's <i>H is for Hawk, </i>I was struck by this passage about how walking the countryside became popular in Great Britain between the wars.<br />
<br />
<i>Despite the eccentricity of a hawk on his fist, what White was doing was very much of his time. Long walks in the English countryside, often at night, were astonishingly popular in the 1930s. Rambling clubs published calendars of full moons, train companies laid on mystery destinations to rural destinations, and when in 1932 the Southern Railway offered an excursion to a moonlit walk along the South Downs, expecting to sell forty or so tickets, one and a half thousand people showed up. </i><br />
<br />
<i>The people setting out on these walks weren't seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour: to Merrie England, or to pre-historic England, pre-industrial visions that offered solace and safety to sorely troubled minds. </i><br />
<br />
<i>For though railways and roads and a burgeoning market in countryside books had contributed to this movement, at heart it had grown out of the trauma of the Great War, and was flourishing in fear of the next. The critic Jed Esty has described this pastoral craze as one element in a wider movement of national cultural salvage in these years; it was a response to economic disaster, a contracting Empire and totalitarian threats from abroad. It was a movement that celebrated ancient sites and folk traditions. It delighted in Shakespeare and Chaucer, in Druids, in Arthurian legend. It believed that something essential about the nation had been lost, and could be returned, if only in the imagination.</i><br />
<br />
For some reason that strikes me as a particularly lovely but haunting image; an entire generation, restless and pensive, many of them soon to be dead, walking and searching for something felt but unknown out there in the misty English moonlight. And I cannot help but think that we could learn something from it; to unplug, get off our asses, and go take a long, lonely walk in the moonlight.<br />
<br />
I suppose it's a natural reaction to the chaos and uncertainty of especially troubling times; to find comfort in the pastoral, the reflection of solitude, and to yearn for the simplicity of an earlier time. To reject - or at least try to reject - the dehumanizing social, political, and cultural institutions that suck us all in, divest us from the best parts of ourselves, and then blow out what remains like so much wheat chaff.<br />
<br />
Of course, the inherent danger of the allure of the simple is that in reality, things aren't, and never were. The truth of all human history is that everything has always sucked, more or less,and simpler times were often the most awful times, especially for simple people. But that fact hasn't stopped demagogues throughout history (and today) from taking these collective yearnings for a simpler, better, and more wholesome past, and twisting them into all kinds of awfulness and shit-assery.<br />
<br />
Still, on a personal or micro level, I can certainly identify with the sentiment. There are some obvious parallels - at least in spirit if not practice - between Britain's walking craze and the American back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, and perhaps to a much lesser extent the current (but perhaps fading) hipster locavore/tiny house movement. When things are seemingly going to hell all around you, you try like hell to latch on to the real, or at least what you perceive to be the real. In the 1930s they walked in the moonlight and conjured Druids, in the 1970s they homesteaded, and now they're planting community gardens, raising backyard chickens, and living in 200 square feet.<br />
<br />
I'd say those are worthy and admirable responses to the mental illness of modern life, all of them. <br />
<br />
<i> </i>Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-11684553334458611172015-05-20T22:29:00.001-05:002015-05-20T22:29:35.080-05:00Environmental Journalists In The Sooner State<br />
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<i> Abandoned Frey Bros. General Store, Amorita, Oklahoma</i><br />
<br />
<i>"Oklahoma is tallgrass prairie and everlasting mountains. It is secret patches of ancient earth tromped smooth and hard by generations of dancing feet. It is the cycle of song and heroic deed. It is calloused hands. It is the aroma of rich crude oil fused with the scent of sweat and sacred smoke. It is the progeny of an oilfield whore wed to a deacon; the sire of a cowpony bred with a racehorse. It is a stampede, a pie supper, a revival. It is a wildcat gusher coming in. It is a million-dollar deal sealed with a handshake.</i><br />
<i>Oklahoma is dark rivers snaking through red, furrowed soil; lakes rimmed with stone bluffs. It is the ghosts of proud Native Americans, crusading Socialists, ambitious cattle kings, extravagant oil tycoons, wily bandits. It is impetuous and it is wise. A land of opportunists, resilient pioneers, and vanquished souls, the state is a crazy quilt of contradictions and controversies, travails and triumphs. It has been exploited and abused, cherished and fought over. It is a puzzling place."</i><br />
<br />
<i> </i>Michael Wallis, <i>Way Down Yonder in the Indian Nation</i><br />
<br />
Michael Wallis is a helluva writer, but he forgot tornadoes, sandburs, and peckerwoods. We're made of those things, too. Tornadoes grow down from the sky, and they are ephemeral. Sandburs grow up from the ground, and they are annuals. And peckerwoods? They grow out from the state capitol<i>,</i> profusely,<i> </i>and those hardy bastards are perennials...<br />
<br />
Oklahoma is a damn vexing place, always has been. I don't know of another state with a history as rich and weird and violent and vibrant and sad and tragic and interesting, but less known, less explored, less understood, and as poorly or falsely chronicled in history and literature as Oklahoma. Hell, most of us who were born and raised here don't even know our own history; environmental, cultural, or social.<br />
<br />
So it was with great interest that I noticed, as I was recently poking around on the website of the <a href="http://www.sej.org/">Society of Environmental Journalists</a>, that the 2015 SEJ conference will be held in Norman, Oklahoma, my hometown.<br />
<br />
It will be interesting indeed to see how the out-of-state environmental press corps views its Oklahoma brethren, a lot whose tenacity, aggressiveness, and independence in honestly covering state and regional environmental issues brings to mind (with a few exceptions) the image of a sweet, toothless Pomeranian sitting quietly in the lap of industry and power, fetching whatever slippers it's told to fetch.<br />
<br />
Back when I was writing more than I am now, I didn't consider myself an environmental writer, even though much of what I wrote had a regional environmental slant to it. Of course, I never considered myself a hook-and-bullet writer, either, although much of what I've written the past six years or so has been exactly that. Like most freelancers, I was - and remain - just a writer, taking gigs where and when I can. As such, I never joined any of the professional organizations like SEJ or OWAA.<br />
<br />
Still, I've always admired those groups, and I'm excited that the diversity and complexity of my home state will be the focus of the conference attendees' attention. The <a href="http://www.sej.org/initiatives/sej-annual-conferences/AC2015-agenda">agenda and session lineup</a> looks pretty solid, and if I were still writing as much as I should, I'd join SEJ and attend the conference, if for nothing else than to get a fresh perspective on a state and region I sometimes think - as I look longingly toward the distant other - that I've grown a bit too familiar and bored with. It'd be nice, and novel, to spend time with people from elsewhere, who will come here and view this place through fresh, curious eyes. Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-58797259768287076162015-05-14T08:23:00.000-05:002015-05-14T09:29:17.249-05:00Sailing the Sagebrush Sea<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ai_uxZo-giM" width="560"></iframe>
<br />
<br />
Wednesday, May 20, on your local PBS station. For more info on the film <a href="http://sagebrushsea.allaboutbirds.org/#theplace">go here</a>. <br />
<br />
It is easy, being trapped in a never-ending and rapidly escalating case of shifting baseline syndrome, to forget about how fundamentally altered the Great Plains region is from what it once was. When you see period photos of early settlers stoically looking out over a helluva lot of nothing, and then you look out your car window and see what, at first through tenth glances, seems to be pretty much the same damn thing, it tends to skew how you view the plains.<br />
<br />
Such is their lot, with no pretty mountains, no anthropomorphized trees named Luna, no eco-tourism, no X-games venues, and no prairie hippies chaining themselves to the buffalo grass or sagebrush. The plains, our national cathedral of space, wind, and sky, suffer the myriad indignities and abuses of our industrialized world virtually without advocacy or protest or concern. Because, after all, there's just not a helluva lot out there.<br />
<br />
Except of course, that there is a helluva lot out there, or used to be; a world now relegated to scattered little pockets here and there, especially on the southern plains, where sage grouse and sharptails <a href="http://mallardofdiscontent.blogspot.com/2013/08/what-once-was.html">did indeed once live</a>, not that long ago. The southern plains, for all their romance and vistas and immense space and distance between points of habitation, are a broken and tamed land, utterly subjegated. For a variety of reason both cultural and political, they are parceled, fragmented, and industrialized beyond any form of landscape-level rehabilitation, or even protection of what little remains. <br />
<br />
But the northern plains are a different kettle of grouse. Thanks to the inherent evils of the Socialist idea of public land, millions of acres of native sagebrush prairie still remain, at least for the time being. For now, you own it. So do yourself a favor and take the time to learn a little about it. There's a helluva lot to see, out in there in the middle of nothing. Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-13069212722508900472015-05-13T23:23:00.000-05:002015-05-14T09:09:35.620-05:00Goodbye, Blue Monday...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
An incredible, blue-tinged Martian sunset snapped by NASA's ever-plucky Curiosity rover. You can learn about why Martian sunsets are blue <a href="http://www.iflscience.com/space/curiosity-snaps-blue-sunset-mars">here</a>, but what's striking to me is the fact that if you converted that shot to B&W to eliminate the blue color, you would, in essence, be looking at a picture of a sunset here on Earth.<br />
<br />
The older I get, the more convinced I become that, as a species, our long-term future lies elsewhere, somewhere Out There. While thoroughly heathen, I do lean heavily Buddhist in some of my worldviews, especially in regard to the idea of impermanence. Nothing lasts forever, not even the security of home.<br />
<br />
A couple weeks ago, while cleaning out one of the raised beds in our garden, I discovered a hollowed-out depression containing five blind, nearly hairless baby cottontails. Apparently their teenage mother was young and small enough to slip through the wire of the fence, and had wisely made her nest in the enclosed, predator-free zone of our garden. Smart rabbit.<br />
<br />
It would take a flinty heart indeed - one far harder than what mine, with age, has become - to do the practical, pragmatic thing, so for the next 14 days, I, a confirmed lifelong hunter and consumer of big-eared rodents - especially garden-raiding rodents - found myself in the unusual position of playing Rabbit Daddy. I kept the dogs from running around loose in the late evenings when the mother would slip through the fence and tend to the babies. I kept the garden gate shut. I checked on them twice a day to make sure they were all still there, and that the thick mat of dead grass and fur she had made to cover them was arranged properly. Once, when we were having storms, I went out and put an upside-down bucket over their nest to keep the rain from soaking them. Real Disney movie crap, I know...<br />
<br />
It was, I must say, a fascinating opportunity for our family to follow their day-to-day growth and development, from wiggling, helpless little things, to eyes-wide-open, fully-formed little rabbits who, when we peeled back the mat and peered into their hole, would simply look up at us from the comfort and safety of the only world they knew. My wife took daily progress pictures, and the damn rodents became something of a Facebook hit with her friends.<br />
<br />
And then, yesterday morning, I went out to check on them and discovered that the mat of fur and grass was gone, as was the pile of sticks and leaves the mother would carefully push over the depression to hide it. Mama had deemed, apparently, that it was time to leave one world for another. Their genetic trigger for self-preservation had also finally been tripped, as all five bolted when I leaned down to look at them. They squeezed through the wire of the fence and were gone in a flash, out of the doomed familiar and into the unknown.<br />
<br />
Someday, in the distant future, when this world is finally used up and exhausted and ruined, I suspect we'll be doing the same, in one fashion or another.<br />
Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-76858907181951300112015-05-12T08:17:00.000-05:002015-05-12T11:02:56.455-05:00Art and WealthI haven't done a helluva good job of keeping this thing up lately, have I? Not for any lack of things upon which to write, rant, reflect, or pontificate. Been a lot happening, actually, but I'll be damned if I've had time to sit down and write about it, or do any other writing, or even much blog reading. I've just been too damn busy with work. Who knew pushing someone else's words around all day would be so time-consuming? Self-reflection is nice and all, but self-reflection doesn't pay the bills. At least not in any form I've been able to capitalize on yet (but I'm working on that...)<br />
<br />
Which brings up an interesting question I've been pondering. I'm reading a book right now, a good book full of lovely writing, and wry observations about many things having to do with fishing, nature, and life. The kind of book written by someone who has no expectation of it making any actual, you know, money to live on and such. <br />
<br />
Of course, many such books (and other forms of art) are produced all the time, all for sheer love of self-expression, with no thought to profitability at all. But in this book's case, the author comes from Old Money, and is apparently quite loaded.<br />
<br />
So here's my question: are there fundamental, existential differences between art made by the hardscrabble and art made by the wealthy? Is art created wholly outside the crucible of suffering, hardship, denial, or
sacrifice any less worthy, or legitimate, than art created by those who, through choice or circumstance, live closer to the subsistence or working-class end of the dial? Or is art made by the wealthy merely an indulgence, a
pastime? Does it lack...something?<br />
<br />
Now I'm generally not a class warrior when it comes to that: if I like it I like it, regardless whether it was created by a trust-funder or a prole. That both can and do produce art is not in question. But I have to admit that sometimes, when the wind is just right, I can catch a whiff of indolence rising from the pages of books written by people who inhabit worlds to which most of us will never have our visas stamped.<br />
<br />
In response, my lower-class populist hackles rise a bit, and I suddenly find myself reading through a filter, a class-based judgement system that is not at all fair to the material itself. That's silly, of course, and in the end it doesn't keep me from enjoying it, but the unavoidable markers of class, wealth and privilege inherent in such works do tend to remind
me of my place in this world, which I'm sure is not at all what the author intended. Social and economic class informs our view of everything, I suppose, whether we want it to or not. Even art and literature.<br />
<br />
<br />Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-54368348711128665772015-04-26T22:47:00.004-05:002015-04-27T08:04:52.234-05:00First Yak Bass...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
...of the year. And a decent one at that. Not huge, but at 5.8 lbs. on my ancient-but-dead-on Rapala digital scale, not a bad way to break in the kayak this season. I would have preferred to have caught her on a fly, but when your gut (and the gusting wind) tells you to put down the rabbit strip leech and start throwing the red shad Tiki Stik, you put down the rabbit strip leech and start throwing the red shad Tiki Stik. <br />
<br />
Truth be told, I probably should have gone turkey hunting. That was my plan. But when I got up early that morning, poured myself a cup of coffee and walked outside into the darkness, there wasn't a hint of wind, a rare thing on the prairie in springtime. So I started thinking about bass and kayaks, and how I'd experienced neither so far this year, separately or in conjunction.<br />
<br />
I am, admittedly, a fairly casual turkey hunter, and a fairly obsessed angler, so bass and kayaks took the day. I ditched my turkey hunting plans, loaded up the yak and headed for a local lake. As it turned out, the wind was just politely waiting for me to get on the water before starting to howl. But I had a good hour to two before it blew me off the lake. The vagaries of plains weather giveth, then taketh away...<br />
<br />
With fish pics I try as much as possible to follow the tenant of "keep 'em wet" (besides the ones I plan on eating), so I snapped a couple quick pics in the water, then off she went. <br />
<br />
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And wouldn't you know, I didn't catch a damn thing after that. So it goes...Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-17375476528751366222015-04-19T22:32:00.000-05:002015-04-19T22:32:40.322-05:00Oklahoma Chrome<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
No, it's not a steelhead, but out here on the arid plains, you take your piscatorial sport where and when you can find it, and when the white bass ("sandbass" in our regional slang) start running upstream to spawn, the banks of a slow, shallow, turbid prairie river is the closest this poor, water-challenged bastard is ever likely to get to chasing chrome.<br />
<br />
But you know what? I don't mind, because the sandbass is a helluva fish in its own right, one of my favorites.They're not large ( most average one to two pounds), they're not found in postcard country, they're not revered and fetishized as totemic symbols of wildness and personal meaning, and they will never be trendy and cool and hip. They are, like the channel cat, a glamourless, working-class prole's fish, caught by people sitting in lawn chairs casting bubble-pack spincasters, then taken home and eaten. The carp, the goddamned common carp, has more cachet (at least with the flyfishing crowd) than the white bass ever will. And yes, I like carp, too. But I like white bass more. They're plentiful, pugnacious, unsophisticated, delicious, and strong fighters, especially on a fly rod. What's not to like about that? Not a damn thing. <br />
<br />Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-75919221524066565182015-04-13T20:54:00.003-05:002015-04-13T20:57:06.840-05:00A Modest American Proposal...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
When confronted by a false and deceitful political "movement" so outrageous, so dangerous, and so fundamentally un-American and antithetical to our core values that it seems like satire, sometimes the only sane response is to go full-on Swiftian.<br />
<br />
A. Richard Hatcher of Lewistown, Montana, I salute you, and if I ever get back up to your fair country to hunt again (and the good {insert deity of choice here} willing, I shall), I will gladly seek you out, take you down to the Mint, and buy you a round or three of Pig's Ass Porter.<br />
<br />
Hat tip goes to the most excellent <a href="http://bullmoosegazette.com/">Bull Moose Gazette</a> Facebook page, which is where I first saw it posted. If you're on FB, do yourself a favor and follow him... <br />
<br />
<br />
<i>BEST PUBLIC LANDS LETTER-TO-THE-EDITOR I'VE SEEN SO FAR<br /> </i><br />
<i>Published in the Lewistown (MT) News Argus, April 11, 2015</i><br />
<br />
<i>This is such a great idea I propose we take it even further and put
Congress out of its misery by restoring the British monarchy to America.
Half the country is ga-ga about royal gossip anyway.</i><br />
<div class="text_exposed_show">
<br />
<i>LEWISTOWN NEWS-ARGUS<br /> April 11, 2015</i><br />
<br />
<i>Look to European model for land ownership </i><br />
<br />
<i>Dear Editor,<br /> </i><br />
<i>I am extremely disappointed that more of Montana’s citizens are not
enthusiastically supporting the efforts of the majority leadership in
the Montana Legislature, recently joined by our junior U.S. senator, to
divest the federal public lands and transfer them to the state. This
transfer to the states should be but a brief prelude to their sale and
privatization, so they can be put to proper use by America’s wealthy.</i><br />
<br />
<i>We should applaud the efforts of these representatives and their
financial backers to return the public estate to private ownership. For
over 200 years, the United States has increasingly strayed from its
European roots and traditions of exclusive private land ownership by the
wealthy and gentry. </i><br />
<br />
<i>The silliness of President Theodore
Roosevelt’s National Forest, National Wildlife Refuges and other
conservation innovations can be put aside in this great effort to revert
to the European model of land ownership and resource management. </i><br />
<br />
<i>As
Montana’s population and its out-of-state ownership <br /> grow, there
simply won’t be enough high quality hunting and fishing for everyone. As
these amenities become more coveted it makes sense that we cash them in
for the enjoyment of the most deserving – those who can pay. </i><br />
<br />
<i>The European model of fish and wildlife ownership by the privileged and
hunting and fishing for the wealthy and their friends is a good use of
these commodities and maximizes their economic value. </i><br />
<br />
<i>Alas,
there will always be public land. It is inevitable that some of the
arid, ugly lands devoid of game and sport fish will not be sold. Here
the public can cling to this ill-considered land use.<br /> </i><br />
<i>Ancillary
benefits to privatization of the public lands include the jobs that are
created in an increasingly difficult economy. The vast, private estates
will require gillies and gamekeepers. Enormous numbers of employees will
be required to fence and patrol these lands against trespass. </i><br />
<i>
People will be needed to conduct the driven bird and game shoots.
Privatization will eliminate all this fuss about public access.
Seemingly, endless time is wasted on these access issues. Your newspaper
alone will save barrels of ink.</i><br />
<br />
<i>We need to get behind this effort to privatize the public lands and get back to the model of European hunting and fishing.</i><br />
<br />
<i>A. Richard Hunter, Lewistown</i></div>
Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-81904057994074394832015-04-08T22:33:00.000-05:002016-02-23T09:32:42.456-06:00John Joseph Mathews<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>"The god of the great Osages was still dominant over the wild prairie and the blackjack hills when Challenge was born. He showed his anger in fantastic play of lightning, and thunder that
crashed and rolled among the hills; in the wind that came from the great
tumbling clouds which appeared in the northwest and brought twilight
and ominous milk-warm silence. His beneficence showed on April mornings
when the call of the prairie chicken came rolling over the awakened
prairie and the killdeer seemed to be fussing; on June days when the
emerald grass sparkled in the dew and soft breezes whispered, the quail
whistled and the autumnal silences when the blackjacks were painted like
dancers and dreamed in the iced sunshine with fatalistic patience."</i></div>
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from <i>Sundown, </i>by John Joseph Mathews<i> </i></div>
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Sometimes we discover great writers through a recommendation, sometimes we stumble across them through sheer dumb luck, and sometimes we discover great writers because we're forced to. I discovered John Joseph Mathews way back in college, in the very same history class where I <a href="http://mallardofdiscontent.blogspot.com/2011/07/re-visiting-some-old-stuff.html">first discovered R.A. Lafferty</a>. And like Lafferty (Steve Bodio has a neat Lafferty story), Mathews is almost completely forgotten these days, even by Oklahomans who should know better. I had certainly never heard of him, or Lafferty, before I was forced, kicking and screaming, to read them both for that western history class. I can think of no better reason than that to go to college. Sometimes enlightenment has to be crammed down your ignorant damn throat.</div>
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While <i>Sundown, </i>his semi-autobiographical novel of the mixed-blood Osage Chal Windzer is probably his best-known work<i>, </i>Mathews' <i>Talking To The Moon, </i>which is often described as a "Native American<i> Walden</i>", is a jewel as well.<i> </i>It's the chronicle of ten years spent living alone in a stone cabin on his tribal allotment in northeastern Oklahoma (Mathews was part Osage) after his return from living abroad, during which he graduated from Oxford (where he was offered a Rhodes scholarship but declined, preferring to pay his own way), served as a fighter pilot in WWI, worked as a journalist in Europe, traveled the world exploring and hunting (Mathews was a lifelong hunter) and generally lived the kind of adventurous life you'd expect from a highly-educated, cosmopolitan person of means (the Osage tribe was flush with new oil money at the time) living in that golden age of adventure. He was the real deal. If you ever stumble across any of his books, I highly recommend them. I believe most are out of print, but easily found online.</div>
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Mathews died in 1979, but his cabin is still standing, and is now part of the Nature Conservancy's Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Osage County. One of these days I'm going to make the pilgrimage over there to see it.</div>
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Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-40722866435672742102015-03-26T22:57:00.000-05:002015-03-27T08:28:33.155-05:00Obliteration <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
One warm summer night a long time ago, I slipped into the midnight water of an Oklahoma farm pond near the city where I grew up. I remember, for many reasons, that particular night among the countless similar nights spent chasing fish. I remember it for the peculiar, ghostly quality of the crescent moonlight shimmering on the gin-clear water, and for the solitude, always the solitude. I remember it for the inky velvet sky that seemed so close above me, for the way the water transformed into brilliant sprays of molten silver every time a hooked bass broke the surface. I remember the slap of the beaver's tail, the tympanic chorus of the bullfrogs, the wonder I felt at the countless unseen life-and-death struggles taking place in the space around and below me as I floated on the water's surface. But most of all, I remember that night for the exquisite<i> rightness</i> of it all, the synchronicity of place and moment, the sense that this was exactly where I was supposed to be and what I supposed to be doing in this place at this time. Nowhere else but here. Nothing else but this. Nothing. Such moments are not sustainable, of course, but their memory is what sustains us.<br />
<br />
I caught a number of bass that night, but I specifically remember only one. It was not particularly large, maybe three pounds, but so vividly and deeply marked that after I brought it to the float tube and unhooked it, I held it there on its side in the water before me, marveling at its color, its pulsing, primordial aliveness. It remains, to this day, one of the most beautiful fish I have ever caught. And as I floated there in the warm water, half in my world, half in its, I slowly released that bass from my hands. It hovered there for a second or two, suspended in the celestial waters, its pectoral fins sweeping back and forth, before disappearing into the luminous depths somewhere between the moon and the stars. I have never forgotten the memory of that bass and that moment and that place.<br />
<br />
I fished the pond many times after that night. I hunted it, too, watched my first chessie, now long dead, retrieve ducks from its waters. But that moment stayed with me. Eventually, however, I moved away and those experiences turned to memories, which in turn were overlaid with other, newer memories tethered to other, newer places.<br />
<br />
But not long ago, and twenty years since the above picture was taken on that pond, I found myself strolling, as they say, down memory lane. Only memory lane was no longer a bucolic and familiar path, but a teeming, bewildering concrete artery four lanes wide and buzzing with people, so many people seething with purpose and impatience and irritation toward the dawdler poking along trying to find old memories buried under the asphalt and intersections and Bermuda grass and sidewalks. Eventually I came to the place I was looking for.<br />
<br />
My pond was gone, of course; it had been drained, filled in, leveled, compacted, surveyed, flagged, gridded and erased; both it and the mixed-grass prairie surrounding it scraped clean, smoothed, and then covered with a skin of fresh, glistening progress. Rows of vinyl and brick-clad houses so close together you could literally jump from roof to roof lined streets so new the gleaming asphalt still exuded an oily stench. Beyond the cookie-cutter houses I could see the dozers and graders and other earth-moving equipment scraping away what remained of the half-section that once contained my pond. It was all going under the blade, and when it was finished there would be nothing - absolutely nothing; not a native tree or plum thicket or blade of grass - to indicate that it had ever been anything other than poorly-planned, cheaply constructed, high-density suburban sprawl. Planned blight. <br />
<br />
Never have I seen the physical place of memory so completely obliterated and transformed into something so different from its original form. A befuddled middle-aged man was now driving, roughly, over the same spot where the kid that man used to be had once floated on water so alive, had once caught a bass that haunted him still. The same spot where that kid had shot mallards and gadwall and wigeon and watched a young dog leap like a brown missile into the water after them and drop their bodies into his outstretched hand. Wonder and amazement and magic are the gods of place, but they are old and feeble gods these days, and powerless against the gods of profit and progress.<br />
<br />
Memory is a helluva thing. We carry it within us, but still have the
urge to seek out the physical markers and locations of where that memory
was created, where it was once not memory, but experience. We seek out
these places, with our now so distant from our then, to remind ourselves
that yes, that did indeed once happen, and it happened here. But what if that here is now gone?
What becomes of that memory? Are all memories ghosts, or just the ones
that no longer have anything physical upon which to tether? <br />
<br />
I tried to reconcile what I remembered with what I was seeing, but reality had already begun untethering memory from place, corrupting the close association of the two I'd had in my mind all these years. I suspect in another twenty years I'll have as much luck trying to remember the first day of my life as I will trying to remember the details of that night. Nothing is permanent, not even memory. I turned and got the hell out of there as quickly as I could.<br />
Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-65290122331674189002015-03-19T21:18:00.000-05:002015-03-19T21:18:40.043-05:00Trivial Pursuits<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">...At noon I would usually
stop in some forlorn, passed-by spot to eat a lunch that I had packed in a small
cooler; forgotten, neglected little parks in forgotten, neglected little towns,
or windswept prairie cemeteries full of ghosts and tattered, sun-bleached
plastic flowers. Sometimes, if I was in a particularly unpeopled area, I would
simply pull over on some little-traveled county road and eat lunch there. But I
liked the abandoned public spaces and cemeteries the best, perhaps because the
ghosts of dreams and folly were so much closer to the surface, more tangible.</span>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>In the cemeteries I would eat in the uncomplaining company of long-dead souls eager to tell their stories, stories
written in the dates of their birth, their death, and in the terse inscriptions
on their headstones. Death banal and death tragic. Death too soon<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and death come at last. Death for the rich
and death for the poor. Death for the loved and venerated and death for the alone
and long-forgotten. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Cemeteries are good places for pondering the arc of
existence and collective experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
would walk among the weathered headstones, cracking pistachios and wondering
about the lives of the people under my feet while marveling at the screw-turns
of history all that old, accumulated time represented.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Some of the parks had little creeks running
through them, or dying lakes or ponds, so when I found water I would break out the
little three-weight I always carried with me in the car. It didn’t matter that
I rarely caught anything. The improbability of the act itself, in those places,
under that sky, in the presence of so much immense loneliness, was reward
enough for me. I would cast in silence in the shimmering heat, high on the
opiate of space and solitude and a rod in the hand. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It was on one such day
that I sat beside a dead river that once emptied into a dead lake, eating my burrito and pondering the folly of man.
There were no fish here to catch, no answers to be found, no balm for the
demons. Forces inexorable and mysterious, but obvious and undeniable, had
rendered this once- living thing into a dry, thin wisp of memory.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And it occurred to me,
sitting there with my rod cased and wondering about the fish that surely once
swam in this dry riverbed, that in the face of such systemic change and
uncertainty, pleasant trivialities like fishing may be one of the few things we have left.
And if that is truly the case, then one must encourage and pursue trivialities when
one can, before they’re gone.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because in such trivialities - or more
specifically, their loss - can be found the bellwethers of larger history;
of tragedy and despair and telling of story on a grander, more terrifying
scale. Every headstone in a cemetery, every dry riverbed on a prairie, every
ruined patch of earth or failed dream tells a single, inconsequential story, a
triviality. But taken together, they tell a history, and perhaps even more.
Seers, quacks, hucksters and algorithms can’t predict the future. Future, as
the old philosopher (sort of) once said, is the province of the dead and the gone
and the whisper of wind across the dry bones of water and memory. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">So my takeaway from this arid, dusty lunch shared with rattlesnakes and harvester ants was this: Go fishing, whenever
you can, wherever you can. Revel in such trivial pursuits, and try to forget,
momentarily, the future those trivialities may someday portend.</span></div>
Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-24892276928524566162015-03-03T23:16:00.003-06:002015-03-03T23:25:50.986-06:00Greed and RainbowsEach and every Christmas, my wife, as one of those recurring holiday jokes, buys me the exact same gift: a calendar of the trout of North America. And although meant as a gag, it's actually a pretty neat gift that I enjoy much more than say, a tie. The calendar gives me 12 excellent paintings and a brief history of various trout species, subspecies, or strains, all of which I enjoy reading about, even if I will never be given an opportunity to fish for many of them<br />
<br />
So today I finally got around to turning the page over to the current month (yes, I'm a little late), and for my March salmonid edification, I was greeted by a very nice rendition of a new-to-me piscatorial dandy called the Pennask Lake rainbow trout, which as you might deduce, is a strain of rainbow unique to Pennask Lake, which, according to the calendar, is in British Columbia (see, the things you learn...)<br />
<br />
At any rate, this Pennask Lake rainbow, while not a particularly large strain of trout, possesses some admirable fighting qualities that once, a long time ago, greatly impressed a visiting sport...<br />
<br />
(from the text...)<br />
<br />
<i>In 1927, James Drummond Dole, the "Pineapple King" traveled to a remote lake in British Columbia with the promise of hard-fighting rainbow trout for his fly rod. Dole was not disappointed and claimed the lake was "nearest to being the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, of any lake seen or heard of."</i><br />
<br />
Dole, so enamored of these rare, hard-fighting Pennask Lake rainbow trout, did what any self-respecting tycoon would do when faced with something precious and beautiful and unique: he used his wealth and power to take it for himself and keep anyone else from enjoying it. Unless, of course, they had the proper cash and social standing to afford the experience.<br />
<br />
<i>The American industrialist and sportsman quickly set about to purchase the majority of the land surrounding the lake and established an exclusive sporting club, the Pennask Lake Fishing and Gaming Company.</i><br />
<br />
Now why does that sound familiar? Why does it seem so, hell, I don't know, prescient, contemporary, even? Like there's something eerily similar playing out across the public lands of the United States right now, with wealthy and powerful interests casting a covetous eye at our public resources, our public lands, our public treasures, our public birthrights, and exclaiming - like the old Pineapple King himself when he first laid eyes on Pennask Lake - that such treasures are "nearest to being the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow." Surely not, right?<br />
<br />
Greed and shitassery are the feedback loop that drives the great bulk of human history, its only constant, the shining north star that has guided and goaded eons worth of sorry jackasses across history's ever-shifting dunes. Empires and nations rise and crumble. Movements flare brightly, then fade to black, then flare into something else. Prevailing attitudes wax, wane, evolve, devolve, and shift in the howling winds of vagary, but the one great truth of human existence is there's always going to be some greedy shitass trying to take your rainbow and your pot of gold for himself, even if that rainbow and gold rightfully belong to all of us.<br />
<br />
Who knew you could learn so much from a Christmas gag-gift calendar about obscure fish? Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-5517048676217827972015-03-01T21:41:00.000-06:002015-03-01T22:16:25.586-06:00AromatherapyI was cleaning out a season's worth of dried vegetation from the pockets of my vest today, the accumulated detritus that always finds its way into the various openings of my vest as I walk the hills. Most of it was sand sage, since that is predominately what I hunt. After a day spent walking through the sandhills, both the dogs and I are sticky with the aroma of sage crushed underfoot.<br />
<br />
So I took this dessicated handful that had built up in my vest, crumbled it between my fingers to release what faint aroma still remained, and ran it though Ozzy's fur. Sage and setter. A damn fine scent, so perfectly evocative of place, of time, of memory. And if there are people out there who find it odd or objectionable that a seemingly normal middle-aged man would purposely rub dried weeds over his dog and then sniff him, well, to hell with 'em. <br />
<br />Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4972254401664966699.post-9883772816978378262015-02-19T08:21:00.001-06:002015-02-19T20:18:57.904-06:00The Viscosity Of Life<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Final weekend of quail season. Not a bad spot to spend it if you're a geographic claustrophobe. Few too many trees for my liking, though...<br />
<br />
Not many birds on this piece of ground, if I'm honest, but I had it all to myself, and the dogs could stretch out and run. That's worth something, I suppose. At this point it's not about numbers, anyway. Never is, really.<br />
<br />
The dogs found enough to be satisfied. I missed enough to get frustrated and hurl invectives into the unsympathetic sky, hit just enough to keep me going. So it goes, as Vonnegut says. I am finding that time does indeed speed up as you get older, and days and moments such as this seem more finite, more part of a larger whole rather than simply being a moment for the moment's sake. There is an arc to what I am doing, what I am, and I guess I'm beginning to realize my place on that arc.<br />
<br />
But it's not a bummer. Far from it. True, some things that once mattered greatly to me no longer interest me at all, and dreams once fervently held have been slowly replaced with a new reality that is neither better nor worse, but simply what is. But that's just life. We are fluid, all of us, from birth to death, and right now my viscosity
is still sitting at about a 10W30. I'm still OK, still flowing forward, albeit a little more slowly and in a slightly different path than what I once thought I'd take. And that's something to be grateful for. <br />
<br />
And I'm grateful that days like this still matter, still have meaning, even though I do not know what, exactly, that meaning is in the grand scheme of things. But then again I'm beginning to suspect there is no truly understandable or graspable meaning in anything, any experience, any reality, other than what we choose to take from it. <br />
<br />
The dogs and I walk the lonely hills because that is still a part of what I am, what I've become to this point. I have not left it behind. My enjoyment and interest in these moments have survived that long distillation process that transforms what we were into what we are, and will of course continue to distill us into what we will be, right up to the moment we hit the bottom of the arc. <br />
<br />
So I will continue to chase the dogs and the birds on these long walks; hitting, missing, cursing, thinking, and trying to find vague answers to vague questions I don't have the foggiest idea how to pose in the first place.<br />
<br />
Restlessness is a good thing. Can't wait for next year.<br />
<br />
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Chad Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13219295562957353591noreply@blogger.com13