Auf Wiedersehen, baby...

I'm sending you on down the road. It's not you, it's me. Well, OK, that's a lie. It is you. You're a killer, and a damn good one, and I'm sure you'll make some leftie out there very happy. But when I hold you in my arms, you just feel cold and artificial, without any feeling, warmth or soul. I dunno, maybe it's that aluminum riser...

I know, I know, it's a shock, but it's for the best, really...

Don't cry, damn it. And stop yelling. What do you mean "Is there another bow?" Hey babe, you knew this was an open relationship from the beginning. I told you straight up I wasn't the kind of man to pull back just one string.

I didn't want it to come to this, wanted to spare your feelings, but the truth is yes, I'm leaving you for the stickbow and I'm leaving you for good this time. No more releases, no more sights, no more stabilizers, no more carbon arrows, no more cams or idler wheels or marketing babble about the wonders of parallel limbs, carbon matrix fibers and offsetting harmonic convergences.

I just felt all that extraneous stuff was coming between us, baby. Every time I brought you to draw it was like going through a pre-flight checklist or something. Don't get me wrong: there's a helluva lot about you I'll miss. The speed. Damn, the speed. And that eighty percent let-off? Yeah, I'll miss that, too.

But no matter how many times I shot you, no matter how many arrows you sent whizzing into those tight little groups, I never felt like you were a part of me, never felt like I was part of you. Let's face it: Once I got you dialed in and your pins set, I was pretty much just along for the ride. I could put you down, leave you for a month, two months, hell, a year even, then pick you up and start hitting the ten-ring.

Performance-wise, you ask for nothing and give everything where the stickbow demands everything and returns precious little compared to you. Sounds crazy and ass-backwards, I know, but then again who can predict love, emotion, the mysterious wanderings of  a soul's desires? I sure can't, so by way of example I'll just leave you with this story...

I was recently shooting you and the stickbow (Hey! She's not a bitch!) together on a sunny day, and as I held you at full draw I happened to look down at my shadow on the grass. What I saw was a machine. I then picked up the stickbow, drew it and what I saw projected on the grass was a cave painting from another time, something drawn on rock by the flickering light of a fire, a vestigal remnant of some primitive inner aesthetic reaching back into the dim lizard-brain recesses of my hunter-gatherer past. It was groovy, man.

What do you mean "what have you been smoking?" I'll tell you what I've been smoking: clarity. And let me tell you; pure, uncut clarity is a helluva nice high. The fact is I'm just not that into you. Never really was.

Auf wiedersehen, baby..

Sea Monkeys and Casinos: The Shocking Link...

Yes, we've got them. Sitting on the windowsill above our kitchen sink, happily swimming around their little Sea Monkey tank, while a mere six inches away on the other side of that window it's seven degrees outside. I don't think the briny little bastards know how lucky they've got it...

So what's the link between Sea Monkeys and casinos? Well, several years ago our state magazine assigned me to write a feature story on the meteoric rise of high-stakes Indian gaming in the state of Oklahoma. And as part of that story they told me to visit a number of casinos across the state and write about what I observed.

So without further ado, enter the Sea Monkeys... (From the May/June 2006 Oklahoma Today)

Although the card games are popular, it’s obvious the machines are what draw the most people. There are a dizzying variety of them. There are games that take the standard slot machine motif with names like Liberty 7s, Royal Reels, Press-it-Up-Poker, Mount Cashmore, Jacks or Better, Mr. Money Bags, and then there are the games with themes so seemingly incongruous with gambling it frankly makes you wonder what their designers were smoking.



I sit down at one such game based on - I’m not kidding - the movie Alien. Now, I love HR Giger’s big-headed palooka as much as the next guy, but intergalactic terror is not exactly an image that makes me want to part with my money. Give me a dancing leprechaun or something. There must be some deep industrial psychology at work, however, because I slip in a dollar anyway. And lose it immediately.


I walk on and find myself along a row of machines that anyone over the age of 30 who ever picked up a comic book would recognize. Sea Monkeys. Someone actually designed a slot machine based on the cruelest hoax ever foisted upon the youth of America.


Now this was a game behind which I could understand the logic. The Sea Monkey ad seduced us, promised us amazing and wondrous things. I bought into it. Didn’t we all? Hoarding our paper-route or allowance money. Sending it off. The anxious waiting, the anticipation and the certainty that soon you will have the coolest thing known to man. When the prize finally arrives you rush to your room, tear open the package and discover you’ve just paid $1.95 plus shipping and handling for a cheap plastic aquarium and a packet of brine shrimp eggs.


You could argue that Sea Monkeys were, for many of us, the first game of chance we ever played. And lost. And now some brilliant designer had gone and made a game out of it. This more than made up for the Alien. I can’t wait to play.


Two hours later, I still can’t wait to play. The Sea Monkeys are easily the most popular games in the casino. No one ever gets up from them, and on the rare occasion someone does, there is a mad rush to grab their seat. I almost make it once, but get shoved aside by a frail-looking elderly man clutching a portable oxygen bottle. He looks a little old to have been screwed by the Sea Monkeys and I briefly consider knocking him aside. I have a good hundred pounds on him and I badly want those Sea Monkeys, but filiopiety wins out in the end and I grudgingly give way.


Discouraged, I go back to my room, set my alarm for 4 a.m. and immediately fall asleep. Gambling’s hard work, especially when you don’t know how. When I awake and stumble back down, bleary-eyed, to the casino a little after four a.m., it’s still surprisingly busy and I recognize many of the same people I had seen the night before, still going strong. I can hear the soft plastic clink of poker chips hitting the tables, velvet surface worm smooth and shiny, the soft technicolored symphony of the machines.


I make my way back to the Sea Monkeys, but there’s a body in front of every machine and none of them act like they’re going anywhere anytime soon. Whatever the motivation; nostalgia, revenge or optimism, it’s obvious these people are here to stay. Too groggy to wait it out, I give up for good this time. I shuffle back to my room and fall asleep dreaming of cheerful underwater kingdoms.

So there you go. Sea Monkeys: Harmless coming-of-age rip-off or insidious gateway to a life of gambling addiction? You be the judge... 

If I Only Had a Voice (like that)

True story: When I first moved to my present location, I took a job as the "news director" for the area's largest radio station. You know the old saw about having a face for radio? Well, I had the face for radio and the voice for print. I hated it.

I hated it because I worked for a guy who, while he wasn't the absolute biggest asshole I'd ever met to that point, he was certainly vying for the crown.

I also hated it because well, I wasn't very good at it. I've never liked reading aloud, and I discovered that I had a tendency when reading on-air, to mix up names and stories. Inadvertently transposing the name of a local high school baseball coach with the name of a local man just charged with rape? Yeah, I did that...

I also hated it because it was, naturally, a top 40 country station and I had to listen to an endless loop of unspeakably horrible, brainless, vapid, willfully and proudly ignorant chicken-fried country pop-schlock. And no, I don't dislike country music. I love country music. Really. You're looking at a guy (figuratively speaking, of course) who owns and cherishes his Merle Haggard box set. I don't know what modern country has devolved into, but it's not music, it's auditory stupidity.

But mostly, mostly, I hated it because I had to hear my voice on-air; the tinny, weak, slightly nasally quality of it. I sounded, quite honestly, like a whiner, not unlike Martin Short's Ed Grimley character from SNL. I simply did not have a good radio voice.

But if I only had this voice, man if I'd only had this voice, then things may have been different...(via James Lileks' Pop Crush blog in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune





And speaking of Pop Crush, Lileks also has a good blog about the death of seventies pop star Gerry Rafferty

Now I will make no claim to be an authority on late seventies pop music. When "Baker Street" came out I was all of eight years old. But it was one of those ubiquitous songs that always seems to take me back to a certain place and time, and sometimes it's nice to be reminded that yes, you were once a child and didn't have a care in the world.

How Awesome A Blogger Would Gene Hill Have Been?

The reason I ask is that I was re-reading (for the umpteenth time) A Hunter's Fireside Book this evening, which I believe was Hill's first book and it struck me that it is, in essence, 160 pages of short, concise, beautifully-crafted blog posts. A total of 76 brief (most around 500 words) essays from Hill's time at Guns & Ammo, back in that long-ago time when even the  gun mags were extraordinarily literary.

I'd have to go back and dig through some of my old issues, but I believe when Hill started writing for Field & Stream his columns ran a little longer, and maybe a little deeper than the material that makes up A Hunter's Fireside Book. But since Hill was such a gifted writer those short little essays seem no less wonderful or evocative than his later work.

That, of course, got me to thinking about what older print writers might have done with the new mediums, and how their work might have adapted to them. I don't mean meaningless crap like Twitter or Facebook, but websites and blogs.

And the conclusion I reached is that I think Gene Hill would have made a helluva blogger. I'm not sure how many of the younger Gen-X and/or Gen Y (or whatever the hell the 18-to-34 demo is called these days) hunting and fishing crowd are familiar with Gene Hill (not even sure, to be honest, if any of them actually read) but surely even they could sit still and keep from updating their status or texting long enough to digest a pithy 500-word rumination on life, right? Surely. And if not, it goes without saying that we as a people are screwed.

But I'll be a rare optimist here and say I think even the instant stimulation-addicted, gleefully willing slaves to the purveyors of brand identity younger dudes I keep running into in the field and on the water might give their texting thumbs a long enough rest to read Hill, were he still here and writing.

At least I like to think so, because that would mean there's still a glimmer of appreciation out there for introspective and honest outdoors prose that isn't trying to sell you anything more than a good story and a few moments of thoughtful reflection, all in 500 words or less...

And Now For Something Completely Different...

Neither ducks nor quail on tap today, but big fish and weird musicians. Ween is one of those kinda-sorta well-known but mostly underground, out-of-the-mainstream groups that have been around forever, have a large and loyal following but are almost never heard on the radio. Think Primus, the Butthole Surfers or the Flaming Lips.

And like those groups, either you get them or you don't. How offbeat is Ween? One of their albums is entitled "Twelve Golden Country Greats" and it's an honest-to-gawd twangy traditional country album put together using real Nashville session musicians, and it sounds awesome. Of course, there are actually only ten tracks, and they have titles like "Piss up a Rope," "Japanese Cowboy" and "Help Me Scrape the Mucus Off My Brain." It's real country, it's just gone through a Ween-colored filter.

Want even more weirdness? Even though most of their albums come with an explicit lyrics warning (and with pretty good reason...) their music is good enough for Spongebob. Those of you with kids, remember this song at the end of the Spongebob movie?




Anyway, I've always been a Ween fan, and a couple years ago Joe Cermele, knowing I'm also a Butthole Surfers fan, sent me an e-mail and link to a website run by Ween's lead singer, Mickey Melchiondo. Turns out Melchiondo is a rabid angler. So rabid, in fact that he has a charter captain's license. You can actually book a fishing trip with the lead singer of Ween. How cool is that?

Not only that, but he tapes his own website-based fishing show, Brownie Troop F.S. when the band's not on tour. And if that wasn't delightfully weird enough, the episode Joe sent is of Melchiondo taking the Butthole Surfers on a Jersey striper fishing trip. The Butthole Surfers. Yeah, those guys. Striper fishing. Recreational pharmacology can't touch this level of weirdness.

And of course it's NSFW. Duh, they're rock stars...




My favorite part? This little gem of dialogue between Melchiondo and Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes as Haynes is trying to reel in a big striper:

"Walk towards the stern of the boat, walk towards the stern of the boat!"
"I dunno where the fuckin' stern is."

Priceless. And just for fun, admittedly not my favorite video, but one of my favorite Butthole Surfers tunes...

More Uncommon Commoners...

I've been simply inundated with common-ness lately: I shot a common goldeneye, got inspired by Steve Bodio to start a commonplace book and then today, this...

A pretty pair of common mergansers that came into the spread this morning, and the fifteenth species of duck the old lady has delivered to hand. My memory is failing so I'm not completely positive, but I believe they're the first common mergansers I've ever shot, and if they aren't they're certainly the first commom mergs I've shot over Tess.

I don't generally shoot mergansers, but certainly not for lack of opportunity. We have tons of hooded mergs on the lake I hunt, and I literally can't keep them out of the decoys. I'm pretty sure they'd decoy in to a bunch of two-liter pop bottles. Not terribly bright, but they're beautiful and fun to watch with their "grrrrt" calls to each other and I figure they add a little motion to the spread as well as give Tess something to stare at while we wait for other ducks to come in.

But common mergansers? For whatever reason I just don't see them whenever I hunt the main lake, which - because my puddles and ponds are mostly dry due to drought - is what I've done a lot of this season.

So when a small group came winging by the decoys not long after LST, I didn't hesitate to shoot a couple. Probably won't do it again, as mergansers don't have the best reputation as table fare, but they are undeniably beautiful birds and I'm toying with the idea of having the drake mounted.

And if you're wondering what's up with the blue speculum, there are also a couple greenheads under there somewhere. All in all not bad for a quickie one-hour hunt, and Tess got another species notch on her collar. Truth be told I've been feeling guilty about that, as I've spent a disproportionate share of time this past month either gone or running Jenny in my ongoing quest to get the pup as many days afield as possible.

But she was happy today, despite having to stand around in chest-deep water again. I haven't, however, informed her that tomorrow she sleeps in while Jenny and I go chase the mythical (at least this year) wild bobwhite quail. I fear she's going to get uncommonly pouty when she sees the truck leave without her...

Of blogging breaks and old profs who resemble Steve Earle ...

After the last post I decided to take a little break from blogging, do a little hunting and get through Christmas before starting up again. I was going to wait until after the first of the year before resuming, but I was perusing our state newspaper yesterday and came across an interesting story about one of my old college professors.

From this story in the Oklahoman

History Professor William Savage doesn't own a cell phone, a new computer provided him by the University of Oklahoma sits untouched in its box in his office, and his e-mail address is listed as “I$have$no$email@ou.edu.”

“I embrace the forms of technology I find useful,” Savage explains. That includes a few “gizmos,” as he calls most devices that are more contemporary than the pencil and legal pad he has used to compose 11 books and countless journal articles over his decades in academia. For instance, since he likes movies, Savage has a VCR and two DVD players he uses with his cathode ray tube TV sets, provided they have “enough holes” to accept the wires those devices require.

In today's light-speed wireless, electronic, digital technocracy, where most people are consumed by a 24-7 matrix of smart phones, social media and texting, Savage ambles along with “snail mail,” landline phones and books printed on that flat material that appears from laser printers. The “troglodyte.” That's what Savage, who won't reveal his age other than to say he is a “pre-Boomer,” has been called, he said. “Mostly it's ‘fossil,' ‘geezer,' ‘coot.' My colleagues frequently refer to me as a Luddite.”


Savage, who tries to have a cigar in his hand whenever he has a photo taken “because it's offensive,” doesn't care for e-books, cell phones jabber in the checkout line and people who e-mail co-workers at the next desk. And don't get him started on Boolean logic. To explain his opposition to what others might call progress, Savage turns to his expertise in Oklahoma history. When farmers needed fences on the Great Plains, he said, there wasn't enough timber to build them with split wooden rails as farmers in the forested East did. Barbed wire solved that problem. When farmers on the arid prairies needed water, the windmill pump was invented.

The point is that the Industrial Revolution solved existing problems, Savage said. These days, he said, countless electronic whatnots solve problems that don't exist and fill needs we don't have, at least until marketers convince us we do. “An awful lot of the stuff made available and marketed to people is nonessential.” The result, he said, is a din of self-expression a thousand miles wide and a quarter-inch deep. “Nobody thinks about much anymore,” he said. “They're too busy talking.”

I took (If I recall correctly) three of Savage's upper-division western history classes at a time when I was seriously flirting with changing my major from public administration to history. Why I didn't is one of those enduring mysteries we tend to look back on twenty or so years later and ask ourselves "Why didn't I? Just what the hell was I thinking?"

As a teacher Savage was exactly as he comes across in the article: a gruff, grouchy, abrupt, opinionated and generally misanthropic asshole who spoke his mind and didn't really give a shit who it might have offended. His classes were great fun, and to this day it's one of my great regrets that I didn't run screaming from the OU public administration program and into the history department.

But in reading the article it occurred to me that "Wild Bill" Savage (as he was known among students) is a dead ringer for Steve Earle. Not young, lean, hairy, dangerous-looking Guitar Town Steve Earle, but portly, post-addiction, male-pattern baldness The Wire Steve Earle. I didn't realize this at the time, of course, because back then Steve Earle looked like this...

While my professor looked (even back then) pretty much like this...

Not much resemblence, is there? But that was then and this is now...

So I guess the moral of the story is: if you're a lean, hairy, cool and dangerous looking outlaw country-rock/folk singer-songwriter, don't go on a decade-long booze, coke and heroin bender or you'll end up looking like a portly, balding history professor who hates technology.

Don't say you weren't warned...

Diver Down

Funny how adding a few diver decoys to your puddler spread in hopes of giving it a little more variety and color tends to bring in a few...divers. Common goldeneye. Not so common around here, at least in the areas I hunt. This is the first one I've shot in several years.

Because of where and how I hunt, most of the divers I shoot are incidental, just random drop-ins. But if I had a boat, oh, if I only had a boat, I could see myself really getting into those big, open water diver spreads...

She'd really appreciate it, too...

I'm not sure on the literal translation, but I think that look says "This standing in chest-deep water shit is starting to get a little old, bub. How 'bout you buy me a boat, loser?"

And Josh, if you're reading, I haven't forgotten your wood duck flank feathers. I'm just waiting until the end of the season in case I have anything else to send you...

Just Words...

There aren’t many things a person can hold on to over the course of a lifetime. We lose friends and family to death, distance and petty grievances. The passing of years turns youthful hopes and expectations into scraps of memory we lock away, wistful artifacts of the people we once were. And promises made in the exuberance of that youth, promises we once held to be inviolate and forever, are revealed as words, just words, as illusory and fleeting as the breath it took to utter them.

I’m no different. There’s not a helluva lot in this life I’ve managed to do right, and the man I am is a lifetime removed from the man I once thought I’d be. I’m difficult to live with. I’m moody. I’m often distant. I’ve never lived up to the potential, the expectations and the faith others have placed in me and I’m not at all sure - and never will be - that I am deserving of what I have.

And what I have, despite having screwed up virtually everything else that’s ever been handed me, is a wife; a remarkable, beautiful wife who fifteen years ago today made a promise. Words, just words, as illusory and fleeting as the breath it took to utter them. But she is still here. Through all the innumerable little disappointments, joys, defeats, triumphs, heartaches, discoveries, losses and every other daily struggle that taken as whole comprises life, she is still here. She’s the anchor that keeps me from drifting, the only one I’ve ever had, the only one I’ve ever needed. She’s the best friend I’ve ever had, and without her I’m not just lost, I cease being me.

I don’t tell her I love her nearly as much as I should, don’t show her those small, spontaneous acts of public affection as often as she deserves. I’ve never been much good at showing affection. But in quiet, unguarded moments I find myself looking at her with the same sense of wonder and amazement I felt when I saw her for the first time, when I first saw that smile that made me feel weak and funny inside and fell instantly, unequivocally, in love. And in those moments I marvel that after all these years I still have the only thing I ever really wanted.

Happy anniversary, honey. It’s not crystal, but then again I was never very good at presents, either. You are the best thing that ever happened to me, you're a better wife than I am a husband and I don't love you just as much as I did when we married, I love you much, much more.

I'm back. Yet again. With news, even...

If I recall correctly, I ended my last blog post, oh so many days ago, with "I'm going to bed." And I suppose it would be reasonable to infer from said statement that at some point in the near future I'd wake up and actually write something rather than simply leave the blog cold for ten days or so.

I did, in point of fact, wake up, but only long enough to wash my clothes, re-pack them and then catch a plane to Utah, where I spent last week engaged in various and sundry activities involving shotguns and birds, activities that would normally - were it not for the kindly largess of others - be way, way above my tiny and impoverished rung on the socio-economic ladder.

More on that, and my trip to South Dakota, later. My schedule has been a bit hectic the past couple weeks, to say the least. It's something that I, as a crabby, short-tempered and generally reclusive (my wife would say hermit-like) misanthrope, am not used to. I've obviously got a lot of catching up to do, blog-wise, so I'll start with some work blog changes that may or may not affect the personal blog.

A few of you may have noticed (or not, if the chirping crickets and lack of comments are any indication) that last week I started co-writing Field & Stream's gundogs blog (Here's a link to my introductory blog. Please tell the world how great I am and much you love me). I'm also still co-writing the Field Notes blog, but David Maccar, who is the newest addition to the online editorial staff, is now doing much of the Field Notes material (and doing a helluva good job, I might add).

I am extremely honored and very excited to get the opportunity to write for the F&S gundogs blog, as the late Bill Tarrant, who was Field & Stream's gundogs editor from 1973 until he died in 1998, was one of my all-time favorite writers of any genre and a huge influence growing up. He was inarguably one of the best writers to ever grace that magazine's pages, and for a publication whose sporting literary tradition can't be touched, that's saying a lot. Now obviously Bill Tarrant never knew what the hell a blog was, and I have no idea what he might have thought of them if he had, but to be able to write about dogs and hunting with dogs in the same publication (even if it is now digital) is a professional and personal milestone for me. I just hope I don't screw it up...

It does, however, pose something of a quandary: I've grown quite fond of writing about my dogs on this obscure little personal blog, and I don't know how much - if any - of what I do here will, or even can, transfer to the F&S blog. I'm still taking baby steps over there, but I'm hoping to eventually be able to get a little more experimental and a little more literary with some of the material (Mouthful of Feathers, Wingshot and Eight More Miles dudes, I'm lookin' at you...).

If that happens, and at this point I honestly don't know if it will, then I might be cutting back some on the dog and upland/waterfowl-related items I write here. But not much, because I can't abandon writing for my own amusement altogether, and of course I've got everything and anything else to write about, too. It's a strange and inchoate beat I march to, and I don't see the blog deviating much from that course regardless of what I write for others.

And whatever I write, next time I'll try to keep from going almost two weeks between writing it...