SpongeBob and Naivete...

In hindsight I guess it’s my own damn fault. If I’d just watch more television I guess by now I’d have built up some kind of tolerance for it, like the way the doomed, hopeless homeless drunks roaming the streets down in Oklahoma City have a tolerance for the three-dollar bottles of rotgut benzene-smelling whiskey they line up for every day, fidgeting in the parking lot and nervously folding and unfolding their plasma checks as they wait for the liquor store to open.

But I haven’t. I don’t watch much television, so I guess you could call me culturally immuno-deficient in that respect. To mix metaphors, when I turn on the tube I am the naive native wrapping myself in the smallpox-infected trade blanket. Bad shit just can’t help but happen.

Such was the case when I was flipping though the channels a few days ago, wondering why we pay seventy bucks a month for what basically amounts to a few educational shows for the kids, Top Gear, the occasional movie on IFC, the occasional OU football game, Sirius radio and SpongeBob. We wouldn’t even have it for the fact that because we live in a rural area we can’t pick up the free over-the-air networks, and my wife and I have been seriously considering dropping it anyway.

But when I saw that this month’s “free preview” channel was one of those “all hunting all fishing all the time” networks, well, my curiosity got the better of me and I started watching. I was genuinely curious to see what I had been missing.

A bit of background: I know nothing, absolutely nothing about hunting and fishing shows and/or personalities. No, screw that. That’s not strong enough. I actually know less than nothing about hunting and fishing shows. I see the ads featuring these people in the magazines and I have no idea who they are, why they’re famous, what they’re hawking and why I should give a shit. On one of the few (and in all likelihood, last) corporate-sponsored junket hunts I’ve ever been on, I basically just sat in a corner of the wall tent and listened to everyone else engage in industry shop talk. It was like they were speaking a different language. I didn’t have a friggin’ clue who or what they were talking about, so I just drank their beer and kept my mouth shut (and incidentally, that’s also a not-half-bad life philosophy…)

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against those shows, I’m just not into thirty minutes of low production values, bad soundtrack music, dumbshit hosts, slow-motion kill shots, inflated body counts, moronic fist-pumping, fake camaraderie, tired clichés and cornpone platitudes, that’s all.

As it turns out, by the time I finished my three-day experiment in purposely watching a cross-section of American hunting and fishing shows, I would have killed to find one professional and classy enough to have low production values, bad soundtrack music, dumbshit hosts, slow-motion kill shots, high body counts, moronic fist-pumping, fake camaraderie, tired clichés and cornpone platitudes. Because most of them were infinitely worse.

Call me stupid. Call me naïve. Call me out-of-touch. Call me Henry Rollins (again). But I had no idea, no idea at all, that television programming could be so willfully bad, could wallow in such unwitting, cringe-inducing self-parody. Obviously I am out of touch because there’s an audience out there – somewhere – that watches and approves of it. And obviously the corporate sponsors who bankroll these shows must watch and approve of them as well.

It’s not the corporate sponsorship that bothers me. That’s just the way the game is. Whether you like it or not, all media is basically an advertising vehicle and somebody’s gotta pay for its creation. What bothers me is how fundamentally bad most of it is, not only in the low production values, questionable footage and moronic commentary, but in warping - in the basest and sometimes gleefully crudest ways possible – the deeper, less easily understood and even less-easily articulated reasons for why we do what we do.

And I’m just wondering what that says about us. I have no idea because I don’t know what’s worse; cynically reveling in stupidity in a calculated effort to sell units or honestly reveling in stupidity because you’re, well, stupid.

So I guess I’ll just churlishly harrumph a bit more and then feel smug and superior when I call the satellite company this week and tell them to come get their ugly-ass dish off my roof.

But damn it, I’m gonna miss SpongeBob…

An Entirely Synthetic Life

                                                                  Prairie Mallard, 1995


I sit in the airport terminal watching the citizens of Zombie Nation quietly ignore one another as they text, surf, tweet or simply stare into space. Husbands ignore wives. Wives ignore kids. Kids ignore everything but what scrolls across the screens on whatever handheld devices they've demanded and received from their self-absorbed acquiescing parents.

Oh, I'm sure they all have lives, I guess. If that's what you want to call it. They probably think they're happy, content, satisfied. Entertained. Occupied. Thumbs become blurs over tiny keyboards. Eyes squint at tiny little messages written in the fragmentary patois of our time. Thumbs blur once again and tiny little responses are sent out into the endless gulf stream of digitally-truncated banality that's ever flowing right over our heads.

I feel superior, of course. I don't know anything about them, so it's easy to make snap judgements. Do I? Oh, hell yes.

Take that booth-tanned guy sitting across from me with the gravity-defying hair who reeks of ASS body spray. I'm sure he's quite happy, quite content to be defined by how he looks, regardless of how much I think he looks like a smug, spoiled dick in his Tapout shirt. And he might be the nicest, most interesting guy in the world for all I know. He may volunteer at a local soup kitchen, read Nabokov because he really digs it and have a kennel full of gundogs. But I doubt it.

And the catatonic kid off to my left studiously ignoring his parents, lost in the depths of his own infinite playlist, his iPod-induced stupor is in turn studiously ignored by both parents who, hunched over their own devices, haven't spoken to the kid, or even acknowledged his existence - or each others' -  in the twenty minutes I've been sitting here. They might be the model nuclear family at home, discussing the day's events earnestly and interestingly over a pot roast. But I doubt it.

And the severe, pneumatic blonde in the black miniskirt and power heels tapping importantly on a netbook perched just-so on long, gym-toned legs while talking into her bluetooth headset to some equally urgent-acting business partner in some other airport terminal. Yeah, she's flying business class and yeah, she looks like she wouldn't hesitate to claw her way over a pile of screaming infants to board the plane first, but maybe beneath that weatherproof plasticized exterior she's really a sweetheart who likes baking cookies in her pajamas, collecting Strawberry Shortcake dolls and sending big chunks of her obviously-considerable disposable income to paraplegic Bulgarian orphans. But I doubt it.

And the tired-looking dads, the disaffected looking wives, the bimbo-looking girlfriends, the bored-looking boyfriends, the spoiled, petulant kids, the ironic hipsters, the crazy-haired spinsters, the emo-looking weird dudes with Romulan haircuts, the tweeners, the teeners, the guidos, the tools, the real fake housewives of wherever; it's like the extras from every lowest-common-denominator reality show on television are swirling around me in a sea of dull, pointless synthetic existence. Behind those slack jaws and vapid eyes they all might be interesting, self-actualized individuals. But I doubt it.

And as I look around I wonder if any of these people, these organic automatons, have ever known  or ever will know a single moment - just one brief shining moment out of the entirety of their dull, manufactured reality - of pure, crystalline rightness; some beautiful, momentary astringent that washes away the waxy build-up on whatever remains of their souls and forces them to feel alive. Not entertained. But alive.

Maybe. But I doubt it.

Prairie IMAX

Just east of my back porch, the tailing edge of a line of storms sweeping off to the northeast into Kansas. Grapefruit-sized hail and tornado warnings for them. A cold beer and a spectacular sunset light show for me.

We'll get ours, eventually, and when we do I'm sure some distant backyard observer on the safe side of the dryline will pop the top on a cold one, stretch out in his lawn chair and think to himself "sucks to be them" as he watches the sky boil up and violently erupt over my house. Turnabout. That's just early fall on the southern plains, a period of transition that's often every bit as violent as spring. New England this isn't.

But right now the sky over my house contains only hot, still air. Summer air. I watch the dragonflies weave and dance in the welding-arc glow of the distant lightning stitching its demented pattern across the sky. I watch the boys play with the dogs in the evening heat. Beads of condensation roll down the side of my beer bottle. I long for fall. Real fall. Hunting fall. Dogs-and-shotguns fall. Not sweat-your-ass-off-for-a-few-dove-and-teal-and-the-gawddamned-teal-aren't-even-here-yet-and-the-gawddamned-dove-are-already-gone fall.

 But that's still a long month away. So I sit back in my lawn chair, take a pull from the cold, wet beer, watch the sky and think to myself "sucks to be them."

Or not, as it turns out.

What happens when you do zero pre-season scouting? What happens when you blithely assume your favorite slough will have water, despite the area being in the midst of a drought? What happens when your dog receives a complimentary full-body skunk mist on the walk in to the slough which may or may not hold water and therefore may or may not hold any teal? Why am I showing a photograph of London's Parliament building rather than a photograph of a limit of teal? Or even a couple teal? Or even a single teal?

Do I even need to answer any of these questions? I think the photograph sums it up quite nicely...

Just add dog. And teal. Or not.

This is why I love early-season teal hunting. Everything I need is in that backpack. A dozen teal decoys, shells, call, e-collar for the dog, water bottle, blind-making tools and other various and sundry accessories I take on all my hunts. No waders to struggle into, no huge decoy bag to lug around. Beautiful. There's nothing like duck hunting in shorts and a t-shirt.

Unless, of course, it's duck hunting in shorts and a t-shirt on a morning that brings an empty, lifeless lake. Teal are the most binary of waterfowl. They seemingly exist in only two states of being. Either they're here, or they're not. I've tried, but I've never been able to accurately predict the vagaries of their early migration.

If they're here tomorrow, I might very well shoot a limit within a few minutes. If not, I guess it'll be a nice morning training session for Tess. Either way, at least it'll be an easy walk in and out. As I get older, that starts counting for something...

Only in America...

From this AP story


Mom pulls gun on middle school volleyball team: Texas woman allegedly confronts opposing team as they celebrate a lopsided victory over her daughter's squad
 
School officials say a woman believed to be the mother of a seventh-grade volleyball player pulled a gun on a rival team celebrating a lopsided win over her daughter's outmatched squad in suburban San Antonio. Judson school district spokesman James Keith says the girls on the Kirby Middle School volleyball team fled when the woman confronted them with a gun Thursday night in the school's parking lot and threatened to shoot.


Keith says no shots were fired and no one was injured. Authorities believe the woman is the mother of a player from Metzger Middle School, which had just been beaten soundly. No arrests had been made as of early Friday. Keith says school district officials believe they have identified the woman.

Guns don't kill people. Crazy-ass parents who try to live vicariously through their children because their own lives are so miserable and fucked up do.

Cover Art Goodness

Since I live 90 miles away from the nearest newsstand that carries The Drake, I've been telling myself I need to just bite the bullet and get a subscription (that's what I eventually did with Gray's and what I still need to do with Flyfish Journal, too).

That way I won't take the chance of missing any issues, especially issues that might be sporting awesome cover art like this (via Buster Wants To Fish)

Now that one is a keeper. And if you're interested, here's the artist website.

And it brings up a question: Why the hell don't sporting mags put real art on their covers any more? Outside of Gray's and Sporting Classics I don't think any hook-and-bullet mags still routinely use original artwork.

Which is a shame, really. Honestly, do we really need an endless barrage of covers featuring underwear models, game-farm bucks, barnyard turkeys, trained megafauna and the latest in tactical cutlery? What's wrong with every now and then using a real artist? Maybe something created from an individual vision rather than a marketing decision.?

It's the damndest thing: the production values on modern magazine covers have never been higher. The photography has never been more technically perfect. The design and art direction has never been more slick and refined. And the end product we see on the newsstand has never been more soulless, antiseptic, inorganic and utterly forgettable.

I glance through a lot of magazines because most of them aren't worth reading (and oftentimes the cluttered, manic, counter-intuitive and generally goofy-ass design and layout actually inhibits reading them...), much less admiring as a piece of pop or commercial art. Happily, this issue of The Drake is both. Now I just need to go find a copy.

How not to photograph your dog...

I had to run into town the other day so I took the pup with me to let her stretch her legs a bit at the local soccer fields. I took along a camera, but I don't know if she's too fast....

Or if I'm too slow...

I can get her in focus when she slows to a trot (which is rarely)...

Or when she stops to tip over a tasty-smelling trash can (which is often)...

But other than that I'm having an awfully hard time getting a really good running shot of Jenny. She's just a blur, a slobbering, tongue-lolling streak. Everything is always just a tiny bit out of focus. I think maybe I need a new camera body, one with a "setter-tracking" autofocus mode.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Monks?**

"The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."

 from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, a book that was originally published my sophomore year in high school. It's now 2010. Why the hell can't we buy one yet? Screw flying cars. I want my Electric Monk.

**Forgive the literary mashup. I've been on a brilliant-but-dead sci-fi writer kick lately.

Redemption. Sort of.

Never worked so hard for a four-ounce bird in my life, but when this one finally dropped from the sky I was whooping like an idiot.

It almost didn't happen, though. A strong cold front came through on Thursday and pushed out a big chunk of our local birds. And what birds remained were skittish and erratic fliers that were by now quite used to dodging the laughingly ineffectual shot strings of the hopelessly slow and earthbound.

And just like opening day, the shooting didn't start out well. Most of it went something like this...



A classic example of the "poke it in the sky, pull the trigger and pray" school of shotgunning. The birds were just coming in too fast for him to swing on, and I was beginning to wonder if switching shotguns on him had been such a good idea.

See, earlier that day, deciding that maybe I should take to heart his advice that perhaps there was "something wrong with the gun" (at least, wrong for him trying to hit a fast-flying dove) I had switched him to a different gun. I decided to try a little less choke, a little less length-of-pull, an additional barrel and a little more barrel length.

Thusly set up, I picked up progeny #1 from school and we went straight to the shooting range where, after about five minutes with the new gun he began to break hand-thrown clays with a fair degree of regularity. Not too fast, but I was more interested in building confidence than presenting a challenge.

But sitting there in the field, watching the hulls pile up I started worrying that maybe I should have thrown him a few zingers.

And about that time when I really began to despair, everything - for one brief moment - went right. A flight of three birds came in right at us, and in one fluid (for a nine-year-old), practiced (well, semi-practiced) motion Brayden shouldered the shotgun, picked out the middle bird, swung through it (finally!) and dropped it stone dead. No one was more amazed than him. Except perhaps me.

And then, of course, he went right back to missing everything. But that was OK. That first giant, intimidating mountain had finally been summited.

Now maybe I can finally take a shot...