Muskie acting like pike are a real kick in the pants

ectoplasmic neural network coonskin cap

All judgments made on the universe of thought are informed by this finite timeline - death is the wellspring of meaning. If I ever get a terminal diagnosis, the first thing I’m going to do is quit flossing.

I want to slow life down so I can do more things, climb more mountains with my wife, take more walks in the woods with my wife and our dog, fish more valleys, bake more bread, smoke more meat. But I don’t want to simply experience things more slowly. This is what meditation is about, I suppose, disorienting the clock of experience, but how can one meditate while doing enjoyable things? That’s the impossible trick - it’s tough to attend to the fact that you’re standing on your fly line on the bow in the wind and the rain and the sun when you’re also trying to attend to the fact that these awarenesses are nothing but the drumbeats of your subjective consciousness and they should pass from our attention as easily as they wandered into it. If you achieved that you’d fuck up the cast and it wouldn’t be you hoisting that beefy brown bruiser with the articulated streamer hanging from its mammal-crushing hook jaw in the picture, it’d be your buddy, who wasn’t so worried about everything.

I want to have time to find a fall-apart honky tonk band, an upright piano and a couple horn players in a shitty bar in a shitty town in a shitty part of Texas where it’s hot and dusty and I’m hot just sitting there drinking cold beer with a handful of people and the band is playing music that I’ve never heard before and I could exist on that clink-clank sound engine for eternity. And I want to have time to find, again, some kind of a funk five piece in a random bar on a random street in New Orleans and it’s so hot and humid that I’m sweating just standing there drinking cold beer and the bar is packed and I’m keyed up on street coke and my heart is beating a mile a minute and I’m bobbing my head and I’m staring at the baritone sax player with dreadlocks in a pony tail down to behind his ass and the sides of his head are shaved to skin and every time he reaches down to blast that low note my balls vibrate to match the harmony of ground penetrating radar and I get a sense of the density of the center of the earth.

Lots of people complain about a sore shoulder but its my hands and forearms that get tired first when I’m streamer fishing and after a long day of throwing a heavy sink tip on a heavy rod without moving a fish I want to give up and sometimes I do give up, but it was that one small muskie a few weeks ago with Don and Chris that charged out from behind the boulder and blasted my streamer on the first strip that keeps me trying. How many times have I tucked a streamer behind a rock, into a log jam, between two massive logs in a slow eddy in deep water, and nothing happened? The muskie I do see materialize out of nowhere right next to the boat and after one figure eight sulk back into the depths like they never existed. But finally one is where it’s supposed to be, hot to trot and ready to fuck and it was small and I dropped it before we got a picture, but I don’t care. Muskie acting like pike are a real kick in the pants.

Let’s try to capture the feeling of what it means to be a real human, to be a thing that exists while wearing this concept helmet, these Inuit idea sunglasses, this sewn on meaning making ghost skin, this ectoplasmic neural network coonskin cap. Served with a side of existential wonder, or substitute dread for no charge! For twenty bucks more you can have a glimpse behind the curtain, through the smoke, for a brief second, a peep show of the sublime, at the skinned body of the world, gawk at it, it doesn’t mind, that’s what it's there for, that’s how it eats, that freak.

Side effects may include, but are not limited to: watery discharge, questioning free will, the origins of the universe, quantum foam, time, space itself, and the hard problem of consciousness. Life is the terminal diagnosis, so go easy on the flossing big guy.

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