Every so often, I need to simply tossing in this little nugget of base, self-serving aggrandizement: My failed attempt to get a fly-fishing film into the F3t, international film tour.
Here. Watch this. Eleven some-odd minutes off your life, but it might be worth it–especially if you like long, embroidered diatribes and atrocious metaphors, similes, and references to eunuchs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXClVibG3xw
There’s a reason I’m starting to clamour for solitude–for the surrounding terra firma–for the veritable Narnian escapade come April 25. The first of which is, it will be exactly seven days after I turn the very age my dad was when my mom looked at him and said, “I think I’m pregnant:” 48.
So aside from getting my mind off of that milestone–one that tells me I’ve only got another score of years before I start wetting the bed, I’ve also got the picture above me.
This is where I’ve been employed for the last ten years. The building to the right is the antiquated, vacant and potentially HAUNTED Juvenile hall. The building to left the the new and improved and exceedingly prison-channeling facility into which we moved. I’ve seen a lot of trauma in those places. A lot of haunted, traumatized, vacant souls, vacant eyes, and lost children blowing in the wind.
I’ve listened to the pyrotechnic screams of addicts. I’ve breathed more pepper-spray in the course of rioting and chaos than some will ever know. I’ve had urine thrown in my eyes. I’ve been punched, kicked, and threatened by people who just finished stabbing someone in the face and neck. I’ve halted more than one suicide in my life. I’ve routinely shot baskets with young people who’ve killed their parents.
I’ve also seen some of the most cleverly-precient people I’ve ever met. Occasionally, I meet a kid that forever marks a moment in my life. And a few have told me, I have been a hallmark for them as well. Sometimes, that is one of the few rewards of a job like this.
But on the whole, it’s hard not to have the culture in a fever-swamp like that start leeching into your mind. The language, the coarseness, the attitudes, the constant need for hypervigilance and awareness–the time-accrued ability to simply “feel” when a fight is about to break out.
“fight or flight” is not a skill. It’s a compounded interest rate that taxes your soul.
Sometimes, it just gets to be too much. I don’t care how jaded you think you are. I don’t care how many first-person shooter games you play, how many episodes of The Walking Dead you’ve seen–nothing compares to the traumas of real life brokers of the awful and bad–brokering awful and bad things at you all day long.
So–I simply dream of doing something else. The world inside those walls can be extremely vexing, and rob a person of ANY goodwill they might want to give their family. At first, it seems an easy tightrope to walk. Ten years later, I’m having my doubts.
I could blog every day about the “inside baseball” nature of that job, without ever violating any laws whatsoever. I’m sure I could actually gain a signifiant following if I did. But why–would a guy who is everyday less and less impressed with thugs and punks,and guys who hear a hip-hop soundtrack in their own heads when they enter a room–want to simply take my private time and go for a helping of traumatic seconds?
Look a that picture again. This time, notice the periphery. That’s the Lower Sacramento River running literally hundreds of feet out the windows of the 900 Pod. There are trout in that river that will convince you you’ve hooked the back of a jet ski. Even though a harsh drought condition manages to sour the tree lines in this picture, I still hear the lyrics to a song–ringing in my ears, begging me to simply find a way to get out there:
When I lose–my smile
and my thoughts get jumbled
when the air and BS–get too thick
can’t take a breath without getting sick
I’ve had enough of this concrete jungle
Of course I’m extrapolating “concrete jungle” from the urban references in the song, but believe me–THAT PLACE is made of concrete. And “jungle” is an understatement.
I simply write this here, because it’s easy to assume from my blog’s general bedrock narrative, that I’m living in a a world of recreation and mental latitude. In reality, I’m not. I Have to force it. I have to actively seek out the solitude not afforded me by current gainful employment.
But one day, it will be the rule, and not the exception. One day, I will be furloughed from the Pod,never to return again–I will one day, get in my four-wheel drive, kick it into drive, and go until I run out of road.
Until I hear banjos . . . .
One thing I’m good at is inflating my hopes. Exaggerating my parameters. Building my weight-bearing circus-tents out of balsa wood. The following is the piece I had been referring to for some time. I truly thought it was going to make the cut in the publication for which it was solicited. It did not. So now, I foist it upon you for free.
(Insert Editor’s appallingly-mundane title here)
Perhaps the greatest irony in my discovery of Tenkara’s quiet minimalism the fact that I was engaged in the base activity of paralyzing my Hippocampus with an Ipad when I found it. Somewhere in the midst of all the pop-ups, synaptic bellicosities, and rank endorphin addictions lay this quiet meadow–and veritable dream for the Walden Pond deconstructionist. The mind screamed; I can fish while tossing all my gear into the ether. I can finally concentrate on things that actually drew me to fly-fishing in the first place.
My life as a guitarist has made no fewer leaps. At one time, my effects rack consisted of every digital delay, distortion, reverb, chorus and harmonizer I could bolt into it. I became so enthralled at the technical maelstrom within the course of making music, that I forgot about making it at all; I was more concerned about air-brushing my Stratocaster with a cloud-shadowed moonrise than causing a foot to tap. Process over mission.
While skulking down road to minimalism, the tackle box genuflected to the fly box. The effects rack abdicated to an effects pedal. This went on until my acoustic guitar had my workhorse electric in some sort of an operational full-Nelson for quite some time. I began to discover that that my time spent in the halls of minimalism gave me a whole new outlook and approach to the times when minimalism wasn’t an option. It made more extravigant pursuits far more economically-constructed. And far more intergral at the core.
So the night I saw Tenkara demonstrated on a YouTube video, the implicatory effects had the same exonerating feel that driving on the open plains does for a cerebral claustrophobic. It was all I could think about for days. Something about lowering the equipment ratio and raising the standard at the same time appealed to me. Within three weeks, I had purchased and landed a fish on a 7:3 Yamame. For lack of a better term, I was hooked.
It was ironically a YouTube clip of virtuoso James Hill playing three simultaneous counterparts of Michael Jackson’s Bille Jean on a Ukulele that had me heading out to peep one of those as well; I was developing a healthy need to toss the extraneous Flotsam and Jetsam for a while. And oddly enough, this musician/fly-fisherman has made exponential improvement leaps in both areas, precisely attributable to falling into the Grand Valhalla of Having Less to Deal With; Complexity within simplicity, as opposed to complexity hacked out of clutter. I can live with that.
The ukulele is the first instrument I’ve ever actually taken to the river with me that seems to have any organic existence at the outset. I will actually sit on a rock and actually play actual music with it. It fits. It fits with the ambient water, it fits with the ambient light, and it fits with the ambient space implied in what logisitcal red tape was not required to get it to the water in the first place.
And now, looking backwards, my silly little penchant for Cliff’s Notes, retrograde analysis kicks in; they have nearly everything in common–aside from the odd coincidence that both arenas brag as their greatest exponents–masters of Japanese heritage.
Range Limitations
If you place your finger on Middle C on a piano, and count 14 white keys to the right—and stop there—you have defined the entire sonic spectrum of a Tenor ukulele. That kind of redaction can be scary—especially to those who depend on a broader spectrum. Yet, Jake Shimabukuro has managed to scorch out a commensurate version of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody at a TED conference without batting an eye. Once the possibility of complexity is seen to remain extant, a sense of possibility sets in quickly.
Hitting the water for the first time with an Iwana rod, eleven feet of line, some 5x tippet, and an odd, reverse-hackle fly feels . . . shall we say, limited. The saturation contrast alone will invoke inaccurate reflexes that call into question whether or not Tenkara fishing is nothing more than a gratifying way to fling line at the water. It never does seem to set in, however, that the 14th Century woodcuts from the Izaak Walton tome portays something eerily similar. He thought this fixed-line approach most swell enough to write a book about it. Maybe we should read it. Maybe we should start hitting the grassed-over berms on the old back roads, instead of constantly trying to be the guy surfing the whitecaps of engineered obsolescence.
And besides. A procedural wreck at the corner of Galhardo and Ishigaki leaves far less damage. I’m still reeling from an adolescent trauma involving monofilament backlash and a button-fed Zebco fiasco. I’m not going back. Level line, please.
Uphill PR
Take your Iwana rod out of its case at your local fly shop, and a swirling, shaudenfreude vortex will open in the ceiling. The simultaneous intrigue and revulsion that accompanies the unknown is sometimes entertaining. I met this first hand when my fly-shop buddy yanked my Man Card ten seconds after I unsheathed the sans-reel, telescoping threat-to-testosterone-levels.
Tiny Tim did more to galvanize the ukulele into some tragi-comic third dimension than the instrument’s diminutive characteristics ever could have by themselves. But no matter the reasons, I routinely find myself in the ambassador’s seat more often than not when I uncase either one of these items. Over time, I’ve just learned to enjoy the conversational points-of-departure and call it day. I’m catching fish. I’m playing things on my uke that turns heads.
And in both endeavors, I’m having aquaintances walk away and say “I think I’m going to look into getting one of those.”
Space
Perhaps the greatest part about such minimal baselines isn’t just about what one has been able to shed, but basking in the joy of the spaces left behind. I never before thought of fishing or music as having an applicable Feng Sui subtext to them, but they do. I’m not the guy to extrapolate some broad, metaphysical doctrine at this level, but the beauty of any song is only partly contingent on notes. The real crux of its DNA deals with the space between those notes. Sometimes, an extra note is too much, causing tension. Too distracting. Dissonant. Or, more to the lexicon, diatonically incongruent. Sure, Flight of the Bumblebee is cool. Try to settle one’s mind around a soundtrack containing an endless loop of said Moto Perpetuo, however, and the measurable leap from obscure music lover to a machete-weilding, aerial CNN aberration is a very small . . . um, space.
Tenkara is about space. Space between arrival at the river and quiet contemplation. Space between the active observation of fauana and flora. Space between the positioning of self and the deployment of line and rod and . . . casting.
Space between fish. These are the notes in the song: Rivers, runs, rifles, hatches and the like. We can choose to oversaturate, composing a dense, overwrought symphony of our time on the water. if you see me, you’ll see me slowing the tempo down. Breathing between measures. pausing between casts.
And perhaps sitting on a rock, playing my uke while the water rests.
Click to see epic simplicity
Tying my first Kebari fly for the mad dash up the mountain, and to the McCLoud. Like time, and friendship, the wait is worth the journey. . . .
I just received my new guitar pedal from Tech 21. All I can say is “wow.” I’ll be reviewing it Monday, after I use it live–actually, THAT opportunity may come Friday.
This thing is a beast.
I say forgive–and then forget
but I aint learned to do it yet
you’d think I’d know by now . . .
I know just how to hurt someone
been on both sides of that gun–
pulled the trigger anyhow . . .
-Bob Carlisle
I will never fail to be astounded by the amount of grace and mercy I have been shown in my life. I guess anyone can potentially say “I should be dead, but I’m not,” without qualification. Once upon a time, those kinds of statements set one apart from the others, or at least provided a contrast from the norm.
Today, nothing is shocking. And while I can say unequivocally that the above statement applies to me, it literally means nothing to an outside world preoccupied with death, reality television, egocentric grandstanding, and the narcissistic ratings race between the Kardashians and their step-dad’s gender-chronicles.
Yet, a small and narrowing circle of people in a an equally small Louisiana parish know for a fact–if not for the grace of God, I’d be dead–NOW.
That will be left for the winds to remember.
But how easy we forget. How easy, the Silent Hand that stops us from falling is slapped away in impetuous haste. How little time must really pass before the God that brought us through the flood is blamed for the humidity.
Sometimes, the avatar for forgiveness comes in the form of people who wouldn’t agree with me in the least about the theological terms I might invoke. Sometimes, it is the one farthest away from church–as it were–that demonstrates the most extraordinary grace–a statement that in no way indicts the church as hypocritical–but sometimes, it seems the contrast in stark reality is only really brought to bear by those who can do NOTHING for us.
Two weeks ago the following verse erupted out of my mouth and guitar–and addition to a song I thought was complete nearly two years ago:
You call me friend
even when I fail
though I betrayed you with a brother’s kiss
and drove the nails
and here you stand
to hear my plea
to release me from my darkest chains
and set me free
It’s been said that not only are we made in God’s image, but really, much of our legal structure in any organized society reflects some form of governmental hierarchy in Heaven.
I mean, did we decide on the matrix of “weighing truth in the balance,” or are we reacting to an eternal echo placed in us? Does the idea of kings and princes come as some kind of biological synapse from a brain borne of evolutionary time, matter, chance, and apparently a flagrant violation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? Or are we projecting towards a perfect day we know will one day arrive?
Thus, the idea that God became a man makes all the sense in the world to me; thirty-three years of temptation, trials, tribulations. He knew the end from the beginning. He was fully aware of the ruse, the setup, the cowardice, and the political maneuvering that would eventually nail him to a tree.
In the end, he will judge ME–not as a far-away, distant and arrogant judge in the anterooms of vaunted halls.
But as one of my peers. He WAS one of us.
And sometimes, I see him in the forgiveness of others that don’t even know him like I do. That–is when I know this thing called “the breath of life” is no accident.
And neither is anything else.
Of all the hair-brained schemes I’ve concocted, the one I am about to lay out is the one that makes the least sense to people. This one seems to supersede:
1) Donning an ape suit and attempting to foment a Bigfoot hoax Easter Sunday of 1991.
2) Tossing a second “pop fly” ball into a scrimmage game.
3) Calling Mr. Rogers on the Larry King show, and asking him if he “ever overfed the fish.”
4) Writing Mother Teresa, attempting to convince her to have Snapple Iced Tea, sent to her tent in Calcutta. (She wrote back)
I did all of those things. And yet, the caper that has generated the most “um . . . WHY?” consternation is a simple foray to South America. A trip to see ONE band in concert: Oficina G3.
Of course you haven’t heard of them. They are Brazilian. They sing in Portuguese. They also don’t answer the phone when you try to find out anything from them. Theoretically, I am going to see them play in Sao Paulo, IF I can ever figure out when they are playing. This requires them to answer the phone.
My friend Yohan, lives in SP, and contends without a doubt that “Brazilians don’t care.” In fact, as I write this, he’s telling me that the annual Carnaval festival going on right now only solidifies every one of his contentions—that pure, unadulterated hedonism coupled with a deep philosophical paradigm known as “not working for five straight days” creates the laissez faire thing he was telling me about.
Plus, a drunk, naked old man outside his window apparently likes to sing.
But Oficina G3 is a progressive metal/praise/Christian band, forged in the crucible of the Petra/Stryper heyday. Their lead singer, Mauro Henrique, is on FaceBook right now, eating BBQ and not getting pasted up on the streets, and excoriating his amazing vocal cords with pointless, enraged bellicosities like the Gadarene demoniac—shirtless edition.
That endears me to them. Any Christian that hunkers down with hot dogs and mustard during the Five Days of the Golden Calf has my vote. But they also play ridiculously good music. Melodic, complex, and with virtuosity on tap.
I can hear even Mike Portnoy giving that drummer props. If you want to hear Mauro Henrique do what he does best, go to the 5:00 mark, and let it play. I’ve chosen a mellower song, to keep the faint of heart from dropping out of the road march.
So . . . down the Portugese rabbit hole I go . . . . did you have any idea that it is possible for song lyrics to rhyme in a language other than English? I did not. Partly because I’ve only really ever messed with two other languages—Hungarian, and Sign language, and . . . .well . . .the latter seems to have a dearth for requests for 4/4 time calibration.
Of course, we can also attribute my noxious ignorance to some nasty, xenophobic underpinning I got from watching Korg, 70,000 BC on Saturday morning cartoons, when I was a kid. Blame television.
Anyway, despite the fact that my friend claims to not listen to any Brazilian bands, I happen to like them a lot. And for some reason, I am able to navigate the umbrage directed to me by my children when I play the last two albums back-to-back on road trips in the car:
“Dad, I don’t like this.”
“But what about the music?” I say.
“But I don’t understand the lyrics.”
At this time, I might actually give in to them and play their music. But now that they’ve plowed the road of logic, I am now laying the rhetorical IED.
“Girls, I can’t understand what Skillet is singing,”
I’ll leave you to guess the logical cobweb waiting for them. Then, I switch it back to Oficina G3.
So . . . wait I do. Waiting to find out whether or not I can get these rogue musicians to give me fair warning about their concert dates. I have a plane ticket to buy. It’s bad enough, worrying about getting killed by the Favelas in Rio. I can deal with that possibility but when the guy in that dark alleyway is named Indifference, it’s anybody’s game.
I’ve no idea how many times in my life I’ve encountered the euphemistic term, “roller-coaster ride,”—as applied to the moments in life that tend to come as alloyed nostalgias and hybrid heartbreaks.
You know the tired old bromide, “life is just one roller-coaster ride,” which, of course, by itself has all the reflexive currency of the guy at my supermarket that slaps his own knee in levity after asking me “are you working hard—or hardly working?”
The issue with clichés is—they become so boilerplate—so pedestrian—so mind-numbingly banal—that any real imputed value goes out the window; the philosophical infant gets catapulted right along with the hypothetical bath water.
The phrase itself came to me presently as I was driving towards San Francisco with my 15-year-old daughter. This trip was my birthday gift to her, you know a “hang out with Dad,” sort of caper. Over to the right, near Vallejo, is a Six Flags park with a rather prominent snarl of roller-coasters visible from the highway.
I looked at my daughter. And It all hit me. The inferred “bumpy ride” that had always been the simplistic takeaway from the phrase in question was now sublimated to another—even scarier thought.
The roller-coaster experience is primarily about expectations. We stand in line—many times for an hour or more, waiting for the ride to bring us on board. We see the height-requirement signs, the hullabaloo, the riff-raff, and the red-faced exultants coming out the exit. We stare at each other in expectation from below, listening to our forerunners scream in the middle of their experience.
Just like being a dad. I’ve spent the last fifteen years in line with this kid, sometimes talking to her, sometimes distracted by the ride itself. I’ve talked to those who’ve gone before me, trying to gain any shred of insider knowledge before I am committedly strapped in.
Finally, what seemed to be a long, and patience-testing wait is all mollified by the staging area—the place where all the adrenaline lives; the place where all the calibrated hydraulics and smell of brakes come together in some odd, but intriguing sum of all parts.
But it’s the committal part of the ride that excites. All of the caveats, seatbelt checks, admonitions to “stow your sunglasses and hats” all become secondary. And off we go—riding high into an assumptive cloud of adventure.
Speed? Check. G-forces? Got em. Bumpy turns and perilous physical moments that requires sudden positional adjustments? You bet. And lots of screaming along the way, too.
Then of course there is the time. We’ve got lots of . . . wait, hey . . . .this thing is . . . .um, . . . over?
It’s over. Ninety seconds later, I could care less about the bumps. The whole thing just ended. Just like that. The ride is now a memory, and an almost depressive, adrenaline dump immediately follows.
Because it all came to a screeching end. Before it even started–it was over.
That—is the lesson of the roller-coaster ride. And as I stepped onto the misty loading dock of Alacatraz with her for another tactile adventure, I can see the life’s beckoning turnstile up ahead–the one telling me you’ve got a matter of days left. Better enjoy it while you can.
We’re in line for a prison tour. But we’re also in line for something bigger. THAT tour is the one that matters. I’m no longer concerned about the bumps and turns–or the nature of the perils that accompany the ride. I can handle all of that. There’s only one thing that scares me.
I simply don’t want it to end.
It seems the writing bug has hit me yet again, in spite of whatever overwhelming wave of neopessimism undergirded the last post.
Okay. I have dark moments. Sue me. So do you. I just happened to forge some articulate, wheedling jeremiad about the matter–instead of engaging a retrograde supplication to alcohol and public self-immolation.
I recently decided I am going to Brazil. I just attended the NAMM show in southern California. I also took my daughter to San Francisco for her birthday. I have reasons to write about all these things. I also have reasons to write half of this in fractured, horrifically-calibrated Portuguese as well, but I will explain that later. Main point is–I’m back. I know a few of you will be happy to hear that.
Come to think of it, so am I.
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Box Number Seven 