It's all about semantics...

Mom: "Jackson, did you pee on the floor?"
Jackson: "No."
Mom: "Accidentely?"
Jackson: "Yes."

The Beard Growing Contest, and Other Stuck-In-Georgetown Musings

A Japanese photographer once asked a monk to bless some water samples he took from the bay and he would take pictures of the water at the molecular level. Some interesting things happened. The waters he blessed had beautiful molecules that looked like snowflakes. The waters the monk cursed looked like splatterings of vomit. We are comprised of 90% water as humans. Do you know what that means?

How to fish a stream.

You can take any fishing pole in that you want. The principles are still the same. Even some fishing line with no pole, but it has to be thin line. Most people use 4 or 6 pound line, which breaks at 4 or 6 pounds, but I’ve used 1 pound before, which looks like old lady hair, and feels as fragile. Attach a single egg snell hook to the line. It’s called that because it is so damned small that you can submerge it into a single salmon egg. This way, the fish sees only a red dot floating by. Go about one to two feet above the hook and attach one or two split shot (lead weights). Now you’re ready. Approach the stream cautiously. The larger trout are smart and can see you. Never cast a shadow over the stream. Find a large pool with a small waterfall flowing into it and approach from downstream. Now’s a good time to bait up with the egg. Find a way to approach the waterfall from the side and gently swing the line over it, so the egg drops in like it was flowing along the stream. The largest fish will wait at the base of the waterfall so they have first dibs on what comes down. Try this a few times, if you don’t catch a fish on the first try.

In Georgetown, they are always having a beard-growing and worst-truck contest. I found the winner of both categories today. They have a most-days-without-a-bath contest as well. There’s a man who rides his burro into town once a month. He lives down in Canyon Creek in a shack and comes in for supplies. The burro is draped with guns, plastic bags and strapped-on junk, and the man’s face is black with dirt. The woman at Four Sisters Coffee wins the award for creating the worst café vibe in the state.

A herring flew into our pond this morning and stood on the plank that juts out from the shore. There, she waited for a fish and, seeing one, swooped acrossed it’s length in one flap of her wings, landing on the opposite shore, where she waited again, until she was full.

I drove by where I lived for the worst four years of my childhood the other day. It was overgrown and overpopulated by livestock. The Christmas trees we’d left to grow were thirty-five feet high, and the new barn was old, but the old barn looked new. The rental house was rented by a lady. Fences fenced horses in where there were neither before. The ones my brother and I so proudly built were twisting and pulling apart with age. Electric wire, which my father always despised, circled the property, five feet from our old black railroad tie and boxcar floor fences. Painting them in the heat of summer was the only thing worse than building them.

If I were a horse, I could easily kick down the old fence and be free. But that tiny, thin electric wire would never let me close enough.

We went to Nevada City for a day of galleries and brunch at the American Victorian Museum. It was closed since the early ‘90s, so we settled for Ike’s. Our waitress had miserable BO and bossiness, but the food was good. One gallery in four was nice, and we drove home down the highway I used to live on. Everything went so fast. It was only an 8 mile stretch, after all, but as a kid it felt much further. The ranch seemed to be shrinking. I know why the Jews say don't rebuild Auschwitz.