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"I didn't learn any of
this at school, of course. I learned it online. The Internet gave me the chance
to pursue all the topics I was interested in, and all the links between them,
unconstrained by the pace of my classmates and my teachers. The more time I
spent online, however, the more my schoolwork felt extracurricular.
The
summer I turned thirteen, I resolved never to return, or at least to seriously
reduce my classroom commitments. I wasn't quite sure how I'd swing that,
though. All the plans I came up with were likely to backfire.
If I was
caught skipping class, my parents would revoke my computer privileges; if I
decided to drop out, they'd bury my body deep in the woods and tell the
neighbors I'd run away.
I had to come up with a hack - and then, on the
first day of the new school yeat, I found one. Indeed, it was basically handed
to me." - Edward Snowden |
So it was that I applied my
powers of ratiocination to the invention of a device called a "Life-Quality Balancing
System."
The L.Q.B.S. consisted of a scale (two pans of equal weight
hanging in balance), 1,400 #8 medium-shank fishhooks (one for each minute of
the day), and a meticulous list dividing my Standard Day into Neutral Minutes
(N.M.'s), Unsatisfactory Minutes (U.M.'s), and Satisfactory Minutes (S.M.'s).
For every U .M. I put a hook on the left scale-pan, for every S.M. I
put one on the right, N.M. hooks I put in a neutral box.
I then
constructed a series of charts and graphs dealing with ways to turn V.M.'s and
N.M.'s into S.M.'s, fully convinced that this simple
scientific process would
eventually allow me to attain a state called "
Unending Satisfaction
Actualization ," or "U .S.A."
I was thrilled with this program,
and baffled that I hadn't come up with it sooner.
Nothing but
unadulterated fishing went into the plus pan; I put Bill Bob hooks in the
neutral box, not because he wasn't satisfactory, but because neutral is the way
he prefers to be.
Of course Ma- and H2O-hooks were piled high in the
junk pan, along with school, yard work,
Flyfishing Clubs, pimple-popping, constipation and other nasty imbalances.
The historian-type reader with his
high tolerance for dull but
factual material may be disappointed to learn that,
though I still use the hooks, the
lists and graphs were reduced to fluffy gray ash when "U.S.A." failed to pan
out.
One fragment survived, however, and since it exemplifies the
quasi-logical gymnastics my polarized brain was
wont to perform, I include it:
IDEAL 24 HOUR
SCHEDULE
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1. sleep: 6
hrs. 2. food consumption: 30 min. 3. school: 0 hrs ! 4. bath, stool,
etc: 15 min. 5. housework chores: 30 min. 6. nonangling conversation: 0
hrs ! 7. transportation: 45 min. 8. gear maintenance: 1 hr. 30 min.
9. fishing time: 14-1/2 hrs. per day! |
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WAYS TO ACTUALIZE IDEAL SCHEDULE
Result: 4,000 actual fishing hrs. per
year!!! It took some time to get settled
in the cabin: a day to stash gear, a day to build a fish-smoker, a day to set
up and stock the aquarium, a day to clean and salt in supplies, two days to cut
three cords of wood.
On June
9th I hung the Ideal Schedule on the wall and
began to live it:
I
proceeded to fish all day, every day, first light to last.
All my life
I'd longed for such a marathon - and I haven't
one happy memory of it.
All I
recall is stream after stream, fish after fish, cast after cast, and nothing in
my head but the low cunning required to hoodwink my mindless quarry.
Each night my Log entries read
like tax tables or grocery receipts, describing not
a dream come true, but a drudgery of
double shifts on a creekside assembly line.
After
two weeks of "ideal" six-hour nights and sixteen-hour days I got
an incurable case of insomnia.
It
hardly mattered: sleeping I
dreamt of fishing and waking I fished till there was one, undivided, sleep like
state.
***
I dreamed Dutch Hines wanted to interview
me!
I knew he'd made Fuzz Gramsay a rich man by endorsing him.
If
I told him that I'd built the rod he'd just used he would inform his
readers.
I knew that if he endorsed me I'd get a thousand rod orders
before the month was out.
I knew that if I lowered my prices, making a
meagre ten dollars profit per rod, that was ten thousand smackers.
I
knew that with profits from that first burst of orders I could advertise in
every major sporting magazine in the country.
I could hire a half-dozen
peons to do my rod-building and fly-tying for me while I became a designer, an
organizer, an entrepreneur.
I
could open a tackle factory and warehouse.
I could hire salesmen and
financial advisors
and marketing
experts.
I could automatize and computerize and expand.
I
could spend my days inventing prototype rods and flies and let the local
peasantry hunch over vises, squinting their eyesight away and snorting rod
varnish.
I could start a guide service, take
fat cats to all the
great sport-fishing grounds on Earth.
I could open a chain of Trusty
Gus's Custom Rods and Flies that circumscribed the continent.
I could
start chains of Cutthroat Gus's Seafood Restaurants, Cutthroat Gus's Riverside
Fishing Schools, Cutthroat Gus's Trouter's Resorts beginning in Lake Tahoe and
Las Vegas.
I could buy the coast of Oregon, name it Gussica, secede from
the Union, start my own
space program, make Titus my Lieutenant Spock and me the Captain of an
Intergalactic Winnebago and blast away into space to search out potential
trout-planets and go where no fisherman had gone before !
There was
fishing. There was nothing else.
A Kiluhiturmiut Eskimo song tells of a
man like me:
Glorious was life when standing at my fishing hole on the
ice.
Did standing at my fishing hole ever bring me
joy?
No!
Ever was I so anxious for my little fishhook if it should
not get a bite, Ayi, yai ya. . . .
Like the Eskimo, my last thought
before going fishing was "Won't it be glorious!" And like the Eskimo I then
stood by the water, a needy, nervous wretch too
anxious to
wonder how "glory" could be so
dismal. Ayi, yai ya!
So I continued my Ideal Schedule and was soon
exhibiting more bizarre symptoms: besides the insomnia, tangled tongue and
water hallucinations, I
began to hide or even flee when I encountered other fishermen; to avoid human
contact I began stockpiling groceries and bought a fifty-gallon gas drum; soon
my communications
with fellow humanoids consisted of an occasional Thank you, Hi, or
Fill-er-up, and that was it.
Like many an addled hermit, I started
yacking a blue streak, but not to myself.
Oh no. I talked to my fly rod,
Rodney.
As expected, we became almost preternaturally skillful at
extracting fish from coastal streams ("we" being Rodney and me).
We
caught cutthroat in staggering numbers, often
over a hundred a day.
I kept only enough to
eat and my appetite shrank with my
ability to sleep; still, I ate trout twice a day and grew no more tired of it
than an anteater grows tired of ants, he with his long snout and sticky tongue,
me with my Rodney and flies.
By mid-July I was no longer in pain.
I was totally bamboozled; I was chicaned;
I was necromanced; I was
stuffed and nonsensed.
I no longer saw anything wrong with my life as
it was.
Rodney fished because I fished and I fished because Rodney
fished.
We had an understanding: we were two pieces of fishing
gear-smash us, lose us, wear us out, fishing gear will never question your
judgement.
That was the thing about
Nature: make one lousy rule to
describe it and it'll contradict you
even if it has to transmogrify and metamorphosize and bust its ass to do
it.
And so what?
If anybody grew wise enough to grasp the real
immutable Laws of Nature,
Nature'd only rear back and strike 'em dead before they got anybody to
understand them.
What use were
such questions?
Everyone
I knew would one day be dead.
Was there reference material
to peruse that would make it comprehensible?
Pills to pop to make it bearable?
Calesthenics to make it ... fun?
I didn't know. I didn't know anything
about anything.
Every thing in my head came from fishing magazines,
fishing manuals, fishing
novels.
And what did these works have to say about
the meaning of Life
and Death?
When I awoke, the first thing I
saw was the morning star, bluegreen and
brilliant between black silhouettes of
cedars.
I scarcely
recognized myself: the
fanatical fisherman in me had died, and what remained was a stranger.
I was someone I barely knew, lying on my side, watching a star.
The fisherman left a pair of binoculars on a peg at the window.
He'd used them to watch for trout rising on the river; I aimed-them at
the star - and was amazed: brilliant greens, violets and blues eddied through
it as it glittered and shone.

My
naked eye had seen nothing of this whirling spectrum, and even now, through
binoculars, I saw little of the beauty that must really be there.
Then
it struck me: trees, mists, mountains, flowers, fish, stones and streams -
all these must be the
robes saving my eyes from
the searing light;
they refracted and colored
the light, and it shone through, making them beautiful.
adapted from
David James Duncan, The River Why |
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