Thursday, July 6, 2006

Jen goes fishin'... a vaguely true story

Sundays at Casa del Jen are Fishin' Days. I'm a very feminine girly-girl, but damn I like me some fishin'. So, last weekend, I ask myself... Sunday? Check. Nice weather? Check. Nothing to do? Check again. It looks like a perfect day for fishing. In a brief fit of stupidity, I call my sister and invite her and her son to go with me. Great, she says. Come on down, I know of a Great Pond to fish. Lots of big catfish, not many people. Sounds good. I arrive, and she decides to stop by one of the pizza shops she owns in town to snag some dinner. I'm going there to fish, not to eat, but hey - whatever works, you know? She grabs some candy, sodas, chips, and some chicken wings at her shop, and we're off. We are all set for some good old redneck fishin'. All we need is some Milwaukee's Best and Copenhagen. Her Great Pond, as it turns out, is a stocked pond that you have to PAY to fish. My inner Orlando Wilson is crying out that this sucks, but I placate him with the promise that a pay to fish pond must surely be stocked with some big ol' fish. I dutifully pay my $7 and trudge toward the fishin' hole. To provide a little backstory, my sister fishes like a girl. As another human of the female persuasion, I feel that I can say this with no fear of recrimination. She won't bait her own hook (worms are "slimy"), and God forbid she actually catch a fish. At the first sign of a nibble (which is when her bobber twitches even slightly), she will shriek and yank her pole while insisting, "That's how you set the hook." If "setting the hook" is defined as yanking your line so damn hard that your soggy worm-laden hook comes flying out of the water and snags in your sister's hair, then she's one hell of a hook-setter. Once in a while, I've seen her actually "set the hook" and catch a fish this way, yanking so hard that some hapless bluegill comes whipping out of the water toward us at Mach 3. On the occasions that this happens, she will invariably squeal, drop her pole and begin her Fish Dance - prancing in place while howling, "Get it Jenni, get it." (I hate that she calls me Jenni, but that's nearly its own rant, so I'll leave it for another time.) That is my cue to pick up her pole, remove the fish from her line and release it back to the water.

Anyway, my sister was in fine form that day. I forgot to mention that her pole whipping "set the hook" rountine usually causes the worm to come off her hook, so I spend a large portion of my time re-worming her hook. Fishing with my sister and her son involves very little real fishing on my part. What usually happens is that I bait their hooks about four times before I can even get down to deciding what lure to use. Last Sunday was no exception.

I realize that I'm not going to get any real fishing done, so I decide to experiment. What types of non-bait foods can be used to catch a fish? Experiment #1 - gummy worms. I mean, it looks like a worm, right? What's not to like? No dice. Not even an experimental nibble. I reel in my line and move on to Experiment #2 - Riesen. I hope chocolate isn't harmful to fish. They don't fall for that either. Bubble gum? Experiment #3 also fails. My gaze falls upon the box of chicken wings. Hmmm. They're meat. Fish eat worms. Worms are sort of like meat. Let's give it a go. I peel off a small bit of wing meat and bait my hook. Bingo! I don't know if it's the chicken or my sister's secret wing sauce, but the fish are going crazy. I reel in two in rapid succession.

Realizing I'm on to something, I grab a Mustad double live bait hook (looks like a safety pin with hooks on the end) and slide on a whole chicken wing. Load on some split shot for weight, and I'm set. I'm gunning for the big fish now. I cast my line far out into the pond, musing that chickens aren't flightless birds after all. As it plops into the water, I settle in to continue my experiment. Five minutes go by. Nothing. I become distracted by baiting my sister's hook for the millionth time. As I'm finishing up, my sister begins her Fish Dance again. Perplexed, I look up to see my pole inching its way toward the water. I lunge at the pole, catching it just in time. Something has taken the chicken wing.

The fight begins. I'm trying my best to reel, but I'm losing ground. My pole is bent nearly in half, and I'm getting pulled toward the water. I'm also drawing a crowd. Nothing like toothless, redneck old men offering their opinions in between spitting tobacco on the ground. "Cut the line," one offers. "Nah, give 'er to me, I'll reel 'er in," chimes his beer toting pal. My inner Oralndo Wilson is dancing a jig with my inner Walt Reynolds. Why I've got two pro fisherman cavorting about inside my mind, I have never questioned. They're just there, and I pacify them with fishin' every now and again. But I digress. At this point, everyone within earshot has stopped fishing, and is heading my way. My sister is performing the most frenzied Fish Dance I've ever seen, and shrieking like a harpy.

The fish breaks the surface of the water. My legs turn to jelly. I'm not sure, but I think I pee myself a little bit too. Oh dear sweet Jesus, this son of a bitch has a head as big as mine. I've hooked the Loch Ness Monster. Okay, it's just a catfish, but I'm scared now. I continue reeling, the old men on the bank whooping with excitement. Ed (that's what I named the catfish - I name things, so sue me) puts up an admirable fight, but in the end resigns himself to the inevitable. My muscles straining, I haul Ed toward the bank, and one of the onlookers leans in with a net and we drag Ed ashore. The pond's proprieter arrives with a scale and a Polaroid camera. I've caught the pond record. Ed weighs 30 pounds, and is 32 inches long. They take my photo, Ed is released back to the water, and the rednecks grumble about a girl catching the record. When they ask me what I used as bait, I just smile and tell them it's a family secret.

So if you ever go to Long's Pay to Fish pond in Carlwick, Ohio, look at the wall of photos. Somewhere on there is a picture of a tall, blond girly-girl, her nicely manicured hands covered in mud, her expensively highlighted hair in disarray, holding the biggest damn catfish you ever did see. That'd be me. True story. Well, parts of it, anyway.

Monday, July 3, 2006

Luck.

I was taking a bubble bath last night (as I do every night), and I had a thought. I often have thoughts in the bath. This is not uncommon. Apparently, bubble baths are a right-brain activity. People often experience intense episodes of creative thought while engaging in right-brain activities. Steven Spielberg apparently gets some of his best ideas while driving in Los Angeles traffic. I read that somewhere once. Driving, too then, is a right-brain activity. If I could drive my bathtub around, I'd be a fucking genius. Anyway, last night, while slowly turning into a prune in the bath, I was thinking about shampoo, and how I'm allergic to dimethicone and apricot kernels and 9 billion other ingredients, and how whenever my fiance accidentally uses a shampoo or a soap that has one of the 9 billion and 2 ingredients that I'm allergic to in it, my face breaks out in these giant bumps and turns red and gets itchy and so on.

And then I started to think about allergies in general, and I started to think about the human condition and general malaise, and then I started imagining a person who was allergic to everything. I started dreaming up this story wher the main character is a person who is completely allergic to every possible allergen on planet Earth. Wheat, milk, soy, strawberries, grass, hell - air. The character's name would be Frank (because that's a funny name) and the story would be called "Allergic to Life". That wasn't really relevant to the topic of this blog, but I thought it, so I'm telling you about it. Deal with it.

Sometime after that, I noticed that my toes were pretty wrinkly. Sometime after that, I started thinking about luck. I've been thinking a lot about luck lately. It seems to me that luck plays a huge role in human life. A big role. A merciless, arbitrary role. Simple good luck. Simple bad luck. Simple middle-of-the-road luck. Luck.

All throughout my childhood and right up into my adulthood, I was constantly told that luck was located at the corner of Hard Work and Preparation. The harder you work, the luckier you get. Or however that cliche goes. I think Thomas Jefferson was the guy who originally said something along those lines.

(Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was about twenty-four years old, by the way. Amazing. His work ethic was off the fucking charts. Okay, okay... he was also born into a wealthy, aristocratic, land-owning family in Virginia, and he received an excellent education. Oh yeah - and at the age of fourteen, he inherited 5,000 acres of valuable property and a bunch of valuable slaves. So maybe his slaves had an incredible work ethic. Lucky them!)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah - the harder I work, the luckier I get. To some degree, I feel that this statement is true. If you don't work hard, the odds of good things happening in your professional or personal life are pretty slim, admittedly. Making a lot of money is pretty difficult if you don't give a tremendous effort. Accomplishing something of lasting significance almost always involves incredibly hard work, conducted with great consistency over a long period of time.

Hard work is a given - it's part of life... but luck is more important. Luck trumps hard work, and it trumps it every time. Plenty of people all over the world work their asses off, day in and day out, for years and years and years. They toil away in good faith, working their fingers to the bone in the name of a better future for themselves and their families. What they get in return is this - Not much. Jack. Fucking. Shit. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

Rich, successful, fortunate people of the Donald Trump ilk often don't like to hear about luck. I suppose they might feel that it undermines the quality of their hard work and the magnitude of their significant accomplishments. "In my experience," they'll haughtily say, "there's no such thing as luck." I tend to disagree. I think these people are incredibly hardworking, and incredibly talented. In many instances, they lead exemplary lives and should be admired for their achievements. But mostly I think they're incredibly lucky. Dumb fucking lucky, for no real reason. All of them. That's how luck works.

Other times, those blessed with good fortune will say that God has blessed them. They'll attribute their good fortune to God or Allah or Yahweh - some benevolent force who is secretly playing puppeteer with humanity. "God is looking out for me," they'll say. "I'm incredibly, incredibly blessed."

Maybe that's the case. Maybe not. I don't really know. On one hand, these people do seem to be graced with some sort of other-worldly good fortune. Then again, if God is determining the fate of all human beings on planet Earth, playing puppeteer with our lives, then logic would seem to indicate that God is a vile, sadistic fuckwad.

If God really is playing puppeteer in this way, where does this leave all of the good-hearted, hardworking people who don't get shit? Those who starve? Those who can't afford adequate healthcare for their children? Those who contract terminal illnesses at ridiculously young ages and bleed out of their asses while dying excruciating deaths in a tiny thatch-roofed hut in some shithole Third World country? What about the meek who are supposedly going to inherit the Earth one day? What kind of caring God would unleash this kind of twisted bullshit upon innocents? Upon children? If we're going to humanize God and credit Him with our incredible good fortune, shouldn't we be attributing our bad fortune to Him as well?

Go over to sub-Saharan Africa or the Jersey shore, and try telling some long-suffering, hard-working, down on his luck bastard that his shitty wages, aching back, metastasizing tumor, and poorly educated children are simply a matter of God's will. Chances are, he'll probably punch your right in your proselytizing, condescending mouth. Personally, I think the universe is totally fucking indifferent. Based on the evidence around me, this seems to be the case. I don't think God is neccessarily a He, and I don't think there's any kind of puppetry at work here. I think it's luck, in the end. Blind and deaf and fucking dumb. With a little bit of human error and achievement thrown in on the side. There's no sound explanation for any of it. Some people get lucky. Some people don't. No real rhyme or reason. The end. Amen.

Luck is, of course, relative. Some people will have it all and still feel unlucky. Some people by comparison don't have squat, and yet they claim to feel incredibly blessed. In some ways, it's all a matter of perspective. I consider myself to be one hell of a lucky individual. I consider myself blessed. I don't deny that I've worked my ass off to be where I am today... but I've got an amazing kid, I'm getting married to someone I love in 6 weeks, I have great friends, am in relatively good health... and I did nothing to deserve it. I was just born. Other people are just born, and their father beats the hell out of them with his belt, or their mother sits on her lazy ass collecting welfare and tells them that they're worthless. And then they get brain cancer at the age of twenty-six and fucking die. Snake eyes. Then again, some people may look at my life and see me as an incredibly unlucky person. I got knocked up at 19, dated a string of losers before I met my fiance, have had some really shitty fair-weather friends, was diagnosed with a serious genetic disorder at 28, and had a stroke that same year. Like I said, it's all perspective.

Which brings me somehow to Paul Newman. (Come on, don't act like any of this other shit followed any real rational train of thought.) Paul Newman is a minor hero of mine. He's not really one of my favorite actors, but he's definitely one of my favorite philanthropists. In his lifetime, he's donated more than $200 million to charity. And he still drives race cars, even though he's old enough to be my grandfather. He appears to be unafraid. I was reading an interview with Paul Newman once, and the journalist asked him if he had any explanation for how he'd managed to make so much money in his lifetime and have such a wonderfully successful career. His answer? "Luck." That was all he said. Just one word. Luck. That was it.

Some people may disagree, but I've always considered that to be a very wise and humble response.