For richer or poorer, in health and sickness, we all remember these admonishments from our nuptials, at least those of us who were paying attention.  In Oklahoma that equates to only about a third of us.  The other two thirds were too hung over from the night before and sleepwalked right through the service thus not hearing the stern lecture from the talking comb over in the polyester suit.  I was reminded of these words this week when my wife caught a stomach bug and filled our humble home with the echo of projectile ralphing.  She ran the full gambit.  She had the short and powerful ralphs that catch you by surprise and you don’t have time to take a deep breath before starting.  She had the long ralphs that start loud and proud and slowly taper off into quiet, oh god will this never end, whisper.  I’ve remained steadfast in my pledge.  This is the”through sickness” part and I’ve stayed true albeit in another room with my headphones on.  The ralphing does bring up an old memory however.
I remember the first time I ever kissed a girl.  I mean really kissed with the king of mouth, the tongue.  I know some of you argumentative types may want to say that perhaps the teeth are the king of mouth but I must insist that I’m right on this one.  The tongue allows you to taste, form sounds necessary to speak the english language, and perfom the universal symbol for up yours.  I’d like to see the teeth do any of that.  But back to the memory that awakened at the behest of my wife’s ralphing.  I was in junior high and I had my first real live girl friend.  Very exciting.  I stayed after school one day for basketball practise and to meet  my new girl friend by the local convenience store afterward.  I couldn’t wait to get done with practice so I could go see her.  The possibilities were limitless.  Basketball practice finally finished and I bolted for the store.  I rounded the corner and there she was, back against the dark wall, staring at me with a look I hadn’t previously seen in a girls eyes before.  I swept in and grabbed her forcefully, I was going to say something really romantic and cool but my mind was totally blank.  The time for the heroic kiss was upon me.  I stared into her eyes and said ahhhh.
It was over almost before it began.  I couldn’t have known this but my real live first girl friend had just polished off one of those foot long convenient store burritos and a bag of funyuns right before I arrived.  The resulting gaseous cloud that came out of her mouth when she opened it to kiss me completely fumigated my throat and lungs and prompted me to always take a quick sniff before kissing anyone, even grandma at christmas.

I saw on yahoo news that some dude caught a 405 pound tuna.  Please.  How do you catch a 405 pound fish?  What do you use for bait?  Is there such a thing as a ten pound earth worm?  How about a twenty pound minnow?  Did he use a wench truck to reel him in?  Come on people, 405 pounds?  Isn’t that overkill?  If I ever catch a ten pound bass I’m going to have it mounted.  I’m going to put it on my wall and be proud.  It will proudly be displayed and talked about to anyone and everyone that comes in my house.  Yes I will.  But what about this jack ass and his 405 pound fish.  Is he going to have it mounted and build a separate house to display it in?  “Now if you will follow me into the backyard, we will hike over to my new 3000 square feet trophy house and view my latest conquest.”  Just call me chicken of the sea.   I don’t want to catch a fish that weighs twice as much as the biggest woman I ever made out with.  It’s unseemly.  It’s gaudy.  It’s an overcompensation for something that is probably way below average.  Now I don’t know the guy personally.  These are just my thoughts on the matter.  He may very well be a perfectly reasonable and lovely man with an average or slightly above average appendage.  I don’t know so I must apologize to the dude who has shown us guppy catchers up.
I may just be venting anyways, or is it called transferance. I  found out tonight that a new electric transmission line will run directly through the middle of our place.  Right through the hay meadow and behind my house.   Damn!  I live out in the country for the quiet and the view.  I want to see trees and birds and stars and cows and such things that creep upon the ground and things that fly across the open sky.  Notice I said open sky.  The sky around here is already getting cluttered with the blinking red lights of the cell towers and  other structures that are tall enough to require illumination for the night fliers.  Damn night fliers.  Fly during the day why don’t you.  I want to see the twinkling of the stars and the crazy gliding of the hawk not the new electric transmission line standing there motionless in it’s stupor,  nor the next time I get a nibble on my line do I want to pull up 405 pound tuna!

I’m sitting at my work bench out in the shop fixing to pour some plastic worms.  I have a good idea for a color combination that I think will work very well.  I’m going to do a fluorescent green body with black glitter and a red tail.  I start to mix the color and I notice that I have a pretty good pile of trimmings left from other pours.  I have a lot of different colors all of which look real good.  The good thing about soft plastic baits is that you can melt down and re-pour anything you have messed up while fishing or anything you have trimmed from the finished product.  I’m looking at a nice pile of purple, chartreuse, red, green, orange, black.  Virtually I have left over pieces from every pour I’ve done since I started.  I’m thinking this will work out.  I’ll start melting down the color I have the most of and I’ll add other colors to the mix to get the color I want.  Easy.
I start by melting down the purple.  The purple looks good but I think I want to modify it a little so I add some white.  The white didn’t do it for me so I added some orange.  Now I have something like the color of split pea soup.  I decide to dump in some red and yellow.  This turned the split pea soup into burnt split pea soup.  So I’m staring at my creation wondering what I should do next and it hits me, put all of the different colors in and come up with a new color which will drive the bass wild.  This new color will revolutionize bass fishing as we know it.  Fish will swarm around my worm and fight over who gets to bite it first.  Only the biggest ones will win the contest thus letting me catch the biggest fish in the lake with every cast.
I mix the remaining colors in the pot and stir methodically with anticipation.  My left arm is twitching a little in anticipation of all the hook sets I’m going to have to administer while using this new color.  I start to look around the shop and wonder where I might put all the tournament trophies I will win.  My head is starting to spin with the realization of my new life as a famous bass fisherman, the money, boats, the tv appearances.  I check my pour pot and what is in there doesn’t inspire confidence but I will keep the faith, my future depends on it, and pour this mixture and see what I have.  I pour.  I cool.  I inspect my master creation only to discover that my new color is baby feces.  This makes sense in a way.  We eat all kinds of colorful foods and it all comes out this particular shade on exit.  I think of a rainbow and wonder how the colors stay seperate.  Maybe rainbows are delusions.  I know from experience if you mix that many colors together you get turd brown.  When it rains again I expect to see a magnificent mono-turd-colored arc reaching across the sky.  Then and only then will I know the truth, that truth being- turd brown is the king of all colors.

It’s Sunday and cold, football watching weather for most of us.  For my son it’s get bored in the house day.  He acts as though it’s been cold for at least a decade.  Fall is so far removed from his memory that spring seems a cruel myth, a lie, a fabrication to give kids hope when there is none.  Also, it isn’t like he doesn’t have video games, a computer, toys abundant.  Way more than I did a that age.  I understand though.  Where I enjoy the short days of winter for the relaxed attitude one can take.  I mean a guy shouldn’t be laying around the house in the broad daylight of summer, but in the winter this behaviour is acceptable and understood.  Sergio (my eight year old son) sees winter as a limitation on the time available for fun. Old man winter is an unwanted uncle who has moved in with us only to take over his room and bogart the tv.
The familiar notes of the pre-game show start to echo through the house and I take this as my cue to get a beverage and nice place to sit.  My son take this as his cue to start building a good sized fort out of blankets and chairs in the middle of the kitchen.  Soon he had the fort like he wanted and it was time to get some fort food.  He was terribly sad to discover we had no wienner dogs so I cut some summer sausage discs and place them on a scewer for him.  The end result looked more like a meat lollypop but it was something he could roast over a candle fire I made for him.  So he roasted meat lollypops over an open fire and I sat and watched football.  It occured to me sometime during the second half that a meat lollypop and an inside tent sitting in the  middle of the pretend woods might be the way to spend a cold winters sunday.  I immediately made me a meat lollypop and we sat around a candle camp fire and he dreamed about pioneers roasting rabitts on the praries and I listened to the commentators call the football game.  Overall a pretty good, though short, camping trip

It’s the time of year to reflect and stay warm.  The sun goes down early leaving virtually no time to fish once the day’s work is done.  I thought I would take a little time to put some thoughts about this years fishing into perspective.
I started fishing early and often in 2010.  There is something very satisfying about bank fishing in January.  We would roll into our super secret crappie hole and immediately build a roaring fire.  We get the coffee and the chairs out of the truck and then it’s time to get poles ready to go.  We use as many poles as the law states we can legally.  In Oklahoma that number is seven per person.  So, if three of us go we have twenty one poles we bait out with minnows and throw out about every three to four feet apart.  Once every pole is situated right, after many recasts and cursing when you throw a fresh bait off, it’s time to warm up around the fire and wait for the running and jerking, untangling and cussing, yelling and reeling.
This last january was a good one.  Almost every time we went we caught plenty of fish.  The really nice thing about our super secret crappie hole is that the fish don’t bite steady.  They bite in wild spurts lasting from a few minutes to a few hours.  When they’re not biting you can sit back around the fire and talk.  It’s very nice sitting around a fire with friends talking about virtually everything in the universe.  There’s always the shared history full of stories everyone knows but get re-invented with each telling.  There are the conversations about the meaning of life and how the universe works.  Stephen Hawkins would be horrified.  Then there is the craziness when the fish turn on.  That’s what we’re waiting for.  that’s the reason we’re there.  We could do the rest of it at home but the fish are the coupe de gras.  On most days last january the sound and sites you would see and hear if you were watching us from afar would be comic and harried.  One guy has a pole in each hand yelling for someone to help out.  Another guy is racing to the other end of the poles to catch one before it gets drug in.  The third guys is busy putting fish in the basket getting minnows and baiting empty hooks.  We go like this until the fish stop or the bait is gone.  Whichever comes first.