so i haven’t posted in a while. it’s not like i don’t want to..sometimes it just doesn’t happen.

i was supposed to follow up my goodbye 2004 post. i did. it’s sitting waiting to be published, lingering in the nether world of blogdom: the draft stage. and it’s gonna stay there. i would like to post it, i really would, but it’s already been outdated; I’ve left it behind like the previous year. maybe that says something about 04. maybe not.

another semester is about to start. i’m nervous, excited. this is the halfway (well a tad more than) point in college. the point where lots of people look to the future, make their plans, go boldly forward. all i feel like doing is fishing. that’s pretty weird for the middle of january.

when i was about 10, a friend and I would go down to the neighborhood lake with our poles to catch some fish. there was this empty lot between houses, not a scary vacant place, but more like a friendly overgrown orchard complete with muddy bank and a great view of the next door neighbor’s back yard. you’d have to tromp through weeds as long as your legs to get to the bank, and there were always a few stupendous ant piles hidden away on that lot. with nothing to knock em down, those little red ants would construct epic pyramids and stumbling onto one was akin to finding a mayan ruin deep in the jungles of Belize, except probably more shocking since the Mayan ruins probably didn’t bite the explorers that stumbled onto them.
In those days before I owned a car or bike, getting a pack of worms to fish with was a major ordeal. we’d spend days in advance digging up my backyard to find earth worms, and then try to store them in one of my grandma’s old flower pots. by the end of our expeditions, the yard looked like an armadillo resort. of course, the worms never stayed in the flower pots. they were those old ceramic orange pots, the kind that seem to be perpetually falling on people in movies, and they had holes in the bottom. worms, being worms, knew how to get back to the ground.
so then we had to nag a parent for a couple days to go to the tackle shop for some real worms. worms from the tackle shop, i was convinced, were a different species from worms at my house. they were huge and black and cold. i figured they were imported, and that fish, like people, liked to dine on exotic french, spanish, indian, or whatever-they-were worms, rather than a good old american Mcworm. I mean, they probably got those off the bank every now and then right?
so finally, having procured the worms, and battled the ants and weeds, we sit on the bank and assemble our poles, trying to make a cast out of the inevitable rat’s nest of fishing line that accumulated on those cruddy punch-button rods. and even after all that, it was worth it. we’d fish and fish, and maybe, we catch at a rate of 1 in 30 hours of fishing if we were lucky. but the little brim were not what we were after.
the neighbors down the street owned a huge giant koi pond full of enourmous giant koi. if you’ve never seen a giant koi fish, they’re impressive. one day, the neighborhood flooded, and two koi escaped into the lake, never to be seen again. except by us.
they came up unexpectedly, two iridescent orange and white behemoths gliding right past our drowning import worms.
that moment changed our fishing lives forever. no longer were we gonna catch silly brim, we wanted those koi, the true kings of the lake.
in true captain ahab fashion, we obsessed over the white fish. we planned to construct a raft, find them in the lake, and use our home-made spear (an old golf club with a case knife ducked-taped to the handle) to capture our worthy prizes. oh but the best laid plans of fish and men.
little did I know then, but soon my best friend would move back to his home in new jersey, and i’d see him again only one more time. more summers would pass than fish we’d ever caught, and soon i’d have forgotten about fishing. i was into more important things like girls, and sports, and school. if i ever thought about or went fishing again, it was on high powered boats with the latest fish sonar and the fanciest reels. and a good day meant a big catch. except for that one time I never saw those koi fish again. i can remember laying in bed at 11 and thinking that we’d imagined them, that we’d had too much kool-aid and mosquito repellent and sun and our collective imagination made them up. but it didn’t matter. for at least that one summer, we could have chased those fish to the bottom of the lake and back. we had seen, and we believed.
but he and I, well, we both moved on and i’d be foolish to think that i’ll ever get to go back and try it again. after all, we all grow up and pursue a career and endeavor to make a difference in this world. but kids, what do they know. they just are. somehow, that’s a contribution in itself.
you know, i’ve heard that giant koi have an extremely long life span, upwards of twenty years. and can you imagine, that if you drove down that street by the lake, with the weeds and the ants, on just the right day, at just the right time, say a holiday, you could drive down there. and if you did, and you drove slow because you weren’t in a hurry to be somewhere or do something, you just might, just might, see a little boy in the shape of a young man, looking hard into the water, peering with all his might, to see something only a child would notice and something only an adult would never forget.

tonight i saw I [heart] Huckabee’s. The movie was great, enjoyed it very much.

Mostly, its about philosophy. The good thing is, however, that it wasn’t serious. By no means did it get me to start re-evaluating my life with new inspiration. But it did have several memorable parts.

One motif that is presented in the movie is in this statement:
“How am I not myself?”

Coincedentally, tonight is the first evening in my christmas break that i’ve spent quiet and alone at home. so i had some time to think about my own life philosophies. and i wrote this poem-esque thing.

unlike some people, I do not live my life according to a philosophy. My life philosophy simply describes how i live and NOT the other way around. Also, most philosophies come about because people and thier brains have to think up some way to explain why Pain and Suffering exist.

of course, i am only 20. i can not possibly know enough to conquer everything right now. but this is me.
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