Read it over and over before you go to war.

Nefarious War

Nefarious War

Last year we fought by the head-stream of the Sang-kan
This year we are fighting on the Tsung-ho road.
We have washed our armor in the waves of the Chiao-chi lake,
We have pastured our armor horses on the Tien-shan’s snowy slopes.
The long, long war goes on then thousand miles from home,
Our three armies are worn and grown old.

The barbarian does man-slaughter for plowing;
On this yellow sand-plains nothing has been seen but
blanched skulls and bones.
Where the Chin emperor built the walls against the Tartars,
There the defenders of Han are burning beacon fires.
The beacon fires burn and never go out,
There is no end to war!

In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
While ravens and kites peck at human entrails.
Carry them up in their flight, and hang on the branches of dead trees.
So, men are scattered and smeared over the dead grass,
And the generals have accomplished nothing.

Oh, nefarious war! I see why arms
Were so seldom used by the benign sovereign

your inner Newt

I am in yoga class watching a young pliable instructor tell us to go to the monkey position.  I assume the monkey position which is painful.  My thighs and lower back are burning in pain.  The instructor’s voice is soft and pliant as she tells us to release our competitiveness.  I feel no release just rippling waves of pain as I am thirty seconds into the pose.  She beckons us not be judgmental.  I think I want to kill her.   I start to channel my inner Newt.

Gingrich had a tough night in the debates.  It looks like he has been frequenting Cracker Barrels across the South.   The Cracker Barrel is a restaurant that pays homage to pork and high cholesterol.  My instructor now has me moving out of monkey into dog.  I feel violated and my inner Newt growls with anger.  She is mumbling something about core and peace.  

I have been suspended in the dog pose for an eternity (ten seconds) she wants my right leg to go parallel to the floor then bend my right knee and do something it wasn’t designed for in my life time.  Newt wants to go to the moon I just want out of the class.  We are both trapped in an arena of ignominy.  Unfortunately, it is of our own making.  Newt teaches us there is no humiliation we can’t bear with Romney bitching slapping him last night.  Newts ex-wife is expelling a bad marriage over the television air waves.  But it is nothing like the torturer in front of me telling me to listen to my body.  My body wants percocets and anti-inflammatory drugs instead I am in happy baby pose.  She must die.

praying

Mitt Romney and his sons at the end of the day take off their mormon underwear and briefly chant together:

Newt Gingrich is a cocksucker, Newt Gingrich is a cocksucker .....  They are waiting for the power of prayer to unfold.

living large

Listening to Dean Martin which is gives me great pleasure when it is cold and snowy outside.  We don't have much in the way of saloon singers anymore.  The music got more amped up, wrapped in anger and pushed something called romance out the door.  Lyrics like "be my whore"or "your my bitch" seem so distant from a thing called love.  Oh well, more end of millennium signs.

Here are some great books to read this winter.

1.  William Manchester's biographies of Winston Churchill.  Nobody bounces back like Winston Churchill.

2.  Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawerence.  Coming out of the soot and grim of Northern England to make an argument for our humanity.

3.  Tennessee Williams - Streetcar Named Desire, Night of the Iguana or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  Williams always sided with our angels and is our lyrical poet. 

4.  Thomas McGuane and the Longest Silence.  I have been fishing and guiding for 30 years.  McGuane lets me see my world in a different and often times better lens.

5.  Anything by Ramond Chandler.  Chandler is the white knight for my soul.

Playing in Hemingway’s shadow

Playing in Hemingway’s shadow.

If you are a certain age and you happen to read, fish and in your spare time do a little thinking at some point you run into Hemingway.  I’ve been bumping into Hemingway on and off for most of my life.  When I was in my early 20’s, discovering how much I liked to read, I remember a Time magazine review of Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-two Degrees in the Shade.  The Time interviewer asked McGuane who he liked to read.  McGuane said, “He liked all the Americans Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck.”  He handed me my reading list.

I started with Hemingway because I liked to read books with big print and wide margins.  I could knock them off pretty quickly go down to a bar and drink heavily while feeling slightly literary.  Hemingway would get a little tight, while I got totally shit faced.  There was something romantic, adventuresome and purely American for me in his novels.  So, I read them all and his short stories and anything that mentioned Hemingway I read.  At the time of his death the three most widely recognized words in English around the world were Singer (for the sewing machine), Coca Cola and Hemingway.   Not bad for a kid from Oak Park, Illinois.

We had a Professor of English from an Ivy League College on one of our Smith Rivers trips who would make these wonderful declarations about literature.  “Jane Austin wrote the perfect novel with Emma,” he said.  Or, “The Great Gatsby is the American Novel.”  Having no fears of being thought an idiot I declared, “All of Hemingway starts with A Big Two Hearted River.”  It sounded good and I think there is an element of truth in it.  The Professor like anyone else who has anything to do with the outdoors and a fly rod has dealt with Hemingway.  So you have a middle-age fishing guide and an older Ivy League Professor sparing about Hemingway on a river in the middle of nowhere Montana forty years after Hemingway’s death.  I call it the somethingness of Hemingway.

High Hopes

Hope all of our elected officials put their communties and country ahead of their re-elections bids.

Hope to find trout that prefer dry flies to nymphs.

Hope all of our soldiers come home and reunite with their families.

No more wars, no more a saber rattling.  Work harder at peace. 

Find more Vets work.

The Seattle Seahawks make the playoffs next year.

We all want to remember this is the way war’s end.  Gone is the patriotic fervor or the 24 hour news cycle, which dominated the television.   There isn’t the gaggle of embedded reporters that escorted the troops into the war.  The embedded reporters came home quite some time ago. 

The war seems to end silently for America.  The one percent that fought the war slide into their communities.   In places like Ft. Benning, Ga. or Ft. Hood, Tx. they carry the weight with high suicide rates and high divorce rates.  Soldiers and their families seem to go unnoticed.  Valor is ignored, honor slighted and sacrifice lost.

In Afghanistan, on the far side of the planet, a 19 year old kid with a rifle and 70 pound pack stands guard watching the moon come over the Hindu Kush.  Unfortunately, his fate is wrapped up with a group of people who claimed a pizza is a vegetable.