GOFAT (Good Old-Fashioned Anti-Theism)

Recently I have been re-watching some of my favorite debates between Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and their various theist opponents on YouTube. Although these debates occurred years ago, they never get old. Unfortunately, I do grow older every day. As my age increases, so do my worries that the general public, while enjoying the spectacle of theist vs. atheist debate, never really took to heart the central message of these atheistic heroes of mine. Our world is one infested with dogma, which seems to have spread from religion into just about every other institution and bureaucracy one can name. Dogma in any form is something that can and should be removed from our systems without emotion and with haste. The expert defenders of dogma (priests and rabbis and apologists) who sat on stage with Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins all have a couple of similarities in their arguments. First, they blame the practitioners of religion for their evil manifestations (we are only human, after all!) instead of the theories underlying the institutions. In other words, dogma comes from people, not god, and we should not throw out the baby (god) with the bathwater (filthy humans). Second, they just flat out wish that things physically were a way that they are not and do so in the face of every actual scientific fact (a characteristic also known as faithfulness). 

My YouTube rabbit hole continued as I pondered this and became curious about the religious and the current arguments they use to justify their beliefs. Unsurprisingly, it looks that they have remained precisely the same for all these years. Sadly, the modern atheist community seems to be embarrassed by the arguments built by Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, deeming them too mean-spirited to the religious community. The ridiculous theist arguments live on, while all of the good atheist arguments have become off-limits. It looks like everyone became afraid to say out loud that religion is harmful! Do not be fooled: religion is still poison, and the best possible world is without a doubt one which is free of these mind viruses and their fruits. 

I want to make it glaringly apparent that I am not going to cite anything here. Facts are on the internet or in our beautiful books, accessible by any reader, at any time. Learning is something that is everyone's personal responsibility. Now on to those two dogmatic defense mechanisms:

1. People are the problem, not the idea

Over and over, we hear the same argument: that we as humans are imperfect and cannot correctly interpret god. If people are the problem, why wouldn't a rational Christian agree that the hateful, warmongering parts of the Bible should be changed or removed to prevent further "misinterpretation" and avoid needless suffering? The answer is that even the scripture contradicts itself, and it is unlikely that Christians would be able to come to a consensus as to what they consider too barbaric to retain. There are Christian people in America who actually believe the earth is 6000 years old and that gay people are "going to hell." At the same time, more progressive Christians around the world proclaim that "their Jesus" loves science and could never do anything so awful to a homosexual. Both of these views can be supported biblically, and yet there can be no sane reconciliation of these divergent points of view under one philosophy. This is because the sources (every single book in the Bible, in every translation) are just bad data. Unfortunately, this information has been used to justify inflicting endless suffering upon blameless non-believers. The variety of torture methods devised by the faithful to disincentivize this type of questioning is almost as robust as the number of translations of the Bible itself. 

Speaking of torture, how exactly is it that we forget that we are lucky to live in a time in human history when we can proclaim that there is no god and live to tell the tale? We must not take this fact for granted. With this in mind, the theists' cry that man is destroying god's loving message via mistranslation seems like a vast understatement. Every day I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that of all the shitty ways to go, being tortured to death by a priest for some blasphemous song lyrics I wrote will not be in my cards any time soon. This is because no sane person, unpersuaded by religious arguments, would ever torture another human being. Our genetics would rather us avoid conflict. It takes a terrible idea of the highest order to make such a monster.

Additionally, if religious truth is so transformative, powerful, and self-evident, why is it so hard to find a "good" Christian? They claim the message is simple, then why can't they come to a consensus on some of their core values? They are and always have been the first ones to admit that not all denominations agree on doctrine. Sadly, without any meaningful framework to criticize and edit their beliefs, the problem will only worsen. Like I stated earlier, this all boils down to the fact that the information they have based their religion on is garbage, and they are unable or unwilling to toss it out. From a trash heap of half-baked ideas, hacked together by transient ungulate herders, they conjured and plagiarized the only books they allow themselves to read, and then are surprised that there are so many ways to interpret them. They insult their own minds by forcing them to mull such distinct fantasies; I imagine their poor shackled brains, algorithmically churning shit outputs from shit inputs. In the meantime, they advise us today (and forced us through the threat of torture and death yesterday) to do the same. Our brains are more interesting than our Bibles, thank you very much, and the problem of religion is in the idea, not the primate's beautiful minds who can't help but become entranced by something so strange.

2. Wishful thinking

"Well, if we believed we evolved from apes, then that would mean that nothing existed besides 'mere' science, and everything on earth got here by just complete total randomness, and I don't like that, so I am going to just choose to believe that it's not true!"

 -Everyone that is afraid to die and is therefore religious 

Somehow, despite all of the human pain and suffering it has fueled, our fetish for faith and dogma has survived. Religion is still doing its same old work in the realm of wishful thinking, just because it always has, and for no other reason. And although it is slowly dying in the hearts of the human population, theology's filthy influence in our politics is still strong, kept that way by the pathetic baby boomers who run our country. Many progressive people seem to have fallen into a "whatever anyone wants to believe is true no matter what" ethical framework, which is boring to talk about and even more tedious to write about. This attitude is coupled with the mistaken belief that one must believe in something, an amorphous higher power, another profoundly dull idea that pains me to think about while I edit this sentence. The search for answers has been all but abandoned with research funding drying up, and everyone seems OK with just believing whatever happens to fall out of anyone's mouth as long as no one has to admit their deepest held beliefs could be false. 

Faith in something nonphysical has become utterly absurd in the face of the evidence. In 2020, if you try to assert that your ethics are based on commands given down from a nonphysical being, you are admitting that they are based on nothing. Please, if anyone objects to this, explain to me precisely what a nonphysical thing is. The argument that my godless morals are somehow inferior to those grounded in a higher power can be safely proclaimed invalid.

I look forward to the day, pendulum fully swung when the majority of snide remarks are reserved for those that believe and not those who honestly say "I do not know."

The point is that wishful thinking is alive and well in religions, spiritualism, and philosophy, and this should not be so with all of the information available to us. It is sad, this need to be a certain kind of special being, set apart from our whole biological lineage. Evolution exists, and it is simultaneously destroying and creating everything we hate and love at all times, whether we believe it or not. Despite this constant change, we have innovated and built tools that allow us to describe the universe up and down in breathtaking detail. We have models showing how self-replication and organization could occur, and from there, natural selection needs no additional help building birds and their wings, humans and their brains. Good answers to the toughest questions have mostly been outlined (a heroic feat despite the lack mentioned above of funds). We could all be working towards finishing several critical scientific theories that would unlock the secrets of consciousness and the universe. Instead, every time we navigate around a new bend in the river of knowledge, we cannot help but find a suitable vein and shoot up our preferred brand of magical wishful thinking, which in turn comforts and slowly rots us from the inside out.

This wishful thinking must come to an end. Wishing you weren't a machine made of machines does not make it not so, it just makes the lies you love more painful to unlearn when the time comes. The last word I would like to say on the topic of wishful thinking is that I really do understand the temptation to fall into it, and it took me many years to finally give it up the Christianity I once held dear. In retrospect, things are much brighter and calmer on this side of the fence, though.

I hope these words make whoever reads this feel excitement, not anger or anxiety of any sort. The truth is that I have grown tired and weary of this subject over the years, resulting from these well-meaning remarks being taken as malicious or condescending. Worn out from constantly being poked and prodded for proof by people whose homes are built on a much less stable substrate than mine. I only aim to share a reality that makes me happy, not destroy someone else's. I wasted my youth professing religious nonsense, and I am trying to help diminish the risk of the further spread of harmful religious memes. Disowning god is something I firmly believe to be a way to increase happiness and decrease suffering around the world. There is no other way I wish to frame this truth except straight and honestly, with a little flair and a few jabs at people who really, really deserve it.

If you are a lazy reader like I used to be and don't want to do the research yourself, I can assure you that after living on both sides, scrutinizing each to the best of my ability, there is no good reason whatsoever to believe in a single religious "truth" put forward by any existing religion. And with religious fundamentalism tearing our world apart at the seams, I am steadfast in calling myself an antitheist: these ideas should be dismantled, not fixed or forgotten. We can explain many of the significant scientific mysteries that most uneducated people still believe that we cannot, but more details are needed. The work ahead is by no means trivial, though; try as we might to diminish them, the blasted mysteries only multiply. But these are mysteries to be solved, not worshipped. There are no gods in these gaps.

Since the early 2000s, much has changed; Hitchens died, and Harris as much as I love him has accumulated a slight whiff of the mystical. And while Dennett, my favorite, is lovable and awe-inspiring, it's hard for people who don't get STOKED reading a wiring diagram to get through some of his work. Dawkins is somehow framed as some kind of heartless monster, a ridiculous mischaracterization that anyone who reads his books and not just out-of-context quotes would understand. We are in a weird place where information hangs freely like jewels in an abandoned storefront, and the onus is entirely upon the people to grab it. Still, they are disinterested or actively disincentivized to do so. Pretending that Christians didn't put our garbage person of a president in the White House doesn't change the truth, just as it is futile to pretend that a human is more than a cooperation of biological cells. Religion still does harm, all over the world, every single day. We have had good ideas and bad ideas, and a lot of the bad ones extend from roots that can never possibly be measured or proved; worse, never disproved. At this point, whatever god could potentially exist has a role so insignificant that he might as well not have existed. If we survive, there will be a lucky future human generation who look back on our religious obsessions as ridiculous, and maybe even a little cute if not for all of the rape and murder.

I see how this can sound mean, but really, I mean this all in the nicest of ways. 

dry

Once upon a time, I was an alcoholic. I don't still claim to be, and now I prefer the term "ex-drunk." People didn't like to hear that in AA, which is partly why I quit going to meetings a few months into my sobriety. The way I see it my addictive personality happened to momentarily latch on to alcohol, just as it had many other less destructive hobbies and compulsions over the years. Probably because as a brewer I had easy access to large quantities of it, and rarely did I have to break out the wallet to support the habit. Getting fucked up all the time felt more acceptable when everyone around me could keep up, and it didn't seem to have an impact on my bank account. The path of least resistance, it seems, is a slippery slope.

Figuring out my current fixation and whether or not it's beneficial to me (example: fly-fishing vs. cigarettes) is so much more important to me than beating myself up forever over one in particular. It's something I need always to be aware of and keep tabs on; left unchecked, even the most benign of addictions have the potential to leave me broke and homeless. Diving head-first into a new fascination is something I am known for, but I try not to immediately define myself by it or get too disappointed if I lose interest. I am not surprised by the relapse rate among alcoholics, and I think a lot of it has to do with them continuing to call themselves one even when all of the symptoms of being a booze hound have faded. I am no longer an alcoholic just like I am no longer a home-brewer.

Many would have alcoholics believe that the next drink is a wolf waiting at the door. I would suggest that it’s just another drink that we don’t need.

After one awful day in December, I finally snapped out of it. Turns out this often talked about "moment of clarity" is real and something profound. It isn't so much a realization that you have a drinking problem; by this point you know you have one and have already tried cutting back, or at least thought about it or made an empty promise to a loved one that you would. It's more about finally recognizing all of the damage this habit has done to your life. At this moment the full weight of the situation hits you like a ton of bricks. The veil drops, and somehow you are unable to continue lying to yourself and everyone around you. It becomes painfully obvious that no, everything's not OK, and in fact, there is a huge mess that needs to be cleaned up. Hopefully, at this point the addicted person has a "better now than never" instead of a "fuck it, I'm in too deep" attitude. The former has always been more my style, and luckily that's what I went with; today it has been two years and six months since I quit my brewing job and vowed never to drink again.

Quitting didn't seem like it would be all that hard. My initial plan was to become a hermit. If I cut off all contact with everyone and everything that triggered my desire to get hammered I figured I would be fine. What I hadn't planned on was having to fill the Grand Canyon-sized hole of extra time that had suddenly appeared in my life. No more 60-hour-a-week job, no more getting a beer with my friends, no more killing time sipping whiskey and chain-smoking on the patio. Holy shit was I ever bored.

Enter: fly-tying. I had picked up fly-fishing two seasons before. That season leading up to my going dry I had made a real go at it, fishing more regularly and reading book after book about the finer points of angling with a fly. My days on the river were some of the only times you could find me without a beer in my hand. This was not because I didn't want to drink, but because I was lazy and beer is heavy to carry. Recently I had been considering taking up tying and even scored a box of old fly tying stuff for a song off of craigslist. The gentleman that sold it to me didn't seem to know what he had, that or he was too close or distant from the poor old guy that previously owned it and couldn't stand to see it anymore. Except for the dull scissors and five-dollar vise, I still use the old, worn tools that originally came with the kit, and my deer hair sedges get their wings off the same aging patch of deerskin that was used to tie my first dry fly.

Up until then, I had yet to get into the box, but with all of this new-found free time on my hands and a sober mind that needed distracting, I tore into it like some punk kid into another child's birthday presents. My first attempts were horrible, nightmare-inducing creatures. They were abominations. Size 4 caddis pupae, parachutes with soft hackle wings. I didn't know a good dry fly hackle from a CDC, but I was in deep. I would spend hours at the vise, burning through instructionals, tying every pattern I could with the wrong materials on the wrong hooks and loving every second of it. It's a good thing that at first I didn't care about doing everything correctly, you get more practice in when you aren't too worried about the particulars.

When you are a serial hobbyist, you love and savor those first hundred or so hours of being a newb. Being a bonafide beginner only lasts so long, and at that beautiful, long-awaited moment when the new obsession evolves into a useful skill, a little more magic gets sucked from the world; the lingo has mostly been learned, and the new thing isn't so mysterious anymore. This pastime that I had imagined lonely, weather-worn old fly-fishers doing while puffing on pipes and muttering to themselves in dark dens has since been made equal in my mind to arts and crafts for grown men.

That January I fished the Arkansas coming out of Pueblo Reservoir for the first time. I was just getting acquainted with the wonders of tailwater in a state with a never-ending fishing season, and I had an Altoids box packed with my pitiful attempts at the classics. To my surprise, the fish were rising, and even more shockingly they were taking my flies as if they were the ones I bought in the fly shop. One sixteen inch rainbow took my wonky size 12 parachute, and another slurped what can only be described as Frankenstein's Caddis. Both flies fell apart after one fish, but they were my flies, and I had never felt such a feeling of accomplishment. I had just rearranged my entire life and given up everything I had devoted myself to professionally, but it wasn’t until these fish looked up and sipped those flies that I was officially reborn.

I don’t need any of those fuckers, I thought to myself, in reference no-one and everyone at the same time.

That day I fished the Arkansas, a novice in both fly-fishing and tying, sober as the day I entered this world, and feeling as new. I imagined my previous obsession floating away down the river, disappearing into the mist rising from the surface, out of sight and out of mind. Something else had taken its place.

My name is Bryan, and I am obsessed with trout and the bugs that they eat.

Spring/Time

As spring finally starts to show its face around here, I am overwhelmed with a feeling that I am continually missing out on some adventurous, beautiful, inspiring happenings that are going on out there in the woods. The noise from the street is like a baby crying, and I’m the new dad helpless to stop it. Sometimes I lie awake at night, editing a mental list of all of the places I want to go, knowing that my weekends until mid-August are all planned out, and some trips aren’t going to make the cut. No matter how many times I run the numbers, they just don’t add up, just like they didn’t last year or the year before that. 

Becoming an outdoorsman awakes a sincere appreciation and understanding of the importance and necessity of seasons. This constant awareness of the timeliness of it all, the fact that certain things in the wild only happen at a particular time and not at others is mind-opening, and you really start to understand the meaning of being one with nature. But it can also become a source of anxiety. For instance, there is a particular time window during the summer when most trout that live in Colorado will take almost any hopper imitation that you cast at it. You toss it, they bite it, you release or bonk the fucker on the head and repeat. But the angler who happens to let his non-fishing life get too busy during this time is an angler who you should be scared to be driving behind. It’s likely he spends more time at the wheel staring at bodies of water trying to catch a glimpse of a fish than watching the road on which he is traveling. He knows that he is missing it, and even worse, it won’t be like this again for another twelve long months. 

One hard left could end it all.

My first warm spring day on the stream this year, when the snow had melted, but one final storm was almost certainly on the way, was more emotional than usual. I was walking up the short trail to a good spot on the Poudre with my fancy-pants Patagucci waders pulled halfway down and no jacket on, smelling the smells and hearing the sounds of spring, and out of nowhere I just started tearing up. Trying and failing to pull myself together and tie a fly on, I just sat down on the bank of one of my favorite rivers, loving that I even had a list of favorite rivers in the first place, just being a part of the scenery. A few short years ago I could barely remember the name of the Platte, and now here I was, sobbing like a baby because I had been looking forward to this moment for so long. You won’t catch me crying in Cheesman Canyon in the middle of September after I have spent months fishing three or four times a week. No, at the end of the season I am more apt to be cursing the fish for not biting instead of just being thankful that we (me and the fish) are here at the same place at the same time.

Pure joy with no strings attached is hard to come by in this world, but in fishing and family, I find it in excess. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and when you love something this much, that first trip out of the year can be as joyful and heart-breaking as seeing an old friend after years of separation. And just as in my relationships with my friends and family, I will sometimes contemplate and extrapolate my lack of free time in the summer to the bitter end, when we are all eventually separated by death. No more fishing trips to plan, no warm embraces, no more flies to tie.

There's just not enough damn time for any of it.

i caught a bass on a fiesta amigo

There is a special place in hell for whoever writes the rules. Boring, nitpicking little fuckers, like a dad at a slumber party telling everyone to keep it down. That line is too heavy, this rod is too light. This fly must be tied as such and fished in this particular manner, or a fish will never eat it. What are you, stupid? Granted, flies for specific occasions are needed, and a fly-fisher needs to be sneaky, capable of casting a fly accurately, and aware of which bugs the trout are into at the moment. It just appears that it isn't long after these necessary skills are acquired before everything gets tossed into the air, and we are all left guessing. This is why, when people usually split off into team Imitative or Suggestive concerning fly choice, I've chosen to keep my ass firmly planted in the KISS camp.The Fiesta Amigo, my all-occasions wet fly, is a direct result of this.

Tied on 2x strong nymph hooks, the Fiesta Amigo can be swung, sunk, or even floated if they are small enough and I use Gink. The bodies I make from SLF Spikey Squirrel Dubbing, with a soft hackle hen feather wrapped around the neck. Some I dub thicker than others. There's also one with a peacock body and grizzly hackle; not pure Amigo but close enough to be named one and competent enough to get it's own full line in the wet fly box. I tie it in 8 colors and 6 sizes, but I usually use the olive, peacock or brown ones in size 16 or 18. This fly is my admittedly-hyperbolic middle finger to the ultra-realistic flies and all of the assumptions about how much a trout really thinks before he eats that go with them.

I got the idea after reading David Hughes' book Wet Flies. In it, he recommends as an experiment tying one simple wet fly in multiple sizes and colors and then matching the hatch at the river with the closest color and size combo. My brain took this as a challenge, and not long after reading the book I had created the Fiesta Amigo and vowed to fish them exclusively for a full season. I lasted until ice-off, about two months, before tying up a big batch of drys, but in that time and the months since I have learned that:

1. Bug colors are mostly pretty similar.

2. Size matters.

3. Presentation, particularly on the first cast, matters most.

There is a lot of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence out there showing that I know how to catch a fish, some of it stored in the form of photographs, but mostly I just talk a lot about fly-fishing. The point is that I don't think the proof is compelling enough to hold up in a court of law. If you genuinely believe that I know what I am doing and ever ask me how to do it, furthermore, it is tantamount to asking me where the songs I write come from. "I don't know, I'm still figuring it out" is probably the correct response. Instead, you will get a bombardment of sometimes romantic, sometimes technical, but never complete, thoughts. Some of it would make sense, the majority would be jargon and most likely accompanied by a few lies to add some spice if I felt like I was losing you. This all happens with the best intentions, and I am trying to be helpful. There is nothing I love more than getting a friend onto a fish. Still, I am doubtful anyone was ever a better angler after hearing me fumble through Bryan's 150,000 Vague, Enigmatic Fishin' Tips. For some reason, it always comes off sounding simple, even though I am not sufficiently dim-witted or new enough to the sport to think that this is the case.

That said, there is one piece of advice I have for anyone looking to up their game: make your own Fiesta Amigo box, or something similar, and fish them and only them for an extended period. At the very least, your presentation will improve, which is more than enough reason by itself to give it a shot. You also start to get this feeling that in most cases, when a trout refuses your fly, it's not the fly's fault. As I said, the majority of the bugs you pull out of the water will be size 16-22 and, you know, brownish green. More likely the fish didn't see it or wasn't hungry, in my opinion. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it?

By now it should be clear what exactly a Fiesta Amigo is and why I use it so much, and this past season during runoff I wanted to see how well this baby did on those warm-water species. Runoff seemed to go on forever in Colorado this year. Clear Creek was too high for after work fishing trips for most of the summer. I wanted to die. During the worst of it, when every river everywhere was a raging milkshake, I frequented a group of ponds up in Longmont that had been closed since the flood but had recently reopened for fishing. At least that's what Geoff (or something), a shirtless stoner that randomly attached himself to us, told my friend Ryan and I when we showed up the first time to fish them. We didn't question him. He was pleasant to hang out with and had good weed, and he even made a trip down to the convenience store to pick up some sodas for us three. He was the kind of guy that shows up to the lake with his conventional rod and reel, but fishes whatever lures he finds in the mud without worrying about it. I guess he picks his fishing buddies the same way he chooses his tackle. Most days going fishing you run into a weirdo, but you don't usually make a short-term buddy out of them.

Ryan is also a spin-caster, but the more sophisticated kind with a tackle box full of all sorts of jiggly, jangly doo-dads. I know our kind aren't supposed to mix, but he's one of the best fishing buddies a guy can ask for. Ryan always shows up on time and doesn't complain about the weather or how early it is. He's got the bug as bad as I do, he just uses a different stick and reel to satiate the monkey. Sometimes he will use one of my extra fly rods, and sometimes he will even catch a fish with it. Ryan is not a picky man. It seems that he will try to catch anything that swims on any gear as long as it gets him outside and on the water. We met a long time ago when I was still in the beer biz and he's one of the only guys that stayed in touch with me when I quit drinking. I'm lucky to know him.

The ponds were a blast. Ryan cranked in a few nice 16-18 inch largemouths on a giant red plastic worm. I was concentrating on the panfish, or at least that's what I was telling people. Here they are larger than you usually find, and I could not drop a Fiesta Amigo into the water without having one take it. I must have caught thirty that day. The problem is that I could see bass holding at the bank, and every time I cast to them, some dumb bluegill would dart over and take the fly before the bass even had a chance to look at it. I wanted a bass, specifically a largemouth on an Amigo, but, you know, I was “focused” on the panfish.

So, that’s how it went most of the day. I would get bored of catching bluegill, swap over to a different fly, get frustrated from the lack of action, then switch back to the Amigos and the non-stop panfish bite. I did manage to land a perch while I was at it. All the while, Ryan was catching nice bass on a regular basis, and ultimately I got fucking sick of it and decided to get down to business. Changing flies was not an option. Time to find the right bass.

I found him at the north end of the third pond on the trail. Hanging out all by his lonesome self with no bluegill in sight, this bass was the one. I tied on a size 10 Amigo, the brown one with gray soft hackle, not the brown one with mottled ginger and red thread. This was probably going to be the most comfortable cast I could ask for as a fly-fisher on a pond with no boat, clear of brush and with plenty of room for a real back cast. My first shot went unnoticed. On the second I gave the fly a quick twitch as it sank down into the strike zone. I assumed the flick of the tail indicated a take. The weight felt on the rod after making my set confirmed my suspicion. Don't fuck this up now, I thought. Yes, this is ultimately meaningless, but I'm proving a point, goddamnit.

The fish came to the net fairly easily. Not the biggest fish in the world, but a chubby fourteen inches. Largemouth bass, size 10 Fiesta Amigo lodged in his jaw. Mission accomplished. Posed him for the hero shot, then back into the pond he went. The whole time I had a strong case of the I-Told-Ya-So's, although I'm not sure who it was directed at. Probably just the same Them I am always referring to in my protest songs. The people writing the rules, keeping the people down, telling me I can't smoke weed in Elevenmile. No, no-one ever told me it wasn't possible to do what I just did, but it just feels implied when I walk into a fly shop or login to Instagram. Fancy, expensive gear must be replaced by newer, fancier, more expensive gear. The simple rarely gets the buzz it deserves, and when it gets the job done, I feel like I am in on something that most people are missing. And on a split-cane rod, nonetheless. I am thirty-two going on seventy.

Fly-fishing is full of opportunities for full-on decision paralysis. For me, I'm going to choose my partners because we get along, spots because there's fish, and flies because they work. Everything else counts as rules for rule's sake, and we all now know how I feel about that shit.

the big idea

Social media, while useful, has gone too far and has overstepped its bounds. Most people only use it to consume content others have created, without creating anything original themselves. I have been free of Facebook and Instagram for quite a while now, and it has been both good and bad. Good because, as an artist, it gives me more time to write words and sing notes and shoot shots. Some of my most exciting songs and photos would likely never have been made had I not deleted those infernal apps off of my phone. Staring at grip-n-grins of dudes catching big trout on Instagram is much more comfortable than getting up early enough to get to the good stream in time to cast a fly at the good fishes. 

The only real negative side is isolation and the lack of feedback on whatever I am doing at the moment. Finishing a song isn't the same when you cannot post it on your social media for people to hear. It just sits there as a .mp3 or .wav on my desktop, begging me to put it somewhere. Selectively sending things to specific individuals is weird; I over-think it and end up not getting as much useful feedback because I'm too nervous to even explain what I'm trying to do correctly. I have also found that it seems like most people are usually lying to you, even when you specifically ask them to be honest, further muddying the waters. Maybe this is how things always were, and I am just rusty with this kind of "human interaction" from using social media through my twenties, but staring someone in the eyes and asking them to listen to my band is something I have not had to do in a long time and it takes some getting used to it. Additionally, losing the constant background noise that is news media makes the times I am forced to watch talking head soundbites and clips utter torture, and my heart breaks as I witness the drawn-out death of long format conversations and ideas that take more than one paragraph to flesh out.

I want to share my work and thoughts, but I do not want to force them into someone else's feed. I want to share photos but don't give a fuck about reading comments on them (unless you know more than me and can show me where I can improve, of course). I want to give myself the time to think through an issue before making an opinion, and I want to connect with people who are doing the same. I do not want to share everything.

So I'm starting a blog.

Subjects here will vary from wildlife conservation to photography, audio engineering to free will to fly fishing. Enjoy it or not, let me know or don't. I have to get to school, so that's all I have to say about that.