We had ice fishing, snow, and zero-degree temps this past December. The photograph is from December 20 years ago, when the likes were more frequent.
The rivers in my area today flowed at good brown trout levels, still slightly stained but coming down from stronger flows after recent rain. I could have got out and tried, but the closest I came to doing that was walking Loki along the Lamington River after disposing of our Christmas tree at Branchburg Park where they make mulch of them. Have been busy with stuff all day afterwards, much of the time administering final touches to my article on South Jersey largemouth bass for The Fisherman next month featuring Thomas Wyatt.
I do believe we will have a sustained ice season beginning soon. I could be wrong of course, but it's like I can feel it coming, and I've felt this way for a couple of weeks. If so, you'll read some interesting stories, I promise. You might see some ice action on my Litton's Fishing Lines YouTube channel, too, and I hope to get time to put up more of the videos I've already shot. I encourage you to subscribe, but read my disclaimer right here and now: I'm a writer before anything else, and I hope your appreciations remain loyal to the blog. I haven't even figured out how to cut video, let alone do any other edits, and so far, I like the rough and ready feel of straight-out-of-the-box video. Some ice fishing is already up on my old channel Litton's Fishing.
I might have a good sense for when to turn my GoPro on and off. It's just that I usually don't think of filming until it's too late.
This past year was supposed to be the year I got my new website up. Naturally, I got tied up in other projects, although the book on trout fishing I've promised you for years is getting rewritten in my brain. So far. Which isn't to downplay the productivity. (I'll finish it once the new website's up.) Often when I'm on the job, I do the physical labor while working avidly in my head on the book at the same time in another space I do simultaneously. I do this for other projects as well, sometimes whipping out a notebook from my back pocket and shamelessly jotting ideas down. I do put the job first. Anyone who gets hired and doesn't do that is a fool.
My wife says I'm going to miss the people I work with. She doesn't say I'll miss the work, but sometimes I feel as if I will. I always end up concluding I won't actually miss it, but there's plenty to be said for working class jobs when you're a writer otherwise. I remember once reading in Poets and Writers magazine what I took to be the clear implication of working-class life as being like a death sentence for writers, while I can persuade at long length why it isn't.
The vast majority of writers need a day job, and I'm sure plenty of us are in the working class. To denigrate what we ourselves do is ultimately unproductive and self-destructive. Instead, we should find our strengths lie in needing to do less than 60 hours a week or more. And rather than devoting all our mental energies to professional performance, we're free to think in our heads what's congruent to identify as writers first. Put the job first, yes, but don't believe you are, personally, that. Take pride in what really amounts to being a "food services worker." The standards you set for yourself. I feel like I'm an act for my eyes only, but the customer satisfaction I produce is that of others. And yet the pride includes the freedom! To be a better writer.
I tried to land a professional job decades ago. While preparing to take one on, I found myself completely lost in procedures. I ended up seeing a psychotherapist, because I was completely baffled at what was wrong with me. She had me take three weeks of IQ testing with another psychologist, which concluded I'm gifted verbally. That shouldn't be surprising, but I tested only average at performance intelligence. That's my problem with jobs that demand high performance intelligence, the psychotherapist concluded smugly.
I've never felt complete agreement with that as final verdict. I've tried to tell myself I do, but the doubt always swam back up and surfaced. (The psychologists were so certain of their conclusion.) I'll cite examples as to why I think the low score has less to do with genetically hardwired intelligence, and more to do with upbringing.
When I was five or six, my parents filled a room with papers spread out, doing taxes. I saw that and felt overwhelmed with desire to participate with them in doing the math. Instead, my father chased me out and shut the door on me, which was traumatic, because I so much wanted to do the math.
Flash forward 10 years or so.
I have never forgotten my algebra teacher telling me something before I dropped out of the class, failing it. "I know you can do this," she said. She said it in a way that reached me as authentic, and part of me agreed with her in a way that was too deep for me to access, given my conscious conviction at the time that I could not do the math.
Recently, I bought an extra spool for a Penn Fierce reel. I need that to load six-pound mono for fishing rivers and Round Valley shoreline trout. I believed I needed a 1000-series spool. I wasn't certain and knew I wasn't certain. But my reel "had" to be a 1000 series. Logically, that's what fits my five-and-a-half foot rod. Or so I thought. I ordered the 1000 series spool. What do you think I felt as I got notification of its being shipped? Whether or not it would fit the reel.
It came, and the first thing I did was check. It doesn't fit that reel. What did I do next? Looked on the spool loaded with braid on the reel to see if it designates series. Yes. 2000 series.
And that's when I understood. It's not lack of intelligence that didn't "perform" in checking the reel in the first place. It was habit conditioned by deep and lasting traumatization. The reel "had" to be a 1000 series, which is nonsense, and I knew it because I felt unsure. But I was blocked from doing the simple act of checking--psychologically blocked, not because of cognitive lack. I knew it might not be 1000 series.
It made me certain that the issue of my performance intelligence is psychologically complicated, and that simply taking an IQ test gave us no real conclusion as to its nature in me.
My next thought was of what to do with the 1000 series spool. I decided to buy a 1000 series Fierce reel and put that reel and the extra spool when I need it on one of my light power St. Croix five-and-a-half foot rods. In addition, I would go ahead and buy a 2000 series spool for the reel on the medium power St. Croix rod of the same length.
The thought of returning the 1000 series spool and then buying the 2000 series spool didn't sit right with me, because what was just wrong-headed in a helpless way--to have not checked on the series of the Fierce I already owned--would have proven to have been merely foolish if I made it Ereplacementparts' problem.
Again, I knew I might not have bought the spool to match my reel in the first place, and I had the reel in my possession to check on just what was right, but one is not always a fool when he knows better, not if he's prepared to make good on what amounts to a deep misunderstanding, so I thought one step further and recognized I had the positive use for a 1000 series reel.
So it is I'll be a little better outfitted in the year ahead.
