Page 2 of 3 FirstFirst 1 2 3 LastLast
Results 11 to 20 of 30

Thread: Hook, Line & Thinker

  1. #11
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    KZN
    Posts
    425

    Default Fly-fishing; The Purpose-driven Life

    ©Wolf Avni 28/11/2007

    Do you ever feel that life may be just the teeniest bit unfair, that it becomes more so by the day and that there’s another hard luck story to hear every time you turn around?

    If you do, take courage. There’s hope yet, not so much in that anything of your personal experience of it will shortly change, or that the athletic tyranny of our socio-political currency; its piggishness and the pronouncements and policies flowing from that will evolve into a more humane equitableness - but in that at least you can take comfort in knowing you have not yet been entirely engulfed by the trafficking of the affirmative delusions that have of late become the national past-time.

    Don’t scoff. In itself this is a huge plus in these crazy times where rapists, racists, racketeers and robbers not only vie for high public office, but are virtual shoo-ins for every vacancy that opens at every level of political hierarchal leadership. I wish it were otherwise, that this were an exaggeration, but every day it seems more as if cheating, thieving, public inebriations of every brazen kind and bare-faced duplicity have become de-rigeur the badges of office in our national politics, in its business and in civil administration.

    The politics of personal liberation and of self-affirmation may not have been the agency that caused such cracks to appear in the bedrock of humanities’ high hope for itself in this, our little corner of the world, but by Gonzo and by the evidence of our own eyes it sure is the vehicle par-excel lance by means of which the humblest freedom-fighter and self-affirmed wanna-be might transport him or herself to the most exalted levels of aspirational venality and spiritual corruption.

    You try to be civic minded, a good and productive citizen, a credit to your community and all that and so you learn the steps to the dance, but in the face of the parochial and petty agendas that seem more and more to drive our national search for self, about the sanest thing left for any old white guy to do is to take yourself off fishing.

    Now that we have that out of the way and have properly prepared the ground for it, so to speak, tilled and mulched it appropriately, the question arises as to what nature of seed one should broadcast in anticipation of a bountiful harvest? The answer of course is Fly-fishing!

    It must be fly-fishing. Clearly nothing else will do . Not the culinary art of boilie making to entice fat and ugly carp, with thick lips and vacant stares, nor the high art of enticing whiskered barbel, bass or even eels with the allure of rotting chicken innards, nor yet an artlure, though it may come close, jigged cunningly to imitate a crippled froglet or similar unfortunate in the face of virtually any piscine predator. It must be fly-fishing. Nothing else delivers as much bang for you buck. I know! I’ve done them all, and more, though I do not always admit to it in polite company.

    But these are desperate times and we must resort to desperate measures. I would discuss this thing further, here and now... but a gentle sou’ wind has kicked up and is riffling the water ever so gently. It obscures the rise forms of feeding fish without masking them entirely. And I have a fistful these little old beetle patterns that I tied up last night. They are begging me to take them for a swim. In the absence of any likelihood of a national epiphany of fair-mindedness, which shall miraculously erupt across the societal countenance, instantaneously becoming a base arbiter of all (or any) of life’s outcomes, humble or otherwise, and in the face of scant possibility for any non-racial, non-discriminatory stereotyping of any contribution that I might have to offer to civic life in sunny South Africa, I think I may just go grant those little beetles their wish.

  2. #12
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    KZN
    Posts
    425

    Default Teaching Teenagers To Flyfish.

    DATELINE; NATAL WITNESS 29/12/2007


    ©Wolf Avni 21/12/2007

    The notion that teenagers can be taught to fly-fish, or anything else for that matter, is entirely absurd; they already know everything. - The Unpublished Epigrams of Surly, the Ghillie


    “Look at the hippos,” says Teenager pointing to a cluster of rounded shapes on the hillside across the lake. “They are rocks,” I reply softly, “remnants of a basalt cap fractured aeons ago and tumbled into the valley, where they have lain for millennia, shaped thus by no more than times’ ravaging.”

    “Well they look like hippos,” Teenager retorts. “ I’d rather they were hippos. Rocks are boring.” A look shot my way, refulgent with implication, insinuates that old farts with threadbare imaginations are boring too.

    “Things are always boring if you do not scrutinise them adequately,” I counter in parental fashion. Teenager, gazing intently through slitted eyes at the outcrop nods, as if in agreement and then says “I’m all scrutinised out this morning and I still think they look like hippos.”

    “That is as may be,” I offer apropos of nothing, but with what I hope will be interpreted as suave authority. It is all I have to mask my impotence in the face of such youthful goopishness. “And those storm clouds building above the mountain,” the teen continues, “ don’t you think that they look like a bunch of purple-turbaned Turks?”

    We are out on the lake in a small boat drifting in the breathlessness of dawn, brought there by nothing more remarkable than my inability to resist an insurmountable challenge; a few days earlier, Teenager, watching me roll a 2 weight floating line over a pod of fish feeding close inshore had said, “Hey that looks cool. Can you show me how to do it?” And in a moment of bravado I had replied, “Sure! Nothing to it.” And so it came to be that we were sitting out on a boat practising the mechanics of casting. Later, when Teenager had absorbed the fundamentals, we would move down to Smuggler’s Corner where the Umzimkulwana chortles through riffles and down Lilliputian rapids.

    In no time at all the teen has the hang of things and is throwing as clean a loop on a short line as one could hope for, but cannot be prevailed upon to curtail the false casts. “You don’t need to wave the line around in the air so much,” I say patiently, “ You’re not conducting an orchestra. A couple of false casts is all it takes to aerialise the line. Your timing is spot on, but you want to get the fly in the water pronto, with as little disturbance as possible. All that brandishing around is just obtrusive, and anyway, most fish are caught when the fly is in the water,” I convey firmly, lightly bruising a brittle teenage ego.

    It bristles back at me; “ Whatever became of ‘more to fishing than catching fish’ ? I thought you told me that the fish were incidental? And I like watching the line. Check out the pretty patterns the loop makes overhead,” Teenager commands imperiously.

    “Oh Boy! What have I got myself into?”, I whisper into the abyss.



    Some days later, once the novelty of the ‘pretty patterns’ that a line etches against sky has paled in the passage of time, I collect the teen and head down the Umzimkulwana for a session on the river.

    In thigh-deep water, with one hand waving free, Teenager makes first acquaintance with the river, with its substrate as slippery as razor blades and with the shrubbery, which leaps out to snatch at every passing fly. “Hey, keep that cast high,” I call jocularly from my camera position at bankside, as for the nth time Teenager snags a bunch of vegetables and for the nth time, wades forward against the current to free the fly. Against all odds, and far more so that I ever came close to back in my learning years, the teen gets the fly in the current and soon shows the beginnings of mastery over the drag-free drift. I say little and am frugal with compliments, yet suspect that I am witness to the genesis of what may yet turn out to be a glorious fly-fishing career. And as the teen slowly gains in confidence and becomes one with the river, I focus my camera and record the moment. Soon enough it is time to leave, but the teen is disinclined. I insist and Teenager reluctantly spools the line and wades out to join me on the bankside, saying. “Hey that’s so cool. I think fly-fishing likes me. I think I like getting my shoes wet!”

    My job is done.

  3. #13
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    Parys, Free State
    Posts
    9,760

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Surly Ghillie View Post
    DATELINE; NATAL WITNESS 29/12/2007


    ©Wolf Avni 21/12/2007

    The notion that teenagers can be taught to fly-fish, or anything else for that matter, is entirely absurd; they already know everything. - The Unpublished Epigrams of Surly, the Ghillie


    “Look at the hippos,” says Teenager pointing to a cluster of rounded shapes on the hillside across the lake. “They are rocks,” I reply softly, “remnants of a basalt cap fractured aeons ago and tumbled into the valley, where they have lain for millennia, shaped thus by no more than times’ ravaging.”

    “Well they look like hippos,” Teenager retorts. “ I’d rather they were hippos. Rocks are boring.” A look shot my way, refulgent with implication, insinuates that old farts with threadbare imaginations are boring too.

    “Things are always boring if you do not scrutinise them adequately,” I counter in parental fashion. Teenager, gazing intently through slitted eyes at the outcrop nods, as if in agreement and then says “I’m all scrutinised out this morning and I still think they look like hippos.”

    “That is as may be,” I offer apropos of nothing, but with what I hope will be interpreted as suave authority. It is all I have to mask my impotence in the face of such youthful goopishness. “And those storm clouds building above the mountain,” the teen continues, “ don’t you think that they look like a bunch of purple-turbaned Turks?”

    We are out on the lake in a small boat drifting in the breathlessness of dawn, brought there by nothing more remarkable than my inability to resist an insurmountable challenge; a few days earlier, Teenager, watching me roll a 2 weight floating line over a pod of fish feeding close inshore had said, “Hey that looks cool. Can you show me how to do it?” And in a moment of bravado I had replied, “Sure! Nothing to it.” And so it came to be that we were sitting out on a boat practising the mechanics of casting. Later, when Teenager had absorbed the fundamentals, we would move down to Smuggler’s Corner where the Umzimkulwana chortles through riffles and down Lilliputian rapids.

    In no time at all the teen has the hang of things and is throwing as clean a loop on a short line as one could hope for, but cannot be prevailed upon to curtail the false casts. “You don’t need to wave the line around in the air so much,” I say patiently, “ You’re not conducting an orchestra. A couple of false casts is all it takes to aerialise the line. Your timing is spot on, but you want to get the fly in the water pronto, with as little disturbance as possible. All that brandishing around is just obtrusive, and anyway, most fish are caught when the fly is in the water,” I convey firmly, lightly bruising a brittle teenage ego.

    It bristles back at me; “ Whatever became of ‘more to fishing than catching fish’ ? I thought you told me that the fish were incidental? And I like watching the line. Check out the pretty patterns the loop makes overhead,” Teenager commands imperiously.

    “Oh Boy! What have I got myself into?”, I whisper into the abyss.



    Some days later, once the novelty of the ‘pretty patterns’ that a line etches against sky has paled in the passage of time, I collect the teen and head down the Umzimkulwana for a session on the river.

    In thigh-deep water, with one hand waving free, Teenager makes first acquaintance with the river, with its substrate as slippery as razor blades and with the shrubbery, which leaps out to snatch at every passing fly. “Hey, keep that cast high,” I call jocularly from my camera position at bankside, as for the nth time Teenager snags a bunch of vegetables and for the nth time, wades forward against the current to free the fly. Against all odds, and far more so that I ever came close to back in my learning years, the teen gets the fly in the current and soon shows the beginnings of mastery over the drag-free drift. I say little and am frugal with compliments, yet suspect that I am witness to the genesis of what may yet turn out to be a glorious fly-fishing career. And as the teen slowly gains in confidence and becomes one with the river, I focus my camera and record the moment. Soon enough it is time to leave, but the teen is disinclined. I insist and Teenager reluctantly spools the line and wades out to join me on the bankside, saying. “Hey that’s so cool. I think fly-fishing likes me. I think I like getting my shoes wet!”

    My job is done.
    Nice abrubt stop,should have a beautiful turned over fly

  4. #14
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Location
    A, A
    Posts
    1,687

    Default

    Nice Going Wolf, we need more of them teenagers likeing them pretty loops and getting their shoes wet
    PK

    I am haunted by waters - Norman Maclean

  5. #15
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    KZN
    Posts
    425

    Default Fear & Loathing On The Fish-fetcher’s Trail.

    
    DATELINE; NATAL WITNESS 12/1/2008
    ©Wolf Avni 9/1/2008
    “Though you may not know it, riding fish around is a big thing in this little old galaxy,” I
    tell my passenger.
    “Cool,” says Passenger, “hey, I wanna be the navigator, Oh pretty please... may I?”
    “Every year, ranging wide across the countryside, we distribute live trout out of the
    hatchery. The point of the exercise is simple; to arrive at a destination with the fish in
    immaculate condition, unstressed and full of ichthyic vigour. It’s not as straightforward as
    you may think. Things can go pear-shaped in the blink of an eye and over the years we have
    pretty much seen most of what can go wrong with a drum full of live trout. They know
    more ways of dying than any combination of sheep, of chickens, or of terminal tik-addicts
    and glue-sniffers stuck in home slum-alleys on the Cape Flats - and they (the fish), spend
    their time swimming around in circles looking for new ways to depart this mortal coil. For
    a creature with a brain somewhat smaller than a pea , they are frighteningly creative in
    this. In short there are more ways to kill a drum full of healthy fish in the middle of
    nowhere than there are interventions that might keep them alive,” I explain to my new
    navigator as we go chundering down the hill through the mists of dawn.
    “Cool,” says Navigator, “ hey, I wanna drive, Oh pretty please may I?”
    “Better check that map. ” I command, not so much because I don’t have a pretty good idea
    of the route, but more to nudge Navigator towards putting a halter on that exuberant
    enthusiasm. We are headed for a hatchery a distant day’s driving to the north-east and
    have chosen our weather-window fortuitously. A robust frontal system has moved in and is
    predicted to provide heavy cloud and torrential rains across the quadrant we must travel.
    The same conditions that will make transport of temperamental heat-hating trout easier in
    mid-summer, are by definition likely to make driving a tricky proposition, especially as our
    mission is two-fold; we must collect fish, yes, but we must also deliver Navigator (who has
    been holidaying on the farm), back into the heart of Cement City and parental custody.
    That requires not only a long journey, but an arduous detour through The Big Smoke and
    things will only get harder once we have taken on better than a thousand kilograms of
    water and fish.
    For once, I am on my way to fetch fish, not deliver them, and the aged bakkie, without its
    default load of a ton of shlooshing water in the tank on the back, skips and bucks down the
    potholed track, scudding and bouncing along. The mists swirl around us as we devour the
    miles. Eventually, with the dawn left far behind, they lift and are replaced by blinding,
    driving rain. The traffic is bumper to bumper. The entire population of Cement City is deep
    into its annual lemming-like migration, headed anywhere, as long as it takes you away from
    home in the big city. “Strange shit,” says Navigator as yet another truck-wreck looms up
    at us out of the blinding rain and we inch along on a freeway clogged tighter than a Nun’s
    nasty, “that folk spend their slavish lives creating homes from which they must flee the
    instant they have a few moments of off-time. ”
    “Yeah, the holidays... it’s all messed up,” I agree, “but you’re supposed to be the navigator,
    remember. Now navigate us out of this.” And so, still in blinding rain we take the next exit
    off the freeway, continuing our journey northwards through the KwaZulu hinterland,
    through the cradle of the Anglo-Boer war. We drive for hours. Our route, mostly mist-
    shrouded, zigzags through rolling countryside and an occasional grungy town.. “I need
    some coffee, and a breakfast,” Navigator commands imperiously as we grind down the
    main road of Grungeville, “let’s find a decent coffee bar!”
    “Along this route?” I grimace wryly. “Not in our lifetime.”
    Eventually, after what seems like an entire incarnation, we pull into Ermelo, where
    Navigator finds us an Irish O’ Hagen’s (f’r chrissake) in the midst of this last outpost of
    once-proud Afrikaner identity. Against my better judgement we park the truck and make
    our way through the doorway into a hell of cigarette smoke, the reek of old cooking oil,
    spilt beer and an inebriated mass of Ermelo-on-its-day-off.
    “Verskoon Meneer,” I ask of a large hirsute local as he sways past our table on unsteady
    feet, “ kan U vir my miskien inlig hoe spreek n’ mens die naan van hierdie plek uit?”
    “ERRR-ME-LOOA,” he tells me in a brogue rough enough to take the skin of the back of a
    fully grown pachyderm, “en ons laaik nie vir die Engels nie. Ons vat geen Engelse *** hier,”
    he continues conversationally.
    “Is dir nou waar?, I enjoin, “glo Oom dat die wat gebreklik is, is ook noodwendig
    vertraagt?”
    “Jy praat die Taal!?” he exclaims joyously from a face instantly wreathed in friendliness,
    all belligerence vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Our waitress, a platteland
    prikkelpop of remarkable ordinariness serves up a basket of snacks swimming in
    unspeakable oiliness, which we shun. We drink our coffee, pay the bill and leave.
    “Hey,” says Navigator, I’m tired of map reading. You take over and I’ll drive.” I bow to
    the insurrection and give up the car keys, surrendering my fate to Navigator, who slips
    behind the wheel and guns the engine.
    Back on the road we head for Machododorp as the rain belts down with biblical ferocity.
    It envelops the countryside till everywhere sheets of water gather on the ground around
    us and flow freely. It slows us down but we plough on.
    Night falls swiftly beneath the racks of cloud and the glooming finds us still short of our
    destination, the hatchery on the Lunsklip river outside Lydenburg. I remember an old
    friend of my youth, Lord Francis of D’Arval , a decrepit artist of renown who lives nearby.
    His estate lies on the road between Badplaas and Machadodorp, where he ekes a
    precarious existence painting vast oil canvasses so big that he must climb a scaffold to
    work on them, supplemented by a modest boarding establishment that panders to the
    equally precarious weekend trade of trout fisher folk fleeing the concrete jungle.
    And so we make the detour along the escarpment lip and as we drive up the long and
    buckled track leading to his gypsy lodgings, the clouds open up revealing the very last
    seconds of a sun setting in glory behind a ridge of broken basalt. We have found sanctuary
    for a night.
    Tomorrow is another day.

  6. #16
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    KZN
    Posts
    425

    Default They Should Have Been Mangoes

    DATELINE; HOOK, LINE & THINKER, NATAL WITNESS 26/1/2008

     ©Wolf Avni 20/1/2008

    “It can’t be easy,“ Bitis Arietans tells me rhetorically, “I mean composing a fishing column, finding
    something new and original to write about every other week. There are after all only so many
    spectral purples with which to colour a sunset, or a fish splashing at the end of your line.

    “Can’t say I’ve noticed,” I reply, “my problem is more in the nature of knowing what not to say, and
    when not to say it.”

    “What do you mean?” he challenges. We are sprawled amongst a mess of fractured dolerite, a
    jumble of boulders, which cap the spur that overlooks Smugglers’ Bend on the Umzimkulwana River.
    Just below us, woven into the scree-ed cliff face beyond reach of the several feral predators that
    roam these hills along faint-traced trails, a hamerkop’s nest - a bouffant of twigs, grasses, reeds
    and arbitrary jetsam thrown up by the river - adds texture to the rock face. The nest’s precarious
    position puts it in the teeth of the north wind, exchanging one peril for another. A winter gale will
    destroy it utterly. A singular robust gust, which can snap the trunks off trees that have stood for
    fifty years, will deconstruct in a blink season upon season of diligent toil on the part of the
    parents. Dust unto dust.

    Lately this has become one of my favourite haunts. It commands a view of the whole valley below
    the lake and the river tumbling out of it. From here you can see to every compass point and the
    spur, a conglomerate of rock and soil and root left behind by the grinding of time vast beyond any
    memory of it, is a microcosmic capsule of the entire mountain. On rigid wings a jackal buzzard
    rides the thermals overhead. In this one place heart’s desire and the mind’s eye marry and leave
    the bonds of earth behind. Sometimes, passing here alone on my way to the river with a camera
    bag slung over a shoulder, I pause in sobriety, forgetting my first purpose, forgetting my second,
    sometimes forgetting myself. I sit with both rod and with camera discarded at my feet, mulling on
    that life and its choices which brought me here to this place, to this moment.

    “Here, take one.” Bitis reaches into a cavernous inner pocket of his fishing jacket and hands me a
    ripe Christmas peach. It is cool, sweet, juicy, and it weeps from the slight bruising it has taken
    in the jostle on its way over the boulder piles. “Don’t you think,” he hisses, “that it’s way overdue
    for you to give up on all this fannying about, this pretense that you are any kind of fishing writer
    at all? It’s not so much that the fish are incidental to your texts, they’re a ***dam distraction!”
    he informs me sternly. That’s the thing with Puffadder, his bite is a great deal worse than his
    bark.

    I surrender easily, conceding that my intent has very little to do with the fact of fishing itself;
    with surges of adrenalin and the heat of the hunt, with the contents of a fishing jacket, or a fly-
    box. I’m no good at all for field reports of a new reel, rod or line, or whether the fish are biting,
    and what ill-named concoction to tie on and throw their way. Indeed not. I’m too old and my hair is
    too long.

    “My stories,” I explain, “are little more than exercises in tonal breath control, noble, if quixotically
    futile attempts to capture the essence of an experience of simply being alive. Expeditions into the
    trepanned interior of your average fisherman’s average cranium are akin to travelling the Empty
    Quarter on camelback, thirsty work and no good place to go in search of a muse, in search of
    dimension to this flat-lining landscape.”


    “Idiocy ,” I tell him, “is perhaps too harsh a word to define as descriptive of the human condition,
    yet still our species has an undeniably clear proclivity for mimicry, aping the conventional as much
    in thought as in action. Mostly, our obedience to the rules of behavioural learning is slavish, and
    our compliance with societal roles, no more conscious. Monkey see, monkey do, and because of it
    there’s a low threshold to how much honesty monkey care to hear about himself.

    By contrast, espousal to the multi-dimensional - and creative expression of it - is a far more
    bountiful water in which to cast a line. My purpose is simple. The meaning of living is revealed
    where ever meaning is looked for in life. And I, fated by this fickleness, am more tuned to the
    moods of the liquids that life swims in, that swim in it, and to the intonations that flow through we
    who follow.“

    Bitis Arietans coils archly and snaps back, “that’s all good and well, but how about an occasional
    simple paragraph on fishing?”

    “It should’ve been mangos,” I reply quietly,
    He bares his fangs. “What have mangos got to do with this living moment and the price of
    breathing?” he demands, exasperated.

    “The peaches,” I tell him. “They were really nice thank you very much, but it should’ve been mangos.
    They might have bruised less easily on the way up.”

    Imagination knows few restraints. It cannot be mere coincidence.

    Ends
    882 words

  7. #17
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    KZN
    Posts
    425

    Default The Hardships Of Easy Living.

    DATELINE ; NATAL WITNESS 9-2-2008
    ©Wolf Avni 6/2/2008

    
    They tell me that we are by nature intense, genetically programmed to be relentless. But what does this mean? Are we to believe the implicit evidence of our own eyes; that animal passion, unacknowledged, un-channelled, is the fatal flaw to human character? Shall we bow the sapient head, conceding this blemish upon our otherwise spotless being, or acknowledge this energy, no matter how raw, to be the very scaffold upon which our human existence depends?

    What The hell. If these be grievous faults then grievously shall we pay. It is the nature of Karma, the doctrine of cause-and-effect, the essence of
    the unbroken chain of action and reaction that makes each of us what we are. And the timber wolf could no more be a hummingbird than a herring, no matter how he might be castigated for it.

    You can only work with what you have and when you do you may find that more than one hand of cards is swung, not so much on the presence of an ace, as on the absence of a deuce. Of course none of that changes the fact that most of what we have is monkey, well, chimpanzee, actually...

    As for that old “if life hands you a lemon... make lemonade” adage, it’s mostly bullshirt. As with everything in the glib life, the theory of things is a great deal neater than the reality of them, where one quickly discovers that not much mention is made of the price that the lemons must pay. We live in a world where the lemonade-maker wears the laurels and there is small dividend in being the lemons. Where does that leave we who hang between
    the two, with neither the wit nor the courage to take ownership of these threads we hang
    from? You may not get to choose the cards you are dealt, but you sure as hell get to choose how you will play them. Take comfort in that.

    I am brought here by an idle musing of the differences in what punters regard as fair bang for their buck. I participate in a web based fly-fishing forum, where the variety, nature and quality of posts makes clear that whatever it may mean, fly-fishing seldom means the same thing to any two anglers alive on the planet at the same time. I wandered into the forum searching for
    web-based opportunities to profile a recently published book, and stayed, trolling through the discussion threads to see what I might learn about the angler not myself.

    Discussion threads on this one platform cover the full gamut of angling aspiration, from mud-pond stockie-bashing to expeditions into the furthest reaches of tundra and taiga in the wastes of Siberian wilderness. It seems there is a fishing fantasy to fill every style from the most lo-rent and modest to the most extravagant of excursions into vanishing wildernesses at the furthest flung reaches of the planet. The interesting thing is that
    though most threads soon vanish, sinking into their own inertia, others take on a life all their own. They seem to almost breath, to ebb, to flow and in them, the nature of the generic fisherman is revealed. More interesting still, these threads that endure soon take on a pattern. A clear and consistent hierarchy soon establishes itself. At the pinnacle a lattice of Alphas; ‘been-there-done-that-smoked-the-Tshirt’ contributors, some genuine, some pretenders, but all equally confident, expressing robust senses-of-
    self. Somewhere lower down come the aspirational Alphas-in-training; They flex their muscles and spar amongst themselves, always testing the bounds of deference, engaging in big-dick contests of varying subtlety, awaiting
    the day when they too might claim a place in the bright light.

    Beneath them come the consorts and ego-grooms. Their imperative is to be acknowledged by the main apes, the manne.

    And right at the bottom with the weak and the frail - oppressed and abused by the sheer weight above our heads- come the poor schmutzes like me who wander trustingly into these things, unknowing, uncomprehending, blown there by the winds of chance, asking only workman’s wages and a whiff of acknowledgement - affirmation of a few molecules of worth to our miserable carcassess, from the ranks of our status-rich betters.

    Come to think of it, that’s not too different to the way things work with our closest relative, Pan troglodytes, the lowland chimp.

    Like I said, you can only work with what you have and in the words of Paul Simon;

    “I’d rather be a forest than a street, Yes I would, if I could, I surely would.
    I'd rather feel the stream beneath my feet, yes I would, if I could, I surely would .”

    Last edited by Surly Ghillie; 14-02-08 at 08:14 AM.

  8. #18
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Location
    A, A
    Posts
    1,687

    Default

    as always a very good read, but I always say if life hands you a lemon squeez it until it squirts in someone elses eye
    PK

    I am haunted by waters - Norman Maclean

  9. #19
    Join Date
    May 2007
    Location
    KZN
    Posts
    425

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by pieterkriel View Post
    as always a very good read, but I always say if life hands you a lemon squeez it until it squirts in someone elses eye
    Like i said; "not much dividend in being the lemon"

  10. #20
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    Vandia Grove, Gauteng
    Posts
    3,622

    Default

    Is that why the Catholic church in the Jo'burg suburbs was called the 'Lemon Squeezer'?

Page 2 of 3 FirstFirst 1 2 3 LastLast

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •