cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I got too good at catching catfish. I've assumed for the last 5 to 10 years that literally nobody reads this. Then suddenly I got a note and noticed that there is a decades worth of notes here that I never saw. How is anyone reading this shit in 2022? I thought that everyone was just on Facebook or Tiktok or whatever. For the last 7 years or more, everything on here was written late at night when I was drunk. So filter everything through that. Tomorrow I'm driving to Richmond with Alex after we haven't seen each other in months. That will be a whole thing. I spent a few hours tonight wandering around from rock to rock on the Rivanna River with a head light and a net. The fish are sleeping and chilling out in the shallows and they are slow to react to anything. I saw a bullfrog sitting about five feet above the water line so big that its body from snout to vent was the length of the base of my palm to my finger tips. I netted about a dozen crayfish and slipped them into a ziplock bag. After I picked my son up from work, close to 11 pm at the fine dining establishment where he is working, I boiled them in salted water and ate their tails and claw meat dipped in butter and salt and lemon juice. Last night we cooked freshly-caught channel catfish for dinner, stewed in a lobster bisque that we made a few nights ago as a sauce. I spent about an hour after them. It was about 12 years ago that I made the new year's eve resolution to "become a pretty god catfisherman." I catch them like clockwork now. Set up around 45 minutes before dusk, and then I have about 90 minutes of constant action on three lines. I am constrained by my ability to deal with the fish that bite within ten minutes of putting a baited line out. Fight it in on the Cuban yoyo, or somewhat less often on one of the rods, scoop it up with the net, deal with getting the treble hook out, put it in the bucket, fix whatever part of my gear got all fucked in the process, re-bait the hook, put it back out, then another fish is on another line. I get about five fish in this process during the heavy bite. They are generally large fish, each being a meal for two. There is never more than a few minutes of downtime in between dealing with each fish. It is difficult to imagine how I could catch more, given the work that one person must do to deal with each bite. Now it has become too easy. I've read hundreds of scientific papers on catfish. I've spent about 2,800 hours fishing over the last ten years, based on figuring that I fish for at least 10 hours a week, seven months out of each year, for the last decade. I can make food appear at will. Now, I'm bored with it. The summer is fading away and I have not planned an event to make turtl3 soup. I've spent the last three years writing a book about a club that made this four times a year for around 143 years and I pretty much have the recipe and I'm not actually cooking it. The H0boken Turtle Club made their soup through the coordinated work of dozens of people, and I hardly know anyone else anymore. I can't do it alone. Leaving social media was more isolating than I ever expected. I don't know anyone anymore. I used to have these hundreds of random people around the world who followed along with whatever I did. Offers to stay with them, hunt or fish with them, requests to come along on any expedition. I still live that life, that so many people wanted to come along for, and sometimes paid $500 a day to do so. But now I live it for its own sake and there is no public performance. I wish that I could go back to the internet of 2012, without the toxicity and conspiracy theories and constant drama of today. Here, I'm posting something on the only remaining platform that still looks and feels like the internet as of about 2002. Mnemosynea isn't here anymore, nor any of the other people whom I got to know. So it feels more anonymous now. I do often miss her, Mnemnosynea. If I am even spelling her old user name correctly. We met here on DL when she was a baby lawyer, graduated but still studying for the bar exam. And then we checked in on each other's lives and visited so many times. We slept together. Then the last I heard from her was early in the pandemic when she texted me that her aunt Jenny had died. Jenny was also a DL user, and we had become very close. I have no idea what Jenny died of, though I suspect an opioid overdose. Mnemnosynea has had a stellar rise as a lawyer in NYC. It has been about 17 years since we met and I miss her. 3:37 a.m. - 2022-09-17 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||