06-08-11

Friday

Thunder and lightning

Bad news, bad news come to me where I sit. (Or is it "sleep"?) Sometimes it's impossible to get it right listening to lyrics. From every corner of the world it comes closer. Just like the black clouds in the picture:

It may symbolize the eternal struggle between good and evil, right and wrong or cloudy and sunny. What's going to win? 
Well for starters I don't accept the first two pairs of seemingly opposite forces or concepts. They don't exist out of our minds. They are just inborn ways of our brains to handle the outside reality. So how can two imagined entities fight each other? Rubbish, if you ask me. 
As you see I'm a bit influenced by Kant in these matters. Not that I understand him or have read him but despite that I'm prepared to interpret him. What he meant, I think, was that we can't look at the world outside ourselves without sorting out what we see in certain categories. 
But I bet most Germans don't understand Immanuel Kant either.  Like I don't understand that more Germans read my Swedish pages than my International. Could it be that they are better at reading Swedish than I am at writing English? Or they don't know this exists?
Well, they don't do that for long now anyway, so who cares?
Today I was caught up in a thunderstorm where the rain fell over me like people stood and threw bucket after bucket full of water over me. And into my boat.  I've never seen anything like it! Flashes, thunderclaps and rolling thunder like in Lebanon. Yes, that war was one of the bad news I was mentioning. Unless you own a lot of stock in the weapon market of course. There's a lot of bombs, rockets and missiles that need to be replaced now...
Another item of bad news was the death of a man few people nowadays have heard of. A man in the music business. Founder and leader of the Los Angeles sixties band Love. A very influential flower power psychedelic rock group whose -67  "Forever Changes" album still is one of my absolutely favorites. But being dead will not stop me from listening to his music. Right now I'm listening to another dead guy's music. A German. Johann Sebastian Bach. I'm always listening to music when I write. 
Seems to be a lot of dead persons in this diary. Well, that's life, isn't it?

But not this pike. It's alive and well. It was the first fish of the day and a handsome but not that big specimen.  "Summer's almost gone, summer's almost gone, almost gone, yeah almost gone. Where will we be when the summer's gone?" In my case out fly fishing for pike as usual.  That's for sure. Very few people like autumn but I do. To me it's not a sign of arriving decay and death. Or less dramatic; bad weather, cold winds and rain. OK, today I had more than my share of what it could be like. That very fine summer weather I had enjoyed for so long seemed to have ended and all the water that had evaporated during the heat wanted to come down today. Out in a boat it wasn't that nice. Had I been on the shore dressed in waders and a raincoat it wouldn't have bothered me but today I was even scared when it went on at it's peak.  I wonder if the weather story repeats itself but this year the other way around, if you catch my meaning.  Which is that last year my summer was extremely cold, windy and rainy but the autumn warm, calm and sunny. I hope so. Last autumn I had a lot of new places or fishing spots I wanted to try out. Some were situated both near and even in the town of Karlskrona itself and demanded the worst weather possible in order to avoid staring crowds. So those spots are still untried by me. And just after the high pressures, warmth and Indian summer related climate gave way to more real autumn like conditions, the winter struck suddenly and quick and the sea was turned to ice.

Even today I discovered a new fishing spot. Strangely enough considering I've been around these big islands for thirty years or more. In some odd way I must have overlooked this site and just skipped this little stretch of coastline I'm referring to. The best part of it is that I can reach it from the land side. That is that I can drive my car in the vicinity, park it and walk there in my waders and then fish away for a couple of hours. The secret, if secret it is, of good fishing is that you collect a lot of good fishing places. The more the better. When the real fishing begins. In autumn, winter and spring. Dressed in waders and armed with a wader's staff and a floating line. When you are almost independent of the weather come storm, rain or hail. When the pikes are harder to get by and therefore means a lot more than for instance today. Then a plethora of good fishing spots to choose from is invaluable. 

Today I even found this season's first big lure. You know the ones I collect and save to my little garden Rite of Spring thing. In a strange way my little fly hook, snagged to the one of the big triple hooks of the wobbler and first I thought a perch or herring or roach had got stuck.  Now, a couple of months after this year's bonfire I think it's time to decide that it had worked. The gods must have nodded to each other, spoken approvingly of me and finally decided to give me a little sunshine and calm weather during my vacation.  Come to think of it, maybe it isn't such a good idea making a little fun of religion these days. I know it exists a great interest of the Middle Ages at least here in Sweden and I myself have read a bit about it, but this! It's the Middle Ages reprise! The worst features at that! It's like a huge live event but with real and modern weapons!  The three Peoples of the Book at each other's throats again! Crusading armies in every direction! War and pestilence! People held in ignorance and superstition! Science giving way to fanatical religious beliefs. Everybody's got God on their side. Yes, it's the Dark Ages all over again! So maybe I should keep a little lower profile in these matters? Why not stick to fishing? I wish George W would do the same though...  I've seen pictures of him with a rod and a fish, probably in Florida.

I'd better stop now. Seems like I can't stop the outside world bursting into my own private, small and smug world of fishing and having a nice time. 

Hey, wait a minute! Now I will try something new. Press this link and see what happens! Or rather listen what happens!

Did you hear anything? I'm not so good at these technical things (either) but it works just fine here, at my own PC.  Hm... Come to think of something... Will this make me a villain and law breaker? Is this illegal file sharing? 
But the risk of the three or four people reading this will turn me over to the police is minimal so I will take my chances.


Anyway the little piece of music's supposed to be one of the two musical quotations my diaries sometimes are full of. Today they were from Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention and Jim Morrison of the Doors. And it just happens that both of them are dead...