Fishing - Yet Another Creative Way to do Nothing

A little list, in no particular order, of the benefits of fishing:

1. You're nowhere.

When you are fishing, people naturally expect that you will be gone all day. Fishing starts very early in the morning before civilization gets out of bed and lasts until the middle hours of the afternoon. Forget your pager and cell phone. A day fishing, no matter how much you catch, is a day off. Hang around the house watching TV or puttering at a hobby in the basement and someone, somewhere, will find a reason for you to stop doing that and make you act like a responsible member of the global marketplace again. Fishing takes you away.

2. It's nobody's business what you're drinking.

Or smoking, for that matter. Short of snagging a bit of precious flesh on a mis-cast hook or falling in the water, there is very little that you can mess up while fishing, no matter how impaired you get. There is also very little in the way of substance abuse that anybody else is likely to care about.

3. It's one of the last things a man can do to indulge their inner cave man.

Everywhere else in our society, a guy is put upon to be a good little metrosexual. The consumer culture kills virtually every primitive male instinct, replacing all previous programming to win the struggle for survival with safe credit-card-scanning transactions. However, to fish for food using your own skill scratches a similar itch as hunting or farming. Once you have dined upon an animal which you have caught yourself, you have the peace of mind knowing that you'd be able to survive on a desert island or in the event of nuclear holocaust and the subsequent collapse of civilization.

4. It's one of the only things a woman can do well and still get manly points.

A woman who can fish also gets to enjoy that same sense of self-sufficiency, and in addition gets the profound respect of every man around her. They may not go fishing with her, but they will be nearly awe-stricken at the prospect. This is one of those paradoxical cases where the actual activity requires neither manly muscle nor testosterone-fueled know-how, yet is still seen as a male-dominated activity.

5. It actually has some sport to it.

Anybody who derides fishing as not being a real sport has never landed a striper. Your average striper has a voracious appetite and will go for any kind of bait at all and sometimes just for a bare hook out of pure fiestiness. When hooked, it will make an initial jump out of the water, whose purpose seems to be to size you up. It will then begin a complicated attack, pulling away in great bursts of strength, tangling the line in weeds, swimming closer suddenly to make you think it got away before trying to yank the rod out of your hand, and swimming back and forth parallel to the shore to try to throw you off. If it finds a snag underwater, it will loop the line around it several times. On finally being landed, it will smack you with its muscular tail in an attempt to beat the stuffing out of you. Stripers are the aquatic equivalent of pit bulls.

6. It's the closest you get to meditation without living in a Buddhist temple.

Fishing is filled with imponderables and inscrutables. By removing the weaker and less clever fish from the gene pool, are we breeding stronger and smarter fish? Where's the best spot? How can you protect your own secret fishing spot? How did people figure out fishing in the first place? You have lazy hours in which to pursue these idle thoughts, uninterrupted by chattering printers, honking cars, blaring radios, or talking people. At the most, you may hear some wind or the occasional overhead goose. The point being that fishing has the side benefit of giving you time to be removed for a while from daily life.