Straw Hat, Fishing Rod and Real Life

Can a man not have a quiet afternoon casting his sinkers and lures into brambles and vines?

I'd just stepped off the cement trail down to the dirt path to find a spot to park my folding chair and tackle box when a "Hi! How ya doing?" barked out of a tree hanging over the river.

Two young men were joining their efforts to extract a rope swing trailing in slow-moving water on a hot spring day, near 85 deg F or thereabouts in north Alabama (Ali Baba, alakazam, alakazoo!).

Growing in the New Balance/Reebok/Redwing tread-stamped trail were spring beauty and starry chickweed, their blooms communicating to me their desire to feed insects in large numbers.

I nodded my John Deere woven head covering at them and found a meadowed spot hundreds of feet downstream of the fellows.

I'm no secret agent or sorcerer.  However, under my employ, men and women compete against one another to provide me resources with which my associates and I can readily exchange information.  The young swimmers up the way were a sign I was supposed to expect an unexpected report.

How old this gets.  I set out the chair, opened the tackle box, found an alluring lure for those lurking ichthyology subjects in the deep pool of water beside a fallen log hosting muck and a much-missed soccer ball, set the top of the pole between the wild grape vine and the water and cast the artificial bait downstream.

That is, I attempted to cast the bait.

Instead, I wrapped the line around the trunk of a small sycamore.

I gently pulled on the line, unwrapped the tree, recast and watched a few fish follow the lure upstream toward my location.

Then a message buzzed in my hand.  Those inventors!

My design team had rigged the fishing pole as an antenna to receive radio signals through the river water and transmit them to the organic circuitry installed in my palm.

I pointed the pole at the water and circled the bait just out of reach of the four- to six-inch shallow water swimmers while listening to a report from my associates.

All I asked for was a couple of weeks of letting the computer program run on its own set of binary digits!

And I'd get what I wanted if there was more cooperation.  Now I'm hearing that the cartels are getting a little machismo in their morning cappucino and think they can muscle in on the action that ain't theirs for the taking.

Look, fellows, I told you it's share and share alike.  You can't keep raking in all that profit and expect to keep it all to yourselves.

We're a family and when a family member disappoints me, I get angry.  I don't get revenge.  I don't get mad.  I don't get even.  I just let the family know it's all a matter of perspective as I demonstrate how business is business.  Get cocky and you sink with a South Korean ship or Russian-made airplane ... or worse.  Sorry, once it's done you can't bribe your way out of death.

I've asked my associates to take care of this business while I'm taking a few days off to fish.  If my ears buzz again, I won't be happy.  I won't laugh.  And neither will you, you understand?

I carry a pocket paper journal where I keep coded ledgers that track those of you still living in the dark ages before the invention of the abacus, batch cards and automatons.  After I received the radio message, I sat down with a beer and checked some notes in the journal.

Some of you are behind in your duties.  If I see you aren't interested in balancing things up the way they should be, then, again my associates have the authority to open a few closed doors and disclose a few so-called secrets that won't be secret anymore.

The Book of the Future is under lock and key.  You don't need to know what's going to happen next.  After all, the future's your business and nobody else's so why should I have to spell out what you're going to do in this public forum?

Take care of business, willya?  It's not like I'm asking you to solve world hunger, treat factory workers fairly or bring doubleknit polyester pantsuits back into fashion.

Now, back to my holiday.  Once again, a quick thanks to all you folks who're doing what the future said you would be doing anyway.  There's nothing in writing that says you have to do what you have to do.  You can change the future at any time, if you know who you are not and that you don't exist, of course.  A big if, but it can be done.

Look at a luna moth and ask yourself why such a big creature lives such a short time.  When you know the answer, you know the future.

See, I told you it's all simple, right there in front of your eyes.  Why you don't believe me, I can't say.  Why all this desire for proof?  You don't want a bunch of fireballs shaking the ground and scorching Earth, do you?  Well, most of you don't.

I haven't asked my scientists to run simulations of what it would take to change the ocean currents unnaturally but I think it's time to work out the details.  We've got the ability to create hundreds of millions of tonnes of nanotechnology that can reproduce itself radically and chaotically.  But why would we want to change the ocean currents?  I'll let you think about that one for a while.