David Siskind | Sunday, 22 June 2025
I passed up what looks, from the photos, like a joyous vacay with my dear Jackie and friends, sailing among the islands in the Aegean. Instead I'm seeing my son for the first time in a year-and-a-half. He and my daughter-in-law have been living in Vienna for 20 months or so and have come back to the west coast for a conference at Berkeley. I couldn’t pass that up, they’re great, but the lovely pics from Greece combined with the end of my five-week sojourn to the east coast has left me feeling deflated. I’m burdened by various obligations here at home and am way behind. Add to this the unnerving and unnaturally quiet streets in LA. The Latinos are hunkered down, buses are nearly empty. The sidewalks are whiter. I had breakfast this morning with a friend of many years who was born in Mexico, has been a US citizen for decades, but has taken to carrying his passport at all times. There are frequent ICE sightings near where I live. Masked groups of tough looking men are piling out of unmarked cars and sweeping people off the streets to God knows where. It’s happening across the country. It's a bad dream. And Trump is paving over the White House Rose Garden.
If all that weren’t enough I can’t quite figure out how to put my fishing lessons-learned in the bank. I often feel humbled by these critters. So I’m contemplating my navel and seeking to recover and reset. I think I’ll go to the park tomorrow and practice casting on the grass at first light. That and a return to some physical training. Practice is always uplifting.
Update: The park practice this morning was a refuge. I built my casts from the ground up - going through the gears, casting around the clock. I cast while walking, kneeling and squatting. I played with large muscles driving the small all the way to the rotation of the rod. Feeling the cast from the ground up, adding a dash of tension via the haul and feeling the tension through the rod-leg as the loop rolled out. I have more to say about this but it can wait until next week. I’ll design some practices around the Sexyloops drills most applicable to my deficiencies in the field over the course of the past weeks.
Sorry to be such a Debbie downer but it can’t be helped. Everything is upside down. I just read in the NYT that we’re positioning the B2s to potentially drop some bunker busters on Iran. Our DNI says there has not been a bomb development program but intelligence doesn’t matter - It didn’t in 2003. This isn’t good for anybody. I really believe that there is a better multi-polar world out there if we can keep from blowing ourselves up. I’m afraid that the US will be the last to join the party but the sun’ll come up tomorrow.
latest: We dropped the bombs.
David Siskind