Whoops! I totally forgot to blogerize last night! Boy was I tired. Full day at the contract job yesterday.
Time out.
I don't know if anyone knows what I do. I'm a writer of course, but in the professional world, I specialize in proposal writing. Simply put, when a company wants a vendor or service organization to do a contract job for them, they put out a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a whole panel of organizations to bid on the contract. A proposal writer takes that RFP and writes the response for the service organization to try and win that contract.
Now as you can imagine, as with all corporate documents, RFPs/busines proposals are fricking HUGE. They also test your persuasive and argumentative writing styles, because if you can't convince this audience to give you the contract, then the company you work for doesn't make a lot of money.
My frustration with some organizations and how they manage this process is that rather than having a central repository for ALL standard copy and materials for preparing these proposals, they continually perform the hunt and peck method. That is they look back through their entire past proposal history to find one piece of copy they want to use.
This process blows.
Rather than finding this copy in the aforementioned central repository within five minutes, you have to sift through fifty some 200pp documents and do a keyword search numerous times to find what you need which roughly takes 2-3 hours if you're lucky. Logic says – MAKE THE GODDAMN CENTRAL DATABASE!
Whew!
Now to the fun stuff. Christa had a picnic for her Brownie Troop last night in downtown Chaska at the Fireman's Park. Now, those that know me, know this is not generally a SCOTT-like production, but it got me out of the house and offered FREE pizza.
At the park, we were kind of early. Only a few families had arrived. But I was immediately drawn to two things: a tree about ten feet from the pond that was being chewed down by a beaver (not actually being chewed on that very minute and it seemed quite odd knowing that a beaver lives in downtown Chaska) and a dock stretching out into the pond. The girls want to go on the dock first, so we ran there. It was one of those docks built on flotation pontoons.
Immediately my mind sang, “FAT GUY ON A FLOATING DOCK!”
The dock didn't sink, you smart-asses. I'm not that big....yet.
The girls were all a flutter. “Look at the fish, Daddy!” so I peered over the edge of the railing and ssaw hundreds of sunfish, bluegills and pumpkinseeds gathering at the dock. Since it was a large pond in a park, I immediately made the connection the primary food source for these fish were breadcrumbs thrown from the dock. So these weren't fish in the wild fish sense, but sunfish that hd been coied – they only miss the infamous orange coi color patterns. They all wanted something but I didn't have anything to give, so I did what any kid would have done without a handful of breadcrumbs – I spit into the school of sunfish – who went absolutely piranha berserk over it. Yeah, eww. But I was still boyishly amazed at a school of sunfish that large.
My fascination started as kid, obviously, but intensified the summer of 1987...88, or was it 90? Couldn't have been. Well it was a summer in the late eighties around there. My father, brother and I went fishing sunfish on Spider Lake up in Marcel, MN. The sunfish on this lake were HUGE – some came in at over a pound. Well, it was a hot June day on our weeklong vacation and we selected this bay on the lake notorious for panfish...and muskies.
Somewhere around and below our boat was an awesome school of sunnies. Catching them was no problem – it was fun, feeling their tug on the line, the way they wavered in the water like you're reeling in a airplane wing. We caught a mess of them. It was scorching hot on a reflective lake, so I took off my shoes and socks and sat at the back of the boat, wading my feet in the cool, bright water.
Yeah, I did say muskies earlier. They don't bite feet, though on that lake we had seen them tail walleyes as we reeled them to the boat, so that shows how big some of them were in that lake.
So I was wading my feet in the cool water, reeling in sunnies like a fish pond at the county fair, when I hooked a bright pumpkinseed (a species of sunny with immaculate and colorful patterns in its scales). I know this because the fish did an uncharacteristic flip out of the water as I reeled it in.
I reeled it to the boat and could see it about a foot from my wading feet. Cute little thing.
That's when the water around my feet exploded in Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom-like thrashing and I saw the long black form of a muskie lunging at my pumpkinseed.
Now all this happened in the span of one maybe two seconds, so bear with me. My first reaction was not to save my feet. Instead, I feared for the muskie stealing my prize pumpkinseed, so I jerked upwards on my fishing pole, yanking the fish out of the water and sending me crashing back into the boat. Back in the deep recesses of my brain, John Williams played those infamous short, fearful staccato notes on the cello.
As I lied on the floor of the boat, my dad and brother eyed the water, saying things like “Jesus,” and “Did you see that?”
Uh, yeah. I was in it.
So I stood up in the boat and saw I had saved the pumpkinseed - cute, colorful and probably grateful to be on the hook. But he was getting eaten regardless. Circle of life, fish. Get over it.
“Throw it back in!” my dad said.
I turned and saw him holding the landing net. “Cast it out there and reel him in slowly, I'll try and net that bastard!”
I imagine if that pumpkinseed understood any English whatsoever, he would have shat himself all over my shirt. Circle of life, man.
So I sat in the back of the boat and cast the fish back to the water there and reeled him in slowly. Sure enough, as the fish got close to the boat, SPLASH and another attack from the muskie. Dad swung the net and missed but managed to hit the fish with the aluminum piping of the net (Keep in mind my pops is really great at hitting things with objects - see a later story involving him hitting a softball a country mile).
“Again,” Dad said.
So I cast the fish out again. Same thing, but dad missed. Again. Another miss. Again. Another miss.
Netting a fish in full on attack mode when he is not constrained to a fishing line is A LOT harder than it seems.
Eventually we quit trying, but that afternoon was one of the most stark afternoons in my life, seeing a massive fish attacking a wee-bitty pumpkinseed.
Being laid off and having the future kind of unclear is a lot like being that pumpkinseed, swimming along, keeping your eyes peeled for the muskie in the shadows and doing whatever you can to avoid the snapping jaws. It's awfully tiring and a lot of work. No doubt that pumpkinseed survived as long as it did because he was smart and strong. Yet, he ended up in our basket and eventually coated in flour, salt and pepper and fried.
Circle of life, man.
Try and try and try and the big muskie or fisherman still takes you. It can almost feel defeating to think like that, so I try not too. I'm doing my best with what the lake has given me. I'm still swimming. But no one can live in that kind of fear. That's not living. That's why doing this blog is cathartic in a way. It allows me to keep swimming sanely and to approach life in a more realistic manner (even though I use a lot of hyperbole and metaphor). After all it's not easy to stay afloat with John Williams following you around still playing those infamous short, fearful staccato notes on the cello.
Duh-dum.
Duh-dum.
Duh-duh, duh-duh, Duh-dum, duh-duh, duh-duh, Duh-dum.
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