A fishing story
Well, I have a place that, when I was 10, my dad taught me how to cast a rod, and it was off a dock. It was a dock in Minnesota, and when you were talking about thrilling with your motorcycle, that was very thrilling for me because I caught my first fish. But it’s come back to me as a memory of a reminder of how I get hooked in to some things. And the actual hook of a rod, and catching that fish, and just that lesson from my dad. And how sometimes those hooks are not always productive for me, but sort of that first moment of getting—catching something, and I was probably 8 or 9. That memory comes back often. It’s thrilling, it’s also sort of a reminder of how easily it is to get hooked into not always great things, but also good things, too.
[So you’re not talking just about an interest in life that you’ve hooked onto?]
Well, I think there’s that, too. But to me, I think there’s constant hooks that get me hooked into wanting. And sometimes, you know, those are okay, and sometimes, I’ve learned to pause at that a little bit because the idea, the story of the fish didn’t really—he wasn’t really, or she wasn’t there to be caught by me, and there I was. Me, you know, catching this fish. So, anyway, it’s something that I just keep rolling into my mind about getting hooked.
There’s all kinds of metaphor there, too, that’s really reminding me of how scary underwater could be when I was younger. I don’t know, you guys are younger, are you ever on a lake and it’s sort of scary to think of the weeds and the stuff that’s down there? To me, there was a big difference: there’s out of the water, and there’s under the water. And fishing was a way to communicate from one world into the other, and you get this fish to come up out into your world because you can’t go down into its world easily, and then there’s the subconscious, the conscious, how to connect to that.
Well, even the word “bait.”
[Bait?]
That has come back to me, too, the word “bait.” Not trying to paint that as a negative thing, those words are interesting to me, hook and bait, thrilling.