Movie night at the cabin has both higher and lower standards than movie night in your regular house. A good cabin movie can have lower standards when it comes to objective quality (in fact, I would argue a good cabin movie should kind of suck, but in a very specific way), but it has higher standards when it comes to its emotional/nostalgic qualities.  A good cabin movie is one that you’ve seen before, but not in this century, or it’s one you’ve seen hundreds of times and can recite lines from.  A good cabin movie benefits from you being slightly drunk while you watch it.  But the absolute best cabin movie is one that you loved when you were younger, but that your spouse has never seen.  The best cabin movie is discovered when one of you says to the other in disbelief, “you’ve never seen….??!!  We have to see if it’s on Netflix right now.”  Think Cannonball Run, or Big Trouble in Little China; something that is slightly cheesy and slightly embarrassing to like.

It’s the kind of movie that if you were flipping around the channels at your house, you might say to yourself “I love this part,” and watch until the next commercial, but at the cabin, it’s a movie that is a scheduled event, with popcorn and pausing when someone goes to the bathroom. A good cabin movie is at its best under the following conditions: when everyone is tired from doing too much for too long, or when crappy weather prevents you from doing much of anything.  A good cabin movie comes from a slight sense of panic that you need to squeeze a little more out of your cabin time.  The best cabin movies are watched when it’s pouring rain, when you’re too tired to do much of anything else, or when you’re snowed in with a fire going.

Your mood is very important for cabin movie night. Everyone must be on board.  All it takes is one person in the group to “not get it” and it’s not cabin movie night, it’s just crappy movie night.  Low expectations are important, but that’s not the same as no expectations.  Low expectations let you forgive the glacial pacing of older movies or absurd plots to still genuinely enjoy the movie.  No expectations mean that you’re just vegging out in front of the TV, waiting for death.

Selecting your cabin movie viewing companions is also very importantly. Ideally, you want people who know each other well enough that they can just shut up and just relax together.  If you don’t know each other that well, a good cabin movie can accelerate the friendship, I feel like what kind of movie a person will sit through tells you a lot.

What doesn’t work is trying to watch a cabin movie with anyone who is the least bit uptight; there’s nothing like prolonged silences during the watching of a movie during a cabin weekend to push the insecure over the edge. The first chuckle at a joke they don’t get and it’s therapy time!  In general, with the uptight you want to keep it light, active and moving until they go to bed, or better yet: home.  Treat the uptight and insecure the way you would a child and you won’t be far off: it’s always about them and the minute you forget that fact they will make a scene at a restaurant that may or may not involve poop.

I think comedies make for the best cabin movies, but a good thriller can work too. Most of early Mel Brooks movies work well and so do Alfred Hitchcock films. A good cabin movie is one that as you’re watching it you say to yourself, “I forgot about his scene this is great!”

But the absolute best cabin movie is one you love that your spouse says that they’ve seen bits of it on cable, but not the whole thing. One of my wife’s favorite old movies is When Harry Met Sally.  I realized that I had never seen it and there we had a great cabin movie night.  She had never seen The Jerk and I got to see it through her eyes as we watched it in front of the fire.  Watching her laugh for the first time at “he hates these cans!” and “the new phone book is here; the new phone book is here!” is better than when I laughed myself silly in 1979.  Watching a movie you love from your youth with the person that you love right now is like taking her back in a time machine.  It’s a way to say to her, “see this is why I’m like this and you’re stuck with me.”

 

 

 

 

There are two great tragedies in the annals of fly fishing literature: that Norman Maclean didn’t write more and that Greg Keeler didn’t write less. I had the great misfortune of spending the length of the book Trash Fish inside the head of Greg Keeler and I can confirm it is an exceptionally vile and puerile place.

Keeler’s book is described as a fishing memoir, but it is so much less. It’s not as much about fishing as it is about failing at life and then going fishing, but without learning anything in the process and then failing at life some more before going fishing.  Keeler writes in the tradition of the incredibly self-involved who believe that their every experience is meaningful and deep, when in fact a lot of them are just kind of pathetic.  There is no growth here, no self-awareness.  Keeler starts this memoir as an unpleasant child and ends it as an unpleasant old man.  He does terrible things and he learns nothing.  He thinks his selfish behavior is adorable and that responsibility and doing the right thing is somehow selling out.

The author never misses out on a chance to let himself off the hook. He abandons his gravely ill wife and children to run off with a young woman, but he doesn’t own up to it.  He refers to this period as when his wife got sick and he had a midlife crisis.  See? Keeler is a victim too, he’s just afflicted with a midlife crisis, not, you know, a horrible person.  In one of the most pathetic affectations of a heavily affected book, he writes about his penis as a separate character, Dick.  Dick is the one who gets Greg into trouble, but as any real man knows, that a sad lie that the weak tell themselves.  It’s also an incredibly worn out joke that most men stop making when they are in their early 20s.

Keeler leeching off young people is a theme of this book, although he doesn’t seem aware of it. Again and again, he is picked up by former students, or people young enough to be his children, and ushered through life.  Keeler doesn’t seem to understand that this is because he is a man-child and that adults have gotten to be adults by learning to avoid people like Keeler and to keep his sad brand of chaos out of their lives.

Keeler has some children, but they’re pretty much props to him. He recounts in one episode how his wife is tripping on acid, holding their baby and threatening Keeler with a kitchen knife. The whole episode is presented as some kind of zany counter-culture moment in their bohemian lives, not a profoundly disturbing moment of failed parenting.  The two deserved each other, but their poor kids deserved better.  He notes at the end that one son lives in Washington, DC; gee, it’s almost as if he’s trying to get as physically as far away from his parents in Montana.

In another episode, Keeler recounts how as a professor at a university in Louisiana, he discovers that one of his colleagues is forcing poor black women to have sex in exchange for passing grades. Keeler thinks this is funny, his wife to her credit does not, but neither of them, you know, actually do anything about it.  Because they are both idiot children, it doesn’t occur to them to act like adults and try to help these poor women. Once again, they failed a test on the ethics of being a basic decent adult.

For all his failings, Keeler is incredibly judgmental of other people. He’s constantly making nasty references about people who he considers to be establishment and squares and all I could think was, “I bet that guy you just made fun of hasn’t abandoned his gravely ill wife and children.”  Keeler is a bad person and that’s his problem and a problem for the people around him, but he is also not a terribly self-aware bad person and that’s a problem for his readers.  A jerk can be a good writer, but being a jerk doesn’t make you a good writer, it just makes you a jerk.  You’re probably wondering why I finished a book I hated this much.  Two reasons, first, Keeler mentioned John Prine at one point and I’m a huge Prine fan, I kept reading in the hopes Prine would turn up again, but no such luck; and second, I started writing this bad review in my head while I was reading the book, including the opening sentence, which I’m quite fond of and wanted to use.

 

 

 

Things got way off the rails this summer. So far off, I couldn’t see the rails from where I ended up.  We got a dog, Bartleby and a cat, Doah.  They ended up taking a lot of attention.  I can’t abide a poorly behaved dog and I judge people who have poorly behaved dogs.  So, I started putting in time with the dog.  He’s still goofy and a puppy who gets into trouble, but it’s within the normal limits.  Doah is a cat, she’s fine.

The cabin we bought has taken a lot more time and money to get on track than I anticipated. Like, a lot more of both time and money, but it’s about there and we enjoy it when we’re there.  It’s clear though, that this was no investment, it’s a luxury.  A base for us to launch our fishing adventures, if it would every stop raining.

Which brings me to the rain. It will not stop raining.  Just rain and more rain.  Fishing trips cancelled, sitting on the porch watching the rain, rain and more rain.  There are a couple of bears in there around the cabin and snakes, lots of snakes this summer.  It’s the summer of the snake and bear.  Snake and Bear would be a good pub name, or maybe a bronze age comedy duo, “people from beyond the river hunt and gather like this, but people of the hill hunt and gather like this.”

The rain has blown out the South Fork. It doesn’t just have that chocolate milk look that a blownout river will get.  It often has that reddish tinge of a profoundly blown out river; it doesn’t look so much like chocolate milk as red-eye gravy. When you glimpse it through the woods, you’d think it was dirt road, not a river.  On the rare occasions when it settles down, you notice debris and mud high up on the banks well past and in the branches of trees.  I only managed to get out on the water a few times this summer.  Brookie streams that are normally so skinny by late summer that you wonder where the fish go are raging and blown out.  Everything is kind of sodden and limp.

The dead man was my father who died at the beginning of the summer. Things got off track, things slipped.  This blog was one of those things.