Gone Fishin'

I figured I'd like make the Spurs and go fishing while the Wolves and Lakers duke it out in the Western Conference Finals.

The Minnesota fishing opener was last weekend, so if I were a REAL Minnesotan this would have been my second time fishing this year. But I'm only quasi-Minnesota so I didn't go until this weeekend. A friend of mine has a plot of land up in Breezy Point, which is near Brainerd, for you native Minnesotans.

It was cold and windy. Fishing is no fun if you can't enjoy the water and the weather. It's even less fun when the fish aren't biting. I caught a 4 pound walleye, but my friend didn't catch anything. We ended up throwing my fish back and settling for burgers and the Twins game on TV at a local bar.

A small highlight of the weekend came when an old retired type guy bellied up to the bar next to me after we had been there for about half an hour. He was clearly a regular. The bartender said hi to him and asked, "You want the usual?" I get this question two or three times a week from guy with bad teeth at my local coffee shop, whenever I stroll into Riverview Coffee around 7:30 a.m. on a weekday.

Of course my barmate's "usual" was not 16 ounces of "Breakfast Blend." Rather, it was some brandy-smelling mixed drink I couldn't identify and an empty basket (the plastic baskets that fries come in). Naturally, I asked myself, "What the hell is the plastic basket for?" I soon found out after he slapped $100.00 bill on the bar for....

All REAL Minnesotans should already know what the $100 bill was for, but non-natives read on.

....he slapped $100.00 bill on the bar for pull tabs! The basket was for his losing pull tab carcasses. After plowing through 100 non-winnig pulltabs, he went on to spend $220 more on pulltabs. He ended up winning $6. Not bad. $314.00 in the red for half an hour's worth of fun opening pull tabs.

I guess when you are retired you can do whatever the hell you want to with your money. But that $320 would have helped me out a lot more than the $10 the local 4H club will benefit from his pull tab indulgence. Hell, he could have given the $320 to me and I would have been much more entertaining than 320 pull tabs. I could have done a stand-up routine, lip synched, jumping jacks, made jokes about people in the bar, whatever he wanted me to do. It would have been a win-win situation. Although I must admit, watching a guy blow $320 in a bar in half an hour was pretty damn entertaining for me, in the guilty-pleasure sort of way. Kind of like watching COPS or reality TV. It's fun for awhile but it soon gets very depressing.

My friend told the guy we didn't have any luck fishing and it must just be an unlucky day. He told us now he needed to take a second mortgage out on his home.

We assumed he was kidding.