Unfriended

So just when I thought I was going to land the 17-inch cutthroat, my line went slack, and the newly liberated trout disappeared under a nearby brush pile. It was enough to ruin a guy’s day.

My pal Stinky Pete had called me up that morning and said, “Let’s go fishing.”

He didn’t need to say anything more than that. I grabbed my gear and met him at the Wally Crawford access. He brought his raft, and we went up and put in at the Darby Bridge.

The weather’s been typical for springtime in the northern Rockies. In other words – completely unpredictable. With a series of weather systems moving through the area, the fishing’s been pretty spotty, but if you hit it right, you can get into some good fish.

Me and Stinky didn’t hit it right.

We were fishing with big, black-butt skwala patterns that were Stinky’s own design. According to him, most folks don’t get the body color right, but he’d found the perfect match. Behind those we were dropping March browns.

“Your arms are going to get pulled right out of their sockets from all the fish tugging on your line,” he told me.

We spent most of the day commenting on the scenery and how nice it was to be out on the river. We told ourselves, “The fishing may not be great, but it beats the heck out of being in the office.”
That’s true, but it sucks compared to catching fish.

We had a few little ones come up and bite at our flies, but most of them were so small that they got scared by the size of our bugs and turned away.

Around 2 in the afternoon, I finally got a nice fish to bite. He had plenty of fight in him, and we wrestled for a bit. I thought I had him tired out, and I was trying to lead him into the net that Stinky was holding.

Suddenly, the trout jerked his head downstream. There was too much pressure on my line to absorb the shock and my leader snapped. That’s when my line went slack, and my day was ruined.

Stinky laughed, and using the latest social networking lingo, he said, “You’ve just been unfriended.”

That got me to thinking.

As a so-called “blogger” of sorts, I’m supposed to know all about social networking stuff, but I don’t know squat. I guess that sort of thing could be helpful for attracting more readers. But I’m not sure how useful it’d be, or if it’d be worth all the trouble.

I’ve been thinking about getting a Facebook page, and I keep asking myself, do I really need more friends?

I know a lot of folks use sites like Facebook and MySpace to stay in touch with buddies, share pictures and stories, and some even use it to talk with clients. But it seems to me that these sites cause a lot of problems too.

There are plenty of stories of cyber-bullying, pedophiles finding targets, and inappropriate photos of young girls getting posted. Just ask John Stossel. Teenagers social lives’ have been ruined, folks have lost their jobs, and people have committed suicide because of things posted on these innocent websites.

Now there’s a new danger from social networking…divorce. According to The Sunday Mail, a newspaper in Queensland Australia, “Marriage counselors claim sites like Facebook are contributing to separations and divorce as bored 40 and 50-somethings try to reconnect with childhood sweethearts.”

Websites can’t cause folks to cheat. If a person is going to have an affair, they’ll find a way to do it. But talking through the internet might be easier to hide than using the phone or meeting in person.

The Sunday Mail went on to say, “British divorce firm Divorce-Online said Facebook was cited in one-fifth of the divorce petitions it processed last year.”

There’s no shortage of divorce websites. They make it fast, easy and inexpensive to kick your spouse to the curb. Facebook may be causing marital strife, but maybe online divorce services contribute to the problem, as well.

Nowadays you can have an affair, get a divorce, and get married again without leaving the comfort of your La-Z-Boy recliner. That’s not the sort of social networking that I need to get involved with.

Getting rejected by a trout is a painful experience, but when you get an e-mail from your spouse telling you it’s over, that’s the ultimate form of being unfriended.

I don’t know, I guess I think too hard about these things.

Copyright 2010