Think I’m goin’ fishin’, Been thinkin’ it over.
Keepin’ my nose out of everyone’s way,
No rhyme and no reason.
No time and no reason, think I’m goin’ fishin’,
It’s my lazy day.
I‘ve known that verse for a long time. Don’t know the rest of the song. Don’t know who wrote it. I remember that single verse because it catches a profundity beyond catching fish - goofin’ off. There are fishermen who focus on catching fish. Such men care more about catchin’ than fishin’. There are other fishermen who don’t much care about the catching.
They care about time in the open air, time free from duty, time to reflect.
Those are the fishin’ interests that interest me.
I don’t fish. I fished once when I was around eight years old, My cousin Duane talked me into it. “C’mon you’ll be hooked with your first cast”. And so I was . I don’t know how the hook got itself embedded in my shirt, scraping out a little flesh at the same time - it just did.
That was enough fishing for me
A gently drifting boat, an endless sky above, a warm breeze blowing from the south, enough beer in the cooler for another two hours; no fish. “Hi honey, did you catch
a lot of fish? No, well, maybe another day”.
Another day, and another, with enough Gone Fishin’
days between to buffer the drudgery of a typical week making
a living. Why do we make excuses for free time? Why disguise needed free time as: fishin’. Why not say, ”Gonna be gone for the day, gonna ramble ‘round the woods, maybe down by the lake. No, no special reason. Be back come suppertime”.
Impossible! Men are expected to be busy at something, all the time. If you ramble aeound without purpose you risk losing the respect of serious people. In many primitive societies people goof-off a lot. Their necessities are few. So are their wants. They have more free time than civilized people. They’re not in a hurry about much. We’re in ahurry about almost everything.
We should show more respect for playfull free time.
All work and no play really does make Jack a dull boy. Goofing off is play. Not doing anything in particular makes it more likely to discover what wasn’t noticed before.
What nose-to-the-grindstone task was Sir Isaac Newton up to when the apple fell on his head? What professorial tedium troubled Einstein in the midst of his day-dream about traveling at the speed of light. What worrisome responsibilities lay uneasily on George de Mestral’s mind when he noticed that the burrs stuck to his dog’s coat were held in place by tiny hooks, the same sort of hooks that would later become, Velcro?
They were all goofing off. Serendipity supplied what hard work didn’t.
You might say, they’d“Gone fishin”.