It's been nice having the Brother here, but I'm remembering why I hate him sometimes. He, the Mom, and the Girl all went golfing Wednesday while I was at work (my back is still pissed about last week and says that I'm not allowed to golf for a while. Controlling bitch.) and he proceeded to kick their asses.

I can't beat them on my best day, and I certainly can't beat them with a hurt back, how does this jackass come up here, not having played in over a year, playing on a course unfamiliar to him yet known to both of them, and beat them so handily?

Tired of his boasting, I thought I'd check the score card to at least see if they beat him on a few holes.

Hmm. Interesting.

I would've thought it would've made all the papers and been on the news if someone had gotten two double-eagles in a row.

Sound impossible?

Nope, it's right here. The scorecard says that the Brother got a "2" on 16 and 17, both of which are par 5's, while the Girl and the Mom both got 8's.

Damn. It appears I had forgotten that this was the man that told me, when I was still in High School, an adage that is an absolute classic.

I was a mediocre offensive lineman for our State-Champion football team and was having a hard time with blocking some of the bigger guys on the other teams. I had figured out that, if I just got my hands under their arms and held them, I could manage. This is illegal, however, and every flag I drew got me 5 laps at practice and got me punched in the head a few times during the game, but it was working.

The Brother had come home during the football season and we spoke about my penalty issues. He proceeded to take all of me and my friends' money at poker for a couple hours and then shared with me his credo:

Win, if you can.

Lose, if you must.

But always. Always.

CHEAT.

Great words from a great golfer.

Seriously, how many people do you know that can get two double-eagles in a row?

---

The Brother, the Texan, knows how to fly-fish. He grew up fly-fishing, as did I. He hasn't fly-fished mountain-river style in some years. He still knows how, but this is not to say that he hasn't incorporated some of the Texan Fishin' Style* into our Rocky Mountain adventures.

When we take off on the river, we would normally each have in our fishing vests a sandwich, a beer, a bottle of water, and about $112 worth of tackle.

Texas-style-fishing boy loads his vest with his sandwich, dumps out all of the fly fishing tackle (line, leader, flies, floatant, etc.) and replaces it with about 7 beers, then grabs his spinning reel and some lures.

His. Fucking. Spinning. Reel.

*Texas Style Fishing consists of a fair amount of inactivity combined with a huge amount of beer consumption. The actual casting for and catching of the fish is a by-product of the incredible amount of alcohol that is to be imbibed and the redneck fun that ensues. It's like toobing with a pole in your hand ("fishing" pole, smartass) and calling it "fishing." It really isn't "fishing," its getting drunk while maybe, possibly, if good fortune is with us, catching a fish.

That may come off as sounding like I'm a fly-fishing snob but, well, good. I am.

Spin-fishing is for white-trash-mullet-wearing-5-teeth-in-their-mouth halfwits who can't outsmart a goddam trout that possesses a brain the size of a fingernail clipping and who only "go fishing" so that they can sit somewhere, get shitfaced, and still come home to the missus with something that proves that they weren't out somewhere just sitting and getting shitfaced.

Fly-fishing is much more than that. It's about the water. And the fish. And the bugs. Oh, how I love looking for the bugs. You get to peek under rocks and put your face down in the water before you even string up your line. You have to check the bugs, you see, to see what the fish are eating that day. That hour.

What's in the water? Are they green? Grey? Black? Winged? Still in their pupal stage? Yes, I said, "pupal." Heh.

What's in my flybox that looks like these bugs? There's one. Same size, same color. I shall use that one.

Then you tie the fly on. This takes a minute but, if your choice is a good one, it's worth it. You then ninja (I stole this word from Dusty Where's-my-credit-bitch-Tsunami) up to the hole, sometimes literally on your belly. You hold your breath and you flick your line out there, arcing it soundlessly through the air.

Once. Twice. Cast.

Your fly alights on the water and you watch it like a fucking hawk, stripping line away as the current carries it down over the hole, keeping the line taught, playing the fly in the current, drifting it naturally� waiting� waiting� NOW! You see the top of him flash across the surface first, like Shamu showing off for tourists but Shamu is a Rainbow Trout and the fly is an unfortunate tourist and it takes only a millisecond, and you lift your pole as fast as you can set that frickin' hook, because while Trout are stupid enough to get something that's sharp and metallic into their mouth, they aren't stupid enough to swallow it. Not the big ones. They're smart, for a fish, and they're that big for a reason.

You hold the line and raise the rod tip up as far as you can, and you know you've got him because the rod bends and bows as the Trout heads for the river bottom.

You can't just heave on it, though, you'll snap that line in a second. You have to let him run, you have to let him pull just for a little while. Then you can pull back.

You wait until he slows and thinks he's safe and you give a good, smooth, hard tug.

SPLASH, that fucker shoots about two feet in the air, flipping and wiggling and shaking and doing his absolute damnedest to get that annoying piece of metal out of his mouth. You pull even harder on the line, because if you don't keep it taught, he'll spit that little barbless bitch out in a heartbeat.

You are frozen in that brief, mid-air, water-churning second with the absolute beauty of the pink stripe down his side, the long, streamline, thick, greenish, grayish, 18-inch body, his white underbelly. The gaping maw with your tiny, little fly dangling at its edge. The clarity and purity of the water he leapt from, and a wave of it and its droplets hanging in the air. Water so clear you can see 6 feet down as clearly as you can an inch.

You are frozen in the power the river holds that can move so smoothly around you and this creature, yet can turn granite to powder and carve canyons from plains. The smell of the tall pines that surround the shore, some of them even growing directly from a crack in the giant boulders. The massive, towering, Rocky Mountains that look down on you unless you are on top of them and have a thin layer of whitish blue snow on them even on a hot, July day. The cloud directly overhead that actually hit the side of the mountain, worked its way around it, and then blocked out the sun dropping the 75 degree air to 65 degrees in under 5 minutes.

You are frozen in the raw, untouched, amazingly, beautiful, moment of it all.

Whoof! That bastard's heading down again and your reels complains loudly as the line disappears from it. The Rainbow is fighting with every ounce of his being, and you have to give and give and give or he will break you. You will never break him. You can only coax and cajole and work him and play him until he's had just about enough. You work slowly to get him up to the surface closer and closer. Finally. You've won.

You pull him up to you across the surface of the water, preventing him any sort of platform for him to kick free from and escape. You reach for your ketchum tool so that you don't have to net him or touch him and wipe any of the life-giving slime-coating from his body, you can just slide it down your line and "pop" the hook free from his mouth.

While you're reaching for your release tool and he's sitting on the surface, with his head along the outside of your left thigh and his tail wrapped around your right, you stare at him in awe. You stare in wonderment at the beauty and power of this creature and you are humbled that you were able to conquer him.

You are proud.

*Kick*

*Snap*

You stared too fuckin' long, dumbass. That friggin' hog, with but a flick of his tail, just took your favorite fly and 3 feet of line.

Good job, genius.

Oh, well. You've got more line and more flies. The hook'll fall out of his mouth in a matter of days. He will live to be caught again with no harm done.

But, he's going to be that much smarter next time. Maybe you will be too.

Just make sure you're still able to cast with that arm you just injured patting yourself on the fucking back, stupid.

---

The Day of the Fishing, at an hour that I haven't seen since my cattle-herding days, we departed the Mom's house. We stopped for gas and, while the Mom and the Brother got coffee, I was entranced by a poster on the gas-station door.

It read: Try NEW PimpJuice

A beige placard with a tattooed, black dude, wearing a bandana on his head and the gradient-colored, 70's-porn-star sunglasses is telling me that I should try something called, "PimpJuice."

So I did. It's apparently one of those energy-drinks like Blue Flame or Fast Guy or some shit, it's just a dollar more per can than the others.

I had to do it though. I knew that I needed that special something to put me over the edge that day as I was about to go fishing with the two people that taught me to fish, starting at the age of 2, the two best fishers that I knew in the world, the Mom and the Brother.

I sauntered up the white sidewalk, in the white neighborhood, down the white street from the whitest private school (U. of Denver) in the white Rocky's, into the gas-station and asked the white attendant where I could find me somma dat' PimpJuice.

He smirked and pointed to the cooler. I grabbed a can, leaned across the counter and asked conspiratorially, "No shit, is this here PimpJuice shit any good?"

He laughs and says, "Yeah, it's kind of an apple flavor. And it's Nelly's own product."

I say, "Right, and she sure knows her energy drinks, doesn't she?"

He looks at me amusedly and says, "'Nelly' is the rapper on the poster you were looking at."

"RIGHT, right, I knew that, I was just seein' if you knew that. Everybody knows 'Nelly' is a tattooed, bandana-wearing black dude, pimpin' energy drinks and bustin' rhymes," I say, not knowing any of that shit at all.

I got out to the car and the Mom and the Brother were duly unimpressed when I told them about the legend of PimpJuice, especially after I told them that it was sure to help me "make 'dem fishes mah bitches, yo. Me an' mah niggah, Nelly, was sho' to git' all up in 'dat shit. "

Sadly, they were still not impressed when I told them that I was sure to "get mah fly ass swerve inna somma 'dat 'fly' ass fishin' 'n' shit," and that, "'doze muthafuckahs ain' seen nuthin' like a pimpass muthfuckah like me swillin' mah juice in the muthafuckin' hizzy."

Word.

Since the Mom and the Brother hadn't seen each other in a while, they spent a good part of our fishing time sitting in the car, drinking, and visiting.

Being respectful of their time together, and the fact that, after a couple hours on the river, there was a total downpour and they are obviously pussies who don't want to get wet, I left them to their own and headed off up the river.

And proceeded to have my best fucking day fishing EVER.

It figures too, that I would have no witnesses, as the lightning scared the rest of the fishermen off the water too. I know I said that I shake like an old-dog-shittin'-peach-pits at the sound of thunder, but I was catching some serious fucking fish, and only a lightning bolt from God herself could've knocked me off that river, for I was full-on harnessing the power of the Pimp.

I drank the nectar of those pearl-handled-cane-totin-purple-velvet-clad-platform-shoe-feathered-hat-wearing Gods and I became as one of them.

Nothing could stop me that day.

That afternoon and into that evening, I caught over 80 inches worth of Rainbow Trout.

I AM a Pimp.

And nonna' you bitches bettah fo'git that shit, yo.