I was outside on my back porch smoking a cigarette breaking Buddhist commandments numbers 1 and 5, when I noticed a fishing pole stuck in the ground by the banks of the lake...this got me thinking...
...i can't fish for shit..i do love fly fishing though...Christians fish...are you kiddin' me, Christians fished like a motherfucker!...they even had that symbol...i wonder if Buddhists fish...they must fish, what with all the caves and nature and streams and shit they meditate by...i know Buddhists are supposed to be vegetarians, so it's probably more of a catch-and-release type of situation...but then how would anybody ever know they caught anything?...i bet Buddhist fishing stories are crazy, "that damn fish was so big it almost didn't exist!"...maybe that's more existentialist than Buddhist...
Then my neighbor walks down to one of the fishing poles, pulls it out of the ground, reels it up and blammo: dinner. He unhooks his catch, drops the pole, and casually walks back towards his porch, fish flopping in hand. I'm all for fresh, the best sushi I ever had was some tuna plucked straight out of the pacific and into my belly in only a matter of minutes, but something about watching my neighbor left me feeling off. I don't know, maybe it's all the Buddhist stuff I've been reading; it's definitely prompted question after question. I've done the veggie thing before and I didn't really feel a difference. Frankly, I just don't care enough about animal rights and burgers taste good. It's hard for me to argue with myself with that logic...
But, Buddhism is challenging me in many ways I did not anticipate. For some reason, I thought this was going to be easy. As usual, I was wrong.
