I AM A CRETIN

The Psychotherapeutics of Ice Fishing

(Jan 07/06)
I tried to find an ice-fishing show on television this morning but failed, miserably. I figured that a professional explaining the benefits of ice fishing, the psychotherapeutics of ice fishing, might cheer me up a bit. The ubiquitous ice fishing sty, a primitive cottage, a hole augured in the centre, and a scrub of bipeds stamping their feet and looking down holes watching red flags and markers on sticks. I used to watch carpentry shows when I was a drinker, or was it a miscreant, the difference seems negligible. The one with that guy in the dopey hat turning wood into spindles on a hand-lathe, or sawing lengths of timber with a bow and arrow, or some contraption he’d fashioned out of his hat and box-twine. Fucking wildly entertaining stuff, no doubt about it.

I watched a model train show once, when I lived in a basement somewhere without a bed, emceed by some cretin from Pennsylvania, wagon and incest country, barns going up every which where. Train savants. These locomotive scholars treat their hobbyist’s avocation like a religion, tiny little people waiting for tiny little trains at tiny little train stations. I had a train set when I was a kid, but never really played with it. And when I did, I’d usually get a shock from the tracks or the wire brushes that served as connectors from the train to the rails. Racing car sets were like that too, wire brushes and shocks all around. I much preferred Hot Wheels, at least they had no electricity coursing through them, all plastic and hard rubber tires and flimsy tracks that did the loop-to-loop, no chance of a wire sliver or shocks all around.

Let us now revisit the ice fisherman and the model train enthusiast. The two share similar characteristics, which can be easily explained in psychoanalytic terms, allow me. The train represents the male sexual organ, the penis, or phallus, which is run in and out of the model train tunnel, which represents the female sexual organ, the vagina, or crawlway. The hole augured in the ice, the ice fishing hole, represents the vagina, or crawlspace, into which the fish pole, which represents the penis, or phallus, is dropped into, then pulled up out of, similar to sexual congress, but much colder. Both the model train enthusiast and the ice fisherman simply sublimate the childhood wish to have sex with the primal other, the mother, into and through these relatively innocuous yet facile sporting activities. The incestuous vissitude, I will leave to your imagination and moral censor.

frogstick

they killed him
with a stick

the one they used
for fishing frogs

from the bottom
of the pool

he went under once
the second time

they had to push him under
with the stick

hooked round his shoulders
like a shawl