April 8, 2025

Look 112: Sixteen tons and what do you get?

Fellow angler,

This will be a short one. That’s partially because I’m lazy and also because, well, no I guess it’s just laziness.

It has been an eventful couple of weeks. Work has been busy and someone on my team was fired in a situation that didn’t inspire confidence in leadership. My kitchen floors and walls have also been in a state of repair for a month because corporate landlords are, to put it mildly, shitty.

It does feel like I’m caught in a cycle of repeating and ever-more-tiring events. Do you ever get the feeling that you’re on the hamster wheel? Like you run and run only for the wheel to spin and bring you back to the place where you started? I know it’s not a unique feeling, but that doesn’t make it any more enjoyable. Getting ahead is just hard sometimes. If not impossible. (Thankfully there always seems to be a wealthy guy around who’ll gladly remind you that you just need to work harder and pull yourself up by your bootstraps.)

The bright side

I’m not here to bum you out. You get enough of that from the news.

Even through a period when everything seems to require more work than I’d hope and when personal progress is slower than molasses running uphill on a winter day, I’ve been able to slow down and focus on maintaining the important stuff — telling jokes that make my wife laugh, calling my grandmother, petting my cat, checking the Friends of Big Bear Valley eagle cam.

Notably, I’ve stuck to the main priorities I’ve set for myself (see my last post). I’m rebuilding my exercise habit: 3 days per week plus 8k daily steps. I’ve continued the slow process of de-googling and divesting from the big tech companies that sell my life story for a quick buck (this blog is now being sent through a domain I own and have set up to use for email). I’m even making slow progress editing the first draft of my novel! (Yes, I do forgive you if you forgot that this whole fishy blog business started because I alleged to be writing a novel. Sometimes I also forget.)

So I guess the takeaway is that maybe I’m actually crushing it.

“Even when taking your lumps, there's no man in town as admired as you… My what a guy, that Gaston!”

Song of the week

I almost always choose a title song before I start writing a post. I have ideas for a theme or subject, but mostly I let the spirit take me where it will. The song I pick always changes what I end up writing.

For this post, I had no real ideas until I spent 45 minutes bouncing around my music library. Then I found myself caught between a few country songs that fit a similar theme.

Many older country songs have a way of telling stories about working men who feel down and out. I think that modern country singers attempt to tell such stories, but maybe they’ve lost touch with the deeper struggles of life.

OG country is also so different from the Nashville pop garbage that’s dominated the genre for decades now. I’m talking about back in the days when the genre was called “country & western” and it included folk songs and blues songs that became standards of rock and hip hop. The lyrics back then felt like stories that sought a singer genuine enough to tell them, and not wannabe singers (or music execs) seeking smooth-sounding stories to sell.

Anyway, the song this week is Sixteen Tons by Merle Travis (Wikipedia link). It’s a song about a coal miner who, no matter how hard he seems to work, always finds himself at the mercy of his company. As Travis says, “You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.”

I’d guess that many modern workers feel the same. How could they not when the ability to afford a living, health insurance, and general self-worth are so tied to work in our country?

This song has multiple elements that the great folk recordings seem to have: lyrics about a working man who can’t get ahead¹, a singer who isn’t the greatest but makes you believe he lives the words he’s saying, and a spoken portion that breaks the fourth wall to remind you that music is a shared experience.

There’s a version by Tennessee Ernie Ford that is more popular, but that Ford fellow feels fake — too polished, too commercial. I have also heard interesting versions by Johnny Cash and Stevie Wonder. They have their charms but don’t hit like the original.

Thanks for listening to my TED Talk. Please enjoy.

Unrelated, it turns out I caught a real alliterative bug because boy was I rocking that rhetorical device above. Sorry and you’re welcome.

Until next time,

Happy fishing!