Welcome Once Again
To The Show That Never Ends My Friends
Sometimes the routine clouds the fact that many of you are here for the very first time. I am sorry. I take for grated the seeds of your addiction were watered here long ago! So let us roll back …
The Monday Morning Sidewalk is the longest running regular column that is supposed to be about fly fishing, and sometimes very specifically, fly fishing in the huge State of Texas. This column started long ago, longer than I realized until recently.
My later life dawned on me when I began spending the wrong amount of time going back through the Texas Fly Caster YouTube Channel, optimizing that channel for consumers. Why would I waste time on that channel, you may ask? Well, I continue to find it very strange that other channels rate so highly (in members) while the Texas Fly Caster Channel is so … lame. In trying to “fix” the lameness, I had to actually watch some of the videos I have made over the last sixteen years. Painful, it was extremely painful. Yes, it was funny and amusing too.
YouTube History
Would you be ready to see yourself ten, fifteen years ago? How about before cancer, during and after cancer? Damn, all these years past it helped me forget just how much of a head banging it was. But there it is, in living color, just another thing someone would never want to see, and want to forget as soon as possible. From fat bloated and unknowingly, but obviously sick years, to 135-pounds and a whisper. Huge spaces in video uploads while I was having my battles, inconsistent uploads — all explain the ongoing lameness of the Texas Fly Caster Channel. That and the fact videos were a distant second to the words being poured out here on the number one website about fly fishing in Texas – constant and consistent.
Along the way, YouTube has become more, for lack of a better word, FUN. The challenges to my decades of photography (not video), and knowledge of photography, teaching photography and an education in photography; all rekindled that visual itch.
YouTube also acts on a person’s base instincts – insecurity, competition, and “greed” (for lack of a better term). Gaining subscribers is like looking at your personal scoreboard, and the carrot at the end of the stick (the stick that is beating your ass) dangles … just out of reach, on and on it goes. Heck, the Texas Fly Caster Channel was a money-maker (truly nickels and dimes) until they raised the limits for everyone, effectively lengthening the stick the carrot was dangling from – to out of reach for years. All the years of videos, I have come to learn, were/are being pushed out to the wrong non-subscribers because of the great success of a few very few fly tying videos. Sad deal. Bad deal.
I have to remind myself; you who are new visitors to the Monday Morning Sidewalk may not know ANY of this history, I just wanted to let you in on some of the inner workings, my inner workings, that I hope bring you here to READ, and take you places to WATCH the videos that can, at times, fill in the blanks and can, at times, provide a little color to the somewhat colorless sport of Texas fly fishing.
Therein lies my/our lesson for today: We are seekers. We seek fish on fly. We seek new ways of helping people learn to fly fish, and we seek so many things in so many ways – in the interest of expanding this sport. We do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard. That includes expression, and creative ways of expressing our love of this sport. Take some time sometime, and have a look at some of the Texas Fly Caster YouTube videos – feel free to tell me where I am going wrong, besides living in the wrong part of Texas and the lack of dreadlocks. I can’t afford a dreadlock wig yet!
Thanks for reading. Have a great week, and you can bet there will be news this week that comes long before the new, and also popular CHATGPT stories on Sunday mornings! Watch the weather, and get ready to get rained on again. I think it is time to put rain gear to the test this week.
Category: Adventure, Body-Mind-Soul, Fly Fisher Health and Wellness, Industry, Photography, YouTube Subscribers
