I've spent the last day or two fighting the flu--tiny nucleic acids have invaded my body and taken over the genetic machinery of millions of my cells. Life goes on.

I fished under the moonlight. I felt the bump of a fish gnawing at the clam I shucked last week, then brined. The clam is dead, the fish now fed.

Sand pipers chirped as they worked the beach where I fished, as though I was invisible--each time they truffled through the wet sand with their beaks, they killed a few more tiny lives. Life goes on.

While wading out to cast, I saw a small fin slice through the foamy surf--likely a young striped bass slicing through the current, munching up critters less adept in the swirling currents.

I caught nothing tonight. Skunked. A few hundred years ago, that would be cause for concern, but I can wander over to the Acme Supermarket today. A few hundred years ago, "skunked" did not happen. Life goes on.

I'd take Arne Duncan fishing if he cared to go, without his entourage, and if he promised to pay attention. Not to me, but to life around him. When his house of cards collapses, when the "Race to the Top" falls the way of the "Initial Teaching Alphabet" (ITA), maybe The Scarecrow will have a brain.

My neighbor across the street is a scalloper--he dredges the sea for the scallops you find on your table. He's more useful to our world than the Secretary of Education.

Really. Try eating a white paper on the intricacies of the complexities of the necessities of modern schooling. Then go fishing with someone who knows how to fish.

A full belly trumps a fool's bellow.

The picture of fishheads was taken in Dublin by Leslie this past July.