About

Hi. My name is Tyler Whitefish. I have a wife, three daughters, a dog, and a mortgage. His name is Grizz. The dog, not the mortgage. I don’t have a name for the mortgage. I don’t name things I loathe - the necessary evils we tolerate every day. And that’s what they are: evil. But we’ll get to all that. We named the dog Grizz because he looks like a grizzly bear. At least in the face. A short, soft-eyed, sissified, whimpering grizzly bear that loves to retrieve and eat gophers. I have a fascination with bears. I killed one once. In British Columbia. I shot him four times as he grazed huckleberries on the side of the longest collection of mountain ranges I’ve ever seen. I killed him and ate him because I loved him. This is difficult to explain. You may never understand completely. I’m still trying to sort it all out myself. You see, I’m a hunter and fisherman, among other things: Dad, as I’ve mentioned, husband, owner of pudelpointer, slave., humanoid quitter, failure, lover, romantic. All these words brush me at certain times but fail to encompass the whole, if there is one. I use these words to try to explain my predicament - I’m a wild man lost in a modern world. I have urges and desires that the long noses call barbaric. I like to kill things and eat them. I like to put hooks in fish mouths and pull them to me. I don’t like to do it because I want to see things die or suffer. In fact, I’ve sometime cried after I’ve pulled the trigger. Like the first life I took. A red robin in my Oklahoma backyard. It fell to a single pellet from my Crossman. I held it and cried over its blood. I buried it and prayed for forgiveness. I’m still praying.

Hunting and fishing are things that I do in the wild world because they’re essential to it. Essential to me. They go together. Like the lion and the Serengeti. But they are only part of the equation. There is also the modern life and my struggle with the diurnal. Money, Love, sex, food, friendships, jobs, paychecks, bosses and all other nefarious dipshits. I find myself struggling with the world I see. The skyscrapers and the Starbucks. My wife drinks Starbucks. Every day. Every single fucking day. At times, I am in utter awe of her commitment. Other times, it intrinsically infuriates my core. It's one of the things we fight about. Some say it’s normal. To fight. I suppose it is. But I don’t really know. It’s hard to decipher normal in a world capable of turning your penis into a vagina or vice versa.

That’s what I hope this blog can do. Make sense of the modern world and our wild urges in it. Because I don’t think I’m alone. I don’t think I’m the only one who has sat in a business meeting and thought, “what in god’s name are these assholes talking about?” I don’t think we’re designed to salivate over progress reports. I don’t think we’re engineered to get boners over 16-bit telecommunication protocols. I don’t think we’re supposed to stress about Sally and whether she gives the promotion to Bill because he smells nice and works weekends unjamming the multi-function laser printer with high capacity cyan and magenta toner cartridges. (Re-reading that sentence makes me want to go outside and shoot copious groupings into my whitetail full-body target.) No, I don’t think we’re built to do those things. I think we’re built to hunt, eat, screw, love (there is a difference) and yes - fight. I think the domestication of man and beast has occurred much too rapidly for our evolved souls to catch up with. And regardless of speed and time, I don’t think we’re ever meant to be "ok" with McDonald’s dollar menu.

Sometimes I’ll use scientific references and historical or literary texts to support this belief. Sometimes I’ll just get on my computer and rant until my eyeballs burn, maybe fueled by Smoking Loon or Bird Dog Whiskey, maybe not. Sometimes I’ll post pictures from my ventures out of doors. Sometimes I’ll talk about my dental hygienist and why I can’t stop like looking at her tits when she plucks last night’s elk tenderloin out of my second bicuspid.

Maybe all this will help you understand why the $80,000 SUV isn’t making you as happy as you thought it would. Maybe something written here will prompt you to buy a fishing or a hunting license. That money helps ensure our wildlife is abundant and healthy. After all, hunters and fishers give more to wildlife conservation than any other group. And it’s not even close. To crib from The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, hunting is conservation. But again, we’ll get to all that.

I must admit here also:  I’m a big part of the problem. I drink Starbucks and eat McDonald’s. I make sacrifices for money and perceived aesthetic value. I am a gigantic hypocrite. And I'm not sure there's an anecdote. We live in a nation of extremes. We think it has be one or the other. It doesn’t. Reality is dark and grey. We are the killers and the saviors. Existence is a paradox. But I do think we’re moving in the wrong direction. I think we’re falling away from the mountains when we should be hiking towards them daily. I think we’re evolving away from the very foundation we’ll never be able to escape: Earth. Nature. Wild animals. Our mother. Our god.

So, I hope you enjoy. I hope I make you laugh, maybe cry. It’s ok to cry. Even if you have a beard. Maybe we’ll talk about beards too. Maybe we’ll talk about our society’s tendency to turn every possible trait into some kind of marketable, salacious, marrow sucking succubus that annihilates all mirth. Or, maybe we’ll just talk about Chevy Chase and why I think Christmas Vacation is the one movie incapable of being overplayed. Either way, it should be fun and maybe, just maybe it will inspire you to take a walk in the woods or a stroll along the river. Maybe sit outside and count the stars. There’s a lot of them. And they’re getting harder to see.