Down With The Sickness

"Oooh, ah, ah, ah, ah!" - Disturbed, Down With The Sickness

Knowing that most of my readers are avid fly fisher people, and knowing what demographic group a lot of fly fisher people are in, I would dare to guess that a good number of you have never heard the song "Down With The Sickness" by the heavy metal group Disturbed. And that's OK. You don't need to know the song in order to understand this blog post. I used the name of the song for the title of this post only because it fits so well with my subject matter. But, if you want to listen to the song, you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking here. If you do watch it, I dare you not to bang your head a little... (WARNING - this song contains a lot of possibly offensive language!) Now let's get on with the blog post, shall we?

Did you know I was so Disturbed?

I have a sickness. It's bad. And I can't seem to shake it, no matter how hard I try. My sickness is that I have a deep-rooted psychological need to own every fiberglass fly rod ever made. I know it seems crazy and irrational, but you could say that about most psychological maladies. That doesn't make them any less real to the people who are suffering. And I should know...

A good number of these are mine...

If I had a couple of free months I could probably go back through all my PayPal transactions to see exactly how many rods I have bought and/or sold over the past gaggle of years. But I don't, so I won't. Let's just say that a lot of rods have spent at least a little bit of time in my fly tying room/man cave in that time. I want to love all of them, but very few have actually found a spot in my heart. Most of them have had some kind of flaw, whether that meant that it didn't fit well with my casting stroke, or there was some sort of blemish that I couldn't get past, or more often than not the fact that I found another rod that I wanted more. Or even that I needed to make some quick cash to help pay for a new car or other of life's necessities. For some reason or another, most rods have been moved on to a new owner at some time or another.

My current stash...

That's not to say that my rod arsenal has dwindled. I still own my fair share of fly rods, and as you can tell by the tenor of this post, my sickness means that I keep an eye out for more and different rods to acquire,
more than I care to admit. It's a sickness, see! I can't help myself!! I need help, ladies and gentlemens! Oh, and by "help" I mean that if you know anyone who is looking to sell an old Berkley Stream Specialist rod, send him my way, will ya? K, thanks!