This page will house my carefully edited studies of the fine literary talent associated with fishing blogs.  There are scribes among us who transcend this world.  And then there are the bloggers I have chosen to review.  Let the honesty flow, my friends.

 Fishing Blogerati Review #1: Buster Wants to Fish,

the ashram of fly-punk awsomnality

Buster Wants to Fish is a blog and a state of mind that encompasses respect for The Dude (those of you who are culturally illiterate need to see The Big Lebowski) and the brotherhood of fishers who think that corporate flyfish America sucks. Their banner (and stickers you can plaster on your transpo) makes use of a prison tat theme. Stepping into the office of the eight mysterious badass gentlemen reveals a literate head to go with the tattooed shoulders. BWTF sounds like a naughty acronym, but it’s really a naughty composite of the egos who contribute to it.

In the process of writing this review, I will kill a part of Buster Wants to Fish, as I will dare to call it cool. But before the gentlemen disband the site at the hands of my geeky endorsement, let me explain the kind of cool. This is the kind of cool that attracts the kids who always do what they’re told and whose moms press their jeans, causing them to suddenly hang out with girls with purple hair. This is the kind of cool that makes people do irrational things, such as post a response to a blog entry and then rewrite it, hoping it’s cool enough (which suddenly makes this review a sort of confession). I tossed and turned a few nights ago in my Batman pajamas with the phrase “laser awesome” bouncing around in my subconscious because Buster Wants to Fish put it there.  I liken this condition to the first time I heard a Jimi Hendrix riff. 

BWTF roots its coolness in a commonality of fishhunting that is not L.L. Beanish, but prides itself on presenting the passion of fishing in a fresh way. It’s sort of like punk rock—it’s been around for a while, but it still pushes enough buttons to make Tipper Gore want to stick a warning label across it. Another lively aspect is the set of cultural references that naturally flow from the fishing scribes who get together and tell the story at BWTF. A post on white Russians with references to The Dude from The Big Lebowski had me at hello. Tags on posts such as “Uppity mountain hippy extravaganza” and “wherein thee issues yet another morsel of profundity” speak for themselves.

All of this glowing prose aside, I’m sure if one looked into the subject in detail, the backgrounds of the principal writers for BWTF include the following: at least one individual who is posing as a cool trout bum who is really a corporate sycophant, one guy who really has prison tats, one guy who secretly wants to dance on Broadway, and at least one guy who is wondering how in the hell he got lucky enough to hang out with this busload of beer-pickled geniuses. But I speculate and only they know the truth about the makeup of their cadre. It’s not about the individual. It’s about the ashram of fly-punk “awesomnality” they have created.

Buster Wants to Fish combines a vocabulary that rivals the Urban Dictionary, a tension with corporate fishing culture, and a collective consciousness of the state of riverbums everywhere. In their words, they are “big in Alaska, Finland, and anywhere else the hangovers are longer than the days.” From stream access issues to glorifications of their own duditude, I salute the work of the extraordinary gentlemen who make BWTF the badass on my blogroll. May the Dudes abide.

Rating: 11. This one goes up to 11.