Colourful spaghetti for dual personalities

Being born a hard core Gemini (my birthday is June 5th), I have been blessed with dual personalities. Personalities that exist side by side, by the way; unlike what I think is the situation for real schizophrenics, where one personality takes over completely in certain situations. The really mad one of me is therefore never allowed to be alone on stage. The sensible other of me is always there to take over when things get out of hand. The one arena where madness is looked upon as a necessary state of mind (by its members, of course, not by outsiders) is fly fishing. Fly fishing is where both of me agree completely and are able to cooperate and where both of us go bananas together. Critical readers might argue that if even the sensible me goes mad, it’s because the mad me takes over, but I like to think of fly fishing and fly casting as activities where madness creates a joy so pure that the original negative meaning of the word (madness) is changed to something utterly positive, and that it is then sensible to be mad.

Anyway, I’m here to talk about spaghetti, even though I don’t eat too much of it. Not because I don’t like it, of course, but because some carbohydrates have a tendency to make you fat. Potatoes and rice are other kinds, and sugar, of course, but I’m digressing again. I’m not here to discuss spaghetti as a food source, but more as a source of visual aesthetics.
Many of my fly fishing friends are organized freaks. They always know exactly where to find their rods, reels and, especially, their fly lines. They have bags where every line is filed away so efficiently that it will only take these freaks seconds to find whichever line they were looking for. Pathetic, if you ask me: You want a line, you find a line……????
Where is the drama, where are the obscenities and where is humanity? Imagine the joy you feel after having looked for that special line for three hours and finally found it, not only under the bed, but also under the thong you ripped off a woman a couple of weeks ago and couldn’t find the morning after. Imagine the variety of human emotions you have been through during these hours: The initial irritation when you couldn’t find it on the living room table, the frustration when it wasn’t in the living room at all, the anger when even thorough searches of the bathroom and the kitchen came up empty and the utter panic when it wasn’t even in the bag where you normally keep fly lines. And then, after having lain on the floor for half an hour, crying, you see the thong among all the dust balls from hell and start thinking of other kinds of emotions, pick up your mobile phone to give that special lady a call, retrieve the thong just as the already mentioned lady answers: “Hello there, loverboy..” in that special voice that normally makes you go week in the knees and THEN you see the fly line you’ve been looking for……
You drop the phone, dive for the line and this time the tears are tears of joy. In the background you hear the muted but frantic cries of a woman in distress, but you don’t care. YOU ACTUALLY FOUND THE LINE!

I’m kind of like this thong guy. I’m probably one of the most unorganized persons on the planet and both of me are hopeless. Somehow though, I often manage to find what I’m looking for. Not as fast as the order geeks, of course, but fast enough for me. This last year I’ve been responsible for designing more than 25 different fly lines (with the help from several others on the Zpey Team) and this resulted in loads of different prototypes that we had to test and then store. I chose to store the already tested prototypes in a big plastic bag, which was fine in the beginning, but turned into a problem after a while; especially because fly lines have a strong tendency to get tangled. It would have been bad enough if these tangling tendencies were reserved to individual lines, but this was like gathering hundreds of naked and incurable sex addicts in a room that was far too small and then return a couple of days later. Utter chaos, but an aesthetic one. And finally I’ve returned to the title of this madness:

Colourful spaghetti for dual personalities.

Please forget the sex addicts (if you can) and focus on a hundred fly lines in a wide variety of colours, all interconnected. A hundred fly lines in one big ball. Beautiful, but sad for both of me, and strangely enough, the roles are reversed this time. The sensible me accept the personality flaw and say: “It’ll take some time, but we’ll manage”. The mad me, however, see all the work that must be done to enable us (both of us) to go out fly casting again, and blames his sensible adversary for this madness. Confusing stuff!
Fly lines, though, are wonderful creatures. Wonderful because of the sleek efficiency they radiate through their purpose in life, wonderful because of that intoxicating smell of ……. brand new fly lines that kind of remind you of the smell of brand new cars and wonderful because of that smooth texture of the coating, tapered to challenge gravity and to penetrate air.
Even intertwined, the beauty of a ball of multicoloured fly lines is exhilarating. Spaghetti is madness and madness is good!

You’ll understand this when you try one of Zpey’s new fly lines this spring: We will introduce 5 different Competition Fly Lines that will rock the fly casting population, 4 long belly lines (# 3, 4, 5 and 6) under the name of “Silence” that will provide longer casts and better presentations for  experienced single hand fly fishers and 15 different double hand shooting heads (5 densities for each of the following weight classes: 8/9, 9/10 and 10/11) under the name of “Fusion Extended”, with lengths between 12,5 and 14 meters and weights between 35 and 45 grams. You will find more detailed information about all of these lines if you look under NEWS on this web site.