There are times when there is just too much mung in the water to fish. Mung, or Pylaiella as it’s officially known, is a foul-smelling brown/red seaweed that rolls up suddenly in huge blooms off beaches on the Outer Cape and up and down the New England coast. Mung wraps itself around anything and everything. You throw out a topwater lure and a minute later you are hauling back a football seized ball of soft brownish goo. Try bottom fishing with bait, and your bait, sinker, and entire line get coated with the stuff. I’ve had my rod bend double, thinking that I’ve got a hit, only to realize that the fish I caught was the accumulation of 10 pounds of mung. What to do? You can keep fishing, knowing that you’ll catch nothing and likely get more and more frustrated. You can go home and give up for the day. Or you can prop up your rod in your sand spike, crack a beer, sit on the beach, enjoy the sound of waves crashing and the feeling of the setting sun and ocean breeze on your skin, and scan the shore for bars and breaks for good fishing spots to check out when you return. I’ve done all three. The only good thing about mung is that it disappears as suddenly as it appears, and it’s likely that the next day out it will be gone.
There are times when the conditions are just not right for activism. I remember one particular protest that took place in New York City during the alternative globalization protests. We had planned and strategized and devised a particularly clever and creative action. And then we got out onto the street and saw that the police had out strategized us. They immediately and aggressively arrested anyone whom they deemed as a leader, and hemmed in and divided up the rest of the thousands of protesters into a series of quarter-block long pens separated by broad no man’s lands. It didn’t matter how clever and creative our action was, we were not going to be able to pull it off that day. Other days the weather has been against us: a driving rain that made us miserable and limited any spectators to our miserable selves. And sometimes the tides of history are against you. Immediately after 9/11, as the US was getting ready to get us into an absurd war yet we could still smell the burning towers and every street corner in NYC was crowded with pictures of loved ones who were still missing, it just did not seem right to be protesting in our usual ways. Sometimes we stuck it out, finding new — more creative and respectful — ways to protest, sometimes we just went home (or to jail), and sometimes we reconvened in a bar to talk about what was happening and plan for our next action.