As the evening sky faded from a salmon color to a sort of flint gray, I thought back to the salmon I caught that morning, and how gray he was, and how I named him Flint.

In a single sentence, Handey compresses a whole “Deep Thought” arc: a serene, poetic observation (the sky’s shifting colors) abruptly swivels into an absurdly literal, circular recollection about a salmon that is inexplicably gray and has been given the name “Flint.” The humor comes from the mock-lyrical tone and the overdetermined chain of associations—salmon color → salmon fish → grayness → the name Flint—ending in a deadpan, pointless revelation. It gently parodies reflective nature writing and the way memory can be made to seem profound through cadence and imagery, even when the underlying thought is trivial or nonsensical.