But I live there…

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions.  Having the axis of the earth tilted at the exact same angle relative to the sun as it was 365 days (and one second!) ago, is a poor reason for me to get off my figurative ass and change something about myself.  But even if it was sufficient reason, why not just pick the anniversary of some other angle?  Any one is as good as the next.  Or better yet, drop the correlation of self-improvement with our home planet’s location in space.  But anyway, there is one thing I want to try to change.  I want to migrate from here….  (I am pointing at my head) to … here.  (now I am sort of patting my belly).

Here is why:  I always have thought that to understand something, I have to be able to describe it.  Such as with words.  Lots and lots of words, if needed, or at least with obsessively thorough and detailed mental pictures, each of which is apparently worth a thousand of those sons of bitches, ceteris paribus.  What this leads to, if you’re me, is a tendency to not just be able to grok some shit on the quantum, accept it and then move on with mental grace and emotional serenity; but instead to succomb to the paralysis of analysis.  This can lead to getting so bogged down in thinking about something or someone or some event or some memory, that the object of such thought can move on and do whatever the fuck it wants while I am still mentally chewing over some fossilized remembered remnant of the thing or person or event.

I have a feeling that this doesn’t make sense yet, so now I am going to describe it some more.  (Haha, that is called irony).  One way to do that is to remember how one of my religion professors in college described religion as an act of metaphor.  There are two parts to a metaphor, the vehicle and the tenor.  The vehicle is the mechanism by which meaning is expressed, and the tenor is the meaning itself, or I guess you could say the thing that is being meant.  Most religions are rooted in references to things or beings well beyond the grasp of human comprehension, making their God by definition something that cannot be defined, but only believed in.  That leaves religion, when considered by me anyway, bogged down in symbolism, chock full of stuff that stands for what is holy, but is not holy in itself.  I am not really educated in this kind of thing, but I do see people regard objects–man-made ones, at that! And food and drink, in some cases–and hold them in reverence and awe, as if “stuff” in a room, right in front of you, were actually something divine.  Let me veer off the rails here to say that this is a very simplistic recap of a series of conversations I had with a deacon (and a couple of shorter conversations with a priest, who by the way is as deeply spiritual and honest a person as I have ever had the privilege of talking to) during the course of RCIA instruction a few years ago.  Yes, I joined the Catholic church, right before I got remarried, and also a little bit before I learned about that church’s arcane thoughts on annulments and whatnot (“Wait…on your say-so, 10 years of my life and 16 years of someone else’s, along with our respective former spouses’ lives, did not actually happen??  Except mine is different because I came to this party really late, but those years just kind of got squirted out of the universe like a watermelon seed or some shit?  OK, so then what the fuck are all these kids doing here, and where did I get that scar??”)  I actually did give it an honest try, and have many times since then, but I can’t fully grok the notion that a wafer and a cup of wine are anything more than symbolic representations.  Once my literal mind gets beyond the shuddering thoughts of cannibalism (and the inner smart-aleck stops thinking shit like “Yum! Krist Krispies, again!”) I still can’t help thinking (see?) that actual human flesh should be chewy and that real blood would not taste so…grapy.

I didn’t mean for this to be about religion.  As you can see I am quite retarded on the subject.  Agnostic in the precise sense as defined by Thomas Huxley, but once or twice in my life an actual believer (not at this moment), would about sum it up.

Try again: many of my life experiences turn into what I would call chewing gum for the mind.  No nutritional value whatsoever, but man does that fucker ever keep busy with memories and conjecture and attempts to define and understand what I have experienced:  replaying, speculating, scripting possible do-overs and alternative responses or behaviors or actions for events that took place way off in the distant past; analyzing the shit out of what I should or shouldn’t have said or did, agonizing over what-ifs and how it could/should have gone differently or better.  Unchecked, this kind of shit could lead to a life that is a tooth-grinding, paralytic waking nightmare.  Good thing for me that this is only a tendency, and not a full time hobby.  Although sometimes at night I wake up with my jaws clenched.

One good thing that has come out of this sort of obsessive tendency is a lifelong love and respect for language; English in particular but also for all the cool shit English has inherited and mostly stolen from other languages.  My prevailing need is to describe shit in order to understand it, to make some order out of it, and what better means to describe shit than via language, hmm?.  I know, there are other ways.  Anyone who is an artist or musician or writer or dancer or athlete, or for that matter anyone who has ever found themselves deeply moved by what artists and musicians and writers and dancers and athletes have produced; knows this on some level.

Anyway, the thing I want to do is not have that analytic tendency so much, the one that gets my mind so bogged down in the artifice of life that it overlooks the beauty in just experiencing it. Analysis paralysis…it interferes with the present, and that is really all we have. It is like this:  if you have one foot in yesterday, and one foot in tomorrow, you are in a perfect position to take a giant dump on today.

If I were not such a retard I could have just summed this all up with some pithy little ditty, like the bumper sticker that says “Be here now”.  I usually fail at that simple instruction, instead concocting some thousand word mental essay going deep in to what that could really possibly mean.  In fairness to me, most of the time that bumper sticker is surrounded by several dozen other ones of equal or greater (by which I mean lesser) pith and depth.  And bumper sticker-plastered cars like that usually just end up pissing me off.  Pithing me off, too.  Take your god damn ontological salience and get the fuck out of my way, I think at them, really loud, in my head.

I do not usually make New Year’s resolutions, but this time I am going to think about it.

Rent-a-git

Sometimes I see things wrong on first glance, and the original misinterpretation is what sticks in my mind, forever.  And sometimes I prefer my first impression of an event or person, regardless of subsequent evidence that the original thought is just stupid or crazy.

First example: On the way to work I pass this place that sells things on eBay for you.  Its name suggests that it should be pronounced “Re-Tag it”, but its logo looks like: reTAGit, with a very stylized font for the TAG part of the name.  For the life of me, I can’t look at that sign without seeing what I saw the first time I read the sign: “rent-a-git”.  I think “Git” is a British synonym for what we over here in the colonies might call a “dumbass” or a “fucktard”, so this makes me laugh inside my head a little each time, and try to imagine scenarios in which I might want to rent one.  Maybe to fill in for me at meetings at work, or to do stuff around the house:  “Oy, come ter order, then…this ‘ere is when we ‘ave a meetin’ ter discuss ther bleedin’ archivin’ rules fer the ‘lectronic communications then, innit?” or “Watcher ffink ’bout some bloomin’ Navajo wite fer the bleedin’ wainscotin’ an’ crown moldin’, then?”  I like the idea of a bunch of obnoxious cockney dumbfucks milling around a holding pen, waiting for the dispatcher to call them up, day-laborer style, for their daily git gig. Giggety git.

Another example is from a misreading of the sign outside the Gordon Food Service outlet store.  The sort-of bolded comic-sans font of their logo makes the sign look like it says “Goddamn Food Service”.  At least it does if you first see it through misty car windows on an overcast day in heavy traffic so you only get a cursory glance at the sign, and you’re retarded like me.  So ever since then, that is what I see every time I pass their store or one of their trucks on the highway.  There goes the goddamn food service truck again.

“Where is that Goddamn Food Service delivery order?”
“I don’t know; maybe we should rent a git to track it down.”

A third, and really stupid example, is from one of the shampoo bottles in the shower at home.  Without my reading glasses, I swear the name of the product on the container looks like “damn clean”.  Closer inspection shows that it is really called “drama clean”, all in lower case like that.  That is stupid enough on its face; in this case I think my version, while stupid in an entirely different way, is actually preferable to reality.

Haiku

This is my favorite one.  I heard it a few years ago:

I don’t like haiku

Because you can only use

Seventeen syllab

Train

I seen somethin’ strange once.  It was out west, and it was a little differnt than anything you ever heard of.  I was a little bit kinda down on my luck a few years back and was ridin the rails, thought maybe I could get me some timber work out by Vancouver, or maybe the salmon fleets were hirin’ out of La Push.  One drizzly night me an some other tramps was floppin’ under a cliff next to a rail bridge on the St. Joe river up near the Kootenai valley, waitin for the 3:05 Union Pacific out a’ Coeur d’Alene.  We useta set up a little jungle by the trestle, where the 3:05 had to slow way down on the straightaway just before the bridge took a hard curve across the river gorge.  The engineer was a friendly, an didn’ much care what kinda boardin’ passes we had, or didn’t.

This particlar night, this little eye-talian feller name of Goosheppy had clumb all the way down the gorge and speared hisself a chinook salmon and diced it into a big pot of mulligan over a fire he made by the slagheap from the old tapped out copper mine.  He passed around a mason jar a’ shine and we was all hunkered down under a big lean-to a’ tin siding, outta the rain.  The rain thrummed on the corrugated tin, soundin’ like a endless round a’ polite applause, as we squatted there talkin, lyin’ about the places we’d been, spittin Mail Pouch into the mud, and usin’ fishribs as toothpicks.  Scared Eddie was regalin’ us with stories about his days on a bomber crew in the Eighth Air Force.  Me, I mainly left things out a my stories, but told some, too.

The engineer on the 3:05 usually seen us an’ just waved, ’cause he knew we knew the bulls only patrolled the city yards, an’ never made it out here to the mountains.  Sometimes though he’d  wave us off if he weren’t pullin no deadhead boxcars, or if the switchyard bulls was out to meet a quota by roustin’ some bums off their turf.  His shift ended up at Bonner’s Ferry so this was his milk run.  Sometimes the milk runs sour though for some fellers, I’ll get to that.

Gotta tell you now ’bout Towser, a old three-legged one-eyed stray mutt that kinda adopted me a couple years before, back in East St. Louis.  Ol’ Towser had this uncanny knack for knowin about stuff that’s gonna happen, kinda like the gift a’ seein’ that them brujos has, down in New Mexico.  One time back in West Virginia, I had just helped some ol’ boys clear out a seam of anthracite from a family mine back in some unnamed holler, an’ was camped out by a little crick, when Towser just up an’ lit out, flyin’ up to the top of the ridge, then runnin’ back to yip at me an’ drag my pants cuff to move me along.  He done that back an’ forth a few times, gettin’ more ‘n more wound up each time.  Well not fifteen minutes later, just as I crested the ridge and was wonderin’ what all his commotion was about, a flash flood filled that holler and warshed that campsight right down the gulley, leavin’ nothing but mud an’ trees, all broke up like kindlin’.  That was the first time I seen Towser act up like that before somethin’ big broke loose, but it weren’t the last, I’ll tell you what.

Anyhow, ol’ Towser was our freight train alarm clock, an would usually start yappin’ and run over to the track an get in a kinda half crouch, half point, and then–you could measure it on a clock–we would hear the train comin 5 minutes later.  We’d douse the fire, take down the jungle and wrap up our swag just in time for the trainwhistle to get into earshot.  Towser would clamber right on up onto a flatbed or a box car only after he was sure I was aboard.

Well, I remember this partic’lar night clear as a bell.  After the rain let up the hunters moon showed through in places.  But the sky was still holdin’ water, kinda misty low and cloudy high, with clear spots driftin’ through.  Around 5 til 3, Towser started actin a little peculiar.  He simpered and whimpered and slunk off all bellycrawlin’, ’til he was fast up against the rock cliff on the far side of camp.  He parked his hind end an’ sat there quiet, with his good eye starin up the tracks all furtive an shifty an worried like.   We all heard the whistle about the same time, only this time, instead of a low occasional moan, it was steady an’ shrill, an’ getting too loud too fast.   Just about the time the clouds broke an the moonlight put everything around in a sort of ghostly pale glow, we all seen the train’s headlight crestin’ the cutout that’d been blasted through the last mountain pass before the river.  Towser looked scared, like if he’d been wearin’ pants he’d a wet ‘em, like he wanted to crawl right inside the escarpment.  The train came down the last straightaway, only instead a’ slowin’ like it always did, this time it was pickin’ up speed.  And this time, instead a’ the engineer wavin’ and noddin’ like he usually did, he was starin’ straight ahead with his face pulled back into the grimace of a dead man who found out just at the last minute what was coming.  Well the dead man’s pedal hadn’t got the message yet, ’cause that diesel was ballin’ the jack, just like to flyin’ down that last straight section a’ track.  Last time I seen a face like that feller’s was when I was a young’un, the day a air bubble got in my uncle Willis’ heart an’ it blew up. Well the doc said he was deader’n James Dean before he ever got dragged under the combine.  That combine made a perfect circle in the winter wheat that day, till it run outta gas.  I know Uncle Willis ain’t never been to England, an’ didn’t make them crop circles over there nohow, but that never stopped his inlaws from castin’ aspersions about him ever’ chance they got, god rest his soul an’ ta hell with theirs.

Anyways, back to this one night.  Where the track turns sharp and goes over the river, the train kept goin’ straight that night.  The bridge timbers groaned and creaked and finally snapped, and the train arc’ed out over the river and fell straight down, lookin just like a giant slow-motion rolly-coaster.  Just about the time we seen the red light of the last car blinkin’ kind of calm and lazy into the mist, we all noticed the same thing, the strangest thing of all, that night.  Kind of a eerie hush fell over the river gorge, all’s we could hear was the river an’ the wind, an’ a loon, real far off.  No explosion, no sound of metal crashing into rock, no sparks, no nothin’.  Goosheppy climbed down the gorge an’ came back an’ said there was no train, no wreck, no dead engineer, just the river an’ the rocks ‘an the pale white glow of the moon and the sound of the wind whistlin’ down the gorge through the broken trestle.  He stood there shiverin’ like he was colder’n a well-digger’s ass, an struck dumb to boot.  Me an’ Towser lit out down the tracks in the direction a’ Coeur d’Alene an’ turned south on the first road we got to, where I stuck out my thumb.  Just about the time the sky turned the color of Velveeta, we was gettin’ settled in the back of a Roadmaster wagon driven by a feller who was headin’ toward Amarillo to do some roughneckin’.  Me an’ Towser got work as rodeo clowns the next spring outside a’ Las Cruces.  Me an’ Towser hasn’t been on a freight train ever since…

All systems…suck!

Apparently some cubicle monkey in Redmond with a head full of locusts decided I shouldn’t post anything about my vacation, or some shit.  I haven’t posted for a while.  I wrote a bunch of stuff down about my recent vacation, and had about 900 digital photos (some from my camera, some from Jillian’s camera, and some from my stepdaughter’s camera) to sift through, to make a nice little travelogue documenting our trip.  Then I did something that apparently one should never do:  I changed the password on my laptop. I know, right?  WTF would one want to do that for?  Having been the owner of an old computer on which some secure data was compromised, that is WTF I do that for.  Well, in my ignorance of the latest Microsoft technology, I did not realize that  my (technically, my employer’s, but with a lot of my own info on it)  Windows XP laptop has a feature in its EFS, or Encryption File System, that can cause everything in My Documents and on the Desktop–I want to pause here to emphasize that I mean EVERY.SINGLE.FILE.AND.FOLDER in My Documents and on the Desktop, including subfolders and their content no matter how far down you go–to not inherit the new permissions, or access, or level of security, or whatever-the-hell-it-is-called.  So I was effectively locked out of my computer.  Not my computer, just all the shit on it that I want to get to, which is kind of the same thing.  That douche bag in Redmond whose responsibility it was to assign people to test this shit before rolling it into a GA release schedule, apparently fell down on the fucking job.  Again.

 
Now, I do have a snazzy new Lenovo laptop, from which I am typing this.  It has Windows Vista–I will pause here to emphasize that yes, I know…Windows Fucking Vista–and I have not yet completed transferring all my crap from my old pc to my new one.  I haven’t even found it all, yet.  Part of me knows deep down that for all the shit I think is so special, moving from XP to Vista is like switching deck chairs on the Titanic, only moving to the chair that is closest to the fucking iceberg.

I know that if anyone is reading this using a Safari browser, they are probably thinking in their head “serves you right, dumbass, that is why I use a Mac”, and may even be going so far as to prepare a statistical synopsis detailing how their system has never crashed and is far superior in every way, from the sleek ergonomic design, to the feature-rich OS, to the easy-to-use UI, to the excellent system stability.  Blah blah effing blah.  I don’t really have a dog in the Macs vs PCs fight, except the little bit of context that I have been using various flavors of Windows for over 20 years.  So it’s kind of like if you’re having a really shitty life and someone points out that hey, your life is kinda shitty, you might feel a little defensive and say “yes, my life is like a god damn mudslide, but it is my by-god god damn mudslide, every nuance, nook, cranny and minor tectonic shift with which I am intimately familiar”.  Or maybe it is the technological equivalent of whatever snapped inside Patty Hearst’s head vis-a-vis the Symbionese Liberation army.

I suppose I should also mention that on a small desk in my kitchen sits one of those sleek-looking Macs, in which all the guts are integrated in the monitor, and to which are attached a very minimalist but ergonomically designed mouse and keyboard.  Many of the other residents in my house are very adept at using this Mac, and swear by it.  The desk it sits on is tiny, and on occasion I will fold myself up and cram my legs under the desk and risk the clotty buildup of thrombosis in my leg veins, and try to use the Mac.  Let me just say at the outset that I know there are probably different schemes and UI themes you can apply to a Mac, but the one my family has chosen has all the icons placed along the bottom of the screen.  As you hover the mouse over an icon, it kind of SWELLS UP! real quick, and then JUMPS! up and down a couple of times, like it is saying PICK ME! PICK ME!.   I am afraid to turn the sound up on this machine, because first of all I don’t know how to, but second of all, I half expect the icon to make either the “SQUOICK!” sound like in the old Q-Bert video game, or worse, to make a bouncy “doy-oy-oy-oinggggg!” noise; and if my computer did that to me every time I was about to pick an icon, I would have to punch it right in the fuckin’ screen, ’cause a tiny bit of that would go a long way real quick.  As soon as I get past all the pogo-sticking icon action, I find myself stymied by the nomenclature.  I can’t find Windows Explorer, or a DOS prompt, or the Control Panel, or the Registry, or the boot.ini, or MSConfig, or ANYTHING I AM EVER LOOKING FOR!!!

I truly admire the ease and comfort with which my family members have become expert users of this computer, and when I publicly deride it as nothing more than a Fisher-Price Activity Center for grownups, I secretly feel like one of those monkeys throwing a bone at the obelisk in the prologue to “2001: A Space Odyssey”, or like some kind of fucking Luddite.

Anyway.  I tried a bunch of things and stuff, and finally got some guy with the right tools to get  everything decrypted.  And then I made sure I got EFS dis-the-fuck-abled on that PC.  So I should be able to resume posting as soon as I close all those god damn windows and reboot the fucker several times.

For the record: I supported OS/2 workstations back when Windows NT 3.5.1 was just another wet dream for Bill Gates’  bean counters.  I really think that back in the day, OS/2 was the best performing and most stable multi-threaded, multi-tasking, 32-bit OS you could get.  OS/2 servers had to be rebooted a whole bunch less often that Microsoft servers, too.  However, IBM’s marketing department could not have sold a bucket of water to Richard Prior that time he got caught on fire from freebasing, so no one ever knew how good OS/2 was.

Also for the record:  my favorite OS to support, ever, was this command line based Frankenstein monster called CTOS, that was produced and supported by Unisys, originated by Sperry or Burroughs or some other extinct company.  What an arcanely convoluted and retarded (but really fun!  No, seriously!) piece of shit that was.  Mastering its nuances made you feel SO SMART!!   In contrast, Macs just make me feel like a thromboembolism is a-fixin’ to blow.  Jeesh.

Anyway:  more later.  Finally.

I worked at a foundry…

 Siebolt’s face was in either a grin or a grimace–you couldn’t ever tell which, due to the ill-fitting choppers that clacked in his mouth–as he raked red-hot pieces of iron and dirt from the bed of the sweatbox.  The oilburner in the ceiling of the furnace was turned down but the maw of the box glowed bright yellow-orange and cast Siebolt’s shadow demonically against the block wall behind him.  The well of D-furnace, Siebolt’s sweatbox, filled up much quicker than those of the other three furnaces, sometimes once per shift, and the molten aluminum was swilling and splashing up into the bed. The bed of the sweatbox was just below chest-high, and was angled to allow molten aluminum to drain into a large cylindrical well  that rested on the ground.  Raw materials were thrown onto the bed and heated to melting, and after the aluminum drained down into the well, the remaining dirt and iron and steel and slag were raked out of the bed into small hoppers.
     Clarence, who disliked his name and would answer only to “Jim”, was shift manager.  He was running a sample from A-furnace, after which he would tap and drain the sweatbox.  Running a sample entailed reaching a long iron dipper into the well, filling it with aluminum, and pouring it into a small mold.  When solid, the molded aluminum disk would be shot with a metallurgical spectrograph, which would reveal the percentages of other metals present and tell us how close we were to the desired alloy.
     Siebolt’s ingots were always a cloudy gray bastard alloy, too high in iron and dirt and too low in manganese, magnesium and silicon to be of any commercial use.  Their only purpose was to stock the “heels” of the other furnaces after they were tapped out.  Several 1,500-pound stacks of sweatbox ingots were always on hand for just this purpose.  Clarence–no one ever called him anything but Clarence after his “be scary to new guys” schtick stopped working–pressed the green button on the hanging switchbox, and the gears that drove the ingot-mold conveyor belt groaned and whirred into slow movement.  The belt was about 100 feet long and contained some 300 concrete ingot molds, each of which Clarence checked for signs of cracking at the mount bolts. 
     The furnaces each backed up to the long pit containing the ingot-mold conveyor At the furnace end.  At the back of each furnace was a tap hole that was plugged by a cone-shaped sandcore, which could withstand the heat but could easily be chiseled out when it was time to tap the furnace.  Clarence used a hammer and chisel to pound and dig a hole through the sandcore.  Molten aluminum, opaque as milk but bright silverish orange and well above the 1800-degree Farenheit freezing point, trickled out of the tap hole.  It ran down concrete-lined open iron channels through a geared starwheel that would distribute it evenly and directly to the molds, not allowing any to escape between the molds into the pit below.  Clarence picked at the hole until the volume and flow of metal was to his liking.  Froggy, a local boy with just enough brainstem activity left over from breathing and dressing himself to get by in the world, had drawn the assignment of skimming the final bits of dirt and slag from ingots before they froze solid at the other end of the conveyor.  Nobody could explain to Froggy that sweatbox ingots went right back into the furnace, were full of dirt anyway, and didn’t need skimming, but there he was in his Skinner-box world doing what he was trained to do.  He also controlled the speed of the conveyor, making sure the molds didn’t overflow or underfill.  A steady trickle of water from overhead pipes cooled the ingots somewhat (sometimes cracking the concrete molds when the hotter alloys were tapped) as they moved toward the stacking end.
    Harbaugh was the other young guy on the 3 – 11, and he and I stacked first, as Siebold was getting old and was excused from stacking.  Harbaugh pried the now-solid ingots from the molds with a chisel tip, using a hammer on the chisel for sticky ingots.  The ingots, solid but still hot enough to cause bad burns and  melt rubber bootsoles, landed on a rack, where I picked them up with a short straightbladed shovel and flipped them onto the stack.  The stacking frame was two small parallel 3-ft i-beams on the floor and two sheet iron walls, about 3 feet high.  One wall was welded along the length of one beam, and the other wall formed a corner with the first, perpendicular to the beams.   The 20-pound ingots were shaped in a trapezoidal cross section such that they could be stacked in rows of 8, every other one upside down.  The first row would lay north-south, the second east-west, and so on up to 10 or 12 rows. I finished my stack and Harbaugh hollered “Towmotor!” - his south  central Pennsylvania take on what to call a forklift came out more like “towmoor”.  The normal pavlovian response was for Davey, the co-owner’s lazy slug of an offspring, to amble on out from the break room, fire up the forklift and haul the stack away.  If Davey was on break or making the scene with a magazine somewhere, it would be up to us.  Timing was critical, since the conveyor relentlessly kept serving up ingots on the rack.  Harbaugh said “fucker ain’t coming” and hopped up in the seat and put the forklift in gear.  Davey rounded the corner and  said “the fuck offa there” – always trying to join in the standard blue collar repartee, thinking he was “one of the guys” and always falling just a couple light years short.  Harbaugh laid a big hocker on the seat as he hopped down and Davey, oblivious,  hunkered down into the seat.  I said, “think it’s OK to get these things out of our way, for crying the fuck out loud?” and Davey flipped me off.  Then it was my turn to pry and Harbaugh’s to stack. 6 stacks later (about 4 tons) we finished out our 3 man stacking rotation and D-furnace was tapped out.  The bigger furnaces held up to 48,000 pounds of metal, taking 2 – 3 shifts to fill and almost an entire shift to tap.  Froggy slowed the conveyor and Clarence plugged the taphole with a sandcore to stop the last trickle of aluminum.    
     Back up in the break room Roy, Sammy, and Pap Crites sat smoking or chewing. Siebolt, a walking zombie, had left for an 8-hour shift driving a truck at a “grit mill”, which I think was a quarry.  Harbaugh was off somewhere making Davey’s life even more miserable than his maker had conspired for him.  Pap Crites was more of an honorary employee than anything else, his useful years well behind him.  He generally held forth as the keeper of foundryman’s lore in the breakroom, and liked to propound on the state of the planet and pretty much let everyone know exactly where they were full of shit, regardless of the topic at hand.  He had years before somehow gotten his legs pinned and crushed under the starwheel on the ingot mold conveyor.  A year later he returned to the breakroom but rarely to work.  The owner and manager no doubt figured paying for his presence was cheaper than a workers comp settlement; and he much would rather have been with his people than laying around at home.
     Roy and Sammy were the ones who had conspired to give me my nickname. Roy was an aging country feller with a gigantic pot gut, stringy short little legs which could only muster a shuffling gait on good days, and a huge appetite for beer.  He had big bassett hound eyes and always wore a grimy ball cap tilted way back on his head.  He always had trouble remembering names, and started calling me “Slim”.  Sam was a 6′5″ Jamaican with a constant and brilliant smile – made even more so on bonus week when he got his large gold front tooth out of hock – who had been a migrant worker and ended up here as he worked on his GED, or as he called it in that syncopated reggae lilt, “my graddiat deploomer from high school”.  My nickname was something that I can’t quite phonetically spell, but imagine a giant smiley Jamaican imitating a boozy hilljack saying the word “Slim” and you’re close: slee-um.
     Roy blew up A-furnace one evening.  It was a recycling foundry, and the furnaces were stocked with all kinds of raw materials: building siding, military plate armor, lathe turnings, 2000-pound bales of crushed beer cans or used license plates, industrial cast aluminum engine blocks or cylinders… anything that was aluminum would go in the well of the furnace.  Oilburners would heat it to melting back in the enclosed heel.  The furnacetender would throw shovelfulls of flux (like sand) or mag flux (like flour) and work it back and forth with long iron hoes.  Compressed air blown through iron tubes would roil and stir the mixture and the flux would float the dirt and slag in a glowing mess to the top.  We used longhandled iron skimmers to scoop the lava-like slag into small hoppers, using the edge of the furnace well as a fulcrum.  Once the surface of the silver-orange pond of molten slop was clean we would lean over it with long iron rakes and dredge the bottom, pulling up baling wire, piston rings, and assorted other iron or steel or stainless steel flotsam that was unacceptable over certain tolerances, depending on the alloy.  This debris would later be weighed, dumped into wood-slatted crates usually labelled “staynels stell” or “irne”, and shipped off to other foundries that dealt with those kinds of metal.  Anyway, about Roy and his big explosion: His job was to drive a forklift carrying big hoppers of raw materials up to the well of the furnace and dump them in, making sure he did it slowly enough so as not to splash hot liquid metal out of the well and not to freeze up the furnace.  One winter evening the hefty little jackpine savage took his forklift and picked up a hopper that had been sitting outside.  The drainholes in the bottom had clogged and unknown to Roy or anybody else, there was a 1 by 3 by 3 foot chunk of solid ice in the bottom, under the ton of lathe turnings. Lathe turnings didn’t freeze up the furnace or splash, so usually Roy just dumped them right in.   This time though, the iceberg hit the molten metal and pretty much vaporized in that single instant, creating the loudest percussive sound I have ever heard.   Ka-WHUMPH!!! accompanied a burst of steam, followed immediately by an immense explosion.  The ice made a splash like the one real husky kid at the swimming pool that can always soak the lifeguard with his cannonball, only the mist that hung in the air from this splash was a hellish concoction of molten metal, slag, steam and smoke.  Years of accumulated dust and grit were jarred loose from every surface in the room, and hung in the air like a dark viscous cloud.  The redhot glow of the furnaces through this miasma made me think of Mt. St. Helens or Pompeii, or Hell.  At first I couldn’t hear anything exept my ears ringing and could only take in the scene in a spooky silence.  The hood and ductwork over the furnace that led to the filter room were torn apart; a gaping jagged hole was blown in the corrugated ceiling 25 feet above; dust, cardboard and anything else flammable in a 30 foot radius around the furnace was  burning; and a 2100-degree aluminum slick spread out from the well.  Then noticed Sam, outside the back bay door, helplessly leaning against the wall, clutching his gut. 
     I ran over to Sam first, and saw that he was shaking.  He wasn’t hurt though, he was just laughing his ass off.  “Dot fucker, he ron like Jesse Owen”, pronouncing it “Ho-wen”, he giggled, pointing to Roy, who with his stumpy little legs and hyperdeveloped beer muscles, had indeed cleared the large bay door and staging yard, crossed the parking lot and was quickly attaining the fence.  By the time the rest of the shift made the run from the breakroom to  the furnaceroom, every one of those old boys on the furnaces was standing with his back to the holocaust and was facing Roy, who backed up against the fence and stared wide-eyed at the mess he had narrowly avoided, muttering “ohhh shee-it…gawdawful dammit!”  Clarence glowered from under the wide brim of his crusher, and then shifted the soggy cheroot, Clint Eastwood-style, to the other side of his mouf without touching it.  “You boys clean this shit up. Roy, you been trainin for the ‘lympics? Haw, haw…”  “No, just havin a god damn heart attack is all.”
     Froggy, in the background, was  recapping the situation for the latecomers, gesturing wildly. “Well the luminum went up like that there, and we knowed she was gonna blow, and sure nough the furnace hood buckled like that there, an Roy lit out like that there, an’…”  Harbaugh interrupted, his arm around Froggy’s shoulder, “Froggy, why don’t you just try shettin the fuck up a while?”
     The sirens got louder.  The volunteer fire station 3/4 of a mile down the road had not been called but they had heard the blast.  After they checked out the damage they left, and on their way out I heard one of them mutter, “these fuckers screwed up a hell of a pinochle meld”.

…

If you are ever in Gettysburg, PA, head south out of town on Rt. 15.  You will drive through a couple of miles of a scenic and haunting stretch of road, right smack through the middle of where Pickett’s charge took place during the Civil War.  Just south of the battlefield there is (or was) a conference center on the left; and just south of that there are two gravel drives that are chained and padlocked.  These lead to the former site of Gettysburg Foundry Specialties, which was in operation until the mid 1980’s or so.  It is now an EPA Superfund cleanup site.

Electric heat

When we lit out with our dog Penny tonight down First Avenue after sunset, there was just a faint hint of light in the western sky.  Sultry and warm, the air was still. A dark purple-gray wedge of cloud stretched from the horizon.  It jutted out oblong toward us, with a clean, almost parabolic arc on its northern and leading eastern edges; frayed and tattered on its southern edges.  In a clear pocket of sky to the left, a thin but vivid sliver of new moon was visible just above the horizon.  To the east we could make out stars very dimly above the yellowish glow of the Columbus skyline.  We began to see streaks and flashes of lightning in and behind the cloudbank, and far off to the north and south.  The only sounds though, were the hiss and chirp and buzz and drone of late summer cicadas, locusts and crickets; and the incidental distant traffic sounds from the interstate.  The lighting steadily increased in frequency and duration as the tattered southern fringes of the cloudbank moved to obscure the thin moon, but still there was no hint of thunder.  As we rounded the corner of Cambridge Avenue and headed toward the Tarpy woods, we thought we heard storm sirens very faintly in the distance.  It was difficult at times to distinguish the steady keening wail of the sirens above the high-pitched tire whine from the semis on the interstate, but at other times it was unmistakeable.  Occasionally there was a light puff of breeze that would bring with it the smell of rain in a barely noticeable trace, but it was just a tease.  We thought (and partly hoped) it would really let go and start in earnest, but the sky just kept gathering in a patient and slow crescendo, with all the action too high or too far away to be a real threat.  Or promise.

The Tarpy woods at night were infused with a barely discernible amber glow, from the reflection of the Columbus skyline off the low thick clouds.  The last few nights I have been there, it has been later at night after the moon has set, and clearer overhead, and therefore much darker.  Under the thicker parts of the canopy we can make out the path partly through the muscle memory of having made the walk hundreds of times previously, and partly because of the bluish strobe-like flashes from lightning far overhead.  Penny usually stays a little closer at night, but she will still dash off through the woods at a sprint when a critter dares her to.  Jagged and arhythmic, at times the flashes of light persisted long enough to cast the trees in pale jittery stark relief against blue-black shadows.  Still, no sound except the night insects and the distant freeway and the faint steady welling wail of the sirens.  The path winds through a section where something viny and thick like kudzu has overgrown everything and obscured almost all the light.  There is an arch-shaped opening like a doorway into an open meadow.  Once or twice a year, the clearing is mowed down to stubble, but now the path winds through thick, high thistle and weeds.  There is a stretch of what looks like Queen Anne’s lace, and in the blue-white flashes of light you could make out the pale white flowering tops of the plants but not the stems, making it look like they were suspended in mid-air, hovering three to five feet off the ground.  We were still early enough to see the last of the evening’s lightning bugs against the woods surrounding the clearing.  The path loops briefly through a very dense thicket which we navigate almost purely by memory, helped by the faint amount of light that gets through.  Penny has her own path through here, maybe part of a the network of game trails too low for people to navigate.  She has a trick of disappearing into the woods at full speed and then showing up a few seconds later from a completely different direction.  We love it when she does that.  We crossed the clearing to retrace the path back through the woods.  From this angle the arched opening is black against the solid wall of the thick viny kudzu. 

As we got back to the edge of the woods we finally heard the first faint rumble of thunder, far off and barely noticeable over the other night sounds. The lightning still came frequently, straight overhead now and far off to both the north and the south.  We went down Lincoln Avenue and then Goodale, and then up the steep short section of Elmwood at a pace to give our legs a little bit of work.  At one point Penny made a reckless sprint across the street toward a raccoon that was poking out of a rain sewer, so she had to go back on her leash.  As we rounded the last corner, back onto First Avenue, we could very briefly make out the pouring edge of the Big Dipper through a clearing in the clouds.  And still, the lightning streaks and flashes continued.  It would have been a poetic ending had the rain started splatting in big fat drops on the street just as we ended the home stretch, but no such luck.  I went out to the front porch with my guitar for about a half hour to wait for the rain, but it did not come, and hasn’t come yet.  From the porch swing a couple of times I saw flashes of lightning far off to the north at the same time I saw streaks of lightning from the south reflected in the windows and lighting up the wall of the apartment building across the street. 

While on the porch I did watch a big fat spider start a huge project involving the chain of the porch swing and the tapered column of the porch.  I know I will have to relocate the spider before my wife or stepdaughter see it, but I want to see its finished work in the sunlight tomorrow morning.  If it’s still not raining.

Plate on a stick

Sometimes I feel like those jugglers they used to have on the Ed Sullivan show or the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, who would have a bunch of pointy dowel rods sticking up in the air, on which they would spin plates.  You know the guys…by the time they get the 10th or 15th plate started spinning the first one starts wobbling so they race back to it, jiggle the stick to apply centrifugal force and stabilize it, then race back to start number 11 or 16, then race back to correct any other wobblers, and so forth and so on, all to the accompaniment of that Aram Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance, which is now a tune wedgie stuck in my head, especially that god damn trombone part (the descending bwaahwaah! part right after all the dah-yitditditditditditdit parts, by the way), thank you very much Armenia or whomever gave him that idea.  I used to play a trombone, so I know.  Anyway, sometimes I feel like those guys, even after I think it through and realize that I really only have a small number of figurative plates, and (to beat the everloving snot out of the analogy) they’re made of plastic anyway so they won’t break if they fall off, and even if they do, so what, is Ed’s ghost going to appear and hassle me because it’s not such a rilly big shew after all??

So I was on that trip with my kids between Friday and Tuesday, and I kept thinking I should be keeping up with work-related email or personal email or this thing right here, or figuring out the AC and other home repairs, or what-have-you, but I kept ending up relaxing or cracking wise or doing stuff with my kids, instead.  That didn’t keep all that other crap out of my head.  Mostly, though, the plastic plates all landed on a Nerf floor and didn’t break, again figuratively.  Fucking trombones.

In medias res

There doesn’t have to be a narrative arc to these things; I finally figured that out.  I’m new at this.  Jumping right in:

I have some inspirational crap on my cube wall and desk at work.  I didn’t festoon the everloving shit out of the place–no pith or depth, no exhortations or testimonials, and fer chrissakes no posters of cats eternally being encouraged to “hang in there”, although I think that picture would be more effective if there were some menacing dude with a hockey mask and a blood-and-fur-matted chainsaw in the background–it is just couple of tattered pictures that have been in my possession since college, one other picture, and a figurine among all the other crap on my walls and desk.

Albert and Abe usually end up, in my mind anyway, doing some kind of exasperated face-palm gesture in reaction to whatever fresh outrage I have perpetrated against the virtues they represent.  Sometimes I even think they look at each other and whisper under their breath, things like “what a lying sack” (Abe) or “What a dumbass” (Albert)  Buddha mostly doesn’t let things bother him, but I think even he rolls his eyes and shakes his head (while muttering some real sarcastic zen koan, the answer to which I would never “get” in a million years) once in a while.  And the other guy usually speaks right to my heart, which usually doesn’t listen.

Albert and Abe are postcard-sized portraits, and the Buddha is a small bronze statue who basks serenely in the pale blue glow of my computer monitor.  The other guy is a picture I found on the internet.  These iconic figures are there to remind me of various things:  to try to be smart, and honest, and peaceful, when dealing with whatever comes up at work.  Note that I did not assert that I AM any of those things…if I were, I would not need the pictures and statues to remind me.  Truth be told, I am more like the other guy.

So, Albert:

 
And Abe:

 
And the other guy, whose advice I never take, even when I should:

 

Hey, look at me, with no madd formatting skillz and sucking at this shit right out of the gate!  Yay!

Anyway, what I will strive for in this endeavor is what I hope I have gotten by keeping that Abe and that Albert around for so many years:  some measure of honesty, and of intelligence, in what I offer.  And hopefully some of what Buddha and the nice cuppa guy in the other picture represent.  And prolly some other stuff, too; I just don’t know what, yet.  My voice is not the product of an orderly mind.  I have strewn snippets of prose and fiction and commentary and fragments of phrases, by the hundreds: across hard drives, jump drives, My Documents folders on dead computers in the basement under the boxes of old video game consoles, and in composition binders, spiral notebooks and miscellaneous scraps of paper.  Some of that stuff may well end up here over time. 

In the mean time, please bear with me as I adapt my voice and adopt a cadence suitable to this medium.

Like I said, I’m new at this…