Thirsty

Black Power vs. White Trash

After watching the Democratic National Convention last week, and from what I have seen of the Republican National Convention so far, I have, for the first time in a long time, a vague and unfamiliar feeling of–what is this?  Is it optimism? Is it hope?–of guardedly positive anticipation, maybe, that this country will soon be on a new and improved trajectory.  No, scratch that.  I am still too cynical for that.  Maybe what I feel is relief, that the socio-politico-economic mudslide we have been riding will soon come grinding to a halt.  Yeah, that’s it:  Not that things are automatically going to get better once the current presidential outfit is out of office, but that the injury they have done and continue to do to the country will stop being exacerbated.  Like the farmer who comes up out of his storm cellar after an F5 tornado, surveys the flattened wreckage of what used to be his farm and his crops, and says “Look, Ma, ain’t it grand the wind stopped blowin’?”  (To paraphrase Bill W., may mad props always be with his legacy).

Amiable Dunce

My personal political cynicism began in 1980, with the Reagan presidency.  I have tried for years to understand the nearly idolatrous cult of hero-worship that surrounds the Reagan legacy, and I just can’t fathom it.  When it was first announced that he had dementia, part of me felt a little bit sorry for him, but part of me was at the same time screaming in my head “No shit Sherlock!  How did that escape everyone’s notice from 1980 on?? His own biographer had to make his story less vapid by inventing characters and other shit about his life!  Seasoned and intelligent foreign policy insiders called him things like ‘amiable dunce’ and wrote books about him called ‘Sleepwalking Through History’, for god’s sake!”  And his defenders assert that he surrounded himself with good people.  And I wonder to them “Who, exactly?”  James Watt was a lawyer for strip miners, who was put in charge of Interior, which put him in charge of our natural resources.  When questioned about global warming, his response was “wear more sunscreen”  Ray Donovan, who dodged questions about legal ties to mob figures, was in charge of Labor.  Nice fit.  And after the inquiry, he asked “Where do I go to get my reputation back?”, to which the logical response should have been “Dude, you work for Reagan! What fucking reputation are you referring to?!?”  And Alexander ‘I am in charge! My finger is on the button, and to hell with rules of succession!’ Haig, whose closet ambitions were laid bare during the drama after the assassination attempt.  And various gunsels, thugs, miscreants and ne’er-do-wells like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and William Casey and Ollie North and Robert McFarlane and John Negroponte and Caspar Weinberger and multiple felons Ollie North and John Poindexter, all of whom basically said fuck the constitution, we’ll do what we want.  Which they did, in the Iran-Contra affair (Hey! Let’s illegally sell these weapons to Iran through Isreal, and then secretly use the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, in DIRECT VIOLATION OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION!  C’mon, it’ll be fun!!), the illegal war in Grenada, the illegal war on working people (firing the air traffic controllers), the fuck-the-poor trickle-down Reaganomic policy (which by the way was ultimately discredited by its own architect), the October Surprise (which almost fucked Jimmy Carter out of a legacy altogether, had he not been born with more character and integrity and intelligence in his little pinkie  (and unfortunately far less cutthroat political savvy) than everyone in every Reagan and Bush administration put together had, ever).

He was a god damn puppet!

This is the crowd that surrounded Reagan, cynically taking advantage of his advancing feeblemindedness and decrepitude to advance their megalomaniacal agendas.  And his defenders assert that he was the right man for the times, and I wonder to them “What part, exactly?  The tripling of the national debt? The quadrupling of the national deficit? The subverting of the Constitution, which that smug bastard North had the unmitigated gall to brag about, in front of Congress?  The fact that the U.S. went from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation by the time he was done? No, really, which thing do you like about his legacy?”   And they mutter something about the fall of communism.  Which only proves that Mikhail Gorbachev was as much of a sucker for the Reagan charisma as his other worshipers are.  Even so, the Soviet Union’s collapse had as much to do with the expense of (and the resulting social disillusionment of the population, due to) the Soviets’ prolonged military misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Southeast Asia (holy shit! sound familiar, anyone?) as with some bellicose orangutan from the West showing its red ass about communism.

Like a cross between Mr. Rogers, Don Knotts, and some Macchiavellian nightmare…

My cynicism continued through the G.H.W. Bush years, which were thankfully cut short when he threw ‘92 to the Dems because he had to issue first term pardons to the Iran Contra crowd, which would have basically been political suicide had he continued to be president after that.  No, really.  He would never have been able to survive the scrutiny and investigations of that little saga of corruption and subversion, along with the probing of his role (and likely exploitation of CIA connections) in the October Surprise, that helped get him and Reagan into office to begin with.

Clinton

We did have what the Onion called “our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity…characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas” during which Republicans demonstrated a) a willingness to spend $40 million investigating secret blowjobs, and b) that there were really no depths to their venality, and their desire to undermine any foreign or domestic policy achievement he ever tried to make.  They just couldn’t fucking stand that his shit worked, and theirs didn’t.  It drove them fucking nuts, which was fun and a little bit sickening to watch  as it played out on the national stage.

What the hell were we thinking?

Along came W., which got my cynicism kicked into full gear.  In 2000, I thought that the best case was, we had an affable goofball, a slaphappy windbag, a country-club chucklehead, who if not for an accident of birth and the backing of a family who would stop at NOTHING to grab and maintain political power, would have aspired to maybe, at the most, be qualified to be regional manager of some “84 Lumber” stores, with the politial skills to lead local chapter of the Kiwanis or Rotary International.  He brought all this heavy-handed religiosity to the table, along with a great whopping shitload of absolute ignorance.  I used to get involved in these epic on-line debates and discussions about the role of religion in government, with a group of political and religious conservatives.  Both sides and many nuances in between would chime in, but sometimes after carefully debunking “Christian Nation” myth by documenting the Deism of the founding fathers, and their specific intent NOT to make this a Christian Nation;  I would invariably end up trotting out ridiculously inarticulate shit like “No fucking way our country was founded on those principles!  Our country was founded by people getting on little wooden boats and sailing the fuck AWAY from those principles!”  And then I would sputter on my keyboard and wait for my neck veins to subside.

I got what what-do-you-call-it, “outrage fatigue”, along about year 5 1/2 of the current Bush regime.  I mean, was that really the best we could do?  And was that the best the Dems could do, to counter it?  Really?  Al Gore is honorable and well-intentioned, but he allowed the media to steamroll him with the Love Canal and Love Story and inventing the internet stories.  They were–and are–all easily debunkable lies, but NO ONE EVER BOTHERED TO PUSH BACK! (fwiw:  Tim Berners-Lee, who actually sort of did invent the world wide web, gave Al Gore all due props for the legislative initiatives that provided for its funding and creation.  If anyone would actually bother to go back and read Gore’s remarks IN THE CONTEXT IN WHICH THEY WERE MADE, they would realize that the whole claim to inventing the internet story is a hoax, originated and perpetrated by the likes of Limbaugh and other screaming douche bags).   And in 2004, the swift boaters succesfully painted John Kerry, more of a war hero than, let’s see, ANYONE in W.’s draft-dodging, military-obligation-shirking, hypocritically-bombastic-jingoism-spewing circle of acquaintances and advisors, as some kind of lying glory-hog.  Again, easily debunkable by the public record, but NO ONE EVER BOTHERED TO PUSH BACK!.  Kerry, brave in combat, showed his fucking belly to a bunch of lying assholes.  That illustrates exactly how Clinton, with all his moral failings, survived (and even thrived) politically, in the toxic political climate that marred his years.  He pushed back, every single time.  Even when he was a) lying, and b) wrong. At least he made the other side fight for their victories.

After we got W. the second time, I sort of had to give up being overtly pissed off about it.  I had to give up the epic lunch-table verbal sparring (I work with a bunch of absolute frothing, Reagan nutsack-licking, W-behavior-justifying-no-matter-how-egregious-and-incompetent-the-freshly-perpetrated-outrage-against-common-sense-and-common-decency, Kool-Aid drinking wing-nuts), and watching shit like Crossfire and the Sunday morning bobble-head shows, and reading shit that would make my blood boil.  Every once in a while I will stump them though, by asking what exactly they are proud of or satisfied with, in regard to W’s legacy.  Hahaha.  But all the same, I came to a kind of resigned acceptance that as a country we get exactly the kind of government we deserve, and if the majority of people vote for it (I KNOW!  THEY DIDN’T! AMONG OTHER IRREGULARITIES AND OUTRAGES AND VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT AND OUTRIGHT FRAUD, THE OWNER OF THE COMPANY THAT MAKES THE GOD DAMN VOTING MACHINES PLEDGED OUT LOUD AND IN PUBLIC THAT HE WOULD DO EVERYTHING IN HIS POWER TO ENSURE THE ELECTION AND RE-ELECTION OF BUSH!  WTF? I MEAN SERIOUSLY!  WHAT.THE.FUCK.QUESTION MARK.EXCLAMATION POINT.  (sigh. deep breath. fuck it. caps lock off.)), then that is what we will be saddled with.   The one remarkable achievement of W’s presidential career is that he successfully pulled off the impossible task of making his father, incompetent boob and bastion of mediocrity that he was, seem like a fucking statesman of genius.  At least, if you grade on the curve.   Note:  I have been a huge fan of the Bush family ever since I found out that their fortune was made by Prescott Bush, who had major holdings and investments in Thyssen Steel and other German industrial concerns that financed and fueled the Nazi rise to power, and that Bush only pulled out when the U.S. froze his assets under the Trading With The Enemy Act in 1942 (THREE YEARS AFTER HITLER BEGAN FUCKING EUROPE, BY THE WAY), and that 60 years later, a civil action for damages was brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave laborers at Auschwitz. Nice fucking family, just the kind of people you want in charge of your country.  Fuckers.

Yeah, yeah.  Whatever.

But this Obama guy, he seems like someone I can get enthusiastic about. Based on nothing more than he seems to be level headed, seems to want the job more than Gore or Kerry ever did, and that he already has more respect and credibility in the rest of the world than W. ever had.  And maybe, just maybe, people are finally realizing that the religio-political conservatism that has influenced and dominated public discourse for a generation, represents a consistently wrong, discredited and dying ideology.   I know, maybe I am just drinking some different flavor of Kool-Aid here.  But I am really fucking thirsty, and have been for too long.

Glen Lake

It has been a couple of weeks, but the awesomeness of that place and that time has not worn off yet.

We got there at dusk:

Our house was about 200 yards from a small park on the lake. 

View from Old Settler

 

Glen Lake

The second day, I took a 15 mile bike ride around Big Glen and Little Glen lake–nice rolling terrain with a couple of good hills.  To me, as a former (slow, Category 5, no USCF credentials) racer, it’s still not really a bike ride unless you get to the point where your heart is beating outside your chest and you’re gasping for breath for prolonged periods.   Another day I rode up Pierce Stocking Drive, which is the scenic route to the Lake Michigan overlook at the Sleeping Bear Dune. 

My kids

Jillian and Ian

Late Monday night a few of us took sleeping bags to a rugged little beach on Lake Michigan and watched the Perseids meteor shower.  If you live in Columbus and it is night right now, go outside and look up.  You will see about 10 stars.  Multiply that by a million, and that is what we had as the backdrop for the meteor shower.  Breathtaking and unbelievably clear.

Tuesday we had another lake day.  We rented a boat and jet ski again.  The really fun part about tubing was having the boat go full throttle and seeing how high me and the tube could go after hitting a small wave.  The the not so fun part was–have I mentioned that I am 6′4″, and 215 (at least so says my scale upstairs, which I like much better than the scale at the doctors office which seems to think that my shoes weigh 7 pounds)?–was the bruised rib from hitting the water at 50 or so mph.  And then there was the wave runner, again.  That was about 10 minutes of gas squandering bliss, followed by a half hour of sitting stalled in the lake waiting for a tow boat, after it started billowing plumes of black smoke from the motor. 

Change of pace the next day… we rented kayaks and paddled on Crystal River, a creek that winds from Glen Lake, through some beautiful and peaceful wetlands, and empties out into Lake Michigan.  We covered about 3 miles of it, at a restful pace.  Nice.

This part of Sleeping Bear Dune is a 450 foot vertical drop to Lake Michigan.  It only takes a few minutes to get to the bottom; less than that if you’re Jillian

We ignored the warnings...

The problem is that what goes down must come up.  It took my wife and I about a 35 minutes to make the ascent.  It took Jillian about 1/2 hour.  Climbing a steep sand hill is the kind of workout you can get from a stair stepper machine at the gym, if you are waist deep in molasses.  Ian, who runs on the track and cross country teams, made it in 8 1/2 minutes.  Li’l bastard.

It is bigger than it looks in the picture

This doesn’t do justice to the view you can get.  To the north, you can see the Manitou Islands, and on the distant horizon, you can just make out Wisconsin on the other side of Lake Michigan.  

Up and down the shore are several miles of rugged and undeveloped lake shore.  There is a “ghost forest” just to the north, which was several acres of dead dried trees, where over the centuries, sand buried a forest and then blew or eroded away, to reveal the dried and bleached remains of the trees.

I want to go back…

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.

Driving day

Friday August 8
My wife and her girls left Thursday night to spend the night with her cousin, who has a farm outside of Toledo. So that meant my kids and I were on the road again…we planned to leave by 8:30 for what Mapquest said was a 7 hour 25 minute drive.  When we plan to leave by 8:30, that usually means we are going to leave at some point during that same calendar day. It was closer to 10:30 by the time we hit the city limits outbound. But we did manage to cram a 7 1/2 hour drive into a 10 1/2 hour ordeal.  We ended up with a bastardized hybrid of Mapquest, AAA (A.A., eh?) and directions some retired truck driver gave my wife when she was at her cousin’s.

The first highlight was that we met up with my wife and her girls at a bead store near Toledo.  I don’t know why.  It was just off the freeway, and one of them had a burning need to lay in some supplies for bead-related crafts.  Jillian set off to look at the goods, and when Ian and I walked in, a nice birdlike lady approached us and chirped “Are you beaders?”  First of all, I didn’t even know that was a verb, and second of all, my default setting is sarcasm.  But fortunately, before I responded “Holy shit, do you really think that when people see me walking down the street, one of the first things that they think of is ‘I’ll bet that guy beads’?  Because if so, I am going down the street to my wife’s cousin’s barn and hang myself from the effin’ rafters…”, my internal editor kicked in and I gestured over to where the girls were poring over the goods, and said “I’m with them” instead.  Whew, close call. 

I think that Ian sensed the testosterone depletion inherent in those types of stores; he came up to me and said in all deadpan seriousness, “Can we please go?  I’m getting an urge to go to Pottery Barn next for decorating ideas”.  I told him that if we needed to, we could go to a Tractor Supply and buy some chainsaw oil, or a trailer hitch, if that would help.

Eventually headed north, through the western part of lower Michigan.  Passed through some beautiful and rugged terrain in the Manistee National Forest, and the Pere Marquette River watershed.

Back! From a vacation rental with no internet connectivity…

Got back late yesterday…8 day trip to Glen Lake, MI. with my wife and four of our kids, my brother and one of his sons, my sister and her husband and the cutest pair of twin 3 year olds anyone has ever seen in the history of the entire world, and my parents.  That’s right, 14 people (15 the night my brother’s gf stayed over) in a house designed for about half that many.  It looked bigger in the pictures. 

We had a great time, the highlights of which I plan to completely bore the shit out of you with, for a couple of posts.

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.

The “F” Word…

Fuck!

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.

On the road again…

I have another vacation to look forward to next week.  It is a real one, the kind that you plan for and make reservations and formulate intentions to be specific places at agreed-upon times.  There is even a AAA Trip Tik involved.  (There is a stubborn and stupid habit in my brain that requires it to silently blurt out a lame recurring mental punchline or play on words whenever, and that means EVERY SINGLE F*&%*@ING TIME!, it encounters certain trigger words or phrases.  One of those triggers is AAA.  And what my STUPID brain does in this case, is to think of a Canadian guy working at a detox, making a referral to a patient to attend a 12-step meeting:  “A.A., eh?”  And then because this attendant guy is a little impatient, and the detox client is sort of a recidivist with a short attention span, sometimes he has to say something to get the guy’s attention:  “Hey! A.A., eh?”, only he says it kind of like Fonzie would, dropping the H.  I know. Just fucking pathetic.  Another one of those triggers is the local hockey team, the Columbus Blue Jackets; and the result is that someone in this scenario approaches the kiosk at the arena that sells Blue Jackets logo garments saying shit like “Got any blue Blue Jackets jackets?  Gimme a blue Blue Jackets jacket!”, talking real fast and repeating himself. Sometimes with that one, the proprietor of the kiosk is named Jack.  There are also orders for “red Blue Jackets pants” on the bad days. <Sigh>).

This trip is in contrast to the make-it-up-as-you-go-along road trip I took with my kids earlier this summer.  I keep saying kids like they are a herd of goats or something; even though they are 20 and 16, I don’t know what else to call them.  My wife and two of her ki-, uh, youngsters are going too (She has 5 altogether, but only two still living at home).  There were several years, right after we got married, where 8 of us (her oldest was out of the house by the time we got married) would load up into two cars and drive down to the beach at Pawley’s Island, S.C. for a week.  We had some incredibly fun and rewarding times, but usually by the end of the week I would be way ready to get back to work, so I could get some rest. 

This will be the first time in way too long that my wife and I have been on the same vacation at the same time, so we are both really looking forward to it.  It will be at a lake–Glenn Lake, or maybe Lake Glenn–near Traverse City, MI.  The big unkown about this trip is that we are going to be inhabiting a gigantic house that will also contain my parents, my brother and one or two of his family, my sister and her husband and their 3 year old twins.  If I counted right, that is possibly 15 people, related by blood and marriage, under the same roof.  By my further calculations, that is 4 heads of households, plus 3 people who think they are, in one house.  I don’t say that with dread. On the contrary, I think it will be fun.  But I will say this:  if anyone does that sneaky trick where they use all but about 2 tablespoons of Corn Chex and then return the box to the pantry, just so they can avoid going to the trouble of pitching the liner bag and flattening the cardboard for recycling, there will be some serious passive-aggressive consequences to pay…

Point/Counterpoint

So finally, here is my Operation Feed point-counterpoint:
Point:  Operation Feed sucks!

(excerpted from a rant I wrote a couple years ago, regarding the setup of a bunch of carnival-like team-building crap to usher in the op feed campaign):
This morning the “Good Morning Associates” guy blasted something on the p.a.  about the aroma of popcorn signifying the onslaught of Operation Feed activities.  Sure enough, a peek out the front windows confirms that the embarrassment (at least for anyone with a moderate sense of irony) has begun.  The tricycle street sprint summer nationals course is set up, as is a large inflatable Jupiter Jump-like apparatus that has been “tagged” on the side with a pictograph of a cloying cartoon elephant, as are all the other various accoutrements of such an extravagantly moronic endeavor.  Let’s think about Operation Feed for a moment, shall we?  Getting past the most egregious symbol of ironic stupidity, the pie toss—our ex-mayor, acting on behalf of the corporate legal staff, throwing comestibles *prepared just for the occasion* into the faces of other gainfully employed (and presumably not homeless nor hungry) coworkers—and moving right on to the subtler examples of cluelessness I witnessed this morning: a heavyset woman, with whom I shared an elevator, huffing with the exertion of trundling her corpulent self from clear over at the cafeteria, was toting two cafeteria to-go plates (one laden with belgian waffles, the other with a goddamn rasher of bacon and two small tubs overflowing with butter and syrup) and a 20 ounce bottle of soda.   The “congestive heart failure platter” was on special this morning, I see.   Tomorrow’s blue plate is the “Bury the needle on the god damn sphygmomanometer, why dontcha, Special”.   And then there were the two immense phocine people slaunched over a bench in the atrium, sitting splay-legged and helplessly recumbent amid a bunch of popcorn that had spilled out onto their clothes and the floor as they plunged their flaccid flippers into the bags and slammed handfuls of the deep-fried, chemical-saturated grain into their gaping maws.  As I glanced over they were each sucking the last trace of rancid salty gelatinous grease from a chubby finger, emitting squishy popping sounds not unlike those you hear when stirring a bowl of macaroni and cheese.  Yum.  You missed a kernel.  Make sure you get your daily quota of FDA Yellow #5 there.  Operation Feed apparently means you Feed your own gut-slung body with enough food for a third-world family of 12 to subsist on, then maybe you get one of those fat-sucking Operations when even the big-boy pants feel a little snug.   Some skinny kid from Franklinton with hunger pangs and dull eyes thanks you from the bottom of his heart.

Take a deep breath…

Counterpoint:  Operation Feed rocks.
I have volunteered at the Food Bank several times and have seen first hand what an impressive and remarkable operation it is. Even those volunteers whose primary motive is just to duck out of work for a couple of hours, end up doing a lot of heavy lifting.  Our company provides 34% of the meals and one out of every 4 volunteers for the Mid Ohio Food Bank, and is responsible for about 620,000 meals per year to hungry people in 6 counties.  So even though we do this partly by stuffing our own faces, taking the slim profit margins from food sales, and donating it to the Food Bank, that is pretty damned impressive.  So there.

Also–the department I work in has an Operation Feed pantry that is, to make up a statistic and a category on the spot, in the top .0000001% of all Operation Feed pantries in the western hemisphere.  I have seen the others.  A conference room table holding a pathetic array of granola bars next to a Dixie cup half full of loose change is not an op feed pantry, Marketing Department!  And you, over in HR?  What the hell is up with warm diet Fresca?  Get out of my sight!  In contrast, we have an entire kitchenette-like enclave that is literally brimming, chock full, of snackety and drinkety goodness.  We are in a new building two city blocks from the either one of the cafeterias where I work, so people flock from other floors in our building to marvel at the sheer magnitude of choices available.  We are even considering a full time pantry monitor to keep the gawkers and looky-loos from impeding the traffic flow and fucking with the feng shui.  The previous sentence is not in the least bit true.  But we do provide this veritable cornucopia of gastronomically delectable comestibles by making periodic trips–during work hours!–to haul the stuff back from Sam’s Club, by the pallet-load.  And that means mid-day road trips with Patti, Jason, Jamie and/or Conrad (depending on who’s available and whatnot), who are among the finest and most fun coworkers you could want to spend the time with …  So put that in your pipe and smoke it, hunger!