is absence a form of peace

It was a soup spoon, the kind the cafeteria lady used to pass out generous portions to the varieties of boys and girls that line up before her every day. Called in some somewhat arbitrary order of the day. 

The idea really hadn't crossed his mind until he saw it sitting in the washroom sink one day.

"This is gonna suck." With a rough estimate of where his heart was, he jabbed the spoon into his chest and scooped it out like grabbing steaming, chunky ice cream. Never one to waste resources, he dropped it into a plastic bag to give to the dog. The next day, he limped outside with a wad of towelling sticking out of his chest, the dog ran over, did a circle, arced the funny hunch of an animal in an uncompromising position, and made a wet pile of shit, full of bloody remnant which would become earth and have an opportunity to be beautiful in some space but not his.

Sometime around solsitice.

The bar counter was stone to a high polish and every facet of the space felt like the most reasonable response to civilized space and just made one feel better. They were central to their story. Married almost 11 years and content. They talked about nothing and everything and perhaps things could have been better and paths could have been different but they were on one together and nothing would change that and it was as it should have been.

God is the fluid moment.

We were sitting on the floor, backs leaning against the wall looking around at a very fashionable show. He, Will, was a former student and his brother had a video release that night and I came out just because.

Since then, the violence has gotten worse and the message clearer. These people are fighting someone's fight. They are doing it to incite disruption and those in the seat are trying to expand their power and get it held in place. They are putting themselves in for a hostile situation and that is rather unnerving. Its hard to concentrate when I don't have a set story to tell. It's a challenge. Everything is being thrown in a light and the only part I do like is seeing the caring that so many of us have for each other.

Sometimes I feel these are transmissions to some place, beacons of how we are. Raising a child in a world on fire from our filth and greed is a bit of hopelessness. Many do more with less, though.
What is my motivation in writing and why should I even care? For now, I have to set goals for me to reach and ones that are valuable. Getting enough written generate any length of thing is the goal.

What do I lose without that vulnerability? It's a weakness and I guess it will always be there and I will just need to be aware of it when I start to see it. We grow to form new uglinesses that need to be recognized.
It's a pain that will be there, like the one where I cut my finger....

Stop bitching and fix what's broke. :In Progress

Frank taught me to weld. . He threw a few pieces over, stuck them together, handed me the welding gun, strutted around the shop, and smoked a cigarette and that was that. Within a few weeks, Frank either moved to a different job or got fired or quit and so it was just Neil and I.
          Neil was the first person to really teach me much of anything in the shop and I still don't know if I have ever seen someone more capable at throwing metal together. Neil was country. He talked about his dad hunting moles by shooting dynamite and had a rope for a belt. He would go down to somewhere in Mississippi during the weekends and get tore up with the wild hill country folks.  Everyone could see how smart and talented he was but dude was an early drunk and had that general air of a fuck up. Just the right person for me to emulate.
         Though I grew up in a blacksmith shop, I did not really start doing steel work until I turned 18 and could work in the shop at Keeler Iron Works.




Rob would bring a set of drawings for the catwalks and then our two groups would split up which ones we were doing. We worked as teams across from each other. The angle iron we needed was bundled on a set of horses between us . We would flip of two pieces, one for each long side of the catwalk, measure them and then cut them down with a torch. I will never be good with a blow torch but was plenty capable for this type of work. While one of us did that, the other started gathering end pieces and flatbar cross pieces.
If you ever look up at your standard interstate billboard and see how it is built, you will see walkways go around for the lower part of the outside, as well as ones that run through the inside. On the stacked sign, there could also be upper catwalks. If a sign is a 14x48, then the walkways run the 48 foot length. Many of the signs were two sided, either a back to back or a V. We didn't build 50 foot long sections, the longest were usually 20 feet. The frames where made from angle iron, either 4x3x1/4 or 3x3x1/4. Angle iron is has a profile of an L. It is one of the most common structural shapes around because it is a useful shape for building and simple. One end would be clamped to a horse and that would be where we would pull our measurements from. The two sides would squared up and then tacked down. The other end would be measured in place and then tackled down. We would weld up the inside of the frame and then lay down the expanded metal. Expanded metal is that open grating that will catch on anything and will slice your hands wide open if you are not wearing gloves. You have to maneuver it like a 6 foot metal springy noodle. There is a method to picking them up off the stack and the sooner one learns it, the better. When I started, we were working with a bunch of galvanized expanded metal and that is worse in every way. Galvanized steel has been hot dipped in zinc so it can handle weather better than painted. I have never been to the galvanizer but I gather that is a shop you work at when you can't function most anywhere else. My experience with the stuff was always awful. Welding melts the zinc and pops hot fire everywhere and fills your welding vision with toxic fumes. The best way to get through that is to set your welder on max hot and burn straight through it. I would crave milk when I got home. It counteracts the zinc somehow. The shop did supply us with respirators but it was 95 in the shade so we wore the minimum of protection like the dumb men we were.
Once the sheets were set, we would put pieces of flatbar across the walkway where two sheets met. We would then tack down the expanded metal, putting a weld every 4-5 spaces down the sides and all across the ends. Neil liked to divide the walk in half, he would start at his end and stop halfway down. No matter how fast I could do my part, he would still finish his part.
After these were welded in, we flipped the catwalk over. He had no patience for waiting for the crane so we did it mostly by hand. After some time, we worked really well as a team and could flip one in a breeze, weld up the back side and then use the crane to stack it in the door so Zeke could come get the stack and spread it out for quality control and painting.
After a few weeks, we got to be plenty fast and mistake free. Neil would then spend as much time as possible making grills. The shop let you use scrap for personal projects and making smokers was the thing to do. Pitbull made the coolest one that looked like a pitbull, big Wes made a big trailer one, and Neil made a bunch. He would scrounge up parts from dumpster and scrap piles and while I finished up welding my half (remember, he was fast) he would assemble it on the floor beneath the catwalk. He would have that done before the day was over, along with getting his share of the work done. Not only was it fast, but it was right.
Periodically, Zeke would come flying in on his forklift with a catwalk and crow about us fucking up or Rob, the foreman, would be frantic to get us to slot a hole or cut it shorter so he could load his trailer and send out the sign.
I worked with these men and a several others and they were influential in a stage of my life but I know now more than ever that I really only knew them through work and periodically getting drunk together away from work. That being said, we often show our most pragmatic and effective selves at work so the good lessons were valuable. One thing that I have always recognized is that you can always learn something from someone and it helps if you can identify what they do best and pay attention.
Neil got made stuff fast and right. The speed came mostly from doing it right. He had the heavy heart of a man who fucks up at life on the constant basis but not in the shop. Whenever Zeke or Rob came in either gloating or cussing us out to fix what was wrong, we all innately looked at the catwalk to see if we did it. It was either us or them. Most of the time, it wasn't us but John, who worked with AC, was eager to assign blame. I followed Neil's lead on this and he never argued, even when he knew John was wrong. He would just look and see how it was going to get done and what steps we needed to take to do so. Neil would spit out some sunflower seeds, our side of the area looked like a bird house neither of smoked so we hate handfuls of sunflower seeds throughout the day, cuss under his breath and we would be done before it had happened and we moved on.
Pointing the finger and blaming others for mistakes makes us powerless. It is, almost invariably, us that messed up.
One time I mentioned about how I didn't like making mistakes in my work, and Thomas, who is a fabricating savant, said, "If you ain't fucking up, then you ain't working." We all mess up, I moreso than anyone I know, but have become so deeply ingrained with assigning blame that we dismiss our involvement both in the problems and solutions. Our relationships with each other and society are far more complicated than some ugly catwalks but from the senate down to the custodian, people are so focused on accountability they let the bath keep flooding. The tragedy in Flint is a great example. People should go to jail, not for the initial big screw up. They fucked up from an oversight and how that happened needs to be recognized but if they responded immediately with the resources to properly fix the problem with expediency, then the world would be a much better place.


New realities occurs with each birth and end with each death. They react the with the others to create the total timeline



We have reached strange point where the right to speech does not mean that one responsible for the content of his or her words.  Innocent till proven guilty is not a protection of right until proven wrong.

Shadowboxing Prometheus

"You gotta find someone crazy enough to let you do it."
That was the final rule Charles gave.
The first was to make sure your hand was completely dry.
Mr. Charles Logan was explaining how to slap the molten fire pouring from the iron pour. That seems like something plenty of crazy folks I know would be curious to think of but when they found themselves near one of Vulcan's forges, then they would realize how insane this idea seemed.
I only know Charles as he is around a foundary. That is, he is either in the long process of pouring or drinking. Really, foundry folk tend to be always smoking and either working with big machines or drinking beer. The hot work sweats out the prior evenings bad decsions and so they tend to be entertaining as hell to be around.
I had escaped the big tent of people and wandered in on a young foundryman arraying some sticks on the floor while explaining his plan to Charles, another fellow, and my brother. The other guy was mostly unremarkable, my brother is a gift to the world.
My brother brought the whole bit up and the young dude knew of such exploits and was eager to learn more. The good sense angel was telling Charles to not discuss such things because young men are prone to doing dumb shit so he only said a little. He said, "Make sure your hand is bone dry, and if it ain't, stick it in some sand." This is in a foundry so there is plenty of sand. Then he migrated away so as to not get in trouble but he really wanted to talk about it and the young man was full of questions and half tales. When you ask someone about what they know about and get really interested, they will be hard pressed not to talk. Charles does not speak much and he tells things in a spiral because each time he tells it, he remembers more and so he tells it again. No story is more than a few lines long. I long for a videographic memory but am too actively a part of the story to even feel comfortable getting out my notebook. I tell myself I will write it down afterwards. Somewhere, there are a few scribbles of notes and the start of this page. That's something so let's go with that.
"Now hold your hand like that." His is out nice and straight and swinging at a good smacking swing.
"Don't go back. Our you'll get that whole part of your hand."
"You can do it again, just make sure it ain't got wet from sweat yet."
The story went around between him and the young cat (call him Steve).
I recalled towards the end of this conversation, Charles saying in his moonshine aged cadence
"I used to thing the biggest rush come from riding a bull but there ain't nothing like slapping that fire."



Some pictures of trees by the river.

climate story: part 1

I was first explicitly taught about our environmental impact in 1991. Dates and years tend to be a blur but I can pinpoint this to the Double Vision skatedeck. My computer class partner and I made a sweet pixel art picture of one them in 6th grade. In that same class, we participated in a project to collect data on acid rain and share our results using telecommunications. In a public school in a maddeningly inept city in the middle of the bible belt, we learned that rain was gathering acid in the air that got there by pollution and bathed the world in such fun stuff. We even used computers and the internet to talk to someone far away. There were protests and campaigns for the ozone layer and smog. Every picture of L.A had that dystopian sky. Enough real movement to happen to see some changes as well as the protracted emigration of manufacturing to nations without pollution and labor laws lead to much cleaner skies. The hole in the ozone began to close!
The first war with Saddam came along but the essential difference is that one had an end. There was a small measure of hope. We weren't at war. There was no boogey man.
I gravitated toward studying environmental science and ecology. The structure of the intertidal zone is a world as worth exploring as the great forests. Academia and science were in strong agreement that people were causing global changes. We could see it happen in the great fisheries of the Grand Banks. Basques had been fishing there for 500 years. History is cool.
The environmental signs were pretty clear, we needed to modify the structural elements of the global system or a lot more and lot worse shit was going to happen. The scale of impact was far to great to understand and any reasonably logical person could see that there were exponentially more variables we had yet to even thing of considering. No avenue of research on our efforts to poison the world yielded positive returns unless we had either never touched it or were actively trying to minimize our impact. This is key for anyone just now jumping into this discussion. We can't save the environment just as we can't fix a cut. We react and allow our body to heal itself, as the planet would have if we had acted then. This is not a tragedy of the commons because it falls far more squarely on the global profiteers.
September 11th, 2001. I was a senior in college and should have been preparing to be a productive piece of the world. We know what happened but it is the response that has ripped our soul from itself and made earlier climate predictions woefully short. We have not stopped being at war and now I teach kids who were born after 2001 and are headed off to the same endless fight. Some accounts place the United States military as the largest polluter in the world. It is definitely in the business of actively destroying it. It does not have to be but that is a different tale.  We are now rounding the curve in the hockey stick cure of global systemic change and it is going to be a strong reminder of how terribly awesome our god is. Kali Ma may be a more apt representation. I have no reason to believe we will create the change we need to avoid this suffering or it would have already happened.
We were duped into letting it happen by profiteers and the leaches that have gained sickening wealth along the way. They take our money to build jails for kids, what's poisoning a river to increase profit?
Something will be done and it will be too late.


Hey!
Some pictures we have.

As for those who deny any of the science, watch as we live through an endless demonstration of energy's movement to balance.
Consider the billionaire class. They know all of this and are surely planning for a different future. They believe that they can protect themselves and their wealth and come off their arks with even greater influence. They stand to recreate the world in their image.
The drums of battle are striking anew. We can not worry about snail darters and beef management when we have a new enemy to consider. We can not afford to do much about it either because we have to buy more bombs. There are and will be some magnificent efforts to redirect climate change.

what is the ultimate point. time for us to plan for that future.....This is a chronic pain and a disease we created and watched. It's not hopeless, the climate is going to change and our response is the everything. The best solution is an all hands on deck change to less waste. You could get a beautiful hope behind an intentionally orchestratred migration of humanity to better formed societies. This will not be false for everyone, what structures do we make the grandest changes in and those require a focus on things far beyond any individual could imagine.
None of this do we have control of. It is hard enough to do so in our ownselves, much last past our doorways. The only changes we can inact are nearest at hand. On the climate level, that is enough to drive the engine but it just can not be that easy. Here's the thing, the best way to having a secure and meaningful life whether the world burns up or not is through much stronger communities that can be self suffecient but also operate as nodes for an even greater societal construct. We, as individuals, can not afford the stress and nonsense to constantly bog down the need for some to prevent progress for it comes at the restructuring of their system. Our votes and living habits should do that lifting for us. As we turn and work to make our community  healthier, stronger, and more sustainable then we force the market towards us.
This is not easy for those of us plenty able to and far more difficult for those who can not afford nearly so much...

Another tape job.

At night between the cries
of late summer forest glory
Cicadas amass the sound
is home but now
he feels the words
shrapnel to his being.
Said with intention to hurt, an end
for which they excelled.
His heart lay before him, once more
battered and amiss he found the tape he carried in his bag
wrapped it with too much practice, gathered it up and continued.



A poem in progress!
Poetry is so hard for me to access either reading or writing it. I am improving slowly but the sensory impact of it is rather difficult for me to pull together but I can't help but view it as the finest of all the literary arts. It's interesting that poetry is also most children's entry into the language. The rythem imprints rather well.
The world is still on fire and there is an idiot at the wheel. How did we get to this point is insanity. Does it matter… I had a story of a visit from one of those prankster gods. It was not long ago. You never know when it may happen but something will clue you in down the road. The presence of a person you have never known and never really see again is familiar to all but difficult to say beyond stranger but these individuals are something more.