Saturday, July 31, 2010

Sun Shines on Dog's Ass

Blame it on the fading moon.
I spend 9 hours a day working to save people time. Does that make sense? Does it add up? If you have a car that theoretically saves you time when you drive to Boston but an industry is spending millions of hours to design and manufacture cars then can you really say it saved any time? And if you drive for a living then the car hasn't saved you any time at all. In fact, it's all a complete fraud. "We're saving time." Bullshit. Total bullshit. Someone invented a noose and it'll save you time in getting to the grave. Die faster!
Believe me if you spend as much time manufacturing high tech stuff as I do then you would begin to question if there is any truth at all to its purported benefits. Basically what happened was I earned enough money to buy some tires and a six pack of beer so someone else can navigate a submarine remotely or test chemicals in the atmosphere...which will take up all of their time. What does it mean to save time? I believe I know since I spent 8 months using all my account of saved time. I figured, fuck it. Time for a withdrawal. I'm saving it and I will use it. I'm not going to die with a balance of saved time. No way. And at the time I went to Mexico I could not raise my arms above my head and walked stooped over and penniless, shitting blood for five years...so I didn't think it was smart to buy the bullshit that I worked to save someone else time.

Whatever, it's a social convention that's been swallowed like the bait you throw out to catch bass in the lake.

Speaking of death...I'm taking care of Bonnie this weekend. She is not only deaf but now she is also blind and needs drops put in her bugging eyes. I have to look at her belly when she is laying down to make sure she's still breathing. Give her mouth to mouth resuscitation when she gags.
I need some paint to decorate her Elizabethan cone. Like, color it to match her coat. I feel bad for her but I wasn't much different this last week. A full 40 hours working on a single impossible harness with a dozen breakouts and pins and connectors and strain reliefs. The stress actually broke me and the boss gave me a warning. The stress was too much and I was abandoned on the factory floor without food or water and I would come home to a 99 degree attic and pass out from exhaustion and then awake at 5am to do it again. I sort of laughed because the indignity of dying because I was wasting away under florescent lights building mystery machines was too beautiful. There was no music and no one speaks. We drag our bodies to work and home...it's almost like what we're doing is important but we actually have no idea what we're building. Some might say it is intelligent design but I call it something different. Anyway, I was deathly sick and lost the sight in one eye, it was weeping for no reason and I developed lung congestion and the pain in my neck is bad enough for me to take advantage of the bulk pain killers the company supplies because everyone there has diabetes and bad backs. This is exactly what a human life is worth...I had no idea what day it was and wandered the concrete floor in search of pins and crimpers and did not pass humans but shells of fleshy robots. So this is it, I figured there wasn't much difference between death and a lifetime of cable assembly. I mean, really. That's my excuse why I wound up in the woods with Kenny trailblazing through a forest of downed trees. I was on my moped and that meant dragging it under logs, coughing, sweating. Kenny, a punch drunk lug who looks like he fell out of the tree of hard knocks and hit every branch on the way down said I looked like a beaten man and he was right. Kenny rode his 650 Honda over branches and ended up in someone's backyard while I fell down the hill near the old age home. We sang our ode to Jackson the dwarf goat and for a second the labor and wasted time was worth it because as you know I worked at Bauer moving hockey equipment for this piano that Mr. Hawkins beat into submission. That night I ended up in Prescott Park in the grass making a video I can not post.

Anyway, this job is as physically easy as a job gets but the existence of this job is like a dagger in my heart. These products are indestructible. They are the opposite of biodegradable and we're shipping out hundreds of miles of copper. This is literally how you would treat a planet you were plundering because your ship is waiting to take you home to Jupiter in a few minutes. I wonder if Bill Gates hasn't already colonized another planet and Earth is just like a spare parts bike to the elite. Because this is how you would behave if there were no environmental consequences. It feels like we're so obsessed with preventing our extinction that we're going to cause our extinction. You got New Yorkers walking over dead homeless people. Come on, Bill, you think mankind is going to relocate to another planet? A job like this will kill me if I work at it or not. I'm inside the death factory and I can see that it's unstoppable. This relates to my opinion that the education system failed utterly but I don't want to get into that right now.

I'm also resisting the urge to commit to the manufacturing because in my mind it is a choice between that and life. The memory of certain people fades with the complexity of these harnesses. I love to do things well and to do these things well means a tolerance of 3 mm over a distance of 31 ft. That will produce a professional connector array. But it also demands I treat friends and memories like the heavy baggage that is slowing down the ship. Like, I'll drag the ocean bottom when I pass this way again. Ha! I thought my priorities were right but apparently they are fucked. I wonder how family and friends can encourage such a thing. Are they really family? Are they friends?
Or is that where they put me in the hierarchy of their demands? I come right after soft toilet paper and paying the cable bill?
Well, I don't have toilet paper or a cable bill. And if the vote is for me to embrace the war against the environment, and to embrace it so fully that their memories are less important than where IEOG-J2 #22 will connect to AEIGG J1 #7 on a robotic cable harness then I've definitely misunderstood something. Or they'll forgive me when we're having a barbecue and I steal a little time to practice crimping a #18AWG D-sub AMP Reverse sex socket...because it's more important...it saves people time....

Here's a multiple choice:
Which do you want?

A:
B:generic technology

Circle your choice. You may only choose one.

You Reap What You Sow

What person said that? Five words that say a lot. You harvest exactly that which you nurtured. No more and no less. It can be applied to a simple backyard garden and, I believe, to humanity in general. We reap what we sow.

GALATIANS 6: 7-9 "For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

Now, it does not guarantee moral choices. A thief can do his diligent best to prepare and if his heist is a success then he has himself to thank. And if the heist is initially successful but ultimately leads the police to his door then that is also a cause and effect issue.

We are living in a time when many people are sowing many things and reaping and raping are widespread. This is folk wisdom and it requires that you either be old with a belly full of experience or young with lots of time to ponder the effects of your causes. What are you sowing? What is our country sowing? What is the world sowing.

I spent some time writing a due diligence manuscript regarding commercial solar farms. That sounds sensible. Demonstrate that you sowed only profitable seeds. Demonstrate that you did your homework to A) avoid problems and B) show you tried to avoid problems. BP executives were asked why they ignored internal memos that called the Deepwater Horizon project "A nightmare well." That is when due diligence comes into play. You are supposed to look out for red flags like "nightmare" and take action. BP did nothing and now are paying for it. They looked like assholes at the congressional hearings because they are assholes. They are reaping what they sowed...just like they deserve the oil they can suck out of the earth when the whole thing works. It's not a miracle; it's due diligence.

Now, take a mile high view of it and map out the project implementation for mankind. It's not easy to do. Maybe the bible is a kind of due diligence written in parable form. That's possible and that will also be incorporated into my own diligence manual for humanity.

The difficult part is living while simultaneously studying the upcoming harvest. Because the act of studying what one will reap is also part of what one is sowing. The process is not done in a vacuum so I am trying to study what I will reap while not sowing anything that I think will poison the land.

But because I feel this is a task I am uniquely qualified to perform and because no one else seems to have done it, so I've got the market cornered on macro-cosmic harvest factors, I will continue to juggle the metaphysical juggling pins aflame with the petrochemical soup. And if this is a harvest that will be ultimately destructive to me then that's what I deserve to reap. It's a tidy axiom and I'd like to challenge you all to ponder it.

Here is my Sermon:

I passed a gray bunny crossing the street by the Greenleaf farm on Peverly Hill Road. It was 5:30 am and it was just me and the other early birds on the street, squirrels and bunnies. The horses on the farm were still hoping fences in their long nose dreams. A fog hovered above the field of brown and green. The trees dripped with the moisture from the evening rain. I saw the bunny grazing near a blown out flip flop across from the YMCA swimming pool. I had a moment of synchronicity with the bunny because in our own way were were reaping what we were sowing or at least sowing something intentionally. If I make it to Labrador or Guatemala then it will be from these 5 am commutes to the robot factory. That bunny was providing for himself and his family. I was nurturing my own field of dreams.

Later, on the way home from work at 3 pm, I passed the YMCA pool and swerved around a bloody mass of gray fur on the double yellow line. Kids were jumping off the diving board, the streets were filled with cars, the horses were standing on crooked knees under the shade of a maple tree. I passed the roadkill fast so I couldn't be sure it was the same bunny or even if it was a bunny at all. The messy lump was the same color but some cats have that color coat. There was no way to tell as I turned the corner and rolled into Portsmouth to ponder these messages. I feel like I've found a trail of breadcrumbs that leads through the universe.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.