Thursday, March 8, 2012

Tidal Bore

Like my life, the forces of the universe sometimes allow me to flow into the polluted ocean of my destiny and other times the surging tide forces me backwards over the same clay river bed that I've camped beside countless times before. I only see the missed opportunities of the tidal bore expert who came down to watch the reversing of the tide and I was too timid to ask him if he wanted to be interviewed. I didn't want to exploit his expertise but my own explanation is a boring translation of what he was so enthusiastic about. It was his whole existence to monitor the tidal bore's many variations exclaiming how sink holes formed and whether this bore was stronger or weaker. They were the characteristics he admired and appreciated and I didn't film it because I wanted to maintain boundaries. But you can't make a documentary if you maintain boundaries. Or maybe I saw he was so enthusiastic and I didn't want to ruin the moment by pulling out a camera and asking if he wanted to be famous. People change when they get in front of the camera and I enjoyed his authentic enthusiasm too much to exploit it. It's material for an essay but not film. If you want to meet him then go to the Joggins tidal bore and wait for him. Maybe that's the lesson. Part of my journey is generic enough to share and part of it is too personal and part of it can only be experienced in person. It's up to me as editor to sift through it all and show you enough to churn the riverbed of your mind, flowing backwards and forwards until the source is revealed.

Step One: Call Oggy

What is life but a pursuit of the undiscovered? To take this chrome trim from 43 years ago and generate something else from it?


How exactly would that look on the back of my insulated overall? I was at the Rochester fair looking over the shoulder of the grandmother doing embroidery with my bad breath and Labrador ears wagging in the goat air, leering at the 4H club girls and the midgets with disproportional busts as tin pan alley songs play through blind man's fingers on accordion playing Beer Barrel Polka and the acid of stale lemonade plunges to Oggy's tender throat. 
"Could I simply do the embroidery on the jacket or overall itself?" I asked, skipping the step in Oggy-like fashion saving resources in his useless and abhorrent way that attracted police and hate mail across New England as oceans acidify and Oggy eats stale bread from under the captain's chair of his ego. "No, denim doesn't work very well, and also," said the grandmother with wrinkles and papery hand flesh, "You'll want to save the work when the jacket wears out." Ah! So, if I make a patch then I can sew the patch on the overalls and then take the patch off and put it on my jean jacket. OR whatever. And I can do the embroidery on weaver's cloth, as it was meant to be done....
Plunging into the work.
 I take a picture and then scale it on the laptop computer. Then I place the weaver's cloth over the screen and it acts like a light box. I tape the weaver's cloth to the computer in my dungeon as animals race across the roof and tornadoes plunder the top soil of America's ethanol crops. I trace the words...."Econoline" Doing this instantly breaks the spell that Ford has on America. We're in the twilight of gasoline and Oggy's van is Noah's arc traveling with gypsy abandon through the midwest wasteland.

Now, I've done this twice with white weaver's cloth and now with navy weaver's cloth. And I've also done this fruitlessly with white carbon paper that was barely visible. Now, the long toil of punch pin embroidery with my arthritic hands punching in the beige 3 strand cross stitch yarn. Punch pin is not like rug hooking where you work on the front of the fabric. No, you should work on the back of the fabric with punch pin but that means you need to either put the design on the back (which Oggy failed to do) or you need to outline the design so you can see it and then flip the design over and start to fill it in so the loops are on the other side. Look closely and the outline is layed flat because that's when Oggy worked the front side. The loop side is actually done from the other side and then when Oggy wants to take a picture he will presume to be working the front of it but actually this is all phony like his pitiful attempts to be Eco-conscious and a contrivance and falsity. He's posing with the work to the front when in reality you can't make those loops by working the front because the loops will end up on the back. You must turn it over and work backwards. You could tell this by the fact his punch pin has no yarn in it and he is an imposter and false prophet and hypocrite that needs to have his hypocrisies and flaws and inaccuracies and bad breath and viral toe nails and bleeding asshole and ingrown beard hairs  and gray chest fur pointed out to him because he wouldn't otherwise know about it. He's slow and stupid and writes for his own amusement and aggrandizement and loves to use big words to impress himself and other people. Even this essay is a mere attempt to win the approval of his gutter-dwelling self esteem.


 
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.