The inspiration tank is as dry as my moped on the way to New Castle and coasting to a stop on the causeway where the cops once chased me down. I pedaled to Fort Stark and then rode home with gas from the weed wacker. That made sense to me. That was within my realm of understanding. That corresponded to my worldview.
But my
robot cable harness bench work has broken me of my self loathing. And self loathing inspired me to write. What am I? A crimper. I crimp wire. Creativity is as remote to the life cycle of a robot's internal wiring as a Haitian whore is to fresh flowers after a sweaty gangbang. And because a well crimped wire, a wire that satisfies military specs, can not be achieved in the dreamy Oggy world that once bubbled forth like oil from the Gulf of Mexico, I have little to say.
I do want to punish myself a bit for actually being flat broke and playing tennis for too long. Funny, I saw Martin at the supermarket today (He was bagging groceries and smiling) and he asked me where I've been. At a bench crimping wire. Not playing tennis, not writing, not listening to Abbey Road, not reading Glass Bead Game. Yes, those are the acts of a child and writing about them is the act of an juvenile bragging about his elongated childhood. That part I already knew and had been reminded of it often by just about everyone. The greater purpose of my independent research is loathsome and an unquestionable mistake. Last night I was talking to a girl in a summer dress and as she sipped her beer and scanned the crowd for someone to take her out of my orbit I explained that "It's like watching a fan and if you really concentrate you can slow down the fan and focus on each individual blade...
while in motion. Or bike spokes. You can slow them all down so you can see it for what it is. That's what I'm doing with humanity and civilization. I'm slowing down the speeding bullet of progress so I can examine it and analyze it and break it down to the component parts."
I work with twenty people who are very content not pondering the mysteries of the universe. They are content with watching a speeding fan without focusing on each blade. The fan was spinning before they came into the picture and it will spin after they leave with hunched back and hacking coughs and gout and diabetes into the dirty New England overcoat with a granite top hat. Sing your dirges softly lest you wake the dead.
The Don Quixote role stopped being funny when I'm walking my out of gas 1974 Vespa Ciao through New Castle to get to my volunteer job at Fort Stark. The deeper problems are the lack of production, this nonsense of chasing fantasies. I watched Young Abe Lincoln from 1939 and realized my Thoreau script was 70 years out of date, written for light amusement with a $100,000 budget. This isn't realistic in Hollywood but there I was in Santa Monica knocking on Robert Redford's production company door like a madman. If it works then everyone is proud. If I end up shitting blood in an abandoned van at the beach then you get a despicable blog.
There are changes on the horizon and I've been considering offers to live in the mountains of Colorado, track the Arctic Wolf down, make a beanbag toss tournament game documentary, move to Spain to study for a guitar performance Master's degree, or continue to crimp wire and weave copper and insulation into a modern pine needle basket,
like engineers artistic contribution to indigenous handicrafts. I need the money to feed myself and to buy a motorcycle.
The deceiving part is a picture like this does not give you an idea of the microscopic nature of crimping. That's the attractive part of the job, excellence is measured under a microscope and also from high above. It all has to work perfectly. The terminal below is something called a ferrule pin and can be as small as the "I" on your keyboard, which means the wire is as small as the little horizontal dash above the "P" key. I can tell by looking at it that it's 1.5-2 mm long. I use wire that is stripped to 3 mm and fits in a ferrule that I can only pick up with a magnifying glass. And the length of the harness can only be 1 inch too long, but can
not be 1mm too short.
I guess it's like the modern tree of life with infinite relays and twists and joints and connectors. A metaphor of the inter connectivity of all humans... There are good crimps and bad crimps. And a good crimp can only be done with the correct tools and with focus. Is that the lesson everyone was trying to teach me? Consider it learned and let's move on. In the meantime, I invite you to read some of my posts from last year. We're approaching the 2nd anniversary of the blog and the earlier work was amusing. Or read some of the more relevant posts from other sites. Like the glaciers that are melting. Big deal? The fresh water they supply is what irrigates the land that feeds most of Asia. How did that song go? "There's a hole in the bucket, dear Henry, Dear Henry." I'll modernize it..."The glacier's are melting, Dear Liza, Dear Liza, the glacier's are melting, dear Liza, the glaciers."
"Well fix it, Dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry, well fix it, Dear Henry, dear Henry fix it."
"By riding your bicycle, you fat fucking American, by riding your bicycle, you fat disgusting fuck."
The lyrics need some work...
"Don't tear down my fence
