What Lead Tells Us About The Modern World

Pb is the symbol for Lead on the periodic table because Plumbing pipes in Rome originally used lead. I can't confirm the accuracy of that statement or most of this essay so don't quote me on it.

I also learned that Kentucky coal miners were stricken by a coal dust disease that caused their throats to turn bluish-purple and that is where the term "blue collar worker' comes from.

I learned these trivial, possibly false, details in a class on lead abatement and containment. I am a certified lead renovator now because my life has not been hazardous enough. I want to delve into poison such as asbestos and lead and toxic waste. The class was taught by an experienced general contractor who had the temperament of a scientist but was raised in a farmhouse with no electricity and became a home builder/renovator. The slow wheels of science finally turned to the point that lead was banned from paint back in 1978...but there was no great rush to address how to contain lead in surfaces panted prior to 1978 simply because all city streets and alleyways, front and rear lawns, sidewalks, parks are contaminated hopelessly with lead residual from the days of leaded gasoline. Standard Oil tried to up-sell vehicles with the promotional advantage of not producing horse shit that stunk on hot days. They knew lead was pure poison but attempted many different variations to remove the lead and failed. All the additive substitutions stunk worse than horse shit, so they kept the lead and poisoned all future generations of Americans. But Rockefeller turned a nifty profit so not everyone lost out!

These tidbits of info are not verified or fact-checked. They may be lies. I will use them only to make a point about due diligence because I think it's amusing.

Let us accept that Standard Oil knowingly violated all the rules of the scientific method and ignored the precautionary principle and The National Lead Company (leading manufacturer of lead-based paint) also knowingly poisoned everyone and then adopted the name of Dutch Boy Paints in an attempt to distance themselves from their villainous past...thus demonstrating fundamental disregard of due diligence.

Due Diligence is something I think too few are aware of. I like to think of it as a process of doing anything in such a way as all the steps can be repeated. Basically, it's the way you would do something if you knew you were going to be sued at the end of the job. Your due diligence would prove your methods and document your efforts so accurately that it would be possible to recreate all the steps. If you erred then your error would be documented along with the reasons for your error and your justification for ignoring the error. Think of it as a global "Show Your Work" reminder like the ones on your 8th grade homework assignment. Your work is your due diligence. The answer is incidental because if your work is correct then your answer will be correct. If your work is wrong then your answer can be ignored since your work is the part that caused the wrong answer. Due Diligence is where the work takes place.

Well, due diligence appears to be a result of lawsuits and I'd like to promote it as an end in itself. You should not need to be sued to embrace due diligence but that seems to be the tradition.

Case in point: lead paint removal and renovation. As a newly certified lead paint renovator I now have an casual understanding of what is required to responsibly and legally renovate dwellings with lead based paint. This involves due diligence, ie. demonstrating and documenting my methods as outlined by the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development and OSHA. I won't go into the details about those methods but I will say that they bear no resemblance to what took place in the labs at national Lead Company and Standard Oil. These companies worked in relative secrecy and it was only the extreme health problems that their employees experienced that caused any changes at all. One of the changes ended up being the Dept. of Labor creating a branch called the Occupational Safety and Health Admin. Lead was a paint additive since 4 B.C. and it still is in some paint. Lead paint was banned in the U.S. but only in household paint. It's still in all kinds of imported products such as Chinawear, Crockpots, Toilets, sinks, Tile, toys, tractors, motorcycles...etc. It's also in any soil near a street. Well, after 2000 years of irresponsible usage it now falls on this generation to expunge lead paint from households and I got a glimpse of what this means.

It basically means containing dust and cleaning the job site, ensuring all the paint is scrapped onto a surface that can be controlled, not onto a hardwood floor with cracks that will capture the lead. I think of the hours this will cost humanity, the lifetimes spent meticulously removing lead paint from surfaces. But it doesn't stop there. Because a renovator removing lead paint from surfaces is probably working on someone else's house they are encouraged to document every step of the process. The first step in removing lead paint is actually informing the client that their home is contaminated and that the process is quite involved to remove the lead paint. The house or work area is then contained and the paint is peeled off in whatever manner is most tedious, whilst documenting the process with photos and client signatures. Again, each step needs to be documented so it can be recreated when you get sued after the client dies of lead poisoning. If you can't demonstrate Due Diligence, then the fact the client died due to unrelated landscaping in the backyard that stirred up lead dust, will be irrelevant. Your renovation, the lawyer will insist, caused the death. No, it was not 2000 years of irresponsible manufacturing, generations of greedy cock-sucking corporate fiends who depleted the Earth to amass huge fortunes in order to buy political favors whilst poisoning the land they rent to wage slaves. No, no, that part is irrelevant and besides, they did no Due Diligence so no one has any idea how lead got in our paint or soil. It was Oggy's 2 week project removing window trim from a house built in 1952. THAT was what caused the untimely lead poisoning of the client. SURE!

It vexes me greatly that this is what it comes to; a blatant engineering blunder that is passed along from one corporation to another until finally the lowest wage earner in the equation is required to DO SOMETHING RESPONSIBLE AND DOCUMENT IT. Is Standard Oil or the Rockefeller Estate or Dutch Boy paint handing out $9000 grants to assist in the removal of paint from some 300 million homes? I ask you? Who will cover the colossal cost of this $2,700,000,000,000 fuck up? The same people who are covering the cost of incarcerating all the developmentally delayed lead poisoned inner city collateral damage victims. Yes, you will pay with dollars and Oggy will spend a lifetime picking apart the mistakes of corporate past. It's worthwhile, right? It's a worthwhile job, dissecting lead poisoned paint. Yes it is.

I shake my head, actually shake my head back and forth like I'm being filmed and the director is shouting "OK, Oggy, shake your head back and forth in deep regret and disappointment!!" That is how I shake my head because of the series of events that led me to today. 

Lead on painted can simply be bagged and thrown away with all the other poisonous trash we toss in a pit that will eventually leech into rivers and oceans. There is no other way to dispose of it since the brilliant chemists at Dow spend all their time trying to poison humanity rather than how to turn lead into harmless elf farts.

Jesus, what a total disaster. Generations of humanity poisoned for brighter colored fences and faster horseless vehicles. So contemptible, so disgusting.

Old Stories

I was rewatching the original recording of this song and decided I could do better now that I'm sober so I'll see how I feel about this take. I was inspired by some Press Room artists who sang average original tunes and I decided to write a tribute to the places I remember growing up with and the nostalgia was unavoidable. I sing this song from time to time for a small audience and wonder what they must think about these places that very few people even remember because they don't exist anymore.

Sometimes I take a moment to tell some details and the detail I like to share is, possibly fake, of Brad throwing a nerf football to me in the dinnerware aisle of JJ Newberry and I missed it and it bounced into a shelf of gaudy crystal globes, knocking them to the ground where they splintered, causing Brad and me to flee out the back door near the pet store section. I'm not sure it really happened.

Another memory is of the now neglected Jerry Lewis Theater in Portsmouth. I didn't see Star Wars there, because I saw that in Boston, but I watched Empire Strikes Back at the Jerry Lewis in '81 or '82. Later, a friend got a job as a ticket taker and I told him to let me in the back door to see Top Gun and I waited there patiently and out popped the manager like a skeleton on a spring. I panicked and said, "I'm waiting for Dan!" and then ran away into the forest. Dan lost that job but did alright in the end.

I'll annotate this song further at the risk of taking some mystery away, J.J. Newberry's had a lunch counter and a pet store where my buddy Christos bought a dog he named after the light hitting Red Sox shortstop Spike Owen, and a toy section where I stole baseball cards and picked up a nerf football and passed to to Brad. He passed it back but overthrew me and it flew into a display of that cheap leaded crystal cracker vases those kinds of stores had. Before the sound of breaking glass even reached the front desk Brad had fled out the backdoor with me in hot pursuit. Laverdier Drug Store was where we stole some gum, Brad got caught because he had velcro cargo pant pockets. I got the gum out of my pocket before they caught me but the event was a red flag in our childhood. They had an arcade at the drug store too. It's a fish restaurant last I checked. Pic 'n' Pay was the name of a grocery store that sponsored a little league team that wore red uniforms. The store is now named Hannafords and it's basically the same. The Little Store was actually called "The Little Store" and it was 2 blocks from my house and sold snacks and bread and had a deli that was probably not licensed by food health department but offered good sandwiches to the winner of the weekly arcade game contest. Venture and Galaga and Pac Man and even Dragon's Lair made their way through that store in the golden era of console video games. Twinkies did cost twenty five cents. It's now a private residence with a cool front porch that was the portal to sugar and games for an entire neighborhood for about 3 years. The 'penny candy' reference is to Strawberry Banke root beer sticks and hard candy that was offered in wood baskets for a penny. Especially the soft cherry balls and multi-colored candy drops and licorice and bit-o-honey. It was across the street from our football field at Prescott Park (which still exists unchanged), so we always could get twenty cents worth of candy on the way home. The hot dog reference is to Gillies hot dog stand between the old J.J. Newberry and the parking garage, which has expanded from the old trolley car unit to almost a modern restaurant. The number of experiences I had at Gillies could fill a book. 'Houses made of logs' refers to the age of the houses, since there are no original log cabins in Portsmouth anymore. But there are graveyards 'old as time', dating back to pre-revolution colonial era. The chorus involves J.J. Newberry a general merchandise store, Peddlers was the local, now gone bicycle shop, Dollifs was the coin and baseball card collectible shop with a quirky, before-its-time blind auction on items like confederate money and old pennies. Sessions was the record store where I bought my first LP album: Billy Joel's Glass Houses. Sometimes I throw in "Daddy's Junky Music" which was an instrument store that closed up after the internet gouged prices beyond what could compete with. Gallaghers was the place I went to have my baseball glove relaced with leather and to buy a BB gun. It was general sporting goods like soccer balls and boxing gloves. The Mall in Newington put them all out of business but the internet got the last laugh.

These places have a personal history but, like the song says, nothing stays the same.  What strikes me about this song now that I've been playing it for several years is that there is a metaphor and longing that I intended for the places, but the final verse is a tribute to my buddy Brad who is also gone and I wonder sometimes if all these places aren't symbolic of him. I think my plan is to sing it as a tribute to the places and if the message is taken as a tribute to Brad then so be it.

The crackling you hear in the background is the old woodstove back in action after a long hot summer. Why did I leave the Costa Rican beach for this climate that is either an inferno or a deep freezer? some guy named Alan Jackson recorded a similar tune. Everyone's got a story.

Tough Day

The damn pack rats (bush tailed wood rat) are endemic and I should've murdered this one but it was so pitiful. The rat built its nest inside the wall and all summer long went back and forth through this little entrance. Well, it's been eating too damn much because one day it got completely stuck trying to make the  90 degree bend after the entrance. It couldn't go up and it couldn't go back. I saw this tail wagging from inside the wall and thought one of my coworkers was setting a trap on me. No, it was a living rat stuck half inside its mizzen entrance. Man, what a mess. It had been there for hours if not days, shitting and pissing on the floor. I was hoping it was already dead but when I grabbed its legs with some trash tongs it squirmed and hissed like a horror movie. But it was trapped.

I had the choice to cut it in half with a sawzall or a hoe but I was afraid half of it would rot inside the wall. So I pried the wall off and set the stupid animal free. It was mortally wounded and gets a nomination for the Darwin Awards, but I showed it mercy. Let nature take its course. It hobbled behind an outdoor storage shelf and I hope it returns the favor to some other hapless mammal. I buttoned up the mizzen entrance, probably entombing a dozen rats who will rot over the winter, but at least this animal needs to learn a lesson and chew the entrance a little wider before winter.

Shocking

Insert bolt in a vise

Push then pull hard on the shock until...

the Oil seal comes out.

This is for a 1981 Yamaha sr185 Exciter motorcycle shock. Yamaha made a slide hammer for this procedure but the vise method works good too. Of course, remove the circlip first and drain the old fork oil out because when the oil seal finally comes out it will pour everything onto the floor.. and use a piece of wood or the old oil seal to seat the new seal instead of something like a wrench which can mar the shock and cause one of the low tolerance sleeves to catch on any burrs. Add 6.3 oz 10w fork oil. etc. etc.  reinstall.
I love how everything is easy to work on with the exciter. They made an owner friendly vehicle. If I can find the part then I can do the work. It's the only bike a person would need for a city or town.


Update 9/18: The left side oil seal lasted only 1 year. It started leaking badly so I had no choice but replace it. I did take the fork off once and measured the oil and thought maybe it was overfull because there was around 7+oz but putting in exactly 6.2oz did not change the leaking. The original oil seals (which I saved because I'm a hoarder) were not actually leaking when I replaced them but the removal process had damaged them so I had to buy another oil seal. I found an OEM fork seal. I'm also a year older and the damage has been done to more than just the oil seal so the push and pull method was jarring my arthritic spine and causes too much pain so I pondered how else I could do this and decided to try a chain+come along/chain binder that we have in the shop. It's hard to describe and I didn't get a picture of it. I don't recommend this method but the slide hammer fork tool Yamaha describes is not something most people have, so you clamp the retaining bolt head in a vise, then put the front axle bolt in the fork, then wrap a chain around the axle bolt and use a chain binder affixed to some unmovable source (in my case it was the steel frame of the building) then bind the chain and torque it together. The worst case scenario would have the steel frame fall apart...the second worst scenario would bend the axle bolt...and the third worst scenario would have so much tension build up on the fork part that either the bolt threads strip out or the bolt slips away from the vise projecting it into your knee or else the two parts spring apart and hit you with violence and pain and spraying fork oil everywhere. In my case, the best case scenario happened, the two parts gradually separated and did not spring apart but simply slipped so that I could catch them. Then I took great care in pressing in the new seal with an old seal as a drift and a rubber mallet and curved wrench as another drift. This works to avoid marring any surface and I hammer in a circle until the new seal was below the channel for the Cir-clip. I hope this will solve the leaking and it's not some awful problem with the fork surface itself that prevents the seal from working. The surface does not look worn but one never knows.)

Captain America

What's not to love?