Neanderpundit

Love was such… wait, strike that.

Yesterday my day began by dealing with the worst auto dealer in North America. Not for my car, but for mom’s. They wanted $900 to change a $300 part, not including the part. So I had them tow the car to my house so I could fix it myself. Mom is going out of town so there’s no hurry.

Then I go help a friend work on one of his CNC machines, a large router. There’s a switch that has become maladjusted and I’m trying to adjust it, which I do, over the course of a couple of hours, and just as I’m about to test it, the factory closes so I have no idea whether or not I’ve accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. I’m rolling off the corner of the machine, as I button things up, and my keys alighn perfectly so that I dig my P38 into my right thigh, the dull blade cutting a 1/4″ deep scar an inch across.

So I drive home, starving, stop and get a White Castle- which I know I can eat- but that hunger mechanism kicks in and I forget to thoroughly chew the first couple bites, and in fifteen minutes I’m on the side of the road hurling into the cattails. I get home, and the dog is going apeshit, so I take him out, and he somehow slips his collar, and by the time I’m done chasing him down and getting him in the house again I’m exhausted. But I need to mow the lawn, so I start up the mower and drag it out, mow the neighbor’s yard first, and as I’m about to start mowing mine, it THROWS A ROD. So I bring it inside to see how much damage has been done and disassemble it- It can be easily fixed, and I have most of the parts, I just need to get out this morning and get them.

The ogwife and daughter are on vacation, visiting famly in C, eh? N eh? D eh? so I’m revelling in my bachelorhood. Fun, huh? Come home, love of my life. Shit don’t go worth a damn when you’re not here.

So last night I eat some chips and salsa, because I can- it’s one of the things that don’t bug me too much. And this morning, I take the dog out for his morning constitutional, wander around the kitchen a bit, bring a coffee to the office and sit preparing to type today’s first post, which will actually now end up being today’s second post. I figure I’ll get the post in, have a coffee, and take MY morning constitutional, get back and see who’s online to yap with this fine morning.

And I get this alarmingly loud message from my colon:

FECES DELIVERY IN T-MINUS 4, 3, 2,….

WHAT???

So I run out of the office. Through the living room. Kicking baskets of laundry out of my way, flinging my bathrobe on the dog, I find I cannot pinch tightly enough to stem the tide, and believe me, it is a TIDE. I make it to the bathroom but not quickly enough to have avoided CRAPPING IN MY HAND, and dropping a little here and there on the BATHMATS. I get past the first wave and start cleaning behind myself, hop in the shower and bring the bathmats with me, clean the bathrooom and scrub the crapper where I’ve “missed” and get the bathroom more or less under control, when the SECOND WAVE HITS. This time, fortunately I’m IN the bathroom so I manage to get it all IN the crapper, but this time the CRAPPER WILL NOT FLUSH. So I take the garbage bag ou tof the garbage can and fill it in the bathtub, use the water to “powerflush” the jogh, and finish cleaning the bathroom.

Beer. It was the first time I’d had a beer since the operation, and the beer hosed up my plumbing. I ain’t never doing that again. Damn.

At some time or another, if you live in North America and drive, you will come upon some fresh asphalt.

The smell, that asphalt smell you get from the laying of fresh hotpatch, is the byproduct of one or more chemicals known as Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These are present in the form of napthalene, anthracene, and benzoapyrene, among others.

When you make coke out of coal (no, not that kind, of coke. And not that kind of coke, either) you heat the coal in thin vertical ovens until it drives off everything but the pure carbon (more or less). The process has a LOT of by products. Sodum nitrate by the ton. Napthalene. Coal tar. The whole plant smells like fresh asphalt is being laid all the time.

When I began my apprenticeship in 1980, at Inland Steel, I walked down Coke Plant Road for the first time, drinking that hydrocarbon smell into me, absorbing all the new sensations and sights- flames in columns hundreds of feet high, ovens burning over 2200 degrees, doors open on their hellish yellow hearts of airless flame. Clouds of steam the size of neighborhoods, machines the size of stately homes that move under their own power.

I walked through the gate of the maintenance area and saw that someone had used a china marker to write, in a small and careful hand, the following inscription:

“Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create
se non etterne, e io etterno duro.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”

I supposed at that time I was the second person in the plant who had read the divine comedy, and the first to have gotten this message, and I was not far wrong.

Fact is, I had a learning experience ahead of me. In the four years i worked there, I became a man. I learned to be a machinist. I learned to be a good mechanic. I learned to be a decent electrician. I saw people die, more than once close enough to blow their heated, sanguine last breaths on my face. I married and became estranged from my first wife. Four, five years of intenseness, every moment a harsh reminder of the frailty of life, as you constantly thought about the misstep you could make which would cause your instantaneous death. I finished my apprenticeship, got the education they provided, and moved on.

Still, when I smell an asphalt truck, or witness fresh hotpatch being laid, the smell hearkens me back to those days, I think of the friends I buried, and the way they died, and I am sometimes a tiny bit ashamed to have lived, more by dumb luck than by skill. Overall, though, the memories it dredges up are good ones, even if bittersweet.