Neanderpundit

I don’t consider myself especially bright. Never have. I was surrounded in my youth by savants, people whose length and breadth of knowledge was awesome to me then, and (of those of them who are still alive) is staggering now. I cannot imagine carrying the knowledge those people carry around in their heads.

Being exposed to those people, at that early age, caused me to do things most won’t- I stretched my brain. I looked at the world through different eyes. I developed the ability to stand back and circle something, so as to see it from a hundred different perspectives. Maybe one of the perspectives I could see was the correct one.

I have witnessed, up close, about every aspect of the human condition. I have been close with convicted murderors- close enough that we shared our lunches. One guy, I drove his car back to his house after he was taken away for his prison stint.
I have held the heads of alcoholics during DT’s to keep them from drowning in their own vomit. I have restrained heroin addicts during acute withdrawal. These were my friends. I have been close enough to horrid industrial accidents to hear the final screams of the dying man. Close enough for the dying man to blow his final breath in my face. I have watched family and friends die of horrible protracted illnesses. I have had to choose between the life of my father and the life of a trreasured family pet, when the pet decided to attack my father. Ever have to shoot your own perfectly healthy dog?

I have also witnessed birth, up close. Seen the struggles of a tiny infant to live. Seen holy men- truly, holy men- on their knees in prayer. Walked and talked with them. Worked with them, side by each. Visited scenes- both natural and manmade- of staggering beauty. I’ve been involved on the fringes of monumental engineering projects, and at the core of engineering projects yet unheard-of.

I’ve done things, too. If you look, not only at the Commandments, but also old Hebrew Law, it almost seems as if I made a special effort to break those laws one by one. Let’s not even talk about the catechism of Vatican II.

I’ve done, and seen, these and many other things, too numerous to mention here. I’ve packed a whole lot of living into my relatively short life, and done so because of my natural curiosity and, maybe, nosiness. I LIKE sticking my nose in places, seeing what is going on.

I read a lot too. I read, on average, a novel sized book a day. Sometimes my reading helps me to understand things I’ve witnessed in real life. Sometimes, I look at what I’ve read, and cry bullshit. Actually, it’s more often bullshit than anything else.

I know this: A day of real living is worth a month of reading. You will always learn more by getting your hands dirty than by research.
There are, of course, always subjects about which reference material is useful; you could probably never rebuild an engine- you wouldn’t know the torque sequence for the heads or the torque values or connecting rod clearances.

Still. Read about a leper colony. Then, go there. Change sheets on a bed so stained with body fluids that the stench can only be burned away. Big difference.

Real people, living real lives, can tell you more about the world than can anyone. Those who learn about the world from personal experience. The ones who learn about the world by research, are most often politicians and teachers, with no idea how the actual world works.

Here’s an interesting take from the Indigo Girls:

Gonna get out of bed, and get a hammer and a nail
Gonna learn how to use my hands
Not just my head
I’ll think myself into jail
Now, I know a refuge never grows
from a chin in a hand and a thoughtful pose
gotta tend the earth if you want a rose.

Get your hands dirty. It’ll make you a better person. And, you’ll have more wisdom than you can ever find in a book.

When i first moved away from home I got a small apartment in a town not far from where I was taking my machinists apprenticeship. I was a cheap bastard then as now, so in order to help defray the costs of my rent, I volunteered to help manage the building. Not a big deal, as it included shovelling walks and mowing a 3′ by 40′ strip of grass.

Sometimes there were more, er, distasteful gigs.

The blond in 3B would often come home from the strip club where she worked, and shower, and the skin oil and glitter and her long hair would clog the shower drain, most often at 3:00 AM. She’d be standing there in a bathrobe being rubbed up against by her most recent acquisition (they were always cops. Why is that?) while I ran the snake down the tub drain and cleaned out a wad of hair that looked like a dead cat. She alwas thanked me with such sincerity, and I’d pack up my tools and try to go back to sleep, imagining her being drilled by the Boy in Blue scant feet from my headboard.

Occasionally, as well, there were crapper problems, and they were the worst. You had to go get the big powered snake from the rental place and set up base camp in the potty for sometimes several hours. I also usually ended up letting the offending party use MY crapper in the interim, and at the end of it all, I’d have to clean up their crapper AND MINE, because they were invariably pigs.

Now, Mrs 6C was a divorcee in her 30’s, and she was always after me, though I was in thrall with my first wife at the time so I never took advantage. I also discovered she seemed to have NO concept of personal hygeine; she flushed pads. Shouldn’t a 30something woman know not to flush pads? The box was next to the crapper, it said “NOT FLUSHABLE” in big mauve letters.

Anyway, I set up in her bathroom and began to feed the snake into the john, after scooping out the brackish water and dumping the most of it in the bathtub. I managed to get the clog broken up, (yes, pads) and decided to run the snake all the way down the main lest some other nonflushable items were there, laying in wait for me to block off the whole building at 2:30 some morning. I run the snake out another eight, ten feet, and then it gets sticky. Figuring I’d just hit a bend in the pipe, I pressed on, and soon the snake was moving along nicely. I managed to run out about thirty feet, which I figured would have been enough to take it to the street. I started to reel back, and it stopped.

I let out another couple feet, reeled back, and it stopped again.

I backed and pulled and backed and pulled until at one point i was perched atop the bowl with my feet on either side of the porcelean rim, both hands on the snake, yanking like I was pulling the worlds toughest weed from the worlds hardest dirt. the veins on my neck were standing out, and my face was as red as the handle of the Milwaukee drill that drove the whole contraption. I know this because of the mirror just opposite the crapper.

I was abvout exhausted, on my nands and knees, tugging and releasing the snake, when I heard a bloodcurdling scream from across the hall. Everyone in the apartment building went running; I shouldered the 5C door open and we found Mrs 5C standing in the living room, having reecently arrived home from work, pointing into the bathroom, where some twenty feet of drain snake protruded from her toilet, where it had grabbed her bathmat, shower curtain, and a towel.
“The toilet is eating my bathroom” was all she could gasp as mr Winters caught her and lowered her to her couch; I had apparently run the snake through a cross in the drainpipe and back out through her toilet, where it sprayed shit all over the place and then flopped about the room knocking things down and latching onto several items which I was attempting to pull through her toilet.

Now, I had three crappers to clean. I lost my part time building management gig because Mrs 5c moved out (I think she probably poops in old milk cartons to this day, she’s never touched a toilet since) and I never got to see the stripper in 3B half naked again.

Meeeeeemmmmmmreeeeeeez.

Yes, I know I’ve been remiss, I’ve been out of town. Nothing has changed, of course, the expressways still suck pretty badly.

To the woman driving the Hummer? With the vanity plate? the woman who is smaller than one of the tires? CONSIDER GETTING A VEHICLE WHOSE WINDOWS YOU CAN SEE OUT OF. YOU CANNOT SEE ANYTHING CLOSER THAN 40′ AWAY, BECAUSE YOU CAN’T SEE ABOVE THE WINDOW LEDGE.

Oh, and HANG UP AND DRIVE.

In other news: I had, after three or four weeks work, found an alternate route that while it had about 34,879 stoplights, was at least not under construction. Of course, while I was in Arkansas murdering armadillos, the Illinois DOT decided to DESTROY THAT ROAD TOO.

::sigh::

You DOT fuckweeds are all brain damaged.