Neanderpundit

doesn’t give you that heft, you know, like when you’re reading a big damned book.

So when I, in the last two weeks, decided to revisit the Dune books, in as much order as I could muster, it was very misleading.

After giving myself a stiff neck (I prefer reading in bed to anything) the series has been read, all of them, including the sequels and prequels and everything they did.

And you never realize you’ve read through, like, 22 inches of paperbacks.

I had to turn on the air conditioning last night. More for the humidity than the heat, but still. When I was a kid we ran around all day in the brutal, miserable heat,often sprawled in glades of poison oak and ivy, and then crawled into beds soaking with sweat and slept like babies.

The wife and daughter were uncomfortable, though they can apparently deal with the heat better than can I. But I did it predominantly for them.

That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

Actualy, not so strange. I dreampt I had gone back to work at inland steel, where I took the first of my apprenticeships thirty years ago.

Had I stayed there I would have been long retired, now. Instead I bounced around, becoming a printer, a print salesman, an advertising manager, robotics engineer, a bunch of other things. I will probably never be able to actually retire, but I make a point of enjoying that time now, and I make a special point of enjoying my work.

Back at Inland, though, the situation was the same. it was the same filthy shithole, only now with more stringent and more ridiculous safety rules; stupider people, and the same handful of talented folks holding it all together, but stretched thinner and thinner as time had progressed. they actually had a room set aside for the addicts and layabouts so they didn’t harm themselves trying to work in altered states, and the ones doing all the work were not only stretched thin but were physically thinner than I remember them, almost ghosts of their former selves, like inmates of concentration camps being made to work beyond thier abilities.

The world of people who will show up and do their jobs is the world of slavery to the idle. Ever it has been so, and ever it will be.