Might makes right

I don’t know if there is anything more dangerous, and difficult to free yourself from than the things you think you know. They are the buggers in the back that refuse to let in the new knowledge.

I wanted to start this essay with the quote:

“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country”

It has to do with the sentiment I wish to convey once, if ever, I get to the point of this article.

I thought it was a quote from JFK. I am not sure exactly how I got that impression, but I did, and if you read again the first line you will see why it has stuck with me.

I am old enough to have used a typewriter. After typing that portion of the sentence, I realized that it was statement enough, such the age in which we live, to say just this would still make a contrast with a fair portion of people who might find themselves reading this.

Now, to my mother. Bear with me. My mother and father have never lived more than a block apart from each other. You could see the front door of my father’s ancestral home from the porch of my mother’s. They knew each other from birth, at least my mother’s birth, as my father was already two at that time.

They got married when my father was 19, and my mother 17, and they were off and running on a life of their own devising.

That life, which has very much influenced my own, was set long before they married, I am sure. They still live in the same house that they did when I was born, a house, it must be said, that they have never owed a penny on. They still have the same washer and dryer. They still have the same phone number.

I remember having a party line when I was growing up. There is something most people will not be familiar with. I grew up in the country. On 40 acres 14 miles from Superior, Wisconsin. The party line is not a rural thing, but a holdover from a time before electronic switches made it possible and practical to handle many different copper lines to each household and provide a private line to each.

I was not old enough, or, more importantly, friendly enough to have anyone to call on the phone during the short time we had the party line, but it did come into play for me. I remember distinctly getting up after everyone went to sleep and picking up the phone and listening to see if anyone was talking. I was not picky. I would listen to whatever talk was going on. “Be at the place by 10:00 AM”, “Do the thing this way”, “I am going out with that girl”.

I suppose in a way it is sad, but it is only meant to shine light on the facts of my upbringing, and allow proper context.

When I was in 5th grade I wrote a paper on Ulysses S. Grant. We had to write about a president, and I liked his name. That was the depth of my choice.

I remember typing the paper on an old, possibly blue, electric typewriter. Knowing what you do about my mother, just from this short missive, you should take heart in also knowing that if it was necessary to find the real color, model number, manufacturer, or an extra ribbon for this machine, then she would be able to provide. I am fairly certain that she still uses the machine, as well as the Singer Sewing Machine, powered by a treadle that she used to mend my clothing growing up. I will not discuss this second machine further, for the sake of maintaining a semblance of transparency in the direction of this epistle.

To type on this machine was in every way a nerve wracking experience. To begin typing, you settled in beneath a machine that would mangle if misfortune found you pinned under its mass. You hit the switch marked ‘On’ and a motor somewhere in the belly of the thing started turning an unseen mechanism[1], and a noise was produced to set your teeth on edge. The lightest touch would set loose a hammer that noisily mashed a letter onto the page with such force as to shake the machine, the desk, and the foundations of youth, a nervous, toe-walking child such as myself could find any of this quite dismaying, but then you had to add to this the fact that each and every time you touched a key, it made a PERMANENT impression on the paper. This last part lingers with me to this day. I will still use a word close to, but not exact in definition because I wrote the wrong letter to start, or because I have talked myself into the idea that I don’t know how it is spelled. I had to type each letter as though the whole page would have to be retyped with a single misstep, because that really was what was at stake.

I slaved in front of that machine to type my paper about Grant, years later I had a typing class in junior high wherein I typed:

“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party”

enough times to drain from it all meaning, and now, decades later I come to find out that the phrase I wanted to use to begin making my point is not attributable to JFK, but instead to the party of Ulysses S. Grant during the time of his seeking the presidency.

Small world, is it not?

I hope you will consider this a preamble to a matter of much greater importance and gravity of tone, to be posted tomorrow, or whenever I get around to it.

1]*[It is many years later, and now I am a designer who reverse engineers products for industry, a task that requires vast, though non-specific knowledge of most mechanical arenas, and I could only explain with limited certainty what the need of a motor running when no letter is depressed would be.]

This blog is not for everyone, only for the person who took my 1¼” spade bit, if that was you, keep reading Mr. or Miss Fucker.

You took my tool, that necessitated improvisation, which led to me stabbing myself in the heart, and now I am dead.

I had made a thing, I realize in the afterlife that the thing itself is not important, suffice to say it was a thing with a number of parts. Through use of this thing, I realized that some of the parts of the thing needed tweaking. I began by measuring and planning the new piece to work with the design. I gathered the wood I needed, cut the parts, and set to drilling the necessary holes.

Here is what annoys me about being dead:

First impressions, second impressions, and third impressions.

The cops showed up weeks after I died. After putrefaction had set in, and the neighbors alerted the already curious landlord, who had been missing the money from the rent for a while, to the smell.

Police came through a locked door to find me lying on the floor, stabbed. There was general jocularity at the scene. Past the smell, and the nervous looks of squeamish patrolmen, there was room to joke about the fact that you almost never see suicide by stabbing anymore.

The coroner looked like Tom Waits. Not a shined up, shaven Tom Waits, with a clean shirt and wrinkle-free pants, but the disheveled Tom Waits I had always wanted to meet. And his breath! Like invisible poison. A combination of coffee and sunflowers seeds uninterrupted for days. It was he who pointed out the wood shavings, and the dowel on the floor nearby, and chalked the whole scene up to a household accident.

Months from now, my poor sainted mother will wonder at her own abilities as a parent. How could she raise a boy, a male child, that didn’t know the difference between a 1⅛” hole and a 1¼” hole.

You did that. To my mother. My legacy will be as one unable to distinguish the differences. Let me tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. I knew the size and depth and location.

Mom! You did fine! I was intimately aware of all characteristic features. It wasn’t your fault.

If you took the tool because you needed to make a 1¼” hole, then fine. You killed me, end of story. You will have to find a way to deal with that. If you took it to stir paint, or prop open a door, then I will haunt your ass so bad that you will have no choice but to turn to drink as means to cope.

My mother will have her justice.