I have never been unhappy while listening to Al Green. I can’t recall if I started out unhappy; I’m just certain I never ended up that way.
When in doubt, listen to Al Green.
This picture is sixty years old, easy. I’m doing the same thing today. How many people are doing anything the same as half a century ago?
The Grind refers to the mental and physical aspect of the day. He’s sanding, not grinding. Me too.
There are some details that have changed, to be sure. This fellow didn’t write a blogpost before beginning. He arrived at work a half an hour early and read the newspaper a bit and drank bad coffee from his thermos.
It’s ever so slightly clunkier than mine, but he’s using a belt sander, same a s mine. His might be better, as it weighs more. It’s easier to use a heavy belt sander than a light one.
I won’t get the enormous snootful of dust this guy got, as a vacuum hose is hooked up to mine. Nose cancer and a condition like miner’s lung from the wood flour was very common in the wood trades. Still is, just less so now. I’m 99% sure the guy smoked like a chimney, too. Everybody did then. Come to think of it, you can still find a lot of construction workers that smoke now. It’s one of the few patches of life I rub up against where a lot of people smoke. People who work with their hands tend to be very fatalistic about such dangers.
It’s very difficult to get them to use devices to safeguard their health and safety, generally. Most large construction companies have to have rigid protocols, strictly enforced, to get people to take the smallest amount of care about such things. They chafe in the harness, that’s why they choose to work out in the wild world instead of in a factory or office. They don’t like being told what to do, and perform a simple rough calculation of loss/benefit/discomfort in their head, and throw dustmasks in the trash the minute no one’s looking. You have to make it safer and easier at the same time, or it doesn’t work. Laws mean nothing in this regard.
The fellow shown above is making a big pile of cheap furniture, and his job is on another continent today. No one shed a tear for its loss. Some one else wanted to do it more, and proved it by doing it better for less. It’s the only calculus that should be allowed into the equation. That guy’s sons and daughters have an enormous amount of consumer goods available to them because the creative destruction wrought by progress was allowed to make his livelihood pass him by. Consider also that there were craftsman making tables before this fellow, that glowered at him and his economy of scale in his big official factory with his state of the art lighting and tools and salesmen and secretary and bathroom and timeclock and power supply and so forth. He did not shed a tear for them, and we do not for him. In particular, it’s sad when people’s livelihoods are swallowed by progress. In general, we all get richer so it’s fine. In a way, I’m more like the guy the fellow in the photo replaced. People shop at IKEA and Wal*Mart and so forth for inexpensive home furnishings. I don’t play in that game, and try to take a big piece of a small pie that’s left over. It’s enough.
I do not expect anyone to shed a tear for me, if the time comes. I’m sanding today, because for right now, nobody wants it more.
I used to be a musician.
I still play occasionally, but only if you really make me. I never paid much attention to learning to play properly. My older brother is a very fine musician and taught me how to play the electric bass in the late 1970s. I bought an axe and amp, had a lesson, and got a job working in The Met Cafe in Providence a week or so later.
Playing the bass is like owning the baseball. You’ll play all you want to if you can manage to show up and mind your business. I did.
The music business was filled with guys like me. They worked with their hands all day in construction, and played music at night. But I was the exact opposite of them, too. I played music for money and built things for the love of it.
I’ve had a few book’s worth of odd and interesting things happen to me while I was playing. I could never remember all the places I’ve played in, and I can’t even remember all the bands I’ve been in. For a while, I’d play with a different set of people four or five nights a week. I don’t miss it all that much, really.
I got to wondering how many people I could recall that I played with that would turn up on YouTube. I was tickled to find two in one video. Pinetop Perkins and Luther Guitar Junior Johnson. They’re both playing with the magnificent Muddy Waters:
Pinetop seemed ancient to me back then, twenty years ago and more, and he’s still alive today and performing at 94 years old. We played in the Civic View Inn in Providence. The dressing room for the bands was upstairs, and it was… how do I put this delicately… um, well, they had shag carpeting on all the walls and the floor and ceiling too. There was a TV bolted to the wall up in the corner; the movies they were playing on there continuously would make an animal husbandry specialist blush. I avoided the doorknob, and there was no power on earth that could compel me to enter the bathroom under any circumstances. Pinetop was bored, so we went down to the bar. I thought it was funny that Pinetop called Johnny Walker Red, his favorite, “high test,” just like my uncle does. He was almost fifty years older than me, but we had more in common than I had with people I considered my friends. He wore a huge cowboy hat, was skinny as a rail, told a million stories. We had a blast. Some guys in his band didn’t show, so we opened for him and played with him too. All he needed was a piano, really.
I can’t remember where the Luther Johnson gig was. That’s him playing the guitar over in the right hand side of the frame. He was one of those guys — lively, talented, good enough to make a living at it, never making a lot of money. I remember giving him a ride back to his house. He lived in a tidy little suburb south of Boston somewhere, and was anxious to get back home to his family. Now that’s my kind of guy. I always am too.
I have a very difficult deadline to meet. It would be much simpler if it was impossible. Nothing is simpler than that:
It can’t be done. Not worth trying. What now?
It’s the tantalizing possibility of finishing well despite great odds that captures our imaginations. It’s the reason very able persons are often disorganized in their surroundings and dilatory in their activities. They’re spotting the world a few points before the game begins. Just to make it interesting.
I would never ask an employee to accomplish what I’m going to accomplish today. It wouldn’t be fair, as you need a bigger dog than just wages in the fight to make that appropriate. When managing others in the past, it has been my responsibility to exhort others to give effort in excess of what was normal. It was always subtracted out elsewhere. It is the nature of the situation, and just.
But I’m going to finish. I’ll write this blogpost, just to spot the world a few points.
I never get tired of watching the little ones play.
I have a larger one, as tall as his mother now, almost. He’s lots of fun in a different way. But it’s the little one, not yet four, and all his compadres that capture my imagination. I literally watch him do nothing. I never get bored of him, ever.
He has a routine as fixed as any salaryman. There’s a pleasant frantic rhythm to it. You can still see the unaffected gears turning in his head as he goes from one activity to the next. Nothing much is hidden behind any sort of pretense. It’s like watching the raw clay for a human pot spin on the wheel, and you put your hands on it and the shape of his personality is made, or revealed.
He will be past it all very soon. He types his name and a few words now. How much longer can we hope for, before that marvelous transparent being is rendered opaque to us?
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