I hereby announce Django is a verb, too.
Steve Trovato wrote one of my son’s latest guitar instruction books. It’s really quite well done and useful.
Arch Davis makes boats, teaches boatbuilding, and sells boat plans in Belfast, Maine.
I’ve built a fourteen foot skiff using methods nearly identical to those shown in the video. I never launched it.
I’d never met or heard of Arch Davis before, but I knew he was my brother from another mother when I saw his sawhorses there in the background in the video. I have waxed poetic about sawhorses before:
I’m not a blogger.
I hate the word. It’s inelegant. The Internet is disorderly and inelegant, so it fits, but I more or less have never gotten the urge to be “a blogger.” This might seem counterintuitive to those who read the URL for this page and see dot blogspot right in my name. Google named it, I didn’t. Google couldn’t even name themselves properly. Who should expect them to name others wisely? I tire of gibberish in great things.
Bloggers are other people. I am not casting aspersions. I’m just telling ya, is all. I confused a few people yesterday, because I put the raw feed from my head on the page. If you look at the picture I supplied, and read what I wrote, it’s entirely coherent. But old friend AJ Lynch’s observation:
and new friend anonymous’:
are entirely fair. They are cruising the Internet looking for people expressing themselves forthrightly. There’s nothing more forthright than the Internet. I can’t ever recall being told to Die In A Fire in real life, after all.
So I’m a little too obscurantist for the Intertunnel. I can’t help it. I write essays here. It’s different. I apologize unreservedly, in advance, for everything I’m ever going to say in the future.
Those were my wedding vows, by the way.
Perhaps I owe it to my audience to explain the idiosyncratic workings of my mind. Here goes.
See the picture at the top of the page? I saw it on our beloved Intertunnel yesterday. What’s the first thing that comes into your mind when you see it? Wanna know what mine is? This:
Marilyn Monroe is sitting on a very old school sawhorse, one that I’ve made myself. I have never encountered another person still making them this way. I learned it from men, all dead now, for whom Marilyn Monroe was more than a Elton John retreaded song reference. My modern carpenter friends would never make sawhorses this way, as it is complicated and labor intensive compared to their designs. But I’ve used mine for 25 years and kept them outside for much of it. They don’t even wiggle in the joints yet. I do, and I generally am kept indoors at night. There is no shame in the carpentry trade in buying pre-made sawhorses now, either, although the people I first learned carpentry from would have never spoken to you for the rest of your life if you brought one to work.
Oh, and Marilyn Monroe? She’d be camped out on my doorstep waiting for me to come home, if she was still alive. Girls like that are a dime a dozen. I’d have to send my wife out to shoo her away. But man, look at those legs.
They’re 1×6 utility grade pine. Set the framing square at 24″ on the blade and 4″ on the tongue to get the angle right.
Let me wax philosophical about my wife’s gas tank.
We drive old vehicles. I don’t like driving old vehicles. The reliability of your transportation is paramount. Old cars break down. Buying a new car is a form of insurance against risk. But real insurance against risk is unavailable, or illegal, for such as us, with one exception — personal avoidance of risk at all costs.
My wife saw a piece of metal hanging below the car that looked as out of place as an honest man in Congress. One of the two straps that held the gas tank from dragging on the road had rusted clean through and broken. The other strap looked as reliable as cell phone service in a tunnel. Something must be done, and immediately.
My family never goes anywhere much now. We cannot hope to weather much bad luck with our own meager resources, and we cannot rely on others, so we keep our heads down. We were lucky that we discovered the problem in our driveway, instead of on the highway. You might think us daft for being grateful for a broken gas tank strap in our driveway, but we were. We were doubly grateful that it wasn’t February, as well. So we offered our hosannahs. Now what to do?
In a fiscal landscape that made any sense, I’d pay a mechanic to repair the car. There’s a fellow down the street –walking distance, what a luxury for us —and he’s honest and could use the money. He’s my neighbor. But I poked around and found out that the repair would cost maybe $750 at a dealer. The mechanic down the street might only command half that, but it’s still too much. I’d have to fix it myself.
I do not enjoy fixing my car. I’ve done it, back when I was young and Gerry Ford and Jimmy Carter were desolating the landscape, but I have no natural ability or affinity for it. But I went to Amazon, and found the correct parts, and ordered them, and crawled under the car and fixed it. My older son is old enough to help now, thank goodness. I am somewhat infirm in certain ways, and to lay vaguely upside-down under a car yanking on rusty bolts nearly overcame me. But after two days of effort interspersed with trips to the fainting couch, we had replaced the parts. The repair will outlast the car.
I did not earn money by fixing my own car, of course –just the opposite. The mechanic did not earn money. The people who rely on the mechanic to earn money will not earn money, and so forth. Ultimately, through a process which must be deduced, because it cannot be observed, this lack of commerce will ultimately filter its way through the entire economy to the point where someone will not buy what I make because I didn’t hire the mechanic. It’s the circle of life, except it’s the circle of the death of commerce.
I am barraged daily with references to Helicopter Ben running the Treasury printing presses day and night, and thereby causing inflation. It’s an insane idea. When the velocity of money sniffs zero, there is no inflation. The Fed makes money and gives it to the government, who lends it to itself, and none of it ever makes it into the wild where a car mechanic and his downstream brethren might get ahold of it. For productive people in today’s American economy, the money might as well not exist. The bill for it will exist plenty in the future, of course. But when the velocity of money is zero, the future must be entirely discounted. It’s a meaningless concept, like watching an unplugged clock.
The term velocity referring to the passage of money through the alimentary canal of commerce is very descriptive, and apt to my circumstances. The economy is in exactly the same shape as my wife’s gas tank — filled with fuel which only makes it sag on its rusty underpinnings further,
making it more difficult to fix, and dangerous to be underneath, but you must bang around under there anyway because there’s no other choice.
Nervous Nellies endlessly warn me that if it was all released at once, it would explode, but that eventuality is remote compared to going hungry because we can’t drive to the supermarket until it’s fixed. And above all, the fuel isn’t taking you anywhere because the whole apparatus is busted, and the process to fix it is busted, and if you want it fixed you better do it yourself because nobody outside a building with a seal on it has any money.
It’s hard to work under the gas tank of Damocles.
Jeff Demps is immediately the fastest running back in the history of the NFL.
Little known fact: I once signed a high six-figure contract at the Patriots’ stadium.
Other little known fact: A friend of mine bought the crummy astro-turf endzones from the old Foxboro stadium, and used them for carpeting.
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