So-me Bitching Beaches

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"Life's a bitch, and then you die"? I haven't been familiar with that aphorism for long. I've never really understood it. Life has been a bitch at times, but other times not. Por mio, it depends on where I'm at with myself at any particular time, and where I'm at in the world specifically. Location. Location. Location.

Doing the same thing the same way in a lotta different places was a lesson unto me. Repetition and redundancy is a hard and fast rule/tool with me. Maybe that's because my astrological natal chart shows that both the Sun and the Moon were in Taurus at the moment of my birth. Fifteen degrees apart. It was during the first crescent of the New Moon when a small sliver of the Moon looks a lot like a bowl.

Some pundits claim that a native's potential enlightenment is revealed by how much light the Moon reflects in the natal chart . They say the configuration between the Sun and the Moon is all any competent astrologer really needs to know to deduce any sort of information about the subject needed to set the hook. In the same way some palmists only read their subject's thumb.

Too much information is worse than hardly anything to go on at all. That's why it's not all that tough to deal with not remembering stuff that doesn't need to be in my life any more. Forgetting stuff is a way of realizing that whatever it was couldn't have been all that important anyway.

I probably learned more about what needs to be learned by becoming a pipewelder than anything else I did in my life. It's said that you can only learn to weld by doing it. Again and again and again. Then, you get a job doing it, and do it all day for a living, and after a few years you might be able to say you've mastered welding.

You can study engineering and metallurgy in the classroom, and that's a fine way to make a living, but even engineers can only learn to weld by burning a bunch of welding rods.

Welding was the first thing I ever actually mastered. I didn't get started until I was in my mid-thirties, and I didn't master the trade until I was in my early forties. "Better late than never." I didn't do it long after that. It wasn't as much fun when I started needing reading glasses.

Making a living as an industrial pipewelder is a personal example of doing the same thing in a lotta different places, and why my moving from location to location to keep a job was such an important part of the process of mastery in my opinion.

I'm convinced that mastering anything helps a person to master anything else if they got the time and opportunity. The length of time it took for me to master pipewelding was what impressed me most of all. I learned to be patient with myself.

In ways it was a big ego trip to be able to weld with such skill that even though every inch of the welds made were 100% x-rayed to find flaws, there hardly ever was a time when a flaw was found. That wasn't just me either. Pipewelders get tested first to get the job, then their work is tested to be able to keep the job.

That's why it's such an ego trip for them. If for whatever reason you lose your confidence in your skills, that hesitation is enough to cause you to lose your job. It's like being a boxer and losing a fight. It takes a lot to work your way back into it, and some never do. There seem to be a lot of trades where craftsmen can lose their edge, and have to do something else for a living.

In my case, it was my eyesight that caused me pause. I was thirty five when I stumbled my way into a government skill center down in Mississippi where I ran outta luck with a young wife and our child. Our car broke down and we had very little money, and things were looking real dim.

The government paid me to go to welding school, and I took to it like a hog to a mud puddle. I didn't have any skills and only a couple of years of college seemed like more of an impediment than a boon. It didn't take me long to realize that if I learned to weld I'd had a fairly sure way of making a living for my new family.

Learning to weld did exactly that, but since I only got started very near the time many people start to need reading glasses my time was limited and I didn't take that into consideration until it was a done deal. Once I failed my first welding test because I needed the glasses I refused to get, it was all over but the shouting.

That probably happens a lot with double Taurus's. It took me a long time to realize what I'd previously been calling "being practical" was really being stubborn. That's why my refusal to admit I couldn't see as well as I thought I did got the best of me.

It wasn't just failing the welding test that got my goat. It was my slow, obtuse refusal to accept the truth that my failing eyesight was just another indication that I was getting older in more ways than one. People who liked me and considered themselves a friend were telling me things for my own good, and I'd not only deny it, but rebuke them for suggesting I had weaknesses.

I switched over to pipefitting for a living. My confidence that I could pass the very difficult welding tests was shot to hell. How was I gonna make a living? It wasn't long after that I lost my family too. No blame.

I kept messing around getting jobs where I could as a pipefitter. It was tough. I didn't like pipefitting like I did welding, and that had a lot to do with me barely scraping by. I'm still barely scraping by. I don't know any other way that I like to express myself than being a poor it.
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