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The sunlight out on my deck is now welcome. It's cool. The ambient temperature is 61° (16.1° C) and the humidity is low for around here. Sitting out in the sun to get vitamin D the old-fashioned way is very comfortable and relaxing. I began reflecting upon having made a living as a journeyman pipewelder, and then realized that's what I could write about today instead of just watching my drifting thoughts evaporate to become a part of the wispy clouds overhead.
Welding was perfect for me as a solitary thinker. It's the only craft I've ever mastered besides oracles. It didn't last that long. I didn't fall into it until I was thirty-five years old and in dire straits. I had walked away from a perfectly good wife and a perfectly acceptable corporate job to "tune in, turn on, and drop out". I don't write as much about that era of my life. Just the results of my walking away.
The guy's name who taught the government sponsored welding class was Benson. Mister Benson to me. I never attempted to get personal with him. I needed to learn how to weld for good reasons. I had married again. My family of another perfectly good wife and child lived in a slum house, and our Volkswagen needed a new engine. I walked a couple of miles each way to the Skill Center.
There were 15-20 guys in the class to start out with. The numbers varied, usually downward, as the months passed. I was thirty-five years old and most of them were in their late teens and early twenties. We got along fine and most of us smoked pot together on the breaks. They didn't exactly know what to do with a skilled labor wannabe who wrote and recited poetry... and was literally the best welder in the class.
I was the best welder in the class because I practiced a lot while the young guys were strutting for each other attempting to pass for being a good catch for the ladies. Mister Benson made me the student foreman because I was such a hard worker and set an example of what it took to do right. Same as when I was in boot camp in the Navy. Start out with a bang! In welding class, however, I couldn't afford to go out with a whimper.
It's not unusual for what the outside world sees me as, to not be exactly true. I was born at sunset, and the sun in my natal chart was in opposition to the astrology sign on the eastern horizon which represents the personality the outside world "sees me as".
What does this have to do with the welding classes? Practically everything metaphorically. It only appeared to Mister Benson and my class mates that I was seriously practicing to become a competent welder by burning rod after rod while most of the other students were goofing around. Like I mentioned above, being a role model wasn't my real motivation.
What my real motivation was turned out to be molten metal. An honest to God intimate relationship with fiery red molten metal. It burned so bright special lens were needed to look at it, much less to learn how to push it around like it was 'mah bitch. '-)
Hey! It's not like I ain't got colloquial with you before, dear reader.
That's why welding and pushing that little point of molten metal around is so intimate. 99% of the ti-me, there wasn't nobody there to witness this goings-on but us chickens, as it were. I could cuss all I wanted to while my welding shield was down, and there won't nobody there to tell me "No!".
Throughout my entire welding career, if that what it was, the people who had a right to by corporate authority always (to a man) told me to take my time and do it right the first time or they'd fire me. Doing any other kind of work previous to welding pipe, the same Type-A's nearly all told me to hurry up or they'd fire me. Slowing down and doing it right was right up my alley. I felt like a boll weevil who had finally found a ho-me.
Later, my supervisors would try to get me to stop working so hard, and they too misunderstood my intentions. They took my daily goals as my motivating force, when por mio, it was my life goals that caused me to work right on through the breaks.
If there was enough work to go around and I could, my supervisors would have to shut off my welding machine or come tap me on the shoulder and tell me to go home. I'm a'telling you straight up, I used to get real joyous while I was hidden behind my welding shield. It was like I could "see" the entire universe within that glowing metal.
"... but, he grew old
this knight so bold,
and around
his heart
a shadow,
grew as he found
no spot of ground
by the name of
El Dorado!
~EAP
(The misquotes and lousy punctuation? Mine)
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
