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jack_babalonWhen I'm out walking I strut my stuff yeah I'm so strung out
I'm high as a kite I just might stop to check you out
let me go on like I blister in the sun
let me go on big hands I know your the one
body and beats I stain my sheets I don't even know why
my girlfriend she's at the end she is starting to cry
let me go on like I blister in the sun
let me go on big hands I know your the one...
~Blister in the sun
Violent Femmes
There is a blister in the center of my right hand. It resembles the eye of Jupiter and it stings when I stretch my thumb and throbs when I don't. The blister though is not a scar; it is a medal, a badge of honor & in its own way a souvenier of my weekend under the sun.
The four of us are standing over the last six feet of the trench we're digging. So far we had made great time tunneling a path throughbookmonkey211 & ozmancometh's yard. We had some Ramones blasting on the boom box, plenty of shade to shield us from the raw sun & a 'what-the-fuck' attitude coasting us along the fieldwork with much quips & laughs. Now we've struck Red Clay! For the last twenty minutes we've been attacking this small length of earth with shovels, rakes & hoes trying to skin three inches of the surface. So far the surface was kicking our ass and taking names.
Now it's time for a quick geology lesson for those of you not familiar with the lay of the land. Atlanta is a plateau that lies in a region known as the Brevard Fault Zone (Which runs roughly through Centralhatchee over in Heard County, covers up northwest Atlanta, Duluth, Buford, and Gainesville before leaving Georgia at the westernmost point on the Tugaloo River in northernmost Stephens County). This zone is characterized by the presence of Piedmont soils. Those soils consist of kaolinite, halloysite and of iron oxides. They result from the intense weathering of metamorphic rocks. This intense weathering dissolves or alters nearly all minerals and leaves behind a residue of aluminum-bearing clays and iron-bearing iron oxides. These iron oxides give the red color to the clay-rich soil, yielding the red clay that has come to be almost synonymous with central Georgia. This is the same type of clay favored by Hebrew mystics when constructing a golem. The word “golem” means “unformed substance” or “formless mass” in Hebrew, and suggests parallels to the biblical account of the birth of Adam: God fashions him “from the dust of the ground” or from clay (“Adam” comes from the Hebrew for “red clay”) and breathes life into him.
Standing there dripping sweat into the thirsty earth, I can see why old Jehovah chose to build the First Man out of Red Clay! So he'd last. What fucking lion or crocodile was going to stand a chance trying to gnaw a prey made out of metamorphic rocks that are soaked in iron oxides? Sadly though we are not building a golem. We are digging out a trench from the dead earth to fill with sand & stone to form a bridal path for the marriage of two friends. I wanted to make the golem and have him do the manual labor of digging the trench. Kill two birds with one stone. Howeverozmancometh kept reminding me that building a golem first would be counter productive to our goal. So would my other suggestions for dealing with the red clay dilema such as:
1)"take arms against the sea of troubles" by which I meant firearms! A few of us blasting the ground with shotguns should loosen up the soil!
2)Dynamite. Like plan #1 but louder, and hence, much cooler to watch.
3)Convince a bunch of freshman drama students to pay us for "Actors therapy". This would be a class where we give these students a shovel and have them dig the trench in order to teach them "How to dig into the role of the character you must assume! How to channel the feel of the character through the zen process of channeling a shovel through dirt!"- It was agreed this would be a good idea but it was to late in the day for such mendacity.
4)Did I mention dynamite already....?
So there was nothing for it but repeated blows. The only other guy with a shaved head joined me after a quick lunch and the two of us bashed, smashed, struck, skinned, scraped, kicked,shoveled & raked off the inches we needed. Yay- now it was time for carrying buckets of sand. I felt like I walked into a Shao-lin aerobics video, as I ran up and down the hill of a driveway with buckets of sand! Finally the work was done. For me at least. All they had to do now was set the stones in the sand, which reminded me of a slow motion version of Tetris. Man cannot live off labor alone and I got a ride over to Criminal Records for my weekly dose of Comicbooks & record store snobbery. Home at last and time to get some rest. After all I had a fence to disassemble, load & unload with Bill tomorrow!
Today i'm at work. Finally some time off! Outside it's the first rainfall i've seen this month and i'm loaded up with bills for analysing & correcting. I look at the blister in my palm, a poor mans stigmata. Perfect for me really, given all the time I spend putting myself on a 'cross'! The flesh will heal, the wedding will come and go, the rain will wash the sand path back into the earth but that's the poetry of it all. To do as much as you can, the best you can, knowing full well that one day the work will be lost in the shuffle of the passing ages. Maybe that's how God felt, playing in the dirt and making little red clay golem action figures in the backyard of Eden. His mother calls him in for dinner and the whole human race lays there in the dirt waiting for that little boy to come back and see what splendid toys he has built.
I'm high as a kite I just might stop to check you out
let me go on like I blister in the sun
let me go on big hands I know your the one
body and beats I stain my sheets I don't even know why
my girlfriend she's at the end she is starting to cry
let me go on like I blister in the sun
let me go on big hands I know your the one...
~Blister in the sun
Violent Femmes
There is a blister in the center of my right hand. It resembles the eye of Jupiter and it stings when I stretch my thumb and throbs when I don't. The blister though is not a scar; it is a medal, a badge of honor & in its own way a souvenier of my weekend under the sun.
The four of us are standing over the last six feet of the trench we're digging. So far we had made great time tunneling a path through
bookmonkey211 & ozmancometh's yard. We had some Ramones blasting on the boom box, plenty of shade to shield us from the raw sun & a 'what-the-fuck' attitude coasting us along the fieldwork with much quips & laughs. Now we've struck Red Clay! For the last twenty minutes we've been attacking this small length of earth with shovels, rakes & hoes trying to skin three inches of the surface. So far the surface was kicking our ass and taking names.Now it's time for a quick geology lesson for those of you not familiar with the lay of the land. Atlanta is a plateau that lies in a region known as the Brevard Fault Zone (Which runs roughly through Centralhatchee over in Heard County, covers up northwest Atlanta, Duluth, Buford, and Gainesville before leaving Georgia at the westernmost point on the Tugaloo River in northernmost Stephens County). This zone is characterized by the presence of Piedmont soils. Those soils consist of kaolinite, halloysite and of iron oxides. They result from the intense weathering of metamorphic rocks. This intense weathering dissolves or alters nearly all minerals and leaves behind a residue of aluminum-bearing clays and iron-bearing iron oxides. These iron oxides give the red color to the clay-rich soil, yielding the red clay that has come to be almost synonymous with central Georgia. This is the same type of clay favored by Hebrew mystics when constructing a golem. The word “golem” means “unformed substance” or “formless mass” in Hebrew, and suggests parallels to the biblical account of the birth of Adam: God fashions him “from the dust of the ground” or from clay (“Adam” comes from the Hebrew for “red clay”) and breathes life into him.
Standing there dripping sweat into the thirsty earth, I can see why old Jehovah chose to build the First Man out of Red Clay! So he'd last. What fucking lion or crocodile was going to stand a chance trying to gnaw a prey made out of metamorphic rocks that are soaked in iron oxides? Sadly though we are not building a golem. We are digging out a trench from the dead earth to fill with sand & stone to form a bridal path for the marriage of two friends. I wanted to make the golem and have him do the manual labor of digging the trench. Kill two birds with one stone. However
ozmancometh kept reminding me that building a golem first would be counter productive to our goal. So would my other suggestions for dealing with the red clay dilema such as:1)"take arms against the sea of troubles" by which I meant firearms! A few of us blasting the ground with shotguns should loosen up the soil!
2)Dynamite. Like plan #1 but louder, and hence, much cooler to watch.
3)Convince a bunch of freshman drama students to pay us for "Actors therapy". This would be a class where we give these students a shovel and have them dig the trench in order to teach them "How to dig into the role of the character you must assume! How to channel the feel of the character through the zen process of channeling a shovel through dirt!"- It was agreed this would be a good idea but it was to late in the day for such mendacity.
4)Did I mention dynamite already....?
So there was nothing for it but repeated blows. The only other guy with a shaved head joined me after a quick lunch and the two of us bashed, smashed, struck, skinned, scraped, kicked,shoveled & raked off the inches we needed. Yay- now it was time for carrying buckets of sand. I felt like I walked into a Shao-lin aerobics video, as I ran up and down the hill of a driveway with buckets of sand! Finally the work was done. For me at least. All they had to do now was set the stones in the sand, which reminded me of a slow motion version of Tetris. Man cannot live off labor alone and I got a ride over to Criminal Records for my weekly dose of Comicbooks & record store snobbery. Home at last and time to get some rest. After all I had a fence to disassemble, load & unload with Bill tomorrow!
Today i'm at work. Finally some time off! Outside it's the first rainfall i've seen this month and i'm loaded up with bills for analysing & correcting. I look at the blister in my palm, a poor mans stigmata. Perfect for me really, given all the time I spend putting myself on a 'cross'! The flesh will heal, the wedding will come and go, the rain will wash the sand path back into the earth but that's the poetry of it all. To do as much as you can, the best you can, knowing full well that one day the work will be lost in the shuffle of the passing ages. Maybe that's how God felt, playing in the dirt and making little red clay golem action figures in the backyard of Eden. His mother calls him in for dinner and the whole human race lays there in the dirt waiting for that little boy to come back and see what splendid toys he has built.
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Thank you so much!
on 2005-09-26 07:05 pm (UTC)Just for the sake of your readers, I want you to know that I did pass out gloves for all chain gang participants.
Re: Thank you so much!
on 2005-09-26 07:25 pm (UTC)But seriously folks, not only were gloves passed out but I got to keep my pair! I will wear them next week when I try make my "Sex-Golem" out of all that displaced Red Clay---mmmmmmmmm- Sex Golems Rock!