Soon we’ll be sliding down the razor blade of life
Tom lehrer, “Bright college days”
Still got that scraped raw feeling, like I had been gently but thoroughly abraded by being dragged naked over roads coated in black ice and frozen gravel.
But ya know, other than that, I am fine.
Feeling a slowly spreading kind of panic when I contemplate the world without my father in it. So I am taking it in small sips. Thinking about it a bit at a time, here and there. Might work my way up to slow, thoughtful gulps eventually. Might not.
Here’s something I think he would have enjoyed.
A friend gave me that link today, and I ended up watching the whole thing, absolutely entranced by all I beheld.
I call this kind of thing “competence porn” because to me, having the competence to pull off something like that is like magic.
But better than magic, because it’s all real and not very hard to understand.
And wow, does that guy have awesome tools. Vertical belt sander? Check. Circular steel lathe? Check. Infinity Gauntlet? On back order.
What I truly love is that the videos are made with the same level of craft and skill and understanding as the restorations. No irritating music. No wordy explanations. Not a single second wasted.
Just the good stuff : watching someone deeply and thoroughly defeat entropy.
Apparently, “I make a new one” is the channel’s catchphrase, and it’s apt, because when he said that in the video above, I was like “whaaaaaat?”.
Amazing stuff. If I could do that, I wouldn’t need to do much else. I would just spend all day looking in junkyards and such for stuff worth rescuing and then restoring it till it’s good as new or better.
Well, and presumably then selling it to pay the bills.
According to the friend who gave me the link, one of the reasons this guy’s restorations are so satisfying to watch is that he doesn’t half-ass anything.
He knows exactly what he is doing and so he always does everything right. To the point that if he doesn’t have the right tool for the job, he borrows it rather than try to use the wrong tool and fucking things up.
That is enormously appealing to my inner Walter.
I don’t think I would get that unhinged about bowling, but I am sure there are things which would push me to this point.
That’s why even if carrying a handgun was an option for a Canadian like me, I wouldn’t do it, because I know that I’ve got a head full of crazy and that I am not stable and that if the right buttons got pushed in my head, I might do something crazy.
The only reason I haven’t done anything super crazy in my life is that I have isolated myself from most common stressors and led a super sheltered, timid life.
Put me in the wrong situation and who knows what I might do.
And that, quite frankly, scares the shit out of me.
And that, in turn, means I probably wouldn’t do the crazy thing.
But I still might.
More after the thing.
LOL, I meant to type “more after the break”, of course. But I am way too amused by my error to fix it.
Still feeling raw. No big surprise there. I can only imagine that I will feel this way, or worse, for quite a while yet.
No wrong way to mourn.
This is my first time grieving a close family member. Well as close as anyone in my family gets, anyway.
At least, with me.
I have been pondering the role of depression in my childhood lately. How being raped by a stranger at the age of four put this impenetrable barrier between me and others that I was too young to perceive.
I mean, I guess on some level I knew there was something wrong with me. But this was decades before people even knew there was a thing called depression, let alone that it was something a child could have.
I imagine there are even people today who would not think a child could have it.
But I had it alright. I had it pretty bad. And if there had been someone – anyone – in my life who was paying attention to me and who took an active interest in my wellbeing, they would have seen it.
But no. There was nobody in my life to do that. There was nobody in my life at all, really.
Then again, I got pretty good at fading into the woodwork due to the bullying. A good day at school was one where nobody noticed me.
Well, not my fellow students, anyhow.
I guess that’s when I learned to just keep going no matter what. What choice did I have? If I stopped, someone might notice me and I would get into trouble.
So I learned to trudge miserably onward, not happy but not broadcasting my unhappiness to the world either.
Same as now, really. This blog is the only place where I let my unhappiness be known. Otherwise, I keep it to myself.
Heck, even my therapist doesn’t know half the stuff I put into this here blog of mine.
I’ve wondered about giving him a link to this blog. He’s not quite the digital innocent he was when I first started going to him a decade ago. He could read it on his phone.
But I dunno. Might make me too self-conscious about what I write and that would defeat the purpose of this thing. The whole idea of this blog is to let stuff out of my mind and on to the page without any other mission but self-expression.
Now and then, I ponder moving this thing to another platform so that it might attract more readers and maybe even help me connect with others.
But I always chicken out.
It’s so very hard for me to stop hiding.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.