roll the drums

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Tin Man

Meet the TIN MAN....he just passed his most difficult inspection. THREE CHEERS!!!

what's happening these days is that I did indeed need to employ a third party inspector, partway because of tightening permit requirements and partway because we are a specialized bunch, us wiley potters who make their own kilns. we are a blur on the screen, electrons of questionable location. they just can't keep up.
so we passed! a slightly elder statesman named Sandy trundled into the back yard with his computer and a suitcase full of gadgets and gizmos, surprised that it wasn't running. Running! this might be a three-day process, I can't just flip a switch! but we met in the middle, me explaining the ways in which I had incorporated an afterburner, how I had designed it, and how I expected to fire it, and we looked at the burners and took them apart a bit, changed the power cords to ones compliant with UL listings which involved a little bike ride to the hardware store, and over the course of the day ended up trading all kinds of great stories about fire and boats and treasure hunting. then we let the burners run without flame for a while while he gave me a great idea for a cheap oxy meter, and told me to look into creating a reduced atmosphere by replacing some of the gas inside with nitrogen... and suggested thinning the oil with alcohol in winter. (so long as i can get a stir-stick into the tank somehow.) He was impressed with the design and construction... so I'm gloating right here.
SO! I'm going to fire it up, empty, tomorrow. Sandy doesn't buy it that the oil wouldn't ignite below cone 08, so I'm going to try. a potter friend of mine says they do it in Japan.. he says that it's only at first that the burn would be at its least efficient, and that is when it would be producing the most carbon monoxide. then we'll load on monday, tuesday, fire uh, friday, sat? I'm all involved in the Portland Open Studio tour, interviewing people and going to meetings, so there are two of those events in the middle of all this, but that's the idea...
and I still have to get 70 gallons of oil in the bed of my truck into the tank in the garden. Jack and I spent all day battling two shitty hand pumps from harbor freight- trying everything, plan f, plan t, plan x, y, and z, plan arrghh!- so I think that until my new 12V pump that I eventually forced myself to order arrives by stork, I will indeed be siphoning it out a few gallons at a time- if it will out of such a tall tank, and pouring it into a funnel. I suppose there are worse ways to spend a day. this is how people get buff without meaning to..

one ox-cart, a middle-aged horse, and a sword

I'm having engine troubles. This is my incredibly useful truck, ie ox cart, shown here transporting two barrels of honey-gold fry grease to the kiln. .....but every trip to the gasohol station costs seventy dollars now. so obviously I drive only when I need to move something other than my own little tush. thank god I live in Port-land of bike lanes and kneeling busses. if I played the oboe, even the bassoon!, I could live without any vehicle whatsoever! But how to visit Brenda or Robin, nestled with their families among the fields and fens? What of the ocean? two hours and a hundred dollars away... or, heaven forbid, I get a steady job teaching somewhere? it came down to blind passion. last summer, in a fit of crush, i bought a horse. I'd been stuffing the paltry earnings of my so-called business into a bottle for a year. my kingdom for a horse! I made the man who sold it to me break the bottle over my table to get the bills out:

he's kinda old. not a pretty boy, i mean bike. tempermental. solid.. I love him. but yes, it's a little scarey- there are still lots of suv's out there, left over from the old days... so there's the crux of the debate: we are at the tipping point- oil is not going to get cheaper. the culture of oil is dying- all the petroleum that goes into the production and transportation of beef, the availability of strawberries in january, felling trees in Canada to build homes in Houston, boiling and refining tar mixed with sand(!?) to feed our ignorant demand for everything, anything, and NOW. the suburbs will be abandoned and recycled- who can afford to drive to them? or they will become townships in themselves- an autonomous ship of a town, economy once more localized, part of a flotilla, serviced by carriers of goods whose oars might be oxen... probably segregated, but that's another story. do I digress? I was just on this fabulous road trip all around the east coast, carried aloft like a dankity queen on the sound waves reverberating off luxury speakers in a luxury car. I lived luxe, i burned a lot of fuel (and I bought a lot of pots- he he!). and I knew it would probably be the last time I had the chance to be so carefree before the hammer really fell.
so what do you do when the gavel falls? is this the story? have one last blowout and then buckle down? is buying a motorcycle a luxury of romanticized freedom or is it a transportation necessity? is it somewhere inbetween- a new paradigm for the shifting times? a new horse? or is it just dangerous and irresponsible and I ought to take my pop's suggestion and run it off a cliff (presumably I would be strapped into a hang-glider at the moment of take-off) - wasn't there a winged horse in greek mythology? Pegasus: it sprouted from the body of the gorgon (not gorgonzola) Medusa when some handsome man named Perseus cut off her head- I think the gorgons had snakes for hair and one could not look into their faces or else be turned to stone- Perseus looked into a mirror instead. how apt. we must look inside to make the changes. we must act differently.
Now I will deliberately digress: really fastinating article in the new yorker called "the itch"- did anyone read that one? the nerves that register itch are not necessarily nerves, but often memory without connnection to external stimuli. the itch is mental. same as phantom limb pain. there is memory that gets shorted out, creating physical sensation. a remarkable therapy places a mirror edge-to the body axis of a person with phantom limb pain, mirror side on the half of the body that has a full limb. then, wave the arms, conduct an orchestra in the air- look at the limb in the mirror as if it were on the other side. the memory gets a shock, a scrambling- new information, new limb, new paradigm. the train of old thinking about pain jumps a track.... me, I've been experimenting. every time I'm lonely at night and want a drink, I reach for the new yorker instead. I'm just trying to not look the gorgonzola in the face.

and what of the sword? I killed my chainsaw the other day. oh fool, how could I? put generic two-cycle oil into my fuel instead of brand-name. and not quite enough of it either... my trusty sword, smoking hot! which would be sexy if it weren't also a problem. so here is a tear-streaked eulogy to this chivalrous knight's trusty damascus. I place it in the stone: "he who so pulleth out the sword from this stone and anvil is the rightful king of all england" .. maybe I'll pull it out this winter and teach myself how to fix it. yea, right- I'll probably end up turning it into yet another useless art project: "Mechanisms of Chivalry: an mobile of Irreconcilable Ideas". hot air rises and makes smog about this. and this.