Tag: Ragtag Daily Prompt

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Community?

 Don’t get cultural anthropologists, sociologists, or other social scientists into discussing what a community is while enjoying a few beers. You’ll be listening to various views, historical perspectives, and theoretical discussions all night. There will be eager expositions of how the sad, old, and worn term has taken on new meaning in the digital age. Opposing this will be someone with a long face pointing out the vulnerabilities communities face due to a host of challenges. Seemingly, mid-stream, there will be a swivel to a discussion on whether or not the term itself is relevant anymore. 

Then, some impulsive fool will suggest a more appropriate term for use—perhaps a spatially domiciled cooperative unit. This will be met with derisive comments pointing out that it makes a poor acronym. Everyone understands that the acronym has to be a catchy phrase in funding rounds for grant applications. “After all, I’ve got grad students that need a job, and I’m up for tenure next year!”

Sometime soon after “last call,” the bartender shuffles them out onto the street. She hopes that they will go elsewhere tomorrow for the sake of her local community and her business. Jeez, you could barely hear the hockey game because of their loud nattering away!

Daily writing prompt
How would you improve your community?
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Change

I wish I could take the proverbial “Hall Pass” on the effects of COVID-19. But I can’t, and to be clear, I’m not one of those who spent time in ICUs or had incapacitating secondary infections. However, there was the long six months of debilitating arthritis – one flare after the other. I also seemed to be mentally functioning, but there were the months of bad financial decisions, as witnessed by the tools I’ll never use gathering dust in the basement.
Looking back, after I initially cleared the infection, I spent about a year getting over the residual complications. I wasn’t consistently having problems other than arthritis, but things might have been much worse for me if remote work had not become the rule.

Going to the station to do evening maintenance work when I could avoid social contact became the new work day. I might wave to another troglodyte from a hundred feet away. Old habits from working in the Operating Room returned—I was pretty good at recognizing people in surgical masks.
At home, I ignored the wood shop for at least a month; I had no energy for work.

Like so many others, the pandemic had lasting effects on me. My wife and I socialize outside of the family much less than before, and I continue to work mostly remotely. This blog existed before the pandemic, but it was during the pandemic that it became something that I spent significant time on. I got tired of non-creative social media platforms like Facebook and found a community of fellow bloggers with interesting things to discuss, show, and demonstrate.

I am truly fortunate; I lost no one near me, recovered from the ill effects, and found new creative outlets.
Things will never go back to the way they were. As a society, this multiyear experience should be a grand wake-up call to strengthen our healthcare system and shore up a delicate supply chain. But come on! That would be too common sense! We’ve become a world that can do intensely complicated things with AI, contorted idiocy in politics, and create elaborate conspiracies. But basic stuff, no.

Daily writing prompt
How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic?
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Breakfast

Oh, no. You want to avoid getting involved with my first hour of the morning, which includes the dog’s first low-pitched whine, followed by the insistent nuzzling of two starving cats, more whining, and eventually “delicate” reminders from the cats of what will happen if I don’t get up.
Of course, I interrupt my peaceful sleep to feed my desperate pets! Not to do so is (in their eyes) unthinkable.

After getting up I hobble my way downstairs. You can’t really go downstairs normally with the dog in front and the two cats weaving between your feet.
On arrival in the kitchen, the cries of starving cats can freely translate to ” Is the fool opening the can yet? What a joker!” The cries are only interrupted when I put the food down.

Then there is quiet. Unless there is disagreement with my choice of type of food for breakfast – then the cries are “Idiot! Cretin! Why did we ever leave Mother!”
The dog offers to solve the issue quietly and removes any remaining cat food with his tongue. At least one of the three is always happy with breakfast.

Daily writing prompt
What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?
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The Doc

I resigned from crazy as a lifestyle at the beginning of the 1970s.To do this, I needed a source of income besides my customary drifting from gig to gig or working in ORs.
I was living settled and transitioning to a steady and serious life as a college student. Returning to the operating rooms as a surgical technician was out of the question due to the on-call hours at night. I tried it for a while but calls kept coming in for emergency surgeries during classes.
At a friend’s suggestion, I decided to try working as a home care worker for older people. After several short-term assignments, I interviewed with a family whose father had dementia. I became their father’s daily companion for almost half a year. I was with him Monday through Friday, from eight to four in the afternoon, when his daughters returned from work. Afterward, I would hurry home, eat, feed my cat, and then attend evening classes at Boston University.
The Doc, because he was a retired Obstetrician, was a crusty gentleman who only recently stopped seeing patients. At home his downstairs office was exactly the way it had been when he saw patients. And it was here that he and I spent hours each day as he waited for patients who failed to arrive. We filled some of the time “talking shop.” I was his private scrub nurse, and he wanted me prepped for cases we’d see at the hospital. I could fall into this role because I was familiar with the universe of surgery, its tools, terms, and tendencies. All this seemed exceptionally normal until mid-afternoon or so. He became delusional when the sherry came out from the pantry.
Now you should understand that I worked for the daughters. Their instructions and parenting style were to allow him to live his everyday life as much as possible, including his afternoon sherry. But the sherry started very vivid images of his old neighborhood in Boston.

Vivid? Very. And he was an exceptional word and image crafter. Over the months, I became acquainted with his old neighborhood to the degree that I visited it and found many of his descriptions spot-on. He could stand in the doorway of his suburban home and describe the street scene in Boston.
I stopped taking care of the “Doc” when my school schedule changed, and his afternoon sherry became too much for me to limit, as instructed by the daughters. But I came away with an understanding that dementia is not just crazy behavior. It often echoes who we are and who we were in intriguing and revealing ways.

Daily writing prompt
Which aspects do you think makes a person unique?
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Your Name Here

I worked for some years in a city that loved to name squares, recreational facilities, and boulevards for locally notable individuals. But it wasn’t much of a deal when the sign came down twenty years later. Then the following week, there was a dedication ceremony for the Lucrezia Borgia Memorial Square. Over the years, I saw this pattern repeated. It was a large city, so unless you were watching, you might not notice the locations dedicated to Civil War vets were rededicated in time to others.
This pattern was strange in a city that claimed a storied history and several nationally prominent colleges. Then I realized that it was happening in the neighborhoods, not the downtown areas or near the universities.
The neighborhood I primarily worked in had been, by turns, working-class, Yankee, working-class Irish, working-class Italian, and Portuguese, with a smattering of other ethnicities thrown in. The sponsors for these dedications tend to be the district city councilors.
I was had lunch one day with a friend. She asked me to come to a local park on Saturday. She didn’t have a camera and wanted me to take pictures of the plaque dedicating the park in honor of her husband. The photos would prove to her great-grandkids the park had once been named for her family. I laughed and thought she was joking, but she pointed out that the municipal building where I had my office had three names in fifty years. Then I noticed the pattern.
I was back in the old neighborhood a few years ago and noted the park still had her family name. But the building where I had my office now sported a new sign. If that city were to ever name something for me, I’d wonder for how long.

Daily writing prompt
If you could have something named after you, what would it be?
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The Lab

What did I want to be at five? Well, do you mean chronological age or emotional age? After all, I’m chronologically in my seventies, but emotionally, I’m only twenty. That was only fifteen or so years ago. Something out of the Playboy Philosophy? I mean, I was only a kid!

I was never well-coordinated, so being a dancer was missing from my list. The lack of horses in my section of New York City prevented me from becoming a cowboy. This is the part of the post where I could falsify things to make myself look good. More mature than I was, intellectually advanced, and so on.
I wanted to be a doctor.

Don’t believe me, do you? Well, it’s true. Between five and around eleven, I was eager to get a medical degree. How did this happen? My sister. She was in a nursing bachelor’s degree program, and I was the recipient of all her cast-off textbooks on things like bacteriology, anatomy, and physiology.
My father was the super for the building where we lived and worked widely throughout the city for his employer. Free basement use came with the job; soon, a small storage room became my lab. When my sister dissected a fetal pig in anatomy, I shadowed the dissection in my lab with a fetal pig from a slaughterhouse ( courtesy of a friend of my father). I learned to prepare, plate, and read cultures from the bacteriology text. When a laboratory at a university closed and discarded equipment, my father scavenged a microscope, lab glassware, and other materials for my basement lab.
Eventually, my interests shifted to other things, like guitars and girls, but the things I learned from the texts stayed with me.
If we fast-forward some years, I am working in an operating room, passing instruments and holding retractors. A few years beyond that, I am mapping out the foramina and physical landmarks on a sphenoid bone—despite studying to be a cultural anthropologist, the osteology lab was fun.

So sometimes, the things you want at five become touchstones for places you go in life.

Pay more attention to what your five-year-old wants to be.

Daily writing prompt
When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
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Sales

I charge different rates for different types of carving. It depends on the complexity of the work. For example, Spoons and bowls are much less complex and require less technical skill than a ship’s portrait or an eagle, and I charge accordingly.
Part of it is that my hair has gone from dark brown to predominantly silver in the years it took to achieve the skills required to carve an eagle or do a portrait.

Clients who appreciate skill need no education about the higher charges for the custom portrait of their boat over the charge for that lovely cherry bowl. No, it’s the ones who act like you are an extortionist or commit blackmail who need the education. As you quote the price, they become indignant.

I explain it in household terms. Carving the spoon is like watering your houseplants. It takes a bit of understanding of how much, how often, and to which plants. But it’s simple enough. On the other hand, the project you are interested in is more like cooking an elaborate gourmet meal of many courses for a dozen people. You have to be a very good, effective, and knowledgeable chef. Only some people have the skill to do it.

We can divide potential clients into three basic categories: those who are knowledgeable about the value and cost of skilled craft, those who can be educated, and those who can be pointed in the direction of a shop selling cheap Chinese-produced junk.

One final note: People are variable and sometimes we are just wrong about people. It’s something that keeps things from being boring.

Daily writing prompt
What’s something most people don’t understand?
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Bit Tech

 Time machines do exist. We travel in time second by second. Most people have, at some point, regretted that there is no reverse gear, though. Technology is very much the same thing. One steps forward with each device or revision and has no easy way back.

I’ve been around video and television long enough to recall relatively simple electronic editing devices that operated on twin tape decks connected to a controller. They were very analog.

 The people teaching me were still amazed at the technological progress of this system over the older manual methods they’d had only five years before. I remember going to a trade convention with them and watching a demonstration of the first computer-based video editing system available. Our pronunciation on it was, “Nah. It’ll never take off!” But, of course, it did. Videotape is a thing of the distant past. And I edit files, not tape, on the computer. Boxes of “classic” tape are in storage waiting for transfer to files jus so they can be archived.

In the “old days,” special effects might have taken days. Now, if you need to distort, re-time, filter, or add any special effect, it might be a matter of moments—on a slow machine.

At the show, I mentioned there was the usual “Buy Now!” feeling about many of the new items. And some of us could barely wait to get our hands on them. But others mumbled that nothing would ever replace film in quality productions. Or that computers would never replace an editor’s sure touch on the control knob. 

It’s important to remember how new a technology television was. It has been evolving rapidly since inception, and technological change was the rule, not the exception.

I hear nattering about deepfakes and AI all the time now. Some friends are confident that AI and deepfakes are coming for their jobs. These concerns are warranted. Up until now, we have always been in charge of the intent and creative direction of our work. Technology has only served those goals. According to some of my colleagues, the next technological revolution may be to reverse that and put us in service to the tech.

It’s important to remember that Technology is not inevitable. History is full of innovations that failed, were abandoned, never popularly adopted, were superseded, or even repressed. We seem to have a passive attitude about our technology – it’s inevitable. Accepting the inevitability of whatever you are given will guarantee a future where you have no control.

Daily writing prompt
How has technology changed your job?
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Junk Mail

All flyers and email notices from tool companies, even my favorite, go to the Junk Mail folder. They get arbitrarily trashed. Why am I not allowing my favorite form of tool porn into my life? Covid.

No, I don’t have COVID-19 again, but a few weeks ago, I was looking in the basement shop I rarely use and noting the unused tools I purchased when I had my about with long COVID-19. It was a bit more than six months. I had a terrible six-month arthritic flair and poor judgment. There is stuff in the shop that I knew I’d never use. During the long spell of pain and brain fog, I hobbled to work and hung on waiting for my health to rally. At home, I made” “sophisticated” business plans for the future. The flyers, emails, and catalogs I read compulsively fueled and fanned my thoughts of a post-Covid rally for my business. I spent.

Looking at the purchases and my reasons for making them, I feel like an outsider looking in—they make no sense to me now. The business is on pause while I plan to reopen as an online shop. The shop’s budget for purchases is zero.

And the temptation to buy tools? Well, the flyers, catalogs, and emails are consigned to the hell of the Junk Mail folder!

 “Vade retro me satana.” 

Daily writing prompt
How often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals?
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Curiosity

Curiosity can be one of the best traits to have. But only if it is balanced with an interest in using what one learns.
You might share the knowledge you gain, like a good teacher, or perhaps use the gained knowledge to generate new things, like an inventor. Even archiving the knowledge in a library, eases its dissemination to others who can use it.

Curiosity can be as simple as the impulse to turn over rocks washed by the tide at the beach. Or as complex as taking apart a watch – and then trying to put it back together.

Curiosity without direction isn’t like a fine wine or cheese; it doesn’t age well, sitting in our brains unused. Let your curiosity spark further exploration.

But most of all, curiosity can give direction to our lives. If you are curious, be grateful that you have a character-defining skill and trait that will take you to interesting places and enrich your life.

Daily writing prompt
What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?
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