Tag: your daily word prompt

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Jug

I was preparing to take out the recycle bin when this “dead soldier” caught my eye. The bottle is an empty jug of spiced rum that powered my don’t drink and then drive fruitcake. Momentarily I was transported to my early days. I took the cap off and began blowing an accompaniment to Washington at Valley Forge, a perennial favorite of 1960’s jug bands.

So if I could see you now, I’d see questioning faces, incomprehension, and a bit of”what the hell is he going on about now? Jug bands?” for those of you without doctorates in American folk music, the jug band was a phenomenon of the American south in the ’20s and ’30s. The primarily African-American groups played jazz, blues, and ragtime music. Among the music’s key elements were the unique instuments used. It couldn’t be a jug band if there weren’t a player on the jug; the bigger and more profound the sound as it got blown, the better. Other instruments could include: 

  • the spoons, 
  • washboard, 
  • stovepipe, 
  • kazoo
  • the washtub bass. You made the bass from a galvanized washtub, pole, thin rope,
  •  Finally, it could include whatever else musicians could improvise to play music with.

As both a type of music and an orchestral form (snicker), the jug band came back in the ’60s. Many folk musicians toyed with membership in a jug band, but only one or two groups succeeded in making it work. It was a sort of unicorn – unique and seldom seen as a form. But it has a kind of landmark status among us survivors of the folk music revival of the 1960s.

And yes, I did belong for about a month to one of those unfortunate groups seeking to explore the outer limits of folk music. But I didn’t play the jug. The jug player had to get the proper plosive eruptions from the instrument. Since the jug player needed a lot of wind and the cheeks to shape the blow into the jug, it was a strangely maximal instrument to play. So instead, I played guitar and kazoo. The great Louie Lefkowitz played harmonica, and the rest of the group was picked up for whatever gig we had to play.

This band was not exactly a huge success. At the base level, most jug bands followed closely in the footsteps laid down by the best-known group – the Kweskin Jug Band. So with similar material, we were not the most inflammable act trying to blaze a path to fame in Greenwich Village. I can’t even remember the name of our group.

But there I was at six in the AM blowing on the jug, stomping my foot, wearing my fuzzy LL Bean winter PJ’s. If the neighbors saw me, it only confirmed what they already knew – whacko, pure 1960’s whacko.

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Old Head

You only get one clean slate. That’s when you are a kid. After that, you can scrub at it, but it’ll always be a sort of palimpsest, with bits of the old layers faintly showing from below. So you can never totally scrub it completely clean. I don’t think this is a bad thing. It’s part of learning and incorporating the old with the new.

Being in a craft or art is the same way. First, you start fresh but soon find that answers often are found by working through mistakes. Some people take the process of working through failure as a sort of crusade. “Onward, despite the cost!” I’ve found it’s wiser to put a loss aside for a while and move to another project. Leave the puzzle where you can see it, and let your mind nibble about the edges of the problem. Eventually, you’ll solve it or leap ahead into finding a different way of doing things. 

Thrusting blindly at a problem wastes energy and leads to frustration. As in war, so is it in a craft; the value of frontal assaults is greatly exaggerated.

The process of attaining mastery is one of learning, making errors, correcting errors, learning effective habits, and freeing your mind to be creative. A pivotal concept is that learning is not a one-way process. You backtrack, learn new things that overwrite old ways of doing things, make modifications, and synthesize the new out of old all the time. You have a palimpsest.

If the term master is disagreeable, try this one – Old Head. An Old Head is a person who has been around, learned the ins and outs, works efficiently and makes it all look easy. Warning: Old Heads are not necessarily good verbal teachers. I had a Judo Sensei who could not tell you how to do a particular throw, but he’d show you a thousand times or until you mastered it.

Old Heads are not always formally taught. Old Heads work on railroads, in boatyards, art studios, and factories. If you need to learn something, look for an Old Head. Their clean slate days are long past, the smudges and stains are there to be seen, but they are a wonder to watch at work.

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Balance

There is a preoccupation with the concepts of success and zenith in our society. As in, ” John’s zenith was in the 1990s.” Some even follow celebrities with a sort of gleeful anticipation -waiting for the talented to slip over the edge. We envy their success, and we gloat over their fall. I think it has mostly to do with the sort of unfair comparisons that spring up early in life. “look at how successful your brother is; why can’t you be more like him?”

Gradually anything less than the best becomes not good enough. So we get set up for a situation where we fail to achieve our best because we expect that anything less than fame or celebrity would be a failure.

The term indefatigable comes to mind when you look at the many people who overcame significant barriers just to live everyday lives. We should look with disdain at those who can’t think about an everyday life lived with joy and satisfaction as a success.

How do I jump from one to the other? Well, I think a certain amount of security complements a creative life. Some people thrive on chaos. I was one of those for years. I eventually discovered the corrosive effect on my mental health and creativity that a chaotic lifestyle brings. I think I’ve lived a longer, more productive life for dampening the messier aspects. Maybe also because I’m no longer obsessed with being the best.

Some people enjoy watching biopics of the talented who sadly burned out at a young age. Dead from drink, drugs, or misadventure. Yes, it’s interesting to watch and comment on how sad and tragic a loss it was. Unfortunately, I was just a little too close to folks in that situation. I was too close to talented friends who burned out and suicided to watch those biopics on Netflix. That’s why I talk about the joy and satisfaction of everyday life.

Having skated the edge of the abyss and watched friends fall in, I find it a bit unfathomable that there is such an attraction to the edge.

Balance people, balance.

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Back Cove

It was three flights down and into the basement. The big tank sat there full of kerosene. I went down every morning, filled the five-gallon can, and carried it back to our third-floor apartment. During January, I wondered if my girlfriend liked having me around so she did not have to make that morning pilgrimage before going to work. Our third-floor apartment in the Back Cove had two sources of heat; a kerosene heater in the kitchen stove and a large space heater in the living room. But, of course, you took your chances using the space heater. If there was a single verity about that apartment, it was cold.

I remember the first time I visited my girlfriend at the apartment. I looked down at the floor and realized that the grey-painted floor was a deck- individual wide pine planks with oakum driven between the seams with a caulking iron. There even seemed to be a slight camber ( rounded curvature) to the deck. Walking around the apartment was like being on the deck of a ship. Some retired ships carpenter had installed the floor and put it in just the best way he knew how. It was like the old shipboard saying, “the devil to pay, and there’s not hot tar!” The original was a deck seam on a wooden sailing vessel that needed caulking, and the hot tar was added to seal the seam further. The housewife had put her foot down regarding the tar. But there was a very neatly caulked deck underfoot.

So the tiny apartment was cold but tightly sealed against the blows that came in over the cove. If you got brave, you started up the space heater and basked in the warmth, all the while hoping that the damned thing did not explode. I’d take out the guitar; we’d make some hot toddies, and between the songs and alcohol, spend an evening.

Good Lord, be careful taking a bath. The heater had enough water for one warm tub, and the heat in the narrow bathroom was an ancient radiant element perched precariously by the window. Suppose that heater fell the wrong way? You were done for. Most of its effect was to add a certain “ambiance” to the room; the amount of heat it added was pitiful. There were no leisurely hot soaks in that tub. One grabbed a towel and hurried out to the relative warmth of the kitchen.

I drove by the old place on George Street about five years ago. A dumpster was parked alongside the building. And I was confident I could see some old gray flooring perched on broken wallboard and plaster. Workers were busy putting in new windows and insulation. I couldn’t imagine the residents struggling with the antique space heater. So there wasn’t much to mourn about the old place getting renovated. But that perfectly laid and caulked deck was gone and replaced by vinyl plank flooring. Somehow that seemed to be a shame to me.

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Exotic

My introduction to the world of exotic woods began early. I had to stack and sort through piles of different woods at my mentor’s studio. Of course, Warburton would never be my master, and I’d never become his apprentice. But he took mentorship seriously while treating me a bit like an apprentice. So when I was in Baltimore, I’d go off to his studio and work as directed.
Sometimes this meant moving and stacking woods that he used, that I never imagined existed. Afrormosia, Agba. Iroko, Lacewood, Genipapo, and Satinwood. Some made me itch, others made me sneeze, and a few gave me a rash where they rubbed on my arm. Warburton’s generosity turned this into a lesson on wood toxicity that I’ve never forgotten. Trees deposit materials into their wood to stabilize structures, resist rot, fire, and insects.

We admire these woods because the added compounds affect the look and feel of the wood. But many of these are toxic to us, to one degree or another. For example, Pink Ivory wood can be very poisonous. A barrier coat of varnish is needed to seal it. Mahogany and teak woods commonly used in furniture have irritating qualities when sanded.

Finishing can be tricky as well. Varnishing teak successfully requires some prep work. It’s an oily wood, and the oils make it hard for finishes to adhere to the surface of the wood. The trick to avoiding a botched job is to wipe the surface off first, with alcohol or acetone. This technique only takes a minute but differentiates between finishes that endure or fail.

Most of my current work is in native North American species that are not commonly known for irritating toxicity: cherry, pine, ash, and maple. The added benefit of these is that most are sustainably harvested and available locally. So, for example, much of my cherry comes to me covered in bark and moss directly from the local woods.

However, just because they are generally accepted as safe doesn’t mean I get a free pass. Dust from cutting and sanding is an inhalation hazard in the woodshop, no matter how non-toxic the material is.

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Clean Up

It may have been the Monk who got it into his mind that cleaning the apartment for the New Year’s was a good and worthy thing to do. ” a new broom sweeps clean for a New Year,” he stated. Most of the other habitues of the Folkie Palace just looked at him as though he was crazed. So it took a day for him to recruit, shame, and inveigle enough help to grab a sponge, mop, and buckets for a New Year’s clean-up. Many grumbled that it was absurd to interrupt leisure time for cleaning. This comment led the Monk to comment that it was clear their poor mother got abandoned to do all household duties alone, while the layabouts lazed the days away. The Teahead of the August Moon looked up from reading Playboy long enough to tell the Monk to lay off the comments about his mother. It was only through an abundance of caution that they were resting. Too much physical activity after so much partying would be harmful to their health.

Once we started, though, enthusiasm for the project developed as trash buckets filled and washing revealed the actual color of the hardwood floor. When completed, everyone agreed that the Monk had been right. The Folkie Palace looked so good, pristine, and neat that they decided that a post-New Year’s party was in order.
So it was decided that the Palace would host a grand Three Kings Day party, complete with a visitation by the three kings – myself, the Monk, and the Teahead.

The party was a great success, but it undid most of what the clean-up had achieved. It also created a massive rift with the landlord, who swore that the next time we did something like that, it would abrogate our lease, and he’d toss the lot of us out. So we carefully cleaned up again. And set out to turn over a new leaf for the new year and behave.

And we did behave until our Patriot’s Day party when Officer Cappucci and several of his brethren in blue hauled off party attendees who were dancing nude on the sidewalk. But that’s another story.

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Jargon

In 1977 I was on one of my summertime retreats from study. It was my routine to come home to the Boston area and split my time between working on orthopedic floors at one of the large downtown hospitals and sailing. At that point, I was close to finishing a Phud, and it was a joke among friends in the medical and nursing professions that I’d soon be Dr. Carreras – although not in medicine.
OK, I lied; I worked, sailed, and partied. I partied a lot. One night I wound up in my usual bar on Cambridge Street arguing with some people I had known from undergraduate work in anthropology. At some point, some of the staff from the orthopedics floor where I was working joined us. In less than ten minutes, language became an issue. One of the nurses accused one of my anthropologist friends of speaking in jargon, “please just speak in English.” Another friend made a counterargument that the nurses and the surgeon talked in jargon.

We’d been having a good time, so I began translating for the two groups being that I could speak both “languages,” so to speak. Within an hour, both groups, intelligent folks, began picking up parts of the other jargon. The babble at our tables now sounded very little like American English, and to use a linguist’s term seemed to be a lingua franca, a creole, or a Pidgen.
As the evening proceeded, the talk at our table grew more animated, a bit loud, and seemed to waft throughout the barroom. At last, one very drunk gentleman approached us and stated, ” I don’t give a flyin’ f**k what you speak at home. But you’re in America now! So quit your damned gobbledegook, and speak English!” After this, he lurched away.

There was only the briefest of pauses before our conversations picked up where they had paused.

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Clean

In the light of a January first morning, the shop looks particularly grody. Just two weeks ago, I put the wrap on end-of-season production. I emptied the trash barrel and walked away for two weeks of non-shop activities. If it wasn’t done, it was going to wait. I do this because I found through hard experience that taking orders much past Thanksgiving resulted in profits but too much stress at home during the holidays. Trying to get that last item finished and shipped in time for Christmas delivery is not worth the sour looks from the family because I was in a bad mood. So I lose a bit of money but enjoy the holidays more.
I should have known that it would be a harbinger of a lousy cleanup at the beginning of the year. All that dust, wood shavings, wood chips, old paint, and old varnish was waiting for me to walk in on January one. Traditionally I’ve spent time on the first day of the year straightening the shop. But, being this had been a busy fall, and I was hurried, the shops needed more than routine cleaning.

The only dissent to this was from H.I.M Xenia ( empress of all she surveys). My running the shop vacs disturbed her New Year’s nap. She was up late, having a good nip toot, and stated that she needed rest, and would I please go away…far away.

Undeterred, I laid into the job. I got the new dust collector attached to the bandsaw, swept up, and began organizing supplies.

That’s when I came across the full Stop Loss Bag and the unused one. If you run a woodshop, you may have partial cans of finish hanging around. They gradually go bad, skim over, thicken up, and become unusable. It’s a waste of good finish, expensive, and a disposal problem. Contact with air is the most common culprit. No matter how tightly you seal the can, enough air remains to react with the contents. The stop loss bag eliminates most of the air. As a result, the finish stays usable for much longer. In the case of one pint of varnish, as long as a year.

Using the bags has reduced the spoilage of cans of finish and saved me money, despite the cost of the bag. And getting this post back to cleaning – it means less hazardous materials that I have to dispose of in my early January cleaning.

And now that I’ve had a break, I should get back to scraping off the bench. This year I’ll work on reminding myself to cover the benchtop with some plywood while finishing.

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Resolved

There was a time when I would ring in the New Year with drinks, hugs, toasts, and of course, Resolutions. Would it be Auld Lang Syne without the midnight resolutions? Promises that we’d drink less, exercise more, be more observant, or go to church more often? After a while, I resolved not to resolve. Instead, I decided that I’d think about things a bit more.
I’ve had better luck with this sidewise approach. Comes the end of February, there was less of a grand finale of guilt when I failed to match the brilliant and bright promises of an early New Year’s Day.

So in January, I think about new products for the shop, I don’t create a rigid schedule. I start thinking about the garden while looking through the catalogs. And I think about increased physical activity.

I’ve found that I have a better achievement level with this sidling up alongside goals and objectives. Getting pally with resolutions generates a guilt trip when your overly ambitious plans don’t work out.