lets talk about wood

Last night at work I was stewing. My department at work has been downsized from three people to one person in two weeks, me. For a couple of minutes I was irritated by this, but I'm over it for now. How did I get over it? I started thinking about wood. A commodity that the human race takes for granted just like water for example. Just about everyone on the planet takes wood for granted except for those Greenpeace tree hugging hippies, but what don't they cry about?

I started thinking about what a profound impact wood has had on my life. Take the first grade for example. Back when I was in the first grade, our classroom used to have a work bench with real tools. Every so often Jack would give me a scrap piece of wood to bring in to school so I could put nails in to it during recess. My grandfather Max bought tools obsessively. After he died my father inherited them and as a result you could probably build a house with the tools that my father has in his basement. When we got a bit older we used to make weapons with wood, some real, some fake. Bows, crossbows, nunchucks and fake guns were always on the menu. I was particularly fond of making a Mace for myself every now and then. What did we do with these weapon's? We swung them at each others heads of course.

As young boys become men they have a lot of aggression. How did we deal with that aggression? We destroyed a lot of trees. Throwing screwdrivers and hatchets into a tree was common place on my side of the tracks.

When I was 12 years old I started practicing Tae Kwon Do. Any test worth remembering always had board breaking involved with it. When an adult tests for black belt they have to break 16 pieces of wood, 3 different kicks with both legs. I had to take the black belt test three times. That's a lot of fucking wood.

As most of you students know, the more successful you become the more paper you have to waste. Every year my wife complains about the increase in the amount of pages she has to put in her papers. I don't know if I will ever get tired of adding pages to this blog, but then again this aint paper.

American Society pretty much judges success by how many stacks of green wood a person makes in a year. A lot of corporations waist thousands of trees a year printing out useless reports that tracks how much green paper is not made on a daily basis. At least that's what the company I work for does. I spend 5 hours a night correcting and researching the previous days missed green stack information, I'm rewarded every month with a very skimpy stack of my own for doing this.

I also like to watch wood burn. I am mesmorized by the warmth, the color and the sound. I like to listen to sap sizzle and crack while wood burns. Plus the warmth of a fire always enhances the buzz you get from an alcoholic beverage.

I apologize for not going into the specifics of diffrent kinds of wood but lets just say I'm partial to knotty pine. It makes for some great kindling. I'm currious, do any of you have a love/hate relationship with wood too?

TGIF?

When I was a kid I used to get up extremely early on Saturday mornings. Between 5:30 and 6:30. I would watch Davey and Goliath (when ever I catch it now, I force my wife watch it) and then I would have to wade through some really bad shit like Captain Kangaroo to get to the three or four shows that I waited with great anticipation to watch every week. Then at about 11:30 or 12:00 it was time to go outside or over to a friends house play. This was my program for many years.

Saturday has always been my favorite day of the week for one reason or another. For a couple of years in there I didn't get up until three or four pm on Saturdays. I can't recall the reason why I would sleep so late on a Saturday but I'm sure there is an explanation.

Today I usually get up around 5:30 or 6:00 am because I have a tendency to go to sleep early on Friday nights usually because of my work schedule.

I generally hate Sundays. I find them depressing. Always have, always will. The only exception to this rule is the 22 weeks of football season. Still, with my work schedule I get a constant nagging reminder in the back of my head that I have to be at work Sunday nights at 10:00 pm. With this said I still prefer football to be played on Sunday.

I don't mind Mondays at all because for me Mondays are Tuesdays. I hate when radio stations complain about Mondays. Is my life and my job so bad that I can't wait for the weekend? What's going to happen next time when I look up at the clock and I'm 50?

Tuesday and Thursday are essentially God's interpretation of Ford's interchangable parts or vice versa. If you don't believe me check any Hebrew School calendar. I don't mind either of these days of the week. Once a year on a Thursday in November I get to watch a parade, stuff my face and watch the Cowboys and then the Lions, and now thanks to NFL network a third game.

Wednesday is a great day. I spend most Wednesdays fantasizing about hitting the powerball. The current Jackpot is almost 200 million dollars. The only minute of the day that sucks is 10:59 pm, cause that's when I realize I didn't win. I'm usually over it by 11:01 because I realize that the Saturday drawing is only three days away. Plenty of time to start the dream process all over again.

That brings us to Friday. By Friday I'm fringin exhausted. I get home from work on Fridays at about 3:30 am and my weekend begins. Allyson is usually wiped out by Friday as well. A lot of time we go out to dinner on Friday night and sometimes we go to a movie or out for drinks or something.

Somewhere in between Saturday and Friday, I also manage to work, write , spend time with the love of my life, interact with people, watch TV, listen to music, and dream. I also manage to sleep sometimes a lot, sometimes not much at all. This is pretty much the pattern of my life. I do this roughly 52 times a year.

The House that Corky Built

This place? Most of us know from this place all of our lives. It looks a little different these days but trust me, its the same joint.

I keep this not so old photo around for a couple of reasons. One day I'm going to show it to my kids encase my parents decide to move. There is a lot of history there. I could dedicate this post just to talking about the front yard. Take the three biggest trees in this pic. I planted them when I was in the first grade.

Cindie and I used to go camping between to the two trees. There is a really cool creek that runs between our house and the white house. I used to catch crayfish and native brook trout in it. A lot of people call crayfish crawdads or crawfish but that shit doen't make any sense to me. IM sure some of you went camping there as well. Benny Cubbeta shot me in the ass with a bb gun in front of this house. Ihab Sali whipped me in the back with a completely fiber glass fishing pole. That fucking hurt, but I wish I still had that pole. It should be obvious to all of you by now that this was also a super hero training compound.

This house was also used to film the very famous documentary "Black Belts" starring the Apologist. We also built a lot of Igloos on the front of this lawn after a big snow storm. One thing I never understood was how the Eskimos put roofs on their Igloos. My father still has two of those snow block makers.

Over here we have a picture of Hazel Ave. In the 70's and 80's this street functioned as a football field, a racing park, and a battlefield to name just a few. If you never skinned your knee or cracked your head open on a street just like this one then I really have no use for you. I learned how to ride a bike on this street and fell quite a few times. The cool think about riding bikes back in those days was that kids didn't wear helmets. There were a lot of Big Wheel races on this street as well. Shooting out street lights with a bb gun or an arrow was always a good way to kill an afternoon on Hazel Ave.

The street has almost completely turned over since the days of you and me and I can tell you this for sure, most of the newcomers that live there are nothing like you and me. Besides the fact that they don't have personalities, the kids ride down the street with helmets on, what's that about? They stay in their own yards, the're not organized at all. I can't dig it. As i recall we owned this entire street and a couple of other ones for that matter.

Oh yeah, I drank a lot of beer and ate a shit load of hotdogs here too.