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?