Back on the Learning Curve

The Skinamalink ignoring my work

 I mentioned in the last post that my sculpting skill-set was somewhat lop-sided. It wasn't that the work itself was crappy, but I was doing all the shaping with saws, and drills, then going straight to the rasps, rifflers, and files. Saws, and drills are just fine, but those rasps, and rifflers are refining tools, and shouldn't come into play until later in the process. Not only that, there's a right, and a wrong way to use those quite costly tools, and I was, uh- doin' it wrong. The consequence is that many of my older tools are quite dull. I wore them out too fast.

The rough shaping is done with a point chisel. I didn't even own one until last Saturday. I had two good chisels, a wide and a narrow blade, but I seldom used them.

Even so, I'm not beating myself over past errors. When I started this game in 1993, I had no experience,  no internet, and no teachers. Starting over, I have all those things. Saturday I took delivery of a set of four basic chisels, and a one and a half pound soft steel mallet.

Monday I put the rifflers aside, and set to work with the single point to excavate the material under the rim around the left figure. A pound and a half mallet gets heavy fast, but the point chisels seriously kick ass. It's going to take time to build up the skill set, but  I'm learning fast. I went from here:

 

 

To here:

..in just a day. This would have taken several days doing it the hard way.

 

Tuesday night I got into a violent disagreement with something I ate. Might have the Italian butter and Parmesan cheese. Hard to tell. Whatever it was it had me out of bed sweating and retching, and pitching up my dinner, instead of catching a good night's sleep. My best little pals, Buddy the Cat, and The Most Mysterious Skinamalink both knew something was wrong with the big guy, and they were both there to help. 

I tried to curl up on the futon in the den. By the time I put my head down, Skinnies was right there to be my pillow. Ol' Buddy jumped up next to my chest. They followed me around the house until the nausea passed, and I went back to bed. Buddy jumped up on the pillow, and took his usual place, curled around my head. Skinnies sat on my feet. I fell asleep to both cats purring, and Mary breathing soft at my side.

 The bond between us and our animals is one of the small miracles of life. I recall (imperfectly) part of a John C. Wright story wherein Cat and Dog were the only animals to follow Man out of Eden. "He needed the company." was Dog's explanation. Cat came as well. He had to find out what was going to happen. Love my ol' cats.

Wednesday afternoon, and...

Whoever lives in the house behind us has been having an addition  put on the house, and now they're having the kitchen, or bath remodeled. Whoever is working there is running a fucking tile saw. This is the most evil, unholy sound in the universe. Or close to it, anyway. The shriek is continuous, and it's been going on for hours. Even with my shitty hearing I can hear it all the way in the den.

GODDAMN I HATE NOISE.

 This is one of the worst things about being hard of hearing. You lose the ability to hear everything but inhuman machine sounds. Birds in the morning are gone, but Skill saws, leaf blowers, and lawn mowers come in loud and clear. Noise pollution becomes more and more irritating the worse your hearing gets. The screaming, grinding, grating, set-your-teeth-on-edge shriek got annoying, then irritating, then insufferable. My temper broke, and I got so fucking furiously pissed off that I just wanted to break shit and kill things. I had to stop work, and go in the house. This went on non-stop until about six in the evening. They're lucky I don't have a flame thrower, or a hand grenade. 

 

I got an early start Thursday morning. A slow early start. The day started gray, and cool enough to need a sweatshirt. By nine thirty it was warm enough to shed the sweatshirt. I'm shaping in the teardrop between the two larger figures. The stone is coming to life. It's turning out much better than I thought it would. The mail came a little after ten, and brought two new point chisels.  I won't need these until the next project, but that's going to be coming up before long. As a side note, the bent tools at the right aren't chisels, but rather scrapers. They're finishing tools used to smooth out tool marks.

 

 Weapons of creation

 

I was just getting lunch out of the microwave a little after eleven. The tile saw started before I was done eating. 

[insert string of vile profanities] 

 

...and Friday afternoon arrived, suffused with autumn, and a good day's work on the project completed. That late golden light was glowing on the shaggy hedges bordering the yard, and a warm breeze was playing the wind chimes. 

 I'm getting near to completion, down to making some few refinements here and there on the stone. This part is pencil work: look,  draw, check, erase, repeat. Look...

Just in time for the tile saw to start. 

 

A sweet moment evaporated, and the anger  flooded in on a charge of adrenaline. I've been putting up with this shit all week, now. I want to nuke the bastards.

It isn't really the tile saw. 

 

The anger isn't coming from the noise. The anger is coming from a host of news items. The anger is coming from the theft of our nation. From the stupid and corrupt vermin who presume to power. The condescending scum who declare themselves our betters. The anger comes from  witnessing the spineless, sheep-like submission of almost everyone around me. The anger comes from the lies, the stupidity, the naked evil.

The mask. Every employee in every business is masked up and faceless. I cannot leave the house except that I see a good half the people on the street slouching along, masked up and faceless.  They don't know, or care that the mask is useless. They take great pride displaying their humiliation, their utter unquestioning submission to the authority of the Lie. 

Nobody stands. Nobody resists. They kneel, bow, and scrape. I see those worried eyes peeking over the edge of the paper. "He's not masked!..."

I don't have the words to describe how deeply I hate this.

Last week I wrote about how the September 11th attack on America showed me how little I understood evil. "You thought 9/11 was the apex of evil? Fuuuck, dude you ain't seen nothin'..."

 

 The hatred of Evil is righteous, but the constant anger is toxic. I can channel some of the anger into work, but the rest seems to metabolize into bleakness, or free floating grief. For that there is only prayer. Forbearance is like manna. You get exactly enough to get through one day with none to spare, and none to keep. Tomorrow there will be more. Or so we hope and pray.