machinist stork daddy we all must have felt that we had a change to affect change in our lives at some point. but so many of us didn't do it then, and now feel so swept up by the machinery of work or obligations or whatever else that now when we really want to, we have no time or opportunity. 050912 ... birdmad One year, quite some time ago, back in the factory days, just before i became one of the technicians, the weather had caused a massive surge in the scorpion population along the riverside. anything i took off of a shelf had to be given a slow once-over with a little hand broom they weren't swarming all over everything in hordes, but there was an increased chance that you'd run into one or two (or three) sitting on top of your work-pile it wasn't until someone got stung that the management made it a priority to call an exterminator to lay traps and do a little spraying over the weekend before that however, my work area was quite the bug-house i was doing some torch-work to break the solder-seam between pieces of an RF combiner when that vague sense of weirdness struck me and i looked down at my leg and realized that there was a fairly large scorpion crawling up my boot setting my torch in the safety bracket and grabbing the scorpion gently with my tongs, i meant to throw it outside back over the fence, but it immediately stung itself to death leaving me no recourse than to set its lifeless body aside until break-time, whereupon a little acetone and a small metal container allowed me to give it a proper viking funeral meanwhile, over in the shipping bay, my buddy Daniel nearly fractured his ass falling down from the stacks after he discovered a whole nest of them all the way at the top of the stockpile of packing foam it was only for the fact that he fell on more foam that he did not get seriously hurt 050913 ... unhinged my grandfather machined parts for the atomic bomb; i wonder if he felt any guilt at all for that. 050913 ... pete he looks at what he builds, what he operats, only wanting to drop his wrench between the gears, but his wife and children need food, his landlord needs rent, so he labours on with that he disgusts, longing for the old days, growing up on the farm, before the crash took it away from him, leaving his family landless, alone in the smog 050913 ... birdmad "I haven't slept in over a year" 050928 ... Tourist ....and to think that nowdays I contemplate the prospect of moving my mind and becoming a machine.... 120813 what's it to you? who go blather from