Two Kinds of Dicks.

Back in the summer of 1990 I found myself at loose ends – the SRL show we had scheduled for ArtPark in upstate New York had been canceled (something to do with word getting out that we were going to burn a lot of bibles…), and I didn’t have anything else going on.  I ran into an old friend, and he asked whether I could come in and help the company in Calgary for which he’d been working, Microtech.  They’d had a group of engineers in there to build some oil+gas drilling instrumentation, and these guys had wasted a lot of time and money without delivering anything that worked.  The company was in trouble, and I do rescues, so I came on board.  I got all that crap sorted out and in a few months we had a prototype we could do our first field tests on.

So in the first week of December we were all installed in an Atco trailer out at a wellsite near Provost, Alberta.  It was seriously nasty cold that winter; we were seeing those -40 days, but the work was going well.  On December 8th we were having breakfast at one of the restaurants in town, and I went out to the lobby to give my dad a birthday call.  As I was calling, I noticed that in one of those little brochure-holders full of American Express applications there was one on which someone had been doodling swastikas.

Now, you need a little context here.  Not too far from Provost there was an asshole named Terry Long who’d hooked up with that miserable old creep Richard Butler, infamous for running the Aryan Nations compound down in Hayden Lake, Idaho.  Long was noisily staging cross-burnings and the like, which the local press dubbed “pinhead picnics”.

This is what I had in mind while calling my dad.  I almost couldn’t stop laughing, and told him we didn’t have anything to worry about from this batch of neo-Nazi shitkickers, since every one of the swastikas doodled on the AmEx brochure was botched, and most of the attempts were drawn in the wrong rotation.  To add to the hilarity, the restaurant’s muzak system was piping out selections from Fiddler on the Roof.  The white-supremacist-wannabe losers who couldn’t even draw their own logo are the first dicks in this story.

But back out at the rig, our testing was underway.  Since the stuff I built was working okay and I was really just there in case problems popped up, I was spending my time in my bunk, reading Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac book.  But our president, Gerry Thorpe, had other ideas.  He wanted to get some snazzy group photos of his R+D crew on their first field test.  I told him to include me out, as I wasn’t particularly interested in trading a warm bunk and book about a serial killer for a romp out in the -40.  But he insisted, so we all got bundled up and posed for him in a steaming clump in front of the drilling rig, and while he was busy snapping pics for the company photo album I flashed him a rat for dragging me into the cold.  Apparently he didn’t notice.

The rest of the trip was uneventful.  Our stuff seemed to behave, and in a day or two we packed it all up and headed back to the shop in Calgary.

A couple of weeks later Gerry called me into his office, and began relating a little story about how, at a meeting of the company’s board and investors, he’d proudly pulled out the photo album to show off his pictures of our first field tests.  And how the chairman was flipping through the photos, and stopped at one, and squinted, and looked closer, and called Gerry over, asking him “Gerry, what’s this?”, to which (Gerry claimed) he answered, “Why, sir, it would appear to be a penis, but it’s very small and difficult to tell”.

I mentioned it was -40, didn’t I?

Tupac: Legendary Thug or Whiny Little Bitch?

I have 12-year-old girls.  They’re in grade 7.  This week they got their first taste of poetry (note air bunnies) at school.

Sarah got Poe, which is completely cool.  During supper I pulled down the book and she read The Raven.  Then we watched the episode of Homicide in which a 10-year-old corpse is discovered walled-in in a basement, and the now-revealed killer cracks up (thump thump, thump thump) and walls himself in.  That was a great show, and a worthy predecessor to The Wire.  But back to the story.

Becky got Tupac.  I swear to gawd.  It’s still not totally clear, but it would seem to have been one of the choices of author offered by her teacher, and this particular piece, Sometimes I Cry, was chosen by one of her classmates.  Now, I hate most hippety-hop.But I love Public Enemy, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and Ice T/Body Count, but with few exceptions the rest blows.  So while I’m not way up on the late Mr. Shakur’s oeuvre, I’m reasonably certain that this poem (air bunnies again) was one of few acceptable choices amongst all the “niggaz” and “muthafuckaz”:

Sometimes when I’m alone
I Cry,
Cause I am on my own.
The tears I cry are bitter and warm.
They flow with life but take no form
I Cry because my heart is torn.
I find it difficult to carry on.
If I had an ear to confide in,
I would cry among my treasured friend,
but who do you know that stops that long,
to help another carry on.
The world moves fast and it would rather pass by.
Then to stop and see what makes one cry,
so painful and sad.
And sometimes…
I Cry
and no one cares about why.

I read that and snorted.  My wife guffawed.  There’s a lot of stuff we don’t agree on, but not among those things is that this sounds like the work of an angst-ridden adolescent girl.

Some thug.

(Thanks to George Booth, the best cartoonist in the whole world.)