July 24 2008

08.07.24 (July 24^th:a Thursday)     It has occurred to me that I could possibly make these thimble plectrums myself! Enough so to where I have decided to do the experiment with the silver plate that I have. I've got to get some steel plate thick enough to be able to pound on when heated to pretty hot. I can hammer my silver plate out thinner, then cut out patterns to then wrap around those fingertip anvils that I haven't made (or had made) yet. **  When I was 20, I had a job with a locomotive-engines rebuilder, wherein I drove a new two and a half ton GMC flatbed truck all around the (SF) bay area, taking patterns to foundries and machine shops & retrieving the finished product, when ready, back to the shop in Sausalito. I remember driving up high in into the western hills of San Anselmo to the last house up that road—to a very lush plush house and grounds—to the pattern-maker's house to receive his latest pattern for the foundry—this one in Emeryville, east bay. As I waited for him—an elder gentleman—to finish wrapping it and boxing it, I gazed around his large living room, awed by the dozens and dozens of (wooden) patterns verily cluttering up all parts of this largish room, with a panoramic view of almost all of the SF bay area. There also were patterns or blueprints for machine-shop metal fabrication. It seems that the company's engineering staff was always coming into need of some part or another to facilitate resolutions to some problem or another associated with the rebuild- ing of railroad (and ships') engines. The shop was easily seventy feet high and three-hundred feet long and a hundred and twenty feet wide! Large. On railroad tracks, fifty feet overhead of the shop floor, was a twenty-five ton crane that could roll from one end of the building to the other and side-to-side to lift parts and or whole engines—sixteen and twenty cylinder ones whose pistons needed a five ton crane to lift the heads and pull the pistons out! The mechanics could stand up in the crankcases to work on the connecting rods and their bearings! The five ton crane ran on the railroad tracks that came right on into and through the building. **  Such awesomely-sized stuff of my memories has surely inspired me, almost fifty years later, to go wham away at an (seeming to the outside world) idiotic idea this guitar-player guy, who shares my other brains with me and him and them, has conjured about some silver plectrums he thinks can assist him becoming way-better-able to do professional-quality playing of this steel guitar he has recently bought and determined to learn how to play. I mean: If that old man could perform all that really fantastic and intricate, and accurate wood carving work, shit, I ought to be able to carve some simple little—tiny by compare--fingertip replicas . . . But first: I will hammer out my silver flatter and thinner and try to wrap them into the conical shapes for further reduc-ing to the actual size of what I want, and how I need it to fit and function, etc. Getting the thimbles thin enough, but with a bit thicker plectrum ends, is the challenge as I 'see' it. Wow! I really think I am inspired; I feel excited to have thought this up and out. For damn near the world's dumbest human sometimes, I am feel-ing not-so-stupid just now. Whoopee! ** I woke with a dream on my tounge's tip, so to speak. I was naked, all my clothes had been stolen. I was thirteen and was wandering a neighborhood at the bottom of the Mill Valley hill I lived on then, and trying to sell and articulated arm such as a drafting table uses to an oriental lady while trying not to be embarrassed as I tried to conceal my nakedness. The dozen or so homes that were in sight on this flatland's street, all had “YARD SALE” signs painted on their walls or on front yard signs . . . I awoke to remark to myself of the strangeness of this dream's circumstances and pondered the whys and wherefores of its potential or possible implications—and had my standard thought-reaction prophesizing theroization that this must mean that I have thirteen more years to go in my life as an alive breathing human. I think this because of my feeling that, as I age, so do I—a part of me—also is concurrently growing backward from death toward my birth. I sense this from countless times before that I have felt this occurring and been able to correlate my age in the dream with what age I was when having it, or some such blathering bafflegab-ishness of a fool's idiotic senseless speculations—please forgive my tongue-in-cheekiness on this . . .