I built a boat just to see if I could. I could.
It has nothing to do with having a boat for a decoration.
At my "certain stage of life" (Old Turkey, ain't he?)
decorations are like sugar roses on dry rye bread.
I built it because the alternative was senility and calcification.
Yesterday, after a winter of storage-shed isolation,
I opened the cabin and uncovered the little diesel engine.
The sensor that reports oil pressure to the dashboard
needed replacing. Might as well replace the oil filter, too!
That is why I spent a good share of yesterday
lying on my side alongside the engine with metric wrenches
like Pick-Up-Sticks alongside, trying for force my fingers
to do what had to be done, maintaining my flexibility
by forgetting that what I really needed was in the garage.
"This," I thought, "is a seriously ludicrous situation!
What am I doing here, at this age, lying on my side
in the bottom of a boat, pretending to be a diesel mechanic?
I should be standing, bent over like a question mark,
alongside Tom across the street, while he picks flower
nursery packs apart in the wheelbarrow, and tosses them,
with indifferent regard, toward holes in the flower bed.
"For God's sake, Herbert Hoover was the President
when I was born! Did Hoover have diesel oil in his hair?"
Joel has twice sent an article suggesting that life
is the shits, and that we should choose to be
the last human generation: let Chinese Elms
and chickens take over the earth: life is a pain!
What is the point? Trade the last chicken for health care,
and lie down to embrace inevitability: that sort of thing.
The pain is not to be denied. It is something like
an oil pressure sensor. It reports what is going on.
All ethics begins with what we feel about things.
If you feel hopeless, you write that article for the Times,
and suggest that we lie down among the Chinese Elms.
You write an article to explain why you feel that way.
However, if lying alongside a little two-cylinder diesel engine
strikes you as a most curious thing to be doing, in dotage--
almost laughably curious--after a lifetime of textbooks
and two-story outhouses and poems, your ethical articles
about the pleasure of being alive will not turn dark.
Our ethical rationality trails our experience,
justifying the diesel oil in our hair.
The new oil pressure sender works just fine!
It has nothing to do with having a boat for a decoration.
At my "certain stage of life" (Old Turkey, ain't he?)
decorations are like sugar roses on dry rye bread.
I built it because the alternative was senility and calcification.
Yesterday, after a winter of storage-shed isolation,
I opened the cabin and uncovered the little diesel engine.
The sensor that reports oil pressure to the dashboard
needed replacing. Might as well replace the oil filter, too!
That is why I spent a good share of yesterday
lying on my side alongside the engine with metric wrenches
like Pick-Up-Sticks alongside, trying for force my fingers
to do what had to be done, maintaining my flexibility
by forgetting that what I really needed was in the garage.
"This," I thought, "is a seriously ludicrous situation!
What am I doing here, at this age, lying on my side
in the bottom of a boat, pretending to be a diesel mechanic?
I should be standing, bent over like a question mark,
alongside Tom across the street, while he picks flower
nursery packs apart in the wheelbarrow, and tosses them,
with indifferent regard, toward holes in the flower bed.
"For God's sake, Herbert Hoover was the President
when I was born! Did Hoover have diesel oil in his hair?"
Joel has twice sent an article suggesting that life
is the shits, and that we should choose to be
the last human generation: let Chinese Elms
and chickens take over the earth: life is a pain!
What is the point? Trade the last chicken for health care,
and lie down to embrace inevitability: that sort of thing.
The pain is not to be denied. It is something like
an oil pressure sensor. It reports what is going on.
All ethics begins with what we feel about things.
If you feel hopeless, you write that article for the Times,
and suggest that we lie down among the Chinese Elms.
You write an article to explain why you feel that way.
However, if lying alongside a little two-cylinder diesel engine
strikes you as a most curious thing to be doing, in dotage--
almost laughably curious--after a lifetime of textbooks
and two-story outhouses and poems, your ethical articles
about the pleasure of being alive will not turn dark.
Our ethical rationality trails our experience,
justifying the diesel oil in our hair.
The new oil pressure sender works just fine!
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