Unsharpened blades produce narrow kerf causing excessive friction

Dear diary,

Has anyone ever said “It takes a village to raise a child”? Then I think it’s safe to call my village sere: withered. Bone-dry of knowledge. How sere was my village? Everything they taught me, I had to unlearn.

They taught me the Mere Christianity of C.S. Lewis; and that’s dead wrong. They taught me the Reagan-Thatcher “trickle down” supply-side economics; and that’s dead wrong. And all the other stuff they taught me was dead wrong, even their math and their science. I had to unlearn everything, in order to become a Wise Prophet.

Let’s take these charges one-by-one...

On second thot, let’s take the first charge alone, then forget to address the other charges and meander instead to fresh woods and pastures new.

As I said, my sere village raised me Christian. It took me almost thirty years to find Gnosticism. All the orthodox or fundamental versions of the big-box religions are false, whereas the esoteric versions are true: that is my teaching. This means that one raised Christian, like myself, must find Gnosticism, and one raised Jewish must find Kabbalah, and one raised in Islam must find Sufism.

By the way, I called them “big-box religions” after the concept of the big-box retail outlet, also known as a super-center, fancy-store, or mega-mart, which is defined by Bryan’s Encyclopedia of Dull Faiths as “the physical universe of a vendor, usually part of a great noose of such markets”. The term sometimes also refers, by extension, to the company that operates the establishment, which is often wicked but can lead to good, as Uriel says in the poem by R.W. Emerson:

Line in nature is not found;
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.

That’s why, even if you were raised on the King James Bible, all hope is not lost. You might grow up to write the book Moby-Dick. Or the collected poetry and prose of William Blake.

Now the second charge against the village that raised me is that they taught me to worship scientists. Personally I’ve always hated the practitioners of science, but it’s not for the reason that you assume. You assume that I hate Barack Obama because he’s milk chocolate, and that I hate Hillary Clinton because she’s vaguely feminine. But a Wise Prophet will look beyond the obvious, physical form of the scientist he’s hating, and discover the hidden flaws within, such as: whether each god’s navel is concave. Just look for yourself: Obama and Clinton both sport the same convex navel: this disqualifies them from earning the smoke of my sacrifice. So the fat and the smoke and the bones get blown to Jehovah, whose belly button is properly concave.

Now if I were a scientist with a convex navel, and my ex girlfriend accused me of sexually assaulting her, I would think a double-thot simultaneously: I myself am both blameless and wholly aghast at whoever did you wrong. In other words: We’ve got to help YOU first and foremost, for the fact of your blaming ME (mistakenly) is just a minor detail that will fall by the wayside once the truth is established.

This idea was on my mind because I recently read a statement responding to allegations of sexual assault by the popular scientist (whose navel is convex) Neil deGrasse Tyson. He mailed a letter to Facebook, “On Being Accused”, which I intercepted via Twitter and read with perplexity. I was bemused by Mr. Tyson’s stance: instead of saying “Hey this woman has accused the wrong man but the important thing is to help her and find out who committed this atrocity,” Tyson kinda subtly passively makes fun of the victim. I’ll copy-paste a quote (the style or lack thereof is his own) so you can see what I mean — here’s a part of Tyson’s official argument:

More than thirty years later, as my visibility-level took another jump, I read a freshly posted blog accusing me of drugging and raping a woman I did not recognize by either photo or name. Turned out to be the same person who I dated briefly in graduate school. She had changed her name and lived an entire life, married with children, before this accusation.

For me, what was most significant, was that in this new life, long after dropping out of astrophysics graduate school, she was posting videos of colored tuning forks endowed with vibrational therapeutic energy that she channels from the orbiting planets. As a scientist, I found this odd. Meanwhile, according to her blog posts, the drug and rape allegation comes from an assumption of what happened to her during a night that she cannot remember. It is as though a false memory had been implanted, which, because it never actually happened, had to be remembered as an evening she doesn’t remember. Nor does she remember waking up the next morning and going to the office. I kept a record of everything she posted, in case her stories morphed over time. So this is sad, which, for me, defies explanation.

I’m tempted to criticize this excerpt clause-by-clause, especially the remarks on memory, which is one of my favorite concepts to wonder about, but instead I shall let it stand for itself. Now just think about the man who wrote this text. Perhaps he is blameless, perhaps he is guilty; at the present moment, we cannot know. But we know that he desires us, his readers, to consider him as blameless of this crime. He’s either truly blameless and wants us to see him as blameless, or he’s guilty-as-charged yet still wants us to see him as blameless. (Note how rare it is for a person to be blameless and yet want others to see him as guilty.) Now maybe it’s precisely the certainty of your own guiltlessness that causes you to fumble so carelessly when making your case; like, if you’re accused of stealing a cookie sometime in the past ten minutes, yet you’ve been standing in front of live cameras reading a nationally-broadcast propaganda report for the whole last hour, so, in almost bragging confidence, you reply to the charge with a smirk: “But those cookies are not even the kind that I liked in my youth; plus, look: the jar that they’re kept in is decorated with paintings of tuning forks: how goofy!—what does the music of the spheres have to do with my astronomical appetite? To each his own, I guess.” But I’d think that even a dense thickheaded scientist would have at least a modicum of compassion for anyone who suffered such brutality. Yes, I’m saying that Tyson’s statement lacks compassion.

Now I can imagine a certain type of heckler responding to my own words above: “Hey idiot Bryan, you say that this woman ‘suffered such brutality’; but she only CLAIMS to have…”

Here I interrupt you: “Get thee behind me, Satan.”

II

I’m sorry to transition so abruptly from that thot to this next one, but the truth is that I dislike remaining depressed: I prefer uplifting topics. So let’s talk about DEBT. I’m serious, this book that I’ve been reading, called Debt: The First 5,000 years, by David Graeber, is the most fascinating scholarly work I’ve ever encountered. It’s pure genius. I can’t do justice to it with one quotation, nevertheless I’ll copy this passage that I highlighted with my gold marker because I love it so much — let this outbalance all the bad thots above:

...We owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in, our habits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions—all of this, we learned from other people, most of them long dead. If we were to imagine what we owe them as a debt, it could only be infinite.

This is a beautiful recognition that I wish we would all keep sharp in our minds continually. All the problems of our day, which have been problems too long and thru countless ages, like hunger homelessness warfare inequality — all these things result, in one way or another, from our being too concerned with “squaring relationships” by “paying what is rightfully owed” or honoring DEBT. I’m always arguing that we should balance the nightmare of rich-vs.-poor simply by transferring the excess from the side of the haves to fill the lack on the side of the have nots. I know this is a simple idea that’s been traditionally ridiculed, but that doesn’t stop it from being absolutely correct: the redistribution of wealth is the sole righteous option. Tho naysayers claim that it’s unfair and that it’ll kill incentive, it’s actually ultra-fair because, as the quote above shows, the only meaningful fairness in an infinite world where all wealth is absurdly disjunctive is MAD LOVE; and far from killing incentive, the paradise that will result from a freely shared abundance will afford every individual the energy to attain self-actualization, which aids the entirety & not just a tiny percentage at the tip of the pyramid: and the self is actualized in WORK, and the greatest boons bespring from experiment. (Forced labor equals slavery; and bare usefulness is tedium.) When you have what you need, you begin to feel the desire to perform some action, and the best type of work is indistinguishable from PLAY, which is goofing around, aimlessly experimenting, the results of which are necessarily unexpected and often immeasurably fortunate. Just to take a lowly example: Diseases are not cured by scientists who keep injecting animals with toxins and then noting the specifics of their agony on meticulous charts; no, the cure for any given disease is always discovered by chance, when a poet dabbling in alchemy mixes strange fermented beverages that surprise him by exploding like a volcano and engulfing the neighborhood in a custard-like foam, which ends up mysteriously curing every ailment. The blind now see and the deaf now hear.

III

The last thing I wanted to tell you about in this entry is my circular saw. I had to read about how to change the blade yesterday, because I need to use a special blade to cut the mock-wood flooring that I plan to install (yes, I’m doing this job again; last year it was for our old apartment, this year it is for our new-old house); and when I opened the instructions, many jewels caught my eye. But first, let me define the term, for those who are not yet in-the-know:

A circular saw is a power-saw equipped with a toothed or abrasive disc that cuts materials using a rotary motion spinning around an arbor. Circular saws, like the Baptist faith, were invented in the late 18th century and are now most commonly used in mills – see the lines from the preface of Blake’s brief epic Milton:

     And did the Countenance Divine,
     Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
     And was Jerusalem builded here,
     Among these dark Satanic Mills?

In an example of a genericized trademark, portable circular saws like the handheld one that I own are often called “Skilsaws” because the company named SKIL Power Tools, in the ancient days of December 2018, was elected by popular vote to be the leader of the Portable Electric Accessories Junta, a political faction serving the do-it-yourself consumer. SKIL can trace its heritage to the saw’s inventor, Edmond Michele, so this company really takes us back to The Essence: it might as well own the copyright for the Primordial Abyss, which is basically the Womb of Existence. Yes, we’re all in SKIL’s debt; so much so that the only way to square this company’s relationship with the rest of the developed world is for SKIL to don the fleshly form of a human and stand before itself as a potential customer, then commit self-slaughter & cannibalize its own corpse, thus barring further pristine record-keeping: unfortunately, however, every time this feat is accomplished, the company forgets to save its receipt. Even worse, I, Bryan Ray, the blogger of this blog that you are now skimming, was born in 1977 — a fact that I’ve mentioned repeatedly, for, like all corporations, I’m a self-loathing narcissist who cannot abide the embrace of my own sea-reflection (it’s far too protean) — & this mammalian birth, by the same logic that prohibits particles from entering existence unless accompanied by anti-particles, prompted the development of SKIL’s Ever-Spinning Model Seventy-Seven, now referred to as “the saw that built New America”. This device set the industry standard for handheld worm-drive circular saws, and it remains in production almost unchanged today: for its worm cannot expire, even if it drinks itself to oblivion.

OK I realize that I don’t have much to say about my Skilsaw. So I’ll just copy some of the passages from the instruction booklet which I thought were pretty good, and leave them as a list here at the end while I coast away. Cuz, tho I’ll go on, I can’t go on.

THE PROVERBS OF SKILSAW

• Cluttered benches and dark areas invite accidents.
• Do not operate power tools in explosive atmospheres.
• Keep all bystanders, children, and visitors away.
• Rubber gloves and footwear will enhance your safety.
• Contain long hair.
• Do not abuse the cord.
• Keep your hands away from moving parts.
• Proper balance enables better control in unexpected situations.
• Holding the work against your body is unstable and may lead to loss of control.
• Do not force tool.
• Any alteration is a misuse and may result in a dangerous condition.
• NEVER place your hand behind the blade.
• An untrained person may cause the saw to walk backwards, cutting whatever is in its path.
• Distractions can make you lose control.
• Do not hold piece being cut across your leg.
• A moment of inattention may result in catastrophe.
• Contact with a “live” wire will make exposed parts “live” and shock the operator. [“My knowledge my live parts.... it keeping tally with the meaning of all things” —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”.]
• When ripping, always use a rip fence.
• Blades that do not match the mounting hardware will run eccentrically.
• Lower guard may be opened by contact with your clothing.
• Wet lumber requires special attention during cutting operation.
• The “ON” switch may not last the life of the saw. If it should fail while the saw is running, the saw many not shut off.
• Large panels tend to sag under their own weight.
• Do not overreach.