This handsome 31-year-old chunk of machined aluminum once belonged to a 1977 Sears 10-inch radial arm saw – the most fearsome power tool I have ever owned.
It rips, viagra dosage crosscuts, web bevels, miters – does just about everything you could want – destroying wood in a way that weakens the knees and liquifies the bowels of anyone who’s ever injured themselves with a power tool. I fear and respect it, in equal measure.
I bought the saw for $45 on eBay from an old pastor, who no longer needed it.
He had it built into a bench, so I was readying to build a bench for the same purpose (and worrying about whether I could build it perfectly square so the saw would always work accurately when I learned a bit more about it: The saw had undergone a safety recall at one point, and you could order a safety kit online – for free …
(more…)
Here are some of the posts I had the most fun writing and/or shooting.If you like any of them, maybe you’ll email one to a friend who might enjoy it, too. And if you just discovered this site, any of these is a good place to jump in:
Yin to the raygun’s yang, the 
To wait for a thing, to truly be patient and allow it to come at its own pace, is an inhuman act of will. We yearn – for new jobs, hot concerts, latest games, fast cars, slow weekends, a first kiss, a second chance, freedom, food, rest, love. Childhood trains us to await Christmas with palpable, potent longing. The Santa legend, the daily ritual of the advent calendar, the growth of the pile beneath the tree. Our lives seem measured out in the stroboscopic wink and bubble of tiny lights on slaughtered evergreens.
Finding the perfect gift for someone quirky. It’s an elusive goal at Christmastime, particularly when you have about two dozen such nebulous missions to add to an agenda of stocking-filling, tree-buying, menu-planning, house-cleaning, wreath-weaving and the otherwise headlong rush of your already insane life. You have secrets for efficiency. The oddball hardware store with everything. The coffee-fueled, lunchtime dead run down the most diverse shopping strip in town. The 
(front)
The vast majority of us have no sense of war. We have 
A nylon tube filled with one chemical inside which floats a glass tube filled with another chemical. Snap them, and a 
He weeps for the sins of the world. And the world 
We scurry on with our materialist lives. We return Christmas presents that were the wrong size, we drift into post-holiday sales and buy things on a whim. We ignore horrors that do not affect us. It’s a peculiarly American behavior. Heads appropriately buried in “our” culture we can ignore the active stupidity of our leaders, the crimes committed in our name, the suffering of millions with shattered lives who live at a safe remove on the other side of the planet.
In your mind, banish all tension. Sign a binding, planetwide truce to end war. Master genetics and cure all disease. Solve poverty and end hunger and illiteracy. Eliminate pollution and extinction. You’re omnipotent. Go ahead. The planet is safe and happy in your care. Now that you’ve given everyone on earth everything they need, you’re left with 9 billion people who still want, who desire, who manufacture needs to give their lives purpose. What happens? War and crime return to restore equilibrium. Now, return to reality’s yin/yang balance, to the natural tension that keeps us circling each other, giving and taking, punishing and rewarding, destroying and creating, warring and reconciling. John Lennon’s “Imagine” is a lovely, unrealistic pipe dream. We live in conflict.
Chiseled, hammered brass, given a round volume and a ringing edge, stamped or engraved with religious symbols. Three for a dollar, here, labeled “Xmas bells” – and nothing farther from the truth. Banged out they were in India, sweated over for more than a few seconds each and tossed into a basket, upmarketed, shipped, distributed and displayed in another basket on the floor of a shop. The ugliest, most deformed of them made the deepest tones, while the smaller, finer ones sound tinny and the biggest, finest of them give a sort of castrato 
Pairs attract me: 
My 
Now available for the first time, you can own a piece of the darkest hour of modern American history! This museum-quality replica of the very weapon that launched America’s War on Terror(TM) is meticulously rendered in vinyl-clad stamped steel, with a razor-like blade and a terrorist-approved pedigree. Made here in the U.S.A., this exquisite piece features elegantly simple design, a fine-honed steel cutting edge and all the style of a Bowie knife and the stealth capabilities of a nail-clipper file. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, yet powerful enough to carve a hole right in the Constitution, this piece is being issued in a limited edition, and available through this site only. Act now, and get yours!
Iconic, kinetic, and about as simple-minded as a yo-yo, the 
So much of faith is expressed in symbolism. This logo or that ritual, those laws to follow, these hands to wash beforehand. True belief takes such a leap of … faith that entire sects, churches, religions, nations, races engage in regular obeisance to symbolic propriety to reinforce their oneness, their righteousness, their might, and their identity as followers of the true way, the one God. Their temple. Their book. Their eyes cast heavenward and their hearts beating forward in visceral, passionate progress toward fulfillment of that way are the greatest testament to their dedication to their faith. In the greatest and gravest cases, the symbolism of faith becomes physical, curdles to disrespect, insult, bloodshed, war. And some wars have gone on as long as the faiths themselves, which have turned from codes of humanity and spirituality to mandates for genocide.
And now, something I have to do. This is the grim saga of 
Exquisite little clockwork instrument, complex of make, simple of mind: It requires no talent to play, and yet rewards with a tinkly, plinky little rendition of Brahms’ “Moonlight Sonata.” Crank it fast or slow, as is your mood, but you have no more control over its workings than over the behavior of a mousetrap. Use it, it makes but one kind of noise as the spines on its tiny drum pluck the vibrating metal tines of its tongue. This one is uncomplicated, devoid – but for the melody – of the 
It’s autumn, and these plummet from the sky like alien landing craft. They lie dormant on the earth for a few weeks, benignly green and pine-coneish. But the Santa Ana winds seem to trigger a rot from within that transforms their pulp to flesh, which twists grotesquely and begins squeezing out vermillion seeds like so many alien spoor, or hatchlings oozing from the back of a 
The hole is said to be lucky, the characters (identified by my good and knowledgeable friends on 
The spherical rhythm of astronomic instruments seduces the eye. Ignorant of its real function, you fall into it, sucked deep by a vortex of repeating rings of mysterious meaning. It’s not the power of the instrument to divine the movement of the stars, but the power of the cool thing made of interlocking circles, the desire to pick it up and spin it, see if it looks different when you reorient its geometry. I made this for my then-new wife a few years back – banged together concentric needlework hoop-frames on brass machine-screw pivots, and at its heart stationed a sun, made by punching push-pins into a cedar ball I had fished from the bottom of the closet. I was never mathematical – Cs and B-minuses through high school – and had no hope of ever really having the patience to understand the markings on a 
Hollywood has an alien economy that couldn’t exist outside its own borders: Flowing through the town is a rich, ceaseless tide of favor and artifice and expense and and gifts that Industry types omehow feel is necessary to sustain the real work – making movies that make money to allow the making of more movies. Among these is the sort of opulent, multi-part schwag kit sent out in a completely guileful attempt to curry favor from members of various guilds and unions and academies whose collective power bestows the 
This came home today in a little box. It used to be in my head. I am now a few grams lighter. Having it removed was far more painful and unpleasant than 
I spent the better part of five or six years, and more than $6,000 trying to keep a malevolent old 
Lines of dialogue come unbidden when this is before your poised lips: “Ms. Dix, letter, date June 18, 19XX, to Oswald Crane, at Crane, Crane and Reynaldo …” “We’re now thpeaking to you from Mr. Hayrick’th garage, where we have just seen the filthy girlth exit the building …” “I’m ain’t sayin’ nothing until I talk to my lawyer and … hey, what’s the big idea, HEY — ! …” The gold-thread cloth screen behind the two-piece cast-potmetal shell speaks of Chanel, cheap cigars, hand-rolleds, Old Grand-Dad. The cord leads (at the other end) to a heavy middle-sized object – a Weber-Carlson reel-to-reel tape recorder with a multi-tube chassis and enameled cast-metal face, and a green “
There was no reason to expect this formula to work: science fiction adventure played wooden marionettes and foot-and-a-half-long balsa-wood rocketships. Yet pound for pound, lovers of high-action melodrama and futuristic equipment could get more thrill out of watching 
Before 
A dense concentration of totemic power – symbols of meaningful events in life strapped to your wrist, proof against ennui, woe and forgetfulness. A long chain of chains leads up to your 
For 15 cents, you could get a double-
This 
I don’t follow the Dodgers. I don’t even follow pro sports. But somewhere in that vast terra incognita is a cult of collectors who fixate on bobble-head dolls, and one of them found its way into our house. No longer the purview of rear decks and lovers of boxer dogs, the bobble-head has become 
At one point about five years ago, the pain in my head grew so extreme that I paid a man to put a pair of extremely strong pliers into my mouth and rip this out of my skull. I don’t recall how he braced my head. I don’t remember what I said beforehand, or afterward. I do remember hearing and – despite the Novocain – feeling the hard “SNAP” of the roots breaking off a bit of bone from the floor of my sinuses as it came free. And there it sat on a bloodied bed of gauze. I gaped, pulling together my splintered wits. Two fillings stared back. He turned it over, and I saw the massive cavity that had prompted the pain and the extraction. I keep it around as a lesson for the kids. Their dentist says they do a great job brushing. I’m chewing gummis as I write this.
Back in college one night, we saw a wall of smoke coming around the corner on Halloween. Being a wannabe photojournalist at the time, and thinking, “fire” I grabbed my camera and ran – straight into a cloud of tear gas. Needles in the eyes, claws in the lungs, I doubled over, immediately capacitated along with about a dozen other people who had fallen victim to someone’s asshole idea of a prank. I spent the next half hour coughing and weeping the shit out of my system, sucking down Cokes at the pizzeria. Cops have some pretty impressive nonlethal weapons at their disposal. Here’s another one: Fired from shells that fit standard-issue riot guns, these don’t incapacitate, but they definitely sting and deter. I’ve never experienced them first-hand – these were fired at a press-and-public show-and-tell day for the Ventura County Sheriff’s station in Thousand Oaks a few years ago, along with bean-bag projectiles, which are shot from fat 37-mm shells from the police equivalent of grenade launchers They had teargas shells, too. Fortunately, they chose not to demonstrate those.
Somebody in a factory somewhere peeled two cast-vinyl frog halves out of a still-hot mold. The air reeked of curing toxins, raw polymers. She glued them together with adhesive or heat, and took up a spraycan or an airbrush to dust the top of the thing (along with all of its brothers, maybe laid out on a tray) with lurid, poisonous red. She let them dry a bit, maybe while pouring the next batch of vinyl, and then returned; she considered the red trayful of red frogs, the red under her nails, the smell of it in her nose, for only a second or two – likely, her boss was counting her output – and then grabbed a brushful of black: quick socks for the feet, and a couple dozen spots down its back. On to drying and packaging they went, and back to the cycle went she – mixing the vinyl again.
The aesthetic of brushed aluminum and blackout metal is as distinct a flavor of modern physical culture as gingham and daisies, bakelite and chintz, mahogany and stained leather. A wave ripples through me as I write this, and I flash on alternate molecular realities – strawberry roan gelding motorcycles; rocket gantries of hardwood and stucco, carpeted with bokharas and kilims; tricycles of flesh, bone and hair, and sneakers of diamondplate steel. Quick – an earthquake renders the earth around your house into Jell-O – literally. Liquefaction soil becomes dessert, a sticky-sweet confection into which the foundation of your 30-ton house begins to sink like the spoon in a playful child’s bowl. What do you grab before you bolt – the album of family photos rendered in colored sand? The satchel made of baseball mitts? Your 3.2-megapixel digital-zoom canteen? Your herbed salt-pork laptop containing your life’s work and your exhaustive research records on the mysterious transmogrification of all matter? Maybe you grab the last real thing you can see – a hard, cold, efficient little pocket telescope – so that you can bolt to higher ground and watch from safety as the house sinks beneath the shimmering green surface with a wet, sucking roar.
Too meek for bones through my septum, too square for even tattoos at that point, I was a square, square newspaperman, covering murder trials, city council meetings, disasters and defense contractor fraud for the 
There was no archetype before this one. Not Rossum’s Usuform Robots, not 
A Navajo silversmith cast this in sterling silver. The Dine (DIN-eh) as they prefer to call themselves, make a living doing business with each other, ranching, running stores and schools and businesses – and with tourists crossing tribal lands, by selling crafts like this from roadside stands in and around Monument Valley and the Four Corners area. From the tourist’s side of the equation, it’s a tiny glint of cunning grace in the dusty, ragged glory of a southwest road trip. From the artisan’s viewpoint, one I can only guess that it’s a symbol of considerable significance, crafted with industry and art, in a form that’s easy to duplicate and sure to sell for a good price.
This is an artifact from my time 
Why does the drink need shade? Are the ice cubes kept cooler and the booze more potent from their not melting? Are we supposed to feel exotic, or more relaxed when drinking an umbrella drink? More 
I am an inveterate disassembler. After building a veritable fleet’s worth of 
Finding these rooted me fast, stabbing a map of the gargantuan Darwinian cosmos with a tiny pushpin labeled “you are here.” The 
There is something narcotic about playing 
My very good friend, Steve Marquez, a sharp, funny, intensely humane reporter for the 
For five of the more intense, confused, striving years of my life, I lived in Philadelphia, about a block and a half from the 
