Day 1407 – Dumb Luck and Dirty Water

Saturday, November 30, 2024

The other day I was getting gas. The fellow on the other side of the pump was arranging five medium sized plastic gas cans on the back of his truck’s tailgate preparing to fill them up.

I debated. What was the best way to suggest that it would be a good idea to put them on the ground? Most pumps have warning to do that. Something about static electricity and gas fumes. It just isn’t a good idea to mix the two. Even an empty used gas may be a bomb, as numerous examples have been illustrated throughout my life. A fire on a loading dock where workers went to smoke right next to a pile of old gas cans marked empty. My brother welding a gas tank. You’re suppose to fill it with water. He did, only left a few inches at the top. Next thing he knew the tank blew forty feet in the air and settled in a tree.

I hadn’t thought of all that when I turned to the fellow and said, “You know, I’ve always heard you’re supposed to put those things on the ground when you fill them up.”

He smiled at me. Young man, in his thirties, beard, longish hair sticking out from under his trucker’s hat, a fish hook lure on one side of his cap like a pencil over the ear. “Well, if it’s my time, I figure the good lord will take me.” He smiled. A big welcoming smile.

I finished gassing up and I said, “Well, it’s not my time so, just in case, I think I’ll get out of here.” 

He smiled. I smiled. We both smiled.

It was a pleasant enough exchange. I was happy that I had raised a concern without pissing him off.

Then the other day I was listening to an interview with Billy Bob Thorton. He’s one of those tangential movie personalities that is on my periphery of knowing who he is and what he does. He’s in a new mini-series where he plays a guy who made it big in the oil patch, lost it all, or most of it and now works for a man who didn’t lose it all. Billy is the fixer manager. They played a clip of an exchange between him and a lawyer.

There was an explosion on a rig. The roughneck was opening the well by hitting the cap with a hammer. There was a spark and the thing blew. The lawyer asked wasn’t it dangerous to do that especially when the well wasn’t OSHA compliant. Billy told her that’s the way you do it. Was it worth a man’s life? She asked. Well, it may not be to you said Billy Bob’s character but if you’re a felon with an eighth grade education making 180 thousand a year is a god damn golden ticket.

And there you have it. I’ll call it reverse baseball. Bottom of the ninth, two out, two strikes, and you hope that you get the hit – or in the case of the two examples above, you hope you don’t. 

Dumb luck? Well, kind of. You can increase your odds if you know something, and you try to minimize the conditions. Some minimize, some don’t. Maybe, you get lucky?

Most of us wander through life, ending up not where we thought we’d be. A few have dreams and pursue it, and make it. For most of us, that isn’t the case.

I saw a little clip that said New York City is laid out in a grid so you can figure out where you are. Not so Boston, if you make a wrong turn in Boston you’re screwed – go home – is what the clip said to do. I beg to differ. In Boston the roads curve around a peninsula. If you make a wrong term keep driving, you’ll hit the road you were looking for on the other side of the peninsula. But there again you have to know something.

Which brings me to The Standells – Love that dirty water, Un huh, Boston, you’re my home.

Once again we are in a race as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote when he visited America in 1831 and wrote about it, publishing in 1835. One of his observations was that America was in a race between its good and noble intentions and its bad. He did this to help people in France understand what was going on in America with its transformational Jacksonian Democracy. France was struggling with coming to terms with its fading aristocracy and the cries for liberty and equality.

That struggle continues to this day throughout the world. A dictator can get the trains to run on time, as Mussolini promised, but at a huge cost to the rest of the population that is kept in check by violent means. Grand promises to fix things, even things that aren’t really broken but were said to be as they gained power.

The solution? Seems to be truth. To gain truth one needs access to it. To do that one needs to be able to read or hear and to understand. Stupidity is often brought up. as in How could they be so stupid? Ah yes, well some have said no one was something or other by underestimating the American people. I am constantly surprised by the lack of a low standard. Can we go lower? Yes, we can!

I see the America I knew as a child being transformed. When I was growing up the goal was to have everyone being able to read and communication was doled out via means that allowed by and large to be factual and truthful. Now, neither is the case. A relentless push to take away public education and privatize it. Standard in reading, math, and general education are falling. This generation will be more ill-informed than the previous, and that has been true for several generations.

As Neil deGrasse Tyson points out – just because you have an idea and you go on-line and find others with the same idea does not mean that it’s true. It may mean that you’ve connected with every kook who shares that idea. (I paraphrase.) And just because you and a bunch of other people believe it, and there is no proof or evidence of it being true, does not mean that it should be held up as being equal to something that has been rigorously tested and shown to be true.

But that is where we are. I fear that in four years we will see, I hope, that at least the foundations of our democracy are still here, even if the walls have been torn down.