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| "There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden" but Bob's gates are fit for a king! |
You'll know protest singer Bob Dylan for his hard-hitting social criticism - songs such as Puff The Magic Dragon, Little Boxes, and In The Year 2525 have made it to the top of the "pop charts" in spite of a message many of the "older generation" find uncomfortable!
But did you know he also welded gates? That's right! Bob stopped by th' IoF© to promote his latest passion! We chatted poolside whilst [grammar - Ed.] Kreemé [below, and eighteen my ass - Ed.] served signature eel spleen n' Reflecting Pool water smoothies!
FT3 Bob! The Bobster! Bobby-boy! Zimbo! You're looking good, my man!
BD Right now I'm lookin' at that gal's ass.
FT3 (laughs) Tells us about this unexpected career change!
BD Just got sick of the singin'. I can sing any old shit out there, make it all one same fucking note, they don't care. They should be booin' me off stage, they're cheerin', goin' crazy. Sick of it.
FT3 So why gates?
BD I've always been interested in railings, bootscrapers, grilles, gates, anything made of iron, steel, metal. Welded. Love me a welder's torch, mask, them heavy gloves. It's a manly occupation. Writin' a fuckin' song? What kind of thing is that for a grown-ass man to do?
FT3 Right. So no more records?
BD Fuck that. Fuck that with a big iron spike with a fucking rusty point on the end. It's the welder's life for me.
FT3 Let's take a break here to show th' Four Or Five Guys© some of your work ...
BD Right, here's me at work. I'm lifting my mask here so you can see who I am. Normally that's over my face, for protection from the intense light and searing heat. OHSA very strict about that.
BD And here's an archway what I did for some mall or something ... no! A casino!
FT3 Knockin' on Heaven's Door! I hav'ta say, Bob, that's better than Tempest.
BD That one's going on tour. I'm curating a truckload of gate-adjacent welding projects for Bob Dylan's Weld Tour. I stay home, weld some more stuff ... yeah!
This post funded in part by Scarcely Credible Developments And Unlikely Directions Magazine
Did you ever have a job that seemed wildly out of character for you? Did you ever even hold down a job? What was the worst job you ever had? What would you like to be when you grow up? Where do you see yourself in five years time? Let's talk about that. Or women. Just fucking engage with the content. Yeesh.
ReplyDeleteI only had three jobs. The first was a paper round for a year delivering the weekly local news rag, the bag and contents was too heavy so had to do it over two days. Also as a teenager Saturday job in a Freshwater Tropical Fish Shop (aquarium), I loved this job, and seemed to be good at it.
ReplyDeleteWhen I left school, got a job in a small advertising agency, when they fragmented I went with one of the bosses to his bigger agency, and then as a self employed artworker to work within a few different printing companies, until working from home about 2010.
Now retired, I regard leaving school to retirement to have been one continuous forty year job - there were no gaps in employment. I think that I was either very lucky or stupid to have put up with some of the people I worked for, especially during this century.
Worst job was teaching for a year in Bristol, England, back in '73
ReplyDeleteI take it there was no chanteuse moment featuring Lulu with Sidney Poitier looking on approvingly?
DeleteThey already know everything in Bristol. It's the Manchester of the South.
DeleteFrom glass cutter to egg sorter, sealing strip fitter, bicycle parking employe,never liked any of those. Butter maker was doable, at the end I became carer, for the last 30 years. Hopefully till I retire
ReplyDeleteHad a dream job for 19 years - in the motion picture industry (Hollywood/Canada).
ReplyDeleteTaught English to a wide range of ages in Fes, Morocco. I had no prior teaching experience.
Regarding girls, I had some time to kill after going to a swap meet yesterday morning and stopped by a Vietnamese coffee shop in Garden Grove a girl at work recommended.
Well, the uh girls that work there are basically naked, maybe a piece of lingerie here or there or just an open robe...somehow I managed to make an avocado smoothie last for two hours...no cover charge, no food...just coffee, smoothies and endless iced tea refills...
As David Lynch would say...it was a "Good Day Today"!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IugOfDBWcGc
~ Jon in California
Am I the only one who thought/hoped the link would go to a video of the Vietnamese coffee shop?
DeleteYeah! FOOEY ON YOU, Jon in California!
DeleteSorry, they don't allow cameras...but if you're in the area, highly recommended:
Deletehttps://www.yelp.com/biz/cafe-starz-garden-grove-3
~ Jon
The summer after graduating high school, I worked at a steel fabrication plant (that made huge girders that supported highways etc.) before starting college. Because they knew I was only there for the summer, I was given the jobs no one else wanted. The worst was being the assistant to "Mean Elmo" (the name tells you everything you need to know) who operated the Wheelabrator Shot Blast area that cleaned the girders by shotblasting them with metal pellets. Imagine a structure the size of a gas station car wash (where your car rolls through) that was inside a huge unairconditioned metal barn. The car wash like structure had thick curtains on both ends to try and keep the metal pellets that were being shotblasted onto the huge metal girders that were being rolled through the car wash structure rolling along on rails. The girders went in dirty and came out silver and clean. The Wheelabrator was VERY old and always breaking down. There was a concrete "moat" around the concrete structure that allowed the mechanics access to the machinery under the car wash structure. The moat/trough was about 10 feet deep. Excess metal pellets that escaped the car wash structure would collect in the bottom of the moat. My job was to go down into the moat with a bucket tied to a rope anchored to a metal railing 10 feet up, fill the bucket up with the excess pellets, then lift the bucket full of shot up out of the moat with the rope. This was June - August in South Texas. It was astoundingly hot down in the moat. I was still living at home, and my mom would look at me at the end of my shift and ask - how are you getting so dirty at your job? I was never really clean that entire summer. Never was a fan of that type of work since that experience.
ReplyDeletebrutal. I mean, South Texas in summer is brutal under any circumstance, but...damn
Delete"Mean Elmo And The Wheelabrator". Great short story right there. Mean Elmo gets his jeans caught on a hook and is dragged through for the shotblasting he deserves. You don't know this, you're down in the trough when one of his eyeballs winks at you from the bucket.
DeleteThe summer I was 15, a friends father who had a construction company hired a set of us to do stuff. I was supposed to be putting up drywall (sheet rock). The first day the poor "old" (he was probably in his 30s?) Black man trying to teach me kept watching me shatter more and more and more drywall. Next morning I was given a broom and told to just sweep up...which I did for the rest of the week and when I got paid on Friday I was told to look for something else...which was barbacking and oyster shucking at a bar one of the coaches at my highschool owned, which was fine-ish until I managed to shuck open a healthy gash in my left hand which I still sport evidence of to this day. Thusly disabled, I went to work at Science Supply & Service Store on the LSU campus, which was fine until during one of the reliable afternoon downpours (where the sun stays out but there is so much water in the air it just starts raining) I was running a package onto the loading dock of a building and, uhm, misjudged the height of the garage door and split the top of my head open, earning several hundred stitches and another job search. I was rescued by Goudchaux's Department store & sold boys clothes for the rest of the summer.
ReplyDeleteHonorable mention: I worked one (count'em, 1) 3-game baseball series at the Minneapolis Metrodome where I walked the bleachers selling popcorn...woof.
Still working on what I wanna be when I grow up; hiding out in academia has been handy that way. Five years from now? Still on the right side of the dirt, enjoying my family and a bowl of ice cream, having too much music to decide what to listen to so putting everything on shuffle all the time...oh, wait...
My parents deserve a lot of credit for anything I've achieved, and one prime example was when I was living in San Francisco and unable to land a job. My folks had dinner with a cousin (I have only three first cousins) and got me the inside track to becoming a Principal Typist Clerk with the University of California. I could (and still can) type fast with accuracy, so it wasn't just nepotism. While doing that job, I learned how to use the Berkeley Unix time-sharing computers ...which basically was the foundation for my next 40 years of employment.
ReplyDeleteMost amusing job was assuredly the summer that I was 17 and accepted to a college in the Midwest of the USA. I delivered drugs for a pharmacy in a small medical complex in the "greater Los Angeles area." The pharmacist and one of the doctors had a prescription scam going, so I saw a half-dozen bottles of pharmacy Qualuudes that they'd ripped off. I also was invited to the pharmacist's apartment one weekend, where he had a mound of cocaine that almost covered all the LP cover to Hot Tuna's first album. I enjoyed more coke that summer than at any other time of my life. I also took prescriptions into some very seedy parts of L.A., including runs after dark; I think of it as evidence that I was once young and dumb.
Now, I take drugs to control cholesterol and blood pressure. :^)
D in California
"... almost covered all the LP cover to Hot Tuna's first album" - what a great visual detail.
DeleteThe dead-end low-paid dumb-waiter drudgery my life currently orbits like a small moon around a huge planet is about the best I've had except for the hellish commute. I've had to walk off a few jobs so ill-suited was I and so obnoxious the setting eg being deafened by Eminem whilst struggling with no end in sight to perform contortions with rods and springs.
ReplyDeleteWhere do I see myself five years from now? Likely dead or bed-ridden but hopefully not knocking on doors again to try to persuade the occupants to take a computerised survey.
First job was the worst job. Aged 13, I bunked off school to pick raspberries for a week to get enough cash to buy the Fab’s latest album, “Sgt Pepper’s”. The work was hell but the pay-off was worth it.
ReplyDeleteApologies for the misplaced apostrophe. Senior finger trouble.
Deleteevery job i ever had dealt with handling currency delivered newspapers by bike work in the local amusement park worked in record stores worked in nyc department stores macy's orbach's and fao schwarz. did security and worked for the federal reserve in both ny and jersey handled more money than god's son until i got fired for verbally abusing an official and i had worked there about twenty years after that i worked for brinks the list runs down my leg
ReplyDeletei also drank heavily most of the time i had any job surprised i'm still here
woody
Cheers, Woodman!
DeleteBest job I ever had was working on an archeological dig. Roman fort foundations. Nothing glamorous like mosaics but beaucoup of pottery shards (beautiful Samian ware) and the occasional bronze brooch - one of which I rescued from the wheelbarrow of the Handsome Bearded Archeologist. Anyway, he was about to tip it away when I dutifully pointed it out to him. He wasn't at all grateful. There were three of us, we'd hunker down in a pit we'd scraped out with our precious trowels (names burned into the handles) and smoke a jazz cigarette while HBA fucked his red-headed assistant in the toolshed - she wore her shirt tied under her bosoms in exactly the way you'd want, like a marine biologist. A little later we were examining prints from an aerial survey, and on close inspection with a magnifying glass there we were, down in the pit with a joint. Lucky HBA had a roof over his head, right? Couple of other things. During one of our pit breaks (an excavated rubbish pit, where most of the finds were found) we were talking about books - like hippies did back then - and I said "Love's Body" by Norman O. Brown was blowing my mind. It was rarer than rare even back then - import only. So Dave reaches into his army surplus jacket and pulls out a copy, right there. One of our far-out synchros. Dave's special skill was keeping a newt (small lizard) in his mouth and letting it crawl out down his chin in front of visitors. Possibly the best joke I ever saw.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, several decades and continents later that same identical copy of "Love's Body" is slowly flaking apart here on my desk. It still blows my mind. Flipping through at random (the pages stiff as my neck), we get this:
"Everything is symbolic, everything is holy ... one flower is the spring. It is all there all the time."
Smoke gets in your eyes ...
Here it is:
Deletehttps://oceanofpdf.com/authors/norman-o-brown/pdf-loves-body-reissue-of-1966-edition-download/
~ Jon
That's it! A beautiful clear pdf, too. Thank you.
DeleteGorblimey ...
Deletehttps://oceanofpdf.com/?s=tim+earnshaw
My co-author, whose authentic experience formed the backbone of the story, hanged himself last year. He went through some bad stuff, and it stuck to him.
DeleteI've worked in a toy factory, on a farm, a supermarket, a corner shop/ general store, a seaside cafeteria, one of the most noted UK government departments of state, for a bank, a communications company, In Prison administration, In Police Administration, A global logistics company, one of the world''s biggest oil companies and an Insurance company as well as owning my own small company twice. Working in tech you get to see all sides of life but the worst job I had was taking the team lead of a project team for a tech hardware firm delivering services in a tech project to a significant institution in the UK legal system. What I didn't realise when I took the job was that the boss at the hardware company who recruited me had made certain promises (in a typical sales manner) on behalf of the company to the independent overall Project Manager of the project that my team were working on that my boss couldn't deliver on and I was basically used as my bosses shield between him and the overall project manager(who had certain sado-psychotic tendencies) to take the fall for his failed promises so when I couldn't deliver on my bosses promises (it was impossible for the hardware to do what my boss claimed it would do) I became collateral damage to be shipped off to the some anonymous role on some other contract. He suckered me and suffice to say the relationship didn't last that long albeit it long enough for me to line up my next job.......
ReplyDeleteAnd the best job I had was at 18 working in the one of the most popular bars in my home town.Tom Cruise in Cocktail had nothing on us (ha I wish)........
It's amazing that a seaside cafeteria was one of the most noted UK government departments of state. We were happier then.
DeleteIn high school, I worked in the furnace room at an aluminum plant one summer (pay was great, but the place was a walking OSHA violation), and followed that up by working as a "hopper" on a garbage truck the next summer (the guys on the back of the truck who hop off and on to grab the cans). Did both to build stamina for sports. Yeah, I was a dumbass.
ReplyDeleteMaking chips in London Zoo's staff canteen on the hottest summer day in 1976!! Talk about sweat dripping!!
ReplyDeleteOne of my bestest jobs was as "relief school caretaker"!! ..main task seemed to be sampling the tea we were constantly making!!
Worst job? Trying to teach a English to a bunch of delinquent Thai teenagers at a technical college!! Still have nightmares about class BU1/4!! .. and that was 8 years ago!!
I suppose you all knew about Bob's heavy metal side quest? It was news to me, and I'm gobsmacked by how good he is. A real artist - something we never saw in his lamentable paintings.
ReplyDeleteI can't BELIEVE nobody has posted Derek and Clive yet. There is poetry, philosophy, and wisdom in these guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SentQjMIioY
ReplyDeleteAdvanced, forthright, signifficant ...
Delete