It's been a while, but here's Sleeping with clowns - part 3. I get the feeling this story is going to ride for a long time - I may have to rename this blog as Sleeping with clowns. Anyway, it's the first thing I've written in three weeks, so if you're still a visitor, please give it a read and let me know how it is for you.
Here's the previous parts:
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As much as it might annoy I have to step back here. I need explain something I said before. This explanation was always bound to be important. Some things have to be said for another thing to operate. Two moments might well seem connected, they might seem like the same moment, but there is a bridge. If you stepped from one side of a river to another across a bright red, metal bridge you wouldn't question that the river looked the same on both sides despite the bridge - this bizarre incongruous bridge just gets stepped across to stop you from drowning. I'm asking you to step through this part of the story. Bear with me because the machine's switch rarely looks like the machine's innards.
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Take a piece of white dust floating in the air. Follow it gently flicker its way in the air and land on a piece of skin. It's hot. The piece of skin perspires. The dust moistens on the skin, sticks to the face. A miniscule piece of white, imperceptible, delicately glues to the skin.
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This was one way to imagine the sanding, to get through the twelve hour shifts - it didn't work though - nothing really did for long.
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I went into each cubed room, overalls on, an old rag tied around my head, a paper oyster clamped by tight, skinny elastic over my mouth and nose, and goggles wrapping my eyes and eyebrows. It was boiling and the equipment suffocated me for half a whole day for five days a week.
For each unit I'd plug in the air sander, always cautious the compression pipe could fly back in pressure and the metal plug could crack my head unconscious. To have this two second fear six times a day was more added sweat.
Then I'd test the sander, click the top button a few times, let it rev some screams out and see it spew dust from the previous unit from its gills. I fucking hated that sander and wanted to kill it.
Then I'd walk into the unit, press the sander against the filled walls and let the white dust kick into the air. It'd only take two minutes for my field of vision to be no more than three feet in diameter, with the choking fog of filler. I'd sweat and sweat and at the same time the dust would clag to all there was of my exposed skin - my cheeks, forehead, hands and neck. If my sweat was fire, this dust was water, but the fire was a volcano. I'd sweat off the caked dust, go into the next unit, get the sander braying onto the walls again and get caked again with fresh dust. It never felt fucking fresh though.
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When the horn went at six o'clock it was angel's singing my release. I'd unplug the sander, fearful of that metal attachment walloping me for the last time of the day, peel off the overalls from my wet body, go to the toilets to wash. The wash would take me fifteen minutes and that was just enough to get me a lift home. Nobody wanted my sweated, second hand filler on their car seats. I was already on my fourth lift-giver in as many months - I had to be clean enough to be accepted into a car and quick enough for anybody to be left to give me a lift. The factory was not the kind of place you stuck around to do a bit of sightseeing ' when the angel's sang a horn blast at the end of the day you were out of there - fixing your brain on anything but the place.
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So, getting home gets me to the start of the bridge - we haven't even begun to cross it yet, but trust me, wait, you'll see how the dust, the cornflakes and the beef all get me to the clowns - the clowns are coming, but not yet - I haven't flicked all the switches yet.
