Osama and I are buying a welder. For me, it’s been thirty some odd years since I walked away from the smoky, grimy old blacksmith’s shop. A place frozen in time where the only thing to change since the early 1900s was the introduction of electricity. That witchery moved the work from the forge and the anvil to the bench and the stinger and stick.

I’m pretty sure my plan was to always, one day, run away from IT like a thief in the night and back to my roots; in the dirt and smoke and sweat.

Never to retire, but to die with a hammer and wrench in my hand, like the proletarian I was born to be.