Back in the day, there was this metal shop, this place had been going so long it still had all the shafts and pulleys in the ceiling from when it was belt driven by a single steam engine.
Down one end, near the door you went through to get to the toilets, there was the guillotine, this was an old machine even then, with a small electric motor, maybe 1/2 hp, spinning up a pair of very large flywheels at the top, and these woked through some reduction gears to a crank, and mounted on that crank was a con rod that connected to the guillotine blade.
This thing probably took 4 or 5 seconds to complete a stroke and return of the blade, and anything metal that would fit in the throat of the machine, which was about 2″ wide by 1.5″ high, it would cut…. possibly a solid bar of 2 x 1 stainless would make it choke, but I wouldn’t bet on it, it was used for cutting 1 x 1 and 2 x 1/4 steel bar all the time.
I remember this shop, and this machine, because there was a “thing” in this workplace, now, every workplace has a thing, if you look long enough you will see it, in this place it was as a worker walked to the toilet, he would pause at this machine, and then look at the blade going up and down, and as it started the down stroke, poke his index finger in and out of the throat of the machine.
I remember at least three of the guys at that shop were missing the ends of their index finger, and it didn’t stop anyone else from doing it.
Hell, I cannot deny that I did not feel the pull… I wasn’t daft enough to do it, but then I didn’t actually work there day in and day out…. that is significant.
There is a conversation that I almost never have with skanks, I have it in my head when they ask, and then I am all meh, what’s the point explaining, it does me no good.
The conversation basically says that if it has been 4 weeks since I have seen and fucked you last, then I have lost interest in you, the pull of madame guillotine has faded.
At that point if you want to get back to me again, you do all the work, and all the driving… cos I can’t be assed… I’m not in the workshop, so madame guillotine has lost her allure…
As I said up there, every workplace has its thing, sometimes it isn’t a crazy thing like sticking your finger in a guillotine, sometimes it is just part of the job, a fisherman working with a capstan winch for example, you do that shit every day so you forget all about the (quite justified) fear and caution you felt on your first day on the job the first time you saw it.
It’s also a group thing, groups of guys in a workshop will have a thing, but the same number of single guys working alone would never have that thing…
I dunno, maybe I am different, or maybe I have (due to the environments I have been in) seen more than my fair share of people maimed and killed by machinery, but I am very much of the “are you sure you want to do that” and “this is going to end badly” school nowadays, it’s almost like watching youtube fail videos, you just know it is going to involve the protagonist getting hurt, you don’t actually have to see into the future, it’s not a different reality that has not yet come to pass, it is more like you have seen the explosion, now you are just waiting for the shock wave and noise….
I remember a guy telling me, he knew this guy who was at an early atom bomb test, and the guy was saying there is this incredibly bright double flash, and then this quite beautiful fireball, and it is all *completely* and *utterly* silent…. of course if you are 3 miles / 5400 metres away, at 340 metres per second it takes a rather astonishing 15 seconds for the sound to travel to you…
It’s only when the sound / shock-wave hits that it sinks in how big an event it was, not just pretty sparkly fireworks.
Even without the pay-off of emptying your balls and an orgasm so powerful it makes you go blind for 30 seconds, there is enough of the madame guillotine factor to explain why guys get burnt by wimminz, go back to another wimminz, get burnt, go with another wimminz, get burnt, etc… rinse and repeat.
You stick your finger in… just because… hard to explain, hell, all the other guys do it, and you only get bitten if you are too slow or your timing is off…
There isn’t actually any pay-off, as such, its just what you do to fit in, at that time and place…. no fisherman has any time for the guy who won’t take his turn on the capstan winch, next time the boat sails, he will be left ashore…
This is one of the unintended and unexpected consequences of the fragmentation of society and the destruction of community, not only will we never again see the village memorial listing the names of all the men who went off to the Great War and never came back, and, frankly, they signed up because their mates did… never again will we see the masses of men signing up for marriage and co-habiting LTR’s… there is no workshop with many men any more, they are all separated into their own workshops so to speak…
Don’t get me wrong, the stuff you can do over a TCP/IP connection is awesome, but, you can’t weld another guys toolbox shut after bolting it to the bench, or glue their cup down, or any of the other shit you pull when you are one of a group.
Madame guillotine just doesn’t have anything like the same temptation unless you are in the company of other guys, many or most of whom have stuck their finger in her throat… whether you are alone with her or watching her over t’internet, you just don’t get the urge, because there is nothing there to belong to.
Years ago, no, make that decades ago, none of my close friends lived more than a ten minute walk away, then as time passed and technology evolved the geographic spread increased, now, none of my close friends live closer than an hour’s drive away, that right there is the reason I don’t get up to some of the crazy shit I used to…
It’s not the nuclear family or the village community, alone, that we have been industriously wrecking, and it is the sub-conscious hankering for that that has driven the meteoric rise in social media such as fuckbook.
And now the same thing has happened with sex, far from these technological tools *allowing* us to meet and date and fuck people from outside a 5 mile radius, we are now as a mass of people generally preferring and selecting and rejecting people, simply because they live too close to us…
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see which way the trends are going…
Suddenly, instead of having to wait for the two week vacation every year to go hundreds of miles away so you could do shit you would never dream of doing in your own home town, like fuck a different guy every night, now there is no home town, and every hook up you make is in effect a vacation one, not on your own doorstep, so instead of being the temporary holiday excess, it becomes the daily norm.
We are, now, way past the point where this positive feedback loop became self sustaining.
I am a participant in something, it should hit the mainstream in autumn this year, and when it does, I will be able to video blog… ok, I could now, but I choose not to… but this thing will have that same transition phase effect on EVERYONE with a webcam.
And, another piece of the old walls of the old society comes crumbling down.
