"I've Got Blisters On My Fingers" - John Lennon

When my wife and I were first working on the old derelict house we bought, my brother-in-law came up to me and said something that has stuck in my memory banks for years: "You know, I really don't like tools".  I suppose that has stayed with me because it was such an odd thing to hear.  How can you *not* like tools?  It was, I'm sure, an innocent and casual remark, but the implications are enormous and I see the effects of that mind-set in our society.



Tools, to some, mean just work; dirty, dusty, sweaty,  hands-on manual labor.  Oh yeah, I can attest to that, having spent more than thirty years living in that world.  It's all true.  Also true is living with the stigma of being in manual labor.  Manual labor is not a four-lettered word, but it might as well be.  Just recently, I had dinner with a friend from high school whom I hadn't seen in forty years.  He is now a vice-president of something-or-other with a large corporation.  In the course of our dinner conversation, he looked at me and asked:  "You're not still doing the work part, are you?".  And there it is.

Tools to others (myself included), are simply the instruments used in the process of creating.  I think this is the part most people fail to understand.  There are those of us who need to create.  This is what drives us.  This is what gets us out of bed and into our dirty, dusty, sweaty workplaces everyday. And at the end of the day, we need to be able stand back and see what we have produced, as we bandage ours fingers and put away our tools.

I think it is this lack of understanding and acknowledgement that bothers me.  I don't for one second think that people don't like tools.  Quite the contrary.  I think we have a great love of tools in this country.  This love of tools keeps the big box stores' doors open.  But we've lost a connection somewhere along the line.  Somehow, the pursuit of money for money's sake has moved too far ahead in acceptance and importance from doing what is real and concrete.

We are craftsmen, we are skilled labor and we are independent as hell.  We have no problem with getting "down and dirty", and  we are the legacy of the American Spirit:  We have created and will continue to create a body of work that will serve society.  That *is* real and concrete.