dredging up posts from 2014

The following is a reblog of a post I wrote in 2014. 

I thought of this blog's title while looking down from a forklift at a puddle.

I am a forklift driver at a warehouse which must, for the present, remain nameless.

I don't want to maintain this blog.

If I do maintain it, the one thing people have told me to include in it is "stories from my life."

For example.

In college I was an English major. One of the last novels I read before graduating was Moby-Dick. (Keep that in mind.)

After graduating, I got a job as a technical writer at a grain processing facility. One of the grains processed in this facility was quinoa. Quinoa, when milled, becomes a very fine flour—something like talcum powder. It has a creamy, off-white color.

One day a coworker asked me to obtain a sample of some quinoa flour. So, I dutifully went to the QA department and got the sample probe, which is a metal rod that pokes into bags of grain, opens up, and receives grain into its hollow center before it shuts again.

I went to the warehouse, opened a 5-foot-tall bag of quinoa, and started jabbing the sample probe into  it. I then began to have deja vu such that I remembered phrases like "From hell's heart I stab at thee--I spit my last breath at thee." I was somewhat confused by these thoughts until I noticed that the sample probe in my hands looked and felt like a harpoon, and the bag of quinoa in front of me looked a lot like the hump on a white sperm whale.

Moby-Dick, it turns out, is relevant to life.

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That is probably a fair example of what you'll find on this blog. Bear in mind, though, that it has been a couple years since I enjoyed writing, and that the other stories will (most of them) include human beings.

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