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2006-11-05 - 2:50 p.m.

Sewing Thread, Soldering Wire

Women�s work, men�s work, I did both of it this week.

First, the sewing. I know, I know, it�s not really accurate to call sewing �women�s work� unless one has the perspective of an Archie Bunker (or whoever the current incarnation of that is). After all, MEN are tailors, right, just like men are CHEFS, etc. But still, my working with fabric and yarn and needle and thread did feel just a little bit feminine. But I am redeemed, because, truly, I was all thumbs. I felt like I was doing a terrible job and was constantly on the verge of quitting. It was just so damned hard. I kept thinking about one of my favorite children�s tales, The Tailor of Gloucester, which was originally a Beatrix Potter book, but the version I love is the Rabbit Ears audio tape of the story read by Meryl Streep, with music by the Chieftains. I kept hearing the words from that story spinning in my head, �Oh, I am worn to a raveling,� said the Tailor of Gloucester, who was struggling to make a groom�s magnificent suit of clothes for the Mayor of Gloucester who was getting married the next morning on Christmas Day, but the tailor was sick and poor and didn�t have enough food or buttonhole trim, what is called �twist�. He kept sighing, �No more twist, no more twist. Oh, I am undone!�

I think �twist� is what it was that I was trying to hand-sew onto the flimsy red nylon fabric of that �Spiderman� shirt to look like a spider web that was formed around the neck. This twist was shiny white crocheting yarn, but barely two braided strands thick. It was actually difficult to manage to get the needle to successfully pierce through it (due to its narrowness), and especially hard to find my place for every stitch, as I was having to come up from underneath. Finally, I hit upon the technique of marking my place each stitch with another needle from the top, and using the point of that marking needle as a guide as I sewed up from underneath. That worked pretty well, actually, and I think the job would have been impossible without doing it that way. But there were needed so many stitches!

I probably should have done millimeter-wide stitches, but there just wasn�t enough time for that. Instead, I did what my mother would probably have more accurately called �tacking�, that is, I sewed in one-inch spaces, one stitch up and down every inch around each spiderweb circle (of which there were five). Then for the vertical �spines� of the web (there were about twelve of those), I stitched at each web intersection.

Even though this method was more �messy�, it actually made the web look more genuine, because real spider webs aren�t perfect constructions unless the spiders have taken acid. Really, that�s not a joke�experiments have shown that if you give spiders LSD (do scientists have WAY too much time on their hands?), they make much more perfect, beautiful, and rather astonishing webs. But �my� spider certainly wasn�t on acid, but, instead, prayed for a pack of mice to come in at night and finish my job like they did for the Tailor of Gloucester. The good little mice helped the tailor, because he saved all his little waste snippets for them. Just to help them along, I saved all my little snippets and thread pieces, too. But no mice came.

I wondered if I should have used my sewing machine to do this. The problem was that I hadn�t used that machine for more than twenty years. Long ago, there wasn�t anything I couldn�t do with that machine�I made dress shirts and casual shirts and bedspreads and tapestries and costumes for videos and even a couple of beautiful cocktail dresses for some women that I knew, but I had drifted away from it so that now I didn�t even know how to get the whole thing started (or didn�t feel that I had enough time to experiment with it). I HAVE just finished getting my machine reconditioned, though, as I want to get the machine going again for the purpose of making some clothes for myself, like I used to do so long ago. (What I used to make was ten times more astounding that anything a person can buy�and custom-fit down to the millimeter, which is good and worth it if your body�s dimensions are good underneath. Off-the-rack clothes will never measure up, in this regard.)

By the way, as an aside, it was great fun taking the sewing machine to the sewing-machine-and-vaccuum-cleaner shop to get it reconditioned. A man is never half so magnetic as he is in a sewing machine shop, I can�t quite explain WHY, except that in that normally-female domain, a man in there suddenly seems to all the women to have about a six-foot cock. Well, won�t they assume, or worry, that you are gay? Maybe, I don�t know, that doesn�t seem to matter��gay�, or the consideration of it, is further down the road; what is more immediate is what is obviously visible, here is a man, he has a sewing machine, and he is in a sewing machine shop getting it fixed. For some reason, the �maleness� of that man is hugely enhanced by that atmospheric contrast. I had women (really sexy, attractive women) buzzing around me like I was a pot of honey. Here�s a big secret for all the randy heterosexual guys, �get thee to any women�s domain� (have their hair cut in a beauty parlor, accompany their sister to a fingernail salon, sit in the waiting room of an �It Figures� gym, etc)., and they will be able to gather more phone numbers than they ever thought was possible. They should go where their maleness stands out. The gym, sports bar, baseball stadium, etc., are NOT good woman-meeting places.

But no, I was stuck doing this by hand.

A big problem I had was automatically turning my sewing thread into a draw-string as I sewed around the spider-web circles. I had to keep pulling the fabric apart as I sewed, but still the fabric would gather up somewhere else, so that when I�d try the shirt on at the end of each circle, I�d find it gathered in several places around the torso. I�d pull the fabric back out like it was supposed to be, which would cause the thread to break. So I was making as many repairs of broken threads as I was doing the sewing on it in the first place.

Next big problem was sewing on the spiders. I had them in various sizes, but the largest size and the second-smallest size were the hardest to sew on, as they both had only thick plastic bodies that I couldn�t get the needle through (instead, I broke two needles in the process). The other sizes of spiders had narrow places where the needle could pierce through okay. The big spiders were essential to my design (front and back, they served as the Spiderman �logo�, only made with �real� tarantulas), so I ended up having to sew them on by wrapping the stitched thread around their legs. Ah, that ended up being okay, just kind of made them look like they were all tangled up in the webbing. But I found no satisfactory solution for the second-smallest size of spiders, so, sadly, had to leave them out of the design. Too bad, because they were black widows and I really wanted some black widows on my shirt.

I also sewed spiders on my blue jeans and even on my shoes.

I had worried about slashing a hole in the shirt to reveal the glued-on prosthetic gash on my stomach, but since the sewing had been such a pain, by the time I was finished, I hated the shirt and so x-acto-knife-slashed it open with relish. I had thought to maybe burn the hole in it, but a test on some cut-off-pieces of the nylon fabric revealed that that was too difficult to control. The flame wanted to melt the fabric too fast, and was hard to put out. So I was satisfied with the cut-open gash, instead.

Of course, I sewed on a dense mass of the smallest spiders around the gash, to look like they had come out of the wound, which they certainly did.

I woke up early the next morning and glued on the prosthetic. I applied the blood and the make-up around it just the way the guy had shown me in the store, and I was amazed at how real it looked! The make-up that matched my flesh color completely obliterated the sight of the edge of the prostethic, and for sure, it looked like I actually had a five-inch gash cut in my stomach. I cut three of the smallest spiders in half and glued their front halves inside the gash, so it looked like they had chewed their way up and out of my body.

The only problem with the make-up is that my body absorbs that stuff very quickly, so even by the time I got to school three hours later, all of it was gone. But no matter, the slash in the shirt was just wide enough that the wound could be seen, but the edges were hidden, so it ended up that the make-up didn�t matter after all.

A final inspection of the whole costume made me think that it was really awesome! It didn�t quite look as good as I had imagined it, but still, it was acceptable for the purpose, so that was okay. I had successfully managed to do it, which, based on how much I had felt like quitting, really was a good victory.

I must confess, though, to be less-than-satisfied by the reactions I received, though. Some people seemed to not even see me; others saw me on the surface, �Nice color shirt,� etc., which, I think, missed the point. There were some who even asked me, �Who are you?� or �What are you?� Fortunately, though, there were others who saw it, got it, and liked it right away�mostly mothers and little kids, it was the school�s employees who seemed oblivious or blind. But that backs up something my mother always said whenever any of us were disappointed at people�s reactions��They�re more worried about themselves.� With me and my costume, whatever it was, the employees had to �compete� (and the first problem would have been whether they even had a costume at all, and if they didn�t, then those of us who did have made them subtly feel bad), whereas the parents and the little kids were in a different world where they were free to enjoy whatever I did.

I most of all enjoyed the mothers who �got it�, but some of the kids were fun, too. Their more typical reaction was one of astonishment or just not quite believing it, particularly the gash in my stomach �Why do you have a rip in your shirt?� was a surprisingly common question, as if they hadn�t seen beyond it.

�Well, the spiders were growing inside of me and finally they chewed their way out, see,� and I�d point out my stomach where spiders were crawling out of the bloody gash.

�It�s not real,� their mothers would say to them in case they didn�t understand, �see, he is Spider man�.�

I was half-afraid that some of them would be very scared, but no one was. For sure they �get� Hallowe�en very quickly, even if they couldn�t verbalize it or write a dissertation on the psychology of symbolically outpicturing the �other world of death and rebirth beyond� during this time of the veil between the two worlds being the thinnest. Children are not strangers to this �astral� dimension, having only quite recently come from there and the practicalities of struggling for survival in the physical dimension has not yet completely blocked that �before and after� dimension out. There IS a benefit to be playing back with this dimension, experimenting with alter-egos (particularly monstrous or negative ones that you want to bring up out of the shadows and then tidy up, like cleaning cobwebs out of corners), which is why in Latin America, for example, �the Day of the Dead� is an important holiday, as is Samhain in Celtic countries.

This whole thing was, of course, bringing up stuff within me that I had to look at, wrestling with issues of always having to tell myself about one thing or another "this is not about me" versus "well, when IS it going to be about me?", questioning where my life was going, or not going, what had meaning for me, what was I accomplishing, where was I wasting my time, and so on�nothing to go into here, but valuable all the same.

Then, after the day at school, I went to a party in Ventura, which I enjoyed. Despite what seemed like cold weather, they had the party outside in their back yard, but they kept a large fire burning in a brazier and that kept the place perfectly warm! Everything was lit by candlelight and they were well-stocked with all sorts of Hallowe�en-type goodies to enjoy. I decided to forgo the beer for the hot spiced apple cider. Probably a good idea, since I was sixty miles from home and therefore had a drive ahead of me.

The host of the party had hung a movie screen on the wall and was able to project onto it horror movies that were on DVDs that he could play on his laptop. They were doing that for �atmosphere,� but it ended up being such a good idea that they are now planning on having some movie nights when the weather becomes summery again. Those will be lots of fun! I love movies outdoors under the stars.

The last person I saw that night was a clerk working at the gas station where I filled up my tank for the drive back home. I went inside to buy some coffee for the drive and of all the people who saw me that day, this guy was the one who most got off on my costume. He laughed when he saw that I even had spiders on my shoes. �You really got into it, man,� he said, �and everybody loves Spiderman!� Finally, I got my validation, from a perfect stranger, the very last thing on Hallowe�en night.

That was the �sewing thread� part of this entry. Now for the �soldering wire� part.

My car is a 1993 Cadillac that I bought used. The people who bought the car originally had selected the option of getting a radio/cassette player for it, not the CD player. That was fine, I have hundreds of cassettes, but as time went on, I began to yearn for the ability to play CDs, particularly the new ones that I was buying. I figured that someday I would have to replace that original stereo, but I wanted to play BOTH cassettes and CDs (still playing cassettes is important, because I listen to a lot of audio books during my long commutes and my preferred format for that is cassette tape). There certainly was room enough in the dash opening for both types of players, this was a 1.5 DIN opening, what in the trade is always referred to as the �Chrysler/GM� replacement size, which is half-again larger than the typical after-market stereo size (1 DIN).

Unfortunately, cassettes are considered a very old technology by now (they came out in the mid-sixties; I got my first automobile cassette player when I was a sophomore in college), heck, even CDs are considered (by some) to be an �old� technology by now (preferring to have everything on an I-pod), so finding ANY after-market car stereo that plays cassettes is pretty difficult, and when you want a CD player, too, to fit in an 1.5 DIN opening, it�s next-to-impossible.

I also had another problem, and that is that I wanted whatever I bought to replace the factory unit to look like it belonged there. It had to integrate into the rest of the dashboard, to be matched to the black-face, green-lighted, conservative, sedate design of the Cadillac �Symphony Sound� stereo unit. But what is on the market is designed to appeal to a teenager, all jazzy lights and exploded angles in the design. No, not for this dashboard.

So I lived with plugging my portable CD player into the cassette unit and having wires hanging out all over the place and the Discman sitting on the floor of the passenger side. I thought the sound was good, actually, but the look and functionality was not. I really wanted something that was built-in.

Finally, after months of periodic searching, I saw that Pyle came out with a 1.5 DIN unit that was both cassette and CD. Unfortunately, it was rather �ugly� (its biggest sin was that it had a brushed aluminum face) and would NOT integrate well with the rest of the Cadillac dashboard. So I wouldn�t get it.

Meanwhile, things were getting worse on the home front. Something was starting to not work right with my factory stereo�inserting and remove cassettes or the portable CD-player�s �cassette� plug-in was making the stereo change the time on the clock and erase all my radio pre-sets. I was constantly having to reset the clock and my radio pre-sets and I could read the writing on the wall�the time really had come to find SOME kind of a replacement unit.

Well, luck was on my side, I did an Internet search and found what more or less was what I had been looking for, a BLACK-face 1.5 DIN cassette and CD unit, made by a brand I had never heard of, Phase Linear, but it looked good and the specs were fine (beggars couldn�t be choosers, anyway), sold by J.P. Whitney, so I bought it.

It came extremely quickly, and once I had it in my hand, I realized that it was exactly the same design as the Pyle unit, only black instead of brushed aluminum, but whereas the Pyle brushed aluminum would have looked ugly in my car, the black of this Phase Linear unit was beautiful.

Looking through the materials that came with the stereo, I could see that �Phase Linear� was a type a �Jensen�, a more-or-less respectable stereo brand name, but then both brand names (and even about five others) were made by Audiovox. Hum. Well, Audiovox I had always considered to be a rather �cheap� brand, having a prejudice against them, I suppose, because where I saw Audiovox being sold was at auto stores like Pep Boys, not higher market stereo stores, but since the face of this unit was exactly the same design as the Pyle, which is not one of the Audiovox labels, I realized that ALL these brands are made by some nameless, faceless company (somewhere in Japan, or in the case of my stereo, China), so the brand name ultimately means nothing anyway.

Anyway, I was happy with what I got, if only I could manage to get the old stereo OUT and the new stereo IN.

Fortunately, I found old-stereo-removal instructions on the Internet (otherwise, honestly, I wouldn�t have had a clue), but the secret was unsnapping the face trim and finding a screw underneath that was discovered when the ashtray was pulled out. All this revealed two more screws along the top edge of the unit, which were star-shaped Torx screws, kind of pissed me off at first, until I remembered that I had a Torx screw-driver in my computer repair tool kit, and sure enough, that driver removed the two Torx screws and I was able to pull the unit out.

However, multi-colored stereo wire spaghetti greeted me behind the stereo unit. How on earth would I be able to match the car�s wires to my new stereo�s wires?

Well, another Internet search revealed a site that sold for a couple of dollars downloadable wire color-code sheets for each model of car, so I bought that, but then Crutchfield sells something even better, wire harnesses for each model of car. I got the one for the 1993 Cadillac Sedan DeVille non-Bose stereo (even though my car is the Sixty Special, it�s the same stereo), and to be safe, an antenna conversion plug, too (which it ended up I DID need).

The deal with the Crutchfield wire harness is that it will be the female socket that matches with the car�s wiring male plug; the Crutchfield instructions will tell you the function of each color of wire, which you then attach to the bare wires of your new stereo (and the new stereo�s wires are all labeled as to function). There were 13 wires in all, wires for things like �power antenna�, �keyed switch on�, �constant battery power�, �ground�, and wires for all the various speakers, such as �left front negative,� or �right rear positive�. Interestingly, the color coding of the Crutchfield wiring harness matched exactly the color coding of my new stereo�s wires (but the code does not match Cadillac�s wiring colors), so that must be the new industry standard. I am glad that I had downloaded the Cadillac color code, because before I plugged everything in, I was able to MAKE SURE that the Crutchfield wires were in the correct positions in their sockets. And they were. Otherwise, I could have shorted out or damaged something (such as connecting the car�s battery wire to a speaker wire, or something).

If you already know the function of each of your car�s wires, you don�t really need the Crutchfield wiring harness, except that it is hugely convenient. You can do all your soldering sitting down at your desk (as I did), or in your workshop, instead of cutting and soldering the wires while awkwardly sitting in your car (which, if you do, you ought to disconnect your battery cable, first). Also, since you haven�t cut into any of the car�s wires, Crutchfield says that when you sell the car, you can easily take back out your (better) after-market radio and plug the car�s wires back into the factory unit and sell THAT along with your car.

I did the soldering last night and enjoyed doing it, felt that I had regained whatever �masculinity� I had lost from spending so much time �sewing� previously. Actually, I wasn�t the least bit worried about gender at all, but, instead, was amused at my one day doing detail work with needle and thread, and then another day doing detail work with solder and wire. It�s all good.

Installing the car stereo wasn�t nearly as difficult as sewing the Spiderman costume, although it wasn�t trouble free. It did require several tools that I was glad I had, and some of the bracket bolts on the old stereo took some leverage in getting them unstuck�a socket driver couldn�t do it, but a socket wrench did the trick. Ultimately, the installation was perfect and looks truly beautiful. Also, the stereo sounds really GREAT, quite a bit better than what I had in there before. Also, the radio pulls in TONS more stations than the old Cadillac radio did, so that�s an improvement I didn�t even expect.

Despite now having this, and this unit will play burned MP3 CDs, too, plus it has a convenient I-pod (or similar) port (if I had an I-pod), and I could connect several pre-amps and a sub-woofer if I wanted (which I do not), I realize that I am STILL behind the times with this, because I don�t have a satellite radio, DVD player, or Global Positioning System. Yeah, or a Bluetooth for hands-free cell phone talking. Do I care?

Oh, about the stereo�s appearance. When it is off, it completely blends in with the rest of the dash components. However, when it is on, its main lighted color scheme is a beautiful blue. The rest of my dashboard is lighted in green. So the stereo does stand out as a custom add-in. But I don�t mind. The blue lighting happens to be so beautiful that it is something I can hardly avoid buying when I see it. Like an Australian Bower Bird relentlessly drawn to shiny objects which it will take to decorate its �bower�, I, too, am irresistibly drawn to this shade of blue lighting. Its beauty, while not exactly blending in with the green lighting elsewhere, does not clash with it (blue is a component of green, anyway), but stands alone in the center of the dashboard as just its own beautiful self. In fact, the blue lighting somehow does something to enhance the wooden interior trim, which always had, but now more noticeably, a purplish cast to its color (almost as if the wood selected was purple heart instead of �walnut� or �oak� or �mahogany�). Anyway, I love it.

And having it is ALL about me!


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