Like Father Like Son...in Some Ways.

Give me your Twinkies! 
 

Click on pic to see the clip I'm going to talk about a bit today. Or get pissed because YouTube's buffering sucks and you have to wait to see it.

 

 

 

This isn't the best way to describe how I get, but everything up till the “until you are dead” line in the clip can be true at times. I'm not bragging that I'm like the Terminator, but the obsessiveness and tenacity I do own. I don't turn this “on” in me by choice. I swear it's a circuit breaker that flips when I reach a point of frustration that's preventing me from reaching a goal. The jist is that it happens on it's own. I don't go the breaker box to turn it on.

Today, I finally got that mount and FM antenna secured to the roof and operating. I can pull in Nantucket once more. I can listen to music with some pretty decent fidelity from stations out of New Hampshire. I have choice of a many stations that don't compress and cut the bandwidth like you have on a computer. In order to jam that much information down the fiber optic line and servers, they purposely cut the highs and lows of a song. You get the boring middle. This, ironically enough, is called “lossless” or “lossy compressed” music. The bastards!

Sure, I can listen to some music station out of Stuttgart Germany and wire that from my computer to the stereo and it'll sound like crap sonically. If I want well transmitted crap I'll listen to WPRO-FM via the airwaves.

This explains my love of uncompressed music. It should, I built a pair of speakers that can go from 20hz to 20,000hz. Not that I can hear 20,000hz anymore.  But I wanted a full range setup and I built one.

Now back to my obsession.

While I was working on the roof, I was reminded of a time when I felt the same way. I was 15 and struggling with a carburetor from a car I wanted to get running. I knew precious little about them but I did know just enough to make them work. My job that day was cleaning the gasoline varnish that can build up in the jets and such. Carburetors are pretty intricate things. You have to place all parts back together correctly, with tensioned springs waiting to go SPROING across the living room and then roll under the couch. I was having a devil of a time trying to rebuild it. I kept trying again and again. I just wouldn't give up. Then something I was doing must've brought the attention of my Mom. I'm not sure what? Muttering under my breath? Swearing under my breath? I don't know. But she had come into the living room and suggested I stop working on the carburetor and hand it over to someone who knew how to fix one. She probably thought I was drowning and making myself miserable. I looked up at her with probably a dead-panned face and said in a monotone voice:

“I'll.fix.this.and.make.it.work.”

My circuit breaker was on and that single-minded, tenacious, do-or-die-trying personality had taken over.

I got that damn thing working after three hours of constant trial and error. I won.

On the roof this afternoon, all four and one half hours. I kept running into delays, problems I never thought of and the usual tools scattering down my roof. As the minutes ticked by, with my hands bleeding from about a half dozen small cuts from the stainless steel ribbon, with my ankles in pain from being bent in such an awkward angle on the roof and from climbing up and down the ladder, up and down the roof...the circuit breaker had flipped on it's own.

Nothing else mattered. Not my sweaty face, not my filthy clothing that got worse from the continued work. Not the blood nor pain in my ankles. Not the phone which I ignored. Not the dying light of day.

This was going to be done. I will achieve this. Come Hell of High Water. If you find yourself in my way, kindly move aside...now.


I won. I got the antenna up and running.

Now, I'm sitting here freshly showered, tired and listening to my wonderful choice in music.

*****

Where did I get this circuit breaker? I know where. My Dad. If you wanted to see someone who was relentless and stubborn about climbing the corporate ladder and once up there, use the same drive to gain new accounts for the bank, it was him.

Nothing else mattered except succeeding at a goal he aimed for. He (and oddly enough I) can burn up every path, use every tool and chase down every lead till we hit the goal. If it couldn't be achieved, it meant it was impossible to gain because he (and I) felt that we were steadfastly sure we worked up every angle. If no path could be found to the goal. It doesn't exist. We know, we investigated every way.

Hell, and I thought I was very different from my Dad. I guess not. Well...I'm not blowing my life on becoming the new CEO of Raytheon. I have to be in love with a goal to blow that much energy on it. I'm not so much in love with the laurels one gets from making it in finance.

I love the music. And I'm not surprised at all that I spent so many calories on that. Again, I had better be in love with a goal, otherwise the effort will be decent enough but not balls to the wall.