| You've tried to start
cantankerous small engines - the ones
with the pull-cords? Like on a gas-powered lawnmower that's been
cajoled into persisting beyond its planned obsolescence: at least for
me, standing with one foot on the motor-housing to get more 'leverage,'
pulling with my whole-body strength ... tinkering and fiddling with the
choke ... maybe even taking out the spark plug, polishing the part
where the spark is supposed to go across with some fine sand-paper and
then re-adjusting the gap ... commenting to the world in general that lawn-mowing is an ecolgically unsound bourgeois re-creation of the deteriorating British forests due to overgrazing by imported contintental domesticated animals after the Norman Conquest (and why not go for authenticity, cropping that lawn with a goat) ... willing the confounded contraption to start ... pulling and pulling and pulling, and then, finally (just about two more fruitless pulls of the starting-cord until that worn-out relic of consumerism would have gone onto the 'parts' pile, languished towards the final journey to the scrap-metal dealer): the motor starts to engage ... coughs a few times ... sputters with seductive encouragement and coughs a few more times ... and then roars into gasoline-powered animation with a cloud of oily black smoke except for the smoke (at least since I quit smoking), that's about how it is for me some mornings -- you should see me, right foot braced firmly across my back, just below my shoulder blades, pulling that starting-cord with all my strength [kinda like those cords they had in the back of a "Chatty Cathy" doll - pull the cord and, child-powered, the doll would randomly screech one of ten or eleven phrases recorded on a little plastic mini-record inside] brain sputtering and coughing and 'idling' unevenly anyway, in the sputtering-and-coughing phase ... having finally coaxed that brain into a semblance of wakefulness, trying to keep her going until the motor 'warms up' enough to run smoothly and do productive work was contemplating Eisenhower's farewell speech, so ... (aaah! that vast cornucopia of miscellany on the Internet) ... googled it. Seems to me worth pondering: President Eisenhower, in his farewell speech on January 17, 1961, warned: |
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