Living the flashdance dream

My sister is like the Jennifer Beals of Christchurch. No, she isn’t trying to get into dance school, and she doesn’t have leg warmers and her boyfriend isn’t an American with a Porsche, he’s a pom with a Subaru. BUT, she is doing a welding course.

Welding is a great skill to have. I would love to learn to weld at night school like her but my current night school class in drinking beer and sitting on my arse doesn’t finish till 2018.

When the apocalypse happens people with skills like welding, fishing, building, first aid and skinning dogs are going to be the valuable members of society. People like me, ‘writers’ will be kicked out of the small fortified villages that spring up along with the car salesmen, parking wardens, Venetian blind installers and IT experts will be forced to wander the ‘dead zone’ where, against all odds, some of us will survive and form an unlikely alliance then hundreds of years later our mutant offspring will attack the fortified villages looking for food and some kind of obscure metal ore or oil that will have become the most coveted thing on the planet……

But back to sis. So yeah welding. I guess the family will be getting welded picture frames and welded nameplates and chunky welded jewelry for birthdays and xmas for a few years. That’s cool, there’s always some sucker on the net that will buy that junk. The other weird link with Flashdance I wanted to mention ties back to the 6 degrees story I wrote a while back. The guy in the film who was Jennifer Beal’s boyfriend and drove the Porsche was the dad of my brother’s flat mate back in the mid 90’s. Freaky eh. So in closing I just wanna say Take your passion and make it happen.’

Welding for God

So I had this idea for a t-shirt it and I got my mate Jeremy to mock one up for me. Idea came to me in a conversation with another friend Chad. I don’t know many people named after a small country in Africa. If I was him I would go to Chad and demand a free holiday and I would buy heaps of souvenirs with Chad written on. His wife could wear an ‘I love Chad t-shirt, his daughter could wear a t-shirt saying ‘I come from Chad’. One other cool thing about Chad. He’s from Texas and his dad is in oil. Of course. Anyway, when Chad’s daughter was born Chad’s dad named an oil well after her. How cool is that. Anyway, so me and Chad are talking about how he is gonna do a welding course. Just for fun. Someone comes over the see him and the wife says ‘Chad is out the back welding’ I’d like to know how to weld. If anything broke round the house I could weld it. When you weld shit it stays welded. Handle comes of a coffee cup. Forget the super glue. ‘Give it to me honey, I’ll take it down to the garage and weld it.’ My daughter comes home with a school project. Say, Whales. No problem. Down to the garage and we weld up and life size whale using old car parts. So Chad is talking about his welding course. Chad’s Texan accent is hard to understand and sometime I tune out. He was going on about the shit he was gonna weld and I started thinking about an idea for a short story. This bloke who discovers god and is also a welder. So he goes off around the world welding for god. Orphanages, churches, water wells. Anything that can help people with a bit of welding. This guy wears sandals because Jesus did and monks do. But he wears a mask cause he is safety conscious. Anyway I got to thinking how the mask could have a cross instead of a slit. Then I realised that would make a killer t-shirt so I sketched it out. Still working on the short film.