Puzzle pieces

It is interesting how the complexities of events sometimes interconnect in small ways. For example, the recent fracas in Tucson where someone shot up a bunch of people, including a Congresswoman, with a Glock 9 mm pistol. Articles about it showed photos of that kind of pistol.

When I was a youth, fresh from reading of WWII scrapping and cowboy westerns, I had fantasies of becoming a gun collector, and read up on the old guns. That did not happen for me, and my knowledge of them about ended back half a century ago, maybe with Army ROTC in college adding a bit.

Anyway, that image of a Glock 9 mm caught my attention a bit; and now I remember what it is about. Back when I was working as an electronic technician, and very desperate for work in the late 1990's, work that was hard to find then especially for an older man like I already was, I ended up working at a job with one other person, who was the only one who knew the job, which involved test and repair of an infrared gas analyzer used for monitoring landfill (garbage dump) gasses. My companion technician was an unusual young man, descended of boxer genes, played rapper music loudly all the time, and liked to cut things with the crafts knives we were issued and would often snag the one off my workbench; he could throw it and stick it into things unerringly, and said he was going to do that to my back. He seemed to frequently provoke me as if trying to get my ire up, but am not easily provoked into physical action. He even told me that he was the one who was going to kill me. It was a difficult job in many ways, cooped up with that guy in an isolated building in a landfill area; but I did adapt, desperate for a paycheck; I even learned to appreciate the rapper music he constantly played loudly, seeing the state of life being proclaimed in it. He did have a system of ethics, however. And he had been working as a security man in the underground security labyrinth of a large amusement park, and still had his connections in the private security networks. There were multiple peculiarities involved; including that I was interviewed for the job by a guy high up in the ARCO skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles. And my coworker often used a computer terminal to communicate with other people but I was never invited to use the email or computer, and he hid the screen from my view.

Although tough he never seemed angry, just coolly aggressive, ever like a boxer in the ring. And I was totally dependent on learning from him how to do my job, other than my general knowledge of electronics and science that I already had; the job included use of potentially explosive methane gases used for calibration of the instruments, too. He was interested in my life, and I since was freshly suffering from having experienced a traumatic razzing about my KESTS to GEO concept shortly before I came to work there, and so I gave him a copy of my technical paper I had presented at Princeton to the Space Studies Institute - that was in May 1997 - only to get it refused for publication and be laughed away in the eventual proceedings. And my aging mother had loaned me the money to do the paper and make the long trip, showing she believed in me; and now I had let her down in my big best effort; it was a multiply hard time for me, and I had to have a paycheck and jobs were almost non-existent for me. Anyway, my coworker kept the copy of my technical paper for a few days, then threw it on the floor and proclaimed I was a destroyer of his world like Einstein was (he thought Einstein invented the atomic bomb.)

The company was bought in a couple of months and moved to a different location which had lot of other people in the same building, and one day, the other tech was given the notice he was being laid off. This surprised me greatly, that there would be a layoff, and he would go. Just about everybody was afraid of him, and to make that step was risky. I watched as he emptied out his drawer in his workbench, and the last thing he removed was a boxy kind of large pistol that somewhat resembled the old Colt .45 automatic pistol which I remembered from my youth interests. I thought it must not be a real pistol, as it had a boxy upper area, unlike the familiar curved areas of the .45.

But now the association is made: it was a Glock 9mm pistol he had in there. Same upper boxy shape. Like was used in the Tucson fracas. I learned something.

So still the pieces to the puzzle come in. What it all points to is still out of my conscious view, however. It is not an interesting puzzle to me; seems an uglier side of humanity; but in the interests of survival some part of me does pay a little attention at times, like now. I don't think he is an immediate danger to me anymore - probably - but somebody is, I sense.

Why can't people stick to constructive things, I wonder, The world has huge amounts of constructive things desperately needing doing. Well, perhaps my coworker back then shows a reason - the young women there at the new job location all wanted to be on his good side ... his very good side.