Those firm rubber mallets come closest, so far -- the ones over there, with the wooden handles and the black, hard rubber heads. The bamboo cutting boards aren't bad, but they're brittle and splinter too easily under heavy loads.
Pounds per square inch of pressure, deflection energies, angles of attack -- all these have to be taken into consideration, and a lot more.
See, like many Americans, and an increasing number of observers eyeing our system from other countries, I'm looking for something -- anything -- to make the political pain in my head stop. However, I would like to leave something like a smoldering tree stump inside my shirt collar, where my old head used to be -- you know, something that might yet grow back in the transformative Spring, after the numbing kindness of Fall, after the hibernation and healing of Winter. It has been a simmering, killing cruelty, this inflamed, and inflammatory, Summer political season.
I don't want my head and its troublesome political thoughts to be gone forever, understand. I'd like the possibility of it budding back out later on, in March sometime, for example, or April, when even the floor of a burnt and scalded forest might be expected to leaf out and live again.
Meanwhile, I expect to quash the pain, and stem the rumblings from my brain stem. I'd like the higher executive functions to go on vacation, like higher executives everywhere. Thing is: Most hard surfaces, I've learned so far, have no shades of gray -- they can either kill you outright, if you launch your head at them, like those steam radiators having elaborate floral metallurgy designed in, or like those mammoth, exposed cross-beams in the attic of old mansions and belfries, or they do nothing at all, like these spindly four-by-fours.
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities,...
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