Doing acid

[Khuutra]

"Well, you can't do that without empathy."

Horse dookie.

I'm the son of a farmer, I've worked around heavy machinery all my life. We would use diesel engines connected to our irrigation pipes in order to pump the water, which naturally involved the use of enormous steel axles - and when they got going, these things would spin at hundreds and hundreds of RPMs. I think we usually ran them at 1100, but I can't remember exactly.

When I was younger I was in the habit of wearing T-shirts out into the field - sensible enough, since work was always hot, but I was very skinny (almost emaciated to be honest) and my clothes tended to hang off me. To this end my father would not let me near the axles of these machines unless the power was shut off.

"Why not, Dad?" I asked him.

"Because that axle will catch the ends of your clothes and kill you - horribly - right in front of me."

Now, I don't know if that was true, specifically - he was applying the rule of "don't wear baggy clothes around heavy machinery" in a situation where it may not have been entirely appropriate - but I took that to heart and never went near the damn thing unless I had tucked in my shirt and tightened my belt so I knew it wouldn't come loose.

I had no reason to believe him, particularly: he'd never seen it happen to another person, leastways not on one of these axles. I'd certainly never seen it. Empathy never entered into the equation.

I just didn't want to die!

That, to me, seems like it would come before empathy.