188 words about welding

I gave this (time) up for you

How do I know I’m my father’s son? The clearest evidence in recent months has been an irregular penchant for dropping down YouTube wormholes and losing countless minutes when it’s least needed to welding explainers and instructionals. It started innocently enough with a Sunday phone call home a couple of years ago during which Dad tipped me off to the high heat and melting action of Swedish railroad thermite welding videos, a seemingly innocuous recommendation that led me to a demo tutorial at a German train museum, then workers at it on the job in Mississippi. When my thermite welding options were exhausted, I turned elsewhere in search of ever more chemically complex and enigmatic methods — forge welding, electron beam welding, oxy-acetylene welding, electroslag welding, flux core welding, underwater arc welding. As with any subject matter, this one’s a very easy path to walk down, look back at some point after hours of inadvertent commitment and forget how you got there, why you have such knowledge, when you will ever need it; in lieu of children, then, I pass existence of this particular portal on to you.