Steve has decided he'd going to be a tool maven, and I wish him well. There was a time when I had aspirations towards becoming a master builder but I waited too long. Kinda like the guy who decides to play baseball in his early 20's and learns that no matter how much raw talent is there, if you don't learn certain things before a certain age you'll never be great. All of the master mechanics, expert metal workers, and real carpenters I've known had been doing it all the live long day since they can remember, and none of the later in lifers have been able to get past the lookee here, nice bird house huh?
Same goes for my life's work and hobby, and at times I forget why the newbees will never know jack shit about firearms. Simply can't hop onboard past a certain age and ever expect a masters-classification in spite of how pretty you can make holes in paper, because the easiest thing to learn about shooting is how to shoot and the hardest thing to learn about shooting is how to really shoot. I frequent a lot of the gun boards and not a day goes by without some expert making reference to something that's so wrong as to be the epitome of wrong, and these dudes make tons of cash teaching the yokels how to defend themselves. The real deal goes something like this; most folks when under stress can't hit anything. Cops miss their targets when it hits the fan 80-85 percent of the time not because they haven't been schooled in the use of guns, but because they're simply not gunsters, no matter how much they've practiced. They've all been told all the wrong things about what happens to you when it's shit or go blind time, and they shrink to the level of their expectations rather than rising to the level of their physiology. Adrenaline is a good thing. Makes you stronger, faster, improves distance vision, but the word about town these days is that it'll turn you into a quivering mass of clumsiness and that's just what happens when the go-juice kicks in.
Also, some people just aren't cut out to draw a weapon and coldly kill another person, and it HAS to be in cold blood or you'll fuck it up. But that's something you cannot learn from a book or a friend or watching a cool video, it's something you've learned along the way or forget about it. Ask a master builder why he's doing something a certain way and a lot of times he or she will have to stop and think about it before they can answer. And you can't think and do good work at the same time, no one can. Multi-tasking is for the easy stuff, not life and death, OR making a beautiful chest of drawers. The work, the art if you will, flows from the heart not the head. All the head does is fuck things up. Thinking takes us to the higher level that makes being an animal or a Da Vinci quite impossible.
Not that some day I wouldn't mind breaking out the old circular saw or trying to recall who last borrowed the welder. But I've gotten over being satisfied with half ass because it's a cool hobby, and always return to what I do best. And you either know exactly what I'm talking about or never will.
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