Watching the thimble cars dump slag at night was one of the most incredible visual experiences I have ever had. It dried me out, like desiccating me from the inside out breathing in all that super hot and very dry air. Imagine walking around inside a pizza oven, that is what it felt like. As it was, I still singed the hairs inside my nose if I inhaled a little too quickly. I wore a face shield (clear) to protect my face from the heat and had to wear a scarf over my nose to prevent breathing in super-heated air. The heat at breathing height was about 200 degrees F. I wore thick canvas over-clothes, but anywhere my body came into pointed contact with the canvas (elbows and knees) I would get “burned” because of the heat transferred from the canvas material through my regular clothes. 24 hours after a “thimble car” dump of red-hot slag was made, I went out and traversed the dump-site, measuring congealed slag surface temperatures, sometimes up to and often exceeding 600 degrees F.

I wore wooden shoe “clogs” to protect my shoes from melting (the same kind coke oven operators wear when servicing the ovens).

I had a job once at the US Steel Pipe Works, Geneva Plant, Utah where I took “slag temperatures” before they sprayed “devils liquor” sump water on it to cool it down. They’ll be afraid to commit suicide, and so will their children. Because if I do go on in this frame of mind and continue to support them, I shall teach them to be like I am, and they’ll go on, dragging it out to support their children, and they won’t enjoy it. Or I identify with my children, and I think of them going on without me and nobody to support them. Because there might really be after all eternal damnation. So if you think that’s the way things are, you might as well commit suicide right now. And these mechanics–doctors–are trying to help you out, but they really can’t succeed in the end, and you’re just going to fall apart, and it’s a grim business, and it’s just too bad. And you, poor thing, have to put up with being put into a body that’s falling apart, that gets cancer, that gets the great Siberian itch, and is just terrible.

It is a mechanism, it is electronic and neurological mechanisms into which you somehow got caught. Because if you seriously go along with this idea of the world, you’re what is technically called alienated. People who had an advantage to make, a game to play by putting it down, and making out that because they put the world down they were a superior kind of people. But however, you see, this whole idea that the universe is nothing at all but unintelligent force playing around and not even enjoying it is a putdown theory of the world.

Extraños eones by Emilio Bueso