I've had calluses most of my life. Even as a kid, Dad has us working hard. I've also come to realize he was a sadistic son of a bitch.
We had a swing set in our back yard. It was just an old rusty thing that brought us more injuries than joy, but it was a swing set and we were glad to have it. It always had bare ground where we dug our feet in to get a start. Those grooves never grew grass.
Growing up in northeast Oklahoma meant that there was regular rain, year round. Combined with those dirt ruts under the swings, that meant Mom often cussed us boys or my sister for tracking mud into the house after sliding or swinging for a while. Now a normal dad would have moved the swing set once a year or something to keep the mud out of the house. Hell, even a scrap of carpet on the back porch would have solved the problem. And that's how I know Dad was sadistic. He didn't solve the problem sensibly. Instead, once a year, he'd go out and buy a bucket or two of class A gravel and then make us boys spread it under the swings.
Think about that for a minute. Class A gravel is the big jagged crap that can cut you just from picking it up. And our dad, who protected us from monsters in the closet, over zealous teachers who gave us swats too often, and killed water moccasins at Lake Keystone with a hair-trigger Remington revolver, made us spread it out under our swing set. An act that created a bed of blood-stained rock for us to land on every time we jumped from, or fell off the swings. So yeah, Dad was sadistic. He was my best friend and my greatest teacher, but he was sadistic.
This post is about calluses though, not Dad's dark streak. He worked us hard. We mowed and trimmed the yard every two weeks, and once a month we cleared the grass from a plot of land we camped on and where we almost built a house. We never had play tools, because as soon as we could hold real ones, Dad put them in our hands. Even my sister worked hard.
I have one brother who is a douche bag, and I don't count him because he is a waste of space. But among the rest of us are some great people. I can't remember my sister ever not being motivated. She spent years in a real estate related field, then owned a successful restaurant for a few years, then went back to real estate. After her comes a brother who can build anything, and probably has. From full-size oil field engines to Revell Chevy V8 models to carpentry, he is more skilled with his hands than anyone I have ever met. Then there is the brother I am closest to. He is the president of a multi-million dollar jewelry company. Recently we talked about his graying hair and whether or not stress is causing it. Next up, a brother who should have been a salesman, but wasn't. He has always been the first to jump in and help on any project, and has a genuinely funny personality that puts you at ease immediately.
Finally we come to me. As a little kid, I mowed yards even though I had asthma. In the winter, I sold mistletoe in sandwich bags for Christmas money. As an adult I've done everything from trudge through swamps and jungle with an 80 pound rucksack to build houses. Over my three decades in the workforce, I've worn a uniform, I've been a short order cook, a truck driver, a carpenter, and a myriad of other things. I once got paid $500 an hour to don an asbestos fire suit and climb into a still hot trash incinerator to clean the ash from its walls. I lost ten pounds to sweat that night. My boots were full of it by the time I climbed out of the access port.
The point is, we all grew up busting our butts. All of us have had blisters and calluses our entire lives. When I closed my home modification business in the Spring of this year, I had decades-old calluses on the palms of my hands, calluses on my feet, and calluses on my joints. You get the idea. But now I have just two calluses on my hands. Oddly enough, they are both on my left hand, even though I'm right handed. One of the calluses is from my wedding ring. Where my ring finger meets the palm of my hand, my ring has caused one under the knuckle. The other one is just to outside of the tip of my left pinky finger. I've spent hours trying to figure out how I got that one.
I realized today that it's my writing callus. I got it from the angle of my hand in relation to the keyboard of my Chromebook. Every time I press the ctrl or shift key, I do so with that exact spot on my pinky. The ctrl key has to be the culprit, since I would guess that I use the right and left shift about equally, but there is only one ctrl key that I use, and it's on the left side. That realization made me think about that key a little bit. How many times do I hit it each day? I mean it's enough to cause a callus right? Or at least enough to push it over the edge from normal use.
So what do I use the ctrl key for? In Google Docs, which is what I use to write my books, I use the key in conjunction with the b and i buttons most. Ctrl b is all about making text bold. See what I did there? Ctrl i is all about italics. In my writing, I use italics to denote POV thought and ship names. I don't mention ship names that much in my books, though they are there. By the way, have you noticed that I name all my ships after gun-related things? The Coach Guns are named after the sawed off shotguns used to protect stage coached in Old West, which is the root of the term riding shotgun, because the guy who rode up by the stage driver carried one. The Mare's Leg is the type of firearm Steve McQueen made famous in Wanted: Dead or Alive. Derringer-class scout ships. The Kalashnikov. Again, you get the idea.
But my guy Cortland Addison apparently thinks a lot, because I have that damned callus on my left pinky finger. Since I write The Warrior Chronicles in what's called limited omniscient POV, that means most of the thought italics are his. Who would have thought that the most prolific killer in human history, or maybe human future, thinks so much? He thinks so much that I have a damned callus on my pinky finger. I just remembered, I use italics to denote Cort's telepathic communication with Bazal, too. So a thoughtful warrior and a telepathic octopus are responsible for it. Maybe if I kill off Bazal, the callus will go away.
