THE WONDERFUL OPERA OF CLEVELAND: an essay

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From Zocalo Public Square:

For 10 years, on and off, I worked in those mills as a union boilermaker, earning my way through college and graduate school. At 7 a.m., with an acetylene torch in hand, I would climb into the black asbestos pit of a dust collector and begin cutting through enormous pieces of warped and rusted metal, all the while thinking of my unsmiling professors and how they remained unimpressed by the latest draft of my master’s thesis, an unwieldy tome by a 27-year-old pseudointellectual who’d fallen under the sway of Joseph Campbell. While my blowtorch melted the inch-thick sheets of steel, I tried to remember Campbell’s words: “Life is a wonderful, wonderful opera. Except that it hurts.”

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