November 24, 2007

I wanted to post something about the shim as a philosophical phenomenon and maybe as a metaphor. I would have put some thought and a sack of craft into it. It would have taken me some time to do.

Fortunately this notion has the official stamp of New Age cliche branded onto it for having already been put across, Google tells me, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It seems some guy had an expensive motorcycle with loose handlebars and he felt better keeping them loose rather than letting his friend fix them by shimming them with a strip of beer can.

I wasn't going to be so haughty about it, if you want to know. I don't think it deserves a whole book. But about ten years ago a friend helped me build a deck (I helped him, really) and I was worried about some of the gaps between the the joists and the decking boards. He whipped out a couple of slivers of soft white pine that looked to me like wings off of one of those balsa wood airplanes. I guess I looked slightly unimpressed, so he said "I believe in the shim." For a second I thought he might ask me if anyone had told me the Good News about The Shim, but he just banged them in and snapped off the excess. Everything tightened up nicely.

About eight years later one of the shims just sort of rotted itself out of its assigned cranny and so now when you step on the sixth board from the house it makes a sound that you'd swear was a dog whining. But basically, more or less, I too believe in the shim.

I was thinking that all I needed in order to create the illusion that it didn't matter about my not having posted in five or six weeks was a good shim. But knowing that this was used already in the Motorcycle book kind of ruined it for me.

There seems to be no limit to the shim's miraculous power:

Bio Shim

The device comprises the wedge shaped shim (with either an initial wedge form or an in situ formed wedge) constructed of a hard (preferably metal) biologically inert material or bioabsorbable material such as polygalactone, which is wedged in between the graft and the wall of the tunnel in which the graft is positioned.

If it's a strip of beer can or a piece of white pine, better not to tell the patient. Just bang the sumbitch in and break off the excess with a chisel.

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