How to Make Some Simple Things Impossibly Thick

Hello everyone,

This is my first instructable. I hope it will be helpful to some and clear enough to understand.

This is a machine I made that makes things impossibly thick. The steps that follow are not perfect, there are variables. These variables should become obvious.

There is a minimum of 10 steps with a few subsidiary steps to follow.

Step 1: November 28, 1980: Conception

November 28, 1980. I was born in Barrie Ontario, Canada at the Royal Victoria Hospital. A 10 story hospital filled with many bodies, machines and countless fluids. I am told that the number of sperm present in a man can vary greatly depending on numerous factors (such as general health, time of the month, the presence of toxins). The body produces new sperm all the time as they are expelled during ejaculation, but they also have a very short life span. There is one egg though countless, unimaginable numbers of sperm, and each one carries a slightly different DNA. The chances that any one sperm will fertilize an egg is very very low.

Conception is miraculous.

Step 2: Montreal

My work room at home, in Montreal, a city of 1.6 million people (as of 2006, but this is just a statistic and we know that statistics are only skeletons of reality). Here is where I sometimes make things. I move about and touch and smell things. Glue them together, rummage, sometimes drill things and my phone is there, too. Yesterday, as I was working on this machine my friend called. We talked for a while about interesting things. 25 minutes passed and I was 25 minutes longer in finishing the thickening machine.

Step 3: Glass and Arguments

This glass, like most glass, is from the depths of the earth. It was once a vessel for pickles in a deli. My friend convinced the deli to give it to her and she used it in a theatre show. People who saw the show liked it. I think that she put a model of Percy Shelly's head in it, but I can't exactly remember. She lent it to me. We used to hang out a lot so she trusts me.

The pickle company bought it from Neston Glass. Sand fields in the south west (USA) are filled with white sand blown in by the four winds coursing the planet. It is a really low area so the wind drops it there. This sand could be a composite of so many of the earths places: rock faces in Nepal, low lying granite deposits in Vermont. I may have bits of Nepal in my living room, rather blind, dumb bits of Nepal. Sometimes things seem dumb to us because they won't betray their beginnings in a language we understand.

Neston glass is in Nebraska. A woman named Yvonne Helder worked there for 12 years. Sometimes she monitored the bottles. She may have seen this pickle jar being made. Through some confluence of atmosphere and repetitive tasks (and their power to induce day dreaming) this jar may have been that last repetition before Yvonne stopped paying attention to the jars and started daydreaming about her daughter. She may also have not even noticed this jar because she was already thinking about her daughter. Yvonne's parents were each born in Ohio.

3b: Arguments

The piece of glass on top of the jar was found in the street on my way home late one night after an argument. But our world is saturated in glass. I wish I knew how to make it. If anyone knows I would love to hear it.

Step 4: Plexi Glass

Plexi glass is strange. It is largely natural gas thousands of years old whose creation requires the pushing and shoving of tectonic plates and fossil deposits. It also requires large industrial rollers to flatten molten chemical compounds and a German immigrant named Ohm persuaded by the American dream.

Step 5: Hydro-Quebec, Jacques Poincare, Chicago World's Fair

5a: Hydro-Quebec flooded miles and miles of boreal forest in the 1980's. It is one of the biggest hydro-electric projects in the world, it's up there with the three gorges dam project in China.

5b: Jacques Poincare had little education but loved life on the South Shore of Montreal (formed by glaciers traveling southward) and he drove the delivery truck that distributed electrical outlet casings to hardware stores. Jean Galliard talked often and bought the wrong cover while gossiping about his wife. They decided not to return it though.

5c: When electricity was demonstrated at the Chicago World's fair people thought it was a miracle.

Step 6: Cardboard

Cardboard, just a little bit. For cardboard you need things to contain. To account for the effluence of things please see: the industrial revolution and the emergence of commodity capitalism.

Step 7: Barrie North Collegiate

In the hall way at Barrie North Collegiate (my high school) my English teacher Ms. Nyman told me, "I worry about your lack of discipline."

Step 8: Uyen

Uyen, looking for work, found herself living with her aunt and uncle in Shanwei and working at a nick nack factory. Finkledy Tool and Die (Scarborough, Ontario) make molds for some nick nacks, including little couches. They ship them to China, including Shanwei. Uyen watched as excess plastic would be trimmed off nick nacks.

Step 9: Things

Things. You need everything to make a thing.

Step 10: Thick

Once it becomes clear that all things inhere in one thing we find ourselves in an incredible thickness.

1 Person Made This Project!

ChristianS2 made it!

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73 Comments

elmejor06

8 years ago on Introduction

Thank you for making this Instructable. It was interesting for me and I really like the thought process behind your steps. I particularly like step #3 since I just sat in the car with my mom a half an hour ago and we talked about tasks that make you daydream and how people do less and less of them. Technology takes away and "facilitates" these tasks for us. I think they are still important because your spirit has time to grow with them. We talked about ironing shirts as opposed to giving them to the laundry. Checking glasses is just as good.
Thank you, a very inspiring text I can connect with. Favorited so I can read it again when time comes for it.

Tardisrepairman

8 years ago on Step 10

Thanks!

That was like a massage for my tired brain.

It's always good to consider the infinite interconectedness of everything.

wagon173

10 years ago on Introduction

Lol I was browsing for new ideas in shop techniques specifically aluminum for a submarine that I'm building (There'll be an instructable sometime int the coming months) It was a welcome break in research though! I'll definitely think twice the next time I look at a pop can or a pickle jar!

mikeasaurus

15 years ago on Introduction

1 - This isn't an instructable. 2 - Your machine looks broken, or incomplete. 3 - No one cares that you were born in the armpit of Canada. 4 - This isn't a forum for introspective storytelling.

Introduction: How to Make Some Simple Things Impossibly Thick