Crayon : Treat :: Toenail : Treat 

They are both fiber when you’re five but also art and color and you don’t know what an analogy is and what’s more human than consuming yourself? Welcome, you little alien, to earf. Draw yourself a place in/on it. 

You : Sara :: Spackle : Wall

Her ass of the phantasm—a teenage fantasy, fantasizeable, a fantasia—and you’re 12 and basically a sack of throbbing hormones and she’s 15 and somehow both Cuban and blonde and this combination is incomprehensible to you and therefore all the more alluring and you want to stick to her, cling, smother, protect, plaster heaped on the metal lath of her heart.

Light : Dawn :: Blacksmithing : Friendship

Dawn pours light across the world, ushers it in like the African light Kapušćinjski lyricized and blacksmithing ushers in a world, too, opens up a new world to nineteen-year-old disaffected you, and Nisan swings a hammer like a god and you want to be that, not a god necessarily but a craftsman, not some doofy little brain merchant hunched in front of a computer, but a WPA poster, a woodblock print of python-muscled forearms bending and twisting steel into something beautiful and useful thus shaping yourself into someone beautiful and useful too. 

Desk : Hell :: Job : Hell :: Life : Hell

You’re 28 and no one told you life was going to be this way and you’ve always hated Friends.

Back : Pain :: Banana Peel : Trash

At 36 you throw your back out parallel parking and have to crawl home sliding along the sidewalk like an arthritic slug like compost sliding down the plastic sides of the trash like like like 

Nicole :     ::     : Joy

At 43 you finally learn some things are too beautiful to share.

asdfg : gfdsa :: hjkl : lkjh 

Time is a circle and life is a square and these angles are trying and you’re 51 and nothing and no one makes sense, least of all yourself.

…

Jon Doughboy is apprentice blade sharpener at the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum in Kobe, Japan. For blade sharpening rates and services, see @doughboywrites