I am an industrial sandblaster and coater by trade. My fellow tradesmen have a reputation for being—behind only roughnecks themselves—some of the roughest and rowdiest animals in the oil patch.

Many of my coworkers have a laundry list of past criminal charges, a current or past hard drug addiction, and live their lives with reckless abandon. They will light up a cigarette next to a live oil well without thinking twice and breathe in cancerous coatings without considering donning a mask. Planning jobs is always difficult, because the office has to assemble a crew, ever mindful of which guys are permanently banned from which particular sites.

My fellow sandblasters possess ardent tempers which flare up without warning and pour forth sublime rage through their few remaining teeth. Though they often look like they are a single cigarette away from death itself, they equally possess an adamantine will to preserve their autonomy absolutely. Such a man can never surrender to the pretenses of civilized society—he is far too bestial.

And yet the paradox of it all is that society is entirely dependent on men like this, because for all their flaws, they are among the hardest workers on the planet. They keep the lights on in your homes and the gasoline flowing through your cars.

I am from a land where man is not quite man, but partly beast also.