So tomorrow I’m off with a friend who knows about tractors to view a couple of them. I plan to be mute. Because my ignorance of tractors is wider and deeper than my ignorance of advanced spaceship technology from the aliens of Arctarus 7.
Despite the ignorance, I am looking forward to it and I really hope one of them turns out to be “the one” and that I get it. If I were what i think of as the “standard aging guy” I would probably see this as a chore. After all, it’s just a practical thing for practical reasons. But in reality… I may come home in a few days with a whole TRACTOR! And then I can figure out how to drive it and use it without killing myself. And the attachments. I mean if I get all the attachments I’m going to have a digger loader, a grader, a… whatever it’s called in English, a kind of portable woodchipper that churns up pretty much everything you drag it over or push it into.
I mean, can you imagine being 8 years old and using all that stuff? You might as well be in a spaceship! And my friend was indeed driving the tractor on his family farm when he was 8 years old. Me, I was shooting rifles in the African savannah, which is why I don’t know a damned thing about tractors, but you know what matters? That our children are being told they cannot, should not, and are not capable of doing either thing.
Do you know how old Joan of Arc was? She was 19 when she was murdered by corrupt clerics and politicians of the day, and she had changed the history of France forever. Noblemen have led armies into battle aged 13.
But if you put your son in the back of an open backed car in Europe, or God forbid in the back seat of a normal car without any seatbelts, you may as well rob banks with a colt .45 in your hand. Not that I or my brother ever had a seatbelt on or where often even in the covered part of the car throughout our childhood, and no one thought anything of it.
The world is becoming weaker, gayer, stupider and more boring by the day.
That’s how I know something will break soon. It’s an untenable trajectory. The human spirit cannot endure such soulless existence for long, and certainly not on a global scale.
And that’s why I hope I’ll have a tractor before it kicks off. Farming in the good times, trench and moat-building in the hard times!
Wish me luck people!
Hello Mr. Filotto,
Get one without electronics! You’ll be able to fix everything at your place (or locally, if you need, say, to have a cylinder head machined), and you won’t be a slave to an overly complex supply chain.
My brother-in-law has an old Oliver from the 50s, for which you can still obtain parts (in Canada at least), and which is still going strong. Being in Italy, I’d suggest an old Landini? The company still exists, and maybe they still manufacture parts for decades-old tractors.
Tractors are really simple to work on, and parts are easily accessible (you don’t have to remove the cab, in order to remove the engine, in order to replace a starter). I was a mechanic in a past life. I worked on heavy-duty trucks, cars, forklifts (the absolute worst), earth-moving equipment, bulldozers, small engines, etc, and farm tractors (at a New Holland dealership and then at a John Deere dealership). Farm tractors are an absolute CHARM to work on. I lost my ability to curse when I was working on them for lack of opportunity to use swear words.
I hope you get your tractor. This machine is the shotgun of the machine world: versatile. You can attach anything on that 3-point-hitch…
Hello Bernard, can I interest you in moving to Italy near a ready-to-go warlord, nice people, good food and countryside living and plenty of opportunities to be a master of machines in the budding feudal state of the Kurganate….