Down (with) the Hatch
It was a phrase that I heard often while I was growing up. My dad, a WWII Navy veteran, used it particularly around situations involving food or nutrition.
“Down the hatch”.
Whether it was stewed tomatoes (ick), or the gross chartreuse-colored protein in liquid form that my mother kept in the fridge - on the right side where we kids would be certain to see it as we opened the door- for us to take weekly (no, no thank you), or the headcheese aka souse meat that my step-grandmother Miss Luanna made for us at Christmas (oh, heck no), there was no shortage of questionable culinary items.
Don’t get me wrong, I adored Miss Luanna. But as I excitedly opened the brown bag lunch packed by Dad, on the first day back to middle school from Christmas Break, and then biting with surprise into the über-peppery headcheese-with-mayonnaise-on-white-bread sandwich, it is a memory that sticks stubbornly to this day. Even now as I write this, my stomach is roiling at the thought of the lunch, and what must have been (to my table mates) the horrified expression on my face as my dad’s voice echoed in my head-
This looks infinitely better than the stuff Miss Luanna made. For starters, hers was square. And did I mention that it was grey?
“Down the hatch”.
One of the consolations of the Great Headcheese Sandwich Lunch Incident is that I think I know how biting into a slab of (mushy) concrete tastes. It certainly looked suspiciously like concrete. At least Miss Luanna’s did because her’s was grey. No lie. Or maybe terrazzo is more apropos in this case.
So, having spent the greater part of my career making architectural representations by hand, I was also compelled to learn how to use a well-known stronghold of computer software for architects. If for only slightly less long than I have been employing analog means. AutoCAD. Anyone familiar with it should remember those days when the slow performance of AutoCAD defined its very essence- before computers were super savvy at the underlying arithmetic operations that power the foundation of the drafting program. It is a different story nowadays. Think Harder Better Stronger Faster.
There was- and I use that word purposefully- one command that caused us CAD jockeys ,aka intern architects, to pull out our hair, to scream at the top of our lungs late at night (usually the night before a deadline), and to consume way too much coffee to combat the effects of this aforementioned command as it crashed the computer while we called it forth like a king calling his subjects to heel.
HATCH. Or, BHATCH (boundary hatch).
Oh, boy. Oh, joy. NO other command could be so simultaneously seductive and maddening. Just like her.
Back then, HATCH could take a drawing-a section or detail in particular- to graphic heights nirvana that would make Frank D.K. Ching proud. When it worked. But when it didn’t- look out. It could mean hours of redoing work. In hindsight, it was probably not such a terrible thing since the second, or third, or twentieth outcome was usually better than the original drawing. In hindsight, I realized that I was learning to be
“Down (with) the hatch”
Maybe it is the experience that comes with age, or (more than likely) the advances made in both computer technology and software efficiency (with Autodesk continually updating AutoCAD), but I am no longer afraid of using that command- even with my long, torrid and tumultuous relationship with it. With BIM (Building Information Modeling), hatches are built in. So, I don’t even have to really think about it. Though it’s a great resultant, I kinda miss the adversity. Just a little. But it makes using HATCH/BHATCH command- when I do use AutoCAD- totally worth it, since I don’t have to hand draw endless pieces of aggegrate for headcheese- I mean, concrete- details, or the never-ending 45° angle lines that symbolized earth cut through in section, or that dirty duo of wall details- aluminum and brick. Which is fantastic. Whoo hoo!
So yeah, you can say that I’m totally ‘down’.
.