Beware The Shithouse Fool

"You should've been a lawyer"

I get that a lot.  Often from my wife, or my mother.  I used to get it from my dad, but he doesn't say much anymore; though I try to get his opinions on things when I think about visiting his grave*.  And I'm sure that people I work with sometimes think to themselves "Shithouse lawyer", when I lay some of my oh-so-reasoned-logical arguments upon them.

I say a lot of that with tongue firmly in cheek of course.  Because I shouldn't have been, and they do, and no they really are not.  Answered and commented in order with reference to the above.

I should be a lawyer, for about the first three minutes of a conflict; whether it be a debate, discussion, argument, whatever.  After that, I start to wonder why I'm there, and what all the fuss was about.

But by then, I've said things I have to stick with now.  Why?  Pride?  Not sure.  But I try to.  Often for as much as five minutes more.  By which time I've mentally thrown in the towel.  Fuck it.  Because few things are worth the kind of effort it takes to maintain a logical repartee in debate for that long.  We are talking upwards of 8 minutes here, people!

I try not to do it anymore really.

I'd go on about this as I have about things in the past, but to be honest, I'm feeling too down about the latest of such incidents last night.  After the other person really only showed concern for me on a certain subject, that I did not want to discuss; I got defensive, I got dicky, and after an appropriate amount of defensive offense, which hurt the other person's feelings; I disengaged.

Because.  Effort.  Fuck it.

If an argument isn't even worth it to me to finish, I should probably start to preemptively stop myself from starting it.  I think I'd be better off in the long run.

The only question is:  Will my wife get sick of my bullshit, before I stop?

Cheers
To being a complete fool, apparently.


*Me thinking of visiting my dad's grave, consists of me driving right by where he is buried.  Probably only about 75 yards away.  Twice a day, every day that I work.  When I'm feeling emotionally peckish, I will think thoughts of him and his morals and opinions as I go by.  But never stop.

And the answer to that why, would take a much longer separate post.  And just not today, thanks.

Oh, but I did visit my Grandparent's grave a week or so ago.  My Mom's mom and dad.  They are down in Saginaw, in a Mausoleum.  A place which reminds me of Hellraiser, and gave me bad dreams.  I miss them though, and I plan on going back to leave some pictures of them on the wall next to their names, as we saw a lot of the other one's had.  1980 was so very long ago.

Poetry and Bananas

I am a poet.  There, I said it.  Now you can all point and laugh, or whatever it is that we do to self professed poets these days.

That being said; I have an opinion about how poetry should look to me.  I can't say if it's right or not.  I just know that there is a certain way that I like to write, that actually feels like poetry to me.

I can defend this point of view with this brief explanation:  What does it mean when someone stands back from something, and exclaims "That is poetry!" ?

In my experience, they are referring to something that is beautiful to them, something that flows easily, something that seems natural, and maybe even lasting in nature.  

I've heard that exclamation in reference to sports.  When a difficult run or catch, or unusual move is pulled off with an effortless kind of grace by the athlete.  It looks like poetry.  Because it is what it is.  

I've heard that in reference to architecture, paintings, sculpture, natural landscapes, and the occasional nude man or woman.  In all cases, referred to as 'poetry', due to how it looks, and more importantly, how it makes the observer feel inside.

That's essentially what poetry is to me:  A group of words, no matter how you put them together, that flow naturally, and make you feel their beauty on the inside of your soul.

On achieving the goal of producing poetry, as I've defined it; I will be charitable, and say that I succeed about 10% of the time.  

The other 90% of time made up of near misses, never should've attempted's , and what was I thinking's.  

The 10% of the time that I succeed at putting words together in a pleasing way, at least to me (remember, this is all subjective!); it tends to flow out of my fingers effortlessly.  Whether it is from a well thought out beginning, middle and end; or from the seed of one word or phrase.  

It is beautiful.  Just like the tuned athlete in motion, it flows without effort for both writer and reader.  With natural starts, stops, and pauses; unforced rhymes and ideas.

To be honest, I was going to take this opportunity to complain about something that myself and a friend have dubbed as "Banana Poetry".  Called so, because it drives me bananas.  

It is the practice of some poets, to dice up their words.  Whether to force a rhyme from the middle of a sentence; or to create unnaturally paused two to three word lines.  

I will give an example using the first five lines of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken":

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

I suppose a scholarly person could describe that as "An example of a-b-a-a-b poetry stanza, blah blah blah"

Whatever.  It's pretty, and a great start, to a great poem, that people can generally look at, and call it "Poetry".  

Ok, now what if I break it up like this?

Two roads

Diverged

In a yellow wood

And sorry 

I could not

Travel both

And be one

Traveler

Long I stood

And looked 

Down one as far

As I could

To where it bent

In the undergrowth

Does that flow as nicely?  Does that make as much sense?  

Ok, I know art is subjective.  And poetry, being art, is no exception.  But the Frost structured original, flows much nicer to me, and is poetry so much more, than the one I broke up for the example.

Same words, same poet; but phrased very differently.

You see, to me, a poem has natural pauses.  Just like punctuation, but you don't even need punctuation in the damned thing, because of how you laid it out.  And how the poet lays it out, with all it's implied pauses and stops, is how it is to be read in the readers head.  And if you didn't mean for the reader to stop at a certain word at the end of a line for a breath; then you've kind of failed at your job.  Because that is what readers do at the end of a line in a poem; they stop to take a breath, so to speak.  

And then another one that drives me bananas.  The ones that cut and hack, just to gain a rhyme.

Just imagine lines of a poem, that are cut off midstride, just to attain that magical a-b-a-b rhyme rhythm.  Which is very overrated.  Yet pretty sweet when you come by it naturally.  

Well, anyways, that is just some commentary by me.  About what poetry is to me, as of this date: 10-5-13.  

I'm sure next year, I will feel differently.  

Oh, and incidentally, when I bitch about a style that drives me bananas:  It is because I've probably tried it, many times; and I hated it, couldn't make it work.  So that's why I don't like it.  As it doesn't feel like poetry to me.

That's not to say it doesn't feel like poetry to YOU.  Or someone else.  So save your hate.  I know it's subjective, I've said so three or four times now.  

When something is poetry, you KNOW it.  From balls to brain.  Nobody has to tell you.  

Cheers, to poetry, in all it's myriad guises.

Aviation Myth and Legend

I'll bet you know some aviation myths.  They could be misconceptions, half truths, outright lies; many different things.  But many of them do have value, regardless.

Why?  Because they do many things.

They can teach, as in a parable.  Does it matter if a parable is true, if it teaches a valuable lesson about something?

They can generate interest in something.  There is that old saying, "There is no such thing as bad publicity"; which as a lot of truth to it.  If there are crazy stories floating around about something, it does make people interested.  Which is in no small part due to our train wreck mentalities as humans.  I still don't know why I slow down to look at car crashes.  If I saw someone horribly injured, I'd have a hard time getting the image out of my head.

They can assuage fears of the unknown.  Maybe someone doesn't have the time or savvy to really understand a concept of how an airplane flies; so a story is told to them about how wings make lift which might be not 100% technically true.  But now they feel better about airplanes, and maybe an upcoming trip.

Aviation Legend, is another thing entirely in my opinion.  These are the things that really happened.  But they were never officially written down or reported.  This can happen for various reasons, similar to reasons you might not report every incident with your car:  Insurance, bad press, etc.

But the aviation legends, are the really interesting stories, even if they get exaggerated over time;  until they begin to resemble myths themselves.

I wrote of one such legend in my first Tales of The Wrench collection.  Specifically, the short story entitled A Tale of Two Towers.  That story was heavily based on events that actually took place in the mid 1990's, in South America.  A Douglas DC-8 really did become lost in the clouds on a test flight, and it really did crash through two huge radio/television antennae on top of a mountain (after narrowly avoiding the mountain itself!).  It really did get tangled up in the support cables, and lose almost 8 feet of it's right wing.  Then it managed to land safely.

You won't find that reported anywhere officially.  It never happened.  But it did.

I've been looking on and off for any mention of this accident for years.  But I have yet to find anything.  I know there is a stack of 35mm photos of the plane right after it landed.  They show the tattered end of the wing where it was severed, the cables wrapped around the wings cutting into the flaps and leading edge, and the chunk of metal antenna structure that bounced along on top of the wing.  But I don't know who has them.

I helped repair the aircraft after it was ferried back to the States.  But I didn't take any pictures myself.

I remember how it looked when it landed.  With strips of "battle damage repair" metal riveted in place over the jagged cuts in the wing trailing and leading edges, from the antenna support wires.  The boilerplate splice that was Huck bolted onto the right wing, attaching a salvaged wing tip in place for the ferry flight.

How we carefully repaired all the damage, and the crazy looking three or four layer doubler that served to splice in that 'new' right wing tip, when it was all said and done.

 I felt it was important to write that story down, and share it.  Because of how marvelous it really is.

All stemming from a mistake of losing track of where you were in a very mountainous area; everything that followed was a straight up miracle of ability, engineering, and luck.

That the aircraft was able to full-throttle climb it's way up the face of that mountain, plow through a couple pretty substantial metal structures, lose a large wing section, and still be able to fly safely and land; is all a testament to the machine and the engineers at Douglas Aircraft.

That the flight crew was able to react to the mountain to begin with, accept what had happened, and stabilize the aircraft for flight and landing; is a tribute to their training and skill.

That's why that story is important.  It shows what can happen, and still be walked away from.  It provides confidence and a bit of pride.

As well as that underlying parable lesson: Don't get lost flying around in the mountains.

Connor's Family Tree Report

My 13 year old son had to write a Family Tree report for school some months back.  And what he came up with was......let's say "creative".  We had him change it to be a little more factual.  But I saved the first draft of it, just because it was rather awesome in it's own way.

I'm just going to put this here for posterity.
_____________________

Connor Robel’s Family Tree Report 2013 (1^st Draft)

My family mostly came from the countries bordering the Northern Atlantic which includes Scotland, United Kingdom, Ireland, East Europe, Hungary, and other countries.  They all came on schooners and frigate ships.  Some of them were poor and came to America to work or own farms.  While some other people came to America almost as wealthy as the Queen of England. 

The Putz’s were the first to come to America.  Of course, to actually get to America, they had to sail past the Statue of Liberty.  After that, they fled to Michigan to start a new life on a farm.  Of course, in 1913’s storm of the century, the Putz’s barn almost collapsed because of the 67 mile per hour winds.  The Putz’s survived the gale but at a cost of their barn.

Arnold Edward Feher was married to Jean Francis McCann, but later served as an ambulance driver during World War II.  Years after that ordeal serving the Army, he went into retirement for the rest of his life.  Dying in 2009, the end of a veteran. 

One of the dominant traits passed on are us having no widow’s peak for our hairlines.

_______________________

I rather like the part about the Putz family 'fleeing' after their passing of the Statue of Liberty.  

That, and the whole "wealthy as the Queen of England" thing.  

My son, has this way of making logical leaps in his mind; so that things make sense to him.  This is that, put into writing form.

Cheers

The Flame Challenge Submission

I posted an entry into Alan Alda's Flame Challenge

I thought I'd share it with you. It's not terrible, it's not great. It didn't even get an honorable mention! Go check out the website for the specifics. But the basic rules were: Explain what 'flame" is, to an 11 year old Alan Alda.

Here's my submission:

Dear Alan,

Thank you so much for asking me what a flame is!

Flame, in my understanding, could best be described like this:

Hot, bright, and hungry.

Almost like a living thing, flame needs air, heat, and food (which we would call fuel, like for a car)

When those three things come together in the right amounts, "Flame" happens.

You could also call it a fire.

The flame eats the fuel, changing whatever it eats into something like "Flame poop" This is the ash left behind after the flame is done.

If you put flame to paper, you will be left with very visible ashes, sometimes almost a black and brittle twin to the original paper!

If the flame is eating a gas, like the natural gas you might have at home for your mom's oven and stove; the ash left behind is so slight that you can't even see it. But over time, maybe weeks or months, if you burn a gas like that in the same place, there will be some ash left that you can see.

So flame is hot, and bright, and eats what it is burning, changing it into something like ashes.

I'm not a scientist Alan, but I hope I've helped you with your question!

Sincerely

Fred Robel

Aviation Maintenance Writing Stuff

Hello there!  I know it's been ages since I've written here.  But it's wonderful too.  Being that I've been channeling most of my creative writing into the Fritz365 project, ongoing, forever.

I've got two books out there floating (bloating?) in the ether.  They're free on Smashwords, blah blah blah.

I'm accumulating more stories about aviation, or aviation related things, for a "Tales of the Wrench" book I'm going to do.  I don't know how it will go over.  As most of the stories aren't that long, and it won't be what most people will be expecting for a book about aviation maintenance stuff.

But it will be what it will be.  Filled with stories of things that actually happened to me, incidents that were told to me, dramatizations of things I heard about fourth or fifth hand, and some things that I just plain made up.  As it should be I guess.  The Lore of the Mechanic, indeed.

I'm trying, trying hard, not to peg any person or company with bad things when I write about stuff.  I hope it all comes off ok.  I mean, some of the incidents are pretty specific, and all you'd have to do is google a bit on the subject, and you could find out names, dates, etc.  A couple times I did name company names though, especially if the company in question is out of business.  Or when I'm making fun of them on purpose (Monsanto).  I mean, Monsanto is in the press for all kinds of horrid genetic things; they might be grateful for me to tease them about something else for a change?  Eh, I guess I'll find out.

So here's a thing:  I've often thought that aviation maintenance would make a pretty amusing television show.  I don't know what sort exactly.  You could do a standard half hour comedy thing, or a one hour light drama, with assorted craziness involved.  The set could consist of a large empty building, which we'd call a 'hangar'.  And one or two junky airplanes.  Which can be bought for scrap prices out in the desert.  Just for the set, something for the actors/mechanics to 'work' on and act against occasionally.

Aircraft mechanics as a group, are a pretty interesting lot, with a reputation for not being normal at all.  The mechanic from "Wings" wasn't far off (Lowell? I think was his name...).  Needs development though!

As a matter of fact, some of the stories from my book would be perfect for adaptation into episodes....... just a thought.  Maybe I'll try my unsteady hand at script writing someday, and try to make that happen.  There isn't much aviation mechanic specific stuff out there.  Could be an untapped market!!

So that's that stuff.  Some worries, some ideas.  Some stuff.

Oh, it's summer again.  Which means my in-laws are living in my yard again.  Must be part gypsy.

Cheers, to thoughts on aviation maintenance and stuff.

Writing There, Not Here, And Publishing

I have noticed, and you may not have, that I've been writing less of these columns.

I chalk it up to the fact that I have expanded the scope of what I do on my other blog, the Fritz365.  It used to be all poetry, or at least that which I viewed as such.  Now it has grown into poetry, concept stories, and serialized stories, and a few ideological statements masquerading as some bastardization of verse.

I'm developing my own style, or at least trying to.  It was unconscious at first, but now I choose to continue in the manner in question, it feels like it works for me.  If it ever catches on, it will doubtless be after my death.  Though the chips are stacked, and telling me that it probably will not catch on at all.

I have been mulling over what to concentrate on next.  I have several threads of ideas going here and there.  I have quite a few of the 'Tales of the Wrench' stories out there already.  It wouldn't be too awful to write some more, and publish them in a book and ebook.  Like I did the Man in the Desert concept (Kisses Blood Kerosene & Silk).

I've written a few blatantly biographical ones, and a few others that are almost that, but with some little creative touches in as well.

I've been very pleased with the Amazon.com publishing process, except for one thing:  I can't set the price of my ebooks as Free.  It's very frustrating.  I'm not trying to make money, or a living at this stuff.  Maybe I could someday, but I'm not counting on it.  So the important thing for me is to simply get my stuff before people's eyes.  Hence the desire to offer it for free.

Smashwords, has come to my rescue.  In more ways than one.

While it was easy making the hard copy book versions for Amazon Createspace, it was a little harder to get the formatting right for the Amazon Kindle store.  It was then a few orders of magnitude harder to get the files formatted just right for the Smashwords edition.

Reason being, that Smashwords converts and sells in many different formats, so as to be available on as many devices as possible.  They also have deals with the Apple store to sell the books that have been submitted to them, as long as they meet some stricter "premium" guidelines.

The "premium" moniker has nothing to do with quality of content, at least I don't flatter myself that way.  Because I'm proud to say I got at least one of my books into that status with them.  It was a simple matter of  formatting, formatting, formatting.  I kind of enjoyed it.

Hopefully, my longer poetry collection will be accepted as well.  Though it was done before the Man in the Desert dealio, it has hit Smashwords last.  This is due to me being silly.

Amazon, has a program where authors share in a pot of money if their books get lent out in their new Lending Service.  Now I wasn't expecting to get money, but I did support the program.  I think It's a good idea.  So I signed up, and was nailed down to a 90 day exclusive agreement with Amazon.com.

That, coupled with my inability to set the Amazon pricing to Free, has limited the downloads of my big book of poetry.  As a matter of fact, the only downloads it has, have been on the five 'promotional' days Amazon gives you.  On those days, 5 days of your choosing out of the 90 days exclusive deal; your book is free to download.  I think about 45 downloads happened.  Which is great!  I'm pleased.  I think at least half of those were friends who were just doing it to be nice, but the other half were strangers, I hope.

So this is a rambley blog post, isn't it?

Well, it's about my self publishing, a little anyways.  And I'm still working on it.  I'm still doing my one entry  a day on Fritz365.  Though who knows how long I'll choose to keep it up.  It's not easy to come up with stuff every day I sometimes find.  And I occasionally have to put up what even I consider to be stinkers.  So that says something.

I mean well though, I swear I do!  Every one of them starts with a cute or clever idea.  I just sometimes lack what I need to make it march for me.

Ok, I gotta run, I'm making little sense anyways.  If anyone who reads this has any questions about publishing an ebook on Amazon, or on Smashwords; go ahead and ask.  But try to go through the sites in question first, after all, if I can figure it out with no help other than the FAQ's and the comment boards; anyone can!

Cheers, to glutting the words market