A Few Things I've Written
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Here are a few Things I’ve Written
Text From A Golf Resort
The following is the response to some “have a happy day shid” my brother copied and pasted in a text to me: where roads reach up to greet you, there’s comfort on difficult days, and other garden placard platitudes that piss me off to no end to see in a text, particularly when I’m in my cynical way. Beware, it is a tad blue:
ME:
Well thanks big Bruthor! Would it be too greedy to ask for, in addition, running shoes with helium, 1/4 of my waistline, and a few payments off of this new minivan?
I just played Baltimore and got back from a jog on this golf course at a hotel I stayed at.
Golf.
Hockey for Pussies.
What a waste of a model airplane flying field.
So there’s this 6 foot wide path with geese shitting all over, old white muffuggas' stogie butts flicked everywhere, little 1/2 ton carts scooting everywhere, greens all maintained and weed-free thanks to chemicals that make Agent Orange look like Kool-Aid, and this groundsman scoots up to me 1/4 mile away from the hotel in his little electric cart tell me “no jogging on golf course”. Seriously? Bicches be walking on that muffugga all day long and I can't jog on it? (Of course I didn't say that shit to him).
He say jogging unsafe cause "you might be hit by a ball"... I say mufuggas need to go take some lessons at the clubhouse get off the green instead of spraying balls all over God's creation and be hittin muffuggas and geese and turtles all upside the head.
So I ask this groundskeeping muffugga, I say, "can I jog back to the hotel or do I have to walk?" He say "just be careful." Be careful my blak ass...I was more afraid of the muffuggin evil attacking geese, who are mad in the first place from getting hit in the head with golf balls, they got on that mufucking golf course and geese come chasing you around pecking you all on your junk. Shid, I was running faster from them geese than I was from any fuggin golf ball.
Shid.
And how are you?
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The Do Not Go Gently Piece
Those that know me know that I usually loathe the mixing of my vocation and avocation. I’ve spoken before about this separation of AeroChurch and Song...
...so the how and why you can read for yourself in that earlier post. Yet as the writer for a column in the Flying Aces Newsletter called Scale Modeler’s Muse, I have the opportunity to just blather on about not so much the how we cobble these flights of fancy together, but why. Here is a more recent entry that ended up a bit more of a treatise on caring than I thought it was gonna. See what it might mean to you:
Do Not Go Gently-
I belong to the Flying Aces Club but I have a clutch of friends, true friends, that I communicate with daily called the Non-List. All are venerable FAC [short acronym for my club’s name...] guys from all over the US, Canada, and England. And out of that group I have made some of the closest friendships I have ever experienced in my life. There’s a mess of other in-contact folks out there too - Don DeLoach has a band of fellows he keeps up with, as does Ronny Gosselin. Here’s the thing - we fellows 60 and under are the next wave, like it or not.
Yet we are different from our predecessors.
We hug, openly say “Love you, Man”, and even the most conservative amongst us are connected to the next one in a way that this previous generation probably isn’t.
Not better - just different. They don’t say we’re sissy touchy feely. We don’t call them puritanical stuck up. Us under 60 fellows, we just care differently, is all.
We’re just different.
We’ve been there at each other’s parent’s funerals, been “Uncle” to the children of that flyer or another, and thrown rice at them as they walk down the aisle. We’ve wept in solace to and with each other in times of divorce or death.
We’re a little different.
Some of us have served, most of us haven’t seen war. However, that previous generation - the ones that arguably made the world safe so we could be as affectionate to each other in this world as we choose to be today - those fellows would meet at the field, fly, time flights, trade quick troubleshooting ideas, laugh, fly some more, and go home. A different kind of male-to-male contact.
I’ve heard of guys that died and the others wouldn’t know until they went to his house to get flags or flyers for the next meet. I’ve known of guys that had cancer for 2 years before his buddies were told. Or an older guy’s wife who died, and his closest flyers didn’t know until a casual “how is she?” came up in conversation some 2 - 3 weeks later.
Many members of this more staid, but caring previous generation have reached their 80s and 90’s and would do well with a check in from you/our under-60, thoughtful, peace-love generation fellows.
Call these mentors of yours.
Jaw about your next project.
Drop over with your stack of “maybe-next-project pictures”.
Run your next project by them.
Bring over that half-done Bristol radial motor you cobbled out of corks wrapped with thread that look like cylinders. Or the new stabilizer for your Spitfire.
Ten minutes on the phone.
A half hour on his porch.
Their eyes won’t let them see enough to build anymore, there are no more legs with which to chase, their hands shake for reasons they will or won’t burden you with, and they have no way to drive to the farm field or the gym to fling anything into the air. Muse with these old men. Keep these blessed modeling treasures in the fold and keep their eyes lit up with your weekly workshop goings on. And take a guess who is also well served from your caring endeavor.
He’s in your mirror.