Just don’t ask . . . and I won’t have to lie to you.

God almighty, the brain cells I extinguished in the Hofbrau Haus.

After I graduated from college, I had almost a year to cool my heels before going to Air Force flight school. So, I ended up in a job as a desk clerk in a hotel near Munich. I’d had six years of German in school, could read and write German pretty well, but there were two major problems:

1. I didn’t really know squat about German history in general or Munich history in particular.

2. I realized that even though I knew the language, everything out of my mouth sounded to the Germans like what I hear from the guy in my yard with the leafblower who I can hardly understand.

This was a problem because as part of my job, I was supposed to lead city tours for guests who requested a guide. My boss “Frau Doris” gave me a cheap info book and shoved me out the door with camera laden guests. I came back six hours later and told her I couldn’t lead any more tours because I really didn’t know jack about half the stuff we were seeing–and that the guests were asking about.

“No problem,” she said,  glugging down her daily liter of vodka–really, she never would have hired me had she been sober. “You just make something up.”

“What?”

“Yes, just make something up. They won’t know.” She fired up another cigarette. “And by the time they figure it out, they’ll be 6,000 miles away. So what do we care?”

I’ve stored that away in my Important Realization File.  And many tourists now show their pals pictures of the distinctive architecture in Munich:

Those twin minarets are a result, they tell their friends smugly, of the Turkish invasion of 1200 b.c..  Well, at least that’s the first thing that came to my mind when they asked. But sooner or later–and 6,000 miles away–some knowledgeable person gutting it out over their boring vacation pictures would finally say, “What?! There was never a Turkish invasion of Germany.” What did I care? It shut them up at the time.

I bring this up to illustrate a point: most of the time, if I don’t know, it’s probably because I really don’t care. So, it’s better if you don’t ask me in the first place. Yes, this extends to in flight.

I don’t want to spoil anyone’s childhood or anything, but here’s the truth: my P.A. in flight–you know, the “this is your captain speaking” cliche they use on TV but is kind of useless since I actually have a name–is canned because it’s easier for me to do over and over ad nauseum. So, I make up a few cities we’ll be flying over, add our flight time for an ETA, and the weather is always “partly cloudy” and whatever temperature I guess it should be. Then when we land, if the weather’s garbage, you will have to accept that this is the part that’s cloudy in my “partly cloudy” report.

Don’t even start with the “what are we over” crap either. Here, you tell me:

Okay, what street are you on? Can’t tell? Either can I–and this is what I’m looking at to navigate your jet five miles above your city or state or whatever. No wait–there it is!

Right? Are we good now? And yes, it’s partly cloudy–this is the part that isn’t cloudy. Plus whatever temperature I make up because it’s kind of a pain to convert degrees Centigrade to Fahrenheit.

The actual weather at our destination? Here you go:

Isn’t “partly cloudy” a lot easier to deal with? We’re going anyway and I’ll handle this when we get there.

Now, I could go on all day about Munich fables, plus don’t even get me started on the translations! Once, after drinking with a guest, he–okay we–decided that it would be funny if I wrote his wife the note she needed for a hairdresser in town and in German, made it say “bitte mein kopf rasieren.” Which means “please shave my head.” Seemed pretty funny till she returned with a crewcut. Thank God it was a weekend so Frau Doris was drinking at home and couldn’t fire me.

Maybe you want to stash all this in your “Important Realization File” and reflect on it briefly before you reach for the call button to ask for information.

Any other questions? If I don’t know the answer, I’ll sure find out for you. Or more likely, just make something up. Still want to ask about our arrival time? Didn’t think so. Now you’re catching on.

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Sent in by an alert traveler, this begs the question, “Anyone feel a draft in here?” plus, of course, “what were you thinking?”

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Today was a good day for recording and mixing. Do you want comatose, or Spinal Tap? Both, you say? Here’s the former

Tempest (Think ocean, storm, rocks, waves . . .)

And here’s the latter

Monstrous (Fire up that bong)

The Bachelor, the diaper, Sully, and the tarnished pilot image.

Okay, Jake, this is me and you talking pilot to pilot down in Flight Ops, with no cameras, microphones, ABC producers refilling cocktails or shrieking hot near-pornish “bachelorettes” slobbering over you.  Here’s the deal. You’re doing more to trash the airline pilot image than Lisa Nowak the astro-nut did to the NASA image by driving ten hours in a diaper to commit a felony.

Used to see the video of the astronauts suited up and each one clomping to the launch pad like the Michelin man, legs akimbo like modern-day gunslingers because, we all assumed, they had such enormous cajones that they had to walk that way.

Lisa Nowak’s arrest revealed the truth: they’re all wearing diapers. The walk is more like toddlers with a load in their pants than steely-eyed spacemen.

You, after blubbering on national TV because Canuck Jillian Harris dumped you for the hillbilly-poonhound-two-note Wes

Wes giving everyone the finger. Kind of like him for that.

even though he was an unfaithful lying wretch, enact a neurotic, girlish negation of 75 years of airline pilot mystique by collapsing into tears on national television. Some girls like that, apparently. So what? Even if the producers scripted your remake of Jason Messner sobbing over the deck rail of a fabulous villa Down Under, you needed to be a man, think of the other jet crew reputations in the balance, and NOT blubber over the rail of the Holiday Inn in Austin.

Think of  your poor first officer: he has to worry that if your aircraft suffers a birdstrike and loses both engines, he’ll have to contend with both a deadstick landing AND you blubbering like a baby at the same time.

So get real, for the love of God, pilothood, manhood and all that’s sacred to our already beleagured profession. Here’s what I want you to do:

1. Man Up. No more “weeping” on national TV. If you must weep–like when you look at your measly paycheck as a commuter pilot–do so privately. In public, maintain your facade, discretely spend those food stamps you’re eligible for by virtue of the pay scale that puts your W-2 income somewhere between that of my lawn guy

and the second assistant manager at Lowe’s. Have any of the bachelorettes caught on to that yet? (Editor’s Note: Those unfamiliar with the airline world may not grasp the subtle distinction between the terms “airline pilot” and “commuter pilot.” It’s analogous to a physician and a chiropractor: sure, they’re both called “doctor,” but they’re nowhere near the same thing. –JB, Blog Mgr & Editor)

2. Shave. The promo pictures of you in uniform with a wino’s-growth of beard is exactly what some bored TSA schlub is dreaming about discovering at a security checkpoint so he can be the hero, summon the police and give you a breathalizer test.  Shave, put on your tie and even though it will muss your up-do, wear your hat. Your pilot hat.

3. Don’t be a hypocrite. When ABC producers found out one of your harem was two-timing you with a production staff member (pun possible, take it as you like), you vented outrage over your unwitting sloppy-seconds, but that’s unjustifiable considering that you are eight-timing the entire harem yourself, swapping spit sequentially with each. (Side note: is Gia a porn star? Seriously.)

Attention TMZ: find the porn pix or videos in her past. I don't have time.

He got fired, she got sent home in a cab–no limo–and you, Mr. Righteous, went on to the tonsil hockey finals with the rest of the concubines. Hygiene note: you really should use mouthwash in between girls, for their sake. I’m just saying.

4. Ease up on the “love” crap. Everything you do isn’t for love, you don’t fly for love or ride your show-sponsored hog for love or bungee jump, and you were about to cry then too, right?  The video below is a normal woman–normal as in not pimped and contracted by a network to kiss your ass or dry hump you–telling you to grow a pair.

Never mind “love”–you live your life as best and as hard as you can, period. Don’t mush all this stuff together. We fly jets because we get paid to, because it’s fun, because we don’t want the Dunder-Mifflin cubicle, because we’re ruined for the forty-hour-workweek in an office after years in the air,

because we thought (in my case, and I’m being honest) that you had to be really smart to go to dental school.

This is what we do, and we’re damn lucky to do it. I’m not kidding: I’m nothing special, just a lucky guy who was at the right place at the right time and got the job that thousands of others can and do perform daily. With our shirts on, shaven. And no crying.

You’ve got half the season to go to redeem yourself. Pick a flight plan: you could be the airline version of George Clooney dry-motoring a weekly variety of babe-age, or the Sully Sullenberger quiet, self-effacing proven studly pilot, or the Lisa Nowak ruin-the-legacy freakshow in a diaper.

Sadly, right now, you’re mostly the latter. I’d envy you the first option, but myself–and most of your colleagues in the cockpit–strive mostly for the middle ground, for the high standard of Captain Sullivan. Join us if you will, don’t if you can’t, wear a diaper if you need to but whatever you do, no more nationally televised blubbering, okay?

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Anyone really out there in the blogosphere? I doubt it. So, here’s a bonus: just finished mixing this; recorded the bass line a dozen times so now I have no fingertips. But still, here it is: Big Dog Whaddya think? Anyone? Anyone? Leave a comment. Or not.

Reality, childhood, and Orion waves.

The intersection of my laziness as a person and my seniority as a pilot is this: I seldom fly early mornings, which means I often fly at night. Since our flight schedules are based on seniority and I’m not a morning person, that’s usually my preference.

In all my years of flying, staring at a night sky like black velvet strewn with jewels of varying sizes and colors, I’ve come to find what seem like old friends in the simpler constellations (remember, I’m lazy) like The Dippers, the “W” of Cassiopea, and on most nights Orion. No matter what’s going on in the cockpit, no matter what’s transpired that day, there they are every night, brighter than ever once you’re at cruising altitude and above most of the atmosphere tainted with smoke and smog and the detritus of civilization as well as nature’s continuous slop of fires and volcanoes and disastrous what not.

It’s a touchstone of distance, too, the way they lay out in the sky depending on how far and wide you’ve flown. Down in the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and below the equator, the stars are all up there but at impossible angles and positions, not because they’ve moved, but because you have, having flown so many thousands of miles past your usual perspective on Earth.

I was telling this to my sweet third grader last year, describing how no matter what, when I’m flying in the northern hemisphere, I can eventually find my old friend Orion, “The Hunter,” usually over my left shoulder in the eyebrow window of the cockpit, steady as a faithful old friend. Then I know where I am in the world, in the sky, in reference to my celestial compadre.

Without a heartbeat’s pause, she asked in wide-eyed wonder, “does he ever wave to you?”

And I hated myself as a parent the very instant my mouth spoke the words, “Uh, no, honey; it’s just a group of stars in a pattern.” Because without meaning to, I’d done the adult thing, contributing unwittingly to the piece by piece dismantling of the childhood wonder I’d just been blessed to wander into. Like any imaginative child, she knew nothing of impossibility, rather, only what she could dream based on what she could see.

Me, on the other hand, after a thousand views of that night sky could only see what is, or at least what I know after childhood dominated by dreams gives way to reality dictated by fact over years and years of making a living in flight. I couldn’t see anything anymore with a perspective given over to knowledge of the impossible rather than the childhood belief in all possibility.

Maybe that shift in belief versus reality is inevitable, so maybe what I’d said was merely a part of the necessary exit from childhood, softened perhaps because it came from a parent who cherished her and her precious grade school years.

But more likely, I’m afraid, this whole incident highlights the coldness of adult-based reality: you give up your sense of wonder and with it, claim a heartless confidence in what you know, period. Then rather than living life as a dream of wide-open possibilities, time becomes a painless yet numb sleep walk from work to days off to work; lather, rinse, repeat.

I don’t really have an answer for this conundrum, and maybe there isn’t one. Clearly, the whole notion of constellations was born of some ancient but adult imagination and endures in modern times despite a millennium of science that proves all of it to be groundless in fact. Maybe that’s the whole point: it’s not that facts don’t matter because really, they do. But perhaps they coexist because there’s value in dreams, maybe even more so for the soul, than in reality.

That’s the lesson I’ve learned: my parenthood can be a bridge between the two for my precious child. I’ll strive to listen carefully and answer more slowly, with careful regard for what’s possible rather than the adult eye for what isn’t. I’ll try that perspective, too, at night at high altitude, stargazing during cruise. Not so much looking for Orion to wave at me, but grateful for the knowledge that in a child’s mind, he just might. Anything beyond that is really not important.