what are you going to do with your life?

Titanum Electron Gun is key to space simulator. Engineer, James Stephens, checks new Caltech gadget.

How did my dad know what he wanted to do with his life? How did he know that he wanted to be a mechanical engineer and build rockets? That question is an oversimplification. He didn’t really build whole rockets but he worked on bits and pieces of rockets and on the robots and astronomy satellites that rode up into the sky on those big tin cans. Still, he always made it sound like he knew exactly what he wanted to do in life and he went right down the mechanical engineer path through school, to work at Rocketdyne, and on to The Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Caltech. I suppose that the glamour of things that are new, bold, and uncharted helped make it an easy decision to pursue rockets and space stuff.

I am in my forties now and I still don’t know what I want to do. I bought into in the whole do-what-you-love thing but it has never really gotten me anywhere that would look like success to most of the people walking around on this rock. I am happiest making things with my hands (the engineer homunculus in me throwing its weight around) but what things I get a kick out of making is always changing. So how does one get the $$ out of that? I’ve never really found the way to make my talents into cash. I suppose I should have gone to art school but I just didn’t want to jump the hoops. I suppose I should have followed the engineer path, but it seems to me that engineers don’t have the fun they did in the age before CAD/CAM and all the computer screens. Sitting in front of a glowing screen all day makes me cranky. It just doesn’t hold up to the tales of early rocket engineers tinkering with hydrazine and living on the edge.

This beats the heck out of an exploding rocket, no?

Digression Warning: skip this bit if you don’t get a thrill from tales of chemical stinks and medicinal serendipity. According to anecdote, use’ta be, in the early days of rocketry and super volatile liquid fuels there was no sophisticated way to check for leaks in the completed and fueled up rocket standing out on the launch rig. A tiny little leak would be a baaaaaad thing resulting in certain disaster. You want all the rumbling flame to shoot out of the nozzle on the tail of the rocket, you see. If anything is squirting out in the wrong place it tends to screw up the works and make everything into a big flame ball that goes nowhere fast. Fortunately the hydrazine in the liquid fuel smells like ammonia. (Don’t quote me on this. I’m running on anecdote and my cluttered and fogged memory here, not on any sort of expertise.) It’s toxic as all get out in larger doses but someone had to be the canary in the coalmine. One person with a good nose and the short straw would have to go out to the launch rig, climb a ladder, open a little door on the side of the rocket, and sniff. No ammonia stink? Thumbs up, it’s launch time! So tonight, let it be Löwenbraü. “Where’s the medicinal serendipity?” you ask. Guess what? Hydrazine is a chemical precursor to thorazine a.k.a. chlorpromazine, an antipsychotic drug sometimes used to reduce effects of a bad LSD trip. Better living through chemistry and the canary feels aaaall riiiight.

Dad was a thoroughly practical space engineer, a loud-mouthed critic of manned space flight, and the fly-in-the-ointment of every hair brained NASA pork barrel project. I don’t know for sure if his boosterism for robotic spacecraft and his practicality was something that grew in time or if he came right out of school swinging the fists of practical testing and fanatical belief in building spacecraft the way Ford cranked out Model Ts. It is telling, however, that one of his early big projects at The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was building a testament to practicality, the Molesink, also known as The Molecular Sink Space Simulation Laboratory. That’s a mouthful. He kept the black sign that labeled one of the steel doors opening into the big room filled with huge vacuum pumps, tanks of liquid nitrogen and liquid helium, and pipes running every which way patched here and there with ape shit* (that one I’ll have to explain later). Long after it went out of use and was scrapped, dad was proud of the big space-making machine that gave him his hernia. We still have the sign. It makes the shop in the garage seem more important.

Galileo's broken umbrella

The nuts and bolts of basic mechanics are tweaked by the very low pressure, intense cold, and ionizing radiation of space. The simplest assumptions made about mechanical parts or electronic devices down here on the ground are often poor designs for spacecraft. Lubricants for moving parts turn into horrible glue or worse they disperse, coating everything with a nasty muck. Materials cold-weld together in unpredictable ways, and plastic polymers just plain freak out. Armed with the Molesink and its threatening almost-like-space torture chamber dad would tear gaping holes in the blueprints of impractical and poorly designed spacecraft long before they could get into space and fail where no one was watching or taking notes. What was so practical about that? The big idea was to make a little bit of space here on earth to find out what was going wrong and to learn how to do things right on the cheap. It costs a whole lot less to wreck your electronics in the Molesink than to send them into space and then sit and wonder what went wrong. This may seem obvious but lots of obvious things get buried in the clumsy machine of NASA. Pork projects get arbitrarily farmed out to companies with no practical experience in a particular field and the same old mistakes are made anew. When the Galileo spacecraft’s main antenna failed to unfold my dad lamented the loss of the Molesink shaking his head. Stuffing a prototype antenna in the Molsink and opening a can of space whup ass would have prevented the whole embarrassing mess by proving the design sucked rocks. Lots of dopey mistakes plagued NASA in the 80s and 90s. The Hubble Space Telescope went up with out anyone trying out the optics. There was a terrible lack of attention paid to proponents of practicality like Dr. Fly-In-The-Ointment Stephens.

Dad worked on lots and lots of projects in his time at JPL, but he was slowly moved out of the nuts and bolts stuff. Eventually he was part of the Technology Affiliates program. It was intended to take new technology and inventions produced by NASA folks and make them available to private companies in need of innovation. Dad criticized the Technology Affiliates program for trying to find a problem for a given solution when he should have been finding solutions for problems. In his own time dad had a little business doing just that. He called himself the technology pimp, hooking up hard-up companies with willing, able, and well-endowed engineers, chemists, and biologists. I think dad had more satisfaction in his pimping work outside of JPL where he could fit solutions and people to a particular problem rather than doing it all backwards at JPL.

I need to dig in the dad box and find the documents so I can get the details right but I think there is evidence that he wasn’t totally happy with his position at JPL in the later part of his career. I think he really liked being the technopimp but the Technology Affiliates program didn’t bear much of fruit. There are a few letters regarding dad being turned down for a promotion/raise in the last few years of his time at JPL. Maybe he was just trying to get a higher salary locked in for a better pension, but I wonder if he was just burned out by the bureaucracy and silliness. I wish I had had the mind to ask. There are lots of things I never thought to ask… like, “How in heaven’s name did you know what you wanted to do?!” Was it all just a ruse? Maybe he was just faking the whole time and he never was that confident of where he was going.

not the right shade of grey

*So, what the hell is ape shit? Nope, didn’t forget. It’s a really tenacious thick grey clay-like stuff used to patch up insulation on cryogenic plumbing. At least that is what my fogged brain remembers. It comes in a big rounded log like an ape pooped it out. We had one of those logs in a drawer in the garage up to just a few years ago. Maybe that was what made dad so sure about what he wanted to do… engineering was just an excuse to say things like, “Hey Joe, toss me another log of ape shit. There’s ice on this bitch kitty.” Don’t know what a bitch kitty is? That too will have to wait.

boobs, good ol' boobs

Remember the days when kids who had just hit puberty had to weasel around to get their mitts on pictures of naked people doing raunchy things? When I was a kid not only did I have to walk through the snow for miles to get to school but I had to be sneaky and find time alone to read about what happened at the doctor's office when the buxom nurse came in. How was it that these people found a doctor who's office wasn't chilled to a goose flesh inducing 58 degrees? And how did the nursing staff maintain such a high level of patient satisfaction all day? They worked an eight hour shift like everyone else, no?

In the new millennium, some really innocent sounding Google searches will produce images of the most atrocious things in people's keisters. Gadzooks! Who posts this stuff? Very little of the crazy weird porn floats my boat, but I am a really big fan of naked ladies. I can't get enough. If you want to careen off the road while I'm driving just mutter, "Naked people." We'll fly headlong into the gravel shoulder as I whip my head around trying to spot the aforementioned flesh while hollering, "Where? Where! I want to see naked people!" Naturally, with my particular orientation, I'd prefer the naked people be ladies... in their 20s or 30s... and jumping around... maybe wearing squirrel masks... Ahem... I could spend hours piddling around looking at boobs, good ol' boobs, and "Pictures of Lilly" by The Who could be my theme song. Other parts are good too but honestly the porn these days makes me grimace within the first few minutes after the initial excitement of, "Naked Ladies!" I don't know, I just miss the days when people still had some hairy bits and the porn was just kind of embarrassingly dumb. Now, so much of it is embarrassingly violent... and embarrassingly available. Plus the giant boob thing was more of an occasional side show and there were no inflate-o-chests with painful looking balloons sitting just below the collar bones. I'm not going to claim that the porn of yesteryear was less exploitative, more socially responsible, or that it had any resemblance to real human sexuality. The stuff has always been kind of ickified, but the old dirty magazine under the bed at least seemed contained... kept at bay... like it knew it shouldn't be out in public.

When I was five or six I laid eyes on one of my first boob pictures. It sticks in my head because it was on the cover of a High Society Magazine that I would encounter again years later during puberty. My first encounter with that issue didn't get beyond the cover photo because I didn't know what porn was yet and my dad was in the room when I spotted the thing. It had been left out in plain sight and I stared for a minute at the woman sitting there cross legged on a beach. Being cover art, she had sand demurely piled in front of her crotch and her arms were over her head as she had just pulled off her surf soaked shirt.

Boobs.

I don't think the cover gave me the intense funny feeling of excitement that I would have later but it made me stare anyhow. My dad noticed my focus and asked matter-of-factly, "Well, what do you think of that?" He neither waited for a response nor expected one. I just went blank as he encouraged me out of the room. I guess he didn't buy these magazines very often or trash any of them because this same issue along with a Penthouse or two and a couple of Playboy were what I would later seek out in a pubescent stupor when left alone in the house. That issue, by the way, also introduced me to the idiot fantasy of lewd nurses. In this case it was a dentist office thing. I think I realized right away how absurd the whole thing was, but that didn't stop me getting kookie thoughts when the hygienist leaned over to floss my teeth and her soft bits were mashed on my arm.

Dad and I never had the serious talk about sex, but the subject was not taboo so I managed to glean things here and there. Having two older siblings provided more chances to listen in. Then of course there were a couple of books left around the house in easy access bookshelves. Where Did I Come From? was cartoony but it got to the point, and Man's Body: An Owner's Manual was crazy technical but it answered all the worrisome questions. If you want to know about the reading material that did me the most good in the sack... lesbian erotica takes the cake, but you've got to be sure you're getting the stories written by and for lesbians. I had to go find it on my own when I went to college, but I have to say these are some people who know how to write about exactly what to do. If you want to help your young heterosexual son feel more confident, this is the stuff.

Dad could occasionally blurt out some astonishingly crude sexual things. Most people wish to avoid thinking of their parents as sexually active or even interested in that sort of thing. I was never really horrified by the thought... still, I think I ignored most of what I heard going on or at least didn't make much of it until later. Putting two and two together, hindsight revels that they were fooling around fairly often, and my dad's occasional explicitness made obvious his active libido. Once, when I was helping him with some carpentry project involving six inch lag bolts we found that cranking the socket wrench was getting too difficult. Dad showed me the old carpenter's trick of rubbing bee's wax on the threads of the lag bolts to ease the friction. "You know what this is called?" he asked grinning. "Love lube. You know why?" I resisted an eye roll. He couldn't help himself, "Because you put it on before you screw!" HA! Good one dad. This was far from the most crude thing I heard him say. The whoppers usually came along when he had other nutty engineer pals around. A few would take me years to decipher.

Out in the garage in the back of a drawer I stumbled onto and old deck of cards when I was deep in the teen angst. I wish I knew what happened to those. They were a 1940's cheesecake boob fest, but the deck had disappeared when I thought of them again later as an adult. I'm certain I could have made a small killing on Ebay, and I often wonder if that deck had been ferreted out of my grandfather's stash in another ignored drawer years before. The ladies all had something or other covering their happy place, but the boobs were all front and center. Some of the gals had the most awkward expressions like, "What the hell am I doing?" Some were making the most goof-ball cross-eyed fish-face nutty expressions. At least they seemed to be having fun, and I think they gave me the green light to think sex was amusing. And here I am married to someone willing to laugh with me after the deed.

I still favor the rare porn with people who look genuinely happy (and who still have their fuzzy bits). This tends to be older stuff so I guess I'm out of style. I get the biggest kick out of the photos of naked ladies who clearly were very fond of the person behind the camera. Boobs are always a really good thing. Present them with smiling eyes and a big grin, and you've got the best stuff on earth.