BLOG
1. In the Beginning…
I was an engineer working in an office with rows of drafting tables whose creativity and imagination were stifled. On a few projects I was able to think ‘outside the box’ but mostly I had to follow rote protocols because projects needed to be built. I found great satisfaction in getting my ideas put into the ground.
Writing this blog brings up memories for me. It is hard to believe that it was about twenty years ago on a pitch-black February night that I started writing my first novel, ‘Wave Upon Wave’. I was depressed. At the office, I was working on a spreadsheet with a few hundred rows, summarizing the performance of a storm drain in Baltimore County. The engineer at the county was a real turd and would make me change the entire spreadsheet because he thought the capacity of a pipe was 75.24 rather than 75.18%.
Many would not feel any empathy towards me since engineers are supposed to be good with numbers. I am, but I figured I was better than this. Part of my problem was that at home, I would sit back and watch movies on cable. That week, TBS was showing ‘Lethal Weapon’ about 10 times. I guess the combination of Baltimore County government and Mel Gibson were enough to push me over the edge.
I thought that I could write an entertaining story just as good as any movie plot, or maybe even better.
Being a Water Resources Engineer, I created a story with a water theme (duh). I began the story with the ‘loss of innocence’ theme, with kids playing in a lake behind a dam, where the sunset was turning the water a shade of red (color of blood). 9/11 had occurred a couple of years prior, and the entire country had its ‘loss of innocence’ moment; we were no longer immune to terrorism.
The brand of terrorism which I brought up in the book was the anti-government kind, by religious fanatics bent on revenge. I never really figured that the plot of the book would be more, or just as topical today as it was twenty years ago. People are still discovering ‘Wave Upon Wave’, and I hear folks talking about it.
I hope that people reading this blog are able to undertake their own creative journey and sit less time in front of the boob tube.
2. I Confess
This is a real conversation I had with the man sitting at the front desk of the local YMCA; I told him that the title of my most recent blog is ‘I Confess’. He asked me if I had confessed to ‘a murder’. I responded that I confessed to the murder of the English language.
This brings me to the back cover of the books I wrote. I once read that the author on the back cover should have some type of blurb about himself that would demonstrate to the reader that he’s a good writer and that the reader should buy the book.
I’ve got a blunt response to all of this:
There is absolutely nothing in my resume’ that would point to me as being a writer.
Most of my education is math and physics courses. In my few English classes I frequently got C’s and B’s on my assignments. I went through a standard education to graduate school where I had enough mastery of English to get my degree. As a matter of fact, for the first ten years or so of writing books I had trouble convincing people I had written a novel. Everybody thought I was crazy. (I still am).
Okay, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I figure I can write the rest of my blog(s).
My second confession is that I started writing the blog to get people interested in my books. Yes, but then I figured that maybe people are reading this to gain some insight into my creative process.
Here. I make my third and final confession. My creative process is not based on words, rather images. Yes, images. This should make sense to people since I have extensive experience with graphics and photography. I wrote my second book ‘Asa’s Gift’ with this premise. The main character, Asa, is autistic and only communicates through sketching. (Check out the book; I make an appearance in one of the illustrations as one of his tormentors).
When I write a book, it is almost like a movie playing on a big screen, like wearing one of those ‘reality’ visors. (For example, people have told me that ‘Wave Upon Wave’ would make a great movie.) I am simply trying to translate the images into words to clue in the people around me about what is happening on the screen.
Well, this is the way I do it. Everybody’s mind works differently. The point of this entry is that I encourage people to figure out what drives them creatively and to just ‘do it’. I would not let a lack of experience or formal training stop you. Just keep on walking towards your goal, and eventually, you will get there.
3. On Being a ‘Messianic’ Jew
Okay, I will continue being in the ‘confession’ mode from my last blog. I will start with the observation that many of my writings have a underlying theme of conformity, or shall I say lack of conformity, which many people term ‘alienation’.
Joseph Hamiz, the main character from my first book, ‘Wave Upon Wave’ is definitely a loner. When we meet him in the second chapter he is happily working alone in the dead of night in his basement laboratory doing his experiments. Of course, he does this for partially for reason that he never felt comfortable in the US. Being a Arab didn’t help. He didn’t make a lot of friends as a teenager, and probably more interested in books than girls. This type of character has been portrayed often in fiction and TV. I guess I chose him for two reasons: 1. Being a outsider is dramatically more interesting than the tall athletic type who scores the winning winning touchdown much to the adulation of the crowd. 2. The ‘villian’, or the antagonist, is much the same way. He turns out to be a outsider but under a set of completely different circumstances. So, there is ultimately a conflict between two equals, which I suppose is the basis for a lot of literature.
In, the second book, ‘Asa’s Gift’ I am more out front with the alienation theme. Asa is a severely autistic man who doesn’t speak, and can only communicate with drawings. If that wasn’t enough ‘alienation’, I thought I would add, not one, but two types extraterrestrials (ET’s) to the plot. Of course, one is good, or lets say ‘benign’, and the other is bad. Asa is able to communicate with the ‘good’ ET, and eventually able help out with the battle with the bad ET’s. So, I make the argument that being different can be a big plus.
Where does this have to do with being a Messianic Jew? I don’t want to bring religion too much into the blog. I grown to respect religions and have many friends of the Christian and Muslim faiths. In recent years, I have spent more time in churches than synagogues. Much of my preoccupation with alienation comes from being a Jewish kid in largely a Christian society. This was probably a large factor in my father’s behavior. My father and mother raised most of my family in the 1950s when anti-Semitism was on the rise. In spite of this, he never hid his Jewishness. One of his favorite things was speaking Yiddish to people he met (especially cab drivers). Anti-Semitism is on the rise now, and we must be vigilant.
One time, I was talking to a drafter in my office. I mentioned that I couldn’t work on the drawings because the next week was Rosh Hashanah and I was going to services. He asked me in a redneck-sounding voice, “Are you one of those Messianic Jews?” emphasis on the ‘J’ and ‘W’)
I responded, “No, I’m just a Messy Jew.”
Let’s just keep it at that. Happy MLK day.
4. Being the Rebel
I spent my previous blog(s) talking about nonconformists and how I built my storytelling around them. I am labeled on the internet as an ‘Engineer, Environmentalist, Photographer, and Author’ (maybe now not necessarily in that order).
I figure now I owe people my explanation of some of my engineering and environmentalist views. Of course, I have a ‘nonconformist’ way of looking at the world around me, sometimes much to the chagrin of my colleagues who are just trying to make a living. In retrospect, my ideas are quite simple and common sense-based, and hopefully, people will not fall asleep reading about them.
I did get the notion of being a Water Resource Engineer from watching the movie ‘Chinatown’ back in high school. (I also paid homage to ‘Chinatown’ in my book ‘Wave Upon Wave.) I had wanted to be an engineer since I had a good grasp of physics and math, and I thought that being an engineer was a good combination of the two. The only problem was figuring out what kind of engineer I wanted to be. The movie showed that water was a ‘universal’ concept, and the basis for many lives, especially out in the west.
When I visited California many years ago, the Napa Valley in particular, I mentioned to people in the wine industry the relationship between river flow and the infiltration of water into the ground. I had studied it extensively in graduate school at Penn State and I was trying to impress them. This backfired. People would look back at me as if I were dumb. It was common knowledge to increase the infiltration of rainwater into the soil to increase the base flow of rivers. It was something they had learned in high school.
You see, water resources and development are linked together (as it was in ‘Chinatown’). My college classes taught that the standard practice was to impound water behind dams and to discharge water to streams with hard, slippery linings that efficiently discharge the water away from the site so that developed areas remain dry.
In the 1980s, one of my first projects was in northern New Jersey when I worked at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). It was related to the permitting of a dry detention pond that discharged to a concrete-lined channel. In a newspaper interview, a woman property owner called the channel ‘a coffin’. At the time, I thought the resident was crazy since the state had spent half a million dollars of pubic funds to provide flood control.
Several years later, I would realize that she was right. The project was a loser. Dry ponds provide terrible flood control for downstream areas, and the concrete channels that were considered engineering masterpieces silted in after a couple of years since they were generally not maintained by the state or the local municipality.
I learned a lot from this experience, and it wasn’t about water resources. Namely, it is to listen to people, even if you disagree with them. People who work for the government can learn a lot from listening to the public (In my case It appears they seldom do). This will be discussed in my next blog post.
5. Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should - (Part 1)
This overused phrase should be the mantra of several government agencies. One of them, the target of my ire in this blog, is the Baltimore County Department of Environmental Protection and Sustainability. Back in 2023, they dropped the ‘Resource Management’ part of their name and added ‘Sustainability’. I wish they had asked me about their new name. I think ‘sustainability’ is the least truthful part; just like calling a six-hundred-pound man ‘slim’.
I don’t have a naive view of the world, and I can handle when agencies slip up. During my forty-year engineering career, I have seen many people mess up, and yes, especially myself. Mistakes are an important part of the engineering process and sometimes the only way people learn, especially when handling complex natural systems such as streams. Stream systems are so complicated that Hans Einstein (the son of Albert) made his career out of studying sedimentation
The thing that makes me mad is the department’s condescending attitude towards the public and using my tax money to fund their mistakes. They spent, roughly from June to October, grading and bulldozing Herring Run, a tributary to the Back River, which, of course, drains to the Chesapeake Bay. Adding another level of insult to injury is that I heard all their equipment all the time I was in my backyard, disrupting my summer rest. What they did was remove the existing trees and vegetation lining the channel, which provided shade and habitat to the few fish that resided in the stream, straighten out and channelize the stream, and dumped crushed rock on the banks in a mistaken notion that it will stabilize the channel. Any person with knowledge of stream processes would know that crushed rock will eventually undermine and wash down the stream during storm events. All they did was discharge sediment to downstream areas.
Here is a photo of their work (across from the backyard of my house).
In all fairness, the photo shows rather extensive planting of trees in the floodplain. How can I be a grinch and complain about trees? My comment is that the trees are rather small. I am not a young man and will be long gone before they reach any maturity. What do you say when someone takes away an important resource and says it will return in ten to twenty years? Most people, even non-environmentalists, would be putting up their middle finger.
I wish I had a photo of Herring Run the way it was when I moved into my house twenty-five years ago. Back then I couldn’t readily shoot a photo of the stream channel because the vegetation was so thick I had trouble getting to the water. I did some field investigations of streams as part of my job, and a couple of times I walked Herring Run in my waders to test their field worthiness . I had to be careful because there were some deep pools, some that had a four-foot depth, and I was afraid that I would get stuck in the muck at the bottom of the channel. Bad for me, but great for the critters that resided in the stream. It doesn’t take an environmental genius to understand that the deeper the pools in a stream, the better the fish habitat since it gives them places to feed, provides hiding places, creates cooler water, which increases the dissolved oxygen, which fish need to survive (we all learned in pre-school that fish have gills and need the dissolved oxygen).
In short, I was very happy to have this resource in the back of my home.
Now I cry thinking about how shallow, less than one foot, the county made the water in the channel of their ‘great design’. With the combination of the rip rap and the lack of vegetation, come summer, the water will be hot enough to wash dishes. Pass the Palmolive.
6. Bond and Multi-tasking
Perhaps I’ve been a bit too serious; no wonder why I have a heart condition. I’ve spent my first five blogs talking about my fiction and my professional credentials as if I have a job interview tomorrow. I am retired and I should really be enjoying life. Yes, I will make that my goal for future blogs.
I do like movies though. Yes, I like the junky, escapist, action movies that have a lot of plot holes which provide action scenes every five minutes so people do not question the implausible story. I let them roll over me like being in the surf at the ocean on a hot summer day. There are people out there who like action movies that are intellectual like ‘Inception’ that are constructed like puzzle boxes and you need to take notes to keep track of what is going on. Sorry, I left my notebook at home.
I am in Baltimore with about a foot of snow on the ground (three feet in front of the outside door), and in desperate need for some mind candy. Netflix has anticipated this need and they have added all twenty-six Bond movies to their library, including ‘Never Say Never Again’, the only one not having been produced by EON. They expect people to put a bag of chips or a pizza on the coffee table and binge them. Given the nature of my heart ailment, I don’t think my cardiologist would approve. Although, being a longtime fan ever since I was a kid, I did decide to check out one of my favorite Bond movies ‘Thunderball’. Sean Connery was in his prime with hair on his chest and a matching toupee on his head.
Reading through the blogs on the net, Bond-files (who can be a bit snobby) have said that ‘Thunderball’ was one of their least favorite films because of all the gadgets. They like films like ‘Dr. No’ or ‘From Russia With Love’ that emphasized stunts or the spy craft, more than gadgets like jet packs or ocean breathers, the device that allows someone to remain underwater without scuba gear. I don’t know, I think the featured hardware, antiquated by today’s standards, is a kind of fun, especially the jet pack, which wasn’t a visual effect, but was ‘for real’ and being flown in the movie by its inventor (who picked up some spending money doing the stunt).
You could tell a film’s cultural impact by the number of things that have been imitated or parodied in other films, such as a villain in drag or the conference room chair ready to electrocute a subordinate that has messed with the big boss. In my own life, during tense meetings with my boss, I have checked under my chair cushion for electrodes.
The major thing that critics do miss is that Bond was one of the original multitaskers; and he never went to Harvard Business School. In ‘Thunderball’, Bond is given just 55 hours, a little more than two days, to stop the bad guys from turning Miami into cinders with an atomic bomb. During that period, he found the time to romance the chief bad guy’s girlfriend, Domino, in the Bahamas. This included having an ocean swim with her, having dinner, and even having a moonlight swim in the bad guy’s shark-infested pool. He also beds the red-haired henchwoman (who, believe it or not, I found more attractive than Domino), and has a fateful dance with her at a supper club.
My favorite scene is where Bond romances bikini-clad Domino on the beach as he effortlessly impales one of the more nasty henchmen against a tree with a speargun. Having taken three psychology courses at Drexel University, I find the scene quite ‘Freudian’ with the spear symbolizing a part of male anatomy. I’m certain Freud would have spent a couple of sessions with Bond creator Ian Fleming discussing the underlying sexual themes and subtexts. Freud would’ve been quite the Bond fan.