BURNOUT
In 2005, I started noticing it. At first, I blamed the feeling on a particular job. That beast drained me of energy and spirit just by looking at it. I’d have to remind myself that yes, although it’s a big job, it will get finished. I know what to do. Just take it one step at a time. A significant paycheck waits at the other end. Just do what they pay you to do.
Of course it got finished to great rejoicing on my part, and I assumed things would return to normal. Not exactly. Seemed like every model I touched afterward had some aspect that made me want to avoid it. 2008 came up and was characterized by lots of work to hard deadlines and any lack of enthusiasm just had to be swallowed and forgotten. Just do the job. ’09 would be more relaxed.
Relaxed, yes, but I just couldn’t seem to get any traction. “All you have to do is build models,” I’d tell myself. “What’s easier than that? What do you know better than that?” But the fact was I’d look for nearly any excuse not to go upstairs to the “factory” and do the work. (When one works out of one’s house there is always an excuse to avoid the business if you look for it.)
The fact was, I was going to some lengths to avoid what was once a major source of enjoyment and satisfaction in my life. Had I outgrown the model-building thing? If I had to have a job I didn’t much like any more, I could certainly find one of those that paid better. (Or maybe not, living in Michigan.) I’d long suspected I’d been the target of mild depression. Was this the reason for my lack of spark, or was a string of frustrating jobs making me more depressed? At my annual physical, I was prescribed a light drug to address depression. I’m not fan of drugs, but I was willing to give it a shot.
The consensus of everybody I discussed this with was that gee, maybe after 23 years of doing the same basic thing nearly every day, perhaps a break was in order. Truly, it had never occurred to me I could burn out on models. Nor had I believed it possible that in 23 years of doing it, could I take any significant time off. How could I rationalize taking time off my full-time “fun” job? Burnout was what happened to people with crummy jobs, right? What did I have to complain about other than the pay? So what if Hawx Planes had cost me my hobby? I still engaged in the activity constantly (whether I wanted to or not.) Plus I got paid something for it. Best of both worlds, right? I stopped all modeling activity for a couple months and pursued other interests. Thankfully, I’ve got other interests.
BACK IN TIME
Not long after that visit to the doc, the monthly Squadron update arrived. As always, I flipped through to see the latest round of alleged “deals,” not the new stuff. (In my mind, “new” has come to be synonymous with complicated and pricey – two things I’d like to avoid.)
I’m a sucker for old kits. Old as in the ones I built when modeling was a source of excitement, not income. I always check the update's list of Airfix kits. I went through an awful lot of those as a kid. I have many memories of serious excitement with Airfix kits. I saw listed for all of $4.19 their original rendition of the Bf.109G-6. An Airfix ‘109G – what a waste of styrene, eh? Maybe. For me that one has some significance.
I first got my hands on one at the convergence in time of my joining IPMS, discovering the Squadron Shop and realizing an airbrush was an essential tool if I really wanted to pursue scale modeling. At that time, the Airfix Gustav was literally the only game in town. I bought the round wing-tipped Messerschmitt I always wanted in my collection, even though I listened to conversations about hard-to-fix outline problems the kit had. (Frog’s F had a better shape, but a G had so many more marking options.) However, I did not own an airbrush. I saw the paint jobs an airbrush – and only an airbrush – could do. It was an absolute necessity to do a convincing Luftwaffe mottled fuselage. I had the kit I so badly wanted done well, but not the tool to do the paint job.
When could I ever own that tool? A decent airbrush and compressor represented some very serious money when I was 12. So I held off on building my Gustav. That was probably the first kit I didn’t buy and automatically build. Thus began an unbuilt kit collection. I’d have gotten to it eventually, though I have no memory of a finished model. What I remember most about the Airfix ‘109G is not building it and never owning another one.
So I put an order to Squadron together and tacked on that ‘109 kit, purely as a gift to myself. A little something for that child within, as it were. The box from Texas arrived and I saved examining the ‘109 for last. It was a rough-looking Messerschmitt to be sure. Though the decals were better than my original kit, the markings were still the same. The more I looked at the simplistic thing, the stronger I felt the urge to slam it together little kid style. Or what about little kid style with the benefit of 40 years experience? How about that experience and current tool/glue/paint technology. A quick bit of fun. Why not?
Now I had tried this exact same exercise a couple years previously as a possible cure for the blues I was experiencing. I went to the garage, found some oldies, and tried to build them “for fun.” I got all the big parts connected on two and put most of a paint job on one, but that’s as far as it went. I could not shut off the voice in my head that kept telling me, “You don’t have time for this. When it’s done, what are you going to do with it? You need to get to this job and that job. If you’re going to spend time on model planes, spend it on models that will pay you something.”
So those two, like so many others, were shelved for another day. Maybe. I recognize the endless tunnel of "another day" isn't as long as it once was.
Somehow this Airfix Messerschmitt was different. The voices in my head were absent. I concentrated on making the parts fit each other as well as I could and determined not to add a thing, and alter the kit as little as possible. The rivets would all have to go, but that was largely it. I’d produce a Bf.109G-6 as Airfix intended it to look. And what was wrong with that? Is it possible to accept shortcomings in a kit rather than go to significant lengths or expense to “fix” things? Where did it say that building them as they came, no matter how they came, was wrong? When model planes gave me the most joy, that was certainly the way I did it. That fact began to work on me. For want of a better word, I started to feel a “tingle.” Was I channeling 12-year-old Pat?
As a kid, “fixing” kits was not a concern. It wasn’t even a concept. After the idea of a collection took hold, having as many plastic airplanes in one place at one time was the important thing. Of course, I wanted to do as good a job building/painting/decaling as I could, but I gave no thought to changing things. Maturity brought accuracy issues and the heartache (and sometimes satisfaction when corrected) that came with it.
For years, I’ve collected kits I built or started to build as a kid. Most of these old Airfix/Frog/Revell kits don’t compare well with what superseded them from Japan and elsewhere. The new renditions reflect different thinking and values, which is terrific, but I don’t have any emotional connection to them the way I do the earlier generation of plastic. I’d buy the old ones (when I found them at good prices) just to have them, lift the sprues and look at them occasionally. Build them? I don’t know. So much work to make them “right.”
Wait a minute. “Right?” Right for who? How important is “right?” Important enough not to build a model airplane? Why? Let me give this some thought while I’m tingling...
THE KID’S COLLECTION
The Golden Age of my own model collection would’ve been the late ‘60s. I don’t think I ever broke the 50 mark, but at the high point, I was very close. Then came IPMS and the Squadron Shop and getting it right vs. getting it built. Most of the old collection quickly became obsolete and fodder for firecrackers and stuff. Some of my favorites I would try to rehab or fine-tune to higher standards, but the idea of just replacing them was much more interesting. Re-growing the all-important collection became a much slower project. Though it did grow, I don’t think the number ever again got much past 20.
In the late ‘70s, the idea of displaying model airplanes in flight took hold followed by an enormous amount of trial and error R & D to figure out an inexpensive and efficient way to mass-produce the stands required. Although there didn’t seem to be a good answer to this dilemma, I pressed on with my idea and soon had a good handful of nice models on matching stands. It would be so much faster to build models without landing gear and open canopies! Open canopies meant tricked-out cockpits. Before the age of resin cockpit detail, this aspect to model building was a guaranteed additional number of days’ work. (As it turned out, painting pilot figures, getting smooth undersurfaces with closed landing gear doors, maintaining good fitting and clear canopies and producing and tweaking the stands would erase that gained time and then some.)
At that moment, when the path ahead looked clear, almost all my modeling activity was redirected to what other people wanted.
For the first five years after creating “The Business,” I was simply too busy with the work to do any building for myself. I had a significant pile of close-to-paint-job models that had been destined for my own collection one day. I would occasionally pull them into the light, hold them at arm’s length…maybe fly them around a little…wistfully imagine what they’d look like painted and decaled, then put them back in their boxes. Naturally there was also the huge collection of unbuilts gathered over time to eventually be stuck together and become part of the finished mob on stands.
Then one day in the early ‘90s, I found myself at the Air Force Museum with some friends. Near the end of the long adventure with these guys, we were separated and I found myself in a haze of fatigue in front of the showcases that housed the Eugene Kettering model collection. This is a collection of hundreds of hand carved wood model planes in one eighty-something scale, I believe, on extended loan from the Kettering family. From the Wright Flyer to the modern jet age, nearly any airplane from any country you could think of, civilian or military, is represented; most in flight. Taken individually, the models were not impressive. Clear parts in particular – where there were canopies and such – were not fussy. Viewed as a group, as a collection though, it was awesome to behold. I had an epiphany there that day. I would do what I could do to create my own Kettering collection in 1/72nd scale.
For the sake of numbers and the overall impact of a huge number, I saw that compromise was indeed possible (if not downright necessary.) SO much time was devoted on my part to canopies and windows. They had to be crystal-clear, they had to blend into the skin of the airplane and there had to be a well-painted guy behind them. What if I just treated them like an ordinary part of the model and painted them with the rest of it? Black, or blue or silver would work. Simply something to denote an area of plexiglas. The implication took my breath away. Not worrying about keeping the clear parts clear had the effect of waving a magic wand over a significant percentage of my kit collection. Scores of models (bombers mostly) whose poor to horrible clear parts were huge stumbling blocks were suddenly viable members of my revised-look collection. Kits missing a clear part? A canopy? Produce the part with epoxy putty or resin! A bunch MORE kits suddenly had value again.
Hell YES! I couldn’t wait to get back home and commence my black canopied Air Force. The enthusiasm for my new vision would conflict with paying jobs, of course. Nevertheless, I squeezed these “personal projects” in where I could.
My goal was to have as many as I could as quickly as I could. Inspired by the Kettering Collection, I cut corners. Markings weren’t important. The simpler the scheme, the better. “Weathering” wasn’t bothered with. As with what I saw at the Air Force Museum, (such as with a massive ant colony) the individual wasn’t important. The overwhelming number was what it would be all about.
As for stands, I’d gotten hooked on dark metallic blue. I also wanted displayed on those dark blue stands, data that pertained to the model. Type, unit and time period were tediously indicated by individual Chartpak letters and numbers pressed on to clear decal film and applied in strips. This was a carryover from my pre-Hawx Planes days and was a mistake. The idea of fast and simple models became just that: an idea.
I had 28 or 29 in a display case in our living room in 2005. With the last few, it had felt like I was just going through the motions. Then we had to move. The new house would have no room for the old showcase and I gave it to a pal of mine. The models had to be packed for a 100-mile journey. Though there were no antenna wires or anything like that to worry about, they were still plastic models, and as such, kinda fragile. They began to look to me like one more moving pain-in-the-ass I didn’t need. By that time my morale with things styrene and otherwise was sinking. We were saying good-bye to our dream house in a dream location. Next year I’d be 50. It all amounted to crossing a grim Rubicon.
Our new house belonged to people that were big fans of shelving. The upstairs bedroom that would be my model factory had shelves to accommodate my collection, but getting it on those shelves was low on the priority list. Once the essentials were unpacked and the work operation was up and running again to some degree, I pulled my little “gems” out of their boxes of Styrofoam peanuts and lined them up in good order. I hadn’t seen them for a few months, literally. What I noticed (and it concerned me) was that I felt no attachment to them at all.
There they sat, part of the scenery, collecting dust and taking minor damage for close to two years. Any enjoyment they’d given me was gone. It had been replaced by regret for the huge amount of time I’d invested in them rather than paying jobs. (Even if I listed them on eBay, who’d be interested in models that looked like mini-renditions of those mahogany jobs, at anything other than giveaway prices?) And this was not to mention the 40 or so other in-progress at one stage or another examples, mostly just waiting their turn in the paint shop. That big collection idea that had brought these into being seemed pretty dumb now. And if what I had wasn’t going to be part of a bigger group, mostly what I saw in them were compromises. They were not meant to be impressive on their own, and they were not.
On top of that, the move had pointed to the utter impracticality of a plastic model collection. Even this simple sturdy bunch was tricky to move around. An uneasy feeling began to creep into my head and then firmly took hold there. A model collection for me was unimportant. My black-canopied bunch had hit their dead-end. The idea of my own model collection made as much sense now as saving my allowance for a nice bike. The time had come and gone.
I found a tall box in the garage and layered them in it separated by sheets of bubble wrap and put them in the attic. Out of sight, out of mind, out of potential danger and much less clutter to annoy me. About six months later, I bought myself an Airfix Bf-109G, and a tingling began. It's still there.
To be continued?
