Monthly Archives: February 2015

February 28, 2015 · 8:07 pm

Rabbit People

castle carrot

On days when I am still recovering from life-altering blows, I often try to find new realms, alternate realities to live in.  (Retreating into a fantasy world is one of the reasons she gave for leaving.)  And since, as a youth in Iowa, I raised rabbits for a 4-H project, I know rabbits better than I do human people.  Rabbits are people too.  So, I have been walking among the rabbit people.  Seriously, bunnies are better people than most human people.  They are not trying to profit off you.  They are not trying to get everything they can off you.  They are merely there to wiggle their whiskers, sniff for food, poop, gnaw on stuff, and make more bunnies.

Mr. R Rabbit

I often see myself as a rabbit person.  In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.

As a teacher, I am always pulling out carrots of irony and gnawing on the ends of them in front of students.  If they complain that eating food in class is supposed to be against the rules, I ask them, “Do you want a carrot of irony?”

“Oh, no, thank you sir.”

“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight.  You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”

“Oh, no sir,” they say.  “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”

And so, I taught on like that… like a rabbit, fast and frumious (a Jabberwocky sort of word), and never really bit anybody.  Teaching is like that.  You offer the good healthy stuff to nourish their little animal minds, and they always choose the junk food instead.

Millis

And so life goes on like that.  Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.

I have started on the final edit of my novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  One of the main characters in the book is Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit Millis.   During the course of the story about invading aliens, Secret Agent Robots from the CIA, and making friends when you need friends, Millis is turned into a rabbit-man by a lab accident.  He teaches Tommy that you don’t have to be human to be a good, caring, self-sacrificing person.  He also teaches him to eat his carrots and greens like a good boy should.

So, I will spend more time with the rabbit people and heal a little bit.  That is what you do with the tragedy that life brings you.  You spin it into whole cloth, making humor and poetry out of everything bad that happens… wrapping yourself up in a comforting blanket of lies (you can also call those fiction stories), and eating a little chicken soup on a cold day to heal your soul.  (Oh, I forget, rabbits often gag on chicken soup.  Let’s make that bean soup with carrot chunks.)

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February 27, 2015 · 1:35 pm

Cold, Hard Truth

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At the snowy end of a cold, hard week… I have some facts to face.  As a family we are suffering from anxiety disorders, depression, and other mental health issues.  And my family is coming apart at the seams.  You may have noticed that much of the joy… the love, and life, and laughter… has gone out of my recent posts.  We are breaking up.  We are not staying together as a family.  I am not spending much time feeling sorry for myself about it.  I have known the potential consequences for quite some time.  You can’t pull the family wagon over the next hill when one horse is pulling to the west, another goes east, and two more go south.  Families often come apart with age.  Children leave the nest.  Sometimes you push them out so they will start flying on their own.  But sometimes they plummet to the ground and break a wing.  Sometimes they break two wings when foxes are prowling nearby.  We have had too much pushing and plummeting this week.  Words have been spoken that I wish were not.  Fires have been lit not to keep us warm, but to burn things down.  And the snow is still coming down.  I will be all right.  I do not fly away when the winter comes.  I will stand by my children for as long as my legs will hold me upright.  And if you have read this far in this gloomy, grisly post, don’t be sad for me.  Happy times we all enjoy make good memories, but the hard times hammer us into stronger, more tempered steel.  Life is a great forge, and we are all under the hammer of God.

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Remember, the cardinal is my personal symbol because he is the little, bright-red bird who doesn’t fly away when the winter comes.  Cardinals bring warm red colors to coldest of winter days.

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February 26, 2015 · 12:39 pm

“Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune”

Ra When I was a teenager and suffering from a terrible secret, I first began to see and hear invisible people.  I know this is not normal.  In fact, it comes under the heading of “wacko-stupid-maniac-loony”.   The first one was my friend the faun.  Now, for those of you who do not know, a faun is a mythological creature in the shape of a man (or possibly boy, or even little girl) with the legs and tail and horns of a goat (or possibly kid).  This creature is a sensual being in the Dionysian tradition.  Wine, women, and song so to speak.

When he first came to me it was a snowy winter’s night, long about December of my 17th year.  At that time I was still repressing the memory of what happened to me out behind the neighbor’s house when I was ten.  But I guess I knew I needed help in reaching out to others.  I was lonely and convinced that for some terrible unknown reason I was a horrible creature not worthy of love.  Then he came rapping at my window.  He was kneeling there in the snow, outside my upstairs bedroom window, on the roof of the front porch of the house, naked except for the goat fur on his legs.  But he wasn’t shivering.  After all, he wasn’t real.  No one but me would ever see him.  He was grinning at me.

“You aren’t going to leave me out here in the snow, are you, stupid?” he said.

“Who and what are you?” I asked, as I opened the window.  The snow was shining with a silvery, blue-white light that originated with the street light out in front of the house.

“I am Radasha,” he said.  “I am your faun… the part of you that feels things and needs things… the part of you you have stupidly been pretending doesn’t exist.”

All right, I know it sounds crazy.  But I needed him in my life.  Elwood P. Dowd had an invisible white rabbit.  Why couldn’t I have a faun?  And it was a very, very good thing.  He taught me how to laugh, and how to love… how to actually live.  And I know he has always been inside me, not really separate from me.  In many ways he is the real me.  But crazy people have their own set of priorities.  And when I was a confused teenager whose personal self-concept had been sexually violated by another, older boy… Radasha was mine.  An invisible friend to talk to.  One who could explain everything… make me laugh and make me happy.  And there is a sound to that.  Do you know the piece by Debussy that this post is titled after?  It is my favorite piece of music in all the world.  And it tells the sweet-sad story of Radasha and me.

Island Girl2z

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February 25, 2015 · 12:30 pm

Why Space-girls Come from Iowa

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Yes, Iowa is a State with very little going on.  Not overly populated.  Not a center of arts and culture and the avant garde.  In fact, it is a State so literally boring that it is a perfect place for someone like me with cancer of the imagination to live.  I grew up in the town of Rowan, Iowa.  275 people if you count the squirrels (and believe me, some of the squirrels are premium corn-nuts).  I confess to peopling the place with the characters and creatures that welled up from the crazy, dark depths of my imagination.  Yes, they were real people, but the things I knew about their secret lives as international spies and alien invaders masquerading as humans were probably not provably accurate.

There was a time when alien potato people gave me an embryo to guard that would be raised as a human being.  When I showed it to my friends, they claimed it was a carved potato with spherical-headed pins for eyes.  Now how were they going to pass off a carved potato as a human being when they wanted him to take his place as a Russian cosmonaut to interfere with the space programs of two countries?  And how did they expect a twelve-year-old boy to make a carved potato grow up to look and act like a human being?  Alien potato people never adequately explain themselves.

And Iowa girls are something else that you have to see to believe.  Are they pretty?  Well, I went to Moo-U, Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.  Why did they always call it Moo U. or Cow College?  Well, more than one of my friends told me that it wasn’t because it was an agriculture and mechanics sort of college.  Oh, it was definitely that.  But they suggested all the girls at Moo U. were fat and desperate and at college to get an M.R.S. degree with a specialty in ball-and-chain.  I must admit to being chased by a couple of cow-shaped co-eds, but I always found Iowa girls to be absolutely fascinating.  I always imagined them in bikinis and nearly nude, even though, with Iowa weather, there is really only about fifteen minutes a year in August when you could really say we had bikini weather.

I was thirteen in 1969 when Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon.  My dreams were space fantasies.  My connections with alien invaders were nearly exposed by the potato-people’s embryo snafu, but most of my day-dreams took me to Mars alongside Alicia Stewart, the prettiest girl in my sixth-grade classroom.  She was always wearing a bikini when we explored Mars… usually underneath her space suit… her see-through glass-and-plastic space suit.

So, as I claimed in the the title, space-girls come from Iowa.  At least, in my mind they do.  In my feverish retro teen-aged imagination they do.  And if I can continue to successfully put fiction into print before I die, you will probably see a lot more of them.

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February 24, 2015 · 5:26 pm

Snow Babies Come to Dallas

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We have a second day off from work and school.  The ice and potential snow is far from a blizzard, but sometimes the mere presence of snow can aid the death that stalks on silent cat feet.

My novel, still in the process of publication, called Snow Babies, has a central problem that concerns a blizzard.  The primary threat, or possibly antagonist, of the story is a deadly blizzard that descends on a small Iowa town.  In the midst of blizzard, whether they are actually hallucinations, ghosts, or banshee-like harbingers of death, are a number of snow babies.  I call them snow babies.  The Japanese call them yuki onna.  They are spirits of the snow that can both lure people to their demise and help to save them for brighter things in their later lives.

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I can’t actually speak about who or what the real life ones stalking about the suburbs of Dallas actually are.  Lives are at stake in my world right now.  I have to deal with some serious depression and mental challenges right now.  The foretold consequences include things worse than death.  I can no more name them than the owner of a glassware factory can afford to take up throwing stones.  Things will shatter that I am trying desperately to protect.  One thing that will definitely help is the passing of the snowstorm.  Just like in my book, people are forced together in the areas of love and warmth that they depend on to survive.  The snow babies themselves are, as you can see by my paffooney illustration, naked children bleached snow At this post is not meant for you.  It is done for me.  It is a statement of resolve and personal refusal to accept that what comes is due to fate alone… that no one can ever change an outcome.  No story-teller ever believes that is the case.

So, here is a post from the snow.  I was born during a blizzard.  I have always known that the snow will come for me in the end.  And it is very cold now where I live.  More snow is in the forecast.  But I will never give up trying to be warm.

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February 23, 2015 · 4:23 pm

Snow Day 2015

Snow panic has hit the Dallas area.  Schools are all canceled.  Idiots are out ramming their cars together on the freeways.  TV reports plead for Texans to stay off the roads if travel is not actually necessary.  We are snowed in by a light dusting of snow and a serious patina of ice.

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We Iowegians transplanted to Texas laugh at storms like this.  It should not stop school.  I drove through worse than this last year when I still worked for the only school district who refused to cancel school on an icy, snowy day over a year ago.  But, a break to daily plans is a welcome thing, except possibly for the fact that you are stuck in the house with family all day with nothing to do.  Hopefully we can stand the togetherness.

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February 22, 2015 · 5:49 pm

A Toonerville Trolley Special Delivery

In honor of the unexpected snow day, and to mourn the death of the stupid daffodils, here’s an episode of Toonerville Trolley that I just had to share.   I need me a laughin’ place right about now, and Toonerville has always been that place.

Maybe tomorrow she will shout, “You no worry!  Katrinka fix!” just for me.

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February 22, 2015 · 5:32 pm

Time Marches On

new kid

My life is rather fragile at this point.  I have recently been ill with a virus.  For me, as a COPD sufferer, that can be fatal.  My lungs will easily clog and become a serious case of pneumonia.  A virus like that will probably be the death of me.  I don’t have the money it takes to go to the emergency room.  Medical costs have perched my finances over the edge of the chasm of bankruptcy.   Caught on a couple of tree roots, my ability to pay for anything dangles over the abyss.  The next emergency will be my last… a conscious decision.  Man, my blog is a real hoot so far, huh?

But as cold and rainy weather moves in… I am at peace.  I have been at war all my life long.   I have fought the war against ignorance by being a school teacher.  I have fought to make a life for my family, and though financial security is not a part of that, I can testify that my three kids are creative and wonderful people that will survive and make me proud.   And my written work, novels and this very blog, are complete enough to secure my legacy of ideas, beliefs, and wisdom to be passed on.

Now, I know that this all sounds like a depressed person saying goodbye.  In some ways that is what it is.  But it is not something to be worried over.  I am not depressed.  I am on medication to prevent debilitating depression.  I have helped members of my family overcome depression.  I am a warrior, and I know how to strike back against the darkness.  I will not take my own life.  I am, in fact, very good at survival.  Thirty-two years ago I beat malignant melanoma.  I have six incurable diseases that I have successfully juggled and dealt with for years.  There is no humiliating thing or gruesome test that doctors haven’t either inflicted upon me or allowed me to narrowly avoid.  I may continue to struggle on for many years.  If I am saying goodbye in this post, it is only a just-in-case goodbye.  It is really more of a statement that I believe I have achieved what a person needs to achieve in life to be successful.  I have completed a quest.  When I was a gawky doofus of an Iowegian teenager, I made a vow to be a wizard.  I wanted to learn and share wisdom.  I believe I have done so.  I am wise enough to know that no man lives forever, and with all the factors arrayed against me, I know what comes next.  So, I apologize for no humor in this post.  But the Toy Soldier Paffooney in this post inspires me.  The forced march continues… and it will not end until the soldiers can no longer put one more foot forward.

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February 21, 2015 · 8:02 pm

The Dog-Walk

Yes, I will admit to walking the dog for all the wrong reasons…  I take her to prevent more poop piling up in the house on the living room carpet, but that’s just the most obvious reason that my wife and kids truly believe is the only reason.  The truth is more sinister.  When life goes against me (like my recent trouble with anti-teacher policies in Texas and the scourge known as insurance pirates) I take the dog out for walks so I can stumble and grumble and swear at the dog.

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I took my camera along on this walk because I needed something to post for today even though I am all grumbly and rumbly and not ready to write.  As we were taking off, I noticed my wife’s daffodils had sprung up to look around, confused by the warmer, wetter weather than we normally get during the time of year when Dallas is known for freezing Superbowls solid.

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Daffodils, like most Texas residents, are a little naive and a little too ready to think only good things can happen to them because they are white and relatively wealthy and very Republican, living in the State at the center of the universe.

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Then the second one pops out.  Like any other Texans, two together make the average IQ in the room drop.  Opinions get tossed back and forth to snowball into masses of prejudice against Mexicans crossing the border, too many black folks, too many people on food stamps eating up all the profits, and other massively bright blossoms of bigotry.  Sometimes they watch Fox News together and get really dangerous.  But fortunately, when two or more fear-charged brain-cells come in close proximity to each other (a feat that requires at least five Republicans) they begin to develop an electro-magnetic sixth sense and begin to perceive truth on the far perimeter.

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The forecast in North Texas for this coming week is for a strong chance of severe winter weather (for North Texas that is the code for a slight chance of snow).  So, I got a good laugh at daffodil expense.  But, I guess I don’t really hope they die an icy death.  I’m just grumpy because sometimes my life just doesn’t progress very well.

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February 21, 2015 · 1:53 am

Teachers Aren’t People… (Apparently)

Black Tim

If insurance companies are people in the same way the Supreme Court says that corporations are people, then they are pirates.   Not Robin Hoods of the Sea sort of pirates who take from the rich and give to the poor.  No, we are talking about the kind of pirate that latches on to the people too powerless to resist their boarding actions and wrings every last penny out of their rudely squeezed and and drained souls.  That kind of pirate.

The reason for the rant is not something I can fully discuss here.   I am in need of a mental health professional for a member of my family.   Of course, if you have read this blog, you probably have already assumed I am talking about me.  Having been a middle school English teacher the suspicion that I have let all the doves out of the loft is a pretty safe assumption.  Still, one would assume that a retired teacher with health insurance should be able to get whatever professional help he needs.  Not according to the company reps who are happy to take my monthly premium.   Previous Psychiatrist, Dr. Good, was one of the best in the city.  He understood the problem better than any other doctor we encountered, including the emergency room doctor and the behavioral hospital doctor.  But our lovely education-friendly State of Texas has to cut back spending on education.  Teachers make too much money and have too many expensive benefits.  And besides, tests clearly show that we are not doing our jobs right.  (This part is true and not merely sarcasm… of course, the tests get harder every year to prove we are doing worse by lower scores).  So, Statewide we have gone to cheaper health insurance.  Dr. Good doesn’t deal with the cheap-o company.  You can’t blame him.  They don’t pay actual money for health care because that cuts too far into profits.  So, no more Dr. Good.  And we haven’t yet found a doctor  to replace him.   Worse yet, we have been working with a therapist who is more patient and kind than we probably deserve.  He has been billing us only the co-pay and negotiating with cheap-o for the rest of his fee.  The previous insurance gladly paid for his services as he helped prevent needless trips to the hospital and helped us accomplish minor miracles.  Cheap-o  told him that even though he’s listed in-network, he isn’t really in-network  and they don’t intend to pay him for the last four months.  Damn.  I hate pirates.  They don’t treat you like a people…. more like a milk cow or something.

So, with extensive stressors in my life, and poor health getting worse, a little depression to boot… it’s gonna be all right.  God and the devil will work something out.  Since I’m still alive, I can safely say, life is good.

Black Wizard

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