Monthly Archives: July 2022

July 26, 2022 · 5:36 pm

AeroQuest 5… Canto 142

Canto 142 – Night Thoughts

It was during that eight-hour period set aside for sleep that Ged awoke in a sweat.  Dreams again!  He couldn’t quite recall what he’d been dreaming, but it gave him the uneasy feeling that it was about his brother Ham, and that it was one of those dreams a Psion sometimes has that comes true.  He was sandwiched in between two small, warm bodies.  Junior was snuggled next to him on one side, snoring softly.  Sarah was on the other side, her small body sheathed in her white body suit, looking like an angel and radiating angelic energies.

The spaceship, in the form of an Ancient Red Dragon, continued to purr with power as it flew through jump space.

Ged knew sleep was highly unlikely for him now.  Still, he didn’t turn on the lights or re-absorb the short brown fur that his Psion power generated every evening now to keep him warm.  He looked at the two sleeping children.  They had grown a lot while in his care.

Junior reminded him of Ham as much as any blood relative would have.  The blue face was totally different from the handsomer half of the Aero Brothers’ Space Safari Service, but the unruly blond hair was similar.  And Ged couldn’t help but call to mind the boy’s wistful smile, so like the smile that made his brother Ham so engaging and heroic.  With one furry hand, Ged reached over and stroked the boy’s yellow hair.  This child was precious to him.  So alien, yet now become an indispensable part of Ged’s life as a spacer.

Sarah, on the other side, was probably the most beautiful child he had ever encountered.  As he looked at her intently, he couldn’t help but think it was far more than a physical beauty.  Her father was one of a handful of so-called Forever Men in the galaxy.  He was an immortal, capable of traveling in a straight line through a thousand years.  He had gifted his daughter with more than a thousand years worth of human wisdom, culture, and literature.  What was more, she was able to draw entire libraries full of learning directly from her father’s head via telepathy.  At less than twelve years old, she was more learned than Ged would ever be.

What was he doing on this alien space craft in a bed between these two amazing children?  How could he ever hope to be worthy of caring for them and protecting them?  Worse, he was now taking them from the relative safety of the planet Gaijin, back into an Imperial Space full of war and violence, cruel pirates, and shambling hordes of rot warriors who were no more than animated skeletons with a computerized control system.  Not just these two, either.  He had a whole shipload of special children that he was now somehow responsible for.  What was he doing here?  How could a talented hunter and space traveler from Questor suddenly be a teacher and the only adult guiding these children toward a highly questionable future?  The thought made him quiver in spite of the warm fur.

Maybe being a teacher wasn’t so bad, though.  He was a natural with loving discipline.  Except for Alec Songh, all of these children adored and looked up to him.  It felt good to be addressed with respectful honorifics and awe.  It seemed he did have something to teach them. 

Shu Kwai had become a powerful telekinetic because of Ged’s success in describing for him the workings of the inner eye. 

Ged’s own perceptive powers had grown exponentially as he continued to practice changing his own shape.  He could transform now not just by taste and touch, but by scent and even by imagination.  He could almost become the creatures of his dreams by placing them at the focus of his powerful inner eye. 

Friashqazatla was gaining a lot in shape-change power from the instruction Ged gave him.  So far, he could only take a humanoid shape with canine features or a small, black wolf with a human brain and voice, but the rest would surely come with time and practice. 

Gyro, the other Nebulon boy besides Junior was learning practically everything Ged knew about starship repair and maintenance.  He could find and pull the skills directly out of Ged’s memory.  He seemed to have a really vast aptitude for anything mechanical or electronic.  He was also a god of mathematics and space-travel equations.  The need to find an astrogator was quickly becoming irrelevant. 

Even the Phoenix and Rocket Rogers were learning from him.  They had a power over fire that he did not comprehend at all.  It was a Psion power completely un-like his own.  Still, they learned to work together from Ged, in the way he had always done so naturally with his brother Ham.  He taught the two boys the hunting language of hand signs and gestures that allowed non-telepaths to speak in silence.  He taught them tracking skills and the interpreting of signs left by those who pass through a place.

But the question that bothered Ged most was, “What have I become?”  He had taken pride in being a moral man, a servant of the true God.  Now, he was the lover of two different women, one little more than a child herself.  His love had caused them both pain and trouble.  And the more he became a Psion and used his power, the more he felt degraded and sick.  He had become a monster.  And what about his brother Ham?

Still, as he lay there awake and troubled he couldn’t help but turn back to thoughts of Ham.  They had escaped from Imperial Space.  They had found paradise.  Don’t Go Here was a source of potential wealth.  He and Ham had liberated the population, revived the starport, and wove them into the great web of space.  They owned the starport and had control over who came in. 

Gaijin was even better. There he had found acceptance.  They didn’t seem to care that he was different and tainted with Psion blood.  They seemed to think it was a good thing.  He and Ham could have a good life between those two planets.  And now, it seemed, both of them were being drawn back into the dangerous realm that was the Imperium.  Looming doom seemed to be beckoning to them both.  Ged hunkered down again between the two sleeping children.  He needed to get some sleep.  Thoughts of the other children in his care, Billy Iowa, Jadalaqstbr, Mai Ling, Hassan Parker, Taffy King, and difficult Alec Songh, could be put off for the moment.  Still, thinking about the future made his stomach churn and sleep remained a stranger.

In the hold, three decks below in the belly of the Ancient dragon starship, the malevolent Tesserah continued to percolate with sickly green and purple lights.  Whatever evil thing the device was supposed to do, it was busy doing it.

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July 26, 2022 · 2:21 am

Where We Now Stand

Where we now stand, if you are going by the picture, is outside in the Texas sunshine and heat. We should be standing, if we were smart, under the shade of the mushrooms that grew up quickly as a result of so much unseasonable rain. Of course, that would be assuming that Mickey is currently a pixie with dragonfly wings, which he probably is not… at least, not right at this moment. Climate change is turning Texas into a giant pressure-cooker with enough leftover hurricane moisture in it to reach an explosive boil by the end of July.

We are being manipulated now by the crafty, vile servants of the deposed idiot-king, treating the righteously-installed successor as an illegitimate usurper.

We are hearing now the testimony of the castle guards as they detail the failed assault of orcs and other monstrosities as they tried to dethrone the legitimate ruler. And one wonders why there are not more beheadings going on in the currently secure castle courtyard. The villains apparently have gained more rights than they deserve.

Still, in a kingdom beset by many ill omens and partisan Republicans, there are good things happening too in the sunshine.

Mickey’s latest free-book promotion gave away twelve e-book copies of AeroQuest One: Stars and Stones. And I have actually sold for money four e-book copies of other books as well, and an additional 400+ pages read on Kindle Unlimited of three other books.

And my mother, now gone from us for ten months, has left me enough inheritance to be out of my bankruptcy for the first time in five years, and, with my two sisters, be a part owner of the family farm that has been in the family for 150 years.

So, we stand together tentatively now, worried about what tomorrow and the next election may bring. But holding the high ground, a good defensive position.

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July 25, 2022 · 2:52 pm

Those Awful Words I Choose to Use

I am a writer who learned to write by reading. Seriously. No, stop laughing at me. I mean it this time. I know I joke more often than not. But this is real. All the good and bad things about my life, all the pain I have endured, all the joy I have allowed to tickle me blue (I refuse to turn pink when tickled, I choose blue instead,) and all the wisdom I have gained by being battered by experience come from the same place, the library of the reading I have done and taken to heart.

Life began for me with Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat and the Cat in the Hat Comes Back taught me that you have to learn hard lessons from life. If you let the cat in the door, not only will your talking goldfish end up in a teapot, but he will be unhappy and two little things will mess up your house. Oh, and if you make the added mistake of letting the cat take a bath, you will turn the snow in the entire neighborhood Pepto Bismol pink. Horrors! But I not only learned the wisdom of not repeating mistakes I have made, but I never let any cats with red-and-white top-hats into our house throughout my entire childhood. Not even the ones who could talk.

The most important lesson I learned from multiple books I read as a child, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe, and The White Stag, was that I could experience other people’s lives through reading a good book. I was ready for most of the bad people and bullies in my youth because I had been on that ship with Jim Hawkins. I could deal with loneliness and isolation because I had been on that island with Robinson Crusoe. I could evaluate the amount of trouble I was in and make a plan to get out of it because I had been Kidnapped in the book. And I had my own white stags to follow in the forests of my planned future… and fortunately, lost the trail to become a teacher.

Of course, when you read a book, the author gives you insights into the nature of the characters in the story. You see inside the people being told about, learning that they have their own inner story that you can clearly read and learn from and even become.

And the truth of the matter is that real people have their own inner story too. Something is going on inside almost everyone. (Maybe not carrot people. I have only ever met one. But vegetables, unlike humans are simple and not filled with conflict.)

You can read real people’s stories too. If you watch them carefully with empathy as your quiet superpower, you can read the elements of conflict within them. Though never as thoroughly as you could if you were reading them in a book. You can sense their embodiment of familiar archetypes.

Reading living people in the real world is something school teachers do. Students especially are emotionally naked almost every minute of almost every class. (Not literally naked. That would be gross… and possibly illegal.) But the stories pass before your eyes constantly. It would be impossible NOT to read them.

I have seen and studied in depth the writing of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Michael Crichton, Terry Pratchett, and Neil Gaiman. By reading I have learned how they write. And they Write Naked. That’s the book Diane Callahan talks about in the very excellent video I linked to the start of this post.

Sometimes I write literally naked. (I know you may think that’s gross, but I have my reasons. And, besides, I am literally a nudist.) But I write emotionally naked too, as the video suggests I should. That involves writing about certain horrible words that make up what I most need to write to be authentic. Let me list a few of those.

  • Death – Here is a thing that everyone needs to deal with in order to reach maturity and survive growing older without going completely insane. Somewhere in life you have to make peace with the Grim Reaper. And I have haggled with the old bone-head more than a few times.
  • Suicide – I have been in Emergency Rooms five times with severely depressed people. I was not the one contemplating suicide. I was there to help. I have lost a second cousin, three former students, a high school classmate, and a fellow teacher to suicide. I only survived my own bout with it because of a friend on the other end of a telephone line. And, thank God, so far I have saved more depressed people who confided in me than I have lost. I can give you no names here. But I have to write about it in fiction form.
  • Sexual Assault – In the long run I have forgiven him, now that he is dead. But he seriously screwed up my life. And I was only ten. It only happened once, but once is enough. And some of my best fiction is linked to this emotional nakedness. I have written more than one book about it.
  • Depression – This killer of dreams I still deal with. Diabetes makes it worse. Thankfully it is not the deadly thing it was for Sylvia Plath that Diane talks about in her video while discussing The Bell Jar.
  • Loneliness – The ache of being invisible when that’s the last thing you need to be.
  • Fear – H.P. Lovecraft and the Bible helped me with this one. Of the two, the Bible is far more scary. But you have to face fear not to be consumed by it.
  • Is that a good enough list to write naked from? Let’s add feelings of inadequacy. But still the list is not complete. It will never be enough and there is not enough time left in the universe to write it all.

So, I write with awful words about terrible things. And it is apparently a key to writing well. What some of us won’t do to touch your heart with nest sentence! Thank you for putting up with me.

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July 25, 2022 · 2:29 pm

A Colored-Pencil Drawing of Music

I now have the ability to scan an artwork with my phone. And this is significant because I do have a number of artworks too big to scan in my current scanner/printer. But I really don’t have anything more to say about this particular picture. I will not tell you what it means. That is for the viewer to decide.

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July 24, 2022 · 5:58 pm

Take Time to Deteriorate More Slowly

I am only going to be 65 years old for four more months. Then I will be 66… even if I croak off this mortal coil before my birthday. It is heck getting older. My eyes and memory and joints all work far less well then they did a decade ago, even a year ago, heck, even last week. They don’t tell you this when you’re young, but you don’t have to be dead to start decomposing. And that doesn’t mean un-writing this essay, though maybe that would be a good idea based on that last sentence.

It is inevitable that the longer we live, the more our aging bodies are going to gradually break down, work properly with more difficulty, and cause us pain and loss.

And as we age, our minds drift back to childhood and days long gone. We obsess about little things. Especially the little things we have lost.

The sense of adventure is mostly gone from our daily lives. Things have settled into a permanence, and the limits of fame, fortune, and future expectations have all been irreversibly set. All we can do to reclaim any of that is to reflect, to remember, and to tell stories about it.

I had a recent story idea that I have begun calling by the title The Haunted Toy Store. It is about a small-town store filled with antique toys that nobody ever buys. And the store owner is very creepy and quiet and does practically no business. People wonder how he makes a living. But there are definitely ghosts in the toy store. And in the long run, it is discovered that the true customers are the ghosts. And the toys are actually the people that are lured in, especially the children, that the ghosts play with. It is not a horror story. It is a comedy adventure. But, like any good story, there is conflict and a number of scary moments.

Why would I even consider telling a story like this? Well, because I am old. There are certain truths, certain experiences, and a lot of goofy observations that I still need to tell about my life, and pretend that somehow it all adds up to wisdom. I am growing old, walking around naked more than ever, forgetting where I put my glasses while I am still wearing them, grumbling to myself like a cereal killer (I did not misspell that, I mean killing boxes of high-fiber cereal,) and arguing with the dog about whether or not dogs can talk, or if I can trust her to write another blog post or not. I will probably be losing my mind soon. I keep forgetting which box I put it in last night when I wake up in the morning and need it again. So, I better slow down and try to do it all the right way.

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Filed under feeling sorry for myself, goofy thoughts, grumpiness, insight, Mark Twain, oldies, philosophy

July 24, 2022 · 2:59 am

Quackatoonity (Religion Where Ducks are Always Watching)

Yes, the universe was not formed in a big bang. It hatched from an egg. And God is the Ultimate Mallard.

Anatidaephobia (pronounced anna-tidy-phobia) is a pervasive and irrational fear that you are being watched by a duck. A person with this rare phobia fears that somehow, somewhere a duck is watching their every move.

This phobia about being watched by a duck may seem like a strange basis for forming a new religion. But I may have had an epiphany as a child when a goose at Deer Farm Zoo stuck his neck, head, and beak of retribution out through a hole in his chicken-wire cage and nearly nipped me in my five-year-old neck. That epiphany led to recurring nightmares about being chased by a duck with large white teeth that looked like he had bad human dentures in his bill.

This I tended to interpret as a sign that I was facing a big decision about what I would attempt to do with my young life, and would do it wrong.

Ducks in the farmyard, you see, are temperamental, often impulsive, and randomly violent. They will punish you for sins you did not know you were committing.

So, in this Quackatoon faith in judgmental ducks who are constantly watching our every move, thought, and deed, we should be taking Saint Donald Duck as our role-model and guide. When we see sin and wrongness in the world we are watching, we must dissolve in incoherent rage. Point your finger. Shout things that no one understands. Get the world’s attention. Confuse them completely. And get them to wonder what they did to make you so rage-filled and dangerously aggravated.

Then, hopefully, they will realize their sin and immediately mend their ways. Or at least, rearrange their feathers.

Or we can rely on the incompetent vengeful wrath of Saint Daffy Duck to see the unrighteousness in the rabbits of the world around us, posting Rabbit Season signs everywhere, and getting his duckbill blown off via the shotgun of a nearby Elmer who has been tricked into thinking ducks are rabbits.

Well, that might not be the most efficient prosecution of God’s will on Earth. But at least it will leave us laughing. And who can sin who is laughing that hard?

At this point in trying to establish this new religion, I should probably be talking about financial matters. Where you can send donations to the Church of Perpetual Quackers? Will there be t-shirts with religious slogans like, “You’re Driving Me Quackers!?” Do we still bring deviled eggs to church socials?

But I can’t talk about that right now… a duck is probably watching.

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July 23, 2022 · 6:10 pm

If You are the Villain

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July 23, 2022 · 4:14 pm

A New Day Art Day

So, how do you follow up a thing like starting a new religion like Quackatoonity? Should you follow it up?

I mean, this is Art Day. And I need a theme for Art Day. How about, “Art with no ducks in it?” Well, Ducks are always watching from somewhere. So, I guess that’s a no-go.

Of course, I could always try to prove the “toon” part is real. I am a cartoonist. I do do cartoons. (Haha! He said, “doodoo!” Shows you the level of humor he will sink to.)

This cartoon is a bit creepy and definitely surreal. This was done more than a decade before I even met my wife. But the two boys seem to be four years apart in age, just like my real-life sons. They do not, however, have visible horns on their heads. This is supposed to be surreal, not photographic.

So, there’s a weird cartoon story for today’s Art Day post on a New Day. And nowhere in sight will you find a duck in it… OH, NO! THERE’S A DUCK IN IT!!! How does Donald do that?

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July 22, 2022 · 7:22 pm

Be Better, Not Bitter

Be better, not bitter,

Even on Twitter.

And if baking while bitter,

The batter will be better,

If you swallow down the snitter,

And don’t be bitter while it bakes.

You’ll be lauded then on Twitter,

And your diners will all titter,

Because the batter will be better

And you won’t be baking bitter cakes.

You will have to forgive my terrible poetry at the beginning of this post. I can’t help myself sometimes.

But just because someone is a terrible poet, the way Mickey professes to be, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to them. Mickey has considerable experience with the topic of being bitter. After all, he was a teacher for 31 years, 24 of which were spent in middle school monkey houses.

But nothing is ever made better by being bitter. No matter what was done to you, how you were insulted, or what injustices you suffered, it does not make things better to get revenge or even plot revenge. The fire of hot anger burns while it is inside you, but, in truth, you are the only one who really feels the heat, the only one who really gets burnt.

You can’t even solve the bitterness by reasoning with the one who offended. They will not listen to reason. They will not yield to authority. You cannot make them do or feel anything that you want them to do or feel.

But you can forgive them. You can tell a joke, even if you are telling it on yourself. You can do the one thing that will do the most to make them feel better… listen to their actual concerns.

So, now you know…

Bitter won’t get better…

Unless you let it.

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Filed under feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney, Paffooney cartoony, poetry, satire

July 22, 2022 · 12:42 am

I Sweetpotato What I Sweetpotato

If you are as goofy and cartoon-obsessed as me, you may remember that Popeye the sailor was known for the catchphrase, “I yam what I yam”. And if you do remember that, it will not surprise you that, when told a yam is another name for sweet potato, Popeye was furious. “It cannot be!” he argued. “I would not say I sweet potato what I sweet potato! That’s ridicumess!”

Well he has a point.

But I would like to talk today about the things that I sweet potato, and why I sweet potato those things.

First of all, I yam a humorist.

I yam this thing not because I am funny. You may think I yam funny because I say really goofy things for no apparent reason, and then keep on talking long enough to convince you that I did have a point to make, but my brain leans so far to the left that I am hardly right about anything.

And I make bad puns a lot.

You see, I have to use humor constantly to deal with all the hard things in life, because being too serious in the face of the world’s basic uncaring cruelty only leads to depression and taking a beating from life. In fact, I can think of any number of situations in my past where I avoided a beating only because I made a joke that made the bully laugh.

So, being a humorist is a survival tactic. Humor keeps you alive.

You see someone like me has to face all the pain and heartache and cruelty the world has to offer by using humor. The real reason is that, when faced with a bad situation, if the humor gland can’t empty itself of all the jokes it produces, it will begin to swell. The humor gland is located either in the brain or maybe in the behind (I am not medically qualified to tell you which it really is), and it can only swell to a certain point, and then it will explode. This is very bad thing for you, if you survive it, and certainly unpleasant for anybody nearby.

But the joke, properly launched at the target, will make somebody laugh, even if it is only the humorist himself. And laughter is the best medicine. Unless it kills you. You have to be careful not to die laughing. The angels will be offended, and the demons will all laugh too.

But I yam not only a humorist. I yam also a teacher.

I began to realize that I might be a teacher when, in graduate school to get a remedial master’s degree to help with the fact that plain English majors all starve to death, I discovered I had a talent for explaining things in simple terms. And then, immediately afterwards, I discovered I had an even greater talent for being ignored while the people I was explaining to made the mistakes they wouldn’t have made if only they had listened to me, before they failed spectacularly, and then realized how the solution I had explained would’ve made them succeed instead. There is apparently no better way to learn an important lesson.

Teaching is, of course, a pretty cool job. You tend to have the summers off. And you get paid for summer because they split the amount of money you earn for the year (which considering what a babysitter makes on average per child and per hour is far too little for the hours you put in) into twelve monthly pittances.

Of course you are expected to have a university degree (although no teacher college in the world can teach you what you really need to know in order to face that many little monsters… err, darlings… every day) and preferably some grad school, and a certification to teach in your chosen subject, and an additional certification if you are going to teach more than one subject (and ESL and Speech and Journalism, all of which I was expected to teach, are separate certifications) and you have to take hours of additional training every single year, and you have to get re-certified every five years, and… Well, you have to be basically smarter and much better-educated than Bill Gates… But the school janitor will probably be making more money per month than you do.

Anyway, it’s a job you just gotta love. I yam a teacher.

And really, there are a whole lotta yams in my basket yet that I could tell you about. I yam a Red Skelton fan. I yam sometimes a nudist (when I don’t have to put on clothes to keep myself from scratching all my psoriasis-plagued skin off). I yam also an artist (of the type known as a cartoonist). I yam pig-headed sometimes, and I yam Grumpy sometimes (so I go from being Porky to one of the Seven Dwarfs.) I yam a lotta things. And my sweet-potato basket is large.

But I can’t talk about all of my yams today. Too many yams are bad for my diabetes.

But here’s one last yam. I yam a storyteller. And I have a free Kindle e-book promotion this weekend. The book is the first in my series of AeroQuest books. It is a science fiction story with a humorous bent. And I mean, it is seriously bent in some places.

So, click on the link and get yourself a copy. It’s funny. And I will save the other sweet potatoes for another day.

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