Category Archives: angry rant

December 4, 2020 · 8:05 pm

Only Bad Guys Seize the Moment?

Political opinions are like dead fish…

You have to use them while they’re fresh because they quickly start to smell bad, and they then can make you ill.

He never should’ve won in the first place. He lost the popular vote. FBI Director Comey and the Russians gave him boosts over the finish line that he didn’t deserve. And after he got away with stealing the election, he went on a crime spree that went completely unchallenged by his own party. In fact, as the party totally in power, they supported some of the very worst offenses he committed against the average people of the United States. He took away environmental regulations to hurry along the killing of our atmosphere, and eventually the biosphere of the whole planet. He struck damage into renewable energy initiatives, pulled out of the Climate Accords, and championed polluting coal over anything sensible in the name of bringing back coal industry jobs, which he promptly failed to bring back.

He undercut farmers by taking away Chinese markets with tariffs, thereby contributing to hunger in China, bankruptcy for family farms, and a boom in China sales by Brazilian farmers.

He then screwed over DACA recipients who are basically raised to be Americans, kidnapped children from asylum seekers at the Southern border, and spewed hate-and-fear rhetoric all over the American media mindset.

He has subverted the basic values of not only the Republican Party, but the whole of the United States as well.

So, we used our voting power. And a record number of votes were cast to bring him his karmic reward.

But my question now is simple. Are we really gonna let him run again in 2024? He committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Shouldn’t we lock him up rather then let him continue to steal money from Republican donors, throw anti-election tantrums, and produce the touring company of the Rudy Giuliani Clown Show?

Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune

Any other worker fired for total incompetence would immediately be shown the door and the replacement would immediately get the chance to start fixing the damage his incompetence caused.

Can’t we do that now? Why does this cat get to poop in the government sandbox for another month and a half? Do we really have a shortage of turds in Washington? Flush him already!!! If he were anything but a Republican, he would’ve been down the toilet hole after his first year.

They say you don’t get the government you vote for; you get the government you deserve. But what did I ever do wrong to deserve this?

3 Comments

Filed under angry rant, cartoon review, humor, politics

November 11, 2020 · 9:12 pm

Grifters, Politicians, and other Cannibals

Yesterday my daughter was attacked by online scammers through her account that she uses to sell her precious paintings. I am still kicking myself for not seeing through it from well before the money was lost.

The evil grifter contacted her about buying her painting for $20.00. That’s a mere twenty, well below what it is actually worth when you add up the canvas, the paint used, and the time she spent on it. Let alone the worth of her talent and original ideas. He said he wanted to buy it, add gift cards to it, and have her send it directly from our house to his girlfriend’s house. This meant that gift cards were to be purchased by my daughter, put into the package and mailed. When I heard that he was sending $330.00 dollars to her by PayPal, I thought initially she was getting the real value of her work. But I had a headache and didn’t fully understand when she explained the PayPal contract she had. PayPal supposedly was going to hold the money while she purchased the cards, and then would release it to her to reimburse her. But she used all $200 in her account to buy two of the three cards he wanted, and PayPal was supposedly refusing to release any of the money until she proved that the three cards were activated. So, I contributed $100 to bail her out and get the last card. I should have been way smarter than that! In proving that the cards were activated to PayPal, she was actually giving him all the numbers he needed to own the cards and spend the money at his leisure. The PayPal link he emailed her was a fake. He got what he wanted and then some. Fortunately he didn’t get the painting.

I told you recently that I am getting dumber with age. I got scammed myself for $3000 dollars in 2007 when I was told I had won a $50000 prize from Publisher’s Clearing House from a contest my father had entered me in. I was given a real check for $3,000. I am gullible when it comes to trusting people I haven’t really even met. The scammer reclaimed most of my bank account money before the bank discovered the check was a fake. Never mind that my father ordered magazines to enter in those contests on more than one occasion. I was liable for the money that got sent to Canada for fake reasons.

The real problem is, it seems, that in the modern world, if you are not a meat-eating predator or a meat-eating scavenger, you are considered meat.

People who are rich and don’t actually need to squeeze me down to where there’s nothing left but bone and gristle are constantly treating me like a farm animal to be harvested. Bankers are pirates. Bank-o Merricka taught me that when they sued me rather than allowing me to do a debt-reduction program. Politicians like the evil Trumpinator are cannibals. I found that out when in 2017 his, “Big, beautiful tax cut” saved most of the people I knew $50 on their taxes, while I owed an additional $1,600 dollars because the December tax cut was retroactive for the whole year, and it required more in withholding from worthless, “taker” pensioners like me.

I grew up in a world where most of the people I knew were basically honest and hard-working. Now I live in a world where, to be successful, you must eat red meat. And I get to be the meat. That’s a good enough complaint to actually feel like I got it off my chest for a change.

8 Comments

Filed under angry rant, feeling sorry for myself, Paffooney

November 8, 2020 · 10:24 pm

Why Have I Grown Dumber with Age?

No, this is not a picture of me.

This is Garrison Keillor, an author, a humorist, and a Midwesterner. I have some things in common with him, but he is not me. So, why is his picture here instead of mine? Because I am growing dumber and I picked the wrong picture.

Seriously, if I do have Parkinson’s Disease like my father before me, that erodes your short-term memory. I had to go back to the grocery store today to buy the things I forgot while I was in the store yesterday. This, of course, included bread. I mean, bread!!! If you live on a peanut-butter-sandwich-based diet, bread means life. Short term memory is a pretty important thing to be losing. I know you are probably thinking, “Mickey, write it down. Make a grocery list.” I did. I forgot it at home fifteen minutes after I finished it. The three items I forgot were all on the list.

And I have found being a writer gets harder with age because years of reading student essays has left me unable to spelll and make verbs agrees with subjects and other writing stuff that you really has to know if you wanna do it good. (Why didn’t the spell-checker flag “wanna”?) I have to look up immediately, embarrassment, and noticeable every time I try to write them. (Including this time… And I find myself using incomplete sentences too now way more than I….) You know what I mean?

And I have three kids that have now all reached adulthood. I survived three very different puberties with three very different results. I have grown more liberal with age. So, naturally, my kids are all conservatives. And they all basically have me convinced that I don’t know anything about anything anymore. And they are probably right. But I reserve the right to be skeptical about their diagnoses of early-onset dementia until I see the evidence in front of my eyes… my really old eyes that have glaucoma and will probably go blind. But I remembered to vote for Joe Biden. And that is a good thing. A smart thing. Even though high school friends on Facebook are all thinking about un-friending me over not admitting the superiority of Trumpocratic thinking in the United Trump-States of Trump-America. What is it about farmers loving Trump after their farms all went bankrupt over the Chinese tariffs kerfuffle that was actually only a penis-length contest between Stormy Daniels’ magic mushroom and Chinese President Poohbear (Don’t have me killed, please, Xi. I just don’t know how to spell things in Chinese. And , hey, you could be his twin brother.) I should be smarter than to insult Chinese and Russian presidents. But I’m not.

I have only gotten dumber as I have gotten older. (Did I remember the “b” at the end of dumber? I did? Well, one for Mickey, then.) Hopefully there is still hope.

Leave a comment

Filed under angry rant, autobiography, feeling sorry for myself, humor, satire

November 4, 2020 · 8:04 pm

Election Eve Hangovers

I do not drink alcoholic beverages at all, not even wine or beer. There are doctors’ orders that explain that bit of my life I have six incurable diseases after all. But I have a hangover after last night.

Needless to say, the election did not go entirely my way. We may not be able to get rid of the Killer Klown from Manhatten at all. And we definitely haven’t gotten out from under the Republican Death Cult that encourages us to go to super-spreader events and catch Covid or else they will invade the Michigan State House and burn the female Democratic governor at the stake after a witch trial in the woods.

Ideally you should get the government you pay for in taxes and they should protect you and pay for the services that keep you alive and educate your kids. And it would be nice if they built government infrastructure like safe roadways and bridges, hospitals, schools, and other useful things.

But a majority of the people who voted last night were apparently voting for our tax dollars to enrich billionaires and pay for secret service men’s trips to cathouses and golfing games at Mar-a-lago. That, after all, is who won in the senate. They will continue to do favors for the Koch Brothers and the Walton Family to make them richer while the rest of us pull our unemployed behinds up by our own bootstraps and show a little gratitude to the Senators who are planning to take away protections for pre-existing conditions at SCOTUS on the 10th..

Ah well, I can’t afford to be sick even on Obamacare. I can barely afford to die with the next health problem. It is such a headache to be alive right now. A hangover headache. And I can’t even have alcohol.

8 Comments

Filed under angry rant

November 1, 2020 · 6:47 pm

After the Apocalypse

I am starting this post as I often do, with an unplanted seed of an idea that I decide to stick into a fertile place and see what grows. It is a very poor way to plan an essay, but it has yielded a very good essay by the end of it on more than one occasion. Of course, it often ends poorly too.

So, we begin to look down this dark and smelly rabbit hole where strange ideas live because the world ends on Tuesday when Trump gets re-elected with a minority of the actual vote and a majority of the dirty tricks. Because if he gets re-elected, his nightmarish deregulations of everything that needs to be regulated in order for billionaires and corporations not to continue to make profits over destroying people’s lives and the ability to eat the world will make it impossible to undo the damage in time to save the environment from collapse, and us from extinction. And I don’t want to even mention whether or not I think the Trump family deserves to be extinct or not, I am through talking about him or laying blame anywhere.

The fact is, even if Biden wins, he’s not behind implementing the Green New Deal, and his vision of reform will still cause the end of life on Earth.

Remember, I am a pessimist. I always expect the worst to happen. But the worst is BAD. We really should be trying to avoid it, not be stupid enough to deny the problem even exists just because a Senator from Oklahoma can bring a snowball into the Senate Chamber.

And remember too we still have the Covid 19 pandemic to survive as well. If, as it appears to be the case, you can get the illness again a second and third time, each round causing more internal damage if it doesn’t kill you, the virus may well stick around long enough to infect everyone enough times to drive us to extinction. I fully expect to die from the virus before that nightmare is all over. And I realize that some think that, because the virus is killing Texans and Floridians at ever higher rates with each new wave of infections, that that is merely a “good start” towards killing the real problem. But I love a lot of the people in both States. And just because Governor Abbott and Governor DeSantis and Mickey Mouse and Matt McConaughey are all probably part of the problem, it doesn’t mean I would take comfort from having them die of the virus along with me. But don’t ask me about Trump, the monkey-flinger has already declared himself immune for life and completely kissable. Augh!

You have probably realized by this point that this is a bit of bitter black humor from old Mickey. But I don’t want to leave you with a totally hopeless opinion of what I think is ultimately true. I still have hope for the future. The picture above is mostly done in black ink, using up more than one pen in the creation of it. And yet, the real subject is the light. Yes, the light of the lighthouse. The two luminous children. And the full moon. I have hope for the Green New Deal (if Trump doesn’t win.) I believe in the children I have left behind when Covid kills me, both the ones I raised and the ones I taught. And if it all fails in the end, it was still worth doing. Even when Trump wins.

Leave a comment

Filed under angry rant, humor, insight, Paffooney

September 24, 2020 · 6:44 pm

I’m Not Gonna…

If you are planning to vote for this criminal for four more years, you don’t wanna read this post.

I am not gonna talk about any of the good things that this criminal prexydent has done… because there aren’t any. He has only caused me loss and pain and financial hardship. And it is fairly obvious he won’t win four more years… unless he cheats, which he has publicly promised to do.

And I am not gonna talk about how he and his gang of senatorial hypocrites are stealing another seat on the Supreme Court. It is obvious that they can’t be trusted to tell the truth. They said when they stole Merrick Garland’s seat that it was because it was an election year and the people must decide. But this seat opened up much closer to an election day and suddenly the rules are different. But I am not gonna talk about that.

And I am not gonna talk about how he thinks he can further punish all of us who are against him by making the most right-wing court in recent history with a six to three edge so that he can destroy the Affordable Care Act, all progress in the battle against climate change, women’s right to choose, and any other progressive change that may come up under the next three or five prexydents if we succeed in getting rid of him.

And I am not gonna talk about how thoroughly racist he is, sending unmarked and unidentified militias into cities protesting the police killings of unarmed black people just so they can stir up more violence and help him make his case that black crime is out of control in Democratically run cities.

And I am also not gonna talk about how this orange-skinned man is insulting black and brown congresswomen like Ilhan Omar, calling them unpatriotic for serving in the Congressional seats that voters gave them, based not on their qualifications for the job (they are much more qualified than he is for his job) but solely on the color of their skin and the religion they embrace.

I am not gonna talk about how some real law-enforcement official should’ve removed him from office for crimes already committed a long time ago.

Clint Eastwood is a conservative, but I’ll bet he isn’t in favor of Trump stealing the 2020 election.

So, I am not gonna say anything further about or against this criminal clown that has killed so many of us and continues to scheme about our ultimate demise and his personal profits. He does bad things… especially to my blood pressure. I need to not talk about him anymore. I am gonna vote during Texas early voting, in person, to make sure my vote gets counted. And I am not gonna vote for a Republican ever again. I am simply not gonna!

2 Comments

Filed under angry rant, politics

September 11, 2020 · 5:46 pm

Recovery

My son has recovered. His COVID test came back negative. He is feeling much better, and he plans to go back to work tonight.

I wish getting back to normal was as easy for those of us who are old, tired, weak, and still devastated. There are a number of long-term things that have to recover.

The climate is the biggest thing. In twelve years we have to go from degrading our atmosphere at record levels of toxic crap expellations and Western States going up in flames to helping the the biosphere heal itself.

It may already be too late. We may have already irreversibly exterminated all life on Earth.

But there is reason to believe that human creativity will invent drastic solutions that we can actually be forced to implement, those of us who don’t lose our lives before that spark of genius becomes a wildfire.

But we also have to recover from a world where selfishness and hatred have grown to a point that many of us can no longer function as a part of the world. The economy is broken. Almost all of the wealth in this world flows into the pocketbooks of less than one percent of the entire world’s population. And they don’t use their wealth to benefit the rest of us, like they were forced to do back in the Eisenhower administration. They become more and more hate-filled and more greedy. They hoard their wealth, pouring it into stock buy-backs and further acquisitions, puffing up their bank accounts. And then they blame the working poor for being too lazy to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (a magic trick that defies gravity, and I have never seen actually working.) People label each other as “the other” and begin seriously hating each other on the basis of skin color, religion, or party affiliation. If all of mankind shared only one body, it would be severely infected and probably terminally ill. Its critical organs fight against each other.

We will not save ourselves from climate change without first solving the “Me-first!” crisis.

I illustrated today’s rant with an oil painting I did with peacefulness in mind. The Native American child and the stag on a starry night are supposed to symbolize peace, harmony, spirituality, and hope, all of which we desperately need to heal ourselves. There is not enough of that going around in the non-oil-paint world.

So, my family is recovering from the darkness where we’ve recently been. But we will never be recovered until, as a world, we all help in the recovery.

2 Comments

Filed under angry rant, Paffooney

August 31, 2020 · 7:07 pm

Today in Rabbit-People News

Okay, big miscalculation here. My old eyes can’t read the rabbit-talk in this cartoon. So, let me do something about it.

Nope. I can read it now. But that’s the problem. Not only is it not funny, but it’s also sorta racist. But wolves do eat rabbits. Still…

News in the RabbitTown Gazette includes the fact that my son is nearing recovery from COVID 19, and nobody in the house has caught it from him. He gets tested on Saturday so he can return to work if the test is negative.

Of course, the nation-wide news is not so great. This is 2020 after all, even in RabbitTown. The price of carrots is still within reach. But rabbit people are continuing to get sick from the pandemic which will be with us well into 2021.

And the weasel in the really bad weasel-wig that somehow got elected Prexydon’t is still favoring wolf-people, even when they kill an unarmed rabbit. And he blames the rabbits for being mad about how the wolves seemed to get away with murder. He twists the facts to suggest that exercising your right to peaceful protest is the cause of the chaos.

Yes, I am basically a rabbit too.

According to the featured editorial in the RabbitTown Gazette, you should be able to say, “Rabbit lives matter!” without having wolves answer back, “You mean ALL lives matter!”

After all, if you can’t admit out loud that “Rabbit lives matter,” then you really mean the opposite when you are saying, “ALL lives matter.”

Rabbits, whether they are black, white, brown, or red, have unique rabbit qualities, and they all have a basic worth. And I don’t mean as food for wolves.

The paper seems to have only bad news about the economy when you look at it from a rabbit perspective. Sure, the wolves are doing great right now on Wall Street, but that doesn’t help those of us who are not invested in the stalk market. We regular rabbits, and especially poor rabbits, are struggling to keep carrots on the table.

So, it is time for all good rabbits to do whatever a rabbit can. And that’s the way it was today in Rabbit News.

Leave a comment

Filed under angry rant, artwork, cartoons, commentary, humor, Paffooney, rabbit people, racial profiling, satire, surrealism

August 17, 2020 · 7:02 pm

Fighting the Good Fight

I like to think of myself as a good person. In fact, having been a successful public school teacher, I basically feel that calling myself a hero is not the same sort of toxic narcissism that Prexydental Trumpalump displays when he thinks of himself that way.

I need to get it through my thick head that everyone sees themselves that way, and that it is universally untrue. We let too much badness go unopposed. We are hard-hearted too often towards our fellow men and women… and children… and animals… and the planet as a whole.

We see others who are different than ourselves as “others” and exclude them from our groups, some of us going so far as to villainize others just because their skin is green, or because they know what “Blogwopping” means and we don’t. And what we villainize, or demonize, or verminize, we feel righteous in harming, even exterminating.

So, what’s the point I am making? Am I such a loathsome creature that the only way I can make the world a better place is to curl up and die? Of course not. That’s the darkness talking me back into grave ideas and depressed thinking. I need to spread a little of that old Norman Vincent Peale peanut-butter on the slice of toast that is my world. Yes, a little bit of positive thinking can re-butter your toast for the better in order to prepare you to battle the battles that must be fought and won.

A true warrior is not the guy doing the most killing on the battlefield. And he is not the one who dies for his country either. Both may have their place in a war, but neither is the one who wins it. A true warrior is the one who endures to the end. The last man standing. The one who rules the battlefield at the end of the day.

So, what do I mean with all this warrior nonsense? I mean, my Great Grandma Hinckley was a true warrior, because she steadfastly led her family through five generations of it, and made more generations possible.

You say the world is dying of climate change? My Grandma was a relentless garden-keeper, helping us to survive with garden-fresh sweet corn, sweet peas, pumpkins, squash, and carrots from her garden. And she planted a multitude of flowers every year to keep the bees happy and a everything they pollinated growing.

You say we may succumb to pandemics and plagues? Grandma Hinckley was a maker of chicken soup, a mender of wills and willpower in the downhearted… church-goer, psalm-singer, user of Vick’s Vapo-Rub, Dr. Scholl’s inserts, Werther’s Original Butterscotch and Hard Candies, and if worse came to worse… Castor Oil!

And for political problems… government corruption and such? Well, maybe you can’t still vote for FDR or Eisenhower… but you damn sure better vote.

Yes, my Great Grandma Hinckley was a true warrior.

And so, I am ready for the fights to come. I will be a warrior like her. I will be a problem-solver, and I will endure. Because that’s just what you do, no matter the odds against you. I learned it from her. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one with a warrior for a grandma, or mother, or father, or sister, brother, wife, or son… even daughter. We stand a chance if we will only stand together. And we do it for love.

Leave a comment

Filed under angry rant, autobiography, battling depression, family, goofy thoughts, healing, humor, inspiration, Paffooney

July 5, 2020 · 6:17 pm

Pontification

Yes, I am guilty. Yes, I will probably do a lot of it in this essay. Do I make stuff up out of thin air to support my pontifications? Well, I try not to… most of the time.

That bit of pontification I just shared is not mine. It’s Vonnegut’s. But it is pontification never-the-less.

To be fair, this manner of delivering information, founded on the basis of revealed Divine authority (as if I were the Pope) is not an evil thing… if it is not misused to propagate misinformation and lies. It is often used to convey moral imperatives and Christian values. And to be fair to me, I rarely pontificate unless I am joking and don’t mean to be taken seriously.

Never-the-less I am often told that my fiction is didactic and my essays tend to hold forth with my convictions and conclusions as if they were revealed to me in a visitation from a burning bush or something.

From my humble perspective, however, I wish to point out that I have, through years of teaching experience and encounters with grave issues that affect health and wealth and happiness, learned a few things the hard way that count as wisdom. I would offer the defense that, in spite of what my wife would tell you, I am NOT always wrong about everything. (I am maybe only wrong about most things.) And as such, my opinions, backed up with facts and anecdotes, are sometimes worth listening to.

As I am probably not going to overcome my habit of pontificating any time soon, I should probably warn you about some of the things I have been thinking about of late that I am likely to pontificate about in upcoming blogs. Here are just a few;

  1. Bad things that happen to Good People are what actually turn them into Good People.
  2. The reverse is not always true. Good things happening to Bad People can worsen them, but they become Bad People when the good thing we are talking about is getting away with doing something bad.
  3. The world is coming to its end. Of course, it is always coming to its end, until it reaches its endpoint at which it probably won’t end and then the prophets of doom will have to pick a new Doomsday that probably won’t end it either… though it might.
  4. The St. Louis Blues hockey team gets to be Stanley Cup Champions for two years in a row because of the pandemic. COVID 19 was only 99% a bad thing.
  5. If you are a three-inch tall fairy warrior, a rabbit as your faithful steed is better than riding rooster-back. That’s because if the spell wears off your mighty steed, the rabbit won’t mistake you for a bug and eat you. (But never disguise yourself as a carrot to hide from humans while riding rabbit-back.)

So, I admit to having bouts of rabid pontification. But I would argue that it is a very natural bad habit for a retired school teacher to have. Up until my retirement I regularly delivered the Word of God (as filtered through the Texas State Board of Education) to kids in a classroom.

They would often respond, “Oh, God! Not again!”

To which I would answer, “I am not God. If I were, there would be lightning right now.”

6 Comments

Filed under angry rant, humor, strange and wonderful ideas about life