I never voted a straight ticket before. And technically I still haven’t. I voted for 15 Democrats and two Libertarians*. This is my first time voting for zero Republicans, I have voted in the past for Republicans like John Cornyn and Charles Grassley. That was back when there were still moderate Republicans. John and Chuck have both yielded to the dark side. There were a couple of Republicans that might have tempted me, but they were both running unopposed, so zero Republicans this year. Take that Sith Lord D’arth Donaldious.
*I do realize that most Libertarians are at least mildly insane. But some of them actually support liberal education agendas, probably because they are not completely sane.
It is an unusual position to be in as a kid in the school room to be the creative kid. First and foremost because you will forever be known as the weirdo, the spaceman, the egghead.
How do I know that? Because I was that kid. And I grew up to teach that kid. And now that I am retired as a teacher, I am still that kid.
If there was a problem to be solved, a picture to be drawn, a group assignment that required somebody to actually think, I was the kid that everybody wanted to be in their group or be their partner. (That time that Reggie and I blew up the test tube of copper sulfate in Mr. Wilson’s chemistry lab doesn’t count because, although I am the one who dropped it, he’s the one who heated up my fingers with the blowtorch. Honest, Mr. Wilson, it is true.) But if it was picking teams on the playground, I was the last loser to be called, even though I was pretty good at softball, pretty good at dodgeball, great at volleyball, and usually the leading scorer in soccer (of course we are talking an Iowa schoolyard in the 60’s where soccer was a sport from Mars.) And as an adult, I enjoyed teaching the creative kids more than the rest because I actually understood them when they explained what they were doing and why, and I was even able to laugh at their knit-witty jokes (yes, I am including those jokes made of yarn with that pun). Creative kids speak a language from another world. If you are creative too, you already know that. And if you aren’t creative… well, how foo-foo-metric for you.
And another unfortunate side effect of the creative life is that you make stuff. You don’t have to be seriously infected by bites from the cartoon bug or the art bug to be like that. My daughter is making a suit of armor for herself from a flat sheet of aluminum that she is pounding out by hand, painting with spray paint and painter’s tape, and edging with felt. After she’s done with it this Halloween, it will go on one of the piles of collections and models and dolls and stuffed toys and… Of course, sooner or later one of those piles is going to come to life and eat the house. There is no place left to display stuff and store stuff and keep stuff that is far enough away from potential radioactive spider bites. I have scars on my fingers from exactor knife accidents, oil paint, and acrylic paint and enamel permanently under my fingernails. Shelves full of dolls rescued and restored from Goodwill toy bins, dolls collected from sale bins at Walmart, Toys-R-Us, and Kaybee, and action figures saved even from childhood in the 60’s are taking over the house and in an uproar, demanding to be played with rather than ignored. (Didn’t know dolls can actually talk? Haven’t you learned anything from John Lasseter?)
Anyway, it is tough to go through life being excessively creative. I have art projects growing out of my ears. And book publishers are calling me because my award-winning book is not generating sales in spite of two awards, 5-star reviews, and generally good quality, but the only solutions they have cost ME money I don’t have. Oh, well, at least it isn’t boring to be me.
This is not an essay about what I am thinking while sitting in an airport terminal. This is about the end of things. Not just my own personal end, which via heart attack or stroke may happen at any moment. But the ends of hope and dreams, of birds and bees, and possibly life on earth.
On his last hunt, Eric bagged two illegal immigrants and a lion. He would’ve bagged the girl too, but his dad the President reminded him that Judy Garland is a white girl and he doesn’t have a current hunting license for that.
Now, I just eliminated 75% of Trumpkins with that last joke, mainly because they didn’t understand, but also because they feel insulted by it. Whenever I say anything about how the current government policies have impacted my health, wealth, and happiness they tell me I am a snowflake and they insult me further because I hurt their feelings. 25% will keep reading to find ammunition to use in hate memes on Facebook and rage tweets on Twitter. After that last Facebook kerfluffle, I am tempted to disengage from social media. They are not buying my books because of it. They are only getting madder and madder at me and hating me more and more for being a goddam liberal. Though, when asked, they still assure me they would never unfriend me.
Relationships with people I have always known and cared about are one of the things threatened with imminent demise. The domination of politics and government by the Republican Party is the reason why.I
I myself don’t have to worry too much about the demise of prosperity. I am already bankrupt and planning for a future life living in a cardboard box. But as Trumpian economics continue to work on world markets, everyone else will soon be joining me in suburban-yard farming and eating insects for protein. Tariffs and trade wars are already destabilizing the world’s economy. Stocks are beginning to fall. Of course, the consequences won’t fall on us like a ton of bricks until after enough Republicans win re-election in 2018 to protect Cinnamon Hitler from the crimes he committed to become President.
Of course, the biggest coming demise that I wish to lament in this post will basically take care of all other things. The demise of all life on earth will pretty much take care of anyone’s need to lament about anything. As the world becomes hotter and hotter, and the oceans turn to acid and rise to swallow Miami, and the planet becomes more of a twin to Venus, the Koch Brothers and others who profit from polluting will be laughing about it. They will either be safely dead of old age or ensconced in gilded survival bunkers. They may even have another planet to live on already.
Okay, as I hyperbolize and carry on about doom and gloom, I need to remind you that I am a pessimist. I always plan for the worst so that I can only be pleasantly surprised. And it really can’t get worse than what I am planning for here. But that is not to say there is no hope. All of these problems have solutions. But I don’t anticipate they will be solved under present conditions.
The Russians decided the election in 2016 and put a criminal in the office of the President of the United States. Enough concrete evidence and testimony of expert investigators now exists and is freely available enough to make a clear case for the truth of it.
They will probably get away with it. Republicans control the government even though they get fewer votes than the other party. This is because they cheat. They use voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other dirty tricks to stay in power supported by a base that is controlled by fear, prejudice, and partisan tribalism. They ignore the rule of law when it favors them getting what they want. This country is no longer a democracy.
9/11 is a terrible event, but it was not perpetrated by terrorists. It was done by government organizations working together to hide the truth and cover the wealthy elite who made money and gained power from this horrible event. The airlines that were hijacked made money for Wall Street investors who bet the stocks for those specific airlines would make a sudden fall in value. The airplane (or possible missile) that hit the Pentagon hit the budget offices that were investigating the missing trillions of dollars, and the money was never found.
Aliens are real and routinely visiting our planet. Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan all knew this for a fact, and the rest of the presidents since Truman may have known it as well… Though probably not Trump. He would attempt to steal from the aliens or find some other way to make money from them. The evidence is there in the form of testimony, artifacts, whistleblower testimony, photographs, and documentation that sometimes slips out of the government’s grasp. The very real cover-up of the truth of it is also evidence of the reality of it.
The human mind is an incredible thing, with bizarre capabilities that we are only beginning to understand. Synesthesia and savants with mysterious brain powers are also a documented reality. Remote viewing and other mind powers have not only been studied by the government but used by them.
Bizarre things are often more true than the ordinary mundane things we all believe in every day. You are welcome to argue with me. I wish many of these things were not true. But I know better. And that sick feeling in your stomach is evidence that you know better too.
A new art project that will (hopefully) depict the negotiations of young love.
Human relationships do not work as a zero-sum game. Let me take a moment to explain. A zero-sum game is where one side wins, which means the other side has to lose. In mathematical terms -1(the loser) + 1(the winner) = 0. So, everyone who plays this game will either go all out to win or they will end up losing completely. Faced with only those two outcomes, the game player is tempted to cheat. Especially if the stakes are potentially life or death. After all, in issues like the national debate over health care, the loser gets to die.
This is, of course, what we have seen played out over the course of the last two weeks in the appointment to the Supreme Court of a radical right judge who was accused by a credible witness of a disqualifying action. It is only a matter of the destruction of a judge’s career versus the defaming of a professional woman who was a teenage victim of attempted rape and sexual assault. It is a very serious zero-sum game set up maliciously in order to achieve political power for the white male ruling elite.
This zero-sum game was won by the grinning evil cartoon mutant man-turtle over the minions of Mad-Looker Booker and the forces of “being right but never winning”. The consequences are decades worth of malignant conservative rulings like the Citizens United Ruling and rulings about health care that take away things like protections for people like me with pre-existing conditions. Losers get nothing. And eventually, the winners have nothing to show for it because the sum is zero.
The orange-faced Trumpinator was right when he predicted we would soon reach a point when we were tired of so much winning. I am definitely tired of Trumpkins winning all the time, especially when they are so heartless in the way they bully and cheat. The problems with the court would not be so severe if the Republicans hadn’t cheated on Justice Merrick Garland’s nomination and stolen that one from Obama to give to old Pumpkinhead. And when it came time to let the FBI investigate the allegations brought up in the confirmation hearings, they cheated again by forcing the investigators to ignore so many corroborating witnesses. You can’t find proof of something by not looking for the proof. (Of course, they were obviously motivated to NOT find anything.)
The solution comes from the fundamental principles of representative democracy being explained repeatedly on various news outlets by Ohio Governor John Kasich. He has been pointing out that what we really need is bipartisanship in government. All sides need to bargain it out so that everybody wins something and nobody wins everything. Compromise is what the Congress is put in place to create. The Supreme Court solution would have been to rescind the tainted nomination and find a candidate that could be broadly supported by both sides.
But in the current era of ruthless Republicans obliterating and overruling diminishing Democrats, non-toxic bipartisan solutions are not going to happen. The two sides, the Neanderthals and their bonkable warclub targets, will continue to bash away at each other with their warclubs. And the Neanderthals will continue to cheat. And in the long run, everybody loses. The overall sum, after all, is zero.
Mickeys are by their nature pessimists. When mostly bad things happen to you in your life, you learn not to expect good things, only be pleasantly surprised by them. And bad things happen only when you are prepared for them if you are expecting only bad things to happen. In fact, the bad outcome will probably seem good in comparison to the terrible thing you were planning on happening to you.
For example, my car is in the shop being fixed for accident damage that prevented me from earning extra money through Uber for a month and a half. I was told on Thursday that the car doors were fixed and it was in the paint shop. It was possible I was going to get it back Friday afternoon. I was not upset or surprised that I never got the call Friday. In fact, I fully expected somebody had dropped the car off a lift or painted it neon puce or something and that it will take another two weeks to fix the new damage. So if it turns out to be ready tomorrow, which I sincerely don’t expect due to Mickey Math, I will still be pleasantly surprised. I might even go into happy shock. After all, I clearly remember one time watching a tow truck operator load my malfunctioning car onto a flatbed tow truck, only to see it roll off the front of the truck to further damage it because he had not properly secured it. That yielded happy shock because the body shop owner who also owned the tow truck ended up repairing my car for free.
What is the science behind Mickey Math, you say? Oh, you didn’t say anything? Well, I will tell you anyway. In a world where 2 + 2 = 4, if Mickey desperately needs the answer to always be at least 4, you can be certain by experimental proof and past experience that it will surely come out as 2 + 2 = 3. Life and physics always disappoint Mickey one way or another. So the science tells Mickey to always be prepared for the worst.
That being said, here are some predictions for the near future figured out via Mickey Math.
Since Trump’s tax cut last year retro-actively re-figured withholding deductions on my pension and I owed $1300 in tax penalties for 2017, I will surely pay twice as much in additional penalties this year in spite of the letter from last December telling me readjustments were being made for 2018.
Trump is in all kinds of legal peril and the scandals of his presidency will probably lead to the Republican loss of control in Congress. Therefore the Republican Party will have a governmental coupe (in case Russia fails to swing the elections to them) which seizes absolute power for them and makes Trump President for life.
If hurricanes don’t wipe Texas as clean as a marble tabletop, then we will experience our first day of 200-degree temperatures in early January.
The baseball Cardinals will not make the playoffs, and the football Cardinals will return to having endless losing seasons.
Termites will eat our entire house, and mosquitoes will drink every last drop of my blood.
Now, it is quite possible that things will fall short of most of these dire predictions, but that is how Mickey Math secures happiness from a miserable life.
Today’s post should probably be titled with “raspberries” rather than “strawberries” because of the alternative meaning of strawberries being a red abrasion or scrape instead of the double meaning I actually need. But I had strawberries from Walmart to serve for breakfast, not raspberries, so that totally ruined the potential metaphor.
I tend to like to watch the news while I cook breakfast for the kids. Hence the need for raspberries. I mean, the angry orangutan in charge of my news-related happiness or horror is on a real tear about now because he can feel the law and the news media zeroing in on every crime and criminal thought he has been playing with for decades, intending to prosecute both him and those who support him. Like several of the speakers at Senator John McCain’s funeral, I have no need to directly blow raspberries at him. The oblique and carefully worded ones will do fine. But I do have nothing but raspberries for him. The things he is doing to health care, education, the environment, and international relationships have either undone the good the government has previously done or made the made the matter much worse.
Of course, the Pumpkinhead in Chief is not the only evil, bloodsucking monster in the news that makes me blow raspberries at the TV screen during breakfast. I will specifically try to sort out my voter registration problems so that I can register a vote against Grandpa Munster… err… I mean, the Zodiac Killer… err… well, you know, that guy whose name I do not wish to invoke at the moment to protect my children and virgins everywhere. It is a problem because I let my voter registration lapse as a Jehovah’s Witness, and now the State of Texas won’t let me renew it by mail. I have to find the proper registration office to sit in for hours being glared at by Republican officials who see on the paperwork that I was a registered Democrat more than two decades ago.
I also blow raspberries at Republican hard-heartedness that still hasn’t reunited children with their immigrant asylum-seeking parents out of fear of letting too many brown people into their “white” country. Raspberries also for conservatives that talk about Democrats being violent and chaotic people as they post threats of shooting deaths for liberals on social media.
I’m sure you have probably already concluded that having the TV on during breakfast makes for rather rootie-tootie-fruity breakfasts around our house. And you wouldn’t be wrong.
I also have raspberries to give the Chicago Cubs this time of year as they try to beat my Cardinals out of the playoffs once again. They deserve lots of fruit. Particularly pineapples thrown at their prissy blue helmets during late innings of games they are winning.
But, fear not. My dietary health is safe for now. I am getting fresh fruits. I am fortified with vitamin C. It happens that we are eating STRAWBERRIES, not raspberries for breakfast. And strawberries are good for you, even if the morning news is not.
After four days of working on getting my car fixed, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel. I have not gotten it into the shop yet. I still have to climb over the middle divider from the passenger door because neither door on the left side of my car can be opened. Both are bent and jammed.
But the gaggle of insurance agents squabbling over who pays for it all is beginning to sound like I might not have to shoulder the entire burden myself. There is a consensus that the accident was not my fault. (Probably due to the fact that the police officer making the accident report clearly stated it was the other goofball’s fault in his written report.) So, Geico, the perpetrator’s insurance, has generously agreed to pay 85 percent of the cost of repair and rental car. (85 percent??? Why not a hundred??? Apparently, because I couldn’t testify with 100 percent certainty with my hand on a Bible that I had my lights on at a quarter to noon in the rain, even though I am in the habit of having my lights turned on even if it is just cloudy and would’ve automatically turned them off when I got out of the car to prevent the warning dinger from dinging. That should cost me $300, right?) My insurance agent from Progressive is willing to argue all the way to arbitration that I deserve 100% coverage, especially since Geico is paying for it, and Uber also stands ready to be coerced to pay if need be because I was on my way to pick up a meal delivery at the time of the accident.
So, I am hopeful in a pessimistic sort of way that I am not going to be socked with another bill that is higher than my emergency fund (which I maintain on the orders of my bankruptcy lawyer).
But it is not only good news about car repair that I am finding questionable today. I have also made progress on a stubborn printer/scanner that has been failing to work properly since I bought it new. I discovered I needed to go online to download an HP printer driver, not once, but twice. Apparently, it had been rendered useless because just after I downloaded and made it work the day I bought the thing, HP decided to update that software with critical patches that I did not have. So, the second download allowed me to discover…
…That the scanner bed was still too small to scan the size of art needed to scan my graphic novel and get that usefully re-created through scans on the internet. You can see the cover is too large to scan the whole thing in one go. I am, however, tricksy enough to scan it in parts and paste the whole together with the paint and art editing tools I already have on the computer. I intend to start doing that to get Hidden Kingdom up and running on my Dungeons and Dragons Saturday posts.
Here’s an adjusted scan to increase my ability to copy and paste a whole together from parts…
It should be easy to quilt together the artwork over time and provide a view not grayed out by having to reproduce the black and white pen and ink art in shades of gray, the way I must if I try to do the thing photographically.
And I can definitely say that scanned art is better than photographed art.
I have included a couple more scans to prove the point.
I hope you listened to Joe. Not just the first part, then got bored and disgusted and turned on Fox News. I hope you listened all the way to the end and heard the hopeful things he says there. He is a very good video essayist who uses real science to reason with you about questions that are really about life and death. One way we may be going to die as a species is through climate change and global warming. The dire predictions we get from climate scientists, whom nobody seems to take seriously, are becoming increasingly alarming. If we are too stuck in our own little kingdoms and don’t look the castle windows at the weather outside, we are not only going to have our parades rained on, it will be acid rain, and the parade marchers will get boiled on the hoof as they march.
Those of us who put too much faith in the Trump Train, burning its beautiful clean coal, are going down to the bottom when we get to the canyon bridge and the train roars off the tracks. Just ask Paul Manafort after his trial ends, or Jeff Sessions after Trump fires him to make racist sausages out of him to serve at an I-Love-Putin Picnic, what the ride has been like on the Trump Tongue Express.
But, of course, the Pumpkinhead in Chief is not the only reason we have no money and no jobs and are going to be roasted to death in a polluted world. There is also the little matter of Trillions of Dollars in Debt that was racked up to make the rich richer and people like me foot the bill.
I know you may be suspicious of an interview conducted on RT which is an arm of Russian propaganda in the USA. But I should point out, if you like Trump, you like Russia already, and both of these journalists, Chris Hedges and David Cay Johnston, are not afraid to tell the unvarnished truth. That means the mainstream media is uncomfortable about putting them on the air, and those who want to stir up trouble find it easiest to do that by simply allowing access to researched facts and basic truths we are reluctant to hear.
If you don’t believe in the predictions offered by science, it is bound to be because of one of two different things. Either you see the science and follow how the results of computer models become overwhelmingly dire, disgusting you with a total lack of optimistic outcomes, or you reject science in favor of the oil companies’ rose-colored fairy-tale outlooks where unicorns will consume CO2 clouds and fart out benevolent rainbows. From where I stand now, broke and old and ill, it doesn’t matter much to me. In the short time frames we are looking at for global-warming Armageddon, I will undoubtedly reach the end of my natural life. I probably won’t be around for the horrific-suffering part of how this all is going to end.
I know if you haven’t turned away from this heat-death-of-the-planet idea already, you are probably pretty depressed by this point in the essay. I know I am. It does not bode well for my children and any future grandchildren. But I will leave you with the reminder that we are human beings. And human beings are complex and able to solve large complex problems. We put men on the moon. (Or we did the even harder job of faking it and not letting the secret be discovered for fifty years, complete with space-travel debris on the moon that you can take photographs of from earth with a really good telescope.) So, just maybe this massive terrifyingly horrible problem can yet be solved in the nick of time. I do believe in the good that can be found in mankind. But I also see the corruption and evil. So hopefully Mark Twain’s final hope for mankind, that this time when God drowns us, there will be no Ark, will be thwarted. Believe me, I have no wish to die a horrible death. But I am a pessimist after all.
I was feeling good after making arrangements to pay off the IRS and both of my hospital bills over time in amounts that I could squeeze out of my present retirement income. Then a random act of stupidity in the rain deprived me of my ability to earn extra money through driving for Uber.
I was driving north in the rain towards the meal delivery I had from Panda Express. I was in the left-hand lane driving next to the median on the divided part of Josey Lane. I was in no way expecting to need any defensive driving measures. In fact, I wouldn’t have succeeded if I had been able to react. The other driver turned directly into my drivers-side doors, effectively sealing both of them so they could not be opened. He told me he didn’t see me in the rain. I suppose it is possible that was true, but I don’t see how considering how clearly I saw him at the last moment.
Sudden surprise bangs and damage are not particularly good for diabetics, either. I got pulled off into the parking lot, canceled my Uber delivery, and had the shakes so bad that I could barely call 911. My fingers didn’t work properly.
But by the time the ambulance had arrived, my brief battle with shock was over. My blood sugar checked out fine in the ambulance and they let me talk to the police and then drive my damaged-but-still-drivable car home.
Now I have the nightmare of dealing with insurance and how I am going to pay for it.
My wife tells me that since the accident obviously wasn’t my fault, I shouldn’t have to pay for any of the damages. Of course, we all know that in the buccaneering world of American insurance, that is not how it works.
So now I can honestly report that I am physically okay, and financially in worse jeopardy. Such is the way the life of Mickey is apparently intended to work out.
Catch a Falling Star 
Terminal Thoughts
This is not an essay about what I am thinking while sitting in an airport terminal. This is about the end of things. Not just my own personal end, which via heart attack or stroke may happen at any moment. But the ends of hope and dreams, of birds and bees, and possibly life on earth.
On his last hunt, Eric bagged two illegal immigrants and a lion. He would’ve bagged the girl too, but his dad the President reminded him that Judy Garland is a white girl and he doesn’t have a current hunting license for that.
Now, I just eliminated 75% of Trumpkins with that last joke, mainly because they didn’t understand, but also because they feel insulted by it. Whenever I say anything about how the current government policies have impacted my health, wealth, and happiness they tell me I am a snowflake and they insult me further because I hurt their feelings. 25% will keep reading to find ammunition to use in hate memes on Facebook and rage tweets on Twitter. After that last Facebook kerfluffle, I am tempted to disengage from social media. They are not buying my books because of it. They are only getting madder and madder at me and hating me more and more for being a goddam liberal. Though, when asked, they still assure me they would never unfriend me.
Relationships with people I have always known and cared about are one of the things threatened with imminent demise. The domination of politics and government by the Republican Party is the reason why.I
I myself don’t have to worry too much about the demise of prosperity. I am already bankrupt and planning for a future life living in a cardboard box. But as Trumpian economics continue to work on world markets, everyone else will soon be joining me in suburban-yard farming and eating insects for protein. Tariffs and trade wars are already destabilizing the world’s economy. Stocks are beginning to fall. Of course, the consequences won’t fall on us like a ton of bricks until after enough Republicans win re-election in 2018 to protect Cinnamon Hitler from the crimes he committed to become President.
Of course, the biggest coming demise that I wish to lament in this post will basically take care of all other things. The demise of all life on earth will pretty much take care of anyone’s need to lament about anything. As the world becomes hotter and hotter, and the oceans turn to acid and rise to swallow Miami, and the planet becomes more of a twin to Venus, the Koch Brothers and others who profit from polluting will be laughing about it. They will either be safely dead of old age or ensconced in gilded survival bunkers. They may even have another planet to live on already.
Okay, as I hyperbolize and carry on about doom and gloom, I need to remind you that I am a pessimist. I always plan for the worst so that I can only be pleasantly surprised. And it really can’t get worse than what I am planning for here. But that is not to say there is no hope. All of these problems have solutions. But I don’t anticipate they will be solved under present conditions.
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