Category Archives: angry rant

May 20, 2018 · 5:46 pm

Debt and Doubt

Rainbow peacock

I sincerely tried to get out of debt when I had to retire as a teacher.  I managed to shed $23,000 worth of my $35,000 of debt before being sued by Bank of America.  The lawsuit forced me into bankruptcy.  Five years of debt-reduction belt tightening and poverty has not turned into a new $35,000 worth of debt including lawyer fees.  And on top of that I have to add about $6,000 of hospital debt and $1300 worth of IRS tax payments.   Instead of solving my debt problem, I have only added to it.  Dying in a manner that will leave my family debt free is now out of reach.  And yesterday I got a notice from the IRS suggesting I may still owe them more.

I am led to these conclusions;

  1. Bankers are pirates and villains.  Especially Bank of America bankers.
  2. Lawyers are too expensive, especially when they are the only ones on your side.
  3. I am no different than a farmer’s cow.  Cows get milked for actual milk.  I get milked every single day for multiple dollars, most of it in the form of debt.
  4. The game is rigged against creative and intelligent people.  You cannot make money as a novelist.
  5. To get ahead you have to be stupid and have no morals.  That is why Trump always succeeds.
  6. But if you can ignore poverty and the disadvantages it brings, life is still wonderful and is worth living.  I don’t need an angel named Clarence to help me see that.

If this essay seems like it has not fully addressed this theme, that’s because it hasn’t.  Many more essays on this topic are coming… God willing.

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April 16, 2018 · 2:33 pm

Dealing With Falling Apart

2017 was not a good year for me financially. And nuclear winter could also be referred to as, “an unfortunate change in the weather”. I was sued by Bank of America because I had the audacity to try to reduce my debt with the aid of a debt reduction company. The lawyer originally assured me that I would probably get a reduced settlement bill. Instead, I lost the case and had to declare bankruptcy. The city was objecting to the swimming pool needing repair and forced us to have it removed at our own expense at the same time the BoA lawyers were eating my whole pie. And then, when so many were getting at least some tax relief from Trump’s tax cut for rich folk, I had to pay over a thousand dollars because of retroactive accounting errors.
I also got a week’s vacation in the hospital that cost lots of money because it was a an emergency room visit under heart attack conditions, but determined that I wasn’t actually having a heart attack without the added benefit of telling me what went wrong that put me in the hospital in the first place. I am now suffering numerous warning signs of heart attack or stroke without the confidence that I can go to the doctor without another hospital vacation I can’t pay for.
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I deal with it by biting the bullets, paying the bills, and buying myself bargain toys. The Astronaut Barbie play set came from the Walmart post-Christmas Clearance Sale shelves. It cost me less than half of its original price.


The Captain Cassian Andor action figure with barely pose-able inaction joints cost me less than $4 at Ross Dress For Less while I was waiting for my wife to do her shopaholic thing. And Goodwill Barbie got repaired and dressed, even though I had to borrow G.I. Joe pants to keep her from being a bottomless bare semi-nudist. Toys don’t make the headaches go away, but I am a little bit less grumpy and foul-tempered when I play with them. Plastic toys tend to treat you a whole lot better than bankers or Trump or city pool inspectors do.

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April 9, 2018 · 2:00 pm

Urgh! The Taxman Cometh

I am now incapable of coherent thought.  Wait!  Did that last sentence make sense?  I guess I am not dead yet.  So I have avoided the Grim Reaper,  But not the Taxman!

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The book I need to take more seriously now.

I wasn’t expecting to make the kind of money from Trumpig’s “Big beeyootiful tax cut” will provide to his wealthy-pig friends.  I have no illusions about him ever doing anything to benefit me.  But I figured I shouldn’t have to pay extra.

Stupid me.

Somehow Trumpig’s tax cut affected the withholding amount for my pension taxes.  Something like $120 a month that retroactively applied to all twelve months last year.  I still owe the government $1,320!

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I had planned to finish up taxes yesterday evening and then get a good night’s sleep.  Then I saw that tax bill and didn’t sleep a wink.  I am already in Chapter 13 Bankruptcy because Bank of America sues people for more than you owe them if you make the mistake of hiring a debt reduction company to help you pay off credit cards.  But the universe is obviously adverse to me making and keeping any money at all before I am riding in a hearse.  Wait!  Did I just lapse into bad poetry?  Death and taxes will mess with your head, that’s for sure.

So now I need a day off to just sleep and feel sorry for myself. I’ll get angry at Trumpig tomorrow and decide how I will handle this latest hurdle in the human race… or human obstacle course… or whatever that stupid metaphor was I cannot even remember any more.

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April 8, 2018 · 2:49 pm

Word Salad and Idea Casserole

In a world filled with interesting and engaging ideas, I get frustrated with the constant barrage of word salad on social media tossed at me by conservative friends.  As Trump seems to be coming closer and closer to ending his administration with his own chaotic behavior, those who supported him are tossing more and more flavorless lettuce and rotted vegetables in the mix.  I have to resist the urge to throw the same thing back at them.  I do not resist such salad-making well.  Witness my attempts to alter this stupid meme from a friend;

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I admit, I kinda barfed half-digested word salad all over this one.  I get tired of debating the issues only to be insulted like this and then accused of only insulting Trump and avoiding what they call the “Real Issues”, like Hillary giving a gazillion per cent of our uranium wealth to the Russians and Obama being the one guilty of colluding with Russians.

But, enough of that.  It is time to make something healthier out of words and ideas.  I have a lot of things on my mind, and I want to get a lot of them said before I die.  So let me make some idea casserole, cooking a whole lot of very different ideas into one multivitamin dish.

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  • Trump, for all the damage he’s done, will end up being good for us if we can just survive his administration to the end.  Scar tissue is always tougher than the surrounding flesh when the wound heals.  Repairing the damage he has done will leave us stronger, wiser, and more able to cope with the root causes of the Trump phenomenon.
  • My friends and family who supported the whole Trump mess primarily to hurt people whom they feel are smarter than them and so more stuck-up and self-important than them, will eventually get back to leading more productive lives than they did before.  And they will continue not to credit the ones who actually made that happen the way they didn’t credit Obama for healing the blunders of Bush.
  • I will get back to writing gentler, non-political-type humor novels.
  • I have my novel Superchicken half-way through the final edit to publish it on Amazon Kindle.  You can see I have been playing with cover ideas.  I plan to write Sing Sad Songs next.  Also I have two more novel ideas that I will add to this casserole as separate ingredients.  And I have The Bicycle Wheel Genius, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, and The Baby Werewolf finished and ready to edit as well.
  • Here’s new idea number one; The Boy Who Lived Forever is a fantasy novel about Icarus Jones coming to stay with the Jones family of Norwall.  He has survived a house fire that killed his parents and now must evade the dragon that pursues him while trying to figure out what is wrong with him health-wise.  Could he be dying?  Or did he survive the fire because he somehow can’t die?
  • Here’s new idea number two; Kingdoms Under the Earth is a fantasy novel about Blueberry Bates, a troubled young girl, falling seriously ill, and the measures her boyfriend, Mike Murphy, and her friends have to take in a realm made of magic and fever dreams to save her.

The truth is I really can’t do anything about politics and government beyond expressing my beliefs and voting my conscience.  I need to concentrate on telling stories.  It is the one thing that still gives my life meaning through the pain, illness, and suffering.  I am not dead yet.  And, not being dead, I need to be writing.

 

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April 5, 2018 · 3:36 pm

Today’s Tabula Rasa

Make no mistake about it.  I am quite capable of waking up in the morning with nothing at all in my head, no ideas, no words, no plans, no dreams…  I can be the most idiotically stupid witless twit when my brain is thoroughly drained.  But that is not the natural state of any man, and certainly not of someone like me who has lived for more than sixty years with a totally fermented head.

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So suppose I woke up this morning without remembering anything at all that I have learned about the world.  What would I do?  What would I write?  What would I think?

I think the first thing I might do if I didn’t remember anything at all about the world I find myself in, I might turn on the TV to find out what is happening, or watch cartoons, I can’t be sure I would know which should come first, if I even remember how to turn a TV on, or what a TV is…

But when I turn on the TV and look at what is really happening, and assuming I can tell the difference between Donald Trump and Donald Duck… Oh! Gonga!  My gawd!  How could it be this bad?

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Donald Duck is president.  And he gets totally angry and quacks on Twitter with that infamously hard-to-understand word-mangle of his, delivered while jumping in place and swinging his fists at the air around him.

A basset hound with a nose for clues has been tracking his every movement.  And that basset hound is a former FBI chief.  He’s very good at accurately sniffing out duck trails.

And then there is a lying and evil Keebler elf at the head of the justice department who is pursuing marijuana crimes relentlessly because he hates black people and wants to put them into the for-profit prisons he owns even though the rest of the country is deciding to legalize marijuana.

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This totally evil elf, it turns out, has been talking to Porky Kislyack, Russian spymaster pig about campaign collusion even though he swore to Senator Frankenberry in his confirmation hearing that he was guilty of nothing… that he could recall.  Hopefully the basset hound has his evil elf scent too.

And the racism and evil doesn’t end there.  Gasper the Unfriendly Ghost is still hanging out with the president, feeding him just the right duck food to create dyspeptic outrage in his duck belly.  Gasper will then spur Donald Duck on to quack more about border walls and guarding our southern border because too many Speedy Gonzaleses is a brown mouse problem in the closets of our country.  We can’t have too many queso-eaters here.

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Gasper the Unfriendly Ghost

And so, if I were to wake up with a Tabula Rasa, a truly empty head, and watched morning cartoons… or news… or whatever the heck that stuff on morning TV is…  I would be left wondering what I was going to do about it.  The options?  Certainly I probably need to vote this year.  Or I could bang myself on the side of the head with a brick and possibly knock all this stuff out of my head again, re-establishing the emptiness in my stupid head.

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April 2, 2018 · 3:32 pm

Oh, Great! Illness Knows Where I Live!

Portrait from the Jungle

I am desperately trying to recover financially after being sued by Bank of America, forced into a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, and being hospitalized in November with heart troubles.  This Spring has found us repeatedly beset by illness as a family.  I mean, I have known for some time that the Grim Reaper has my address penned into his address book.  He knows where everybody lives.  At least those of us who are alive.

But the Third Horseman of the Apocalypse, the one with the scales,  who decides who deserves what and how much we get and how much we forfeit, has also taken notice and recommended that the Fourth Horseman sow a little pestilence in our garden.  I am ill again, for three days now, and my daughter is working on day two, the third illness since being diagnosed with the flu in January.

That Night in Saqqara 2 No one here is asking to live forever, but you would think horsemen could be a little more sympathetic and not layer on quite so thick a layer of never-ending disease.  And yet, I am reminded that I do plan to look at the benefits of the worst things that happen to me in life, and what good things they lead to.  I have been ill enough in my life to become quite good at it.  Arthritis has slowed me, but not stopped me.  I still get around quite speedily, even though I often require a cane to do it.  I am still not on insulin for my diabetes because of my diet and exercise efforts.  I have learned how to cope with illness and keep going in spite of it.

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Now I hope to transfer some of my illness-battling skills to my daughter so we might have at least some hope of her graduating high school in two more years.

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March 30, 2018 · 3:18 pm

The Secret Meaning of “Donuts”

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I am diabetic. I am not supposed to have donuts for breakfast any more.  Hence the obsession with donuts.  I am only guessing here, but I think it may have something to do with the fact that the very name of donuts tells you what to do.

“What?!” you say.  “What goofiness are you talking about now, Mickey?”

Well, I’ll tell you.  I had a donut for breakfast this morning… with nuts.

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The name “donuts” is literally a command.  It tells you to “Do nuts”.  So I had nuts with my donut this morning.  Peanuts to be precise.  Of course that’s what is wrong with the whole scenario.  It doesn’t mean “peanuts”.  It is commanding you to do something nutty.  Maybe more like eating a donut when you have diabetes.  No matter how good that particular donut tastes when you eat it, an hour later you are going to suffer.

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So here’s the result of my being nuts this morning.  I have come to the conclusion that the root of all evils in the modern world is “donuts”.  Especially when it is pronounced “doo nutz”.  Yes, eating a donut subjects you to the command, “Do nuts!”

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And we all know how bad Trump’s diet is.  Could he be imbibing donuts?  Horrors!  That explains Twitter, cabinet firings, tariffs for the fun of it, random protestations of “No collusion!”, and even “Covfefe”.  Although Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary is an evil beyond even the power of donuts.

And how did Trump even get elected?  Do people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan glory in eating donuts before voting?  How about disgruntled Bernie Bros?  And one also suspects that middle-aged white women can’t resist a good donut… or an evil one either.

Could it be that I am down on donuts because I ate one and now I am writing this with a pounding high-blood-sugar headache?  Well, yes.  Eating one inspired this post.  It was a chocolate donut with green, mint-flavored frosting.  And it was evil.  It is taking out its evil revenge on the blood vessels in my brain.

So, I implore you if you are reading this… no, I’m not going to tell you not to “Do nuts”… I am going to tell you, “Please, for the love of God, keep donuts away from me!  Eat them yourself if you have to.  But be warned!  They have a secret meaning.”

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March 28, 2018 · 3:34 pm

How Computers Actually Work

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This is how computers actually work.  I swear that it is true.  I know, I know… I have on occasion stretched the truth just a bit… like down the block and around the corner where I tied it around a lamp post.  But in my defense, I write fiction.  This is not fiction.  This is a narrative of actual experiences that I managed to live through and learn from.

You see, as I was working on my writing, I underwent a plethora of computer malfunctions that made me really, really mad.  I took my rubber stress ball and threw it at the far wall.  It bounced back directly into my left temple, making me see stars, and then, apparently, summoning a genii.  He was standing there grinning at me.

“How can I be of service, master?” he said with magical sparkles in his white teeth.

“Oh, I just wish I could see inside the computer to know why it does these terrible things to me every time I press a key.”

“Your wish is my command, master.”  He poofed me in a pink and blue cloud of genii magic, and suddenly I was tiny and digital, able to walk inside my computer and take a look.”

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“What makes you the most mad, master?” the genii, whose name I learned was Computus, asked me.

“When it deletes stuff for no apparent reason…” I began.

“Ahh!  You need to see the Desert of the Deletion Dervishes.”

So he took me to a digital field of file flowers, where all the files that contained my best saved work were growing peacefully.  There were all the maniacal digital dervishes on digital horses, busy slashing the stems of my file flowers with their digital scimitars.

“Aagh!  No!” I cried.  “Why are they deleting my stuff?”

“Oh, do not worry.  They are focusing on the files you use most and deleting only those.  They are very efficient in carrying out their orders.”

“And who gives them these orders?”

“Why you do, sir.  When you give the computer orders from a drop down menu, you are rarely clicking on the order you intended to.  And “Save” is close enough to “Delete” to make our work simple.”

“And why do I keep having new windows opening up randomly where I don’t want them to?”

“Ah, the Public Pool of Pop-up Peris!  Let us go see that too!”

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So he poofed me into a pit of electrical fire filled with electrical fire beings who were busy crafting evil pop-up windows to plague me.

“So, these creatures are filling my screen with ads for hemorrhoid creams and Asian dating sites?”

“Yes, and surveys about why you love President Trump and thought Obama was terrible.”

“And why when I click on the X’s to get rid of them, do two more appear?”

“Oh that’s simple.  They purposefully make the X’s so tiny and the surrounding area so sensitive that if you don’t hit the exact center of the X precisely, then it knows you want to see two more ads chosen specifically for you by the mind-reading genii.”

“But the ads are always the opposite of what I actually want to see!”

“Well, of course they are.  Computer genii are the kind made entirely of fire.  We call them Efrits, and they are the most powerful evil jinn we have available.”

So then I awoke with a painful knot on my forehead and a new understanding of why this post was so difficult to write.   The computer treats me so evilly because that is precisely what it was designed to do.

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March 26, 2018 · 3:45 pm

The Doofus Divide

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I am trying to cut down on political notions and noodling in this blog.  It is like sugar to a humor writer.  The easy laughs are sweet, but if you are diabetic, they will eventually build up and kill you.

But between Twitter-tweeting twit-wits and Facebook false-fact fools, I keep getting drawn back in.  The gang of kids I grew up with in Iowa are seriously infected with Tea Party propaganda now that they are old coots like me, and continue to vote for Teabagger trolls (And I mean literal trolls.  Steve King, Congressman from Iowa, has green skin and lives under a bridge… and maybe eats foolish children when they try to cross) for public office.  And of course, I live now in Texas where gun-toting cowboys look at you intently to find any possible reason to shoot you and then thank Jesus if you are fool enough to give them one (like admitting to be mostly a Democrat in your political persuasion).  They want to argue anything and everything I post on Facebook.  Apparently even my bird pictures and cat videos politically offend them.

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Oooh!  This one really offends Teabaggers… especially the ones who make $25/hr or less.

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Can you pick out the Trump voters in this line?  All of them maybe?

And I am not suggesting that people who voted Republican in the last election aren’t as smart as my side.  I waited until now in this essay to say that, because the childhood friends and family members in that group who read my blog will have all stopped reading by this point.  I really don’t need to give them any more ammunition for Facebook and dinner table arguments.

But my side of the table are not wholly guilt free.

 

I regularly tweet or post things like these, innocently believing these heroes of the heart and mind have universal appeal because they champion truth and science and facts.  But I become alarmed when I learn how much Bill Nye offends them.  They tell me, “That guy is not a scientist!  He has no right to argue for climate change issues or the non-existence of God.  He’s just a TV guy.”  And, I suppose they have a point.  I mean, his extensive education and background in engineering, or his years in television promoting science to kids in research-based creative ways, doesn’t necessarily make him an expert on all science.  And Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist.  He doesn’t have a degree in EVERYTHING.  And when I point out that their so-called experts on climate-change denial from Fox News cannot even claim to be TV weathermen, they are further put out by my brain-bashing bullying way of using my superior knowledge of science to put them down.  Okay, I get it.  I am not being careful enough of your feelings.  (Oh, I forgot, you stopped reading this a while back.)

But the point of this is, we have to stop listening to and electing stupid people, while at the same time being a bit nicer to each other.  We have to approach the discussion with the notion that you yourself may not be totally right about everything, and you may actually learn something by talking about it.  (Which is, of course, no problem for me since I really don’t know anything for certain and need to learn practically everything as if I were still four years old.)

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Okay, Bill, I get it.  I am probably wrong about that too.

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March 16, 2018 · 3:03 pm

Blue Sunrise

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I am not a politician. I am not a political writer.  But I have opinions about the policies that affect my life and livelihood.  And my opinions, though often expressed poetically, or even humorously, are based on real troubles never-the-less.

I am disturbed by the problems I see in education.  Teachers are not paid what they are worth.  Anyone with half a brain can see that, for the level of education required of them, the professionalism expected of them, and the ever-increasing responsibilities foisted upon them, they are not compensated for their work in a manner comparable to people who do the same work in the corporate world.  And those comparable workers never have to endure the conditions of a teacher’s job, overloaded with students, forced to stand and deliver to a hostile audience whose behavior you are responsible for controlling six or seven times a day, and then being evaluated by how that audience does on tests that often measure the wrong thing with financial punishments waiting for failure and rarely any rewards waiting for success.

I started teaching in 1981 in South Texas for a salary of $11,000 dollars a year. That was below the poverty line in 1981.  If I had a family at that time, we would’ve been eligible for food stamps.  The highest I ever earned was $55,000 with a master’s degree, 28 years of experience, and a summer of teaching summer school.  Some one who delivers similar forms of information to a receptive audience in a boardroom, only has to deliver maybe once per day, and is paid upwards of twice that highest amount is treated far better.

And when teachers strike in West Virginia for being the lowest paid in the country, or  a teacher complains on social media by revealing their actual yearly salary from Arizona, or a teacher is forced to move from Oklahoma to Texas for higher pay even though they were the teacher of the year in the State the year before,  there is blow-back.  There are stupid people out there that think teachers are overpaid.  They think all teachers have to do is talk to kids every day, and they have only 185 work days a year, they have the summer off, and their job is one anyone can do.  These stupid people have less than half a brain.  What makes a guy who sits in an office all day with his feet up making decisions about stocks and bonds and business deals worth thousands of dollars a minute?  Teachers, in my amateur political opinionater’s opinion, are underpaid.

To quote the Beatles’ 1969 animated movie, the Yellow Submarine, “It’s a blue world, Max.”  Unfortunately, in the world of education, the Blue Meanies are now in charge.

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