Category Archives: angry rant

July 13, 2017 · 3:03 pm

The Big Golden Banana-Eater’s Very Sad Day

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I have spent some time on this blog avoiding making fun of Donald Trump.  He has, as Fearless Leader of the Pottsylvania Republic that America has become, done innumerable things that have impacted my life already.  I am a diabetic who can no longer afford insulin.  I can’t breath the city air in the city I am living in.   And my wife still has a green card after twenty-two years of marriage.  He could’ve hurt me more than he has already if not for the fact that the monkey can’t keep secrets for very long, and the harder he tries, the more Pandora’s boxes he opens up.   But the more I leave him alone, even though he’s such an easy subject for practicing humor and satire on, the less he seems willing to leave me alone.  So forgive me for taking joy from his misery.

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Don Dumb-o Jr. managed to convict himself in the press by Tweeting emails that aggressive political journalists had been pursuing for months.  Seriously, I always knew he was something of a bird-brain, but who’d have thought that Dodo birds weren’t extinct after all?  He published the very Russian collusion transcripts that Trump had made all kinds of nasty faces and Obama-hate-Tweets in order to keep under wraps.

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So, while I am happy that the truth is coming out and the old windbag liar can’t stop it from coming out, I have absolutely no faith that the problem will get solved.  The government is still in the strangle-hold grip of the vile and greedy modern GOP (Greedy Old Party).  They are quite likely to continue to excuse and protect the orangutan we elected because the monkey-man will continue to let them get away with everything their greedy old party wants to do in robbing the poor to make the rich richer.  My Republican friends who support Trump are kinda quiet for the moment, but they still support Trump and believe whole-heartedly in every nasty little thing he wants to do to me… with the help of the Russians, apparently.

Oh, well…  He has at least stopped incessantly tweeting bird poop on Twitter for the moment.  So let me enjoy it while I still can.

 

 

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July 7, 2017 · 2:10 pm

When You Need a Little Sunshine

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I am working hard on the yard and the pool to get the city off my back about missing repair deadlines that they didn’t actually set before.  I paid their stinking 500 dollar ticket for having water in the pool while away on vacation.  I am in a race to save the pool and not have the city send in a contractor to remove it at my expense since I can’t even afford to go on insulin for diabetes.  I should be upset.  I am probably going to lose this race.

But I am happily working on the pool when I can in the buff.  Let ’em come and check on me and be shocked.  I can still whistle Disney songs and think writer thoughts while I work.  I am not insane.  Merely coping.  Three days to make the pool hold water.  And it could rain all three of those days.  Oh, well.  I am wearing my drip-dry work clothes.

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July 6, 2017 · 2:57 pm

Mickey Sings More Blues

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I paid the city more than 500 dollars in fines this morning for my pool having water in it during my two week vacation.  What can I say?  I’m guilty.  I drained the pool again before we left, but it rained while we were away.

That’s nothing compared to the penalties they will impose if I don’t have the pool running and up to code by Monday.  They will choose a contractor to come in and remove the pool at my expense.  More than eight thousand dollars.  My finances are not yet recovered from five week-long hospital stays my family needed between 2011 and 2014.  I am looking at losing the house to the bank after living in it since 2005.  And the pool had unrepaired cracks in it when we bought it.  You live and learn.  Hard lessons are probably good for the soul, but more than a little too painful.

So I am trying desperately to plug pool cracks and get the pool running again.  I did it successfully once before.  But the deadline is upon me.

I guess city governments simply can’t allow criminals like me to live in their city.  They are working hard against me.  After all, I am a former school teacher, a writer, a blogger, and a goofball.  That’s only a step away from being a terrorist, right?  Oh, yeah, and there is more rain in the forecast before my deadline occurs.  It has rained three times since the case against me was filed.  I really need a break.  But God seems to want to break the wrong thing.  Fun times ahead.

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July 4, 2017 · 4:03 pm

Issues I Really Didn’t Need

An ill wind has been blowing my way of late.

Not only is the household under threat  from city inspectors intent on taking away as much of the little money I still have as possible over the issue of the non-working swimming pool, a plethora of other things is continuing to happen to push me towards the dark side of the force.

Not only have I not made reservations at the local nudist camp in Alvord, Texas… I have not even purchased a tent yet.  Whether they will pay me for blogging or not depends on accepting my work to begin with.  And reviewing the camp will cost me more in usage fees and equipment purchases than I will make on the blog by far.   Especially if they decide they don’t like my stuff enough to pay me for it.  That is a ridiculous thing to do for no monetary return.  So, what’s the worst that could happen if I simply refuse to go through with it?  I signed up as a nudist with the AANR (Arbitrary Association of Nudist Ridiculousness?  I forget what the acronym really means) for nothing, then.  So maybe you need not worry about me and my awful pink-spotted  corpus ridiculousum going nude anywhere public any longer. I can breathe a sigh of relief too.

And my internet is out.  Saturday morning, before my blog was finished, the internet went offline.  And yesterday afternoon the technicians did not find anything wrong with the lines outside the house.  So the repair appointment got scheduled for 8:00 a.m. Tuesday morning.  That’s right, on the 4th of July holiday.  Lucky me.  Even luckier them, meaning the technicians who have to work that day and crawl through my attic rat-land to get to the problem.

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So you may have noticed, I haven’t kept up my posting streak on WordPress this weekend.  This post won’t appear until after the 4th at least.  Bummer.  It means my streak ends at precisely two years and seven months of posting every single day.   880 days of writing a post every day.

Of course, I have still maintained my practice of writing something every single day.  And I have written at least 500 words each of those days I have been offline.  Once you really start being a writer, it is like being a diabetic, you can never stop being one again.  Not only have I written these late-posted blog posts, but I have been working on publishing Magical Miss Morgan and writing the second draft of The Baby Werewolf at the same time.

So, I have a number of issues pressing me to come to angriness and the power of the dark side.  Can you believe me as Darth Mickey?  What terrible power I will wield!  Wait… what terrible power will I wield?  Can you use humor-writing for evil?  Other than becoming a nudist for the sake of writing humor, I mean?  And of course, my fallen-Jedi masters tell me that the dark side shouldn’t be considered “evil”.  Though Republicans say giving tax cuts to billionaires will make us all better off, so there’s that line of logic gone down the toilet.

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June 21, 2017 · 3:31 pm

Why Farmers Ain’t Millionaires

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A professional baseball player goes up to the plate.  A hulking six foot man goes up on a little mound and hurls a stitched horsehide sphere at him, ideally around ninety miles an hour, hoping to throw it past him three times, or, failing that, coming close enough to his head that he forfeits the next two.  If the baseball guy swings his hitty-stick at the ball and smacks it into the field in a place where nobody can catch it three out of every ten times, that man will soon be a millionaire if he isn’t one before swinging the hitty stick for the first time.

As a public school teacher it was my job to teach kids how to read and write.  It is a lot harder thing to do when you consider how teachers are expected to do that job.  You are in a classroom of up to thirty kids, no more than ten per cent of whom are self-starting and self-maintaining.  The rest are problem-filled haters of reading and wordless when it comes to writing.  You have to lead them into the land of joyous literacy.  And when you step up to that plate, if you are getting a hit only three times in every ten at-bats (as measured by beloved state tests that are inherently biased in a multitude of ways) you will lose that lovely teaching job.  You are expected to hit 8 out of 10 or higher.  And that is just to keep your job year to year even though you make less money per year than a city garbage man.  No chance you will ever be a millionaire.  And they don’t even let you use a hitty stick to do your job.

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But I promised you this rant was about farming and farmers.

My roots are in the farmlands of Iowa.  I am the result of the union of the Beyer family farm and the Aldrich family farm.  I know what farming is all about.  And we do the job of feeding the nation, and possibly the world.  But it is not an easy job.  You gamble each year that you will be able to produce corn and soybeans and possibly beef or pork, and when the harvest comes, you have to hope you can sell it for more than it cost to produce it.  Tornadoes, hail, floods, and droughts get more than their fair say in the outcome.

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So, why isn’t what the farmer does worth more?

The answer is simple.  People with money and power are the ones who control who makes money and who doesn’t.  Through speculation and commodity trading they control the price of corn and beans, and they control who makes the profit.

We do the majority of the work and take the majority of the risk.  We don’t get the majority of the rewards.  Other people than farmers decide who does, and only rarely do they decide those matters fairly.  But thus the world is.  Or rather, thus we have let it become.

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June 17, 2017 · 2:30 pm

This is How the World Ends…

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The T. S. Eliot poem “The Hollow Men” talks about the disappointing nature of human beings and ends  with a dire four lines quoted more often than any poem’s end in the history of poetry.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Now I have revealed this particular truth more than once.  I am not prescient.  I am an idiot.  And the only things I know for certain about the future are that I will die one day, and so will everyone else.  But knowing those things  is wisdom.  Especially the idiot part.

And I can see how things are progressing.  I know what people are like at their core.  If humanity is doomed to die out in the next century, or even the next decade, it will not be because of nuclear war.  It will be something sneakier, quieter, and more permanently lethal.

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It will be the fact that people are capable of heartlessness and cruelty.  Adolf Hitler turned the full power of government-focused hatred on those he defined as less than human; Jews, gypsies, gay people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the mentally handicapped.  He used that focus to burn those peoples out of existence.  But many forces in the human character rose up to shield the victims, saving some and avenging the others.  Hitler learned the hard way that he was not the end of the world… from a bullet, in a bunker, having lost an empire.

Now, the Republican clown show in the United States is turning into Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

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They show lack of concern for anything but corporate profits.  They will undo Medicare and cancel the Meals on Wheels program because, according to evil leprechauns in charge of the budget, we can’t afford to feed people, or educate people, or do anything to dry up the painful ocean of poverty capitalism is creating.  No, we must bury our pots of gold and any magic they have left in them.

They have changed the laws on environmental protections to allow themselves to profit by pouring pollutants into rivers and water supplies.  They pull out of world-wide agreements to work towards saving the environment from climate change.

They may have found a way to focus hatred through the lens of indifference.  Hitler’s mistake was in thinking most humans could be manipulated only through fear and hatred for those who were different.  Trump’s troll army has added stupidity and greed to the lenses the light can be filtered through.  And so, they may well succeed where Nazis failed.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

 

 

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June 14, 2017 · 3:17 pm

The Terribly Icky Car Trip

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The Iowa Landscape in late, late afternoon… or possibly evening.

We made it to Iowa.  But only after a long, hard, impossibly-icky travel day.  More than 700 miles were covered in only fifteen-plus hours.  With no real breaks for meals because restaurants will not look kindly on bringing the family dog into the dining room.  Especially our dog, who will kill for people food, and even threaten small children if she thinks they might pull her ears and also look tasty enough.  Traveling with an insane dog is never easy.

And the way was unusually challenging.  We normally travel up Interstate 35 because it goes from the North Dallas suburbs where we live to within a few miles of the family farm where my parents still live.   It is a good route because it is very travel-friendly with numerous places to stop and a 70-plus miles per hour speed limit to make the trip faster.

But first, we had to pass through Oklahoma.  And unfortunately that means Okie drivers.  Especially the super-speed Bubba trucks (Chevy pickups with a rebel flag in the back window and more often red than any other saner vehicle color), ultra-super-speed oil-money Wasp-rockets (BMW’s, Rolls Royces, Italian sports  cars of high-dollar varieties),  and the most dangerous, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol (because I have a Texas license plate, that is.  They never seem to be a problem for the first two groups on this list.  Do other people in the world do racial profiling against Texans in general?  They probably should.)

And, apparently every bridge, over-pass, and under-pass on Interstate 35 has to be repaired, inducing a lowered speed limit that also apparently doesn’t apply to Okie drivers.  And the powers that decide things for highways went with the northbound lanes first so they could save the southbound  side for my eventual return trip.  I got honked at, headlight flashed at, and endured several Okie drivers using one of their fingers to brag at me about their current I.Q. (I won’t mention which single finger they all use for that).  They heaped this scorn on me for daring to go no faster than the posted speed limit.  I mean, there are road signs in Oklahoma that tell you it is against the law not read and obey all road signs.  And fines are doubled, if not quadrupled, in work zones.  But the laws against not reading probably don’t apply to those who naturally can’t read.

And I ran into trouble with Kansas City rush hour.  Which, of course, travels in the opposite of a rush.  And while we were sitting and waiting in the middle of the rush, my little car’s engine overheated.  So I had to turn the heater on high and aim the dashboard vents out the rolled-down windows to prevent the car’s engine control chip from shutting the engine off to cool down in the middle of the stationary rush.  The heat made the dog even more insane.

And when we finally got to Iowa just before dark, we may have been kidnapped by aliens.  Time, it seems, completely went missing  in southern Iowa, making the trip last even longer.  I may actually have captured the reason for that.  I took a few pictures with my phone camera on top of the steering wheel, which probably isn’t a safe thing to do, but I wasn’t in Oklahoma at the time.  So decide for yourself if this is significant, or just marsh gas.

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June 7, 2017 · 3:34 pm

The Darkest of the Coming Darkness

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Egghead  might be slightly batty.

I do not claim to be prescient.  But like any overly smart and perceptive person, I often see what’s going to happen before it happens.  Sometimes it is almost as eerie as a Vincent Price movie.  Sometimes eerier.  After all, on the 60’s Batman TV show, Price played the ridiculous villain Egghead, and was completely creepy while doing it, but still, you know… Egghead.

One thing that I have to predict about the coming darkness is about politics.  I mean, the current Republican administration, where it is decisions by all Republicans all the time, has become nothing more than a monster movie.  Not merely a bad monster movie, but a super-creepy-bad monster movie with a gigantic orange rubber rooster as the main monster.

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This is what the great orange rooster looks like in black and white.

The reason it is bad is because, basically, to become a member of the Republican Party’s elected elite, you basically have to have your heart removed.  Heartless, soulless monsters have a tendency to do things like take away Meals on Wheels for invalid seniors, health-care services from Planned Parenthood, and any hope of ever having affordable health insurance that actually pays for health care.

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                                                                          Senator Ted Cruz grinning about taking away Obamacare

And now, the monsters who have taken control of the theater are pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement because… well, apparently clean air isn’t good for decaying, desiccated monster skin and shriveled monster lungs that don’t breathe air anyway.

So here are my predictions for the coming darkness.

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What people like me will look like in the future.  That’s me in the middle.

I won’t live to see it.  My body is breaking down at age 60. My lungs are compromised by years of bronchitis and flu.  I am diabetic, so my very body chemistry is betraying me.  There is a family history of heart disease.  And I have already gone broke once on health care bills that the health insurance people really don’t pay for.  (They are in the business of collecting premiums, after all, not making people well.)

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What a lovely oxygen-free environment we will have!

As the climate changes take away large parts of our food production and resources, and the sea rises to take away land and major cities, people will be at war increasingly over diminishing resources vital to a population of seven billion souls.  Graveyards and unburied bodies will become a part of every monster-movie scene.

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Kiss me, Baby!

Love will become more complicated, because people who are selfless and put others before even their own life will die out first.  The heartless, selfish, and often stupid ones will have the best chance for survival because they put themselves ahead of everyone else, and so have an unfair advantage over those who are not content with mere survival and exhibit self-sacrificing love.

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You’ve never had a friend like me.  And I can always eat you later if need be.

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So, if you find my black-and-white monster movie post upsetting with the darknesses I am sincerely predicting, please remember, this is a satire post in a humor blog.  The way it is supposed to work is that you wake up to the factors that make it upsetting and decide to do something for yourself to change them.  Everybody doing a lot of the same little thing to make the world better can move mountains and fly to the moon.  Big things don’t happen without everybody taking a hand.  Maybe we can dream dreams once again and make some good things come true.

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May 31, 2017 · 10:48 am

So Tired of Tires

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The wheels on my car, the wheels I rely on for the most important functions remaining in my retired, sick-all-the-time, but still-a-father-with-kids-in-school days, have recently been under assault once again.   The back right tire has had a slow leak in it for three months because of some piece of metal embedded in the treads.  And last week the front driver’s-side tire was cruelly popped by a piece of road debris, a hubcap that was left on the road to be run over repeatedly.  Number two son and I had to be rescued from the roadside by AAA (and that is Triple A, not Alcoholics Anonymous… a fairly important distinction).

It meant I had to drive around on an emergency spare for a while and spend the majority of my Memorial Day holiday at Sam’s Club’s tire repair center getting two tires fixed.

And how do you deal with tires being damaged and needing to be fixed so often?  Satire of course.  After all, it has the word “tire” in it, doesn’t it?

The piece from Vox points out that satire is the way comedians are dealing with Trump news and Trump fake news and Trumpian self-satire usually administered to claim innocence over a truly horrible and self-damaging something he said.  They are using satire to cut the crap and get to the center of the ridiculous dog-and-pony show Trump puts on and Trump supporters are constantly dazzled by.  I point this all out because I satirically believe no one who looks at my posts on this goofy-danged blog ever watches the videos.  And it probably is true, that thing you are thinking at the moment, that Mickey only adds videos to fill up space.

But if satire can be used to pop the tires on the political clown car, then why can’t it also be used to fix the tires on my little gray errand-wagon?

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Of course, you will say, “You can’t fix a tire with satire!  You have to have tools and patches and rubber cement for that.  And you would be right.

But I have had three major tire-related disruptions to my little retired life in the last two years.  A careless driver ran into the back tire of my little pony last spring and not only wrecked the tire, but bent the back axle and totaled the entire car.  Then I hit a pothole on a carefully unrepaired Dallas street and not only destroyed the tire, but dented the entire rim.  And now the new tire disaster fills my holiday with more sit-and-wait-and-pay-lots-of-money woes at a time when I really don’t appreciate such a long run of bad tire-luck.  It drives me to satire.

So maybe satire can’t fix a tire, but it can make me laugh about it.  And isn’t that better than crying, or a long string of cuss words so foul they would’ve gotten me fired before I retired three years ago?  Besides, I already tried those.  They didn’t work either.  But satire makes me laugh about it and feel a little better.  And, after all, it has the word “tire” embedded in it.  And that has to count for something.

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May 29, 2017 · 2:00 pm

Cutting Losses

Sometimes going forward will set you too far back.  Sometimes the only direction you can take is down and out.  I am not at that point yet.  But it is now on the horizon.

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Am I sounding suicidal?  I hope not.  I was glooming about publishing and books that I am trying to make live.  I have paid Page Publishing practically all the payments I stupidly agreed to, and yet, I am stuck in an endless loop of editing where they ignore my emails and appear to be proceeding without me.  The clueless case manager sends me an email saying, “Go ahead, take all the time you need to edit” after I have already emailed them the final instructions and requested the process continue to the next step.  I re-sent that email and asked them if they have gotten my last email.  No responses, though.  What the hell am I paying them money for?  I’m editing the book myself.  Their proof-reader makes changes that I have to change back to the original, and then they don’t even want to take the next step?

I admit that my illustrations for this rant are only pictures saved for other posts that never got used before.  Like this cool Kingdom Hearts one;

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But I am not ready to kill the project yet and hire a lawyer to sue the publisher to get my money back.  I want to see this book, Magical Miss Morgan, live.

And I need to see Snow Babies live too.

But from here on we go with the cheapest possible options.  Free if possible.

Here is another Wizard Donald to look at while I continue to stew about publishing problems;

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I have always tried to make the best of what I already have.  I have always lived by the idea that other people are all my equals, even the really stupid ones, and I have nothing that I am not obliged to share.

I have little left besides wit and wisdom.  And I have tried hard to share that here.  But I sometimes feel like I am alone and pointless.

But the captain always goes down with his ship.  And if my ship is sinking, then at least I will soon know if there are mermaids down there willing to teach me to breathe underwater, or possibly not.

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