Category Archives: angry rant

November 12, 2016 · 5:44 pm

Healing From A Fatal Wound

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The Trumpkins and Trolls won the battle and are now busy eating their prisoners… along with the puppies and kittens for desert.  And as far as I can see, the war is over.  We had a chance with the Paris Climate Accords to repair the damage to the life of this planet, even though it was a very eleventh-hour plan to avert the end of life on Earth.  The Trolls and Trumpkins are peeing on that fence too, shorting it out and preventing it from saving us from being eaten by the heat-wolves of corporate polluters.

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I myself wasn’t expecting to live through another decade in any case, but now, I fear the lives of my children and grandchildren will be cut short as well.  You can’t poop where you eat on a regular basis and expect not to get sick and die.  I predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series because they stole key talent from the Cardinals and had a young, rising club to add them to.  I got that one right.  I predicted that Trump would win the presidency because I know a lot of the Trump-voter kind of former middle-class white people who are seriously in financial and existential pain, and I knew who they were going to blame it on.  If I am right about this last thing too, then we are all doomed.  3f96a6e4e030fa8fa38c97da9d206240

“Jeez, Mickey!  You don’t call that humor, do you?”

Well, I guess I do, because humor comes from being able to laugh at the darkness and make fun of the dumpy-lumpy lumbering bears of bad fortune that are about to eat you.  We are going to have a laugh or two before the end at the expense of Trumpkins and Trolls because they make world-shaking decisions based on faith in false facts.  The irony and stupidity of it all is a very laughable absurdity that will build BS mountains taller than Everest.  And those mountains will collapse upon them, burying them in poop.  Never mind that we will also be buried.  They brought it on themselves by the choices they made.  Seeing them get their comeuppance has to be worth a laugh or two.

I have pretty much let Will Rogers speak to this current election result through the memes I have chosen to accompany this gloomy-doomy essay.  I think it is significant that wisdom from a hundred years ago still applies so completely to the politics of today.  With democracy and elections we get what we deserve… not what we want.  We need to change to face the future, if we even get to have one.  But the past clearly shows that we haven’t learned our lessons very well.  I guess there’s nothing left to do but laugh about it… and try to love each other a little better before the bitter end.

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Thanks for sharing, Cousin Will.

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November 9, 2016 · 12:31 pm

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future

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…Except it ain’t zactly funny. Somehow we let the orangutan take over the zoo.

I did tell you the world would end because the Cubs won the series.  Now we have to pay for our excesses and mistakes.

No more Obamacare.  The monkey vowed to repeal it.  And I have six pre-existing conditions, four of which may cost me any and all health insurance.

No more Paris climate agreement.  The monkey likes to burn coal and pollute the air with carbons because it makes money and his monkey friends like it.  Global warming turns the Earth into Venus.

No more nuclear agreement with Iran.  The monkey promised to tear it up.  He hates Iran’s particular flavor of invisible sky-friend.  He believes it gives him the right to kill them, kill their families, and take their stuff.  He is an aggressive and thoughtless monkey.

And I saw this all coming.  My Bubba friends all kinda like this monkey because he says all the things they want to say and get away with… even in polite company.  There are a lot of Bubba friends in this country.  Some of them are not even angry all the time.  Some of them are not even white.

And now that the dust has settled from massive monkey tricks, voter suppression in southern states, lies from Fox News, and Comey’s “Oh-one-more-reminder-about-emails”, the White House will become the Monkey House.  I doubt this essay will get me thrown in prison.  The monkey doesn’t read… except for Twitter.  And he doesn’t understand metaphors.  And I never used his real name in this post.

But everything that’s bad in life gets worse… and then you die.  So I have a little while yet to live and love and make the best of life.  But the monkey wins in the end.

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November 2, 2016 · 3:04 pm

Doom is Imminent, It’s Time to Sing!

Yessir, the Cubs have a chance to win their first World Series since 1908 tonight.  They have not won the title since Tinker to Evers to Chance was the double-play combo of poetic proportions.  They have never won in my lifetime, and I am quite old.  So, there is proof positive the world is about to end.

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Yes, I can even describe the mechanics of the thing.  Donald Trump will be elected President of the United States thanks to Mr. Comey’s timely reveal of more scandalous emails that he has not read and chuckled about yet.  You know, the ones that he couldn’t have actually read yet because they come from potential pedophile Anthony Weiner’s computer, and he had to have a separate warrant from a judge to read anything that may have to do with Hillary, even though probably none of them contain nude pictures from Hillary, and she probably didn’t even write those emails.  The world had to know about that right before the election, especially members of the Republican House Committee for examining Hillary’s every boo-boo.  So, the Donald will win, because nobody is doing any press conferences on the FBI investigation on his ties to the Russian government through the biggest bank in Russia.  ‘Taint important, Pogo.

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And once the great orange pumpkin-head is our next president, our health care will no longer be under the misguided protection of Obamacare.  Instead, it will will be taken care of by “something terrific” that will make high profits for somebody, and make certain that I will never be able to pay another medical bill (since those who are deceased rarely do).

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And, of course, President Pompadoodle will be able to declare that we no longer have to believe in the climate change hoax.  The result being that we will soon be able to buy beachfront property in Iowa and Missouri, be able to purchase our breathable air in factory-made brick-form, and possibly grow a helpful third eye from the mutating effects of nuclear radiation.

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And, lastly, I would like to thank the late great Walt Kelly for illustrating today’s post.  One wonders how a cartoonist can look so far ahead from the 1960’s to do such a fine job of illustrating the problems of 2016?  Will miracles never cease?  I mean, really, we could probably do with a few less of these industrial grade miracles made out of recycled elephant poop.

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October 14, 2016 · 3:51 pm

The Car Radio Keeps Me Alive

Today I had to deliver my daughter, the Princess, to her high school in the rain.  It is hard enough make the circuitous trip to the west in order to go south and then east again through all the construction and roadwork going on with stupid people who are somehow allowed to drive a car and carry a gun in Texas even though they don’t know what a turn signal is for or that a speed limit sign shows the maximum rather than the minimum speed you should go at every red stoplight and corner without there being rain to obscure vision and make the mangled pavement slick.  You have to be able to concentrate and perform like a virtuoso while driving to make it there alive.  I would simply not be able to do it without the car radio.

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Driving the family car in Texas

The radio keeps me calm and gives my brain the power it needs to overcome obstacles.  The jump across the river with the man-eating fish in it alone requires an energized brain and a cool head.  I listen to oldies on the radio with KLUV in the mornings.  It is how my children have come to love Don Henley and the Eagles as much as I do.

For the last seven years of my teaching career, I had to learn the hard way that music is critical to driving well, and driving well is the only way to stay alive on the mean streets of Dallas.  I had a morning commute of 40 minutes, 30 miles, and 45 stoplights one way to my teaching job in Garland.  I drove it starting at six in the morning to avoid traffic.  But after school, I often had to labor for three hours through rush hour traffic on the way back home.  I learned to switch the station to 101.1, the classical music station.  Listening to Mozart and Beethoven not only makes you smarter, it makes you calmer.  Calm enough not to get out of your car at the stop light and beat the guy in the car ahead of you with the detached bumper of your car that he knocked off while cutting in front of you because he was in the wrong lane to make the turn he needed to make and didn’t realize until 15 minutes into the wait for the red light to change enough times that our cars actually had a chance to make it through the intersection.  Yes, that is a run-on sentence about road rage.  And road rage is real.  But in real life I didn’t beat him to death because of Mendelssohn playing on the car radio.  It only played out that way in my head while the radio soothed my brain and prevented my hair from catching fire.

I owe my life and sanity to the car radio many times over.  And I am resigned to the notion that I will probably need it many times more before the curtain closes the last time.

 

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October 13, 2016 · 3:35 pm

Fix Coulrophobia… Now!

I love clowns.  I always have.  When I was five I wanted to be a clown.  Red Skelton is my personal hero and role model, the reason I became a teacher, to use my clown skills for good rather than evil.  But sinister folks who think they are joking are seriously jeopardizing all of that.

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In 1988 I did watch and enjoy the movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space.  It was funny.  And I liked Stephen King’s “It” as a horror movie.  It was definitely scary.  But 2016 has become the year of the creepy clown.  Why would any idiot want to dress up in an expensive horror-clown mask and clown suit to wave at somebody’s security camera at two in the morning?  And, Mr. Idiot, did you at least try to figure out if the homeowner was a gun owner in an open carry State?  One of the recent clowns to be arrested turned out to be a teenage boy… you know, the ultimate planner and thinker-ahead-er.

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I would like to propose that we prosecute a case or two of creepy clowns in the woods at night with a mandatory “How to Love a Clown” class.  After all, clowns are a worthy thing.  How many clowns over how many years have handed out candy to kids and brought a smile to small faces during a Fourth of July parade?  How many circus clowns like the Great Emmett Kelly made us laugh with a pantomime routine?  How many Shrine Circus clowns helped entertain us and raise money to fight childhood disease and cancer?  Bob Keeshan who was Clarabell the Clown on Howdy Doody helped raise me and make me the person I am now as Captain Kangaroo.  The real creepy clown crime is that they are taking the image of a clown, which is a very good thing and turning it into something bleak and horrifying.  My purpose for this post is to remind you of the good things about the people under the face paint.  I want you to remember a few of these.

 

 

 

 

 

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October 8, 2016 · 4:28 pm

Yes, There Are Pirates in Our World

What is a pirate?  A privateer?  A buccaneer?

There are people in this world who are driven by greed and a sense that they have nothing to lose by risking everything to take what belongs to you.  They swoop in on their fast pirate ships, swing on board your little boat, hurt you, steal what you have, and eventually kill you.  Movies romanticize swashbucklers as somebody who takes from the rich and the villainous as a sort of cosmic comeuppance.  But the reality is they are criminals and murderers.

But they don’t carry swords any more.

They are the CEOs of banks.

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Bank-o’ Merricka is an excellent example who sailed their Jolly Roger right up to the gunwales of my little boat.  I underwent a debt reduction program because of five hospital stays in five years that drained my personal treasury.  $35,000 in credit card debt reduced and paid off in three years.  But Bank-o’ Merricka, after they learned I would not be able to pay all the interest I owed, immediately stopped calling.  The debt disappeared from my account.  They had sold the debt to a debt collector and quietly sat on the bill as I paid everything else off.  Then, they filed a lawsuit for the entire amount I owed, plus interest, and plus legal fees.  If I hadn’t hired a lawyer and fought the lawsuit, they would’ve won the entire amount by default.  That’s how they clean out most of their victims and prey, because people generally surrender to pirates who come over the rails with swords in their teeth and burning cannon fuses in their beards.

I  may still lose the battle in this boarding action, but at least I haven’t simply surrendered.  But there are other pirate ships circling my little boat as well.  My evil health insurance company are also buccaneers, and they demand higher and higher premiums and co-pays, and routinely deny all claims.  Diabetic supply people keep calling me and offering free meters and stuff the health insurance pirates are supposed to cover one hundred per cent.  I just paid them $260 dollars of a $500 dollar scam bill that hit my little boat like a cannon shot.

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So, the pirates are out there.  I am still fighting off the boarders.  But I think my little boat is sinking.

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September 30, 2016 · 3:16 pm

Morning With Grumpy

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I have not been having good days lately.  Things go wrong constantly.  Things that cost money that I don’t have.  I’m a writer, after all.  I don’t even have a waving acquaintance with money.

Fire ants bit me on Tuesday.  My hands and feet are still plagued with painful, itchy bumps.  At the same time the city is telling me how the yard has to be done and the trees have to be trimmed and the pool has to be repaired.  If I don’t complete the work and get the pool running again, in spite of the fact I don’t have any money, I face a two-thousand dollar fine, which would be cheaper than fixing the pool, but it would recur every month until I got the pool fixed.  Well, welcome back to Debt Town.  At least I will have a swimming pool again this winter.  And the drive this morning to take the Princess to school was an epic battle with high-speed morons in Bubba-trucks.  I made a wrong turn downtown in the rat’s maze that the I-35 construction project has created right next to downtown Carrollton.  I had to dodge between people in cars that don’t know how to drive, but drive too fast, kids on foot on that have their heads plugged in, so they don’t hear you coming when they step out in front of you without looking because their eyes are fixed on their phones.  We got there five minutes before the tardy bell.

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Some mornings I just need a chance to complain.  Thanks for listening.

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September 29, 2016 · 3:16 pm

Sick and Sad…

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Ant bites can cause an allergic reaction.  So can the ragweed pollen that floats in massive quantities through the Texas air right now.  So can reports that Donald Trump won the recent debate, despite the evidence presented before my very eyes that he was destroyed like a movie monster in the 1960’s at the end of the late night horror flick.  Whatever the cause, I am feeling poorly.  Another day of inaction and illness and sore throats and headaches.  My daughter, the Princess, is also home from school today ill.  She’s in slightly better shape than I am.  But we will recover.  The country, if it is truly as filled with ignorant racist people as the Trump presidential campaign has made it seem, will not.  Soon we will be forced to shout, “Seig heil!” at the cinnamon Hitler we have apparently chosen to put in charge.  How is he not polling negative percentages after that debate?  He should have to give back three quarters of those votes he got in the Republican primaries.

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September 16, 2016 · 3:37 pm

Because Bankers Are Evil

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Yes, Bankers are evil, so I need pie.

My post today is just a bunch of old artwork because I had to spend the morning fixing a bank problem.  My mortgage payment got lost.  Yes, I had an Uncle Billy moment that turned out not to be my fault at all.  All the other payments went through the automatic bill pay system normally.  But the mortgage payment did not.  Even though it went through normally every month for the last three years.  The mortgage bankers apparently misplaced the electronic payment.  So I tracked down the proof of payment at my bank and printed it out.  The mortgage bankers, of course, will not accept it until I can get my wife’s signature on it.  And what will you bet that they are going to charge a late-payment fee?

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Unfinished Stag n snow

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September 12, 2016 · 3:18 pm

Opinions Are Like Onions

The REAL Sarah

“Why does something always smell bad when I am talking?”

Opinions are like Onions.

All you have to do is subtract 3.141592 and they are exactly the same.

The people that like the way they taste like theirs a lot.

They want you to try them.

And if you don’t like the taste, then you just don’t know what’s good for you.

Onions are good for you.  They make you fart and they clear out the bad gasses made up of methane and other toxic waste from your colon and digestive tract.

Opinions are good for you too.  They make you fart out of the mouth, clearing bad gasses made up of stupidity and toxic ideas out of your little old brain.  You should not be holding that stuff in.  It is poisonous and it could potentially explode.  Not something you want to happen in either the colon or the brain.  Only stupid people hang on to them in the face of contradictory evidence.  (It makes me nervous that I don’t see people exploding more often, because I hold the opinion that there really are a lot of stupid people out there.  I, too, am probably in danger of exploding at some point.)

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And see, that’s the important point here.  Opinions are only as valuable as fart gas.  For the all-important progress of ideas to really happen, opinions have to be tested.  And I don’t mean opinions like whether or not you like the taste of onions.  I am talking about opinions that lead to policy.  Politics are crammed full of opinions.  (I got that right, didn’t I?  I didn’t say “onions” when I actually meant “opinions”, right?)

Hillary Clinton is apologizing now for the opinion-based fart-gas of saying that “half of Donald Trump’s supporters are deplorable people”.  The facts are that the KKK has voiced support for Trump, as have a number of immigrant-hating racists like Ann Coulter who will tell you in detail about all her onions concerning Mexicans and brown people.  People at Trump’s rallies have physically assaulted black people and protesters of any variety.  And to “deplore” someone is to speak out against their ideas or actions.  So the critical word that is not a fact, but rather an onion, must be “half”.  This is the word where Hillary went wrong.  I am sure that “half” is an under-estimation.

And Mr. Trump, as a connoisseur of truly stinky onions has said that Clinton and Obama are literally the founders of ISIS.  And in his onion, Vladimir Putin is a stronger leader than President (of this country) Obama.  One wonders why no one has really sliced and diced these particular onions.  One imagines that if Hillary were the chef serving these onions, no one would be willing to have them in the dining room, let alone eat them.  Onions need be tested for flavor and rightness long before they are served.

So, to close up this onion-smelling essay before it makes me fart again, let me just say, we need to not get stuck in the onion patch and mistakenly convince ourselves we are smelling roses.  Roses shouldn’t make you cry.

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