Category Archives: angry rant

August 3, 2016 · 2:48 pm

A Day for Battling Monsters

Long John Silver

Today I must see a lawyer about preventing Bank of America from taking all the money in my accounts and seizing some of my non-exempt assets… which may or may not include my house and car.  And all of this basically for unpaid interest payments.  Yes, I had the account maxed out for a few years, paying only minimums.  So I have basically paid back more  money than I spent, but they intend to collect more than merely the unpaid amount.  The lawyer I am going to consult says they are gambling that I won’t hire a lawyer and fight it.  So he is either going to be a great help, or another bloodsucker draining my resources.  We shall have to see.  But in this modern world where everything is about debt… debt they don’t really want you to pay off, sometimes you have to roll up your pant legs and wade through the sea of shallow cow poop.  If I fail to win this fight, I may end up bankrupt and homeless, so it is pretty important that I take on the beast.  It will be something more to laugh about in any case… in the future when the wounds heal.

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August 1, 2016 · 2:57 pm

The Story Continues…

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I find myself caught up in the story once again.  Netflix put a new monster-movie series out there with eight episodes starring a Dungeons & Dragons-playing group of middle school kids, a psychically powerful girl-experiment named Eleven, an assortment of dysfunctional adults, star-crossed teen romantics to use as potential monster food, and a creepy mouth-headed monster from the “upside down” to eat them all.  How could I not binge-watch such a thing?

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This binge-watching addiction comes at a time when I have other things on my mind.  My aging parents are in poor health and have a critical doctor’s visit coming up this week.  Bank of America has decided to experiment on me to see what happens if they sue me for the total amount of my debt, plus court costs, plus additional fees for betraying them by going to Wells Fargo, plus additional additional fees just because they don’t like me and think I’m ugly.  I am awaiting a call from a potential lawyer-advocate to help me even as I am writing this.  I am also planning how to live without money until the total is payed off in garnished pension, seized property and bank accounts, and whatever other way they can squeeze more money out of me.  Some monsters are all mouth.   This of course comes after I completed a program of debt resolution and paid off all my other creditors.  When I called Bank of America, they didn’t seem to know what happened to the debt, so they did not participate in that.   Were they plotting evil, or just that stupid?  Such questions go into the making of a monster.  Perhaps a monster movie television series on Netflix was precisely what I needed.

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The only episode I haven’t watched yet is the last installment.  Potentially the monster gets its comeuppance.  That’s what the lawyer, a consumer rights attorney, promised me in his letter.  It also is what the kids in Stranger Things are promising as they prepare to enter the monster’s lair.

Why do I need to see the ending of the story so badly?  Because when we reach the end of our life course, the happy ending, in real life, does not overcome death and endings.  We live our time on Earth, reach the end, and then we are no more.  Only the story continues.  New lives and new adventures begin, only to proceed relentlessly to their ending.  Even when the human race’s story comes to end and there is no more life on Earth, the story continues.  You have to be caught up in that.  There is no other choice.  The things you dread stalk you and eventually catch you, and the happy ending is bound up in how you handle it along the way.

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July 9, 2016 · 3:33 pm

Return to the Stone Age

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Pebbles Winchuk, South Texas dino-girl

We are swiftly returning to the Stone Age.  We are dividing into armed camps and shooting each other.  Texas is an open carry State and they are allowed to carry rifles to Black Lives Matter rallies.  Former Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh took to Twitter to declare the conservative position (at least the lunatic half plus at least one per cent).

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Well, if he is coming for Black Lives Matter punks, then he might as well come for me, too.  I believe black people have been unfairly targeted by law enforcement (even black cops who buy into police-culture prejudices).  I think police forces need to be retrained to be more race-sensitive and determined to de-escalate potentially violent situations instead of executing the suspect on the spot.  If they can do that for white suspects, even armed and potentially violent white suspects, then they can do that for everybody.  As a school teacher, I stopped and broke up at least forty fights in my career.  Two of them involved weapons and I stopped at least four high school fights while being forced to walk everywhere on campus with a cane.  You can bring violence to an end by talking to the participants.  You don’t have to shoot Jose and Deshawn to get them to stop punching each other because they both like Maria.  But the government does nothing to move the national conversation in the direction of non-violence.  The Dallas shooting was made so much more complex because there were so many potential “good-guys with a gun” on the scene that the brave policemen who charged towards the shooting had a hard time determining who the bad guy was.  And Joe Walsh is coming for us because we don’t believe we should be shot without due process.

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A picture of the Pebbles Winchuk picture taken with my brighter light.  Still not as good as sunlight.

So, we are returning to the Stone Age.  I need to start chipping away at pieces of flint to make more spear points.  I probably need to brush up on my dinosaur-training skills, or at least, watch Jurassic World another couple of times.  The Walshian tribe is coming, shouting “Ugga-bugga Thump! Thump!” and getting ready to throw more stones.

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July 4, 2016 · 4:30 pm

The Need for Easy Pants

Urkel

I have never been an advocate of hard-to-wear pants.  Pants are suppose to be an aid to civilization, allowing a man to hide away the sensitive and sorta ugly bits that make him more like the animals, and in certain situations, unable to access the rational data-base in his little bean-like head.  My own need for comfortable pants is further complicated by an enlarged prostate that presses on the spine, as well as two lower vertebrae eroded by years of arthritis.  Pants have to be tight enough to hold me together, yet not so tight they cut off the blood flow and kill my lower half.  It would be danged inconvenient to have to walk around without any legs, or any butt, or any naughty bits.  If I wore Urkel pants, I might even lose my heart and my stomach, things I’m almost certain I would miss.  And I wouldn’t be able to do the Urkel dance, either.

Of course, there are times when the whole issue of easy pants can become a real concern.  I am trying to make my way through the labyrinth of problems of the retired on a budget.  So I tend to favor cheap pants.  I buy most of my pants from Goodwill Inc.   They are mostly used pants… or previously loved pants… or previously worn-out pants.  The pants I am wearing at the moment have developed holes in the region of the crotch… not a good place for unwanted air-conditioning.  And the pants I bought to replace them have buttons in place of a zipper in the fly.  I didn’t realize the potential for spontaneous bathroom dancing that the combination of buttons and arthritic fingers could cause.  My best pair of blue jeans are the kind of denim known UN-affectionately as “high-water pants”.  This, of course, leads to inconveniently aerated ankles.

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The final verdict is in about easy-pants issues.  To avoid all pants-related issues you have to give up wearing pants.  And I do still have issues with becoming a nudist as well.  So the struggle to obtain and wear easy pants is a never-ending battle that we simply cannot afford to give up on.

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June 16, 2016 · 5:03 pm

Aunty Entropy Moves In

Mother Nature’s sister is one of those rich relatives you don’t really like, but have to endure.  She tends to take charge of everything and ruin all your plans.  Yes, we do not throw a party when Aunt Entropy comes to visit.  Well, at least not the happy kind of party where everybody has fun.  Aunt Entropy has come to stay for a while and take things apart.

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One thing Aunt Entropy likes about Texas is its utter dedication to fracking and oil money.    High profit motives have continued to force oil companies to pump toxic liquids into the underground to break apart shale and push out the oil.  We have fracking to thank for lower gas prices and Fox News talking points about no longer being dependent on evil ookie-icky foreign oil.  We also have it to thank for the current condition of the foundation of my little house.  Alternating years of flooding and drought have expanded and contracted the small hill the house sits on so much that the front end of the house has all but cracked off.  The frequent Dallas area earthquakes have no doubt helped this process.  Auntie Entropy clucks her tongue at it.  “Insurance doesn’t have to pay for this because you should have invested in foundation repair long ago.  It isn’t earthquake damage, it is neglect!”  Of course, my healthcare costs over the last decade have completely prevented any notion of paying out for foundation repair.  No one would loan a deadbeat former teacher money for household repairs just because he is old and broke and decrepit.  Lovely caring woman, that Aunt Entropy.

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The fracking related sinkhole under Wink, Texas… those lines around it are roads and highways.

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The Grandbury, Texas parking lot sinkhole which formed after heavy rain and a long history of fracking.

Aunt Entropy is, after all the personification of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in the science of physics.  To put it simply, Entropy is a process by which matter and energy progress from a beginning state all the way to a final state.  In the case of our universe, the process goes from the Big Bang of creation to the final star winking out at the end of the universe as we now know it.  Entropy means the progress we are making towards the ultimate ends of death and decay.  Every action we take leads to a consequence and a further action until we are dead.  Not just me.   Not even just you and me.  But all of us, everywhere in the universe.  This is why the little things where our lives break down make Auntie Entropy smile when nothing else will.

Here are some things that make Auntie Entropy smile;

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The Orange King with golden crown and tiny hands may be our next president.

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The hatred and self-aggrandizement that he campaigns on have taken root in the fertile soil of fear and hatred that Fox News and conservative leaders have tilled and toiled over for so long.  They are beginning to bud with flowers… if you can call weeds flowers.  And they are bound to produce poisonous fruits.

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Mickey’s car is breaking down again because of heat.  After paying over a thousand dollars to get pot-hole damage to the front tire and rim repaired, the coolant pump gave out and had to be replaced.  Now the overheating warning light comes on daily and we are forecast to have dangerous levels of heat in Texas weather for the next few days.  I am going to have to decide whether to spring for more car repair, or go see the doctor about the pain in my extremities.  I won’t be able to afford both.  Oh, my aching bank account!

My wife is overseas in the Philippines spending a month with her family after the death of her father.  But she left her green card here.  I had to express mail it to her for a large amount of postage cost and risk losing it along the way in the mail.  She might never be able to return to this country.  Well, I do see that as a bad thing, after all.

So while Aunt Entropy is visiting… or rather living here permanently, and feeding us her bad-luck salad made with equal parts misery, misfortune, and mayonnaise, we must learn to endure her wicked sense of humor and micro-managing ways.

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May 19, 2016 · 6:27 pm

Point by Point

Wally22

I was enumerating yesterday all the bad things that make my life exactly the way I expect it to be as a total pessimist.  Of course, I left out that I am fully expecting Donald Trump to be the next president of this country.  Yes, I expect the worst to happen.  Hillary Clinton will not beat Trump either because of her toxic unfavorability or because the email thing will bring down an indictment to nullify her eligibility to be president.  And all my conservative friends who love Trump will continue to dance happy dances and sing about me being a hopeless “lib-tard” who doesn’t really know anything about anything as Trump continues to rob them and make their lives more miserable with the help of the government he will control from the inside.

Yes, one of the biggest downers about being too smart for your own good is, you see past the lies everyone tells themselves, and perceive the darkest of the truths that lurk behind them.

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I got this meme from a high school friend who served in the Navy and became a firefighter… an honorable public servant no matter how you look at it.

In the meme to the right, I am characterized as a self-centered numb-noggin who thinks his opinion is more important than the realities of this person’s life.  It makes me sad that my childhood friend believes this is true about my political beliefs.  But I am not claiming to be oppressed.  Well, maybe by Trump once he does away with the healthcare law that guarantees insurance companies will cover me despite six pre-existing conditions.  This is a straw man argument that sets up liberals as unreasonable norks that want the law to dictate that everything should be the way liberals want them to be.  That is not the way I see being a liberal.

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I choose rather to look at what people are saying on all sides and make decisions based on my hopefully broad and enlightened mind.  I would never advise someone to have an abortion.  But I do care what happens to children once they are born.  Are we limiting their suffering when they are not wanted by anyone?  When they are born into poverty?  When they drink lead-contaminated water and are subjected to brain damage and death because the conservative government decided saving money was worth the risk?  I believe all people are deserving of respect and all people have value.  I have gay friends and former students.  Their existence in this world enriches it, and I am not ashamed to know them.  I would never ask one of my conservative friends to marry another man… or marry anybody.  I have a wife who is from a foreign country and her road to citizenship is still not traversed.  Could we be making that road harder than it needs to be?

I am a liberal.  But I would not call myself a tax-and-spend liberal.  I would rather see the money we already pay in taxes go for better public schools, better roads and bridges and public works, less expensive, or even FREE college education for my struggling children, rather than tax breaks and corporate wellfare for GE, Pfizer, and Exxon.  Is it too much to ask that our taxes be spent on us rather than enhancing corporate profit margins?  And couldn’t millionaires and billionaires afford to pay the same percentage of taxes that I do?  Maybe even more because they have more?  Why does believing these things make me evil?  Or stupid?  Or any of the other things that my conservative friends tell me that I am because I am a liberal?  I would rather reason things out than simply insult others, something the other side of this argument doesn’t make a habit of doing.

I have no problem saying, “Black lives matter.”  They do matter.  And they have not been treated fairly.  Not Trayvon Martin.  Not Michael Brown.  Especially not Tamir Rice, the twelve year old shot to death for having a toy gun.  These are children who are not to blame for their own deaths.  So I am not burdened to add “…All lives matter” because it goes without saying.  White and Asian lives have not been snuffed out in Walmart’s toy section for handling an air rifle.  I guess I must be a reverse-racist for saying this like I have been told on Facebook.

I am a liberal.  So shoot me.  Er… rather, don’t shoot me.  But be patient with my fact-heavy and logic-heavy arguments.  If you are a Christian, then weigh my arguments against what you know in your heart Jesus actually would do.  I know scripture.  I have read the entire Bible more than once.  I am confident my wanting government to do what helps the greatest number and harms no one will stand the test.  And I am preparing to deal with a President Donald Trump who probably won’t see it that way.

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May 15, 2016 · 8:40 pm

A Question of Gender

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As an almost sixty-year-old heterosexual man with a wife and three kids,  I am really not in a very good position to pontificate on the North Carolina transgender bathroom controversy.  I play with dolls and stuffed animals (though in my defense, it is more of a collector and wannabe toy-maker style of thing).  A couple of my children may actually decide to consider themselves bisexuals (though in their defense, almost all teenagers go through this sexual-identity angst and it is fluid, not carved in stone).  The religion I professed for most of last twenty years says that we should hate gender problems and treat them as a wicked lifestyle choice, not a genetically determined spot on the flexible continuum between male and female.

But I have known transgender people as a school teacher who was always approachable and who students often trusted with their deepest, darkest secrets.  And teachers, by the very definition of the profession, care about students.  The insensitivity of this stupid controversy breaks my old teacher-heart.

The truth is, transgender people in this country inhabit a bear pit full of angry bears that wish to rend them with claw-like condemnations and bullying treatment all because their preachers and opinion leaders tell them that they should be angry about this.  But whose business is it really?  And all the transgender people I have ever known, all two of them, were incredibly damaged people.  Suicide is the most likely result of the depression and self-loathing that most transgender teens experience.  I pray that such a thing doesn’t happen to children whom I have taught and tried to love for who they are.  But it happens.

(I need to warn you… the next part is not funny at all… nor is it intended to be.)

My example story does not have any names attached.  I will not tell you what happened in the end because transgender people are entitled to privacy.    But I am using a concrete example because I want to share with you things I know to be true.  The boy I am telling you about was really born a girl.  He was a boy on his birth certificate because an accident caused by hormonal imbalances during gestation gave him a penis on the outside even though he had internal girl parts, including ovaries.  He was not a hermaphrodite, though he was closer to being that than he was to being normal.  His culture forced him to be raised as a boy, even though his thoughts and actions revealed him to be a girl.  The people around him had decided he was gay by the time he was old enough to be in my classes.  He was bullied, insulted, and abused in very Catholic and homophobic community.  Things got even worse as he began to develop breasts.  It was no wonder he acted out in school.  The image burned into my memory was the day he threw a fit in the school hallway and had to be restrained so he would not continue to smash his forehead against the doorpost.  He was screaming and crying and ended up having to be hospitalized on a protracted suicide watch.  I never found out what set off the meltdown, but I can imagine based on the things I saw people do and say to him.  I believe he eventually had a sex-change operation in his twenties.  I pray that was a true rumor and not just wishful thinking on the part of some of his former friends.  That would’ve solved much of his problem, if only it had been an option before so much damage was done.  It might’ve been better if he had been allowed to dress and act like a girl from early childhood on… like the other one I know about but can’t say any more about.  They deserve to keep whatever dignity and respect they still have.  We don’t have the right to take it from them.

This has been a very difficult thing to write about.  I hope, if you read this far, that I haven’t made you cry as much I as I did myself.  But crying is good, because it means there is caring in a place where more caring and understanding are desperately needed.  There are places to gain more knowledge about this issue, and I hope that you can see that more knowledge is what is most critical to resolving it.  Let me offer a link from a right-hearted clergyman to help you know a little bit more.

A Baptist Pastor Tells You What He’s Learned About Transgender People.

Cool School Blue

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April 20, 2016 · 7:22 pm

Mr. Lucky

Self Portrait vxv

Sometimes everything goes wrong.  That, of course, is something that happens more often than the times when everything goes right.  Lately I have had the fortune to experience the more common of those two sometimes.

My most recent publisher, the one that was supposed to publish Snow Babies, underwent a reduction in capacity and financial difficulties.  They had to reorganize and reduce their commitments.  That meant they could no longer publish any of my other novels.  It apparently also means that they will no longer fulfill the publishing contract on Snow Babies.  Bummer.

My new car, a Ford Fiesta that I bought from Enterprise Rental Car to replace my old Ford Fiesta that was unceremoniously killed by a passing motorist as it sat in front of my house, is now in the shop with it’s own hoof and mouth disease.  While picking up kids from school, I hit a pothole on a Dallas street.  Not just any pothole, but a huge camouflaged cavern of a pothole capable of taking a huge bite out of the right front wheel.  I was not speeding.  I did not do anything wrong but drive in place I have driven a hundred times previously… though this time it was after torrential rain and a bit of nasty hail that I had no way of knowing made potholes bigger and angrier and more horrible.   I am surprised that it didn’t eat any other cars in the moderate traffic I was surrounded by.  But I initially thought that once a passing motorist, younger and more pothole savvy than me, did the good Samaritan act of helping me change the tire, that I would only have to get the tire fixed or replaced and would be happily on my way again.  No such luck.  Not only was the tire ruined, but also the rim it was mounted on, and possibly the undercarriage of the car.  It was going to cost at least the $500 deductible from my insurance company, unless something even worse happened that they couldn’t see without looking at their bank books a little harder.  And I had to get another rental car in the mean time.  But, of course, the recent hail storm not only had most of the rental cars rented, but the rental companies had lost cars to hail damage as well.  I was stuck with a rather expensive Dodge Challenger that the car insurance can’t completely pay for.  And I have no place to park it if the hail decides to revisit us this week.  Double bummer.

And, of course, it doesn’t end there.  Having kids in school is a challenge, especially this time of year with high-stakes testing going on.  I can’t give you particulars because some things have to remain private, but even really bright kids like mine, the children of two teachers, can be subject to test-anxiety and failure and the resulting depression which can prove fatal if not taken seriously enough.  Triple damn ding-dang bummer!

But we can’t let bad luck be the end-all of the story.  I am a pessimist by nature.  Nothing has happened to me recently that took me by surprise.  I am always expecting the worst to happen, and life rarely disappoints me on that score.  So I am not floored by these randomly-occurring sucker punches.  Rather, I am given that shot of anger and adrenaline needed to pick myself up and start fighting back.

class Miss Mcover

I have my novel Magical Miss Morgan almost ready to submit to another publisher that I found through a friend, with a couple of backup publishers to send it to after it is rejected the first time.  I have researched three possibilities so far.

I talked to the insurance agent today to stop the hemorrhaging of money down the drain of car repairs, and though I have taken a pretty good-sized cannon shot in this battle, it will not sink my little pirate ship.

And a conference with principal and teacher and student and parent solved a lot of the other problem.  It can be an advantage to a kid to have a teacher as a parent.  We tend to know how everything works, and we speak the secret language of Edjumacation to help get things actually done.

So, no worries, man.  Even though all my luck is bad luck, I am still lucky… since there is a lot of it.

 

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March 6, 2016 · 10:30 am

Making Fun of What’s Funny

 

Senator Tedhkruzh

There is only so much time you can spend making fun of Tronald Dump and Cred Tuz…  Only so many “Ted Cruz is a lizard-man” jokes can be made before they are no longer funny.  But it is never going to be less important during an election season than it is now.

Lizard-man Cruz is a religious-fanatic-poser who will lead us further into the realms of oligarchy and fascism.  We see him constantly in the Republican Presidential debates using lizard tricks to get any advantage he can get.  Telling Ben Carson supporters that Ben the Sleepy Dwarf was leaving the race and his supporters should vote for Cruz, the next best choice.  Of course, Carson was still in the race.  And all we got from the Cruz campaign was a big old “oopsie”. Those of us dedicated to making fun of Senator Cruz, especially those of us in Texas who have to take the blame for him, are trying our hardest to expose what he is to everyone who listens to us, and it isn’t working very well.  Cruz, as sleazy and reviled as he is, still seems to get what he wants… at least preventing others from having what he doesn’t want us to have.

Here’s a lovely video of Ted Cruz from Bad Lip Reading on YouTube;

I have to admit that I had to watch this three times to figure out that they were matching words to his lips rather than just showing us stupid crap that Ted actually says.  I mean, he really does talk and act like this.  How was I supposed to know it was mere satire?

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And as bad as Ted Cruz would be as a choice for President, Donald Trump would be far worse.  The irrational humanoid orangutan is using the same sort of fear tactics that Herr Adolf used to rise in Germany in the 1930’s.  He uses Mexicans and Muslims as whipping people instead of Jews, but he is similar in almost every tactic.  In fact, I believe that Herr Hitler would have his own reality TV show if he lived in New York City in this day and age.  He would definitely relish firing people on television, especially using real fire.  This man is leading all the Republican candidates in the polls.  He is even capable of beating Hillary Clinton due to her Benghazi-and-email tarnished reputation.  We may soon be required to salute and shout “heil Donald!” in this country.

Any of the Republican candidates would be better than these two I have concentrated my ridicule upon, yet any of them would be a disaster.  Kasich and Rubio are the most moderate and least-likely-to-destroy-all-life-on-earth.  But Kasich wants to slaughter public education, and Rubio is actually an enemy to immigration reform, not an advocate.  They are no bed of roses either.  Bed of thorns maybe, but not sweet-smelling like roses.

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A fairly accurate portrait of what Marco Rubio sees when he looks in a mirror.

So now I have used my 500 words to elucidate and lament the evils of politics as they have played out in this election year so far.  I hope you will laugh with me at the ridiculousness of booger-eaters like Cruz and monkey-men like Trump.  But I also hope you will take this humor at least a little bit seriously.

 

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February 27, 2016 · 7:47 pm

SNAFU Car-Buying

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Today I bought a used car from the people who rented me the chibi clown car after my poor little pony was murdered while parked in front of my house.  (Murdered in a sense that the drive-by crasher broke its leg, and you shoot a pony with a broken leg, which my auto insurance cold-heartedly did for me.)  So last week the auto insurance sent me a check to cover the purchase of a used-car replacement.  The auto insurance put my wife’s name on the check even though it was not on the title of the car or on the bank account I am now using for my retirement money.  So, when I tried to draw out the money for the down payment, the lovely bankers told me there was a problem with the check.  Even though my wife endorsed it and they put it into my account, I could not withdraw it again because my wife’s name on there turned it into a third-party check.  Apparently her signature isn’t proof enough that she agrees I get to spend that money on a car.  The banker said they have to have her fingerprint and a copy of her driver’s license.  She, of course, is out knocking on doors as a Jehovah’s Witness and they couldn’t do anything anyway since today is Saturday and not technically a business day.  So I went to buy the car without the down payment, which it turns out is okay because the car I want to buy is in Independence, Missouri.  It will take seven to ten days for it to arrive.  Oh, and there is a transportation fee to get the car from there to here, and an insurance deductible, and fees of all sorts like title and license, so that my $10,000 used car is actually going to cost more like $15,000 by the time it is paid off, almost as much as the car that was destroyed which was nearly paid off after five years.  So, bankers, car dealers, rental car people, and insurance people are all happy with their respective profits in the ordeal, and I still have to drive the chibi clown car for another week (which I must pay for myself).  I really don’t have to write any new jokes to make this post humorous.  Existential irony has pretty much taken care of that.

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