Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright, and Albert Pujols are all potential Hall-of-Famers. This season was probably the last for all three. Certainly the last with the Cardinals. But they are swept out of the playoffs in the very first round by the wild-card Philadelphia Phillies. I am bummed.
And yesterday I woke up with flu-like symptoms (though my last Covid test was negative.) Today I am down and out, sick in bed. The appointment with the eye doctor had to be rescheduled. I am double-bummed.
And I have watched more of the January 6th Committee hearings. There is so much evidence that Donald Trump is guilty of election manipulation, fraud, obstructing justice, and citing an insurrection while trying to overturn the last election. There is more credible evidence, testified to by Republican officials than got Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed for treason. It leads me to grumpily wonder why the orange one is not also on trial and destined to be executed. More people testified against him than the Rosenbergs. More people directly died from the insurrection violence than died from the transmission of nuclear secrets the Rosenbergs allegedly enabled. Maybe that will change if Putin uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, but Trump has ties to that too. He had nuclear documents about the defenses against nukes from some unnamed country (possibly France) that Putin would pay handsomely to see. The stolen documents in Mar a Lago scandal is only one more reason to try and execute the malevolent orangutan.
And why are you so angry at Trumpalump today, Mickey?
Well, duh… I am sick. I have a low-grade fever, a headache, and the bleching blahs.
And as I try to mend while watching TV, all the talking heads are bemoaning that, though Biden’s presidency has done a lot to repair the damage the orange president created, and he has given us many benefits that no one reasonably expected, the Republicans will take back the House and the Senate and proceed to try endlessly to impeach Biden, until a Republican wins the Presidency again in 2024. And then public schools will be privatized, the fossil fuel industry will be deregulated, Medicare and Social Security will be legislated away, and the entire planet will become a lifeless, post-industry hellscape.
The picture, “That Night in Saqqara,” is about youth and age, life and death. One of the things I intend to discuss as a change is the way my life has tilted on the scale of life and death. The weights are health problems, environmental problems, and social problems. And all of those weights seem to go on the death plate of the scale.
My scale has arthritis, diabetes, high risk of heart attack or stroke, and diabetic depression on the death plate. By contrast, the pharoah above only had advanced age and death prior to the picture on his death plate. Of course, the fact that he’s already dead should be a heavier weight than any of mine. But obviously the pharoah also has mummy-necromantic magic working in his favor on the life plate of the scale. And me, being now a serious Christian Existentialist (an atheist who believes in God,) I can’t even claim a faith in some mythical afterlife where I will have wings and a harp and can be a nudist all I want since many artists have depicted angels as nudists.
But the boy in the picture is faced with the same weight imbalance as both me and the pharoah. He has youth and health and a brass ahnk necklace that symbolizes life on his life plate. But if he’s alive today, his prospects for life are skewed too. Climate change may cause his death from heat or storms at almost any point between now and the climate Armeggeddon that the Koch Brothers have been nurturing with their fossil-fuels-carbon emissions in order to score higher profits before everybody on earth dies (something that won’t affect their lives since they both plan on being dead before it happens. One of them is already dead.).
And, of course, in the United States generally, and Texas especially, there is the whole gun-rights debate that loads massive lead weights on the death plates of young and old alike. After the Newtown and Uvalde shootings (excuse me… 15-minute break for weeping… I spent 31 years being a teacher) not even elementary-school classrooms are safe places for children.
This, of course, is a very significant change in the way the world is. More than half of my teaching career occurred before the Columbine school shooting. Before that point we had no plan for dealing with an active shooter on campus. Afterwards we discussed, changed policies and procedures, and practiced what we were supposed to do… lockdowns, hiding kids, keeping them silent in the dark… and deciding for ourselves, “They will not kill my students until after I am already dead.”
This is called “Magic Carpet Ride,” though it could be called, “No Fortress is Safe Anymore.”
So, what are the current changes I am bemoaning in this post?
I am currently closer in fate and time to the pharoah rather than the ahnk-wearing boy. I will not be around for more than another decade at the most. But I am not alone being under threat.
The world is ending in flames and hurricanes because of greedy people valuing their wealth over everybody’s lives, I hope you all live long after I am gone myself. But I have doubts about how long we collectively have.
And politics and gun-culture have grown toxic. We could be ended by a bullet at any time, in any place. And it is a scary thing that we have no power over that at present.
As always, I prepare for the worst, and I then hope and pray it doesn’t happen that way.
I know you read the title and immediately thought, “Oh no! Not another self-reflection post where maudlin Mickey complains about what he thinks is wrong with himself and is usually eerily right on the money, although it is strange and bizarre and will probably never be corrected.”
But it is what successful authors do. I have seen Stephen King reflecting on his own career and writing process. I have seen Seinfield complain endlessly about every little thing that happens around or to him. And so, I plan to do it too. Though I probably will do it wrong and be terrible at it, so it will work the same way as my terrible poetry, making great poets better by comparison.
That which is pretty bad about me now includes the fact that my productivity has really fallen off. In the last decade, from 2012 to 2022, I have written and published 21 books. I have written this daily blog almost every day, and I have drawn, colored, or painted more pictures of various kinds than I could possibly ever keep track of.
But my storytelling has slowed in a molasses of forgetfulness, confusion, and lost thoughts. My drawing has slowed by arthritis pains in my fingers and hands. And if I can claim that less output is made up for by distilled and concentrated power, maybe I can pull out of the triple-bummer tailspin I’m in. But I am also pressed to prove that the concentrated stuff is actually better.
My following on WordPress is dropping as more and more I reveal the real me in these goofy little essays. I am being followed more and more by nudists. But the more nudists follow me, the more normal people who wrongly believe nudists aren’t normal people will unfollow me and swear off following any more Mickey-like nudists. And the irony is that less and less, because of health conditions, can I be actually naked. But more and more I am being emotionally, spiritually, and candidly naked. Naked in my beliefs. Naked in my soul. More and more leads to less and less which become more and more again. Maybe my followers on WordPress will do that too. I am linked to and followed by the AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation) and https://histonudismo.wordpress.com/. I seem to be making more sales of my nudist stories thanks to Twitter nudists who gleefully share everything they like about nudism.
And I have been really having a time about being the unluckiest human being that somehow managed to survive every dark turn in 66 years of life on earth.
The car that I was hoping would be the last one that I would ever need was destroyed by a Dallas pothole. Its replacement is giving me a hefty car payment I was hoping to never have to pay again. My wife’s bedroom ceiling collapsed on her bed. The plumbing in our house is seriously malfunctioning and beyond my pocketbook to repair. As is the bedroom ceiling. So, the luck part of my personal mojo is up to its lifelong bad old tricks.
But the baseball Cardinals have won their division this year. And Aaron Judge hit 62 homers in the American League this season. It ain’t all bad.
It is the goal of those who write humor to reveal truth and make you laugh about it. Unexpected truth is funny. It is also the main reason that far-right political kooks have no sense of humor Simply put, for the evil and stupid people who are taking over this country, truth is not funny. It is the enemy.
The fact that so many who are quick to argue cannot be quieted by a joke anymore means that the conversation can’t end until they’ve owned the libtard, or punched him in the face… or worse, shot him dead with their beloved Second-Amendment Rights.
And a source of that evil is the whole conservative-bubble propaganda wheels that never stop turning on Fox News, Breitbart, One America News, and Stormfront publications.
They take up arms against the things they fear. And they fear those people that their propaganda wheels identify for them as the “other.” That means people of color, Democrats, liberals, ANTIFA (which stands for anti-fascists, and as far as I can tell are mostly fictional… which prevents me from joining them,) and intellectuals (meaning anybody that is smarter than they are… specifically me.)
Yes, White Priviledge is real, though they will complain you’re being racist if you say it out loud.
The most frustrating thing about the armies of evil is that they are made up of good, basically God-fearing, fine-hearted people who would do anything for you if you are identified as a member of their group by the color of your skin or your support of their glorious leader Don Cheetoh Trumpaloney. Unfortunately the consumption of propaganda from their fear-centered and conspiracy-theory-prone propaganda wheels stimulates the fear centers of their amygdalas (also known as their lizard brains) and suppresses their natural empathy to the point of being able to do violence in the name of leaders who are basically robbing them, conning them, and laughing about it behind their backs.
Enthusiasm for an idea like this… good or evil?
And the leaders who are doing all of this, they are the primary beneficiaries of corporate greed and control of politics to the point that they can make more profits than ever from fossil fuels at a time when the planet is dying from green-house gasses that cause fires in the western States and the ferocity of Hurricane Ian in Florida.
So, what are people who would rather see good happen than have the world die in fire and a hail of bullets going to do about it?
We can vote. Here are the names of some people who support evil ideas and have made lots of money in their respective offices; Ron DeSantis (Mickey Mouse’s new nemesis), Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Greg Abbott (Evil Emperor of Texas,) Marco Rubio (enemy of immigrants everywhere,) and basically anyone who rules with a Maga hat on, or calls himself a Trump Republican.
We have to keep fighting for public education, fair and equal and well-funded, free of book banning in school libraries that target classic works of black authors, gay authors, truth-tellers, and authors of science books that include climate change and evolution as scientifically established, and willing to treat kids as valuable learners no matter what color, religion, ethnicity, culture, or sexual orientation they are blessed with. Kids are kids and deserve love and respect (even the naked ones, though I am not advocating for nude schools… that’s just a joke.)
We have to treat the aggrieved and fearful members of the evil armies not as evil, but as our misguided brothers and sisters, neighbors, useful members of society, and people who can be reminded that they do have good hearts, and only cold-hearted lunatics and despots are truly evil.
And I will continue trying to open eyes and hearts with humor. Hopefully the kind that brings smiles and laughter. But also the kind that brings tears and self-examination as necessary. (Of course, I can’t promise to be good at it. Funny is in the brain of the laugher after all.)
We get smaller as we age. Both physically and mentally and in terms of property…. smaller is what we get.
The car problem was solved by buying a new car (a new used car.) I bought a 2015 Ford Focus that I am quite happy with in spite of the fact that I will have to pay for it for 72 months and may well have to give up driving for medical reasons well before that.
But then the car problem got significantly complicated when the insurance company, instead of totaling the car that hit the pothole and giving me the current value of it less the deductible, decided to okay the repair of the transmission, in spite of the fact that the total cost couldn’t have been more than a few dollars less than the total value of the car. So, I will pay $800 to get back a beat-up car that I no longer want or need.
As a writer, I am also diminishing in my ability to produce output on my laptop keyboard. My mind is still churning out story ideas and daily progressions, but my fingers, arthritic and covered with numerous band-aids, can’t seem to control the typing anymore. Just typing this paragraph forced me to correct letters that seemingly for no reason appear in the wrong space, even in the wrong sentence, paragraph, and wrong page. How does that work? Muscle twitches? Not remembering where the proper letter goes? Or possibly the curser is simply wandering for no reason, highlighting and deleting things at random.
Just as the fairies I have been obsessively telling stories about lately have diminished from human-sized in the Middle Ages to three inches tall today, so too have I become much smaller as a storyteller than I was when I was teaching. I used to have 6 captive audiences 5 days a week. Now I have had 28 pages read on Kindle in the last week, and only made $2.25 in the last month as a writer. Definitely not challenging James Patterson for space on the Walmart bestseller display.
So, I am tiny now. Less well known than I was as a school teacher. Less wealthy than I was two weeks ago. And, if you measured me with a yardstick, probably shorter than I used to be too. Only three inches tall before you know it. And not even any magic to overcome my disadvantages with.
Some days simply nothing goes right. Some days things go so wrong that a couple of bad days turn into a bad week which then morphs into an unlucky, really bad month. So it is on a bad Friday.
A quick and messy explanation; my hoopy old automobile hit a pothole. The pothole broke the transmission. The repairs seemingly are going to cost more than the car is worth. The insurance wants to total the car. But my son in the Air Force bought my wife’s car a while ago. And he now needs his car to go to his post in Florida. So, my family has gone from being a two-car family to a no-car family in a matter of three weeks. This next week my wife has a job to drive to. My daughter has a class to go to twice in the next city to the East. I don’t have a usable toilet to use in our house, and I need to walk to the nearest public toilet in the grocery store. That’s a lot of Uber and walking we didn’t have to do a year ago.
I am endeavoring to get the destroyed car dealt with. The shop where it is now sitting wasn’t the first choice of the insurance company. So, they arranged a tow to another shop. But the tow truck and the shop where the car currently is had a big misunderstanding and that sudden cancelation became my problem. It took an hour and a half on the phone to straighten out the mess. The car won’t officially be deceased until the 19th. But the coroner will most probably declare it still dead.
And the attempt to get a new car derailed today too. I have been waiting to test drive a Ford Focus I found at Carmax since Tuesday. But, it turns out, the car couldn’t pass a pre-test-drive emissions test, and when they went back to check the paperwork from previous owners, they discovered a problem that requires investigation. So, I have to go through the car search for a used car all over again.
But, although the crisis of the family cars is reaching a double-deadly deadline, it is a bad day that isn’t all bad. The St. Louis Cardinals lead their division by seven and a half games with two weeks left in the regular season. I am pre-qualified for financing at Carmax in spite of having a Chapter 13 bankruptcy from 2017 to 2021 and having no credit rating at all. So, even from the depths of this bad day, I can see future sunshine over the next couple of hills.
Life is a slapstick comedy. And when it’s me on the stage, I always seem to be the slappee, not the slapper.
I have had an excitingly terrible week. On Tuesday my car broke down. It had been showing a check-engine light on the dash off and on for over a week. Probably caused by a construction pothole that I hit really hard in mid-August. It was running okay until last weekend when it started coughing and kicking and letting me know in no uncertain terms that it might be dying. We chugged into the Five-Star-Ford service center where it may have breathed its last. The service supervisor told me that they are booked solid until October, so it will be sitting in their overflow lot until then.
But while my wife is still in the Philippines attending her sister’s wedding celebration, we still had her car to use, right? But then we found out that our number two son, who bought that car from my wife, is finishing his Air-Force MOS training and will need that car in Florida to do his first assignment. So, we go from a two-car family to a no-car family by Thursday. Then on Friday, that car also breaks down. I call Triple-A for a tow truck, but they send a battery specialist instead. (Well, I did tell the computer voice that my car wouldn’t start before I talked to a real person, so, my fault.)
But when the battery specialist arrived, he talked me into letting him check the battery. Sure enough, the battery was among the evil dead. And he had a battery with him to give us for free as AAA members. Aha! We temporarily have a car again.
And it was a good thing we had a car on Saturday. My daughter woke up with so much pain in the kidney area of her back that we had to go to Primacare to see a weekend doctor. But she has brand new health insurance. And Primacare couldn’t take that. So, they sent us to the Baylor Hospital Emergency Room. We were headed to a very expensive place with possibly no insurance coverage.
Well, we lucked out again. The hospital did, apparently, take her insurance. They did bloodwork and an MRI to determine it was a urinary tract infection easily treated with generic antibiotics, and no kidney stones showed up on the MRI. So, now, on Sunday night, she is comfortably recuperating in her own bed.
And I will have to solve the car problem by buying myself a new car, something I can actually afford to do since I paid off my bankruptcy debts last year.
If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.
But the question remains, why does this ping-pong game of endless crisis management always seem to happen to me?
First of all, the older I get, and the more my arthritis and my diabetes slow me down and make me clumsy, the more I find Physics, and Gravity, in particular, are now my enemies. I have to walk with a cane everywhere to prevent falling down. And, of course, I fall down anyway. I run into things when I try to move around them. Acceleration, impacts, collisions, and other actions that Physics applies to my locomotive powers erratically are a constant source of ill luck, worry, and pain.
If Statistics evens things out like the Statistics professors say it should, I have enough good luck coming to me to win the lottery three times and then live to a hundred and ten years of age to balance the scales of good and bad luck.
This is about being a writer, not a swimmer. But in a way, it is also about not drowning.
I have achieved some success as a writer. But my development economically is stagnant and I am treading water in the sea of money where sharks are circling intending to eat any value I may create.
I have, of course, created some value. If I had published my 21 books 25 years ago, and I had a contract with a major publishing house, I would be doing as well as some of the authors you see occasionally making best-seller lists today. I am not saying I would be a million-dollar celebrity author like Stephen King, James Patterson, or J. K. Rowling, but I would be a full-time writer making a decent living at it. I am not bragging. I have had a lot of literary education, and I know from input from professional editors and former employees of the major publishing houses that my skills as a storyteller are as good as, or even better than many of the traditionally-published authors today. I stood next to Terry Brooks (author of Sword of Shannara) in a MacDonald’s waiting for my Big Mac in Corpus Christi one time in the 1980s. As former English teachers both, we have a lot in common. But he started publishing in the 1970s, and he only taught for a couple of years. I taught for 31 years and only began seriously trying to get published in 2007.
Obviously, the publishing industry changed in the time between meeting Terry Brooks and getting published myself. Back then the major publishing houses were the gate-keepers, taking submissions and winnowing out the chaff to find the diamonds in the rough (Yes, that is a mixed metaphor, but either I don’t really care about that anymore, or somewhere along the way I have actually found a diamond or two growing alongside the grains of wheat.) If you wrote well enough to win a contract, they would offer you a standard twenty-thousand-dollar signing bonus and a book contract that would guarantee standard royalties for the duration of the book’s life in print. You would then be committed to whatever promotional book tours, lectures, and signings the publisher thought would be most effective, and your next book would have to be offered to them first. Of course, my first book would’ve been a commercial flop from the get-go, although that would probably not be the book I succeeded in publishing first.
Things no longer work like that. When I successfully got the first yes from a publisher in 2007, it was from Publish America. That was a total scam. They paid me one dollar to publish my book Aeroquest. But that wasn’t the scam part. They did publish the book, and they did pay me a dollar. But their attempt to make money did not come from that. I was supposed to do all my own editing and proofreading. They would do the formatting and the marketing. I had to compile a list of family and friends to receive a promotional letter. The only attempts they made to sell copies of my book were to those people on my list. They added typos to the final form of my book and then offered to fix all of that for a hefty fee. They made a couple of hundred dollars doing that. I got a total of six dollars in profits for myself. Publish America was sued out of existence in 2014, the same year that my contract with them was up and I got back the publishing rights to the book.
So, then, I vowed I was going to submit to a publishing house that was still open to submissions, and I found I-Universe which was an imprint for Penguin Books. I submitted a manuscript that they tepidly loved and agreed to publish, for a fee. It was explained to me that, in order to compete with things like Amazon, the traditional publishers were also putting more on their authors in order to guarantee they could still produce profits for shareholders and eliminate the risk from flops the way traditional publishing had always had to weather them. I would have to pay my own editors (company-provided professionals who were actually worth what they cost, I learned a lot from them.) I would also have to participate in and pay for marketing efforts. All told, it ended up costing me about five thousand dollars. And the pre-made cover they forced on me has no real connection to the story itself. (Nowhere in the comedy about aliens invading a small town in Iowa did any silhouette girl fly a kite at night. The girl characters were all green, fin-headed aliens.)
I didn’t feel as cheated by I-Universe even though I spent a lot more money with them. My book ended up winning two awards from them, Editor’s Choice and Rising Star Awards. And I learned everything I know about the publishing world from the good people I worked with. They were square with me, telling me that the traditional publishing business was dying, and they were all worried about their own jobs going away. They keyed me in on how to effectively open and present a good fictional story. They started me writing this blog, and they would’ve included me in many more marketing ventures to make my book profitable if I hadn’t gone bankrupt in 2017 and had sworn off paying them more money in 2014. They still try to get me to invest more money in marketing schemes. They hate seeing my award-winning book sit unprofitably unmarketed. But the total earnings in royalties that book has made is only sixteen dollars, and they will not cut my first royalties check until that reaches $25. Not gonna happen.
Then I killed a publisher with my next well-written book. PDMI Publishing LLC was enthusiastic about publishing my snowstorm opus, a comedy about orphans freezing to death in a small town (or, actually only almost freezing to death, to be less snarky about it.) But as I finished that book with a rookie editor that the firm had newly hired, they had to go out of business from losing too much money in a single year. They were not the only publisher to collapse financially in 2016.
So, my publishing solution was to turn to Amazon, slayer of traditional and small publishers alike.
With Amazon KDP I am free to publish anything and everything I want to publish. But I have to do everything myself. Writing, editing, formatting, proofreading, illustrating, designing book covers, and marketing are all entirely up to me. There are many successful authors on Amazon. Some of them even make more money than they spend. Amazon pays you monthly royalties, even if you only make two cents because somebody read four pages of one of your books that month on Kindle Unlimited.
But Amazon can freeze or delete your account for any reason at any time. And some of those decisions are made more by algorithm than any actual reader of your books. They can accuse you even of plagiarizing your own books if you are not careful. The whole scheme behind KDP is to do none of the work themselves, but pay out as little of the profits as possible to the authors and keep as much easy money as the scheme can generate.
So, I am a published author… for now. Writing whatever the hell I want and not caring much about whether I make any money or not. That’s not the point of being an author. You can’t be a starving artist if you are not actually an artist… and you can’t be one without starving either.
This is a class exercise moment, not monkey-house behavior.
Schools are starting this school year with too few teachers to adequately do the job. I got a call asking if there was any way I could come back to work, even as a substitute teacher. But it just isn’t possible. I am still alive, but far short of well enough to teach for even a single day. And I have spent the entire week watching teachers on YouTube telling the world why they have quit. It’s complicated. I have watched teachers tell angry stories. I have watched teachers cry. I have watched teachers make jokes to keep from crying. And this isn’t just the same old thing about low pay for an extremely difficult job. Chuck Todd says the problem is a 280,000 teacher shortage nationwide.
A painting of my first year as a teacher
Kids’ behavior is surly, rude, and out of control, but nobody explaining why they quit as a veteran teacher named this as the reason for leaving . They still love the kids. Nobody who becomes a teacher and lasts for more than five years does the job without at least secretly loving their students more than money, fame, and peace of mind. Realistically, if the kids don’t eat a teacher alive by the time five school years have passed, they secretly love that teacher too.
As an experienced middle-school teacher, I realize that every kid with their hand up in this picture got a candy bar after the photographer clicked the photo. And the empty seats in the back would be filled except the principal doesn’t want the actual class sizes revealed. Floor sitters and window standers have also been removed.
The biggest roadblock to veteran teachers in red States is interference from the radical MAGA governor who wants to burn some of their school library books and edit what words come out of the teacher’s mouth over things they have basically made up like, “Critical Race Theory,” “Don’f Say Gay ,” or “Sex is something that exists.” And this comes with additional threats at school board meetings, school assemblies, or sometimes even surrounding the teacher’s or administrator’s home with torches, signs, and AR-15s because MAGA parents don’t just get angry, they do something about it.
Another huge factor comes from the way that schools are funded… or not funded as is increasingly the case. Back when Rick (I’m smarter with glasses on) Perry was Emperor… err… Governor of Texas, he had a multi-billion-dollar rainy day fund at the same time when school districts in Texas were all suffering from a lack of funds. Rainy day, right? Not according to the Emperor… err… Governor. While he fiddled with presidential-run preparations, he let schools cut arts programs and lay off teachers and increase class sizes. Teachers were encouraged to pay for classroom supplies out of their own pockets. Teachers were required to do more with less.
And then there was the pandemic. My time as a substitute teacher came to an end as teaching became potentially a death sentence for me. My wife got the opportunity to teach kids by Zoom calls, and then teach both in the classroom and by Zoom calls at the same time… for which no additional pay was offered, though the added requirements for the teacher’s efforts were all mandatory.
So, education in America is in extreme crisis. You can go be a teacher if you have some college hours in any subject area. and you can be a substitute if you are still alive. I don’t know if they would accept a zombie or not.
And it looks like everybody is soon going to get everything they deserve… except teachers, of course.
Sometimes the US Government does actual good things.
Of course, it helped the process along that we voted out the mutant orangutan covered in Cheeto dust that somehow chose the White House as its unnatural habitat. That was a long four years totally misspent until the last gasp of the Republic in peril.
But now that we have actual governing professionals somewhat in charge of both houses of Congress, we actually got some good things passed in a reconciliation bill. There are over 360 billion dollars for combatting the climate crisis in the bill. Solar power, wind power, air scrubbers, and carbon-sequestration methods got a huge boost and may help mitigate the worst of what’s coming.
Of course, the stupid people who are guided by shape-shifting lizard men who tell them comforting lies on Fox News, still think Biden is destroying the economy and wants a socialist country instead of a patriotic one that knows better than to believe phony science from liberals about climate catastrophe, and never mind about the record heatwaves all across the country, that’s just a coincidence. Republican paradise which was granted to us by the orangutan can only be restored by, at the very least, not allowing a cap on insulin costs to protect pharmaceutical profits from diabetics who keep scheming to stay alive without pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. (That one thing was the only Republican priority that was voted in by Republicans, who voted, “No!” on everything else in the bill. They had to get something. So, economic pain or death for diabetics was a real Republican win.)
And it wasn’t just a climate-crisis win for the good guys (or somewhat good guys.)
The ability to give Medicare the control to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies is also in the bill. As are tax increases for corporations (especially the ones who pay nothing in taxes on billions of dollars.) Good things were wrested out of the hands of lizardmen who work for the supposedly-ruling 1%.
But the Republicans still plan on winning back both houses in the midterms. Then the Hunter Biden trials will begin with lizardman fervor and cold-blooded profit policies will again rule the day.
It’s nice, however, to at least win one before the end of the world.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Diminishing Man
We get smaller as we age. Both physically and mentally and in terms of property…. smaller is what we get.
The car problem was solved by buying a new car (a new used car.) I bought a 2015 Ford Focus that I am quite happy with in spite of the fact that I will have to pay for it for 72 months and may well have to give up driving for medical reasons well before that.
But then the car problem got significantly complicated when the insurance company, instead of totaling the car that hit the pothole and giving me the current value of it less the deductible, decided to okay the repair of the transmission, in spite of the fact that the total cost couldn’t have been more than a few dollars less than the total value of the car. So, I will pay $800 to get back a beat-up car that I no longer want or need.
As a writer, I am also diminishing in my ability to produce output on my laptop keyboard. My mind is still churning out story ideas and daily progressions, but my fingers, arthritic and covered with numerous band-aids, can’t seem to control the typing anymore. Just typing this paragraph forced me to correct letters that seemingly for no reason appear in the wrong space, even in the wrong sentence, paragraph, and wrong page. How does that work? Muscle twitches? Not remembering where the proper letter goes? Or possibly the curser is simply wandering for no reason, highlighting and deleting things at random.
Just as the fairies I have been obsessively telling stories about lately have diminished from human-sized in the Middle Ages to three inches tall today, so too have I become much smaller as a storyteller than I was when I was teaching. I used to have 6 captive audiences 5 days a week. Now I have had 28 pages read on Kindle in the last week, and only made $2.25 in the last month as a writer. Definitely not challenging James Patterson for space on the Walmart bestseller display.
So, I am tiny now. Less well known than I was as a school teacher. Less wealthy than I was two weeks ago. And, if you measured me with a yardstick, probably shorter than I used to be too. Only three inches tall before you know it. And not even any magic to overcome my disadvantages with.
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