Today during the school-drop-off downpour, I was forced to pull into the Walmart parking lot and pass out for a few rainy minutes. Good times, huh? But life is like that with diabetes. I have been a diagnosed diabetic since April of 2000. I have learned to live with my sugars out of whack, my mind potentially turned into Swiss cheese with cream gravy at any moment, and a strangely comforting capacity to weather headaches, both the heartbeat in the temples like a timpani kind, and the red-hot needles of Nyarlathotep boring into my skull kind. I suffer, but I also survive. In fact, the terrible incurable disease most likely to kill me is, in some ways, a sort of a back-handed blessing. I certainly don’t take life for granted with it. I am more conscious of how food can affect me and make me feel. I have had to learn how to take care of myself when taking care of myself is tricky like an Indiana Jones’ adventure in the Doomed Temple of Mickey’s Body. I take going to the doctor seriously and have learned what questions to ask. I have been to the heart specialist and the endocrinologist and the dietitian more than most people, though not more than most people should see them. I have also learned how to make fun of dread diseases… a skill I never imagined I might develop later in life.
My first experience of diabetes wasn’t even my own illness. Back in 1984 I had a boy in my seventh grade class who seemed to be falling asleep constantly. He was a shy little Hispanic boy with curly hair who was usually whip-smart and very charming. But I couldn’t seem to keep his head off his desk. So I asked him what the matter was. He was too shy and worried that he had done something wrong to answer me. So I asked him to get some water to wake himself up. The reading teacher across the hall told me, “You know, Juanito is diabetic. His blood sugar might be low.”
So I asked him, “Is that your problem?”
He nodded and smiled.
“The office keeps some orange juice in the refrigerator for him,” the reading teacher said.
So, I saved his life for the first time in my career without even knowing what the problem was or how to solve it. He came back from the office perky and smiley as ever. And I realized for the first time that I needed to know what diabetes was and what to do about it.
Juanito became one of a number of fatherless boys that adopted me and spent Saturdays hanging out with me to play video games and role playing games. He was one out of a pack of kids that swarmed my home in the off hours and would do anything I asked in the classroom no matter how hard. He was a juvenile diabetic, the son of a woman with severe type-two diabetes (adult-onset). His older sister had become a nurse at least partly because of the family illness. Juvenile diabetics, though their lives can be severely at risk, have the capability of growing out of it. As a seventh grader he didn’t really know how to take care of himself. Teachers who unknowingly offered candy as a motivator could’ve put him in a coma because he was too polite and shy to say no. But I fed him a few times, befriended him a lot, encouraged his interest in sports, and he grew up to be a star defensive back on the high school football team. He gave me the portrait I share with you here for attending so many of his football games and rooting for him to overcome the odds. When he visited me at the school years later, he was basically diabetes-free.
Juanito’s story gives me hope. I know I will not overcome the dreaded Big D disease of South Texas. I will live with it until it kills me. It caused my psoriasis. It gives me episodes of depression and chronic headache. But at this point, I am still controlling it through diet and exercise, not taking insulin or other drugs. (In fact, it was one of those other drugs that was making me pass out at work constantly from low blood sugar. Diet works better than pharmaceuticals.) One day it will give me a fatal infarction or a stroke and be the end of me. But until that time I will continue to do the difficult dance with it and get by, because, after all, dancing is exercise, and exercise overcomes the effects of the disease. Just ask Juanito.
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Catch a Falling Star 
Self-Reflection
Every writer, whether he or she writes fiction or non-fiction, is really writing about themselves. The product originates within the self. So, that self has to gaze into the mirror from time to time.
So, the question for today is, who, or possibly what, is Mickey?
I have been posting stuff every day for a few years now, and in that time, I have been much-visited on WordPress. Maybe not much-read, but then, you cannot actually tell if somebody read it or not. Most probably look only at the pictures. And, since I am also an artist of sorts, that can also be a good thing. Though, just like most artists, my nude studies are more popular than the pieces I value the most. But unless the looker makes a comment or leaves a “like”, you really have no idea if they read or understood any of the words I wrote. And you have no idea what they feel about the art. Maybe they just happened to click on one of my nudes while surfing for porn.
I rarely get below 50 views of something in my blog every day. The last three days were 86 views, 124 views yesterday, and 88 views already today. My blog has definitely picked up pace over the length of the coronavirus quarantine. But no definable reason seems obvious. Some of my posts are polished work, but Robin is right when he says today’s post is merely fishing with the process, which is true almost every day.
As a person I am quirky and filled with flaws, pearls of wisdom that result from clam-like dealing with flaws, strange metaphors that shine the pearls, and obsessions like the one I have with nudism that leaves me properly dressed for diving for pearls.
I have demonstrated throughout my life that I have an interest in and experience with nudism, though not the boldness to parade my naked self before the world outside of the writing that I do. I also spent most of my bachelorhood dating reading teachers and teachers’ aides, finally settling down and marrying another English teacher. I completed a thirty-one year career as an English teacher, which means I spent a lot of time teaching writing and reading to kids who were ages 12 to 18. Twenty-four of those years were spent in the middle school monkey house. And all of that led to being so mentally damaged that I wasn’t good for much beyond becoming a writer of YA novels or possibly subbing for other mentally-damaged teachers in middle schools around our house.
A real telling feature of what I have become is the fact that most of the characters I write about in my fiction are somehow a reflection of me. Milt Morgan, seen to the left, is illustrated here with a picture of me as a ten-year-old wearing a purple derby. Yes, I was that kind of geeky nerd.
And most of the plots are based around things that happened to me as a child, a youth, or a young teacher. Many of the events in the stories actually happened to me, though the telling and retelling of them are largely twisted around and reshaped. And I am aware of all the fairies, aliens, werewolves, and clowns that inhabit my stories. Though I would argue that they were real too in an imaginative and metaphorical way.
So, here now is a finished post of Mickey staring into the metaphorical mirror and trying in vain to define the real Michael, an impossible, but not unworthy task.
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