The field on which I have printed these supposedly poetic words is part of the farm that I and my two sisters have inherited. The land belonged first to my great grandfather, Friend Aldrich. His son, Raymond Aldrich, was my grandfather, the father of my mother. Now that my parents are both gone, one-third of this farm is now mine. But I don’t own the land. The land owns me.
I have endured with my roots in this land for more than 65 years. The old cottonwood tree on the corner has been there longer than that. You see the cottonwood in both of the pictures so far used in this post. They say that the total root system of this old tree is just as large and spread out as the part of it you see above ground.
Ironically, my roots are here where the ancestors who came before me planted them in the 1800s. Ironic because my life now blooms in the Dallas, Texas suburbs, almost 750 miles away from my roots. That is a deeper and larger root-connection than the cottonwood has.
I don’t farm the land myself. Another local farm-owner rents the land and farms it for us, increasing his yield and profits in order to keep his own farm producing food for the world. My own crop consists not of corn or soybeans, but rather words, memories, statements, stories, and meanings distilled from more than 65 years of brewing them from the things that formed me, the things that came from farm and family, and resulted in the poetry that is my life.
Yes, it is poetry written by a fool and a notable terrible poet. But it makes people laugh and sometimes cry and reaches out from the center of my soul to communicate the wisdom of a life that has been lived and is now almost done. How is that not poetry? A poem written by a fool.
Ah, irony again! It ends up being anything but simple. You can write in simple, adjective-and-adverb-free sentences as Hemingway did, and still manage to convey deeply complicated and thoughtful ideas. One might even suggest that you can create poetic ideas in mere prose, dripping with layers of emotion, conflict, theme, and deeper implied meaning. You can also write prose in the intensely descriptive and convoluted style of a Charles Dickens with many complex sentences and pages-long paragraphs of detail, using comic juxtapositions of things, artfully revealing character development, and idiosyncratic dialogue all for comedic effect. Prose is a powerful and infinitely variable tool for creating meaning in words. Even when it is in the form of Mickian purple paisley prose that employs extra-wiggly sentence structure, pretzel-twisted ideas, and hyperbolically big words.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Darkest of the Coming Darkness
Egghead might be slightly batty.
I do not claim to be prescient. But like any overly smart and perceptive person, I often see what’s going to happen before it happens. Sometimes it is almost as eerie as a Vincent Price movie. Sometimes eerier. After all, on the 60’s Batman TV show, Price played the ridiculous villain Egghead, and was completely creepy while doing it, but still, you know… Egghead.
One thing that I have to predict about the coming darkness is about politics. I mean, the current Republican administration, where it is decisions by all Republicans all the time, has become nothing more than a monster movie. Not merely a bad monster movie, but a super-creepy-bad monster movie with a gigantic orange rubber rooster as the main monster.
This is what the great orange rooster looks like in black and white.
The reason it is bad is because, basically, to become a member of the Republican Party’s elected elite, you basically have to have your heart removed. Heartless, soulless monsters have a tendency to do things like take away Meals on Wheels for invalid seniors, health-care services from Planned Parenthood, and any hope of ever having affordable health insurance that actually pays for health care.
Senator Ted Cruz grinning about taking away Obamacare
And now, the monsters who have taken control of the theater are pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement because… well, apparently clean air isn’t good for decaying, desiccated monster skin and shriveled monster lungs that don’t breathe air anyway.
So here are my predictions for the coming darkness.
What people like me will look like in the future. That’s me in the middle.
I won’t live to see it. My body is breaking down at age 60. My lungs are compromised by years of bronchitis and flu. I am diabetic, so my very body chemistry is betraying me. There is a family history of heart disease. And I have already gone broke once on health care bills that the health insurance people really don’t pay for. (They are in the business of collecting premiums, after all, not making people well.)
What a lovely oxygen-free environment we will have!
As the climate changes take away large parts of our food production and resources, and the sea rises to take away land and major cities, people will be at war increasingly over diminishing resources vital to a population of seven billion souls. Graveyards and unburied bodies will become a part of every monster-movie scene.
Kiss me, Baby!
Love will become more complicated, because people who are selfless and put others before even their own life will die out first. The heartless, selfish, and often stupid ones will have the best chance for survival because they put themselves ahead of everyone else, and so have an unfair advantage over those who are not content with mere survival and exhibit self-sacrificing love.
You’ve never had a friend like me. And I can always eat you later if need be.
So, if you find my black-and-white monster movie post upsetting with the darknesses I am sincerely predicting, please remember, this is a satire post in a humor blog. The way it is supposed to work is that you wake up to the factors that make it upsetting and decide to do something for yourself to change them. Everybody doing a lot of the same little thing to make the world better can move mountains and fly to the moon. Big things don’t happen without everybody taking a hand. Maybe we can dream dreams once again and make some good things come true.
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Filed under angry rant, battling depression, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, horror movie, humor, monsters