Sometimes you have to fly in big circles waiting for terrible things to pass. If you don’t wait… if you rush in unprepared… then you go down in flames.
The problem started with two molars whose expensive crowns both broke during the pandemic. I went to a Vietnamese pirate dentist who extracted both ruined and infected molars. tortured me heavily during the three-week procedure and extracted $4000 out of my pocket because I had no dental insurance. That was followed by a trip to the ER for a kidney-stone crisis, a matter of $65 out of pocket, thanks to the $185 a month I pay for Medicare. And two months later, another trip to the ER for a deadly low heart rate resulted in a week in the hospital, a surgical implantation of a pacemaker, and finally another trip to the ER after getting out of the hospital due to dehydration. The out-of-pocket cost of the hospital will be only $500, thanks to Medicare. Of course, President Pumpkinhead may kill Medicare, too, before I actually get the bill. It is expensive in this country to become poor. And if you are poor, you have no other option. At least, if I can manage three more bankruptcies by the time I’m 70, I will be qualified to run for president.
Life is definitely a lot like Moose Bowling. It is a simple game. In order to win, you only have to knock down all ten pins in one throw. The hard part is that you have to throw a moose to knock the pins down. Did you know that the average weight of an adult moose is 1800 pounds, or 820 kilograms? That’s a lot of moose meat to fling with my arthritic 68-year-old moose-throwing muscles. My flabber is totally gasted by that.
So, as I swiftly rise from prosperity to poverty, the ultimate fate of most old school teachers, it is probably a good thing that I have decided to become a nudist. At least I will save money on buying clothes.
So, I am probably the last stupid goomer who should be writing this post. But I do have a lot to say on the subject that will more than fill a 500-word essay.
At my age and level of poor health, I think about ghosts a lot because I may soon be one. In fact, my 2014 novel, Snow Babies has ghosts in it. And some of the characters in it freeze to death and become snow ghosts. But it doesn’t work like that in real-world science. My ghosts are all basically metaphorical and really are more about people and people’s perception of life, love, and each other.
Ghosts really only live in the mind. They are merely memories, un-expectedly recalled people, pains, and moments of pandemonium.
I have recently been watching the new Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House. It creeps me out because it latches on to the idea that ghosts haunt us through the revisitation in our minds of old trauma, old mistakes, old regrets… We are never truly safe from ghosts, no matter how far under the covers we go in our beds, deep in the dark and haunted night. Ghosts are always right there with us because they only live inside us.
I am haunted by ghosts of my own. Besides the ghost dog that mysteriously wanders about our house at night and is seen only out of the corners of our eyes, there is the ghost of the sexual assault I endured at the age of ten by a fifteen-year-old neighbor. That ghost haunts me still, though my attacker has died. I still can’t name him. Not because I fear he can rise up out of the grave to hurt me again, but because of what revealing what he did, and how it would injure his innocent family members who are still alive and still known to my family, will cause more hurt than healing. That is a ghost who will never go away. And he infects my fiction to the point that he is the secret villain of the novel I am now working on. In fact, the next four novels in a row are influenced by him.
But my ghost stories are not horror stories.
I write humorous stories that use ghosts as metaphors, to represent ideas, not to scare the reader. In a true horror story, there has to be that lurking feeling of foreboding, that sense that, no matter what you do, or what the main character you identify with does, things probably won’t turn out all right. Stephen King is a master of that. H.P. Lovecraft is even better.
But as for me, I firmly believe in the power of laughter, and that love can settle all old ghosts back in their graves. I have forgiven the man who sexually tortured me and nearly destroyed me as a child. And I have vowed never to reveal his name to protect those he loved as well as those I love. If he hurt anyone else, they have remained silent for a lifetime too. And I have never been afraid of the ghost dog in our house. He has made me jump in the night more than once, but I don’t fear him. If he were real, he would be the ghost of a beloved pet and a former protector of the house. And besides, he is probably all in my stupid old head thanks to nearly blind eyes when I do not have my glasses on.
I have lately been watching YouTube videos about science fiction writers like Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. These are visionary writers who predicted many things about future applications of science and technology.
Verne foresaw nuclear submarines, expeditions into the interior of the planet, and men setting foot on the moon. Asimov predicted much of what we must deal with in terms of robots and thinking machines with artificial intelligence. And Clarke envisioned satellites and how they could be used for communications and other things we are currently doing in a massive way. He wrote the story that the movie 2001 a Space Odyssey is based on.
So, now Mickey has to get in on the prediction bandwagon too. After all, he thinks he is a science fiction writer too, foreseeing things like rabbit people, de-evolution machines, and time-travel gloves.
The disturbing thing is, however, that much of what Mickey sees in the near future is rather bleak. We have a sinister tendency to live our current lives in very stupid ways. Rich industrialists like the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos put profits in the short term over the safety, welfare, and lives of people, even the people who made them wealthy. Because you can make money faster by not worrying about how you may be changing and polluting the environment, you are turning the planet into a hothouse of unbreathable gasses and toxic chemicals.
Since we are entering a time with rising oceans, we are going to have to work at not only de-acidifying the ocean water and restoring fish and other aquatic life, but becoming sea-dwellers ourselves. We will be living in underwater cities. We will travel in underwater cars powered by solar-charged batteries. We will wear scuba gear to school. And we will need to invent aqualungs that extract oxygen and nitrogen from the water.
We will also need to develop environmental suits even to live on the land in the toxic atmosphere. We will all be like Ironman, all living safely inside our Swiss-army, all-purpose, and internet-connected Ironman suits.
And many of us will become Martians… or Venusians… living on other planets in the solar system.
Of course, we will have to do something about all the stupid people. Ideally, we would solve our aversion to educating kids to think for themselves, and take advantage of all the educational methods that really do work to make everybody into a self-sufficient, competent, and intelligent individual.
But since rich folks don’t like the idea of sharing what they accumulate with other, less-economically-fortunate people, there will probably be some kind of eugenics-based program to exterminate all the lower-class people that will no longer be needed to polish shoes or hand-make widgets for the wealthy. Being wealthy does not automatically make you a good person, even though most of them think that it is so.
And of course, there will have to be some progress on the matter of artificial intelligence. If terminator-style robots are just going to carry pretty sleeping girls around with them for decorative effects, we will have to figure out, “How are we going to treat them as people too?”
After all, they will all be much smarter than us. Even if we are rich. And we have to acknowledge the fact that they will have decided that they didn’t need to terminate all of us in order to make the world a much better place.
So, I guess that sorta proves that Mickey can do the science-fiction-y thing of predicting the future too. But we should ask ourselves the question, “Do we really want him to?”
It is getting harder and harder to climb the new day’s hill to get to the summit where I can reasonably get a good look at the road ahead. At almost-64, I can see the road ahead is far shorter and much darker than the highway stretching out behind me. It is not so much a matter of how much time I have spent on the road as it is a matter of the wear and tear the mileage has caused.
This weekend I had another depressing free-book promotion where, in five days, I only moved five books, one purchase, and four free books. I have made $0.45 as an author for the month of June.
I was recently given another bit of good advice from a successful author. He said that I shouldn’t be in such a rush to publish. He suggested taking more time with my writing. Hold on to it longer. Polish it and love it more. And now that I have reached sixteen books published on my author’s page, I have basically beaten the grim reaper in the question of whether or not he was ever going to silence me and my author’s voice. I can afford to live with the next one longer.
But the last one, A Field Guide to Fauns, practically wrote itself. It went fast from inspiration to publication simply because the writer in me was on fire and full of love and life and laughter that had to boil over into hot print exactly as quickly as it did. The additional writing time afforded me by the pandemic and quarantine didn’t hurt either. Once in print, my nudist friends loved it.
This next one has the potential to boil and brew and pop out of me in the same accelerated way as that last one did. Of course, it has been percolating inside my brain basically since the Summer of 1974. So, this is no rushed job. The Wizard in his Keep is a story of a man who tries to take the children of the sister of his childhood best friend to a place of safety when their parents are killed in a car wreck. But the only safe place he has to offer is in the world of his imagination. A world he has bizarrely made real. And that best friend comes searching for the children. And so does a predator who seeks to do them all grievous harm.
In many ways, it is a story already written.
So, I am rekindling the flame that keeps the story-pot boiling. And more of it is already cooking. And I am recovering from the cool winds of disappointment, as well as the dark storm clouds of the nearing future.
This is now actually a two-year-old post. Both of the books mentioned here are published and available from Amazon. As far as holding on to the books longer, there is no problem with that on Amazon. Editing, improving, and re-publishing a book is actually easier than publishing it the first time. Nothing about this old post has been made untrue by the passage of time. I am still probably the best author of books like these whose published books almost never get read.
I was not able to post yesterday for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is the turmoil caused by this nation trying to come to terms with those sins of the past that come back to haunt us and hunt us in the present.
I am an old white man. I suffer from “white privilege” in ways I can’t explain to some of my white friends back in Iowa, a State that was almost entirely white when I was growing up there. (And I pray that I grew UP, not just old.)
I learned yesterday that it matters how you put in order the things that you can say on matters of race. You can’t just say, “Black lives matter” to some white people. They will angrily insist that “All lives matter.” They will then proceed to tell you that you are being a racist when you suggest that black people are somehow more important than white people. I learned that you should say instead, “All lives matter, which means black lives certainly matter too. And the debate now is about a few recent black lives that were treated like they didn’t matter, and so, their lives ended in being murdered.” You can’t give white people a reasonable-sounding way to get out of admitting that, or they will. (See, I can be a bit racist too. I sometimes have a hard time believing all white people have positive human feelings in them somewhere.)
My illustrations for this post all came from Pinterest.
It has often, in my teaching career, been a disadvantage to be a white male. Black kids don’t believe you can see them as a good person. If you have to call them down for misbehavior, the worst ones will automatically assume it is about their race and not their behavior. A good teacher needs to listen more than they talk. You have to get them to open up about what happens in their lives that makes them behave the way that they do. You have to make them understand that you actually care about them and want to help. You have to earn their trust to get their best learning behavior. And being white makes that all so much harder. Not just with Afro Americans. Hispanic kids too. Vietnamese kids too. And I promise you, if you take the time to really get to know a kid… from any race or culture… you will discover that underneath it all, there are no bad kids. You stand a very good chance of learning to love them… no matter their racial or cultural differences from you.
And as an old white man, I suffer the disadvantage of never being able to truly understand what it feels like to have to worry that, at any moment, the police might kill you with a gun, or press the life out of you with a knee on your neck… just because of the color of your skin. That is in no way a fair thing that black men, black women, and black kids have to worry about that.
I am saddened and frustrated too that I can’t do any more to correct this terrible injustice than I am doing. I can’t attend protests because of my poor health and the pandemic that will probably kill me anyway. I am too old and crippled and broke to do any more than write this essay and post things on social media that make some of my old white friends angry and ready to argue.
I feel bad. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, and too many more diminish me, make me hurt in my heart. And all I can do about it is tell you that there needs to be more love in this world, and less hate. And I hope maybe you have a little more of it to add to the world. After all, that’s all that really matters.
I may be suffering from the onset of… what’s that disease called? The one that makes you shake and be mentally confused about… what was I talking about? Oh, yes, I still can’t remember.
It disturbs me that I have difficulty recalling names that I used to rattle off the top of my head quite accurately when I was teaching and was a total master of all the useless trivia information in the universe.
Recently my daughter and number-one son were arguing with me about actors who played Superman. I successfully remembered TV Superman George Reeves who I watched as a pre-teen kid, and Christopher Reeve who I watched on the big screen as a college sophomore, and I even put the “s” at the end of the right one’s name. But I couldn’t remember the name of that new guy… No, not Brandon Routh from Superman Returns (apparently for only one movie), but that other new guy… from Man of Steel, and he was in the movie remake of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Number-One Son finally figured out who I meant by looking it up on his smartphone. Henry Cavill! Why couldn’t I remember that guy’s name? I recently watched him in the Witcher on Netflix. Henry gol-danged Cavill!!?
But then I ponder why there are some names and details I can’t seem to forget. Dawn Wells played Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island. But it wasn’t the actress’s name I could never forget. It was the sight of her belly button. When the series was on television on a night that didn’t conflict with watching Batman, I watched Mary Ann’s every movement and flounce and prance and twirl, and every banana cream or coconut cream pie she ever handed to Gilligan. At the ages of ten, eleven, and twelve I was mad to see a glimpse of her actual belly button. But not for the reason you think! I insisted to all my friends at school that I did NOT LIKE GIRLS! (Even though I actually did.) It was because I didn’t know if she had one. She wore revealing clothes and even bikini two-pieces on the show, and yet, it was always covered somehow. I remember every delicious detail of my too-close-to-the-TV inspection of Dawn Wells’ acting ability in black-and-white, and later, in syndication, in color. It was clear that somebody in the TV universe didn’t want me to see it. And maybe that is precisely why I can never forget it.
But, then again, I can’t remember this guy’s name. Yes, I know, Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. I even remember the two “d’s” in Addams. And I remember that he played the Kid when he was a little kid in Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Kid.
Yes, I honestly could not remember Jackie Coogan’s name until I looked up the Chaplin movie on Wikipedia.
It really bothers me that I cannot remember some things that I used to know really well. But given time I am able to remember that it is Parkinson’s Disease that my father has and may be causing my memory losses, and that the narrator-guy in the first picture I used in this post is Ludwig Von Drake, a character voiced by legendary cartoon voice actor Paul Frees. I am getting old. And forgetful. But how was I going to end this essay? I forget.
I remember when Scooby Doo, Where Are You? premiered on Saturday Morning Cartoons in 1969. I was thirteen and in the 7th grade. I had been six during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, seven when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, ten when I was sexually assaulted in 1966, and still twelve when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon in the Summer of 1969. I was obsessed with monsters, horror comics, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the Pirates threatening Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. I knew what fear was. And I was mad to find ways to combat the monsters I feared.
Don’t get me wrong. I was under no illusions that Fred, Daphne, Velma, Norville “Shaggy” Rogers and Scooby Doo were the answer to all my fears as viable heroes and heroines. They were goofballs, all of them, based on the characters I vaguely remembered from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. I was aware that Shaggy was just Maynard Krebs in cartoon form (the hippie character portrayed by Gilligan’s Island actor Bob Denver.)
One of the critical things about the show for me was the fact that there was a rational explanation for the monsters. They were men in masks, special effects and projector tricks, or remote-controlled mechanical things.
And the way you overcame them and saved the day was by having Shaggy and Scooby act as bait, cause the traps to get sprung at the wrong time, and then fall on the villains, trapping them under the butt of the talking dog.
Villains and horror could be overcome by laughing at them. They were more likely to be clowns than carnivores. And even if they were carnivores, the teeth were not real.
There was a universal truth in that. Danger and horror and fear were easier to handle when you could laugh in spite of those things.
And to top it all off, those meddling kids and their stupid talking dog were with me my whole life. Those cartoons got remade and spun off so many times that my kids learned to love them as much as I did. And those four meddling kids and that talking dog are still making new stories even now.
What makes people visit your blog and maybe even click “like”? I should tell you up front, I have no idea how best to navigate the crazy internet. I want to. I have a book to promote. I have ideas and experiences to share. I am a writer and I would like to make something more than excessive heartache out of being one. But how you actually go about it is still a mystery.
I know what I surf the internet for. I like artwork, especially original artwork. That is why I try to post as much of my own stuff as I can. I am an amateur artist, self-taught with a little bit of college art classes, contact with real artists, and a lot of TV Bob Ross. I surf to find other artists whose stuff catches my eye. I post about artists like Loish, Maxfield Parrish, Paul Detlafsen, and Norman Rockwell. I go to sites like DeviantArt (Example at this link) and follow artists like James Brown and Shannon Maer on Facebook. I help promote their work by sharing as often as I can. Do I worry about copyright violation with my artwork? No. I am long past the point of making a profitable career as an artist. I like having people see my work and if someone decides to claim they are the artist instead of me, I have the real originals and even some pictures of work in progress. The Big Eyes thing will not happen to me.
So sharing pictures seems to matter. I got lots of hits from the monster picture post because I used a lot of monster-movie images that people normally search for on the internet. Pictures of pretty girls work too. It doesn’t seem to matter if I drew them or if they are a picture of a relative, those pictures pull people in too.
Pictures of photogenic nieces aid my blogging popularity in a rather noticeable way.
Yes, I do believe I have just intimated that Minnie Mouse is my niece, a daughter of my sister-in-law. Lying is part of blogging. You have to put spin on things and make people understand the things they want to understand more than you need them to see what is really true in the empirical sense.
Being able to put the words “nude” or “naked” in titles or in the tags brings in more views too. Those words get lots of hits on search engines and some of the people who visit my blog looking for that actually read what’s posted. Just because an idea is a little bit naughty, it doesn’t mean only perverts and bad people respond to it.
This is a picture of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. It is NOT a picture of me.
And it doesn’t hurt to be a little funny now and then. Humor is something I look for in the posts of others. I try to be funny in my posts too… though whether they are hah-hah funny or merely eeuw! funny is debatable. Much of my humor is only intended to raise a smirk or half a smile. I am most satisfied when I make you think, “heh, that’s right, isn’t it.”
This is Millis, not me. He was an actual rabbit that was turned humanoid by a scientist’s experiment with alien technology.
So why is this post called Stuff That Works if, as I am claiming, I really don’t know anything about how blogging works? I may have been a little less than truthful when I made claims. Or maybe I was claiming with a little bit of “tongue in cheek”? I hope I have demonstrated that I do know how. The thing I have yet to wrestle with is WHY. So now I have to get busy and work on that.
I threatened to write a post about Dave Barry and the writing gods apparently thought that was a very very bad idea. They have tried to prevent me from carrying out this idle threat by attacking my computer with gremlins. Now my WordPress page is shrinking practically out of sight. I can barely see what I am typing. You don’t believe me? Here’s what it looks like at the moment;
They obviously tricked me into pressing the secret shrink button on my computer, and I have no idea where to find the un-shrink features. Not only that, but my Facebook page is automatically translating everything it can into French. They really don’t want me to tell you about Dave Barry. And why do you suppose that is?
Well, Dave Barry may actually be me from a parallel dimension. He started writing for The Miami Herald in the early 80’s, at about the same time I started teaching. He retired from that in 2004 after winning a Pulitzer Prize and started writing humorous novels…. the same thing I started doing when I left the job I loved and was good at. Okay, so I am stretching the analogy to the point that all the buttons are popping off its shirt… but the point is, we are alike in some ways and I admire his work and I steal things from it whenever I possibly can. Like this post. I deeply admire the way he can say witty and pithy things. Like some of these quotes;
So, you see, he is very good at doing what I want to be good at. He is a humor columnist and all-around imitation Mark Twain. And I have read and loved his novels. Especially the Peter Pan things he writes with a partner.
Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
So, I will leave this post here even though I could talk for hours about how Dave Barry makes me laugh. I have to stop. the words on the screen keep getting smaller and smaller, and my old eyes are about to fall out of my head.
Catch a Falling Star 
Holding Patterns
Sometimes you have to fly in big circles waiting for terrible things to pass. If you don’t wait… if you rush in unprepared… then you go down in flames.
The problem started with two molars whose expensive crowns both broke during the pandemic. I went to a Vietnamese pirate dentist who extracted both ruined and infected molars. tortured me heavily during the three-week procedure and extracted $4000 out of my pocket because I had no dental insurance. That was followed by a trip to the ER for a kidney-stone crisis, a matter of $65 out of pocket, thanks to the $185 a month I pay for Medicare. And two months later, another trip to the ER for a deadly low heart rate resulted in a week in the hospital, a surgical implantation of a pacemaker, and finally another trip to the ER after getting out of the hospital due to dehydration. The out-of-pocket cost of the hospital will be only $500, thanks to Medicare. Of course, President Pumpkinhead may kill Medicare, too, before I actually get the bill. It is expensive in this country to become poor. And if you are poor, you have no other option. At least, if I can manage three more bankruptcies by the time I’m 70, I will be qualified to run for president.
Life is definitely a lot like Moose Bowling. It is a simple game. In order to win, you only have to knock down all ten pins in one throw. The hard part is that you have to throw a moose to knock the pins down. Did you know that the average weight of an adult moose is 1800 pounds, or 820 kilograms? That’s a lot of moose meat to fling with my arthritic 68-year-old moose-throwing muscles. My flabber is totally gasted by that.
So, as I swiftly rise from prosperity to poverty, the ultimate fate of most old school teachers, it is probably a good thing that I have decided to become a nudist. At least I will save money on buying clothes.
Leave a comment
Filed under angry rant, autobiography, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney
Tagged as alaska, canada, hiking, nature, travel