Mickeys are by their nature pessimists. When mostly bad things happen to you in your life, you learn not to expect good things, only be pleasantly surprised by them. And bad things happen only when you are prepared for them if you are expecting only bad things to happen. In fact, the bad outcome will probably seem good in comparison to the terrible thing you were planning on happening to you.
For example, my car is in the shop being fixed for accident damage that prevented me from earning extra money through Uber for a month and a half. I was told on Thursday that the car doors were fixed and it was in the paint shop. It was possible I was going to get it back Friday afternoon. I was not upset or surprised that I never got the call Friday. In fact, I fully expected somebody had dropped the car off a lift or painted it neon puce or something and that it will take another two weeks to fix the new damage. So if it turns out to be ready tomorrow, which I sincerely don’t expect due to Mickey Math, I will still be pleasantly surprised. I might even go into happy shock. After all, I clearly remember one time watching a tow truck operator load my malfunctioning car onto a flatbed tow truck, only to see it roll off the front of the truck to further damage it because he had not properly secured it. That yielded happy shock because the body shop owner who also owned the tow truck ended up repairing my car for free.
What is the science behind Mickey Math, you say? Oh, you didn’t say anything? Well, I will tell you anyway. In a world where 2 + 2 = 4, if Mickey desperately needs the answer to always be at least 4, you can be certain by experimental proof and past experience that it will surely come out as 2 + 2 = 3. Life and physics always disappoint Mickey one way or another. So the science tells Mickey to always be prepared for the worst.
That being said, here are some predictions for the near future figured out via Mickey Math.
- Since Trump’s tax cut last year retro-actively re-figured withholding deductions on my pension and I owed $1300 in tax penalties for 2017, I will surely pay twice as much in additional penalties this year in spite of the letter from last December telling me readjustments were being made for 2018.
- Trump is in all kinds of legal peril and the scandals of his presidency will probably lead to the Republican loss of control in Congress. Therefore the Republican Party will have a governmental coupe (in case Russia fails to swing the elections to them) which seizes absolute power for them and makes Trump President for life.
- If hurricanes don’t wipe Texas as clean as a marble tabletop, then we will experience our first day of 200-degree temperatures in early January.
- The baseball Cardinals will not make the playoffs, and the football Cardinals will return to having endless losing seasons.
- Termites will eat our entire house, and mosquitoes will drink every last drop of my blood.
Now, it is quite possible that things will fall short of most of these dire predictions, but that is how Mickey Math secures happiness from a miserable life.
It is a time when we need a hero to step forward. We lost one when Senator John McCain .headed off to Valhalla this week. I didn’t agree with practically any of his political positions. But the man stood up for what’s right and what’s wrong. He took stances routinely that went against some of the worst drivers of Republican actions. He prevented them from doing a lot of worse evils. My Republican friends in Iowa disparaged McCain just as Trump did as a RINO (Republican In Name Only). But he stood up for us with the thumb down gesture when the evil Republican Oligarchs were voting to take away the gains in health care that we made under Obama.
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 
Ghostly Reflections
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 don’t believe in ghosts.
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