Yes, now that I am bankrupt, I thank the God who made me that he made me poor and saved me from the terrible torture of being rich.
I know that sounds like a joke. But I am serious. In this world where you have to be willing to climb over the bodies and crushed hopes and dreams of your fellow human beings in order to be rich, I would prefer to be on the side of the downtrodden with a clean conscience and an empty wallet.
I have a castle of my own, but it isn’t very large.
I am actually a bit miffed after this last week. The swimming pool that has given me ulcers from significant financial reversals all summer is still not removed. I keep having to pay more and more. I had to declare bankruptcy because my credit rating was degrading and all insurance companies and mortgage companies punish that crime by charging you more money. The city is pushing hard to get the pool removed, but on Friday their city inspector failed to inspect the pool which must happen before the demolition can begin on Monday. In fact, the inspector never showed his face or called to explain why. But the city did not fail to contact the bank that holds our mortgage lien to make them reconsider the value of our property and the payments we are required to make. Chapter 13 bankruptcy doesn’t protect you from such things as that, by the way. In fact, it doesn’t help protect you from debt. I still have to repay everything I owe Bank of America and the other credit card banks I owe money to. The only thing it does do is stop the snowball of finance charges from rolling further down the mountain, and then it reorganizes my finances with outside guidance to guarantee the banks get paid off. That is because, even though I had to pay lots of money to the lawyer, and will have to pay more before we’re done, taking care of the banks’ needs is the first priority. So, I am on my own with the city and their demands and their bullying to make certain their demands are met too. It is probably a good thing that I have decided to become a nudist. After all, there will be no money left for clothes.
You will have to forgive me for beginning to think dark thoughts about rich people. One way or another, the wealthy minority are to blame for most of what’s wrong with my life. Congress right now is trying again with the Graham-Cassidy Bill to make certain that my next health reversal kills me. It is very important to them that Obamacare is repealed. And why would that be? Is is it because Obamacare works because it takes more in taxes away from one per centers, and the Republican-controlled Congress wants to give that all back to the rich folks? They need the extra millions more than I need to keep living, right?
I am tired of fighting over numbers in bank statements and credit card bills. I am poor. I have paid an awful lot of money to get to that point. I will be satisfied to defend my tiny kingdom to the death as the orcs of wealth-acquisitions overwhelm me. After all, I have a certain satisfaction with how I have lived my life, and no matter how badly it ends, that satisfaction cannot be taken away from me.
Catch a Falling Star 
Fauns
Fauns originate in Greek mythology as forest spirits, sensual, playful, and infused with the energies of the natural world. They are followers of Pan, the god of the forest. They are hedonistic, seeking sexual gratification from nymphs and human girls, loving wine and feasting. They are not the same things as satyrs, though Roman mythology would come along and squeeze them both into the same mold.
So, why am I, a boy from Iowa of distinctly German ancestry, so fascinated and obsessed by fauns in art and literature?
The answer is both goofy and creepy. I have a faun of my own. He lives with me as an invisible friend. His name is Radasha. He is Harvey to my Elwood. (That’s a Jimmy Stewart movie reference if the twists and turns of my mind confuse you.) Just like the fauns of mythology when confronted with travelers and wanderers, he sometimes helps with guidance and advice, and he sometimes does me mischief with ridicule and wicked tricks.
My theory for why my convoluted psyche has need of invisible companions goes back to the fact that I was sexually assaulted when I was ten. That is why Ra is basically a ten-year-old boy with the legs, tail, and horns of a goat. He is the sexual/sensual part of me that got split off from my inner self by that traumatizing event.
Being a child-victim can do terrible things to a boy. It seriously interfered with my blossoming interest in girls. It turned me from an inventive, out-going leader of the gang into a quiet and somewhat timid introvert. I repressed the memory of the actual event, more of a torture-situation than seduction, so that the real psychological damage of it occurred at the subconscious level. I began to worry that I might be gay. I began to seriously loathe myself and my own body. I went so far as to burn myself on my lower back by lying against the furnace grate in order to repress desires I felt were evil.’
Radasha showed up at my bedroom window late one snowy night when I was about seventeen years old. He began talking at me, making fun of me for being terrified of girls, and encouraging me to risk being naked more. He wanted me to enjoy the idea of sex more and shy away from it less. In some ways, he kept that part of me alive.
Of course, I made myself familiar with the mythological creature Radasha obviously was. I read everything I could about it. I even acquired a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and read it with great fascination even though the prose was dense and archaic. I realized that I wasn’t alone in using fauns as an artistic expression of the repressed sensuality that constantly consumed me. Ra was there to needle me and encourage me, to lead me to learn how to better like myself.
I know by now most readers will have given up on this post already, put off by bizarre self-analysis of my rather atypical case of abnormal psychology. But being naked more is apparently part of faun-therapy. At Ra’s insistence, I am making myself more psychologically and metaphorically naked by revealing these things here in a blog that mostly nobody reads anyway. And naked fauns in my artwork are a definite thing that merits exploration. So if you have actually read this far through this mythological mold spore of an essay, you now know about as much about me as I know about myself. And you will probably do just as I do. You will shake your head and continue to wonder how any one old guy can be quite so weird.
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