I just finished a novel project last Thursday, completing the manuscript of Recipes for Gingerbread Children. But being the excessively creative goofball that I am, this was not a stand-alone project. The companion book, The Baby Werewolf, is an incomplete manuscript of a comedy horror story about a boy with hypertrichosis, sometimes known as werewolf-hair disease. Both books happen in the same period of time in 1974 and share both characters and events. The boy, Torrie Brownfield, has lost his mother. His father has brought him back to a small Iowa town where he himself was once a boy, to live in the same house where the boy’s father and uncle grew up. The uncle, hiding some dark secrets of his own, requires that Torrie be raised in hiding up in the attic. But this only lasts until a local farm boy, Todd Niland, discovers Torrie’s sad existence and becomes his friend. This is a much darker story than I have tackled before, and I am no stranger to dark humor. It is significant, though, that both Todd and Torrie are gingerbread children from the book I just finished, and even though some sad, dark things come to light in that book, they are not nearly as sad and dark as what is present in this next project. So I had to find some inspiration before trying to re-ignite the novel forge for The Baby Werewolf.
That led me to watch the video Donnie Darko for the very first time.
Oofah! What a strange, horrible, yet beautiful movie! Richard Kelly’s first film is an incredible artwork that makes your soul sing darkly. Talk about listening to dark rabbits from the future… really, I mean, no one told anyone they should talk about about dark rabbits from the future… but this film does with a twisted elegance and ironically terrible beauty. It discusses the sex lives of Smurfs, raises alarms with old women wandering aimlessly to the mailbox in the path of oncoming cars, and fires teachers from their jobs for discussing the short stories of Graham Greene. There is no way I can explain in a witless-wordless movie review. You must simply watch the movie for yourself.
Remember this musical masterpiece? “Hello, Darkness, my old friend… I’ve come to talk with you again…” Yes, I am entertaining the darkness again because I will be depending on her to help me write this book whose theme is going to be, “Everyone dies in the end, but the real life depends on how we deal with that fact.”
Yes, people who know me, I mean really know me, including the facts behind what I can’t actually say in this blog because the innocent must be protected, will probably worry that I am undertaking a writing project about monsters and depression and suicidal thoughts and child abuse. I do have scars. But I am at peace with the hard parts of the life behind me. And from great pain and profound suffering, beautiful things can be made. So don’t worry. Downloading a bunch of monster-movie darkness into my stupid old head is not going to hurt me at this point in my life. And if I can’t write it now, it will never be written.
Catch a Falling Star 
Apparently, What Winning Looks Like
Somebody who has an orange spray-tan on his face, a wig made out the remnants of the Scarecrow from Oz after the Wicked Witch was done with her revenge, and tiny, tiny hands once promised that if elected, he would make us sick of winning. Heck, I was sick before the battle started. And winning so far this week has meant merely that the Trumpcare/no-care/death-care plan failed spectacularly in the GOP controlled House. And why did it fail, providing me with a backhanded win? Because the Freedom Caucus couldn’t agree to a plan that wasn’t cruel enough to the old, the sick already, and the poor. Seriously, they wanted a healthcare plan that didn’t cover mental health, prescription drugs, hospitalization, or basically everything that I might need an insurance policy to cover. They want, ideally, to give us health insurance where we must continually pay premiums month by month and then, when we get sick, choose to die at home and get no benefits. So winning for me means that I can continue to get the crappy insurance coverage I already have under Obamacare to keep me perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy. And it IS a win compared to what the Evil Republican Empire wants to do to me.
But one thing that makes me even sicker about this kind of winning is that it is simply a temporary stay of execution. They are going to do it again. How many times, after all, have they voted to repeal healthcare already? I have lost count. Republicans really, really, really don’t want us to keep any of our own money when we can give it to some soulless corporation instead. And the budget that lurks around the corner is just as big, bad, and brutal as the whole healthcare kerfluffle. They mean to roast and eat Big Bird like a Thanksgiving Turkey, steal food from school children, fire everybody who works for the government and even thinks about preventing corporations from pouring poisons into our water and air, and cut funds to the State Department so that diplomacy and prevention of wars is seriously impaired.
So what, as a concerned citizen, am I gonna do about it? Well, I’m a sick old former school teacher who likes to write humor pieces while I’m busy slowly dying. So I’m going to make fun of the bad guys. Seriously, the best I can do is try to ridicule them to death.
So let’s start with the Trumpinator’s penchant for hiring evil leprechauns to torment us.
And I want to take a moment to talk about the perils of allowing turtles to do politics.
It is true that “slow and steady wins the race” but, come on! It also apparently allows you to steal Supreme Court nominations and have no clue what “hypocrisy” means. He is offended when Democrats refuse to accept and love his party’s proposals, but demonstrated absolutely no ability to say the word… you know the word… the one that means the opposite of “no”… when Democrats were in charge.
And then there’s the lovely zombie-eyed granny hater that we have allowed to eat the social security system. His plans for Medicare, Healthcare, and Social Security are all featured now on posters in the Grim Reaper’s public relations office.
So there you have it. That’s the best celebration of the recent win that Mickey can come up with in his stupid little head. It’s no wonder we are tired of winning already.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, politics
Tagged as evil leprechauns in politics, healthcare, humor, Jeff Sessions, Mick Mulvaney, Mitch the Turtle McConnell, Obamacare repeal, Paul Ryan, politics, Trump winning