Category Archives: feeling sorry for myself

September 30, 2016 · 3:16 pm

Morning With Grumpy

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I have not been having good days lately.  Things go wrong constantly.  Things that cost money that I don’t have.  I’m a writer, after all.  I don’t even have a waving acquaintance with money.

Fire ants bit me on Tuesday.  My hands and feet are still plagued with painful, itchy bumps.  At the same time the city is telling me how the yard has to be done and the trees have to be trimmed and the pool has to be repaired.  If I don’t complete the work and get the pool running again, in spite of the fact I don’t have any money, I face a two-thousand dollar fine, which would be cheaper than fixing the pool, but it would recur every month until I got the pool fixed.  Well, welcome back to Debt Town.  At least I will have a swimming pool again this winter.  And the drive this morning to take the Princess to school was an epic battle with high-speed morons in Bubba-trucks.  I made a wrong turn downtown in the rat’s maze that the I-35 construction project has created right next to downtown Carrollton.  I had to dodge between people in cars that don’t know how to drive, but drive too fast, kids on foot on that have their heads plugged in, so they don’t hear you coming when they step out in front of you without looking because their eyes are fixed on their phones.  We got there five minutes before the tardy bell.

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Some mornings I just need a chance to complain.  Thanks for listening.

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Filed under angry rant, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, grumpiness, humor, photo paffoonies, soliloquy, strange and wonderful ideas about life

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September 28, 2016 · 3:18 pm

Fire Aunts… Aaugh!

Yesterday I experienced first hand one of those Texas things that makes life spicier to a salsa-rrific degree.  I mowed the top off a fire-ant colony that I didn’t know was there.  In fact, I didn’t realize what I had done until my feet and legs began to burn with numerous pinpricks of volcanically heated acid.  I left my shoes in the yard.  I left my pants on the floor in the kitchen.  My hands got bitten as I slapped at ants on my feet and legs.  I went immediately to the bathtub and soaked my wounds in hot water.  Now I am covered in little white bumps that sting and itch and hurt, and my allergic reaction to the bites makes me feel like I have a bad cold.  So, there is the reason I have to do a lazy, short post again.  Not just because I am basically lazy, or because I am hiding out from neighbors who were terrified to see me suddenly take my clothes off in the yard…  But because fire ants gave me boo-boos.

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September 23, 2016 · 2:37 pm

My Post for Today

My computer is wearing out.  It blew up the WordPress posting sight on my screen to where the letters in the title are once again an inch tall.  The chances that it will suddenly wipe out everything I have typed and save a blank post over the whole thing almost instantly is making me tired.  To combat the problem, I must constantly keep a back-up copy on Microsoft Word which may also grow or shrink for no apparent reason.  It gets frustrating, and I am old, ill, and quite tired.  But I am also only a month away from two entire years of posting every single day, a feat I am not ready to fail at this close to the end.  So let me show something from my cartoon collections stolen from the internet at large.

From the Lola Bunny file;

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From Movie Art;

From Hanna-Barbera Toons;

And these are all things I could’ve written a 500-word post about with unique and possibly yawn-inducing Mickian insights, but today I would rather not.  Today I take the “picture is worth a thousand words” thing and give you 17,000 thousand words worth of not having to listen to me.

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Filed under blog posting, cartoons, collage, feeling sorry for myself, grumpiness

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September 17, 2016 · 7:09 pm

The Pinterest Problem

I suddenly find myself back on Pinterest for the first time since the Spring of 2014.  It is not that I have been forgiven by the powers behind Pinterest, rather that I have created a new email account which apparently wipes the slate clean of accusation and animosity.  But I have to explain what the problem is between me and Pinterest.

First, here are the good things;

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  • Pinterest is a way to make use of my insane hoarding-disorder urge to collect internet images of all kinds.
  • Pinterest is another place to promote my artwork and I can link covers of my books back to Amazon or I-Universe where crazy people might just be goofy enough to buy one.
  • I am hoping that in three months I will have another book to put on Pinterest.  Page Publishing was goofy enough to offer to publish Magical Miss Morgan, as long as I pay my way.
  • Pinterest allows me to organize my collections into “boards” which are actually free-flowing collages made up of the pictures I have collected.
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  • The Down-Side;
  • I was blocked from Pinterest back in 2014 for being a pornographer.  They had a lot of sexual content running rampant in their social media site in 2014, which, being a site created for women to share favorite recipes, they didn’t really know how to handle.
  • I am not shy about liking nudes and boobs in artwork.  I was not aware that some of the nude photography I was liking and even sometimes sharing had been added to Pinterest from porn sites.  My bad!
  • After being warned, I stopped liking and re-pinning nudes.  I even tried to remove what boobage I had on my boards.  (They were popular boards, and some of the bad stuff was among the most popular and re-pinned.)
  • I got kicked off for copying an artful nude off my list of recommended pins to my computer instead of any of the Pinterest boards.  I think it was a Waterhouse oil from the 1800’s, but I don’t know for sure what the problem item actually was.  Pinterest for a while was extremely sensitive to depictions of female breasts.

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But getting kicked off of Pinterest was a good thing for me.  Though embarrassing… at least a little bit… it did help me cure the problem I was having with Pinterest filling all my hours that should have been used for writing.  It also helped me self-censor a bit more effectively.  The last thing I want to do on social media is give offense.  I do not wish to promote my brand in any way similar to how Donald Trump does it on Twitter.  And it allows me to bring my artwork, with the appropriate link to WordPress to old ladies collecting recipes and Disney cartoons everywhere.  I am happy to back on Pinterest.  (And please don’t tell the Pinterest administrators how I did it.  I promise to behave.)

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Filed under artwork, collage, collecting, feeling sorry for myself, humor, irony, Paffooney, self pity

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September 16, 2016 · 3:37 pm

Because Bankers Are Evil

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Yes, Bankers are evil, so I need pie.

My post today is just a bunch of old artwork because I had to spend the morning fixing a bank problem.  My mortgage payment got lost.  Yes, I had an Uncle Billy moment that turned out not to be my fault at all.  All the other payments went through the automatic bill pay system normally.  But the mortgage payment did not.  Even though it went through normally every month for the last three years.  The mortgage bankers apparently misplaced the electronic payment.  So I tracked down the proof of payment at my bank and printed it out.  The mortgage bankers, of course, will not accept it until I can get my wife’s signature on it.  And what will you bet that they are going to charge a late-payment fee?

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Unfinished Stag n snow

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September 11, 2016 · 3:41 pm

Flubtastical Floundering

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Seeds of despair have been growing and blooming into black orchids of depression.  Doubt creeps in.  It is true that the publisher I just signed a contract with is the kind of publisher that squeezes their money out of the authors rather than readers.  That seems to be a dominating trend in the publishing world now.  You don’t make as much money as a publisher by investing in advertising, editing services, and printing services at your own expense, even paying advances to authors for the rights to their works.  The old way is dead.  One way or another, to compete in the modern market you have to squeeze more and more profit out of your workers.  More productivity for less money in wages puts more money into the hands of the owners, the corporations, and the CEO’s where it obviously belongs.  I suppose, as one of those little guys at the base of the poo-poo volcano of American business, I have a right to feel cheated and abused.  My hard work is taken supreme advantage of by others.

Lots of stuff has been going wrong lately.  The yard has gone untended for too long and is now overgrown and wild.  The dog got hold of number two son’s $350 retainer again.  Both of my kids at home are groaning under the strains of work and school.  My health continues to slide down the old hill.  They are even cancelling one of my favorite Facebook games.

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I must now say goodbye to Avengers Alliance on Facebook.

But despair is not really in my nature.  I knew going in that publishing my book this way was going to cost me money I will probably never make back in my lifetime.  But it will be available in print.  It will even have my own artwork on it.  And if I have to publish the other novels as digital Kindle copies only, at least I will actually have three books in print.

The yard looks unkempt, but there are blossoms everywhere, and our plants are at least processing carbon dioxide and putting oxygen back in the air.

The dog got hold of the retainer, but this time apparently realized how much trouble she was in.  She doesn’t appear to have bitten or chewed on it at all.

Broken spirits and weariness are the intended products of the modern American school system, so we are doing that right, at least.

And not being able to afford to go to the doctor any more has made my wallet a lot healthier.  I have the money… er, credit… to spend for the first time in ten years.

Maybe the orchids are not so black as I thought.

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Filed under battling depression, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, grumpiness, humor

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September 10, 2016 · 3:47 pm

Spitzen Sparken Compu-BOOM!

Yesterday I had to start a post over again that my computer wiped out completely just as I was finishing it.  I had intended to rewrite the post today, but found key parts of it that I really liked were gone from my diabetic old memory.  Life is like that.  We get old and we get all futzed up, and no… the computer did not malfunction and save me from using a bad word there.  I meant to say “futzed”.

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It is a Yiddish sort of word… so I guess you could argue it is not a real word.  Yiddish, after all is a language intended by God to provide Jewish comedians with words that sound like insults but really aren’t… and words that don’t sound like insults that really are.  (Have you ever looked up what “putz” actually means?)

But that is what the Mickian computer has been up to.  It mashes, mangles, impedes, and implodes my writing.  If it wasn’t so handy for coming up with a funny post about fighting with a computer, I might actually become aggravated enough to throw this old computer out the upstairs window and into the sickly, green, unused swimming pool below.

I have used my computer daily and put it through all sorts of contortions and convolutions in the past three years of ill health and bed-ridden retirement.  It is probably no wonder it is wearing out.  I not only write and turn drawings into jpegs on it, I use it to mess with photography, play Facebook games, and keep up with the international clown show that other people generally refer to as politics.  I shed beard hair on my keyboard.  I drop popcorn on it when I am trying to jam too much in my mouth at once.  And I occasionally baptize it with a juicy sneeze or projectile cough.  I confess that I probably deserve the revenge it wreaks upon me.

Besides randomly deleting my posts and instantly saving the changes, it will also shrink the view of the entire page so that I can’t even read what I type with a magnifying glass.  The only way to correct the problem is shift to a different browser for a while until Firefox or Chrome stops hating me long enough to reset.  I have also had problems with the computer blowing things up.  One time I was trying to write on WordPress when only three huge letters at a time would fit on the screen.  That can make it quite hard to pull the old train of thought out of the darker parts of the tunnel of stupid ideas.  (I also just now had to re-type the part in italics when the computer deleted it.  I am making a back-up copy on Microsoft Word, but sometimes I can’t copy and paste fast enough.)

Truthfully, something is seriously wrong with this laptop.  The mouse pad malfunctions and the control key sticks.  I may have to buy a new computer soon.  But this one has given me numerous goofy smiles, and I will miss it when it joins the pile of old dead computers in the garage.

If you haven’t quite figured it out, these are some of the numerous goofy smiles.

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Filed under angry rant, blog posting, feeling sorry for myself, goofiness, humor, Paffooney, self pity

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September 4, 2016 · 5:22 pm

Goodbye, Sweet Gene

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I’m going to miss him.  I’m really going to miss him.  I know he suffered from Alzheimer’s and hadn’t really done anything new and exciting in a while, but still, I always knew that he was still there.  He was still Gene Wilder.  Not only that, he was still Willy Wonka, still the Waco Kid from Blazing Saddles, still Dr. Frankenstein from Young Frankenstein, which he not only starred in, but wrote.

He was also Gilda Radner’s husband.  The great love of his life, gone too as a victim of cancer back in 1989.

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The first time I ever saw him on screen was in college, in film class.  We watched Mel Brooks’ The Producers on the classroom projector.

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We studied the movie in class as evidence that comedy films are difficult to make, but have a potential to be truly great film achievements.  That same year, both Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein hit the big screens in Ames, Iowa.   I saw and loved them both.  Of course, I had watched the televised version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory on Grandma Beyer’s color TV sometime before that.

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Gene Wilder helped me see that I could live in a world of pure imagination.  And that I could be whatever I truly wished to be.

I’m definitely going to miss that man.

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August 25, 2016 · 3:30 pm

The Dog is in the Doghouse

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My name is Jade Beyer, and I’m the loyal, lovable family dog (at least, I hope I still am).  I am writing today’s post because Dad is mad at me.  And I should point out that it takes a lot of effort for me write Dad’s post for him.  I can’t really type with my paws because I hit lots of letters all at once when I do that.  I found a way, however, to roll up my tongue and punch a single letter at a time.  And the dog slobber  only makes the computer spark and fritz a little bit more than usual.  So he should really appreciate me for going to all that effort.

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You see, yesterday, after lunch was over, I got up on the table to look for left-over people food.   Eating enough people food turns you into a people, as I’m sure you already knew.  Really, it’s true!  Otherwise, how could a family dog like me learn to read and write so good?  Anyway, while looking for people food, I found a clear plastic thing in the shape of Henry’s teeth next to his empty plate.  It smelled like Henry.  And I love Henry.  So, I chewed on the thing that smelled just like Henry because I love him.  How was I supposed to know that a new retainer costs $350?  People pay ridiculous amounts of money for stuff that Henry just puts in his own mouth anyway.  It doesn’t justify my family re-telling that awful story about when Uncle Maligaya was a boy in the Philippines and he let his friends talk him into cooking and eating the family dog.  I really don’t like that story.

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A portrait of me as the people I’m meant to be

And this morning, Dad got back from driving the Princess to her new school all grumpy because of traffic and stupid Texas drivers who don’t know how to signal for a lane change but definitely know how to cut you off in the drop-off lane.  I offered to drive for him.  But he’s still mad at me.  And he reminded me that the last time I drove the car, I accidentally ran over three cats.  (I told him the reason for that is because I have no thumbs and can’t hold the steering wheel properly.  But that might not be entirely true.  Mr. Tinkles is evil and deserved to die.)  So, we settled on me writing his post for today so he could have time to call the orthodontist and make an appointment to get a new retainer made.  And if it doesn’t turn out to be any good as a piece of literature, well, it’s because I am dog, and apparently not a very good  dog.  (I’m really not clear on what “I’m going to make dog burgers out of that @#$%&! dog!” actually means.)

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Filed under family, family dog, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

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August 22, 2016 · 3:22 pm

Return of the School Daze

Today, school starts, and my two over-large babies are toddling off to two different campuses on opposite sides of the city.  My wife, of course, is still teaching and has a job to get to, so the responsibility for getting happy little kids to happy little schools (more accurately, big, nasty-smelling gathering spots for belligerent and borderline delinquent teenagers) is mine alone.

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Seriously, it was not a good way to start the day.  I got out of bed feeling moderately ill as the mold spores in the air have been heavy enough to really give the gift of swelling to my COPD restricted lungs.  I grabbed breakfast, an egg burrito with salsa, and quickly discovered the salsa had at least three ingredients in it that I am allergic to (not fatally allergic like a peanut allergy, just GAWD-I-HAVE-TO-VOMIT!!! allergic).

I got in the car after delivering my breakfast to the upstairs toilet, and was only a pale shade of green still, when wifey calls the Princess and I, three blocks down the road, and makes us come back for a first-day-of-school photo, which she now possesses ten of, kindergarten through ninth grade.  So, still determined to get there early, a new school that I had never taken a kid to before, we immediately ran into a pile of rush-hour traffic on Josey Lane.  The road crew had put out cones to indicate another mindless digging project so they could laugh at fuming, frustrated motorists while they stood by the side of the road and had donuts and coffee.  The school is less than a mile from my house, but the traffic jam was easily going to last for an hour or more and make us late, so we executed plan B.  I used Google Maps to chart a route that was only three times as long, and we got there in about fifteen minutes.

Blue and Mike in color

But the school parking lot was a worse design for drop-offs than the one I had been teaching at for seven years before I retired.  It had loads of entry access, but limited exits.  In other words, it is a place for parents and old elephants to go when they are ready to die.  It might’ve been easier to get out of if there hadn’t been so many old junk cars with human skeletons in them dispersed throughout the parking lot.  45 minutes later, I got out, but not before the engine overheated on my little Ford pony.  And I just had a new coolant pump and thermostat put in a week ago.  Ah, well… this is going to be an interesting year.

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