Category Archives: feeling sorry for myself

August 4, 2016 · 4:14 pm

Truthfully…

Truthfully… for a fiction writer, a humorist, a former school teacher of junior-high-aged kids, telling the truth is hard.  But in this post I intend to try it, and I will see if I can stand the castor-oil flavor of it on my tongue.

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  • The simple truth is, I rarely tell the unvarnished truth.  And I firmly believe I am not alone in this.
  • Yesterday I battled pirates.  (While this is not literally true, it is metaphorically true.)  They were the scurvy scum o’ the Bank-o’-Merricka Pirates who are suing me for over ten thousand dollars despite my efforts of the last two years to settle 40 thousand dollars worth of credit card debt.
  • I hired a lawyer, but in spite of what he told me, I expect to lose the lawsuit and be wiped out financially.  I also believe Donald Trump will win as President.
  • I am a pessimist.  And it helps me through life.  I am always prepared for the worst, and I can only be surprised by happy and pleasant surprises.
  • My son in the Marines has developed an interest in survivalist gear and chaos-contingency plans.  We are now apparently preparing for the coming zombie apocalypse.
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  • I like to draw nudes.  I have drawn them from real-life models who were paid for their participation.  But no bad things happened.  It was all done with professional integrity even though I am an amateur artist.  Chaperones were a part of every session.
  • In high school I identified as a Republican like my father.  In college I became a Democrat (Thanks, Richard Nixon) and voted for Jimmy Carter.  I argued with my father for eight years of Ronald Reagan and four years of George H.W. Bush.
  • My father has now voted for Barack Obama twice and will vote for Hillary this fall if he is still able.  We spent most of our conversations this summer exchanging “Can you believe its?” about Donald Trump.
  • Blue Dawn
  • I have been collecting pictures of sunrises for three years now.  I stole the idea from my childhood friend who now lives in Florida and takes beautiful ocean sunrise pictures over the Atlantic.  But I do it because I know I don’t have many more sunrises to go.  I have six incurable diseases, including diabetes, hypertension, and COPD.  I could go “BOOM! …dead” at any given moment.  I believe in savoring it while I have it.
  • I was sexually assaulted when I was ten years old.  I can only tell you this particular truth because the man who assaulted me and inflicted physical and emotional pain on me is now dead.  It is liberating to be able to say that.  But I regret forty years’ worth of treating it is a terrible secret that I could never tell anyone.
  • Telling that last truth made me cry.  Now you know why telling the truth is not easy.

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  • I really do love and admire all things having to do with Disney.  And when I was young, I really did want to find a picture of Annette naked.  There was no internet back then.  That quest helped me learn to draw the human form.  I know how bad that sounds… but, hey, I was a normal boy in many ways.  And I don’t draw her naked any more.
  • Finally, I have to say… in all honesty… I don’t know for sure that everything I have told you today is absolutely true.  Truth is a perception, even an opinion.  And I may be wrong about the facts as I know them.  The human mind works in mysterious ways.  I sometimes think I may simply be bedbug crazy.
  • (P.S.) Bedbugs are insects with very limited intelligence.  They cannot, in fact, be crazy or insane.  Their little brains are not complicated enough for that.  But it is a metaphor, and metaphors can be more truthful than literal statements.

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August 3, 2016 · 2:48 pm

A Day for Battling Monsters

Long John Silver

Today I must see a lawyer about preventing Bank of America from taking all the money in my accounts and seizing some of my non-exempt assets… which may or may not include my house and car.  And all of this basically for unpaid interest payments.  Yes, I had the account maxed out for a few years, paying only minimums.  So I have basically paid back more  money than I spent, but they intend to collect more than merely the unpaid amount.  The lawyer I am going to consult says they are gambling that I won’t hire a lawyer and fight it.  So he is either going to be a great help, or another bloodsucker draining my resources.  We shall have to see.  But in this modern world where everything is about debt… debt they don’t really want you to pay off, sometimes you have to roll up your pant legs and wade through the sea of shallow cow poop.  If I fail to win this fight, I may end up bankrupt and homeless, so it is pretty important that I take on the beast.  It will be something more to laugh about in any case… in the future when the wounds heal.

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July 30, 2016 · 12:29 pm

Islands of Identity

Island Girl2z

Who am I?

Why do I do the things that I do?

No man is an island.  John Donne the English poet stated that.  And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it.  We need other people.  I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines.  She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.

Gilligans Island

When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan.  My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island.  This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!”  By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan.  But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island.  And no man is an island.  Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.

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You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be.  It was who I was as a teacher.  Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan.  Being a teacher gave me an identity.  And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger.  Not a bad thing to be.  And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.

But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here.  Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now?  We never really find the answer.  Answers change over time.  And so do I.

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July 24, 2016 · 1:32 pm

The Clock on the Wall

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Who in their right mind writes an essay about a clock on the wall?  Well, the “right mind” thing gives me an out.  I do watch the clock on the wall.  Especially now that I am old, and the sand in the hour glass is running out.  The clock on the wall can be quite entertaining.  Especially one like the cuckoo clock that hangs in my parents’ front entryway.  On the hour, the dancers twirl and the two goofballs in lederhosen saw away at the log they will never be able to cut in two.

My wife and I gave that clock to my parents as a gift for their 50th wedding anniversary.  We bought it in Texas and brought it on a visit back to the family farm in Iowa.  Having old German relatives as a boy, I remember waiting impatiently for the clock to strike in Great Aunt Selma’s house, anxious to see the cuckoo pop out  and the clockwork entertainment do its little mechanical show.  I’d have gladly wished on a star for the hours to pass instantly… to see the show again right away… and be older and wiser and able to do more.  Back then it seemed like older folks like Aunt Selma lived forever, with her dried-apple face and German accent.  Accumulated time seemed to have majesty and power.  It was magical.

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But now I am old.  My joints hurt every time I move.  I can’t get out of bed of a morning easily.  Parts of me that I used to take for granted no longer work.  I have forgotten what it feels like to feel good and full of energy.  The time on the face of this old clock hasn’t changed in nearly a decade.  My parents don’t keep it wound.  We no longer look forward to the clock-Kinder dancing so often.  If the clock stays forever at five after four, maybe the grim reaper won’t come knock at the door.

I have always believed that there was magic in old cuckoo clocks.  It was a simple, earnest faith in magic that only a child can truly know.  But now, as an old man, I remember.

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July 22, 2016 · 2:43 pm

Dows, Iowa

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Bustling downtown Dows with the grain elevator in the background

There are many simple truths to be gleaned from a simple visit to the scene of your childhood.  You need every so often to get in touch with where you came from and the roots of who you are.  Dows is not the town where I grew up.  But we played them in 4-H softball, and we won almost as much as we lost to them.  It is a town near enough to my little home town to be a place that impacts who I am.

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You have no idea what this is, right?

Day before yesterday we went to Dows for a dinner with relatives.  My cousin and her second husband were there.  Her parents, my uncle who still lives on Uncle I.C.’s farm place that has been in the family for more than a hundred years, and my aunt who is going bald a bit, were also there.  We ate in a totally Pepsi-Cola-themed restaurant and had a Rueben pizza with roast beef and sauerkraut on it (talk about your total cultural potpourri!)  The experience taught me a simple lesson.  We come from a bizarre mixture of themes and things cooked together in a recipe for life that can never be repeated and cooked again for our children.

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You don’t order Coke here.

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We avoided talking about politics because Iowa is very conservative and none of us enjoy yelling at each other about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton using fact-free Fox News talking points and cow poop about how building a wall that Mexico pays for will cure all our economic problems because we all think we know how Hispanics moving into Iowa are ruining our lives.  So, instead, we talked about how Eaton’s machine tool manufacturing plant in Belmond is facing more lay-offs.

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The restored and re-purposed Dows’ Rock Island train station.

We talked about businesses that have gone out and not been replaced in the little Iowa towns around us.  We talked about how no one walks beans any more, walking the rows of soy beans to pull button weeds and cockle-burrs by hand and chop rogue corn with hoe.  We talked about how farming has gone to spraying weed-killing chemicals and factory-farming pigs instead.  It is a simple lesson in how ways of life come to an end and are not necessarily replaced with something better.

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There is an artist working on a patriotic project to put one of these in every county in Iowa.

We constantly remake ourselves as the world changes and ages around us.  Nothing lasts forever.  Life is a process of growing and withering and regrowing.  A simple word for that is “farming”.  Who we were impacts who we have become and will affect what comes after.  But we learn simple lessons from going to the places we love best and doing our dead-level best to get from there to here and move eventually to someplace beyond.  And Dows, Iowa is just one of those places… I guess.

 

 

 

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July 14, 2016 · 8:46 pm

Idea Fertilizer

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Picture borrowed from the North American Manure Expo’s Facebook page

This morning as I was going to QT for my daily dose of wake-up juice with caffeine in it, Jody Dean and the Morning Team on KLUV radio station were making fun of the North American Manure Expo taking place in London, Ohio this week.  Jody Dean, the radio talk-show host, was suggesting that the Expo would’ve been a natural thing to host in Fort Worth because, well, Texas and cow poop just naturally go together.  But it occurs to me, that this is fortuitously a part of Ohio this month because the GOP convention is taking place shortly in Cleveland, and the bull dookie won’t have to be shipped as far for that.  Besides, having grown up as an Iowan, I have a farm-boy awareness of the intrinsic need for poo-poo conventions where the latest distribution technology is on display.  After all, cow poo is fertilizer… it makes stuff grow.

Yesterday I was unable to write the post I had planned about the tragic police shooting in Dallas.  There was a lot to write about.  It was a terrible thing that affected me deeply and did considerable damage to the fight for human rights in this country and preserving the respect and dignity we owe to the men in blue who too often give their lives to keep us safe.  It also gave our Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick a chance to actually put both feet in his mouth at the same time, and for Dallas resident and former rodeo clown turned president George W. Bush to do a goofy smiley-faced dance during the playing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic while the memorial to the fallen Dallas policemen was in the middle of a rather somber occasion.  Poop makes stuff grow, and that post would’ve been epic.

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A project I was working on yesterday while sulking.

You see, yesterday I didn’t have the usual amount of time for writing because I had to install an air conditioner for my hot wife.  It was difficult to install because the bedroom I installed it in has no regular windows.  Only a window/door onto the patio.  And I had to do the installing because my wife wanted to take a sledge hammer to the bedroom wall and knock out enough bricks to make a vent hole for the air conditioner.  I did not want my determined little wife taking up the hammer herself, so I carefully mapped out a plan and bought supplies to cut a hole in the drywall and then jury-rig a makeshift air duct to a pre-existing hole in the brickwork.  I got the hole cut in the drywall and then ran into a snag when I exposed a support beam in the way of my plan.  Well, this led to a discussion of the details executed rather loudly and I believe I was compared to a donkey at least three times.  We then reached a compromise (by which I mean what husbands usually mean when they use the word “compromise” which is that we did things the way my wife wanted them done.  Or, rather, my wife picked up the hammer and crowbar, and I retreated to my room to sulk like a proper adult.  The air conditioner is now humming.  It is blowing half of the exhaust out through the space left by the two bricks she knocked out rather neatly, and the other half up through the wall into the attic.  Oh, well, it works and she is happy with it.  Hopefully no building inspectors read this post.

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Another piece of alien art done while sulking.

The point is, cow poop happens.  And cow poop is fertilizer.  It makes things grow.  Including ideas for posts on my blog.  I was able to illustrate the Telleron alien kids from two of my novels while I was busy sulking and feeling sorry for myself.  In fact, the novel Catch a Falling Star probably only exists because of Iowa and cow poop.  Yes, life in farmville is resoundingly boring and uneventful, so my fertile imagination couldn’t help but make up an alien invasion of a small Iowan farming community.  And my imagination was probably fertile due to so much exposure to cow poop on my grandfather’s and my two uncles’ farms.  So now you know.

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July 11, 2016 · 3:49 pm

The Need for Magical Teddy Bears

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I woke this morning in excessive amounts of arthritis pain.  My left elbow has not been working well for a month.  My lower back is always painful after a restless night’s sleep.  Neither of my knees is willing to do the basic job required of knees in the early morning when you first wake up.  So I had to work joints back and forth to loosen them up despite the pain.  I had to stretch parts where muscles were knotted up in protest to stretching.  And it took me a half hour of painful work to get on my feet.

I have been psychologically in pain of late as well.  Being a school teacher who dedicated his life to getting young people to work together and grow up and mature, I have been deeply distressed by both the police shootings of innocent black men and the massacre of policemen here in Dallas.  My publishing goals have also hit a brick wall with recent rejections and cancelling of contracts.  I need to curl up in a corner and lick my wounds.

When I was a child I relied on stuffed animals to make me feel better when I was sick and in pain.  I had a toy tiger that was my constant companion.  I had a couple of teddy bears, one a panda, the other Smokey the Bear.  And there was a terrycloth pink elephant that I shared with my sisters.  Like many children, I talked to the stuffed animals.  Like a strange few other children, the stuffed animals would answer back.  I think that plays a large part in explaining why I am a writer of fiction stories.  I medicate my mind not with drugs, but by talking things out with imaginary people.

At this moment in time, when I am on the verge of being overwhelmed, it is a good thing that my hoarding disorder has caused me to collect stuffed toys.  I have more than one magical teddy bear to turn to.  Everything will be all right in the end.

 

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July 4, 2016 · 4:30 pm

The Need for Easy Pants

Urkel

I have never been an advocate of hard-to-wear pants.  Pants are suppose to be an aid to civilization, allowing a man to hide away the sensitive and sorta ugly bits that make him more like the animals, and in certain situations, unable to access the rational data-base in his little bean-like head.  My own need for comfortable pants is further complicated by an enlarged prostate that presses on the spine, as well as two lower vertebrae eroded by years of arthritis.  Pants have to be tight enough to hold me together, yet not so tight they cut off the blood flow and kill my lower half.  It would be danged inconvenient to have to walk around without any legs, or any butt, or any naughty bits.  If I wore Urkel pants, I might even lose my heart and my stomach, things I’m almost certain I would miss.  And I wouldn’t be able to do the Urkel dance, either.

Of course, there are times when the whole issue of easy pants can become a real concern.  I am trying to make my way through the labyrinth of problems of the retired on a budget.  So I tend to favor cheap pants.  I buy most of my pants from Goodwill Inc.   They are mostly used pants… or previously loved pants… or previously worn-out pants.  The pants I am wearing at the moment have developed holes in the region of the crotch… not a good place for unwanted air-conditioning.  And the pants I bought to replace them have buttons in place of a zipper in the fly.  I didn’t realize the potential for spontaneous bathroom dancing that the combination of buttons and arthritic fingers could cause.  My best pair of blue jeans are the kind of denim known UN-affectionately as “high-water pants”.  This, of course, leads to inconveniently aerated ankles.

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The final verdict is in about easy-pants issues.  To avoid all pants-related issues you have to give up wearing pants.  And I do still have issues with becoming a nudist as well.  So the struggle to obtain and wear easy pants is a never-ending battle that we simply cannot afford to give up on.

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July 3, 2016 · 6:41 pm

Butts and Nolts

“Don’t you actually mean nuts and bolts?” someone is surely going to say.  Oh, yes, I misspelled that little item on purpose.  This is another inane post about the writing process and trying to improve my “brand” with my blog.  It is something I have no earthly idea how it works or how to go about it.  So I often have to go back and think about the nuts and bolts of how you put this stuff together and try like heck to figure out what I am doing wrong.

Dumb Luck

Doofy Fuddbugg here is an example of what a “Nolt” is.

So, the problem is, while the blog as a whole has been gaining momentum, my blog traffic is down for this month.  People are not viewing and reading my actual stuff and nonsense as much as they were in the other months besides February.  So I have to look again at what works and why it works.

A lot of my work generates interest from the real world outside of my stupid little head because of the artwork.  I am really probably better at drawing colored pencil Paffooneys than I am at the constant yadda-yadda-yadda of trying to write humor.  Pictures like Mr. Fuddbugg here draw people in better than anything else I can post.  Of course, the artwork I post from my favorite cartoonists and comic artists of the past, like Wally Wood and Rumiko Takahashi draw far more views than my own artwork does.  This is due to the undeniable fact that they are better known and better at it than I am.

And both of those artists are well known for the “butts” that are in their works.  Yes, nudes and naked pictures increase your blog traffic.  Two of my top ten posts of the past two years are Be Naked More (https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2015/12/20/be-naked-more/) and Naked and Nude (https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2015/03/04/naked-and-nude/).  (Sorry for the poor link quality, but my computer is still having brain farts and keeps shrinking stuff and blowing stuff up at random, so I cannot, for the moment, make proper links.)  So, I can probably boost my blog traffic by posting another nude I have never posted before, even though it may make it impossible to share this on Facebook.

Gryphon

This picture is actually a very complicated thing to post.  I have issues with things like sexuality and nudity because I was assaulted as a child.  And some of my nude drawings involve real-life models whose privacy I don’t want to invade.  (Yes, I had a real Gryphon pose nude for this picture.)  But this picture is old, having been created during my wild days as a grad-school college nerd.  Adding the “nude” tag to this post will undoubtedly draw in viewers.  (There really do seem to be a lot of people out there who want to look at naked Gryphons.)  And I am not ashamed at having drawn this pencil-piece.  It brings back lots of grand and glorious memories, though probably not the ones you think I mean.

Finally, I may need to get more aggressively insulting.  It seems to be the thing to do to create political humor with the impending Presidential Election coming up between the Wicked Witch of Wall Street and the Racist Orange King.

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The Orange King is very, very HYUGE! but his hands are small.

But there are difficulties in pulling that one off.  I mean, I spent a lifetime learning how to love the unlovable in the classroom because all students are able to learn and we owe them all, as teachers, the best education we can give them.  (Believe me, you will have a better life because I spent my teaching career trying to iron out the stupid from the laundry basket of Texas education.)  So I will have to settle for a more serene and gentle sort of political wit (if I may be allowed one last oxymoron).  Because I agree with Neal Gaiman on the subject of Political Correctness.

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There’s my two cents, such as it is.  Four cents after inflation.  I have had my say about the Butts and Nolts of this essay.  And if that’s not enough to explain it, then feel free to call me names in the comments and look at some of my other recent posts that nobody is reading so you can see how terrible those are too.  And thank you for actually reading the whole post.

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June 30, 2016 · 4:13 pm

Travel Troubles

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My wife visited her home in the Philippines as a consequence of her father passing away there at the beginning of the month.  It has been a mixed bag of treats and tragedies.  Yes, there was a funeral involved.  But it has been years since the six sisters and one brother have been together.  They were able to re-connect with friends and family, eat their favorite foods from the old days, and gain weight.

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Here’s what they looked like once upon a time before anybody came to the United States.

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They are a bit bigger now.

But things always happen to complicate simple happiness-es.  Somehow, before she left she managed to put her green card in the wrong pile while sorting stuff to go and stuff to stay.  As a resident alien for more than twenty years, she absolutely had to have that green card to get back into the country.  So, my daughter and I tore the house apart for three days trying to find it.  Then, after throwing my hands up in despair of ever finding it, I managed to sit on a pile of stuff near her bed in the bedroom and realize with my very intelligent behind that I hadn’t searched that pile yet.  There it was!  I rushed it to UPS with the carefully copied address triple-checked against the text my wife sent me with the warning that it should be written exactly as it appeared in the text.  But, naturally, the clerk at the UPS Store was confused by the idea that the zip code had to come before the name of the province.  I should’ve asked to see how he wrote it down.  The green card finally arrived there two weeks late because the Filipino UPS couldn’t find Tatang’s house.  They called the US twice asking for other ways to contact the household.  Of course, on our side, we had the advantage of there being no convenient phone in the neighborhood.  I finally had to send my wife the tracking number, and she tracked down the package herself.

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Of course, we were not home free on the whole return trip thing either.  During her journey home, my wife encountered a flight delay in Shanghai that made her miss a connecting flight in Los Angeles.  It was a gift of an extra day of travel courtesy of terrorists in Turkey.  So, it was a huge relief when yesterday, we were finally able to pick her up from the airport.  Of course, now her luggage is missing.  Virgin Air had to comb through their entire inventory of lost bags and still didn’t find it.  So, there’s a continuing battle we didn’t particularly need either.

Still, in spite of the fact that so many things went wrong, and it was all about a loss of a treasured family member, the adventure has ended, and she is back home again, safe and well.

 

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