Category Archives: feeling sorry for myself

January 19, 2024 · 2:27 am

Leftovers in January

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You reach a point after a hard month has lingered long where you have to eat the leftovers and accept what is.  I face challenges in the new year at least as large as the challenges of 2017.  When faced with such a situation, I need pie.

So here are some of the things left in my January file for use in this blog.  The only reason they are here is because I haven’t used them yet and the ideas have not been knitted together for any rational purpose.

This will be a crazy quilt blog post.  But crazy quilts keep you just as warm in winter as any other kind.

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My newest Facebook friend is the daughter of my wife’s cousin.   I have only known her as the sweet-faced little smiler at Filipino-American family gatherings who sometimes gets my attention by squirting me in the ear with a water gun.  Her father is from Greece and teaches Math in San Antonio.  Her mother, like my wife, is from the Philippines.  I won’t tell you her real name, but we used to call her “Sweetie” because she resembled the little pink Tweety-bird character from Tiny Toons Adventures.

I have also spent considerable time writing to and for nudists I have connected with through their various websites and on Twitter.  These two lovely works of nude art were shared with me on Twitter.  I have collected a number of nude pictures from Twitter nudists that I can’t use on WordPress because I am still entirely too modest to be the unrestrained naked person that some nudists are.  I can’t really claim to be a complete nudist myself.  But I do have stories to tell about naked people, and I have been working on them diligently.

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Of course, I still miss being a teacher.  I was a teacher of English for 31 years.  I taught reading and writing in English to over 2,000 kids.  I also learned how to stare in Klingon.  It is a useful skill for keeping students in line and keeping them from becoming a disappointment to the empire.  I miss teaching kids, especially talkative kids.  Far fewer people talk to me during a day of retirement than used to talk to me in a single class at school.  Those interactions were precious.

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And several things are just too confusing for my old brain to explain.

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But I do like this picture I found on Facebook of Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor, playing with multiple kittens.  I don’t know why, but it makes me happier.

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January 17, 2024 · 12:50 am

Scientifical Dog-Poop Theories

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I have been taking note of the Republican approach to science as displayed repeatedly in Congress.  I decided that this is the kind of science that can best explain the dog-poop phenomena, since it is, ultimately, about how the data feels more than measuring and quantifying and dealing with, you know, those fact thingies.

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You see, the problem comes in with the fact that my dog, Jade, is producing dog poop at record levels, and it is all becoming rather a burden.   Now the dog-poop literature, (yes it does exist, since dog lovers write about anything and everything to do with dogs), says that it is not uncommon for a healthy young dog to poop as much as 5 times a day.  But my dog seems to poop exactly one time more per day than the number of times you take her for a walk.  If we go out five times, she poops six.  If I take her out in the middle of the night for a sixth time, she poops seven.  What the heck?

My wife really hates the dog because she poops on the carpet so much.  (The dog, not my wife.  My wife is satisfactorily house-broken.)  There are places on the living room carpet she marked as a puppy five years ago where she insists on re-pooping practically every night.  No matter how often we scrub the carpet and box her ears, still, brown spots and poop lumps to greet us almost every morning.  Maybe she does it because my wife tells her how much she hates her and the dog wants to get even.  But that is the opposite of what the dog says.  She loves Mommy because Mommy gives the dog soup bones.  Somehow, it seems the dog believes she is giving us all a gift by pooping on the carpet and filling the house with her personal scent.  She poops for us because she loves us.

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Here Jade Beyer is busy using Henry’s computer. She has her own Facebook page and everything.

I drew the diagram at the start of this article to better explain my Republicanized theories of dog poop and dog love.  You will notice that, based on observations of total output, I have theorized that dogs must be almost completely hollow.  They don’t apparently store poop in their legs, but the rest of their dog bodies appear to be hollow poop-tubes that store nearly infinite amounts of poo.  Dogs also apparently have some kind of instant-poop-maker at the base of the throat so that anything they eat, dog food, my missing left socks, my son’s retainer, dead rats, whatever was growing behind the rice bag in the pantry, and whatever people food they can steal, is instantly transformed into poop.  Need to poop on the floor because dad didn’t give you any of the bacon at breakfast?  Eat a sock.  Fill up with instant poop ammo.  The poop on the floor will prove how much you love dad and why he should give you bacon more.

So, now that I have studied the poop problem, what solutions could there be?

Well, I have threatened the dog to use corks and other sorts of plugs, but that wouldn’t solve the problem so much as merely delay it.  And I dread the impending explosion in the living room that such a plan suggests to a vivid imagination like mine.  I have thought about feeding her less, but it seems she can still use the puppy beg-eye to such good effect that she could subsist entirely on people food conned out of my son and daughter.  So, I will use a Republican congressional solution.  Since their response to poverty is to give more money to rich people, and the solution to climate change is to cut pollution restrictions, then obviously I need to feed my dog MORE!  I need to cram it down her greedy little throat if necessary.  That will fix it.  Or bring about fat, exploding dogs all the sooner.

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December 25, 2023 · 2:06 am

‘Tis the Season…

Yesterday I posted one of my patented conspiracy-theory posts which was intended primarily to give my three kids more practice at using their Eye-fu skills. You know, that ancient Chinese martial art of using the dramatic eye-roll to combat the embarrassing way elderly parents have of saying what they actually think for the sole purpose of humiliating their much-more sensible offspring. So, today I need to humbly contemplate the many reasons I will not get any Christmas presents this year and begin to generate some holiday spirit to lighten the mood of what is likely to be a rather lonely Christmas season.

So, here’s a selfie from old Grumpy Klaus, wearing the aggravated countenance of the Jolly One looking at the Naughty List to determine who gets the bricks and who gets the lumps of coal… and who gets referred to Old Krampus.

Ho ho ho… kinda…

Having married a Jehovah’s Witness twenty-six years ago, I have gotten mostly out of the habit of celebrating Christmas. The Witnesses believe that holidays with pagan origins are from Satan, and bad for you. But it has been almost seven years now since they decided I was from Satan too, and so I stopped believing in knocking on doors and trying to get homeowners to reject their own form of Christianity because we are somehow more right than they are, and if they don’t swear off celebrating Christmas they are doomed. Among the many other things you have to swear off of for that religion. Like swearing.

Don’t get me wrong… Jehovah’s Witnesses are wonderful, loving people who care about others and whose religious teachings are more helpful than harmful over all… just like all other Christians who aren’t ISIS-level radicals. (The Westboro Baptists leap to mind for some reason.) If you really need religion, it is a good one to have. But even though my wife still needs to be one, I have begun to feel like I do not.

I personally cherish the holiday traditions I grew up with, and I really wish I could have shared those with my children. (This is another point for practicing Eye-fu right here.) I fear however. that like most devoutly religious parents, we managed to raise three devout agnostics and atheists. I have trained them in the last four years to like the tradition of making and eating gingerbread houses and gingerbread men. That’s probably of pagan origin too, but it’s too late now to save my sorry old soul from gingerbread.

Anyway, I am trying to look forward to the season of Peace on Earth once again. And though I will be celebrating mostly alone and ill and condemned by gingerbread, I do have pleasant memories. I can still reach my sisters and my mother by phone. They share some of those memories. And my kids will be around enough to eat the gingerbread castle I bought for this year.

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December 21, 2023 · 1:21 am

Merry Christmas… (maybe)

This holiday is going to be different. Different from the holiday I grew up with. Different than the celebrationless non-holiday I lived with for twenty years. And different from the new traditions we established, my kids and I, as we pulled away from my wife’s religion. The pandemic affects everything.

I was born into a family of Iowa Methodists living in North Central Iowa in a tiny farm town called Rowan.

I remember Christmas being the most magical time of year. I believed in Santa Claus. I felt like the Christmas magic that we saw in seasonal specials on TV in black and white were so real… the realest reality there could be…even if Andy Williams wasn’t the host of the program. Candy canes and Christmas trees and sitting on Santa’s lap being terrified of getting it wrong… and making him think I was asking for a talking Chatty Kathy doll even though I was a boy… FOR MY SISTER, SANTA! FOR MY SISTER… Oh, gawd, that really went wrong. And we had family gatherings where we ate pot-luck family meals with Swedish meatballs and turkey and mashed potatoes with brown gravy and casseroles of fifteen different kinds and nuts and candy…eating ourselves into a semi-stupor as we also did only three and a half weeks before at Thanksgiving.

And presents. Everybody gave presents. And Christmas Carols in Church.

But time goes on. You grow out of believing in Santa Claus. You even grow out of believing in Andy Williams. Perry Como was better. And it was getting so commercial. And Christmas shows we loved as kids seemed so simple and lame when watched again as young adults.

And then I married a Jehovah’s Witness. If you are not aware of it, Christmas originated as a pagan holiday, the Roman Saturnalia. It was a night of feasts and orgies and excess. And Jehovah’s Witnesses believe their beliefs are the only true beliefs, and celebrating Christmas is of Satan. I celebrated Christmas for the last time in 1994. I married in 1995.

For the next twenty years I did not celebrate Christmas. At least, not out loud where Brothers and Sisters in the Truth could hear. And the season became very austere and sanitized for me by the religious integrity of those around me in the faith.

But there were friends in the faith that lost their faith and left the congregation permanently. And the people around me changed. And I was beset by illnesses, mine and my family’s. And Jehovah’s Witnesses are very good at helping the sick. But, apparently only for others, not me and mine. They began turning away.

I am probably disfellowshipped now. They have turned away from me, and I am now isolated from all those who used to be friends and acquaintances. My wife is still a member of the congregation. And this is good because she desperately needs to believe. It is a good life for her and keeps her relatively well. But I know they disfellowshipped me, even though nobody told me so like they always do in such cases. My wife barely talks to me now. And this is probably because members of the congregation are supposed to shun the disfellowshipped, even if they are family.

But I bare no one ill will. That may be part of the problem. The Bible directive is to “Hate what is bad.” And blood transfusions and psychiatry are both bad things according to the Witnesses’ understanding of Bible commands.

I didn’t need any transfusions, and though I have significant stress and diabetic depression, I was never hospitalized for that. But I did kinda fake some disfellowshippable offenses so that I would be the one, and my wife would still be able to be a Witness. She needs it more than I do.

And, to be quite honest, I need to feel a little bit of Christmas now in my old age and infirmity. After all, it is a holiday all about making sacrifices in order to give gifts to others. I know that this post will make Jehovah’s Witnesses cringe. But now that they are shunning me, I guess they won’t be seeing this anyway. And I wish them a Merry Christmas in spite of it all.

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December 10, 2023 · 2:00 am

Living in the Spider Kingdom

Life seems to be getting harder and harder. And I realize that a big part of that perception is the fact that my health is deteriorating quickly. This is a humor blog, but it has been getting more and more serious and more and more grim as the grim reaper becomes more and more a central character in my own personal story.

My perception of reality, however, is best explained by a passage in a novel that spoke to me in college. It comes from the novel, the Bildungsroman by Thomas Mann called Der Zauberberg, in English, The Magic Mountain. In the scene, Hans Castorp is possibly freezing to death, and he hallucinates a pastoral mountainside scene where children are happily playing in the sunshine. Possibly Heaven? But maybe not. As he goes into a stone building and finds a passage down into the ground, he sees wrinkled, ugly, horrible hags gathered around a child’s corpse, eating it. And this vision explains the duality at the center of the meaning of life.

For every good thing, there is an equal and opposite bad thing that balances it out. There is no understanding what perfection and goodness mean without knowing profanity and evil. Just as you can’t understand hot without cold nor light without darkness. And you don’t get to overturn the way it is. You try your hardest to stay on the heads side of the coin knowing that half the time life falls to tails.

So, what good does it do me to think about and write about things like this? Well, it makes for me a sort of philosophical gyroscope that spins and dances and helps me keep my balance in the stormy sea of daily life. I deal with hard things with humor and a sense of literary irony. I make complex metaphors that help me throw a rope around the things that hurt me.

We are living now in the Spider Kingdom. Hard times are here again. The corrupt and corpulent corporate spiders are spinning the many webs we are trapped in. As metaphorical as it is, we wouldn’t have the government we currently have and be suffering the way we are if that weren’t true.

But no bad thing nor no good thing lasts forever. The wheel goes round and round. The top of the wheel reaches the bottom just as often as the bottom returns to the top. So, it will all pass if we can only hold out long enough.

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November 21, 2023 · 1:26 am

Toons Are Easy

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November 9, 2023 · 1:00 am

Doom is Imminent, It’s Time to Sing!

**This is a repost of my prediction from 11/2/2016 that Trump would win the presidency in 2016, posted again because  Pogo and I are concerned he is on track to do it again from prison in 2024.

Yessir, the Cubs have a chance to win their first World Series since 1908 tonight.  They have not won the title since Tinker to Evers to Chance was the double-play combo of poetic proportions.  They have never won in my lifetime, and I am quite old.  So, there is proof positive the world is about to end.

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Yes, I can even describe the mechanics of the thing.  Donald Trump will be elected President of the United States thanks to Mr. Comey’s timely reveal of more scandalous emails that he has not read and chuckled about yet.  You know, the ones that he couldn’t have actually read yet because they come from potential pedophile Anthony Weiner’s computer, and he had to have a separate warrant from a judge to read anything that may have to do with Hillary, even though probably none of them contain nude pictures from Hillary, and she probably didn’t even write those emails.  The world had to know about that right before the election, especially members of the Republican House Committee for examining Hillary’s every boo-boo.  So, the Donald will win, because nobody is doing any press conferences on the FBI investigation on his ties to the Russian government through the biggest bank in Russia.  ‘Taint important, Pogo.

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And once the great orange pumpkin-head is our next president, our health care will no longer be under the misguided protection of Obamacare.  Instead, it will will be taken care of by “something terrific” that will make high profits for somebody, and make certain that I will never be able to pay another medical bill (since those who are deceased rarely do).

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And, of course, President Pompadoodle will be able to declare that we no longer have to believe in the climate change hoax.  The result being that we will soon be able to buy beachfront property in Iowa and Missouri, be able to purchase our breathable air in factory-made brick-form, and possibly grow a helpful third eye from the mutating effects of nuclear radiation.

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And, lastly, I would like to thank the late great Walt Kelly for illustrating today’s post.  One wonders how a cartoonist can look so far ahead from the 1960’s to do such a fine job of illustrating the problems of 2016?  Will miracles never cease?  I mean, really, we could probably do with a few less of these industrial grade miracles made out of recycled elephant poop.

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November 8, 2023 · 2:01 am

Healing From A Fatal Wound

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This is a repost from 2016, the beginnings of terrible times under a pumpkinhead president.

The Trumpkins and Trolls won the battle and are now busy eating their prisoners… along with the puppies and kittens for dessert.  And as far as I can see, the war is over.  We had a chance with the Paris Climate Accords to repair the damage to the life of this planet, even though it was a very eleventh-hour plan to avert the end of life on Earth.  The Trolls and Trumpkins are peeing on that fence too, shorting it out and preventing it from saving us from being eaten by the heat-wolves of corporate polluters.

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I myself wasn’t expecting to live through another decade in any case, but now, I fear the lives of my children and grandchildren will be cut short as well.  You can’t poop where you eat on a regular basis and expect not to get sick and die.  I predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series because they stole key talent from the Cardinals and had a young, rising club to add them to.  I got that one right.  I predicted that Trump would win the presidency because I know a lot of the Trump-voter kind of former middle-class white people who are seriously in financial and existential pain, and I knew who they were going to blame it on.  If I am right about this last thing too, then we are all doomed.  3f96a6e4e030fa8fa38c97da9d206240

“Jeez, Mickey!  You don’t call that humor, do you?”

Well, I guess I do, because humor comes from being able to laugh at the darkness and make fun of the dumpy-lumpy lumbering bears of bad fortune that are about to eat you.  We are going to have a laugh or two before the end at the expense of Trumpkins and Trolls because they make world-shaking decisions based on faith in false facts.  The irony and stupidity of it all is a very laughable absurdity that will build BS mountains taller than Everest.  And those mountains will collapse upon them, burying them in poop.  Never mind that we will also be buried.  They brought it on themselves by the choices they made.  Seeing them get their comeuppance has to be worth a laugh or two.

I have pretty much let Will Rogers speak to this current election result through the memes I have chosen to accompany this gloomy-doomy essay.  I think it is significant that wisdom from a hundred years ago still applies so completely to the politics of today.  With democracy and elections we get what we deserve… not what we want.  We need to change to face the future, if we even get to have one.  But the past clearly shows that we haven’t learned our lessons very well.  I guess there’s nothing left to do but laugh about it… and try to love each other a little better before the bitter end.

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Thanks for sharing, Cousin Will.

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November 7, 2023 · 1:56 am

Upon Further Reflection…

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My 60th Birthday Self Portrait

Time dictates lots of things.  I am not now even the ghost of what I was back then.  I look more like Santa Claus than my father or my grandfathers ever did.  You may notice that, even with glasses on, I have to squint in order to see who I really am.

It is normal to do a bit of self-examination after a milestone birthday.  But I never claimed to be normal.  In fact, I doubt after the results of the recent election that you could say I was anything like the common man at all.

I was raised a Christian in a Midwest Methodist Church from a small Iowa farm town.  But I have since become something of an agnostic or atheist… not because I don’t believe in God, but because I don’t believe anyone can tell me who God is or how he wants me to be other than me.  But I am also not at the center of the universe the way most religious people believe.  I believe that all people are born good and have to work at being bad by making self-centered choices and making excuses to themselves for behaving in ways that they know are wrong.  God doesn’t forgive my sins because he doesn’t have to.  I am tolerant of all people and most things about them.  To sum up this paragraph, I am nothing like the dedicated Christians I know and grew up among.  The actions of the new, in-coming government and dominant political party convince me that intolerance, self-interest, and rationalizations are the norm.

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Sometimes my nose gets really red and my hair bozos out for no particular reason.

I deal with the problems of life by making jokes and forging ahead with carefully considered plans in spite of the doubts others express about my abilities, my choices, and my sanity.  I prefer to do something rather than to sit idly by and do nothing.  Yet, I never do anything without agonizing over the plan before I take that step.  And like the recent election, things usually go wrong.  I have failed at far more things in my life than I have succeeded at.

I am told I think too much.  I hear constantly that I make things too complicated.  People say I should do practically everything in a different way… usually their way.  But I inherited a bit of stubbornness from my square-headed German ancestors.  In fact, I inherited Beyer-stubborn from my Grandma Beyer.  In all the time I knew her, I never saw her change her mind about anything… ever.  She was a Republican who thought all Republicans were like President Eisenhower, even Ronald Reagan…  but not Barry Goldwater.  Someone convinced her that Goldwater was a radical.  That was almost as bad as being a Democrat.  I, however, have strayed from the Beyer-stubborn tradition enough to change my mind once in a while, though only after carefully considering the facts on both sides of the question.  Nixon changed me from a Republican like Grandma into a Democrat.  Fortunately, Grandma Beyer loved me too much to disown me.

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In my retirement, I have gotten even more artistical than I was before.  This is a picture of me with my fictional child Valerie.

So how do I summarize this mirror-staring exercise now that I have passed the 500-word goal?  Probably by stating that I do have a vague idea of who I am.  But I promise to keep looking in the mirror anyway.  One never knows what he will see in the map of his soul that he wears on his face.

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September 28, 2023 · 12:42 am

Humble Pie

The difference between who you want to be and who you are is humbling.

The recipe for humble pie requires good, clear eyesight.

And you need a reliable mirror that only shows the flaws in the reflected image, not in the mirror itself.

And you need to look at every detail in the whole of you. Even the secret things that you tend to conceal from everybody, especially yourself.

And writing a novel, if you do it right, is a form of baking humble pie.

The good and the not-so-good is reflected in reviews, which are often written with mirrors that have flaws.

But what you see, if you are honest with yourself, can show you that, even though you are far from perfect, you are exactly what you are supposed to be.

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