Category Archives: forgiveness

May 7, 2024 · 12:17 am

Danse Macabre (the cartoon dance of death)

I would like to say going in that there are good reasons why young people can become obsessed with death and suffering and the color black and the dance towards the grave.  I danced that jig too when I was younger.  At age 22 my experience with sexual assault came back to me in dreams.  I thought they were only dream images, but as I continued to think about it and be tormented by it, I began to clearly recall the terrible things he did to me that I had been repressing for twelve years.  And I deal with traumatic experience with art for some crazy reason.  I took a week in 1981 to get all the horrid feelings out on paper.

Danse M3

You will notice the tombstone lists the date of death as being before my eleventh birthday in 1967.  That is when it happened.  It was not actually a sexual experience… it was torture.  He took my pants off and did things to my private parts to cause me intense pain.  And he even said to me that it was my own fault, that somehow I had told him that I wanted this horrible thing to happen.  For several years after I intentionally used the furnace in my home to make burn scars on my lower back and the back of my legs.  I believe now that I was hurting myself in order to extinguish sexual thoughts and feelings.  The worst thing he did to me was make me feel guilty about what happened.

Danse M2

When you go back to the art of the middle ages, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and other European artists both young and old, you see artists grappling with mortality, the fact that all people, including me, will die.   At times it can seem to the immature mind that death is the only possible escape from suffering.  This artwork comes from a time when I was contemplating exactly that.

Danse M1

If you are looking at this closely, you will see that I signed my name to it backwards.  I signed my art as Leah Cim Reyeb, or simply Leah Cim.  I put these four panels into my big black portfolio and never showed them to anybody until after my abuser passed away from a heart attack.  I don’t believe in Hell and I don’t believe in ghosts, so now, I finally feel safe about sharing this artwork with others.  The terrible secret is a secret no longer.  He can no longer reach out and hurt me any further.

Dansegawd 4

I apologize for not being funny… even remotely funny… in this post.  Funny is probably not the appropriate thing for this post.  You may be wondering why I even bother to post it.  Isn’t this a private matter, best kept to myself?  You tell me.  This is a terrible thing that happened to me.  I am now honest about it in a way I could never be before.  I can explain it without worrying about any retribution by or against him.  I can finally forgive him.  I can overcome what happened and be the stronger for it.  And if you have read this far without being so revolted by it that you stopped reading and stopped following my blog, maybe you need to do the dance with me.  Is there something you need to overcome?  It can be overcome.  So dance with me… and rejoice.

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May 1, 2024 · 12:18 am

Danse Macabre (the cartoon dance of death)

I would like to say going in that there are good reasons why young people can become obsessed with death and suffering and the color black and the dance towards the grave.  I danced that jig too when I was younger.  At age 22 my experience with sexual assault came back to me in dreams.  I thought they were only dream images, but as I continued to think about it and be tormented by it, I began to clearly recall the terrible things he did to me that I had been repressing for twelve years.  And I deal with traumatic experience with art for some crazy reason.  I took a week in 1981 to get all the horrid feelings out on paper.

Danse M3

You will notice the tombstone lists the date of death as being before my eleventh birthday in 1967.  That is when it happened.  It was not actually a sexual experience… it was torture.  He took my pants off and did things to my private parts to cause me intense pain.  And he even said to me that it was my own fault, that somehow I had told him that I wanted this horrible thing to happen.  For several years after I intentionally used the furnace in my home to make burn scars on my lower back and the back of my legs.  I believe now that I was hurting myself in order to extinguish sexual thoughts and feelings.  The worst thing he did to me was make me feel guilty about what happened.

Danse M2

When you go back to the art of the middle ages, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and other European artists both young and old, you see artists grappling with mortality, the fact that all people, including me, will die.   At times it can seem to the immature mind that death is the only possible escape from suffering.  This artwork comes from a time when I was contemplating exactly that.

Danse M1

If you are looking at this closely, you will see that I signed my name to it backwards.  I signed my art as Leah Cim Reyeb, or simply Leah Cim.  I put these four panels into my big black portfolio and never showed them to anybody until after my abuser passed away from a heart attack.  I don’t believe in Hell and I don’t believe in ghosts, so now, I finally feel safe about sharing this artwork with others.  The terrible secret is a secret no longer.  He can no longer reach out and hurt me any further.

Dansegawd 4

I apologize for not being funny… even remotely funny… in this post.  Funny is probably not the appropriate thing for this post.  You may be wondering why I even bother to post it.  Isn’t this a private matter, best kept to myself?  You tell me.  This is a terrible thing that happened to me.  I am now honest about it in a way I could never be before.  I can explain it without worrying about any retribution by or against him.  I can finally forgive him.  I can overcome what happened and be the stronger for it.  And if you have read this far without being so revolted by it that you stopped reading and stopped following my blog, maybe you need to do the dance with me.  Is there something you need to overcome?  It can be overcome.  So dance with me… and rejoice.

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March 13, 2024 · 1:06 am

Writing Myself To Life

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I have been working on my novel The Baby Werewolf, and I am now in the final phase, working on the climax and crisis point.  And I surprised myself.  The killer monologues to the main characters who have now become his intended next victims.  I have played this out over and over in the twenty-two years I have been writing this book.  Last night, for the first time ever, the hero character laughs in this scene instead of the cringing fear that had always been there before.

How is such a thing possible?  What changed?  I have been writing and rewriting this story since 1996.  But it goes much deeper and darker than that.  This story went on my have-to-write list in 1966 when an older, stronger boy who lived near my home trapped me in a place out-of-sight of others and stripped me, gaining some horrible kind of pleasure by inflicting pain on my private parts.  Recovery from that has taken half a century.  The recovery itself probably explains why I struggled so long to pull this story together in a finished form.

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There are things about my writing life that are undeniable.  First of all, I have to write.  There is really no other choice for me.  My mind will never know rest or peace without being able to spin out the paragraphs and essays and stories that make it possible to know those things.  Nothing is real if I can’t write it out.  Secondly, I am a humorist.  If I can never be funny at all, can never write a joke, then I will descend into madness.  My sense of humor not only shields me and serves as my suit of armor, it heals me when I suffer psychic wounds.  This book is a horror story, but like many of the best horror stories, it relies on humor to drive every scene and knit the plot together.  And it was a breakthrough for me to have the hero character laugh instead of cringe in the critical scene.  It allows me to live again.  And love again.  And the real monster that caused this book to be, is now forgiven.  The world continues to turn.  The picture is now complete.  And soon, the novel will be too.

ts14

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December 25, 2023 · 10:58 pm

Thinking About Thinking About Christmas

Yeah, I know… The title seems like a typo. But this pointlessly obtuse Mickian essay is actually about metacognition of the concept of having the “Christmas spirit.” In other words, I am writing about and analyzing how I think about Christmas. A nerdy thing to do done by a nerd who wants you to think he is smarter than he really is.

The Reason for the Season

Yes, I live in Texas, so I am constantly seeing the “Reason for the Season” signs in every Southern Baptist churchyard. So, what do I think is the reason? Yeah, you probably don’t want to know. I was a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses for 20 years. Not that I believed in the evils of celebrating Christmas. I only stopped following Witness commands when they abandoned me in times of spiritual need, but I do retain the belief that if Jesus was a real human being, he was not born on December 25th. If the shepherds were watching their flocks by night, then the latest it could have been was in October. Shepherds don’t graze their flocks in winter. The celebration is what the Christian bigwigs decided they would use to co-opt the pagan Saturnalia. The date represents the rebirth of the Sun after the Winter Solstice on December 21st. The Sun, not the Son.

But unlike Jehovah’s Witnesses, I don’t see the Christmas holiday as a bad thing. People, Christian or not, are nicer to each other this time of year. They are much quicker to think of others and take pity on those who are suffering or are in serious need of help. And they think about giving gifts to others. particularly family. Growing up a Methodist Christian, I never noticed any parents at all giving their kids lumps of coal. Even the really bad kids got cool stuff as gifts from Mom and Dad, or Grandma or Grandpa, or whoever else was lucky enough to have to put up with them daily throughout the year.

People actually willingly spend time with their family this time of year. They hear the minister occasionally when he reads aloud the Bible verses about what Jesus commanded concerning widows and orphans, the homeless, and the poor. And Jesus never said that their reduced condition was their own fault for not working hard enough or not being a good-church-goer enough. And people who choose to reach out and spend time with each other during the season of good feelings generally find they actually like those fellow human beings they chose to spend some of their time with. All people are generally good when they are not being swayed by a way to make lots of money or enraged and vengeful for the real and imagined hurts that others have inflicted on them. I think it is absolutely vital that people have a celebration when they have survived another year of life in which not all of their family and friends are dead and they may even have a little money on hand to celebrate with. If Christmas didn’t already exist, we would desperately need to create something just like it.

Vincent Price’s Christmas Tree again

Vincent Price’s Christmas Tree Explained

The picture above, a surrealist picture-poem of how I feel about Christmas now that I am retired and no longer a Jehovah’s Witness, has never really been explained by me. Now that I am baring my soul as a Christian Existentialist Nudist Atheist who believes in God, I should elaborate on what it means.

The picture is named after the photo-shopped Christmas Tree in the back corner. I photo-shopped it from a photo of Vincent Price, the horror-movie actor, in a TV Christmas special in the 1960’s. I photo-shopped Vincent out of the picture, of course, just clipping and pasting the tree itself. I spent a good share of my youth, including all of my teen years, nursing a terrible secret. I was sexually assaulted at the age of ten. I believed I was a monster. But the Christmas I created the picture and photo-shopped Vincent out, I had successfully made peace with the monster in my past. My story is not a horror story. So, horror-movie-star Vincent had to leave this party.

And part of that is represented by the Cotulla Cowgirl basketball player. Vivi here represents all my 31 years as a public school teacher. By serving the children of South Texas, and later the ESL kids of North Texas, I managed to prove to myself that I was a good and worthy person. I know because of the many things they told me over the years, that my students would mostly agree with my self-assessment that I am not a bad man.

I put myself in the picture as a happy, confident nude boy. This is a thing that I wasn’t able to be after the age of ten. Doubt, fear, and depression clouded my world from 1966 to 1976. When I spent time trying to explain to the high school counselor what was wrong with me, he had to admit that he knew something was wrong, but he did not know what it was nor how to help. And I could not at that time admit what had happened, as I could not even allow myself to remember the actual trauma. So, becoming a nudist in 2017 and coming to terms with the scars and trauma, was a gift to myself. The mental chains are gone.

Anneliese, the gingerbread girl, represents my mental linking with the German-American world of Aunt Selma’s Christmas parties in the 1960’s. The gingerbread cookies, the candy, and the Christmas stories she told with a charming German accent led to the writing of my book Recipes for Gingerbread Children. Christmas is a day full of gingerbread men… and now, making gingerbread houses.

And Annette Funicello is in the picture because Christmas always used to have a Disney-movie, happy-endings sort of theme. I needed that happy ending to every year to keep me going. It was an emotionally essential thing I counted on every year to be able to face a brand new year.

I am an atheist. And an Existentialist. Oh, and a nudist. But I need Christmas. It matters to me. And I know I am not the only one.

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December 18, 2023 · 2:20 am

Doing Diddly-Squoot

Yes…

It means I am doing nothing.

And I am working really hard at it.

I do have a work in progress.

I have added to it once in the last week.

I think the expression, Iowegian as it is, comes from the expression “doing squat” which means “doing nothing at all” combined with “diddling around”, the non-sexual meaning of which is “dithering or only working in an ineffective way.”

I humbly confess that I am not that great of a researcher when it comes to linguistic facts and word origins.

I am much better at making things up and creating my own portmanteau words.

But I do have a very good ear for how people actually talk. Especially when it comes to Iowegian, Texican, Spanglish, and Educational Jargon-Gibberish. Counting English and Tourist-German, I speak six languages.

I also humbly confess that I make big mistakes. I have been working hard for a week on editing published books because of how an overreaction to one small inappropriate detail nearly destroyed one of my best books and now I have to deal with the impression some readers have that I write inappropriate stuff all the time.

Yes, I definitely erred…

I also realized I assume everybody accepts nudity as easily as I do.

They definitely don’t.

But naked is funny. And that is not a point about my writing that I am willing to concede.

Doing diddly-squoot can also result in really weird stuff like this Christmas-card composite of my artwork and Vincent Price’s 1967 Christmas tree.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, foolishness, forgiveness, humor, nudes, Paffooney, pen and ink, self portrait

May 1, 2023 · 12:39 am

Danse Macabre (the cartoon dance of death)

I would like to say going in that there are good reasons why young people can become obsessed with death and suffering and the color black and the dance towards the grave.  I danced that jig too when I was younger.  At age 22 my experience with sexual assault came back to me in dreams.  I thought they were only dream images, but as I continued to think about it and be tormented by it, I began to clearly recall the terrible things he did to me that I had been repressing for twelve years.  And I deal with traumatic experience with art for some crazy reason.  I took a week in 1981 to get all the horrid feelings out on paper.

Danse M3

You will notice the tombstone lists the date of death as being before my eleventh birthday in 1967.  That is when it happened.  It was not actually a sexual experience… it was torture.  He took my pants off and did things to my private parts to cause me intense pain.  And he even said to me that it was my own fault, that somehow I had told him that I wanted this horrible thing to happen.  For several years after I intentionally used the furnace in my home to make burn scars on my lower back and the back of my legs.  I believe now that I was hurting myself in order to extinguish sexual thoughts and feelings.  The worst thing he did to me was make me feel guilty about what happened.

Danse M2

When you go back to the art of the middle ages, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and other European artists both young and old, you see artists grappling with mortality, the fact that all people, including me, will die.   At times it can seem to the immature mind that death is the only possible escape from suffering.  This artwork comes from a time when I was contemplating exactly that.

Danse M1

If you are looking at this closely, you will see that I signed my name to it backwards.  I signed my art as Leah Cim Reyeb, or simply Leah Cim.  I put these four panels into my big black portfolio and never showed them to anybody until after my abuser passed away from a heart attack.  I don’t believe in Hell and I don’t believe in ghosts, so now, I finally feel safe about sharing this artwork with others.  The terrible secret is a secret no longer.  He can no longer reach out and hurt me any further.

Dansegawd 4

I apologize for not being funny… even remotely funny… in this post.  Funny is probably not the appropriate thing for this post.  You may be wondering why I even bother to post it.  Isn’t this a private matter, best kept to myself?  You tell me.  This is a terrible thing that happened to me.  I am now honest about it in a way I could never be before.  I can explain it without worrying about any retribution by or against him.  I can finally forgive him.  I can overcome what happened and be the stronger for it.  And if you have read this far without being so revolted by it that you stopped reading and stopped following my blog, maybe you need to do the dance with me.  Is there something you need to overcome?  It can be overcome.  So dance with me… and rejoice.

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March 16, 2023 · 1:04 am

The Doofus Divide

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I am trying to cut down on political notions and noodling in this blog.  It is like sugar to a humor writer.  The easy laughs are sweet, but if you are diabetic, they will eventually build up and kill you.

But between Twitter-tweeting twit-wits and Facebook false-fact fools, I keep getting drawn back in.  The gang of kids I grew up with in Iowa are seriously infected with Tea Party propaganda now that they are old coots like me, and continue to vote for Teabagger trolls (And I mean literal trolls.  Steve King, Congressman from Iowa, has green skin and lives under a bridge… and maybe eats foolish children when they try to cross) for public office.  And of course, I live now in Texas where gun-toting cowboys look at you intently to find any possible reason to shoot you and then thank Jesus if you are fool enough to give them one (like admitting to be mostly a Democrat in your political persuasion).  They want to argue anything and everything I post on Facebook.  Apparently even my bird pictures and cat videos politically offend them.

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Oooh!  This one really offends Teabaggers… especially the ones who make $25/hr or less.

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Can you pick out the Trump voters in this line?  All of them maybe?

And I am not suggesting that people who voted Republican in the last election aren’t as smart as my side.  I waited until now in this essay to say that, because the childhood friends and family members in that group who read my blog will have all stopped reading by this point.  I really don’t need to give them any more ammunition for Facebook and dinner table arguments.

But my side of the table are not wholly guilt free.

 

I regularly tweet or post things like these, innocently believing these heroes of the heart and mind have universal appeal because they champion truth and science and facts.  But I become alarmed when I learn how much Bill Nye offends them.  They tell me, “That guy is not a scientist!  He has no right to argue for climate change issues or the non-existence of God.  He’s just a TV guy.”  And, I suppose they have a point.  I mean, his extensive education and background in engineering, or his years in television promoting science to kids in research-based creative ways, doesn’t necessarily make him an expert on all science.  And Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist.  He doesn’t have a degree in EVERYTHING.  And when I point out that their so-called experts on climate-change denial from Fox News cannot even claim to be TV weathermen, they are further put out by my brain-bashing bullying way of using my superior knowledge of science to put them down.  Okay, I get it.  I am not being careful enough of your feelings.  (Oh, I forgot, you stopped reading this a while back.)

But the point of this is, we have to stop listening to and electing stupid people, while at the same time being a bit nicer to each other.  We have to approach the discussion with the notion that you yourself may not be totally right about everything, and you may actually learn something by talking about it.  (Which is, of course, no problem for me since I really don’t know anything for certain and need to learn practically everything as if I were still four years old.)

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Okay, Bill, I get it.  I am probably wrong about that too.

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February 11, 2023 · 2:24 am

Mickey Viewed From the Inside

Yes, this post is a self-examination.  Not the kind you see Donald Trump enacting every weekend, where he says any crappy thing that occurs to his craptastical very good brain to cover what he doesn’t want us to believe about the truth on Twitter, basically for the purpose of continuing to say he is great and we are poop.   I do not like myself the way Trump likes himself.  I am an old bag of gas that is in pain most of the time, in poor health, and the subject of endless persecution from Bank of America and other money-grubbing machines that are convinced any money I might accidentally have really belongs to them.  But this is not a complain-about-crap fest either.

This is a self-examination that attempts to honestly examine where I am in my quest for wisdom and my affliction with being a writer.

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If I am being honest about the type of writer I really am, I guess I am most like the Weird Recluse in the bottom corner.  I can’t claim to be as good as Kafka or Dickinson, but I am definitely better than some of the crap that gets published and marketed as young adult literature.  The business of publishing is more interested in how many books they can sell, rather than literary merit or good writing.  Some of the crap that is out there and being made into bad movies (which I have not seen because I don’t go to movies that don’t pass the fiction-source smell test) is actually a form of brain poison that will mold young people into sexual predators and professional poop makers.  And people will take poison happily if it has been deviously marketed well.  So far, in the money test, I have made only $16.43 dollars as an author (plus whatever I have made from I-Universe that doesn’t cut a check until it reaches at least $25 dollars).  Nobody is buying my books because nobody has read them.  I have sold a few copies to friends and relatives.  Some of those books are just sitting on a shelf somewhere unread.  I have a couple of 5-star reviews on Amazon, and that is it.  I will die in the near future not having known any measurable success from my books at all.

I have entered novels in writing contests and done well enough to make it into the final round of judging twice.  I have not, however, made a big enough splash that anyone really noticed.  I have paid reviewers to review my books online.  One of those charged me money, and then reviewed a book with the same title by a different author, a book which was nothing like my book, and then, when forced to correct their error, only read the blurb on the back of the book to write the oopsie-I-goofed-last-time review.  They were not worth the money I paid them, money that Bank of America could’ve sued me for instead.

The only thing I have done successfully as a writer is, I think, this goofy blog.  By writing every day, I have managed to give myself considerable practice at connecting with readers.  I have practiced writing humor and written some laughable stuff.  I have plumbed my soul for new writing ideas, and found a creative artesian well bubbling up with new ideas daily.  I can regularly manufacture inspiration.  I am never truly without an idea to write about.  Even when I write a post about not having an idea to write about, I am lying.  Of course, I am a fiction writer, so telling lies is what I do best.  I am also a humorist, so that means I can also tell the truth when I have to, because the best humor is the kind where you surprise the reader with a thing that is weirdly true.  Like just now.

So, somewhere ages and ages hence, I hope there will be a trove of old books in a cellar somewhere that will include one of mine.  And some future kid will pick it up, read it, and laugh.  The golden quality of that laughter is the only treasure I have really been searching for.  It is the reason I write.  It is the reason I continue to be Mickey.

Since I wrote this blog post originally, I have added a few books published on Amazon.  You can find information about this random noveliciousness here at this page in my blog.  Click on this linkie thingie here.

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Filed under autobiography, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, forgiveness, humor, Paffooney, philosophy, publishing, self pity, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing humor

December 23, 2022 · 4:03 am

Doing Diddly-Squoot

Yes…

It means I am doing nothing.

And I am working really hard at it.

I do have a work in progress.

I have added to it once in the last week.

I think the expression, Iowegian as it is, comes from the expression “doing squat” which means “doing nothing at all” combined with “diddling around”, the non-sexual meaning of which is “dithering or only working in an ineffective way.”

I humbly confess that I am not that great of a researcher when it comes to linguistic facts and word origins.

I am much better at making things up and creating my own portmanteau words.

But I do have a very good ear for how people actually talk. Especially when it comes to Iowegian, Texican, Spanglish, and Educational Jargon-Gibberish. Counting English and Tourist-German, I speak six languages.

I also humbly confess that I make big mistakes. I have been working hard for a week on editing published books because of how an overreaction to one small inappropriate detail nearly destroyed one of my best books and now I have to deal with the impression some readers have that I write inappropriate stuff all the time.

Yes, I definitely erred…

I also realized I assume everybody accepts nudity as easily as I do.

They definitely don’t.

But naked is funny. And that is not a point about my writing that I am willing to concede.

Doing diddly-squoot can also result in really weird stuff like this Christmas-card composite of my artwork and Vincent Price’s 1967 Christmas tree.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, foolishness, forgiveness, humor, nudes, Paffooney, pen and ink, self portrait

October 9, 2022 · 5:41 am

Dancing Towards the Brighter Light

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In Texas a little girl who has cerebral palsy committed the crime of crossing a border patrol station near Laredo on the way to having life-saving gall bladder surgery.  So the border patrol followed her to the hospital, waited until the surgery was finished, and then took her to a detention facility for deportation.  Wow!

We are a heartless people.  We elect heartless representatives to congress to make heartless laws to punish people for being poor, or not being white, or not being patriotic enough at football games during the playing of the national anthem.  We elected an orange-faced creature with bad hair to the presidency rather than electing a human being with a beating heart.   And why did we do that?  Because too many people were in favor of health care laws and regulations that help people we don’t like.  We elected him to send a message to all the people we don’t like.  That message was, “Screw you, why don’t you just die already?”  We like that message because we are a heartless people.

 

xx5

But while we are only thinking of ourselves and vowing to let everybody else go to hell, somewhere the music of the dance begins to play.  Hear it yet?

Somewhere children are laughing.

Somewhere Santa Claus is real.

Holidays are approaching and, with indictments sealed and in the hands of prosecutors, possible impeachment looms.  The happy dance is about to begin again.

Or maybe it never really went away.  People did care, do care, about the crisis in Puerto Rico.  After the hurricane, Dippy Donald Dimwit tossed paper towels to survivors, apparently suggesting that all he needed to do was that to symbolically get all the people cleaning up while holding on to their own bootstraps and pulling with all their might.  Apparently heartless people believe you can levitate if you pull upwards on bootstraps.  But Tesla gifted the city of San Juan with solar panels and batteries and started set-up of an island-based solar power grid to get Puerto Rico back online in the modern world.  And Elon Musk is taking the steps towards building the future that the pumpkinhead in chief can’t even conceive in his empty pumpkin head.  The music sways and builds.  The dancers circle each other and first steps in ballet shoes begin.

We are a heartless people.  We suffer in our cubicles alone, angry at a heartless world.  “Why don’t you love me?” each one of us cries, “aren’t I worthy of love?”  But crying never solved a problem.  No, counting our regrets and hoarding the list of wrongs done to us never started a heart to beating.  But the music builds.  Try smiling at that hard-working clerk who takes your information at the DMV, and then thanking them at the end for their hard work even though they have to deny you the permit because there are more bits of paperwork that have to be found and signed.  Try making a joke in line at the post office that makes the other hundred and ten people actually laugh while waiting interminably.  Do your best to bring light to the darkness, not for yourself, but for other people.  The music builds.  Do you know the steps to the dance?  No?  Well, the steps won’t matter if you begin to move to the music, begin to glide… And the heart starts pumping, and we begin to feel alive again.  Hallelujah!  We are dancing towards the light again.

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Filed under compassion, empathy, forgiveness, healing, insight, inspiration, strange and wonderful ideas about life