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.
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 of her resemblance to 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.
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.
And several things are just too confusing for my old brain to explain.
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.
Of course, there is the opposite problem too. Some writers are not hard to understand at all. They only use simple sentences. They only use ideas that lots of other people have used before. You don’t have to think about what they write. You only need to react. They are the reasons that words like “trite”, “hackneyed”, “boring”, and “cliche” exist in English. But simple, boring writing isn’t written by stupid people. Hemingway is like that. Pared down to the basics. No frills. Yet able to yield complex thoughts, insights, and relationships.
Catch a Falling Star 
Wake Up Sunday Morning!
As weekly rituals go, one of the most important ones came every Sunday morning when I was a kid. My parents were 50’s people. By that I mean they were teenagers and young adults during the post war boom of the 1950’s when everything seemed hopeful and bright and alive with wonderful possibilities. As a kid in the 1960’s the Sunday morning routine was this;
Obviously the most important thing in that routine was complaining, because I listed it twice. But when it got down to it, we were thankful for all the good things about life. We were positive people. We sometimes listened to Norman Vincent Peale on the radio. We knew we ought to be positive and thankful and love goodness and be kind.
Somewhere along the way, though, the world forgot the life lessons of Family Circus.
Somehow we managed to screw things up.
Environmental scientists like Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, warned us that the world could soon be ending. And we ignored them.
Richard Nixon taught us not to trust politicians any more.
We stopped believing in things like the wholesome goodness of scrambled eggs.
We let corruption in our government and inequality in the economic sphere become the norm. The greedy people who were cynical and had no empathy for the rest of us took over. That is how we ended up with someone like Donald Trump. Racism, fear, and complaining now rule the emotional landscape in America and most of the world.
So, what is the answer? What do we do?
Well, The Family Circus is still out there. We can learn from it, laugh a little, and apply some of those life lessons. Especially this one;
Leave a comment
Filed under cartoons, comic strips, commentary, goofy thoughts, humor, inspiration, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as Bill Keane, Family Circus, positive thinking