I told you recently that I believe that opinions are like onions. Consuming them is good for you. It cleans out the system. It turns little imperfections and poisons into gas and leads you to expel them. Yes, I mean opinions from my stupid old head come out of my mouth in the same way that digested onions form into gas and come out the other end. And keeping them inside (and safe from being argued or made fun of) can poison you and make you insane. So, I need to plant some onions… err, I mean opinions… and you should feel free to sample the stuff in this onion garden and fart back in my general direction if you feel the need.
It would be good if you don’t throw bricks.
Donald Trump is going to be our President until he dies. I am not saying I want that to happen. I didn’t want Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush to be President for life either. But bad things happen with the inevitability of thunderstorms and flu season. Fox News has been spreading poisonous onion gas for thirty years as a propaganda service to the corporate masters, and they will continue to provide us only with business-and-crime-friendly leaders who will wring every last penny’s worth of value out of our increasingly valueless souls.
Human civilization is doomed. We have failed to deal with human-induced climate change for too long, and now the air is turning into methane and carbon dioxide (that’s right, fart gas!), and only the people wealthy enough to create totally sealed environments will survive. We have the innate capacity to solve problems and overcome disaster, but we won’t because President Trump doesn’t want it to be that way. And he says that climate change is a hoax anyway. I think he has held onion gas inside long enough to pickle all his brain cells.
The Roswell incident was real, and there are aliens living on planet Earth. They will not save us from ourselves, however. President Trump won’t allow that. After all, they are immigrants.
Doctor Who is the best thing that the British ever gave us. It combines science fiction, fantasy, a goofy sense of humor, and serious charm into a show that can make us think about things in a new way and make us see things from a different point of view. Donald Trump won’t allow him to save us either, even though Great Britain is our very tremendous ally. Foreigners keep us from winning economically.
Eating onions is better for you than eating cheese. Onions get the gas out. Cheese makes you constipated. The French call cheese “fromage”, but that doesn’t make it any better. Cheese by any other name still can stink like Limburger.
“Once it reaches three months, the cheese produces its notorious smell because of the bacterium used to ferment Limburger cheese and many other smear-ripened cheeses. This is Brevibacterium linens, the same one found on human skin that is partially responsible for body odor, particularly foot odor.”
So I have now planted some real stinkers in the onion garden. In a just and reasonable world, the debate would now begin. Refute, if you will, dear reader, for that is the very reason that opinions exist, to start a debate. You cannot clear the air of fart gas without at least waving your hand at it.
I do write poetry. But I must admit, I am not a serious poet. I am a humorist at heart, so I tend to write only goofy non-serious poems like this one;
So here is a poem that rhymes but has too much “but-but-but” in it. A poem about pants should not have too many “buts” in it. One butt per pair, please. So this is an example of spectacularly bad poetry. Why do we need bad poetry? Because it’s funny. And it serves as a contrast to the best that poetry has to offer.
As a teacher I remember requiring students to memorize and recite Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”. Now this sort of assignment is a rich source of humorous stories for another day. Kids struggle to memorize things. Kids hate to get up in front of the class and speak with everybody looking at them. You get a sort of ant-under-a- magnifying-glass-in-the-sun sort of effect. But in order to truly get the assignment right and get the A+, you have to make that poem your own. You have to live it, understand it, and when you reach that fork in the road in your own personal yellow wood, you have to understand what Frost was saying in that moment. That is the life experience poetry has a responsibility to give you.
Hopefully I gave that experience to at least a few of my students.
Bad poetry makes you more willing to twirl your fingers of understanding in the fine strands of good poetry’s hair. (Please excuse that horrible metaphor. I do write bad poetry, after all.)
But all poetry is the same thing. Poetry is “the shortest, clearest, best way to see and touch the honest bones of the universe through the use of words.” And I know that definition is really bad. But it wasn’t written on this planet. (Danged old Space Goons!) Still, knowing that poetry comes from such a fundamental place in your heart, you realize that even bad poetry has value. So, I will continue writing seriously bad poetry in the funniest way possible. And all of you real poets who happen to read this, take heart, I am making your poetry look better by comparison.
You reach a point after a hard month has lingered long where you have to eat the leftovers and accept what is. I faced challenges again like the bankruptcy in 2017 and the COVID pandemic in 2020. July and August in 2023 have been super hot and withering of both soul and resolve. 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 have developed a tradition of repeating this post in times of trouble. Of course, updates are necessary. The pie I just had was a cherry pie, not the apple in the picture. 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. But at the end of this month, I need the crazy more than the quilt. I am having no trouble keeping warm at 108 degrees of real temperature today.
My once-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. Since this bluebonnet picture was taken, she has graduated from high school and definitely become a worthy young adult, slightly older than my own daughter. I did once hold Sweetie in my lap as an infant.
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. I have been working on a book-length essay called Naked Thinking, full of ideas and drawings about being naked and honestly open to the world. Whether I live long enough to publish it remains to be seen.
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.
Tom Baker with kittens all over him… It doesn’t get any better than that.
It is said by somebody who wasn’t basically me that any time an artist draws a picture of someone, or paints a picture of someone, or twizzles a twizzle-snoot of someone… they are basically making a picture of themselves.
So, this Paffooney that I paffooned of a purple mouse in a Don Martin-esque style, is supposed to be Mickey the cartoonist. And Mickey is supposedly, basically me.
And here I am as Muck Man, the superhero. It is me because the super power he has is his horrible, non-adorable, and unrelenting stench. The horrible smell of him renders villains and bad people unconscious or worse… sometimes straight to the hearse. And using his olfactory assaults on evil as a way to make something terrible into something with a -someness of awe, makes him indubitably, indelibly basically me.
“Long Ago It Might Have Been”
And here is a picture of a boy who might’ve been my son if only I had been given enough good sense to fall in love with that first blond young lady who first had thoughts about making babies with me. I didn’t. I’m stupid. And now she has only girls. That makes it a picture too of basically me.
And this little not-me was me all along, and as the boy who sees colors, it’s really not wrong. Synesthetic they call it in a name that’s not long, but is resoundingly deep like the words of a song.
And you might argue this one and say that it’s true… “This one is too pretty to be a picture of you.” But you would be wrong on this basis, you see…
The monster inside me is basically me
And here I am all magic and purple, and I just blew the rhyme again, so this isn’t another danged verse. I drew this picture of Milt Morgan from an old school picture of me.
I often say the character in the stories is based on the Other Mike, the other boy I grew up with who was named Mike in my little home town.
But he thought like me, he acted a lot like me. He even looked like me, at least a little bit. So, if I am portraying him, I am depicting basically me.
And this is the naked me, as a nudist back in childhood in Rowan, Iowa, which I never was… not like this… but still am. Because I am a writer. And writers always write about their naked selves, showing the whole world what saner and more prudish people keep secret. If they were truly smart and wanted to keep their secrets to themselves, artists would never draw or paint or write about or twizzle about themselves. In fact, they would make no art at all.
Yes, I know this is supposed to be a Saturday Art Day Post, but you can make art in many different ways. That can include pictures made with a camera while I play with dolls… er… action figures and try horrifically to be funny. There is an art to that, right? Maybe?
Ah, Reluctant Rabbit using the big pencil in the front of the classroom. What could that be a metaphor for? How about teaching kids by showing them how? You teach writing by writing in front of the class, talking out loud about your process, editing yourself, and polishing your writing in front of those who need to learn those skills.
So, here is the metaphor in action. Me teaching 7th graders.
Is an avatar not a metaphor for me?
Mr. Dickens, Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Disney, and Mr. Poe… do I really need to explain this metaphor?If the horns are the metaphors, what does that say about my boys?What’s the meaning of the metaphors here?Foolish bravery, positive thinking, and terrible circumstances (That’s not a parachute in his backpack, it’s the picnic lunch he would share with Gretchen after the mission.)
Once I was finally able to scan pictures again, I did some scanning of old pictures that only got the camera treatment before on my blog.
But why stop a drawing at just the pen and ink, when there is potential for so much more?
So, I took the Microsoft generic paint program and my generic photo editor to not only this pen and ink of the Jungle Princess, but a few other pictures as well.
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This is what she looks like after being attacked with color by my arthritic old hands. (There was a day when I could have handled intricate details more cleverly, but that was many, many days ago.
Anyway, I have added new dimensions to Leopard Girrrl with color.
Now I need to add more complications to the basic story of the picture.
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Here is an older pen and ink.
This is Dorin Dobbs, one of the dueling plotlines’ protagonists from the novel Catch a Falling Star.
But, of course, Dorin is a more complex character than this old black and white.
So, color needs to be added.
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I had this one actually already painted in…
But in order to use it in this project, I needed to enlarge it to make it fit into the other picture.
Making this unlikely pair work together in a story is one of the challenges of doing surrealist stories. They have to be grounded in realism, but also bring jarringly different things together. Like the Jungle Princess going on an adventure with Norwall’s Lying King.
But, putting these two together is still not enough. Let’s try some other things.
The Jungle Princess together with Tomboy Dilsey Murphy is an unusual pairing.
Or what about the blue faun from Laughing Blue?
Or even Annette Funicello?
Ridiculous, I know. But don’t they look like satin sofa paintings?
Yes, I am saying the world I live in is a low-budget commercial movie made without literary or artistic pretensions. You know, the kind where movie makers learn their craft, taking big risks with smaller consequences, and making the world of their picture reflect their heart rather than the producer’s lust for money.
Mostly what I am talking about are the movies I remember from late-night Saturday TV in black and white (regardless of whether or not the movie was made in Technicolor) and the less-risky as well as more-likely-good Saturday matinees on Channel 3. Movies made in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. They were perfect, of course, for the forbidden Midnight Movie on the show called Gravesend Manor. I had to sneak downstairs to watch it on Saturday nights with the volume turned way down low. (Not that Mom and Dad didn’t know. Well, maybe they didn’t know how many of those I watched completely naked… maybe.)
I watched this one when I was twelve, late night on an October Saturday. I had a bed-sheet with me to pull over my head at the scariest parts. Frankenstein was a crashed astronaut brought back to life by the magic of space radiation. He was uglier than sin, but still the hero of the movie, saving the Earth from invading guys in gorilla suits and scary masks (none of which looked like the movie poster.)
This one, starring James Whitmore, a really good B-Movie actor, was about giant ants coming up from the sewers and the underground to eat the city.
I would end up watching it again twenty years later when I was wearing clothes and not alone in the dark house lit only by a black-and-white TV screen.
I realized on the second viewing that it was actually a pretty good movie in spite of cheesy special effects. And I realized too that I had learned from James Whitmore’s hero character that, in times of crisis, you have to run towards the trouble rather than away from it, a thing that I used several times in my teaching career with fights and tornadoes and even rattlesnakes visiting the school campus looking to eat a seventh-grader or something (though it was a bad idea for the snake even if it had been successful.)
This one, of course, taught me that monsters liked to carry off pretty girls in bikinis. And not just on the poster, either. But it was the hero that got the girl, not the monster. This movie taught me that it sucks to be the monster. Though it also taught me that it was a good movie to take your pajamas off for and watch naked when you are thirteen.
But not all B-movies had to be watched late night on Saturdays. This movie was one of the first ones that I got to go to the movie theater to see by myself. (My sisters and little brother were still too young and got nightmares too easily to see such a movie.) It came out when I was in my teens and Mom and Dad began thinking of me as an adult once… or even possibly twice in a month.
And not all B-movies were monster movies, gangster movies, and westerns. Some, like a lot of Danny Kaye’s movies, were movies my Dad and my grandparents were more than happy to watch with me. I saw this one in both black-and-white and color. And I learned from this that it was okay to take advantage of happy accidents, like a case of mistaken identity, and using your wits, your creative singing ability, and your inexplicable good luck to win the day for everybody but the bad guys armed only with your good sense of humor.
And some of the best movies I have ever seen, judging by what I learned about movies as literature from Professor Loring Silet in his Modern Film Class at Iowa State University, are by their nature B-movies.
I am using movie posters in this blog post only from movies I have personally seen. (And I admit that not all of them are strictly “good” movies according to Professor Silet, but I like them all.)
Feel free to tell me in the comments if you have seen any of these movies yourself. I am open to all opinions, comments, and confessions.
This one is based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
I saw this one in college. You had to be 18 at the time to even buy a ticket.
I actually think that this is one of the best movies ever made. It will always make my own personal top-ten list.
I live in a B-movie world. The production values around me are not the top-dollar ones. But the stories are entertaining. The real-life heroes still run towards the problem. And it still sucks to be the monster. But it has always been worth the price of the ticket. And during my time on Earth here, even in 2020, I plan on staying till the end of the picture. I go nowhere until I see the Best Boy’s name in the end credits. And maybe not even then.
I often get criticized for talking to people who are basically invisible, probably imaginary, and definitely not real people, no matter what else they may be.
The unfinished cover picture is from the novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius which I just finished the final rewrite and edit for. All of the characters in that book are fictional. Even though some of them strongly resemble the real people who inspired me to create them, they are fictional people doing fictional and sometimes impossible things. And yet, they are all people who I have lived with as walking, talking, fictional people for many years. Most of those people have been talking to me since the 1970’s. I know some of them far better than any of the real people who are a part of my life.
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These, of course, are only a few of my imaginary friends. Some I spend time with a lot. Some I haven’t seen or heard from in quite a while. And I do know they are not real people. Mandy is a cartoon panda bear, and Anneliese is a living gingerbread cookie. I do understand I made these people up in my stupid little head.
But it seems to me that the people in the world around us are really no less imaginary, ephemeral, and unreal. Look at the current Presidentumb of the Disunited States. He is an evil cartoon James Bond villain if there ever was one.
Animated cast of OUR CARTOON PRESIDENT. Photo: Courtesy of SHOWTIME
People in the real world create an imaginary person in their own stupid little heads, and pretend real hard that that imaginary person is really them in real life. And of course, nobody sees anybody else in the same way that they see themselves. Everybody thinks they are a somebody who is different from anybody else who thinks they are a somebody too, and really they are telling themselves, and each other, lies about who somebody really is, and it is all very confusing, and if you can follow this sentence, you must be a far better reader than I am a writer, because none of it really makes sense to me. I think everybody is imaginary in some sense of the word.
So, if you happen to see me talking to a big white rabbit-man who used to be a pet white rabbit, but got changed into a rabbit-man through futuristic genetic science and metal carrots, don’t panic and call the police. I am just talking to another fictional character from a book I just finished writing. And why are you looking inside my head, anyway? There’s an awful lot of personal stuff going on in there. Of course, you only see that because I wrote about it in this essay. So it is not an invasion of privacy. It is just me writing down stuff I probably should keep in my own stupid little head. My bad.
Catch a Falling Star 
Planting Some Onions
I told you recently that I believe that opinions are like onions. Consuming them is good for you. It cleans out the system. It turns little imperfections and poisons into gas and leads you to expel them. Yes, I mean opinions from my stupid old head come out of my mouth in the same way that digested onions form into gas and come out the other end. And keeping them inside (and safe from being argued or made fun of) can poison you and make you insane. So, I need to plant some onions… err, I mean opinions… and you should feel free to sample the stuff in this onion garden and fart back in my general direction if you feel the need.
It would be good if you don’t throw bricks.
Limburger – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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