Imagination is always the place I go in times of trouble. I have a part of my silly old brain devoted to dancing the cartoon dance of the dundering doofus. It has to be there that I flee to and hide because problems and mistakes and guilt and pessimism are constantly building un-funny tiger-traps of gloom for me to rot at the bottom of. You combat the darkness with bright light. You combat hatred with love. You combat unhappiness with silly cartoonish imaginings. Well… maybe you don’t. But I do.
When reading the Sunday funnies in the newspaper on lazy Sunday afternoons, I spent years admiring Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes for its artistry and imaginative humor, believing it was about a kid who actually had a pet talking tiger. I didn’t get the notion that Hobbes was actually a toy tiger for the longest time. That’s because it was basically the story of my own boyhood. I had a stuffed tiger when I was small. He talked. He went on adventures with me. And he talked me into breaking stuff and getting into trouble with Mom and Dad. It was absolutely realistic to me.
I have always lived in my imagination. Few people see the world the way I view it. I have at least four imaginary children to go along with the three that everybody insists are real. There’s Radasha, the boy faun, my novel characters Tim Kellogg and Valerie Clarke, and the ghost dog that lurks around the house, especially at night. That plus Dorin, Henry, and the Princess (the three fake names that I use in this blog for my three real children).
Have you noticed how Watterson’s water-color backgrounds fade into white nothingness the way daydreams do? Calvin and Hobbes were always a cartoon about turning the unreal into the real, turning ideas upside down and looking at them through the filter-glasses of Spaceman Spiff.
Unique and wonderful solutions to life’s problems can come about that way. I mean, I can’t actually use a bloggular raygun to vaporize city pool inspectors, but I can put ideas together in unusual ways to overcome challenges. I almost got the pool running again by problem-solving and repairing cracks myself.
So, I am now facing the tasks of working out a chapter 13 bankruptcy and having a swimming pool removed. The Princess will need to be driven to and from school each day. I will need to help Henry find another after-school job. And the cool thing is, my imaginary friends will all be along for the ride. Thank you, Calvin. Thank you, Hobbes. You made it all possible. So, please, keep dancing the dance of the dundering doofus.
If you are old, forgetful, and retired like Mickey, you may have the same problem Mickey does with remembering what day it is. But he has a solution. At the end of the week, he simply has two Fritterdays. They take the “Fri” from Friday, and the “turday” out of Saturday…. But wait just a gol’ danged minute. We have to get the “turd’ out of there because nobody likes those. And we do that by changing the “u” to an “e” which means we also add a “t” to it to change the long “I” sound to a short “I” sound because “fritter” can mean wasting something, especially time, because that’s what you do when you don’t even know what-the-heck day it is. Fritterday! Fun times for the hopelessly forgetful.
And it is fun to be retired and not have anything to do… but put eye drops in each eye three times a day from three different colored-coded bottles so you don’t go blind from glaucoma… and pick up the package for the Princess at the Post Office because the doorbell is broken and nobody hears the package-delivery guy when he knocks… and go to CVS for more bottles of eye drops because they finally filled the prescription three days after the doctor phoned it in… and the Medicare paperwork needs to be filled in at the pharmacy… and you get 4 free Covid 19 test kits just because you are old… and… phooey! It is hard to make a run-on sentence like that fun. And the grammar-check program hates it in a mixture of blue and red squiggly underlines.
But you found things you didn’t even know you had lost, like paper doll clothes that had fallen off the paper dolls because the little white foldable tabs don’t stay folded and need to be given a little dab of glue. And the rubber bands you use for your ponytail because haircuts give you psoriasis sores and you don’t cut your hair anymore because of them, but they are all back in the same sack again because you found them scattered on the floor while you were cleaning in order to find the lost package-claim slip that you mislaid… apparently under the bed… the one you needed to claim the Princess’s package which contained… a white stuffed tiger toy all the way from a game company in Japan… because it matched the stuffed tigers she had as a child and she won it by playing an online game. Boy, howdy! Another sentence or two the grammar checker hates!
Annette Funicello from the cutout paper doll on the back of a 1960’s Cheerios box looks good in the cowboy getup… err… cowgirl getup you found under the corner of the bookcase. You have liked her since you were a boy. You once had a yearning to see a picture of her naked, but that never panned out. She was a Disney star and not allowed to even think bad thoughts, let alone pose for any nude photos. She was in the Mickey Mouse Club, not the Playboy Magazine Bunny Club. Darn it!
But the mind still works, and you’re still not blind, and you enjoy enraging the grammar-check program, and you cleaned your room without meaning to. You even wrote most of this messy blog post in second-person point-of-view without realizing you were doing it.
Hang-dang! A Fritterday! And there’s probably another one coming tomorrow.
I firmly believe that I would never have succeeded as a teacher and never gotten my resolve wrapped around the whole nonsense package of being a published author if I hadn’t picked up a copy of Mort, the first Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett that I ever encountered. I started reading the book as a veteran dungeon-master at D&D role-playing games and also as a novice teacher having a world of difficulty trying to swim up the waterfalls of Texas education fast enough to avoid the jagged rocks of failure at the bottom. I was drinking ice tea when I started reading it. More of that iced tea shot out my nose while reading and laughing than went down my gullet. I almost put myself in the hospital with goofy guffaws over Death’s apprentice and his comic adventures on a flat world riding through space and time on the backs of four gigantic elephants standing on the back of a gigantic-er turtle swimming through the stars. Now, I know you have no earthly idea what this paragraph even means, unless you read Terry Pratchett. And believe me, if you don’t, you have to start. If you don’t die laughing, you will have discovered what may well be the best humorist to ever put quill pen to scroll and write. And if you do die laughing, well, there are worse ways to go, believe me.
Discworld novels are fantasy-satire that make fun of Tolkien and Conan the Barbarian (written by Robert E. Howard, not the barbarian himself) and the whole world of elves and dwarves and heroes and dragons and such. You don’t even have to love fantasy to like this stuff. It skewers fantasy with spears of ridiculousness (a fourth level spell from the Dungeons of Comedic Magic for those fellow dungeon masters out there who obsessively keep track of such things). The humor bleeds over into the realms of high finance, education, theater, English and American politics, and the world as we know it (but failed to see from this angle before… a stand-on-your-head-and-balance-over-a-pit-of-man-eating-goldfish sort of angle).
Terry Pratchett’s many wonderful books helped me to love what is ugly, because ugly is funny, and if you love something funny for long enough, you understand that there is a place in the world even for goblins and trolls and ogres. Believe me, that was a critical lesson for a teacher of seventh graders to learn. I became quite fond of a number of twelve and thirteen year old goblins and trolls because I was able see through the funny parts of their inherent ugliness to the hidden beauty that lies within (yes, I know that sounds like I am still talking about yesterday’s post, but that’s because I am… I never stop blithering about that sort of blather when it comes to the value hidden inside kids).
I have made it a personal goal to read every book ever written by Terry Pratchett. And that goal is now within reach because even though he is an incredibly prolific writer, he has passed on within the last year. He now only has one novel left that hasn’t reached bookstores. Soon I will only need to read a dozen more of his books to finish his entire catalog of published works. And I am confident I will learn more lessons about life and love and laughter by reading what is left, and re-reading some of the books in my treasured Terry Pratchett paperback collection. Talk about your dog-eared tomes of magical mirth-making lore! I know I will never be the writer he was. But I can imitate and praise him and maybe extend the wonderful work that he did in life. This word-wizard is definitely worth any amount of work to acquire and internalize. Don’t take my convoluted word for it. Try it yourself.
As a general rule, I kinda like stupid people. Being around them makes me feel smarter than I probably really am.
But as a general rule, you should not argue with stupid people.
You cannot win the argument.
If you hire a debate judge to score your argument, and you technically trounce your stupid-person opponent according to the judge’s score card, the stupid opponent will lay a stupid insult based on nothing on you. The stupid people in the audience will cheer and whoop. The stupid person you argued with will declare himself the winner and take a victory lap.
You cannot win the argument. The stupid people outnumber the rest of us.
This is not a stupid person. He just plays one as Governor of Florida. He promotes all the stupid things stupid people love to see promoted because stupid people will love him for punishing the things and people the stupid people hate. That makes him an evil person who takes advantage of stupid people.
Stupid people have simple, one-way hearts. If they love you for some stupid reason, or some smart reason that’s simple enough to understand, they will basically love you fiercely for life. But if someone convinces them you are worthy of their stupid hatred, say for being a socialist, a Muslim, an opinionated and educated woman, black or Hispanic, they will definitely hate you until either you die or they die. And some of them will gladly help you die.
So, the secret is, to get them to love you rather than hate you. They can love a black or Hispanic person if they see them as a black or Hispanic friend that proves they are not a racist. They can love a socialist if you never use the word socialist and instead point out that taxpayer money should benefit the good people like them who actually pay the taxes, rather than solely benefitting the wealthy elite. Not being an opinionated and educated independent woman, I cannot tell you how to avoid stupid people hating you for being one. You should ask one how they do it. But not Hillary Clinton. She obviously doesn’t know.
This is not a stupid person. He just plays one on television. He is a smarmy bad actor who does evil things and convinces stupid people to vote stupidly because he’s rich and smart and you will be just like him if only you adopt his way of thinking that favors rich people over everybody else. (Join me in knowing the Dark Side of the Force, for it is more powerful. And if you stand by me, as the Sith apprentice of Darth Ted, you will know power and wealth beyond your wildest dreams.) (Except you won’t because he won’t let you.)
If you try to argue with a stupid person that he or she shouldn’t like Darth Ted because he takes advantage of them, you will only force them to stupidly like him more. But if you point out that Darth Ted has betrayed some other stupid person that the stupid person loves, they will stupidly join you in your stupid hatred of stupid Ted. (Of course, we have already established that stupid Ted is not really stupid, so, to pull it off, you have to lie and pretend… which makes you the same as Stupid Darth Ted, which is a stupid thing for you to do. You really can’t win arguing about evil Darth Ted.)
But there is always the hope that science will invent a cure for being stupid. It will probably be green and bubbly with a hint of lime flavor. It will probably be addictive. And it will probably mechanize your brain with Artificially Intelligent smart-people juice that will make you evolve into something that is no longer human. And that, too, would be a stupid thing for you to do.
Never argue with a stupid person. It is a stupid thing to do. You cannot win. But even though you can’t win an argument with them, stupid people are mostly everyone you know. All people are stupid at least some of the time. Even Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Elon Musk. Elon can be especially stupid on Twitter and he’s still alive to demonstrate how stupid he can be. So, don’t give up on stupid people. Just don’t argue with them.
This beautiful song, an operatic aria by Puccini, is from the comic opera Gianni Schicchi. But, more important than that is what the song actually means in context.
In the opera, Gianni Schicchi is a con man intent on swindling a family out of their inheritance and knowing all along that he will be destined to go to hell when he dies. The family is gathered for the reading of the rich man’s will, which is, because this is a comic opera, lost for the time being. Their main concern is for the money, which rumor has it has all been willed to the church. But one among them is actually worthy of inheriting the money, Rinuccio the son of the rich man’s cousin. And, as luck would have it, as it always does in comedies, Rinuccio is the one who, during the manic and desperate search for the will, actually finds it. And assuming he comes out well in the will, he secures a promise from his mother that if he inherits money, he can marry Schicchi’s beautiful daughter Laurretta whom he truly loves.
But when he reads the will, he is devastated. The money all goes to a monastery. He begs Schicchi to help him convince the family that he should marry Laurretta anyway. This Gianni Schicchi tries and finds it harder than turning water into wine. So Schicchi is about to give up when Lauretta finally speaks up for herself through the song,
O Mio Babbino Caro (My Beloved Father)
At this point Schicchi is moved by the beautiful song and even more beautiful love his daughter has surprised him with. He not only agrees to help, but executes a bizarre plan, hiding the rich man’s body and pretending to be him come back to life to rewrite the will. Now the will favors Rinuccio, and over the protests of the family, he inherits the money and marries his true love, Schicchi’s daughter. The opera ends with Schicchi singing his case to the audience, telling them in song that going to hell is worth it to aid true love.
And this, then, is the truth of O Mio Babbino Caro.
Love, expressed through the surprise of hidden talent suddenly revealed, is the most persuasive argument there is.
Whether it is the love in the music suddenly discovered in the overwhelming voice of a little girl like Jackie Evancho or Amira Willighagen, or the late great Maria Callas who also sang the role, or even the singer of Puccini’s greatest work who is yet to perform it and make silly old men like me weep for beauty’s sake, the song is the most persuasive argument there is in favor of true love.
That is a thing I desperately want to capture in the novel I am writing now, Sing Sad Songs. Love expressed in music. Love that reverses loss. Love that heals all things. And Love that moves all people. The love that is masterfully sung in O Mio Babbino Caro.
That book is now published and available on Amazon.
I do not claim to be prescient. But like any overly smart and perceptive person, I often see what’s going to happen before it happens. Sometimes it is almost as eerie as a Vincent Price movie. Sometimes eerier. After all, on the 60’s Batman TV show, Price played the ridiculous villain Egghead, and was completely creepy while doing it, but still, you know… Egghead.
One thing that I have to predict about the coming darkness is about politics. I mean, the current Republican administration, where it is decisions by all Republicans all the time, has become nothing more than a monster movie. Not merely a bad monster movie, but a super-creepy-bad monster movie with a gigantic orange rubber rooster as the main monster.
This is what the great orange rooster looks like in black and white.
The reason it is bad is because, basically, to become a member of the Republican Party’s elected elite, you basically have to have your heart removed. Heartless, soulless monsters have a tendency to do things like take away Meals on Wheels for invalid seniors, health-care services from Planned Parenthood, and any hope of ever having affordable health insurance that actually pays for health care.
Senator Ted Cruz grinning about taking away Obamacare
And now, the monsters who have taken control of the theater are pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement because… well, apparently clean air isn’t good for decaying, desiccated monster skin and shriveled monster lungs that don’t breathe air anyway.
So here are my predictions for the coming darkness.
What people like me will look like in the future. That’s me in the middle.
I won’t live to see it. My body is breaking down at age 60. My lungs are compromised by years of bronchitis and flu. I am diabetic, so my very body chemistry is betraying me. There is a family history of heart disease. And I have already gone broke once on health care bills that the health insurance people really don’t pay for. (They are in the business of collecting premiums, after all, not making people well.)
What a lovely oxygen-free environment we will have!
As the climate changes take away large parts of our food production and resources, and the sea rises to take away land and major cities, people will be at war increasingly over diminishing resources vital to a population of seven billion souls. Graveyards and unburied bodies will become a part of every monster-movie scene.
Kiss me, Baby!
Love will become more complicated, because people who are selfless and put others before even their own life will die out first. The heartless, selfish, and often stupid ones will have the best chance for survival because they put themselves ahead of everyone else, and so have an unfair advantage over those who are not content with mere survival and exhibit self-sacrificing love.
You’ve never had a friend like me. And I can always eat you later if need be.
So, if you find my black-and-white monster movie post upsetting with the darknesses I am sincerely predicting, please remember, this is a satire post in a humor blog. The way it is supposed to work is that you wake up to the factors that make it upsetting and decide to do something for yourself to change them. Everybody doing a lot of the same little thing to make the world better can move mountains and fly to the moon. Big things don’t happen without everybody taking a hand. Maybe we can dream dreams once again and make some good things come true.
After years of being stored away, I discovered that my mother had hidden a hoard of my old artworks in the upstairs closet in Grandma Aldrich’s house (now my parents’ house).
This oil painting was done on an old saw blade at the request of my Grandpa Aldrich. He wanted a farm painting on it, like the one he’d seen in a restaurant during a fishing trip in Minnesota. I chose as the subject Sally the pig. Sally was a hairlip piglet that had to be bottle fed and raised in a box by the stove until later in life she became a favorite pet. Believe it or not, pigs are smarter than the family dog. She became a pig you could ride. And Grandma had taken a precious old photo of my mother and Uncle Larry riding the pig. I used that photo to make this painting. It was also the painting I wanted to find on this trip to Iowa. Searching for it led to finding all the others.
These two are among the earliest paintings I did. They were both done on canvases that I stretched over the frame myself in high school art class. The purple one is a scene from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The blue one doesn’t have a title, but you can see what it is. It is an ancient shibboleth water monster lurking under a dock, fishing for young boys to eat.
This drawing was done on the front porch in the house in Rowan. It would be years before mom framed it. It is another example of what I could do as a high school kid. In fact, I composed it from art-class sketches I did my senior year in school.
The Boy in the Barn was painted on the remains of an old chalkboard that my sisters, brother, and I had used in grade school.
Grandma Aldrich asked for this picture to hang over the sofa in the farmhouse living room. It stayed there for many years.
Great Grandma Hinckley passed away in 1980. I created this portrait from a combination of photos and memory. It was too good. It was never hung anywhere because it always made her daughter, my Grandma Aldrich, tear up.
This pencil drawing won a blue ribbon at the Wright County Fair in the late 70’s.
This picture is called First Years are Hard Years. It was painted in 1982 after my first year of teaching at the junior high school in Cotulla, Texas. I painted mostly the good kids. The girl on the lower right would later go on to become a teacher for our school district. I can’t claim to be the one who inspired her, but she did make straight A’s in my class.
This is called Beauty. It is done in oil crayon on canvas. I did it for my mother to hang in the hallway in the house in Taylor, Texas.
So, it turns out, I unearthed art treasures by searching for the one painting.
Prince Flute’s rooster riders made a mad dash for Castle Cornucopia. They all knew that their presence was desperately needed. But more than ever was their presence required since Poppy’s new spell provided an answer to the war problem that the Fairies never had before. Bad guys could be changed into allies by magic. And once having a taste of life as a Sylph or an Elf, the Gobbuluns definitely preferred to stay in their new bodies on the side of the Fairies.
“We promise to fight hard for the Cornucopians,” said the Elf, the fastest learner of Fairy English. “There is no going back for us. And even if we have to fight and kill our former friends, they are such low and horrid creatures that we will not shed a tear over them.”
“Not ebben for me wifey!” added one of the Sylphs. “She be too uglee and stoopid for keepin’.”
They all rounded the final turn, and Castle Cornucopia was laid out before them. It was, of course, actually a Slow One’s barn with Fairy ramparts and towers added to all the wooden walls, but disguised by magical glammers that made the barn appear to be a normal functioning palace for milk cows.
But the truly unbelievable part was the fact that the entire defense force, instead of manning the fortified walls and ramparts, were out in the middle of the field to the east of the castle, surrounded by a sea of raging green Gobbuluns and enemies from the Unseely Court.
“What’s this? Why is Lancelot attacking rather than defending the castle?” Prinz Flute was shocked.
“He be mad, dat one!” called out Schtinker.
“We have to help them survive. That is the entire defense force of the castle about to be slain!” cried Tod.
“No, no, no…!” called out Glittershine.
Flute turned to Poppy and put a hand on each of her arms. “Can you polymorph a really large number of Gobbuluns into Fairies?”
“I… I don’t know. That takes an immense amount of power. It will completely exhaust me, and I doubt I can change enough of them to make a difference.”
“Can you try, please? As many as you can, on the side closest to the castle so the encircled army has a way to escape.”
“I will do the best I can…”
PoppenSparkle gathered all the energy her tired body could hold. It wasn’t enough because she hadn’t absorbed enough sunshine since she had changed the four from the abandoned barn. But it would change a few dozen completely. She crackled with the summoned charge of energy, and then carefully spied out the area of fighting Gobbuluns she meant to target.
The power left her fingertips as soon as she uttered the trigger word and formed into a lightning bolt before becoming the transformational cloud over the writhing Gobbulun bodies. They twisted and morphed as if they were made of clay and became mostly naked and poorly armed Sylphs, Elves, and Butterfly Children.
“Men of Cornucopia! Follow me back to the castle!” shouted Prinz Flute, dashing forward to toss fireballs with his wand into the crowds of green Wartoles that hadn’t been touched by the polymorphing cloud.
“No! Hold your ground men! We will be covered in glory this day, even if we all die.” Lancelot seemed outraged at Flute trying to take command.
“Look at all these new Fey Children on our side, Lord! We now have a chance to hold the castle. Why should we still go through with the plan to sacrifice ourselves? We don’t have to die now! And you will not die in any case.” The Rascal was obviously defying his master. But it was effective. The Sylphs under Lancelot’s command broke ranks, fighting only to protect their escaping brethren. The mass of Fairy warriors flooded back towards the castle, carrying Flute’s rooster riders and all the newly made Fairies with them.
At the castle gate, Lord Lancelot, King Mouse, and Prinz Flute all pulled up short of it to shout at each other.
“How dare you countermand my battle plan?” roared Lancelot.
Prinz Flute, taken aback, quickly replied, “How dare you try to get everyone killed in spite of the fact that I provided you with a means to survive the day, and possibly win the war?”
King Mouse was a Pixie, of the kind that take on the partial form of woodland creatures. His head and paws and tail were all very mouse-like, while his body was very hunman-shaped and capable of wearing a suit of Fairy armor.
“I know your status as Tellosian Hero means you outrank me, Lord Lancelot, but as King of Cornucopia, I side with Prinz Flute on the question of whether today is the day we all die or not.”
“Well, we can’t exactly reform the troops and attack again now. But I would rather take the fight to them than hole up for a siege and defensive last stand.”
Prinz Flute seemed to be actively trying to calm himself. Poppy appreciated how calm he could make himself in dire situations. “You must come in and listen to the new plans I have formulated. I have made a breakthrough in magical research that might win the day for us without fighting battles against foes that outnumber us.”
Angry as Lancelot still seemed, he nodded his assent.
The Rascal ran up to him to make a report on the retreat into the castle.
Lord Lancelot eyed him coldly. “I have no time for disobedient underlings. Rascal, you are dismissed from my service.”
Crestfallen, the boy turned and walked back into the castle without making a report.
“Now that we have more men to defend the walls with,” said King Mouse, “let’s retire to the throne room and discuss further strategy.
Flute signalled to Poppy, calling her to him. “You have saved the day yet again, PoppenSparkle.”
“I only did the magic. You made it happen.”
“You look exhausted, little one.”
She smiled. She was actually taller than Flute, but not about to contradict him. He put his arm around her to guide her.
Lord Lancelot stood in the gateway, looking at the stupidly confused horde of Gobbuluns. He finally turned and entered too so that the gate could be shut and barred.
The Toonerville Post Office and Bert Buchanan’s Toy Store.
Toonerville is not only a wonderful cartoon place created by Fontaine Fox in the 1930’s, but the name of the town that inhabited my HO Train Layout when I lived in South Texas and had the Trolley actually running nearly on time. The train layout has not been restored to working condition for over a decade now. The buildings which I mostly built from kits or bought as plaster or ceramic sculptures and repainted have been sitting on bookshelves in all that time. I still have delusions of rebuilding the train set in the garage, but it is becoming increasingly less and less likely as time goes on and my working parts continue to stiffen up and stop working. So, what will I do with Toonerville?
Wilma Wortle waits on the station platform for her train at the Toonerville Train station. I built this kit in the 1970’s, hence the accumulations of dust bunnies.
Loew’s Theater has been awaiting the start of The African Queen for more than twenty years.
Main Street Toonerville at 2:25 in the afternoon. Or is it three? The courthouse clock is often slow.
Grandma Wortle who controls all the money in the family likes to park her car near the eggplant house when she visit’s Al’s General Store.
But I may yet have found a way to put Toonerville back together through computer-assisted artsy craftsy endeavors.
A two-shot of Bill Freen’s house and Slappy Coogan’s place on the photo set to start production.
Bill Freen’s house lit up with newfangled electricical. (and I do believe that is the way Bill spells it all good and proper.)
Bill Freen’s house cut out in the paint program.
So I can make composite pictures of Toonerville with realistic photo-shopped backgrounds. Now, I know only goofy old artsy fartsy geeks like me get excited about doofy little things like this, but my flabber is completely gasted with the possibilities.
Bill Freen’s house at sunset… (but I don’t get why there’s snow on the roof when the grass is so green?)
It pretty much goes without saying that, since I am an author of fiction, determined to be a storyteller, I spend most of my time talking to people who exist only inside my goofy old head. Sure, most of the imaginary people I create to keep me company are at least loosely based on real people that I either once knew, or still know. You can tell that about Millis, the rabbit-man, pictured here on the right, can’t you? Sure. I had a New Zealand White pet rabbit that I raised as a 4-H project. His name was Ember-eyes… because, well, yeah… red eyes. It just happens that my goofy old memory transformed him into an evolution-enhanced science experiment in my unpublished novel, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. But he was a real person once… ’cause rabbits are people too, right?
Anita Jones, a character from my unpublished novel, Superchicken, is based on a real person too. I admit, there was a girl in my class from grades K through 6 that I secretly adored and would’ve done anything to be near, though every significant event I remember from my life that involved an encounter with her, involved red-faced embarrassment for me. That’s why I remember her as having auburn-colored hair. Charley Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl… duh! I would’ve died sooner than tell her how I really felt, even now, but by making her into one of a multitude of imaginary people who inhabit my life, I can be so close to her that sometimes I am actually inside her mind. There’s a sort of creepy voyeurism-squared sort of thing.
Dorin Dobbs, the main human character of my published novel, Catch a Falling Star, is an imaginary character based mostly on my eldest son, though, in fact, I started writing that novel five years before he was born. Like most of the imaginary people in my life, I talk to Dorin repeatedly even when the real Dorin is half a world away in the Marine Corps. And even though the Dorin I am talking to is not the real Dorin, he is still constantly using language that is extra-salty far beyond his years, and is often defiant of my fatherly wisdom, and always argues for the exact opposite of any opinion I express. That’s just how it is to be the father of an imaginary son.
Realistically, I have to admit that even the flesh-and-blood people in my life are imaginary. No one ever actually inhabits another person’s head except through the magic of imagination. Even though I am talking to you at this moment, you are only an imaginary person to me. I don’t even know your name as I write this. And I am the same to you. You may have read my writing enough to think you know something about me… but you really only know the Mickey in your mind that I have worked at putting there with my words. And I really have no idea what that imaginary Mickey you have in your head is like. He is probably really the opposite of who I think I am.
I am, after all, married to this girl panda, Mandy Panda from the Pandalore Islands, and my three children are all Halfasian part-panda-people. Yes, this is the imaginary person who is my real-life wife. The secret is, we only ever know the imaginary people we have in our goofy little heads. We don’t know the real person behind anyone in our lives, because it is simply not possible to really know how anybody else thinks or feels, even if they write out their lengthy treatise about how all people are imaginary people. That stuff is just too goofy-dippy to be real.
Catch a Falling Star 
Fritterday
If you are old, forgetful, and retired like Mickey, you may have the same problem Mickey does with remembering what day it is. But he has a solution. At the end of the week, he simply has two Fritterdays. They take the “Fri” from Friday, and the “turday” out of Saturday…. But wait just a gol’ danged minute. We have to get the “turd’ out of there because nobody likes those. And we do that by changing the “u” to an “e” which means we also add a “t” to it to change the long “I” sound to a short “I” sound because “fritter” can mean wasting something, especially time, because that’s what you do when you don’t even know what-the-heck day it is. Fritterday! Fun times for the hopelessly forgetful.
And it is fun to be retired and not have anything to do… but put eye drops in each eye three times a day from three different colored-coded bottles so you don’t go blind from glaucoma… and pick up the package for the Princess at the Post Office because the doorbell is broken and nobody hears the package-delivery guy when he knocks… and go to CVS for more bottles of eye drops because they finally filled the prescription three days after the doctor phoned it in… and the Medicare paperwork needs to be filled in at the pharmacy… and you get 4 free Covid 19 test kits just because you are old… and… phooey! It is hard to make a run-on sentence like that fun. And the grammar-check program hates it in a mixture of blue and red squiggly underlines.
But you found things you didn’t even know you had lost, like paper doll clothes that had fallen off the paper dolls because the little white foldable tabs don’t stay folded and need to be given a little dab of glue. And the rubber bands you use for your ponytail because haircuts give you psoriasis sores and you don’t cut your hair anymore because of them, but they are all back in the same sack again because you found them scattered on the floor while you were cleaning in order to find the lost package-claim slip that you mislaid… apparently under the bed… the one you needed to claim the Princess’s package which contained… a white stuffed tiger toy all the way from a game company in Japan… because it matched the stuffed tigers she had as a child and she won it by playing an online game. Boy, howdy! Another sentence or two the grammar checker hates!
Annette Funicello from the cutout paper doll on the back of a 1960’s Cheerios box looks good in the cowboy getup… err… cowgirl getup you found under the corner of the bookcase. You have liked her since you were a boy. You once had a yearning to see a picture of her naked, but that never panned out. She was a Disney star and not allowed to even think bad thoughts, let alone pose for any nude photos. She was in the Mickey Mouse Club, not the Playboy Magazine Bunny Club. Darn it!
But the mind still works, and you’re still not blind, and you enjoy enraging the grammar-check program, and you cleaned your room without meaning to. You even wrote most of this messy blog post in second-person point-of-view without realizing you were doing it.
Hang-dang! A Fritterday! And there’s probably another one coming tomorrow.
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Filed under autobiography, cleaning genii, commentary, doll collecting, humor, Mickey, photo paffoonies, playing with toys, satire, self pity, self portrait