No, Mickey is not dead. So, don’t worry… or if you are celebrating, stop it!
I just got to thinking that since I am feeling ill again, and every time I have a cold or flu or a Covid variant it could easily be the death of me with my six incurable diseases, I really ought to have the chance that Tom Sawyer once got to eavesdrop on his own funeral.
Of course, there would undoubtedly be more laughing and joking at my funeral and less crying than there was at Tom’s.
The purple mouse-man would begin the service. He would be wearing his best polka-dotted bow-tie. And he would say, “We come here today not to praise Mickey, but to bury him. He was nothing like Julius Caesar. In fact, he was nothing like anybody we know of from history, recorded newspaper accounts, or Shakespeare plays like Julius Caesar. He was a novelist and an amateur cartoonist. And the best thing that can be said about him is that he was a public school teacher for many, many, many, probably too many years. And he never killed a student (that we can prove,) and he never made a student leave his class dumber than he was on the day he entered the class (and Jorge is not an exception to that statement because the drugs he took that melted his brain came from a San Antonio drug dealer, not from Mickey’s wonderful teaching.)”
And then there would probably be former students that wanted to say something. Clint would probably say something like, “I never had a teacher as funny as him. We would put tacks on his chair, and he always would see them before he sat down, but he would yelp even though he had secretly removed the tack first so that he could tell by which one of us was laughing hardest who was probably guilty. But he never blamed me for the ones I did. He blamed Robert for those. He only blamed me for the ones Robert put there. And Robert put more of them than I did, so it was not fair that I had to talk to the principal more than Robert did. That’s why I ratted Robert out and we both got put on in-school suspension for a week. And then, when we both came back to class, he was laughing harder than I ever saw him laugh before. And I began to suspect he was really evil then.”
And then Leopard Girl would stand up and say, “He was also a good teacher for imaginary students. We would be exposed to all kinds of books and stories, and we had to read and have opinions about stuff. And if we liked a character in a story, he would make us write an imaginary conversation with that character and argue with them about treating the environment better, or being nicer to other people, and think about things from the story that impressed us the most. And you know what? I think sometimes he tricked us into actually learning things.”
And then it would be the talking dog’s turn to speak. And he would get up front, sniff the podium, pee on it, and say, “He was not very smart. He thought dogs could actually talk to people. Like this one time we were walking in the park and this German Shepherd started barking at him. He tried to tell me that the dog was saying good morning to us and inquiring about Aunt Mabel’s lumbago. I told him the dog was barking in German, so he couldn’t understand what it was saying. He claimed he took three years of German in college. I told him that what the dog really said was that if it could get off of its leash, it would come over and eat us because we smelled like burglars. He told me that I was a dog and didn’t actually understand German, and that the word actually meant a person from Hamburg in Germany. I told him I was just a dog and I didn’t actually speak English either!”
I have to admit, my funeral will be nothing at all like this. My sisters wouldn’t stand for having a dog talk at my funeral. And my wife would want to have me cremated and put into a coffee tin to save money, forgoing the expense of an actual funeral so she would have a bit more money to spend on shoes.
Here’s a view of the front of that same TV bus as it sits between Miss Wortle’s place and Eggbert Egghead’s Egg House. Dabney Egghead is the boy in the sailor suit showing off his brand new velocipede.
The baseball player in the upstairs sitting room where nobody sits, once spent an entire winter at the bottom of the swimming pool. That’s why his blue uniform turned a bit putrid green. He stays in this room with my Wish-nik Troll from 1967 and the Winkie Soldier from Oz, who is naturally green in the face and never took a swim.
Cranky Old Coots Complain and Don’t Care
Yes, I am a coot. I became a coot in 2014 when I retired. I have the hair in the ears to prove it. I sometimes forget to wear pants. The dog is learning to hide from me on days when my arthritis makes me cranky.
So I am a practicer of the ancient art of being a cranky old coot. I have opinions. I share them with others foolishly. And I am summarily told to, “Shut up, you danged old coot!” And, of course, I don’t shut up because that would be a violation of number five in the by-laws of cootism. Obnoxiousness is our only reason for still being alive.
Lately, my group of coots on Facebook (who call themselves a “pack” like wolves, but, in truth, a group of coots is called an “idiocy”) are talking about politics… very loudly salted with firmly held opinions, beliefs, and bad words in several languages. I mean, it’s texting each other on memes we disagree about, but we do it LOUDLY, like that, in all caps. We also do it in such an infuriating manner because, if no one ever bothers to tell us to “Shut the hell up!” we will begin to suspect we have actually died and gone to purgatory where we are still being obnoxious, but nobody knows we are doing it. That is rubbing coot fur in the wrong direction.
The radical right (otherwise known as coot paradise) have been cooting up a storm about school shootings and gun control of late. They have more or less turned their ire on me because, knowing I was a school teacher, they have seized on the Coot in Chief’s notion of arming teachers to protect schools. Obviously a majority of old coots agree that requiring a few “volunteer” teachers to conceal carry and learn how to handle a school shooter crisis situation with a gun instead of the way teachers are actually trained and practiced on handling such a situation, is the only economical way to defend schools from crazed lunatics with assault weapons. Of course, it is definitely more economical than hiring full time police officers to handle security because “volunteer” teachers does not mean that they are necessarily willing to do it, but rather that they are doing it without pay. And of course they shout at me things like, “Why don’t you just admit that you are too scared and unpatriotic to carry a gun as a teacher, and cowardly allow some female teacher with a big pistol to step in and do the job for you?” That is a very coot thing to say, and is hard to adequately counter, because if you try to argue using logic other than coot-logic, like the notion that since a majority of teachers in this country are female, you are asking women who are fierce enough to do the job (and I have known more than a few who would take it on no matter how hopeless their prospects) to take a handgun that the principal bought at Walmart with money from the Coke machine in the hall and face down a suicidal maniac with an assault rifle, you will not even be heard over the cacophony of coot braying and chest-thumping, let alone be understood.
And, for some reason, coots love Trump. Maybe because they feel he is truly one of them. He is older than dirt. He has an epicly bad comb-over to hide his bald spot. He says bad words very loudly in front of women, children, and everybody. He says, “Believe me,” a lot, especially when telling lies. And he’s not afraid to fart in public and blame it on the dog. I admit to insulting Trump in front of them only because I like to see coot faces fold up in extra wrinkles, and coot heads turn various shades of angry red and apoplectic purple.
So, yes. I am a coot. Not proud to be one… that I can remember, but a coot never-the-less.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, goofy thoughts, grumpiness, gun control, humor, Liberal ideas, oldies, Paffooney, teaching
Tagged as coots, gun control and coots, obnoxious coots, old coots