I have started re-reading my werewolf stories again as I intend to promote the heck out of the two books pictured here in the rest of 2019.
Both books are intertwined even though they are both stand-alone novels with different genre ties and different themes. They share the same characters, many of the same scenes (though seen from different viewpoints in each novel), many of the same plot points, and the same werewolf. I like to think that reading both books together makes a better, more nuanced story as a two-book whole. But each book is also a whole in itself. And you can read them in either order.
I started by re-reading Recipes for Gingerbread Children. This book is basically a fairy-tale story-collection contrasted with a Holocaust survivor’s story. It is about how a storyteller manages to shape the world around her to help herself and others make sense out of a cruel world filled with evil and betrayal.
Dunderella and the Wolf Girl (a random werewolf illustration not connected to either book)
The Baby Werewolf is a Gothic horror tale where the real monster is hidden by deeply buried secrets, and lies have to be pierced to protect the innocent. I will re-read and promote this book second. I love both of these books with a paternal sort of overlooking-the-warts-and-birth-defects love.
So, I have a plan. A hopelessly pie-in-the-sky plan. But a plan. And hopefully at least some part of the plan will work.
Drawing nudes is a risky business. People judge you more harshly when you draw a nude and don’t explain the context. What a pervert you must be. They forgive you a little when you explain that you are an artist and once you took an anatomy drawing class in college where you were drawing from actual nude models. But understand, artists probably take classes like that because they are perverts to begin with.
And you have the added complication of being a victim of sexual assault as a child, so you have a PTSD-sort-of fear of nudity and physical contact while at the same time having all the natural urges that flesh is heir to.
The nude above was drawn actually from a photograph, a Polaroid. The griffon (who represents the fear in your PTSD-inspired dreams) did not want to pose nude in real life. So, you were given a photograph in which she was actually holding on to her boyfriend’s shoulder. Oh, wait! You mean “he” not “she”. The griffon was a boy. But she smiled when she saw the picture. And she asked why there was an eagle in it.
“But that’s not an eagle, it’s a griffon,” you said. “It represents being afraid of being nude.”
Obviously you did not give her the version of the picture with the “eagle” in it. She was happier with the nude you did give her, though it wasn’t drawn as well as this one.
And you are always a little leery of posting nudes you have drawn over the years on your blog, but somehow they get more views than anything else you post, and while you have to wonder why these pictures are so popular among judgmental people who have told you that you are probably a pervert, you secretly know the real reason.
This picture of Karla gets lots of views. You have posted it three or four times before. (Of course, that is not Her real name.)
It is kinda the thing that started the college nude drawings. She was your roommate’s girlfriend, and she was looking at your drawings because Bill told her about your artworks and she was curious. She challenged you to draw her. It was the first nude model you ever drew outside of class. Bob sat in the room with the two of you and watched you draw. (Oh, wait. You called him Bill before. Change that. Bob Bill. There, that’s better.) You drew in pencil.
You did two versions of it. The pen and ink that you drew of it in 1996 was made from the one that you kept.
If you had never done that picture of Karla, the one of the griffon wouldn’t exist either. She had to go and show her picture off to her friends. After all the great cartoons you drew over the years, you might know that the biggest reputation you ever got as an artist came about because of a pencil drawing of a smiley nude girl. And she had a big mouth… both figuratively and literally. But she was nice, and you couldn’t be mad at her. She and Bob Bill got married, and she probably still has that picture in its little frame somewhere in her house.
My novel Snow Babies reveals things from my life that are only metaphorically nudity.
There was a time in my life, in fact, for a majority of my life, that all these things were pretty much secrets that I kept to myself. I didn’t show the nude pictures to others. I kept them in a portfolio in a closet. I never would’ve admitted to being a nudist at heart either. Or anything about being assaulted as a boy. Or told anyone about any of it in a blog post like this. I can only do that now that I am old and know that none of my sins are really that awful and need to be kept secret. There is a certain beauty in that. You don’t even really need to keep doing it in second person point of view, confusing the audience into thinking it’s about them and not about you. Sorry about the meta-messaging. I just find it funny that I can be completely open at the end of the essay of life, and no longer feel the need to hide all the things that we hide under our clothing. Sometimes there is beauty to be found in the depths of a risky picture.
You have to wonder when you pay attention to what people are actually doing in this world, if the human race needs to be exterminated once and for all.
I know that as jokes go, that one is a little bit dark. But as we may actually be faced with a tipping point into the funnel of human extinction in only twelve years, it seems to me we are more likely to go down that awful rabbit hole at the bottom of the funnel than not. And that is not a very nice flesh-eating bunny we are going to find in that particular hole.
Remember, please, that I am, in fact, a pessimist, both temperamentally and philosophically. I look at the worst that could happen. But I am chagrined to see that people are actively either ignoring the climate change problem, or working to bring it on even faster by deregulating polluters in the name of making higher short-term profits. So, when the Midwest becomes an inland sea, the oceans rise to make New York and Miami into underwater bubble cities like the Gungans have, and we will have to learn to eat dirt in underground tunnels as drought and heat eliminate farming completely, we may very probably be getting what we deserve.
Obviously we are not taking things seriously enough when we continue to let the criminal orange monkey sit in the White House in pile of his own political poo and tell us things like “The Green New Deal is the radical Democrats’ attempt to turn us into a socialist country!” He doesn’t even understand that the Green New Deal is merely a strongly-worded resolution not to die in a blaze of heat generated by greenhouse gasses, and to be willing to do whatever it takes or pay whatever it costs to stay alive.
Maybe the whole question shouldn’t matter to me. I will, after all, probably be dead before the end comes for the rest of humanity. Like the Koch Brothers, I probably don’t need to fear the consequences of what industrialists like the Koch Brothers have done to our world just so they can have more money to stuff under their silk cushions to sit on.
But I do care about the world I will be leaving behind. I have many children in it. Three of my own and over two thousand that were mine for a school year or two or three to nurture and teach and shape into real human beings. I will be leaving behind a literate culture that I love and have tried desperately to add to. The worst part of that is all the wonderful books that I will never get the chance to read and own and share with others.
But there is an answer.
Motivational Quotes Human Race and Mark Twain Love Quotes | Quotehd – DAILY QUOTE IMAGE
If we can laugh about it as the ship is sinking, we will be alright, no matter what the outcome.
I got hooked by hockey in 1969 and 1970, winter of my eighth grade year in school. It was the year we first started getting NBC on the old black-and-white Motorola TV. WHO in DesMoines had finally boosted their signal to the point where our TV antenna in Rowan, Iowa could pull a signal in.
from Sports Illustrated, poorly scanned by me
The NHL was on every Sunday morning during football season and my friend Mark had one of those hockey game boards where you twirl players on metal rods to score goals in a plastic net defended by a metal or plastic goalie. We were 13 and deeply in love with a game we could only watch on TV and never play (No hockey rinks are generally available in rural Iowa).
Mark liked Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito and their Boston Bruins hockey team who battled through the division of six old teams that had been around forever and had all the good players.
I, like the fool I have always been, pledged undying loyalty to the underdog St. Louis Blues. The expansion division consisted of teams that had only played for three years, filled with young guys and old veterans nearing the end of great careers. Hall-of-Famer goalies Jaques Plante and Glenn Hall both played for the Blues. So did the Battling B-Brothers, Bill Plaeger, Barclay Plaeger, and Bob Plaeger. Along with Red Berensen, Frank St. Marseille, and Doug Harvey. I idolized those guys. In the 1970 Stanley Cup final, they lost every game except the last one, which they lost in spectacular fashion in sudden-death overtime.
Bobby Orr scoring the overtime goal that beat my Blues (and hopefully getting at least one bruise as he came down).
I was a Blues Fan for life. I was disappointed every single year as they lost somewhere in the playoffs or in the regular season, never making it back to the Stanley Cup Series. Until 2019.
Young boys’ dreams can come true, even if it takes a lifetime to get there.
An African coin from Kenya worth 5 cents in 1969, a Sacajawea dollar, and a Bi-Centennial quarter.
How do you make a difficult and consequential decision? Me? I often flip a coin. Heads, yes. Tails, no. So, that makes me as crazy as Two-Face, the Batman villain, who decides everything not in terms of good or evil, but rather, heads or tails. This is not normally a good method of decision-making. Unless, of course, you wish to become a Batman villain.
My coin collection, kept in a 1940’s cigar box, consists of African coins my great grandfather left me in his will, Mexican coins, a Canadian Loony and a Canadian Twoney, an Andrew Jackson dollar coin, a Washington dollar coin, all the State quarters, and lots of other old coins and keepers.
But flipping a coin never actually makes the decision. If I get a yes, I often think about the consequences of yes and flip again… best two of three, three of five, four of six, and on and on until I have given it a thorough thinking-through… or until I get the answer I wanted from the beginning. It is not really the decider, but rather, the think-about-er.
My Space Jam collector’s coin on the cigar box lid.
On Sunday I made a coin-flip decision to not go out Uber driving in the afternoon. A half hour after making the decision, the damaging high winds hit the city. So, the coin flip kept me from being caught out in the storm.
Life is not random. It is merely ordered in really weird ways.
“This is a very strange story,” said Pidney, blushing
furiously.
“It’s practically pornography,” said Mary softly.
“I think the interesting part is where it tells about the
juju man,” said Valerie. “It tells us
how to make it work.”
“Yeah, it does kinda, doesn’t it?” said Pid.
“It doesn’t say the order to tap them in,” said Mary,
looking at the ugly wooden man with the even uglier wooden mask on his face.
“It doesn’t say they have to be tapped in order,” reminded
Valerie. “It just says to tap them each
one time and say the magic words.” She
reached out her hand and tapped each of the twenty-eight tattoos only one time.
“Good gawd, Val, don’t do it!” whimpered Pidney.
“You mean say the magic words?” asked Mary.
“Yes!” said Pidney.
“Juju do dah goodah!” sang Valerie as if on cue. Nothing happened.
“Don’t !” screeched Pidney.
“You must also have to say oojie-magoober,” said Mary.
“Oh, Mary! No!”
cried Pid. At that moment a cloudy
stream of purple smoke boiled out of the top of the wooden juju man. The idol began to glow with an eerie greenish-blue
neon light. The smoke was sweet
smelling, like burning sugar.
The little wooden man began to shake himself as if he was
trying to wake himself up.
“Who are you?” Valerie asked him with a Cheshire Cat’s grin.
“Juju do dah! Yaya!”
cried the little wooden man. “I am Oojie
Magoober. You have summoned me!”
“What?” said Mary.
“It was an accident. Go back to
sleep or something.”
“I cannot sleep again until my task is complete,”
“What’s your task, then?” asked Pidney. “We will help you do it if we have to.”
“I must take a virgin back to my master, Mangkukulan!”
“Which virgin do you mean?” asked Valerie.
“You will do nicely, but my master asked for the other one.”
“No!” said Pidney.
“Not that! You may not do
that!” The football hero drew himself up
to his full height and towered over the little wooden man.
“Very well. Be
warned. I shall cheat and use
magic. Oojie Magoober squirrelly doo
dah! Yaya!”
The little wooden man twitched his stubby wooden fingers at
Pidney, and suddenly the football hero shrank down into his clothes, until
nothing was left but a twitching pile of empty boy’s clothing piled upon empty
boy’s shoes.
“What have you done!” cried Mary. “Pidney!”
From out of the collar of the empty shirt, a reddish-brown
squirrel popped his squirming, chittering body free.
“You turned him into a squirrel?” cried Valerie, distraught.
“Smaller and easier to deal with.”
“But there are still two of us against one of you,” said
Mary menacingly. “Both of us are bigger
than you.”
“Oojie Magoober squirrelly doo dah, two dah, yaya!” The fingers waggled at Valerie and Mary both.
Valerie felt a wave of nausea pass through her tummy and
then the room swirled around her.
Everything went dark. Except, it
was a colored darkness. Roughly the same
color as the pink blouse Val had been wearing.
She pushed at the darkness around her and felt that it was cloth. Her hands felt funny. Not the kind of funny that makes you
laugh. It was a funny tingly feeling in
the finger nails as she clawed at the cloth around her. Then she found an opening.
As she freed her head and eyes from the darkness, she saw
one of Mary’s saddle shoes. In it sat a
confused and forlorn-looking squirrel covered in about the same shade of auburn
fur as Mary’s hair. Then, horrified, she
looked at her own two hands. Squirrel
paws. Her arms and body were covered
with a golden-blond fur that was not far from Val’s own hair color.
“We’ve been turned into squirrels!” she tried to say to the
Mary-squirrel. “Chee-chee
chit-it-it-it!” was what actually came out.
“No one understands squirrel talk,” said Oojie. “Now get into my sack.”
Valerie-squirrel rushed to the side of the saddle shoe where
Pidney-squirrel had joined Mary-squirrel.
“Chit-it-it-it Chree-eek!” cried the Pidney-squirrel, leaping
onto the wooden-head’s mask and sinking gnawing buck teeth into it.
“You can’t hurt me,” said the wooden man. “You are just squirrels. And I don’t even have to get you into the
sack by myself. That is the very
reason I asked the cats to help.”
Suddenly,
at the top of cellar stairs, five cats appeared. Valerie shuddered as she recognized
flat-headed old Skaggs. And he was
leering evilly at her.
Mary, the leader of the Pirates, with Squirrel Valerie and Invisible Captain Dettbarn
I am now writing every novel as if it will be the last one that I ever write. So it is with my current work-in-progress, When the Captain Came Calling. It is a story that comes before my best novel, Snow Babies, already written and published, but was actually formed in my head and in my libretto long before I began putting Snow Babies down on the page. It is a good novel, but not the best I have ever written. I am very near to completing it.
But, unfortunately, I am also very near to completing my whole life. Pain is a constant reminder that my health is so poor, that each new day could easily literally be my last.
The IRS is trying their best to help me on towards the grave.
While I am currently dealing with the tax burden from 2018, they dug up another unpaid bill from 2017, a late-payment penalty they forgot to tell me about last December. More than $200 dollars worth. I am flatter than broke.
So, I am forced to Uber drive once more. Yesterday and today I picked up fares again for the first time in the last ten months. And I am not really well enough to do it. The curse is heavy.
But this grumpy old man ain’t quite dead yet.
One more novel to finish, and maybe another one after that.’
I followed the naked girl and her pet red panda about a mile
along the beach. She skipped and sang
songs in a language I didn’t recognize, but sounded a lot like the Filipino
language. The panda sported about like a
playful puppy, following her devotedly.
I didn’t think you found red pandas on small Pacific islands like the
one we were on, but it didn’t matter what I thought. I was no scientist or naturalist, so I didn’t
really know. I kept looking worriedly
out to sea. I mean, I did know for a fact that Chinooki the
mermaid could eat people.
“We have been coming to this house, my tahanan,” she said
proudly, showing me a beached submarine from World War Two. It had a large rising sun flag from the
Empire of Japan painted on the conning tower.
“You live in a submarine?”
“It is where Mangkukulan wants me to stay while we wait for
the volcano.”
“Oh. It’s like that,
is it? Well, show me. Do you have any guns aboard? Or swords?
Something to protect us from Chinooki?”
“Oh, silly captain man, Chinooki serves Mangkukulan. She will not be harming me. And she is ordered not
to be hurting you also.”
I was a little worried about the actual intentions of this
coo-coo man. I didn’t think he really
had Malutu’s best interests at heart.
Not if he meant to toss her naked into an erupting volcano. I followed her warily up the side of the
submarine and down into a hatch near the nose.
“My goodness, this is certainly rusty and rather dreary,” I
said as I surveyed the narrow candle-lit corridor in the center of the
submarine. I followed her into the
forward section where I really expected to see a forward torpedo room. I found, however, that it had been hollowed
out, lined with bamboo, and turned into a cozy and rather decent living
space. It had a bed in the center of the
not over-large room. There was a
potbellied stove that had obviously been put there for cooking. The room was also decorated with carved
wooden idols. They were the kind of Tiki
idols that you could buy in Honolulu if you were a tourist who liked kitschy
stuff to decorate your porch back in Iowa with.
Especially one large ugly idol with a man-like body and wearing a
frightful carved mask.
“You have a nice home here.
Didn’t you say something about clothes you could put on?”
“Oh, yes. Or… you
could be getting naked too, Captain.”
“No, no. Put on a
dress please. You need to be decent
around me.”
She pulled out a rather nice red cloth dress with a white
flower pattern on it. It was a Hawaiian
sort of wrap-around affair.
“This okay? Or are
you wanting the kimono?”
“That one is fine.
You are very beautiful like that.”
“Yes, I am being beautiful for you. It is being important that I get you to like
me very, very much.”
“Oh, yes?”
“I am liking you. But
I must be telling Mangkukulan that you are here now. Chinooki has done well.”
“Um, maybe we can hold off a bit on telling the coo-coo
man.”
“Why? I am supposed
to be telling him immediately… faster if it is being possible.”
“Are you sure that coo-coo man has our best interests at
heart? I mean, it seems to me like he
might be trying to hurt us in some way.”
I was imagining being tossed into the volcano along with the girl.
“Oh, no. This he will
not be doing. I will be sending the juju
to tell him you are here.”
She went over to the biggest, ugliest Tiki idol and tapped
his tattoos, once each until she had tapped them all. And she sang;
“Juju do dah goodah… oojie-magoober!” Purple smoke poured out of the top of the
Tiki’s head and filled the room with a smell like burnt sugar.
“Is that a magic spell or something?”
“Yes, it is being something.
We are wanting you to be very comfortable here, Captain mans. Will you not be taking off your clothes?”
“I most certainly will not.”
“Okay. We will be
doing the talking about it. You will
see.”
To my utter shock and horror, the Tiki man began to glow
with an unearthly greenish-blue light.
He moved as if he were alive and trying to shake himself awake.
“It’s alive?”
“Don’t be being silly.
It is made of wood. But,
Oojie-magoober, please be telling Mangkukulan that the Captain is here.”
“Juju doo dah! Yaya!”
said the wooden creature. Then it
scampered out of the room and out of the submarine.
“You are liking Malutu, yes?” she asked me.
“Yes. You are very beautiful.”
“Good-good! Now you will be taking off your clothes, Captain.” And just like that she had me naked. I was as much under her spell as the wooden Tiki man.
The next day Valerie had a chance to hang out with Pidney
and Mary again, so she took it. She road
into town on the school bus after school with Danny Murphy. They didn’t actually talk about anything the
whole way. Anticipation is often better
than the real thing. And it wasn’t often
that Mary and Pid were both off directly after school. Pidney had no football practice that
afternoon, and Mary canceled whatever school meetings she had planned that day
in order to come back to Norwall with him after school. The four Pirates were supposed to meet in the
Library for Pirate business.
“There’s Mary and Pid,” said Danny pointing as he and Val
stepped off Milo’s school bus.
“Yeah, but who is that?” Valerie asked, pointing at a
mysterious cloaked figure standing behind the tree by the Library door. She was instantly reminded of the cloaked man
she had seen the day they got the Tiki idol.
“Hey, Pidney!” Danny shouted, “who is that near you behind
that tree?”
Pidney was holding the door of his step-dad’s old 70’s
Lincoln Mercury to help Mary get out.
Mary carried a tall stack of books.
They had driven home from the high school in Belle City together.
“What man? Where?” The figure moved out of sight behind the
large fluffy pine tree.
“Look behind the tree!” shouted Valerie.
Pid walked around to where he could see behind the
tree. He looked back a Valerie and Danny
and shrugged. “Nobody here that I can
see,” he said.
“You guys need to see what we found in the high school
library,” said Mary waving them to come towards the Library building.
Valerie looked at Danny.
He shrugged. They both walked
toward the Library.
“I found some old high school yearbooks in the library,”
said Mary. “We can use them to get an
idea what Captain Dettbarn used to look like.
He’s kinda hard to describe any other way.”
“And there’s a book about the ship, Mary Celeste. It tells about the old ghost ship, not the
Captain’s ship, but I still think it is important,” said Pidney.
Valerie and Danny walked across the street from the bus stop
to join the two high school kids.
“Here’s the 1962 Belle City Bronco yearbook,” said Mary,
handing the black-bound thin book of pictures to Valerie. “The Captain is in the Junior Class in that
one. He had a beard then, just like the
one he had on his face the last time I saw him.”
Valerie opened to the page of Junior portraits and ran her
finger over the C’s and D’s until she got to Dettbarn. He was kind of a dumpy fat boy even then,
with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a derfy smile that showed his crooked
teeth. He had a rather ratty looking
beard, which was perfect for a rodent-like face, that, while it didn’t look
like a rat, it did look an awful lot like the face of a woodchuck, or some kind
of short-toothed beaver.
“He’s kinda funny looking,” Val said to herself, but loud
enough for all to hear.
“Now, see here! I
take exception to that remark!” said a cloaked and hatted figure stepping out
of the shadow of the evergreen tree by the door.
“Who…?” croaked Mary, leaping away from the figure and
towards Pidney.
“Help me…!” squawked Danny as he awkwardly leaped into
Pidney’s arms, the football muscles catching hold of the smaller boy easily.
“Don’t you get mad at me!” said Valerie hotly. “It is not like I was talking to you… whoever
you are!” She lunged toward the
stranger, grabbing his yachting cap and yanking it off his head.
But where the head was supposed to be… nothing at all there
except a pair of thick bifocal glasses hanging in the air like they were
weightless in outer space.
Valerie looked at the glasses, and then down at the yearbook
picture still in her other hand. Yes, it
was an updated version of the same style of thick glasses.
“Erm… Captain Dettbarn. It’s you!”
“Uncle Noah?” Mary said.
“What happened to your head?”
“Oh, um… it’s still there, Mary dear. Head-hunters didn’t eat it or anything. I am just the victim of a curse. A curse that makes my body completely
invisible.” He removed the cloak to
reveal a free-standing pair of pants, a short-sleeved red-and-white-striped
shirt, and empty neckerchief, and floating white gloves that didn’t seem to be
properly attached to the invisible dumpy body wearing the sailor’s clothes.
“Er, uh… sir?” asked Pidney, “What is all this purple smoke
coming out from behind the pine tree? It
has a funky smell, like burning sugar or something.”
“Well, I hate to say it, but that is an indicator that the
witchdoctor himself is watching us at the moment from somewhere not too far
away. That purple smoke always seems to
come around right before some evil magic happens.”
“Oh, that’s not good.
Maybe we better go inside the library before anything bad can
happen.” Mary was looking around the
street for signs of the evil witchdoctor.
Pidney put Danny on the ground and both boys headed up the
Public Library steps.
“Um, uh… Pretty girl, can I have my hat back. I want to go in the library in disguise. No sense in scaring the librarian.”
Valerie frowned at the invisible man as she handed him back
the hat and the disembodied gloves placed it back on top of his invisible
rodent-like head.
“Let’s go inside the Library,” said Mary. “We have things to talk about and questions
to ask… Lots and lots of questions to ask.”
Catch a Falling Star 
That Damned Human Race
You have to wonder when you pay attention to what people are actually doing in this world, if the human race needs to be exterminated once and for all.
I know that as jokes go, that one is a little bit dark. But as we may actually be faced with a tipping point into the funnel of human extinction in only twelve years, it seems to me we are more likely to go down that awful rabbit hole at the bottom of the funnel than not. And that is not a very nice flesh-eating bunny we are going to find in that particular hole.
Remember, please, that I am, in fact, a pessimist, both temperamentally and philosophically. I look at the worst that could happen. But I am chagrined to see that people are actively either ignoring the climate change problem, or working to bring it on even faster by deregulating polluters in the name of making higher short-term profits. So, when the Midwest becomes an inland sea, the oceans rise to make New York and Miami into underwater bubble cities like the Gungans have, and we will have to learn to eat dirt in underground tunnels as drought and heat eliminate farming completely, we may very probably be getting what we deserve.
Obviously we are not taking things seriously enough when we continue to let the criminal orange monkey sit in the White House in pile of his own political poo and tell us things like “The Green New Deal is the radical Democrats’ attempt to turn us into a socialist country!” He doesn’t even understand that the Green New Deal is merely a strongly-worded resolution not to die in a blaze of heat generated by greenhouse gasses, and to be willing to do whatever it takes or pay whatever it costs to stay alive.
Maybe the whole question shouldn’t matter to me. I will, after all, probably be dead before the end comes for the rest of humanity. Like the Koch Brothers, I probably don’t need to fear the consequences of what industrialists like the Koch Brothers have done to our world just so they can have more money to stuff under their silk cushions to sit on.
But I do care about the world I will be leaving behind. I have many children in it. Three of my own and over two thousand that were mine for a school year or two or three to nurture and teach and shape into real human beings. I will be leaving behind a literate culture that I love and have tried desperately to add to. The worst part of that is all the wonderful books that I will never get the chance to read and own and share with others.
But there is an answer.
If we can laugh about it as the ship is sinking, we will be alright, no matter what the outcome.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Mark Twain, Paffooney, pessimism, philosophy
Tagged as climate change