I was a boy back when the milk man still came around in his blue-and-white panel truck delivering bottles of milk with Elsie the Cow on them. I don’t remember clearly because I was only 4 years old back when I first became aware of being a boy in this world instead of being something else living somewhere else.
There were many things I didn’t know or understand back then. But one thing I did know, was that I loved Elsie the Cow. And why would a farm boy love a cartoon cow? There were many not-so-sensible reasons.
For one thing, Elsie the Cow reminded me of June Lockhart, Lassie’s mom and the mom from Lost in Space.
Lassie’s Mom, June Lockhart
It may be that June Lockhart’s eyes reminded me of Elsie’s eyes, being large, soul-full eyes with large black eye lashes. It may be that she starred in a TV commercial for Borden’s milk in which Elsie winked at me at the end of the commercial.
Or maybe it was because Elsie had calves and was a mom. And June Lockhart was Lassie’s mom and the mom of Will Robinson, so I associated both of them with my mom, and thus with each other.
Elsie gave you milk to drink and was always taking care of you in that way. Milk was good for you, after all. My own mom was a registered nurse. So they were alike in that way too.
And she was constantly defending you against the bulls in your life. She stood up to Elmer to protect her daughter more than once. Of course, her son was usually guilty of whatever he was accused of, but she still loved him and kept Elmer from making his “hamburger” threats a reality.
And you can see in numerous ad illustrations that Elsie’s family were basically nudists. Although she often wore an apron, she was bare otherwise. And though her daughter often wore skirts and her son wore shorts, Elmer was always naked. And that didn’t surprise me, because no cow I knew from the farm wore clothes either. From very early in my life I was always fascinated by nakedness, and I would’ve become a nudist as a youngster if it hadn’t been soundly discouraged by family and society in general.
Proof that Elsie’s family lived the nude life.
Puppets from a Borden’s commercial
So there are many reasons why I have always loved Elsie the Cow. And it all boils down to the love of drinking milk and that appealing cartoon character who constantly asked you to drink more.
Arkin Cloudstalker
had stepped out for a bit of a look around.
Castle Orpheum was too dark and mysterious for his taste. He preferred a cockpit in space, or even the
open air to this dim and dreary underwater place. He missed his family, wife and kids who lived
parsecs away on a moon of the wealthy residential planet called Bird
World. Being a corsair had driven him
further and further away from his original vision of being a Galactic
Hero. He wanted to make the universe a
better place to live, but more and more it seemed that all he could manage was
to become a better killer and criminal.
The lamp-lit streets of Castle Orpheum were deserted at this time of the
artificial day-night cycle. Most
intelligent residents were in bed asleep.
Someone was walking towards him on this particular street. This someone had an orange Kevlar jumpsuit and a very big gun. This someone clanked as he walked, metal striking the pavement to the beat of a slightly off-kilter step. Arkin slowed to a stop.
“Don’t stop on account of me, Cloudstalker,” said the figure. He pulled up short under a streetlamp so that Arkin could finally see his face. It was an undead Mechanoidface, skull-like and one-quarter metal. The enlarged right eye was a glowing red computerized visual sensor. “I came to see you face-to-face about a little matter of a bounty. I am an ace bounty-hunter, Argo “Ace” Campfield.”
“I didn’t call for any bounty hunter,” said Arkin, measuring the distance between them at about forty paces, easily within the range of the big gun the Mechanoid carried.
“No, Count Nefaria hired me with money he got from a Galtorrian Knight he called Sir Saurol. With Nefaria dead, I’ll probably get even more money for your severed head.”
Arkin leaped for a
nearby alley opening, rolling and coming up with his emergency blaster pistol,
a one-shot plasma gun that he kept in his vest for occasions like this
one. Campfield’s deadly green beam
burned leather, hair, and the top layer of skin off of Arkin’s left shoulder.
“Gazzool!” groaned
Arkin, using the only Bird World cuss word he still remembered, mild though it
was. He aimed unsteadily and fired his
blaster. The air sizzled with a beam of
pure star fire and Campfield’s robotic right leg melted into two pieces.
“Hah! I laugh at losses like that!” growled Ace
Campfield. He hopped on one metal leg in
Arkin’s direction. “You may have slowed
me down, but my sensors tell me you have no more shots left to take.”
Arkin knew the
undead death-machine was basically right.
He was slightly wounded and weaponless against an enemy who was tireless
and had nothing left to fear from him.
He was as good as dead unless he did some very quick thinking. The alley he had dodged into ended in a
ladder that went all the way up into the subsea dome’s catwalks. From there he could make his way to the
submarine pens if only he could get out of range up that ladder before
Campfield hopped into position for a good shot.
That would be a darn good trick, since the robotically enhanced senses
of a Mechanoid were bound to make Campfield’s marksmanship superb.
As swiftly as
Cloudstalker could run, he bounded towards the ladder. It was only a matter of moments before
Campfield would lock on him as a target and burn a hole through his chest or
back with that energy beam. His heart
pounded as he looked up the ladder into the distant grill-work of the catwalks
above. His heart almost stopped for a
moment as he saw another face peering down at him over the edge of a catwalk
platform. Did Campfield have a
partner? Was he trapped as well as
doomed? The face was almost as unusual
as Campfield’s skeletoid visage. This
new face had crossed eyes and a white fright-wig of frizzy hair crammed up underneath
a black top hat. The silly pink tongue,
longer than the normal humanoid tongue, lolled out of the slack mouth. Before Arkin could yell, the strange face
dropped a coil of rope down on top of his head and motioned for Arkin to grab hold
with one hand while he waved a skinny rubber chicken with the other hand.
Having little
other choice, Cloudstalker firmly took hold of the rope. Instantly he was dragged upward by some
high-speed winder that thumped him several times against the ladder, but pulled
him up to the platform in a matter of seconds.
Campfield spotted him, but even robotic reflexes didn’t allow him to get
a shot off before Arkin was safe.
Face to face with
his weird rescuer Arkin tried to thank the man.
“You saved me from certain death just now,” he said, gasping for air.
“May I know your name?”
The man, his tongue
still flopping out of his mouth, shook his head yes and handed the rubber
chicken to Arkin.
“What does this
mean?” Arkin asked.
The man pantomimed
turning something over.
“What?”
Looking stupidly
impatient, the smiling fool took the rubber chicken back and now slapped it
forcefully down in Arkin’s hand.
“I don’t have time
for this. What are you trying to tell
me?”
The man pantomimed
turning something over again, then slapped the feet of the naked rubber bird. Finally realizing something of the nature of
the message, Arkin turned the rubber chicken over in his hand. There was a name written there in purple
crayon. It said, “White Dook”.
“The White Duke
sent you?” Arkin was incredulous, yet at
the same time amused. The fool grinned
and handed him a second rubber chicken.
He turned it over to see the word “YES” in purple crayon.
Below them,
Campfield was at the base of the ladder.
His robotic muscles pulled the one-legged bounty hunter up
hand-over-hand at a frightening speed.
“We’d better get
going!” said Cloudstalker.
He received a
third rubber chicken. When he turned it
over, it said, “You said it, sister dear!”
This is the best Trump cartoon I have done of him so far, so I will use it multiple times.
The current President of the United States initially seemed to me to be a gift from the gods of comedy. I figured it would be easy to make humorous blog posts about a clown who wears orange face paint, wears super-long red ties, and is more cartoonish behavior-wise than Yogi Bear.
But the Grumpy Trump leadership style is more depressing than even that of Rodeo Clown in Chief, George W. Bush, though Trump has managed to be accused of fewer war crimes by international tribunals. He is so relentlessly inhuman in his every deed that you can’t use exaggeration humor against him. The reality is too far over the top for that. And you can’t rely on insult humor, because he does it so much more often himself than any comedian can, and he really MEANS it. He doesn’t tell or comprehend jokes unless it makes a good excuse to claim he was only joking.
One of the things he does that bothers me the most is the use of criminals in his cabinet and departments that do all the dirty work.
Sleepy McBoing-Boing, the HUD secretary seems to be in his job to screw things up for poor people who were barely hanging on and turn them into homeless people while he commits crimes to put an expensive dining table in the HUD office for his personal use. “Let ’em eat cake,” right, Ben?
Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke, heads of the EPA and Department of the Interior are so busy spending Federal budget monies on personal uses that their departments are falling apart, and so the air we breath and the water we drink are now more at risk than they were under Obama, where it was a very real crisis having very real effects.
I think I am through posting criticisms about Trump. Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers do so much better at skewering the pumpkinhead than I ever could, so look to them for actual political humor of the thoughtful kind.
The only thing I want from Trump now… Now that his tax cut has cost me extra money and his healthcare meddling has made the price of insulin out of my reach… Is for the whole thing to end. He won’t resign. You can’t expect Ebola Fever or brain tumors will go away on their own. But it is so obvious that he has committed impeachable crimes that, for the good of us all, the Congress needs to get rid of him. The Dark Lord with White Hair, Mike Pence, though deeply evil, would be better.
The only advice I am actually qualified to give here is… don’t take any blogging advice from me as worth more than diddly-squoot.
Life is like moose bowling because… In order to knock down all the pins, you have to learn how to throw a moose.
That being said, my blog views are gradually going up year after year. I am followed by readers all over the world, and some of them actually read my blog regularly, rather than just looking at the pictures and occasionally hitting the like button.
I have not yet, however, learned to throw the moose. I started this blog in order to promote my published writing. I now have seven published books available on Amazon. I made $2.60 in royalties during 2018 so far. So, as a marketing ploy, it has been a total failure.
But as a tool in my writing life, here are some things I definitely count as benefits;
Writing a blog post every day makes the ideas flow more easily and does away with any threat of writer’s block.
Writing every day is practice and it makes me a better writer.
I have learned how to engage with an actual audience.
I am able to try out various writing ideas without worrying about success or failure.
So, all of these things add value and keep me at this blogging thing which didn’t exist in my early life when I was planning for becoming a writer when I left teaching.
If you are tempted to make the huge mistake of following my advice and emulating me, I would warn you, I do not make a living as a writer, and I never will. I am a writer in the same way I am a diabetic. I can’t help it. I wouldn’t change it even if it were possible. I have a body of work that I intend to continue to build on until I am no more. The creation of it is a necessity of my existence. And I certainly don’t regret a single syllable, though what happens to it when I am gone is not important to me in any way that matters. I hope my children will keep it as a legacy, but I only do it because it shapes the story of my life.
And so, I continue to throw meese (or mooses… or moosi… or whatever the hell the funniest plural of “moose” is) and continue not to knock down any pins.
My morning was used up making a cover for The Baby Werewolf out of old works of art and art-editing programs. I will soon start the final edit and formatting of the book, and I hope to publish it in December. It is a related story to the one I just published, Recipes for Gingerbread Children. The two books share some of the same characters, events, and even dialogue. The two stories, however, have a very different focus and thematic approach to what happened. It is a gothic novel with humorous overtones. The Baby Werewolf himself is not really a werewolf. He is a boy with hypertrichosis, the werewolf-hair genetic disorder that gave Jo-Jo the Dog-faced Boy his carnival freak all-over fur. The story is a first-person narrative told by three different characters who all were in Recipes. Torrie Brownfield, the Baby Werewolf himself, is one of the three narrators. I can’t wait to see how this two-novel story arc comes together, and if anybody at all will actually read it.
Dr. Hooey proved
to be as wild and eccentric a character as Trav Dalgoda. He wore outlandish clothing and said
remarkably stupid things without a moment’s hesitation. He was not pretty to look at with a big nose
and uncombed hair. He was consistently
frazzled and at his wit’s end. Still, he
was probably the highest-level problem-solver that Tron had ever met.
Outside the
pyramid that no one had been able to detect two miles outside the borders of Oasis City,
Hooey was hunkered down next to Tron and Hassan as the wind blew fierce,
stinging sand all around the base of the pyramid.
Dr. Hooey
“I don’t know how you found this thing, Hooey!” said Tron, having to yell over the roar of the storm. “It seems like this sandstorm never ends. It’s been here since my people arrived within scanner range of the planet.”
“I think it’s more or less permanent. All I had to do to find it is scan for a focus of artificial radiant energy large enough to create a concealed feature of the planet, like this one.”
The King of
Killers came back to his leader, running with his head bent down into the
wind. He had a breath mask on to keep
the sand out of his lungs, and brought three more for Tron, Hooey, and Hassan.
“The doorway seems
to be over there,” he yelled, pointing with the breath mask on his chin while
he handed out the remaining masks to the others.
“Okay, King. Lead the way!” ordered Tron.
Tron had his laser
pistols attached to the powerpack on his back.
The King had an ACR hanging
from the leather strap over his back, while Hassan had a net-pistol that had a
one-shot net trap loaded. Hooey carried
a thing that looked like a small plastic water gun that he called his really
big gun.
The four men ran
to the pyramid door, hands up to protect their faces from the cruel white
sand. King brought them to a dark alcove
in the base of the pyramid.
“This is where we
go in!” hollered King. “I don’t know
what’s in there. My sensors read nothing
at all, not even the stone that it should be reading!”
Worried, the group
inched forward into the darkness. Tron
took over the lead and allowed King to drop back and cover the rear. Hooey hovered over Tron’s right shoulder,
while Hassan limped along on his new leg to Tron’s left, trying to get used to
the unfamiliar device.
“I do hope there
are no mummies in here. I hate battling
the living dead!” said Hooey firmly.
“How could a man
of science be stupid enough to think that mummies could ever come to life?”
asked Tron, rolling his eyes, the artificial one looking more disgusted than
the natural one.
“Pretty easily!”
remarked Hooey. “Look there!”
In the long
Gallery ahead, hard to see in the dim light, four shapes lurched toward
them. They were skull-faced and
bandaged. Mummies come to life!
“No. I’m not sitting still for this crud!” growled
King. “I have a wife to get back
to.” The infamous King of Killers rushed
to the front and tried to prove that he deserved his ruthless nickname. He went fully automatic with his ACR and sprayed bullets all over the approaching undead
creatures. Bone splintered and wiring
sparked. Two of the creatures fell
completely to pieces. A third one lost
its head, but still kept stumbling forward.
“There’s something
fishy about these mummies,” grumbled Tron.
“They walk too much like movie monsters to be real. And what’s with all the electrical sparking?”
The two wounded
mummies kept coming towards King even though men who were punctured that much
by armor-piercing shells should have died and fallen still. King tried feverishly to load another clip of
ammo, but before he could, a mummy grabbed his shoulder. Electricity shot out of the bandaged hand and
King went unconscious, his hair smoking profusely.
“Hooey!” shouted
Tron, about to demand that the Time Knight do something.
Dr. Hooey stood
and pointed his little plastic water pistol.
He sprayed the two remaining mummies and completely shorted out their
control circuits. They fell in smoking
piles of bones.
Tron rushed
forward to help his fallen man. King
Killer would live, but he’d had a nasty shock.
“What were those
things, Hooey? Tell me straight, or I
might have to shoot you.”
Hassan picked up a
severed hand wrapped in rotted bandages and took a close look. “Rot warriors,” said the Space Elf. “They are Mechanoids made from completely
dead men.” He handed the boney hand to
Tron.
The bones were
inlaid with glittering microcircuitry that you could only really see up
close. A nearby skull yielded up a
wrecked computer processor. The main
control pod was found in the chest cavity.
“The perfect
soldiers,” said Tron. “They’re too dumb
to question orders.”
“Yes,” said Hooey,
“and designed to put a real scare into any locals who might come in here.”
“What do you
suppose they are protecting?” asked Hassan.
“Oh, I already
know,” said Hooey. “They are protecting
a Galtorrian agent of Count Nefaria called the Lizard Lady. She’s here in this complex somewhere.”
“You already know
what’s supposed to happen here, don’t you?” said Tron. “That’s how you knew to bring the water
pistol.”
“Well… In a sense,
that’s true.”
“All right, King
is already hurt. Spill it, Doctor. What will happen next?”
“Patience, Tron,
my boy, only time can really tell.”
I am reaching the point that I am almost ready to self-publish another novel. I am only 30 pages away from having Recipes for Gingerbread Children fully edited and formatted.
Do you know that feeling of dread you get when you go back to a completed manuscript that you have left in the cooler for a bit? You don’t? Is it because you have never done that? Or because you have never dreaded it? I was terrified that, as good and wonderful as I thought the story was when I wrote it, the impression was a false one based on self-delusion and narcissism. I dreamed in my nightmare about re-reading it and realizing it was total garbage and a total re-write would be necessary.
Well, I was worried about nothing. On rereading it, I discovered that the things I was sure I had messed up on were executed well. The story was precisely the way it was supposed to be after mulling it over and plotting for more than twenty years. The structure I built it on still seems to work beautifully, and the key themes are still present for the reader to interpret as he or she sees fit.
There is nudity, violence, and horror in this book, but not done in a way that leaves the wrong message in a young reader’s mind. In fact, it answers questions about life that, as a former school teacher, I strongly believe are on young people’s minds. It has characters who are nudists and want others to become nudists too. It has stories about Nazis and concentration camps. It also has fairy tales that are almost as gruesome as those of the Brothers Grimm.
The main character and focus of the story is an old German woman who is a Holocaust survivor, a story-teller, and a baker of gingerbread. The character is based on an old woman who lived in our little town when I was a boy. But though the character is inspired by a real person, the real Old German Lady was not a nudist, nor, as far as I know, a storyteller. So, most of what you learn about Gretel Stein in this story is really about a story-teller who is me. I promise, however, that I did not wear a dress at any point while researching for this book.
It will be a story about fairies fighting to have a place in the modern world though they have shrunken in importance to the size of mice and insects. It is about finding the courage within yourself necessary to survive a terrible thing like the Holocaust. It is about self-sacrifice. It is about love. It is also about baking cookies and telling stories. There’s a werewolf in it. There are also two twin sisters in it who are nudists and spend a lot of the story naked. It is about standing up for yourself and becoming the hero of your own story.
And the most exciting thing for me is, soon this book will be available from Amazon.
This week saw two difficult problems arise that took a whole lot of problem-solving, panic, and unbelievable luck to solve. I had considerable evidence that my laptop computer was fatally infected with a trojan virus in spite of the subscription I had to Norton anti-virus software. And on top of that, I had to renew my driver’s license since yesterday was my birthday. And not an ordinary renew-by-computer sort of thing, but a dreaded trip to the horrid hated DMV.
The DMV was a thorny problem because Texas is a Red State and fully committed to keeping certain people with the wrong color skin, the wrong sort of last name, or the wrong size of bank account from acquiring picture IDs for the purposes of the foul crime of voting for Democrats. So, specifically, of the long list of things you were supposed to bring to get a license renewed, the birth certificate was a problem for me. I have a birth certificate, but because of a courthouse fire in Iowa in the 1970’s, it was only a photocopy of a handwritten replacement document. They had warned me when I called and asked that this would never do. I had to have an authenticated copy issued by the records department of the State of Iowa. So, I spent 50 dollars on an expedited official document by express mail, still likely to arrive after the expiration date of my license.
Of course, once I lucked out and received the document only three business days after I requested it, I discovered that the DMV had been moved from the location I had relied on for almost ten years. And when I did find the DMV office and waited in the cold in the early morning for the doors to open, I discovered that the DMV I had found didn’t actually issue driver’s licenses. Bummer. I had to try again the next day ten miles further away in Lewisville.
I fully expected to be turned away again that day for some unforeseen and petty reason. Instead, I found the opposite to be true. They saw an old white guy walking with a cane and thought, “Oh, Republican voter!” I was moved to the front of the line. The Indian lady ahead of me was not given a license because she did not have both a birth certificate and a valid passport. But I got my license with only the expiring license to prove my identity. They didn’t even need to see the birth certificate.
The computer virus was just as frustrating. The only option was to try to find the right software to remove the bug by using the infected computer to purchase one online. Since Norton had been overwhelmed, I went with McAfee and, fortunately, got a year’s subscription for 60% off the regular price. I downloaded it, spent three agonizing days on a full scan, then got a result of zero problems found and fixed. So, as further programs began crashing, I called their tech support and got a guy with a heavy Indian accent to remotely fix the problems for me. In three hours of time, he miraculously restored my computer and even removed some other unwanted programs slowing my computer which I had been unable to remove myself. It turned out that the problem may have been caused by another anti-virus program whom I accidentally downloaded with another program package, but then I refused to pay for the upgrade when it reported that it had found five seriously infected files on my computer. You can’t be too careful when downloading things from the internet, though being careful and vigilant is almost impossible when there are so many horrible things out there that you never suspected people might be capable of.
Anyway, I survived both ordeals and still managed to finish a novel manuscript and got closer to publishing another one.
Catch a Falling Star 
Dump the Trumpy Grump
The current President of the United States initially seemed to me to be a gift from the gods of comedy. I figured it would be easy to make humorous blog posts about a clown who wears orange face paint, wears super-long red ties, and is more cartoonish behavior-wise than Yogi Bear.
But the Grumpy Trump leadership style is more depressing than even that of Rodeo Clown in Chief, George W. Bush, though Trump has managed to be accused of fewer war crimes by international tribunals. He is so relentlessly inhuman in his every deed that you can’t use exaggeration humor against him. The reality is too far over the top for that. And you can’t rely on insult humor, because he does it so much more often himself than any comedian can, and he really MEANS it. He doesn’t tell or comprehend jokes unless it makes a good excuse to claim he was only joking.
One of the things he does that bothers me the most is the use of criminals in his cabinet and departments that do all the dirty work.
Sleepy McBoing-Boing, the HUD secretary seems to be in his job to screw things up for poor people who were barely hanging on and turn them into homeless people while he commits crimes to put an expensive dining table in the HUD office for his personal use. “Let ’em eat cake,” right, Ben?
Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke, heads of the EPA and Department of the Interior are so busy spending Federal budget monies on personal uses that their departments are falling apart, and so the air we breath and the water we drink are now more at risk than they were under Obama, where it was a very real crisis having very real effects.
I think I am through posting criticisms about Trump. Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers do so much better at skewering the pumpkinhead than I ever could, so look to them for actual political humor of the thoughtful kind.
The only thing I want from Trump now… Now that his tax cut has cost me extra money and his healthcare meddling has made the price of insulin out of my reach… Is for the whole thing to end. He won’t resign. You can’t expect Ebola Fever or brain tumors will go away on their own. But it is so obvious that he has committed impeachable crimes that, for the good of us all, the Congress needs to get rid of him. The Dark Lord with White Hair, Mike Pence, though deeply evil, would be better.
Leave a comment
Filed under angry rant, cartoons, commentary, humor, lying, Paffooney, politics
Tagged as politics