Technology is supposed to be your friend. But the last few days have proved repeatedly that computers are definitely not Mickey’s friends. They don’t seem to like him even a little bit.
The problem seems to stem from making the mistake of taking my beloved old laptop to Iowa. My daughter was the only family member who could go along on the vacation to see Grampa and Gramma. And her laptop now consists of a broken laptop body with no keyboard linked to a wifi-linkable keyboard and wifi-linkable used-television monitor. That computer was not exactly in a portable condition. I suggested she could replace the sticky-used-chewing-gum connections when she got to Iowa, but she wouldn’t risk it.
So the decision was made to take both my old laptop with the barely living battery and my backup cheap Walmart laptop for her to use. We made it to Iowa with my beloved old laptop still able to boot up on the barely living battery. I had tried to replace the battery by purchasing a new one directly from HP online. But it was delayed enough that we couldn’t get it before leaving. Still, the car trip didn’t completely kill the dying battery I had. So I used it to save and edit pictures from the Wright County Fair and write my daily posts while visiting in Iowa. A successful trip by internet-addicted idiots according to the uninformed standards I was apparently judging it by.
But on returning home to Texas, disaster struck totally by laptop.
First of all, the dying battery expired as soon as I tried to fire up Old Beloved on our return home. And then I learned that the battery I had bought to revive it was an out-of-stock discontinued item at the HP factory. My order had been canceled. They gave me a line on a company that provided discontinued parts, but I did not have the money to swing that at the end of the month. So that went on hold.
My backup laptop had now become my new Old Beloved. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember any of my old passwords for practically everything on the internet. So, I spent a week recovering online accounts on my new Old Beloved. That was hectic and un-swell. But I reached a point where most of my August bills were paid or scheduled to be paid, and I was settling into my old routine again when I discovered the terrible mistake I had made. My daughter had keyed everything on the new Old Beloved to her Google account. I had been saving all my new passwords to her account rather than my own. Oh, beehoofadoo! Whoever would’ve thought that such world-rattling consequences could befall me because of such an innocent mistake? There was a point at which I had no way back into my email account because it was no longer tied to my cell phone or current computer, and there were no means for recovering it, not even by using voodoo. Then I happened to remember an account I had set up solely to get back into Pinterest in 2016. I was able to log back into that and use it to get recovery codes for everything that either I or my daughter had destroyed or deleted because of the Google mix-up.
Last night my beloved daughter wanted the old password for our Hulu account to put it on her Frankencomputer, and after all I have been through in my own personal cyberwar, I nearly lost it. Fear not. My daughter still lives with her eardrums intact. And no damage remains from the top of my head blowing off that couldn’t be fixed with duck tape and super glue.
Ah, irony again! It ends up being anything but simple. You can write in simple, adjective-and-adverb-free sentences as Hemingway did, and still manage to convey deeply complicated and thoughtful ideas. One might even suggest that you can create poetic ideas in mere prose, dripping with layers of emotion, conflict, theme, and deeper implied meaning. You can also write prose in the intensely descriptive and convoluted style of a Charles Dickens with many complex sentences and pages-long paragraphs of detail, using comic juxtapositions of things, artfully revealing character development, and idiosyncratic dialogue all for comedic effect. Prose is a powerful and infinitely variable tool for creating meaning in words. Even when it is in the form of Mickian purple paisley prose that employs extra-wiggly sentence structure, pretzel-twisted ideas, and hyperbolically big words.
The worst experience I got from this summer’s food delivery came at the hands of a fellow school teacher. I had to deliver faculty lunch to an elementary school in the last week of summer school classes. It was a large lunch with two bags of burgers and a tray loaded with drinks in flimsy cardboard cups. It was a short drive from the restaurant to the school. But when I got there, it was a school with many entrances and kids playing on two different sides of the building. I went to the door I thought the Uber navigator was directing me to. I knocked. When I got no answer, I called the lady who ordered everything. I told her I was at the west door. She told me that I had to find the main door on the south side of the building. So I managed to juggle the two sacks and the easily spillable drinks to three different doors on the south side, all locked. I called again and was told I must have the wrong building, so I went to the school building across the street and found an office building with only kindergarten and daycare kids present. I called again.
Catch a Falling Star 
How Mickey’s Brain Percolates
I tend to do a lot of thinking about thinking. I pay attention to what sources of input and images I use to bring the old brain to a boil. It is entirely possible to turn into a malevolent moron in this age of Trumpalump Twitter Twit-Tweets if you pay too much attention to its anger-inducing misinformation and rage-ranting. So I have to limit how much I think about calling Trump and the other elephant-heads names. I enjoy it, true, but I really don’t want to become a malevolent moron.
The anti-moron medicine comes in the form of remembering who I used to be and how problems were solved as an educator, mentor, and advocate for young people. I remember how the times I used name-calling and anger in place of problem-solving tended to only make the problem worse. If you deliberately brainstorm solutions to the problem instead, I have found that after you test several solutions and have them spectacularly fail, your persistance eventually yields a solution that works.
So when I think about how to proceed with the daily problems of life, especially the age-old question, “What the hell am I going to write about today?” I find that I tend to leap out of the box, think all around the outside landscape, and seize on something silly in a very round-about and experimental manner.
The things I choose to write about in book form are all based on my own real experiences. But I have the unfortunate gift for having an overdose-level vivid imagination. So my books are about fairies and ghosts and aliens as well as the kids I have taught, the people who raised me, and the people who have always surrounded me. I write about ideas in some depth, but always from a sideways viewpoint that reflects my beliefs in non-violence, rationality, and love.
My mind works like a match in a firecracker factory. But I try not to use it for evil. And now that I am done revealing the secret of how Mickey’s brain percolates, feel free to tell me how stupid it all is and call me whatever bad monkey-names you can think of for me. I can take it. And when I take it, I most likely will use it to make something surprisingly good. Mickey-brain tea… now there’s a weird, wild, and wonderful metaphorical brew.
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