Category Archives: humor

Aeroquest… Canto 8

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Canto 8 – Hammer Plans

      Trav Dalgoda was busy with research.  He had discovered that Frieda could answer practically any question his evil little brain could ask, and so, allowed him to feed his avarice and greed until they became obese and bloated.  Where most men had two little angels on their shoulders, one good and one evil, to debate with, Trav had only these two little fat things that he actually called Greed and Avarice when he talked to them.  They were discussing now how he could obtain the so-called Hammer of God.

“Ummm!  Frieda says the Hammer is a building device and it is on the planet below.  I have got to have it,” said Goofy to himself.

“Ged will distrust it, and he won’t let you use it,” said Avarice.

Greed scratched his fat red behind with his pitchfork.  “We have to get there before Ged,” he said lazily.

“I can go down to the planet in my new star ship,” said Goofy.

“Yes, and blow something up with it on the way!” said Avarice.

“Explosions in space are so pretty!” cooed Greed.

“No,” said Goofy.  “I can’t let myself get carried away.  Ham always says, “Don’t blow things up, Goofy.””

“Not even a little something?” asked Avarice sadly, feeling the sharpness of his left horn with a fat finger.

“Well…” said Goofy, almost relenting.

It was then that the manic spacer was interrupted from his internal dialogue by the sweet-faced blue Princess.  She had entered the room from behind him.  They were all alone, just Trav, the Princess, and Frieda.  She was as naked as the day she was born.  She walked up to him, took his gloved hand, and put it sadly on her breast.

“Oh!  No, girl!” insisted Trav, turning bright red under his eye patch.  “Nobody asked for that!”

She pointed sadly at the slave tattoo on her right shoulder.   She looked down at the deck beneath her feet.

“No, I mean it!” said Trav.  “You don’t have to do that for me.  I am not your master!”

“Maybe I can help,” suggested Frieda.

“How?” asked Trav.

“Tagasserah nah, po choi freem koohballa Marjarac Inoijuc.”

The blue princess was suddenly transformed into the happiest creature Trav had ever seen.  She kissed the Goof on the end of his nose and left the control room clapping her hands together gleefully.

“What was that about?” asked Trav, puzzled.

“I explained to her that you wanted her to be free so she could be your friend.  I explained that she owed you a debt of honor for releasing her from her servitude.”

“Really?  All of that, huh?”

“Yes.”

“So what can you tell me and my two little friends about the planet below?” asked Trav.

“First you must put the Crown of All Stars upon your own head,” said Frieda.

“But won’t that melt my brain?”

“Oh, it might.  But from what I’ve observed of you, I don’t think your circuits are complex enough to be in danger.”

“Oh, thanks,” said Trav.  “Say, by the way, old Jester, can you teach the lovely Princess to speak our language?”

“Khomparuc sah, Trav.  It shall be done.”

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Trav Dalgoda, a goof for all seasons.

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Uber New Year

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Who knew that being an Uber driver required the skills of a swashbuckling hero?

But that is exactly what it is.  I am approaching the end of my first $100 dollar week.  And I have already been on a harrowing ride through the world of ride-sharing for money.

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The key to successfully picking up and ferrying passengers to the site of their choosing is a matter of being personable and at ease with driving and talking.  Of course, I have talking skills.  My whole 31 year career was a matter of learning to effectively talk to kids all day long.  And you may not believe this, but adults, people who actually have money and the freedom to choose their own path, are easier to talk to than kids.  I have learned about people’s families, people’s jobs, opinions of their bosses, opinions of the government and taxes, and even some tell me about their love lives, both directly, and second hand.  If there are two in the car, then they forget that the driver has ears and can hear (within the limitations of really old ears).

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One recent passenger was absolutely convinced that no Uber driver actually knows how to drive.  That passenger sat in the back seat and sent a barrage of traffic warnings and worries forward for me to deal with at the same time I was watching the road ahead.  It was almost exactly as harrowing as driving with my wife as a passenger.  I felt like a child again, driving for the meanest teacher I ever had growing up.  (Sorry, Ms. Rubelmacher, I learned a lot from you.  Don’t give me detention for writing that.)

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But why did I say “Swashbuckling hero” if I am only going to talk about talking to passengers?  And why all the Batman gifs?

Well, I am talking about driving in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, ain’t I?  Do you know what Texas drivers are like?  On Saturday I picked up a coach headed for a retirement party at a Luby’s on the border of DeSoto (a southwest Dallas suburb.  That was a twenty-two dollar trip from east-central Dallas catty-cornered all the way across the city in a diagonal direction on the tollway and then I-35 South.  I had three cars cut me off for driving too slow (by which I mean the speed limit.  Hey, Uber monitors that through their app.)  The Uber Navigator told me to keep right at a time when keeping right nearly threw me off 35 onto an intersecting highway, so I had to make a quick two-wheeled Starsky and Hutch turn through the corner of the median to stay on course.  (Fortunately, Uber can’t monitor that.)  Dallas drivers are a combination of speedy predators in WASP rockets, Texas killer grandmas in Cadillacs, and Elmer Fudds going too slow in classic cars from the 50’s.  They provide you with a booby-trapped obstacle course to drive through, and go so fast that the speed limit becomes dangerously too slow.

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So I definitely appreciate Batman for providing me with all the animated illustrations to use for portraying the high-risk life of an Uber driver.  It makes driving this way easier to pretend that I am one half of the dynamic duo driving the Batmobile in Dallas downtown traffic.  Yes, it’s true, I am saying I pretend to be Batman.

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Star Wars, the RPG

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After getting married in 1995, there was a long break from the playing of role-playing games.  I had to wait for Number One Son to reach an age where he understood enough about things to enjoy a game where telling a story together was the main thing.  He was aware of Star Wars through the fourth movie, The Phantom Menace, which we saw together in the Austin area where Grandma and Grandpa Beyer lived.  Then, after the next movie came out, The Attack of the Clones, a role-playing game from the 80’s was updated and I bought the rule books in local game shops.  Number One Son and Closest Cousin began playing with me whenever we had the opportunity.  We even played during our tent-camping trip to Niagara Falls.

Closest Cousin was basically a young girl in her Disney Princess phase when we started playing. So she chose to be a noble.  She wanted a Princess Leia-type character, and she created Princess Moreno D’ark to fulfill that need. Number One Son wanted a more action-oriented character, one who could solve problems by whacking them with a light saber.  So he created Juba Jubajai, a gung-ho space marine sort of Jedi guardian.  We chose to play in the Clone Wars era because that was where I had the most resources in book form and related most closely to the movies they had recently seen and loved.  I had a bunch of other old 80’s Star Wars game supplements that I could adapt to fit into the game universe we were using.

Of course, two people is a little short of a full adventuring party, so we recruited some good NPC’s to fill in.  We had to have a Wookie.  So Hrowwuher became Princess Moreno’s devoted sidekick.  He could blow stuff up whenever the Princess’s negotiating and problem-solving skills failed to keep the group out of trouble.  Keebo Kloohorn was a musician and often supplied the sneakily supplied game-master’s hints to keep the adventure on track.  He was also sometimes the character used by Number Two Son, but at a mere five years old, the game rarely held his attention long enough for him to really be playing.

On upcoming Saturdays, I will recount a few of our memorable adventures in the Star Wars game realm.

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“Mickey, What’s Wrong With You?”

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Yes, I am trying to answer that old question that old girlfriends used to ask me back when they were young and I was young and too stupid to answer honestly. You know, the question always asked right before they tell you, “Why don’t we just be friends and leave it at that.”

After having spent my Christmas money from Mom on an 18-inch giant gorilla action figure of Kong on Skull Island to terrorize all the dolls on the Barbie Shelf after midnight when all the dolls secretly come to life, I feel more prepared than ever before to answer that particular question.

I am not in my second childhood. I am still in my first one. Yes, I reached the ripe old age of 12 and then Peter Pan Syndrome set in bigtime. On the inside, I will always be 12 years old. I still, at 61, play games and play with toys. I never really grew up.

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I am not a Brony, but I am still buying My Little Pony dolls, and can name all six of the main characters. From left to right, Fluttershy, Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Apple Jack, Rainbow Dash, and Twilight Sparkle. And yes, I have watched the cartoon show and like it, but am still not a Brony, okay? There are a lot of things wrong with me, but I am not that bad! My kids, however, are embarrassed to be seen with me when I am shopping for toys at Walmart, Toys-R-Us, or Goodwill.

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I still play with the HO scale model trains that I have owned and collected since the first year I was actually twelve. I would love to get them running again. The Snowflake Special and the Toonerville Trolley seen in the picture both still ran the last time I tested them four years ago. I still love to paint buildings and HO scale people to live in my little train town. I am still working on a set of townspeople that I bought back in 1994. German villagers circa 1880.

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I have always been fascinated by imaginary places and the people who live in them. Especially imaginary places in the fiction of the past. Places like the castle of Minas Tirith in the realm of Gondor in Middle Earth, and like Pellucidar that David Innes and Abner Perry discovered at the Earth’s Core in their boring machine called “the Prospector”as part of the Pellucidar series created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan novels. So, another thing wrong with me is that I live mostly in the past and entirely in the worlds of my imagination. I have very little to do with the so-called “real world”.

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So, to sum up, the things wrong with Mickey are; A. He’s a goofy old child. B. He still plays with toys. C. He likes girly stuff. D. He confuses fantasy with reality. No wonder the girls used to run away screaming. And I haven’t even added the part about Mickey thinking he is a nudist now and walking around the house naked when no one else is home and forced to see the full horror of it.

But maybe you should think on it for a moment more. What if the things that are wrong with Mickey are actually good things? What if he’s found the secret to long life and happiness in spite of a world full of troubles and illnesses and blechy stuff? It could be true…

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Aeroquest… Adagio 3

Adagio 3 – Homo Lupines

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It was during the founding years of the Galtorr Imperium that genetically altered mutates, more commonly called “Freaks” were created in the laboratories of Faulkner Genetics.  The lessons of Dr. Frankenstein were completely lost on those poor doody-heads. Most artificial races were created to fill very specific slots in the colonial plan.  They first got away with monster making in the forgotten past.   When the Galtorrian lizard people and the Earther primates were both struggling to make their way into space, they somehow managed to splice their genomes together to make one race that had the worst qualities of both.  This melded race, of uncertain origin, is probably the fault of early Earther explorers who found the Galtorrian homeworld,  and scared out of their pants by the warlike reptilians, began crazy-mad experiments the way witless Earth humans do.  Having a mutual genetic link in the Galtorrian Lizard-Men meant that both the Galtorrs and the Earthers could feel like part of one people.  Well, that was the big idea, anyway.  These masters, though, having established an artificial ruling race, soon found use for slave races.

They created the tiny, elfin Peris of the planet Djinnistan to do immense computations in their overlarge heads with an edge of extreme creativity.  The winged Eagle-men, also of Djinnistan, were used for jungle warfare and air patrol duty.  They created the simian Security Beasts of the planet Karridon for obscure reasons, something about the Earther obsession with gorilla-like monkey violence.  Even the speedy Longlegs of the planet Nestor’s Palace were not a natural race and kept as work slaves.

Some science geek (not like me, I’m a nerd rather than a geek, I have never eaten a light bulb) in the days of the Gene-Splicer Renaissance thought it was a natural idea to combine the genes of Earth men with the genes of Earth dogs.  They reasoned that since dogs were man’s best friend, they would make a race of friendly, loyal dog-men.  They could then be their own best friends!  What a stupid concept!  They overlooked the fact that all dogs on Earth originated from wolves.  Wolves, if you didn’t already know, get hungry enough to eat you.

With my handy telescope I saw the Lupin Rebellion.  Waves of wolfmen turned on their masters and stole spacecraft and weapons.  Blood was shed as they threw off their collars and turned to wolf-pack piracy among the stars.  They were carnivores and totally uncontrollable.

The furry man-wolves formed fleets of corsair raiders known collectively as Stardogs and laid waste among poorly protected colonies.  Then, during the Second Unification War the Galtorr Jihad launched their war fleets against Stardog colonies and outposts, nearly making the Homo Lupines race extinct.  The Galtorrian hero, Sir Echo Saurol, had every intention of wiping them out like fleas in a flea-powder factory.  Only the Lupins who fled into deep space survived the wrath of the Galtorrians.

The first Aero-base, the sentient starport called Frieda, had originally been a Galtorrian Exploration Command Center.  A surviving pack of Lupins and Stardogs descended upon it and slew everyone in the planetary command before fleeing further into the unknown.  It had, however, been 329 years since the attack when the Aero brothers landed and claimed the base.  They knew nothing of the Stardog Freaks and their Lupin Rebellion.  All Ged knew was that Lupins were a creature he had hunted before, a very intelligent and dangerous creature to hunt.  Soon both brothers would learn more than they ever wanted to know about Lupins, especially the one that had been marooned on the Don’t Go Here Grange station.

 

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Bedbug Crazy Planning

It occurs to me, (usually suddenly in the middle of the night making me leap out of bed with a light bulb over my head that tends to evaporate if I don’t write it down), that you may not be able to make much sense of the order of my posts, or the way that I leap from one pond frond paragraph of ideas to another with nary a bridge over troubled water between them.  The phrase, “Crazier than a bedbug” may have just leaped into your head.  If it didn’t, then I didn’t do a very good job of planting it there just now with this loony opening paragraph and my witlessly wired title for today’s post.

The problem probably begins with seeing the world as I see it.  As in, “Nobody sees the world the way you do, Mickey!”  For example, look closely as this picture of me cooking breakfast and pointlessly taking a picture of it. See the star I am cooking?

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Really?  You don’t?  How about now?

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Still don’t see it?  Well, let me try once more with my artsy-craftsy weird Pythagorean math religion skills to make you see it so you know what the heck I am talking about.

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Still don’t understand about me cooking stars in the morning for breakfast?  Well of course you don’t. You don’t think like a bedbug.  I read an article about needing protein for the first meal of the day to help diabetes and your thinking parts work like a well-oiled machine.  Err… well, like a well-oiled sausage, then.  And I see stars while I am cooking, because my mind works like that.

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So, what does the expression “Crazy as a bedbug” mean, anyway?  Well, if you have ever seen a bedbug crawling on your quilts at night… first of all, poor you!  I hope it didn’t bite you more than once… but the bedbug seems to travel on all sixes in totally random directions, suddenly stopping, backing up, and then curly-cuing onward in its bizarre little paisley-patterned way.  It is unpredictable.

My writing journey has been more or less like that.  The first novel I completed was Superchicken, set in the year 1974, in my hometown, Spring and Summer.  Then the first hometown novel I published, Catch a Falling Star, was set in 1990, Summer, in my hometown and on Mars.  Then I finished the novel Snow Babies, set in 1984, December, in my hometown during a blizzard.   I went back to the future… um, a past future… with Magical Miss Morgan, set in the 1989-90 school year in the little town where I went to junior high and high school.  It will soon be published by Page Publishing.  I published Stardusters and Space Lizards, set in 1991, entirely in outer space, but with characters from my hometown on board the space ship, on Amazon Kindle Publishing this last November, followed closely by Snow Babies, published in the same place with the same publisher.  I am now working on The Baby Werewolf, set in Fall of 1974 in my home town again.  So my writing journeys through time in total bedbug fashion.

What, then, am I planning to write this weekend and during the holiday?  I can promise you, I won’t know until tomorrow… if then.

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Totally Terribly Bankrupt

Disney recently unveiled the new President Pumpkinhead animatronic doll that they are putting into the Hall of Presidents at their theme parks.  Scary thing, that.  Scarier still, it would probably make a better President than the one currently in the White House.

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Can you tell from this picture which one is the animated lump of unnatural doll parts and metal wires, and which one is the Disney animatronic President?

And in the Congress, the House and Senate each passed a tax reform bill that will reverse-Robin Hood money away from the poor and middle class to feed the never-ending greed of the top one per cent.

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And a third thing that is now revealed this week, devastating for me personally, is my Chapter 13 Bankruptcy, signed and finalized on Monday.  My bankruptcy, unlike Trump’s many Chapter 11’s, does not cancel any debt.  I must pay 100% of the money won by Bank of America in their lawsuit against me and 100% of the rest of my unsecured debt with all of my other credit cards like Discover that had to be canceled out.  The only break a personal bankruptcy affords a retired teacher like me is that I no longer have to pay any interest on any unsecured debt.  And Bank of America does not get to take away my house and car and dog and light bulb out of my refrigerator.  They are most certainly disappointed by that last thing.

So, now we get to see the suffering actually come to an end.  Yes, no one must any longer worry about going to Disneyland and being bored by stuffy politician robots in the Hall of Presidents.  Instead the Hall of Presidents will now be one of the scariest horror shows in theme park entertainment history.  A robot Cheeto Man will be horrifically disemboweling and eviscerating the Constitution and portions of the English language on stage in front of children, grandmothers, and everybody.  Rich people will no longer have to suffer the discomfort of knowing that other people have any money at all, or are entitled to any of the wonderful things that only ultra-rich people are supposed to enjoy, like Disneyland, for example.

And Bank of America and its merry band of blood-sucking pirates can rest easy in the knowledge that Mickey no longer has any money to fund undeserved privileges like the ability to think for himself.

Paul Ryan and Donald J. Trump can now sit smugly satisfied and glory in the fact that Mickey’s losses guarantees them a Mickey-less world.

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Aeroquest… Canto 7

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Canto 7 – Good Doggie

 

Ged planned the mission to the Grange station just for Ham and himself.  Trav was put in charge of the star port and given strict orders not to blow anything up or do anything stupid.  The last part of those standard orders was intentionally left vague enough to cover almost anything Trav might do.

In the Leaping Shadowcat they quietly slid a quarter of the way around the planet to the geo-synchronis orbit of the space-food installation.  It was vast.  At five miles in length and a mile in width it should’ve been feeding at least a million people in space.  It appeared that the hydroponically grown plants had grown almost completely out of control.  Greenery obscured any view of the interior through the sun-source windows.

The docking bay was large, and Ham easily steered the Shadowcat into position.  The automated systems attached to the Aero Brothers’ ship as smoothly as any starport in the Imperium.

“The power still works here.  Do you suppose someone’s been maintaining it until a short time back?” speculated Ged.

“Dunno,” said Ham.  “Somebody might be maintaining it and our sensors didn’t pick him or her up.”

“Maybe,” said Ged doubtfully.

Ged had spent ten years as a space-safari hunter for hire.  He had been successful in tracking xenomorphs on four hundred worlds and survived many dangerous encounters.  It was only natural that he led the way.  Caution had always been his hallmark as a hired big-game hunter.  He brought his customers back alive even if it meant not bagging the big xenomorph they were hunting.

Ged carefully set his medium-tech laser rifle on the stun-cone setting.  He didn’t need to kill whatever he encountered, just control it.  No telling how big a dog they were facing.  He led the way into the Grange with hand signals to Ham.

Ham had the big gun.  He carried an 80-pound MPPG, a man-portable plasma gun.  It put a stream of thermonuclear star-stuff out that could burn through planets if necessary.  It was the kind of weapon they’d kept safely out of Goofy’s hands for twenty years, since their teen years.

They were surprised to see the inside of the Grange fully operational.  Someone had recently been tending it.  Several of the hydroponic farms were operating efficiently and producing fruits and vegetables that the brothers hadn’t tasted in over two years.  Ham couldn’t resist grabbing and biting into a succulent carbo-melon from Antares One, purple juice running down his arm to the elbow.

Of course, most of the farms were thoroughly overgrown and idle.  A place like this needed a thousand people to operate completely, but someone, maybe two someones, had been very busy here.

Ged signaled to Ham.  “Paw Print!” he said in sign.  Ham signaled back.  “Dog?”

Ged signaled.  “Too big.  Only two legs.  Werewolf.  Like me?”

Ham grinned.  “Maybe you changed and got loose?”

“Not lately.”

Ged was an excellent tracker.  He followed the sign down into the artificial valley and from under cover, sighted the paw-print maker.  It had the head of an overly-fuzzy wolf or a husky dog, but the barrel-chested body was like a man’s.  Its crooked dog’s legs ended in bare paws, but it wore pants and had a tool belt around his middle.  He was shirtless and fuzzy-chested.

“Dang!” signed Ged.  “Homo Lupines.”

“Bring down,” signaled Ham.

Ged rose up from behind the foliage and fired a cone of shock-laser beam at the Lupin.  It dropped like a stone.

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The Nature of Our Better Angels

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I have friends and relatives that believe in angels.  Religious people who believe in the power of prayer and the love of God.  And I cannot say that I do not also believe.  But I also happen to believe that angels live among us.

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My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was, as far as I am concerned, an angel.  Born in the late 1800’s, she was a practical prairie farmer’s wife.  She knew how to make butter in a churn.  She knew how to treat bee stings and spider bites. She knew how to cook good, wholesome food that stuck to your ribs and kept you going until the next meal rolled around.  She knew how to cook on a wood-burning stove, and knew why you needed to keep corn cobs in a pile by the outhouse door.  Or, in the case of rich folks, why you needed to read the Sears catalog in the little room behind the cut-out crescent moon.

She also knew how to head a family.  She had seven kids and raised six of them up to adulthood.  She sent a son off to World War II.  She had nine grandchildren and more great grandchildren, of which I was one of the not-so-great ones, than I can even count on two hands and two feet, the toes of which I can’t always see.  Great great grandchildren were even greater.  Tell me you can’t believe she was a messenger from God, always knowing God’s will, and making the future happen with a steady hand, and eyes that brooked no nonsense from lie-telling boys.

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Mother Mendiola was an angel too.  I met her at my first school, Frank Newman Junior High in Cotulla, Texas.  She was the seventh grade Life Science teacher.  She had been a nun before becoming a teacher, and she was a single lady her whole life.  But she was a natural mother figure to the children in her classes.  She’s the one who taught me how to talk to fatherless boys, engage them in learning about things that excited them, and become a lifelong mentor to them, willing to help them with life’s problems even long after they had graduated from both junior high and high school.  She was not only a mother to students, but she nurtured other teachers as well.  She showed Alice and I how to talk to Hispanic kids even though we were both so white we almost glowed in the dark.  She went to bat for kids who got in trouble with the principal, and even those who sometimes got into trouble with the law.  She had a way of holding her hand out to kids and encouraging them to place their troubles in it.  She even helped pregnant young girls with wise counsel and a loving, accepting heart, even when they were seriously in the wrong.  When they talk about being an “advocate for kids” in educational conferences, they always make me picture her and her methods.  I can still see her in my mind’s eye with clenched fists on her hips and saying, “I am tired of it, and it will get better NOW!”  And it always got better.  Because she was an angel.  She had the power of the love of God behind her every action and motivation.  It still makes me weep to remember she is gone now.  She got her wings and flew on to other things a long time ago now.

Some people may call it a blasphemy for me to say that these people, no matter how good and critically important they were, could really be angels.  But I have to say it.  I have to believe it.  I know this because I saw them do these things, with my own two eyes, and how could they not be messengers from God?  I convinces me that I need to work at becoming an angel too.

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Extremely Strange Christmas Gifts

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This summer, in order to decompress a bit over the swimming pool removal crisis, I joined a nudist website in order to be able to write a blog for them. I believe it can be now revealed that it didn’t go entirely according to plan.  Pretty much in the same way that, because I am not Santa Claus I will not be delivering Christmas gifts on December 24th.

The deal was, I needed to give them a sample of my writing to consider, and then be prepared to write a blog post about my first visit to a nudist park.  It was technically a professional writing situation, but because of the cost of membership in the website and the cost of visiting a nudist camp, I was paying out money instead of taking it in.

So, I submitted a rewritten version of my blog post “Blushing in the Garden of Eden”, a piece about the comedy inherent in me being associated with nudist experiences written long before I ever imagined having the courage to actually go to one of these places and be a nudist at the same time.

I took the bull by the horns… okay, let’s not use that trite old expression because of its unfortunate metaphorical connotations… I prepared for the job by contacting a local nudist park, Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas, and I made arrangements.  Then, while my family was off enjoying roller coasters at Six Flags that I was not physically fit enough to ride, I went to the nudist park for a day visit.

I wrote about all the fool missteps, embarrassments, and gobbledygook I went through to visit a nudist park on one of the hottest days of the summer wearing only a thick layer of sunscreen, hat, and shoes.  I thoroughly embarrassed myself in an autobiographical essay or three about actually enjoying my brief time among the naked people.  And then nudist connections began to blossom.  Who knew that they might be so willing to recruit a spotty old naked man into their society?  My blog post was re-blogged on a popular nudist website.  Twitter nudists began following me by the baskets full.  I became connected to nudist sites in Canada, Great Britain, and, curiously, Spain.  I got tons of ads for nudists experiences in places world wide that I will never be able to afford to go visit.

But through it all, not a word from truenudists.com about my blog application.

Well, now, during this season of Santa Claus and gift-giving, I started receiving some extremely strange Christmas gifts.  Tomorrow I get to go sign the court petition that allows me to be bankrupt under Chapter 13.  No more credit cards for me.  Including the one used to pay for my Truenudist membership.  And then, out of nowhere, the blog coordinator of Truenudists contacts me about being delighted by my submission and being willing to publish my work on their website, Facebook sites, and Twitter account.  I am now officially a nudist blogger.  Now that the nudist wardrobe is about the only thing I can afford to wear.  And my wife added one last gift last night.  A plan to sell our house so we don’t end up losing it to the bank.

So, I wrote a letter to Santa Claus, thanking him for my wonderful gifts this year, and asking him to join me whenever possible at the nudist park so he can truly see how I have benefited from his presents.

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