He says things daily that are provably untrue. He makes huge messes that nobody is willing to clean up, both internationally and domestically. He throws fits and Tweets like a Twit on Twitter. He insults people with impunity and tries to wreak vengeance on those that give as good as they get from him. How can he possibly be the President of the United States? Well, he can’t. If this were an actual democracy, he’d never have been voted in, let alone stay in the office this long without being impeached and removed. Most intelligent people who haven’t been hitting themselves on the head with hammers of prejudice and party ideology can see that. Even some Republicans.
The selfish, orange-headed moron only cares about what affects him directly. He constantly seeks attention and plays to the camera and to friendly audiences. He is deliberately provocative because it gets him the attention he craves, whether it is positive or negative doesn’t seem to matter. His decisions are guided by virulent racism and misogyny. He will provoke conflict and do irreparable damage to the functioning systems that keep this country running. And the Republican controlled Congress will let him do it because they got that control by cheating. All the levers of power are in their corrupt, feckless little greedy hands. And they will let the monkey throw poop everywhere until we all succumb to poop-related diseases.
I am already today feeling quite ill. It helps slightly to take out some of the bad feelings on the Nazi clown that is now in charge. But only slightly. At some point I’m still going to die. And we the people are probably never going to be in control of the government again.
Much scarier than Batman’s Joker, isn’t he?
So I am bummed. Things are not going well. I have hand cramps from shooting the bird at the TV news every day, every time Monkey-face Cheetos-head is talking. Bile is my ruling humor this morning. And I need a nap so I can feel better.
stuff, and doing some of it naked.
But that, of course, is not how it works in real life… even without the nuclear physics which was an exaggeration for humorous effect.
My wife constantly tells me I am wrong… about everything. And I probably am. So that is not right. And if you think that’s my wife in the picture, you would be wrong. She’s much larger than that in real life.
Catch a Falling Star 
Mickey at Sixty
It is true that I am now only a month away from being 61. But this reflection is based on what happened to me while undergoing the year past. My fictional character, Valerie Clarke, took the selfie above of the two of us. She doesn’t have her own smartphone, after all, she’s a fictional character, so she used mine. It shows in the picture what she looked like at eleven and what I looked like at sixty years and eleven months, in other words, this morning.
So, what exactly does the picture reveal about us?
Well, for her, it is fairly obvious that she’s only an imaginary person. She was eleven in 1984, the year of the fictional snowstorm in Snow Babies. She’s a bright and vibrant young girl with hopes and dreams ahead of her. She’s also known tragedy, especially after her father’s suicide. But the fact that she’s fictional and based on more than one real person from my past does a lot to explain why this reflection is not about her.
For me, however, you get a look at a grumpy old man with a straw farmer’s hat, an author’s beard, and silvery Gandalf hair. More of my drawings are glimpsable on the wall behind me. I look like the kind of seedy old curmudgeon who yells at neighbor kids who walk on his lawn.
But I’m really not what I look like.
I am a writer. So I am full of experiences, ideas, and feelings. And I am also full of people. Valerie is only one of those. I create fictional people from the people I knew or knew about in my little Iowa town, Rowan, where I grew up. Kids that went to school with me. Their parents. Shopkeepers and business people and creepy old people that I sometimes encountered. Hot tempered people. Wise people. And stupid people who were often laughed at for good reason.
I can also draw on (and draw pictures of) all the people I knew as an educator. More than two thousand kids who passed through my classes in four different schools, some of whom I knew as well as I knew my own children, were available to pull details from to mix and match and make fictional characters from. Fellow teachers, some gifted with a natural way with students, some hopelessly lost in the wrong profession with the wrong sort of personality were also available to make characters from. Fools and idealists. Bullies and shrinking violets. Heroes that possible readers could look up to and love.
I am the kaleidoscope, the thing that you can look through to see the world and have it refracted and patterned to make it beautiful, even in its ugliness.
But all of this reflection is only that, the view in the mirror, the outward look of the man who is me. Mickey at sixty is many things, not all of them pretty, not all of them wise. But some of them are. And some even better than I think they are.
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