I have to because somebody has to control the words.
People are made of words. Their identity, their inner self, their reason for existence… all made of words. The very thoughts in their heads are… words.
If I want to control the words I am made of, then I must be the writer who writes his own story.
I don’t want anyone else to write the words that essentially become me. Do you?
Of course, authors create characters. Even autobiographers create characters. Carl Sandburg could no more make his words into Lincoln than a bird can make its tweets into a cat. Sandburg can, however, help us to understand Lincoln as Carl Sandburg understands the words that are Lincoln.
Lincoln probably did not have the words for “bikini girls” in his head when he wrote those words in the second quote. But somebody thought that the picture would help us understand the words. By all accounts, Lincoln was not a particularly happy man leading a particularly happy life. But he showed us the meaning of his words when he stood firm against the strong winds of harsh words and bad ideas in a terrible time. And he was as happy about it as he made up his mind to be.
I, too, have not lived a particularly happy life. But I was always the “teacher with a sense of humor” in the classroom, and students loved me for it. Funny people are often not happy people. But they make themselves out of funny words because laughter heals pain, and jokes are effective medicine. And so I choose to write comedy novels. Novels that are funny even though they are about hard things like freezing to death, losing loved ones, being humiliated, being molested, and fear of death. Magical purple words can bring light to any darkness. I am the words I choose to write in my own story. The words not only reveal me, they make me who I am. And it is up to me to write those words. Other people might wish to do it for me. But they really can’t. The words are for me alone to write.
And so it is imperative that I write my words in the form of my novels, my essays, and this goofy blog post. I am writing myself to life, even if no one ever reads my writing.
Internet memes apply to me. It says it in the name. In fact, it says it twice. “Me+me = meme”.
This one is uncanny. I revere Mark Twain. Apparently I walk in his shoes enough that I am imitating everything he did except becoming wealthy and famous.
And maybe I am not as good of a writer as he was. Maybe. But I am heck at living an unhappy life and going bankrupt in the process.
And this is not the only meme that uncannily defines my life.
They put a stupid, orange-faced man in charge of the government because they wanted to tell Mickey, “F*** You! You are not better than me just because you are smarter than me. We are going to burn it all down to get revenge for your superiority!” And they are laughing and enjoying it now as the flames get hotter, even though their houses are on fire too. But stupid people aren’t really winning the game. There are evil people lurking in the background waiting to exploit and make money. They are winning. They hate Mickey too.
Of course, I never said anything about being better than them. Mickey is smart, but humble. I suffer from the wildfires anyway.
But if you know where to find it, there is helpful wisdom in memes. Short, pithy wisdom, but wisdom never the less.
The “Me”” of the memes can be hurtful at times, saying things out of anger or fear. But he can also be uplifting, making hearts sing and soar. There is magic and power in words… if they are the right words, delivered in the right way.
Sometimes people need be appreciated and built up rather than torn down. Some groups have been hurting more than others. Having been a teacher, I know this is particularly true. Teachers need to hear thank yous.
And I find memes to be a useful way to gain that temporary feel-good nugget of wisdom. I think it is probably a chicken nugget of wisdom. You know, bite-sized pieces of white meat protein to fortify you against the cold and the darkness. And it is important to turn away from the angry and the fearful memes. Going positive instead of negative is a bit of an antidote to the illnesses that infect social media. And I know Facebook is evil, but we are sorta stuck with it, so we might as well use it for good as it uses us and our data for evil.
So, I have shared several memes with you today because that is me…me. I do stuff like that. And you can’t tell me I am doing it wrong.
If you have seen any of my numerous posts about dolls or old books or even, you guessed it, Pez dispensers, you know how badly I am gifted with hoarding disorder. You know the disease. Every old string-saving grandpa or scrap-booking maiden aunt you had as a kid had it. Piles and piles of useless and pointless things all neatly stacked and sorted somewhere in the house, or possibly garage… lurking like a monster of many pieces waiting to take over the whole house.
I can’t help it. Collections have to be completed. If you see it and you don’t already have it, you must possess it. Twenty-seven cents short of the full price with tax included? Go out to the car and dig in the cup holder. Oops! Can’t part with those particular State Quarters. Will they take that many pennies? Have to try.
Lately I have been victimized by a combination of my disorder and the fact that Toys-R-Us is a convenient restroom stop on the rush-hour drive along I-35 to pick up the Princess at her high school in Carrollton, Texas and my son Henry at his school in Lewisville, Texas. It is a killer two hours and I need to go potty at the halfway point. And I can’t make my way to the restroom without passing the Pez dispenser display. And I can’t pass the Pez dispenser display without… well, you know.
What can I say? I’m diabetic. I have to visit the restroom frequently.
And they do look good on my bookshelves with a lot of the other junk I collect.
And not all of these are new, bought some time this school year. In fact, not most of them.
And they only cost a couple of dollars each.
And I do resist the urge to buy one once in a while… honest, I really do.
And see here? Only Minnie Mouse and Pluto on this shelf are new. And how could I leave this collection without Minnie and Pluto?
And it’s not like butterfly collecting, which I shamefully admit I did as a kid. You don’t kill and mount Pez dispensers. Although I admit, I really don’t know for sure how their factory works.
But I also have to admit, Pez dispensers aren’t the only thing that turns my collecting urge up to the highest possible settings.
So don’t hate me for hoarding. If you’re worried, all of these things are available in stores too. And I have worked on my photographicalizing skills a bit to share them with you. And who knows where these treasures will end up when I pass on to the cartoonist’s paint box in the sky? My daughter has vowed not to let them end up in a landfill somewhere. Somebody will play with them and love them when I’m finally done. MAYBE EVEN FUTURE GRANDCHILDREN. There is a possibility, you know… always a possibility.
Don’t get too excited. I searched every box, trunk, bag of tricks, safe, closet, and jelly bean jar that I have in my rusty old memory. I didn’t find much. In fact, the old saying is rather applicable, “The beginning of wisdom is recognizing just how much of a fool you really are.” The little pile of bottle caps and marshmallows that represent the sum total of my wisdom is infinitely tiny compared to the vast universe of things I will never know and never understand. I am a fool. I probably have no more wisdom than you do. But I have a different point of view. It comes from years worth of turning my ideas inside out, of wearing my mental underwear on the outside of my mental pants just to get a laugh, of stringing images and stupid-headed notions together in long pointless strings like this one.
Mason City, Iowa… where I was born. River City in the musical “The Music Man“.
One thing I can say with certainty, nothing makes you understand “home”, the place you grew up in and think of as where you come from, better than leaving it and going somewhere else. Federal Avenue in Mason City looks nothing now like it did when I was a boy in the 1960’s going shopping downtown and spending hours in department stores waiting for the ten minutes at the end in the toy section you were promised for being good. You have to look at the places and people of your youth through the lenses of history and distance and context and knowing now what you didn’t know then.
Grandpa Aldrich’s farm in Iowa is now Mom and Dad’s house. It has been in the family for over 100 years, a Century Farm.
The only thing that stays the same is that everything changes. If I look back at the arc of my life, growing up in Iowa with crazy story-telling skills inherited from Grandpa Aldrich, to going to Iowa State “Cow College” and studying English, to going to University of Iowa for a remedial teaching degree because English majors can’t get jobs reading books, to teaching in distant South Texas more than a thousand miles away, to learning all the classroom cuss words in Spanish the hard way, by being called that, to moving to Dallas/Fort Worth to get fired from one teaching job and taking another that involved teaching English to non-English speakers, to retiring and spending time writing foolish reflections like this one because I am old and mostly home-bound with ill health. I have come a long way from childhood to second childhood.
If “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is really true, I should be Superman now. I look like I’ve seen a lot of Kryptonite, don’t I?
Six incurable diseases and being a cancer survivor since 1983 have left their marks upon me. Literally. Little pink bleedy spots all over me are the mark of psoriasis. The fuzzy-bad photo of me spares you some of the gory details. The point is, I guess, that life is both fleeting and fragile. If you never stop and think about what it all means then you are a fool. If you don’t try to understand it in terms of sentences and paragraphs with main ideas, you are an even bigger fool. You must write down the fruit of your examinations and ruminations. But if you reach a point that you are actually satisfied that you know what it all means, that makes you the biggest fool of all.
If I have any wisdom at all to share in this post about wisdom, it can be summed up like this;
Writing helps you with knowing, and knowing leads to wisdom. So take some time to write about what you know.
Writing every day makes you more coherent and easier to understand. Stringing pearls of wisdom into a necklace comes with practice.
Writing is worth doing. Everyone should do it. Even if you don’t think you can do it well.
You should read and understand other people’s wisdom too, as often as possible. You are not the only person in the world who knows stuff. And some of their stuff is better than your stuff.
The stuff you write can outlive you. So make the ghost of you that you leave behind as pretty as you can. Someone may love you for it. And you can never be sure who that someone will be.
So by now you are probably wondering, where is all that wisdom he promised us in the title? Look around carefully in this essay. If you don’t see it there, then you are probably right in thinking, just as I warned you about at the outset, “Gosh darn that Mickey! He is a really big fool.”
In Dungeons and Dragons games you are trying to bring characters to imaginary life by getting into their deformed, powerful, or magic-filled heads and walking around in a very dangerous imaginary world. You have to be them. You have to think like them and talk like them. You have to love what they love, decide what they do, and live and die for them. They become real people to you. Well… as real as imaginary people can ever become.
But there are actually two distinct types of characters.
These, remember, are the Player Characters. My two sons and my daughter provide them with their persona, personality, and personhood. They are the primary actors in the stage play in the theater of the mind which is D & D.
But there are other characters too. In fact, a whole complex magical world full of other characters. And as the Dungeon Master, I am the one who steps into their weird and wacky imaginary skins to walk around and be them at least until the Player Characters decide to fireball them, abandon them to hungry trolls, or bonk them on the top of their little horned heads. I get to inhabit an entire zoo of strange and wonderful creatures and people.
Besides the fact that these Non-Player Characters can easily lead you to develop multiple personality disorder, they are useful in telling the story in many different ways. Some are friendly characters that may even become trusted travel companions for the Player Characters.
D & D has a battle system based on controlling the outcomes of the roll of the dice with complex math and gained experience. In simpler terms, there is a lot of bloody whacking with swords and axes that has to take place. You need characters like that both to help you whack your enemies and to be the enemies you get to whack. There is a certain joy to solving your problems with mindless whacking with a sword. And yet, the story is helped when the sword-whackers begin to develop personalities.
Crazy Mervin, for example, began life as a whackable monster that could easily have been murdered by the Player Characters in passing while they were battling the evil shape-changing Emerald Claw leader, Brother Garrow.
But Gandy befriended him and turned him from the evil side by feeding him and sparing him when it really counted. He became a massively powerful ax-whacker for good because Gandy got on his good side. And stupid creatures like Mervin possess simple loyalties. He helped the players escape the Dark Continent of Xendrick with their lives and is now relied upon heavily to help with combat. He was one of the leaders of the charge on the gate when the Players conquered the enthralled Castle Evernight.
Not every NPC is a whackable monster, however. In the early stages of the campaign the Players needed a magic-user who could read magic writing, use detection spells and shielding spells and magic missiles, and eventually lob fireballs on the bigger problems… like dragons.
Druaelia was the wizard I chose to give the group of heroes to fulfill these magical tasks. Every D & D campaign requires wizarding somewhere along the way. And Dru was a complex character from the start. Her fire spells often went awry. When Fate used a magic flaming crossbow bolt to sink a ship he was defending, killing the good guys right along with the bad guys, it was with a magic crossbow bolt crafted by Druaelia. Her fire spells went nuclear-bad more than once. She had to learn along the way that her magical abilities tended more towards ice and snow than fire. She learned to become a powerful wielder of cold powers. And while she was comfortable in a bikini-like dress that drove the boys wild because she grew to love the cold, she didn’t particularly like the attentions of men and male creatures that went along with that. More than one random bandit or bad guy learned the hard way not leer at Dru. There are just certain parts of the anatomy you really don’t want frozen.
The Player Characters will need all sorts of help along the way, through travels and adventures and dangerous situations. They will meet and need to make use of many different people and creatures. And as Dungeon Master I try hard to make the stories lean more towards solving the problems of the story with means other than mere whacking with swords. Sometimes that need for help from others can even lead you into more trouble.
But as I am now nearing the 800 word mark on a 500 word essay, I will have to draw it all to a close. There is a lot more to say about NPC’s from our game. They are all me and probably are proof of impending insanity. But maybe I will tell you about that the next time we sit down together at the D & D table.
I read a lot of other people’s blogs for a lot of reasons. As an old writing teacher and retired Grammar Nazi, I love to see where writers are on the talent spectrum. I have read everything from the philosophy of Camus and Kant to the beginning writing of ESL kids who are illiterate in two languages. I view it like a vast flower garden of varied posies where even the weeds can be considered beautiful. And like rare species of flower, I notice that many of the best blossoms out there in the blogosphere are consistent with their coloring and patterns. In other words, they have a theme.
So, do I have an over-all theme for my blog? It isn’t purely poetical like some of the poetry blogs I like to read. I really only write comically bad poetry. It has photos in it, but it isn’t anything like some of the photography blogs I follow. They actually know how to photograph stuff and make it look perfect and pretty. It is not strictly an art blog. I do a lot of drawing and cartooning and inflict it upon you in this blog. But I am not a professional artist and can’t hold a candle to some of the painters and artists I follow and sometimes even post about. I enjoy calling Trump President Pumpkinhead, but I can’t say that my blog is a political humor blog, or that I am even passable as a humorous political commentator.
One thing that I can definitely say is that I was once a teacher. I was one of those organizers and explainers who stand in front of diverse groups of kids five days a week for six shows a day and try to make them understand a little something. Something wise. Something wonderful. Something new. Look at the video above if you haven’t already watched it. Not only does it give you a sense of the power of holding the big pencil, it teaches you something you probably didn’t realize before with so much more than mere words.
But can I say this is an education blog? No. It is far too silly and pointless to be that. If you want a real education blog, you have to look for someone like Diane Ravitch’s blog. Education is a more serious and sober topic than Mickey.
By the way, were you worried about the poor bunny in that first cartoon getting eaten by the fox and the bear? Well, maybe this point from that conversation can put your mind at ease.
Mickey is tricky and gets good mileage out of his cartoons.
You may have gotten the idea that I like Bobby McFerrin by this point in my post. It is true. Pure genius and raw creative talent fascinate me. Is that the end point of my journey to an answer about what the heck this blog is about? Perhaps. As good an answer as any. But I think the question is still open for debate. It is the journey from thought through many thoughts to theme that make it all fun. And I don’t anticipate that journey actually ending anytime soon.
This is a place I explore in cartoons and daydreams. It is a little town known as Animal Town for fairly obvious reasons. It is populated by silly anthropomorphic animals who wear clothes and keep naked people as pets.
Animal Town is one of the all-time silliest places to visit in the cartoon dreamland of Fantastica.
Mandy Panda and little brother Dandy are my constant companions and guides when I tour the dangerous streets of wild Animal Town. In my cartoons, Mandy is an immigrant from the Pandalore Islands. She is also the cartoon version of my wife.
Three of the Town’s most important head monkeys.
It was Mandy who introduced me to the government officials who run Animal Town. Judge Moosewinkle is the head of the Animal Town court system. He is a hanging judge, so I am very careful about littering and loitering when I am in town.
Constable Geoffrey Giraffe does all the arresting and police work. He used to work in a toy store, but quit his job there when he couldn’t get them to stop writing the R backwards on all their signs. Grammar infractions annoy him more than any other crime.
Linus the Kitten-Hearted is the mayor of Animal Town. They wanted to crown him as king, but he always says that’s only for when he’s in the jungle. In town he prefers to be a democratically elected leader. Of course, if you refuse to vote for him, he might eat you.
Most of my dreams in Animal Town are about the school there.
Yes, this is a yearbook picture from Animal Town Elementary School.
Miss Ancient’s Class of 5th graders is usually rather rowdy and difficult. You may have noticed there is a bare bear in the old buzzard’s class. The fact is, the bears in Animal Town are all naturists and refuse to wear clothes. This disturbs poor Miss
Ancient greatly, and it is therefore a real godsend that a fig leaf just happened to be drifting down through the air at the time this picture was made. Bobby Bare is not shy, but some things are better not put into a cartoon.
Yes, this is another yearbook picture. And I am in it twice, since Mr. Reluctant Rabbit is also me.
As a visitor to Animal Town, Cissy Bare took me to Mr. Rabbit’s class as her pet for show and tell. She is also a bare bear, and she also benefited from a passing leaf at picture time. You may notice students putting rabbit ears behind each other’s heads in pictures… something that human children do too in real life. But when I study this picture, I can’t help but think that maybe Mr. Rabbit started it. Now, Animal Town is located in Fantastica, a part of the Dreamlands. So that sort of explains how I ended up in school naked. My dreams are like that. You are in school in the middle of lessons before you realize that haven’t got a single stitch of clothing on.
When I am inevitably charged with public indecency for being in school naked, I can turn to Animal Town lawyer Woolbinkle Moosewinkle. He is totally incompetent and not very bright, but unlike most of the animals, he is friendly and on my side. Spot Firedog is a Dalmatian who knows how to use a newspaper. He is a reporter, publisher, and all-around good dog. He wrote an expose on me being naked in the Animal Town Elementary school.
Big Bull Beefalo runs the local hamburger emporium, which might seem like collusion to cannabalism, but Bull is a very gentle and very large soul. He is himself a vegetarian, but he is a gifted fry cook and chef. I can go to his restaurant when I get out of jail, though hopefully not as food.
So, Animal Town is a very different kind of place. It is the result of dreams and goofiness and uncontrolled spurts of cartoonist creativity. It is a cartoon sort of place where spontaneous and random humor happens.
I have always contended that I don’t have writer’s block. But some days, especially if I am not feeling well, I have writer’s lethargy. I can be slow to come up with the next thing. Writing can become bogged down and I am easily distracted or lose focus and have to return to what I was trying to do previously.
There is evidence that I have often had that kind of problem frequently on this blog. One thing I do to overcome writer’s lethargy is suddenly start thinking about how you can overcome writer’s block. What are the strategies that help me overcome it?
I often resort to “kickstart statements.” These are surprising or deep-left-field items that give the old brain a shot of adrenaline. The picture of the girl with the message blackboard is that kind of kickstarter. I never could have used that thing in any kind of social-media post when I was still employed as a teacher. It has the potential to generate parent complaints and administrative thoughts about evaluations and contract cancellations. But there really are kids who have thoughts like that in your classroom, and I know because not only was I a kid like that myself, I used it as an optional journal topic for writing practice, and, boy! do they ever catch fire when they can write about something like that and they know only the teacher is ever going to read it. It is the way I learned how many of my students had ever been to a nude beach in Corpus Christi or Lake Travis (Hippy Hollow.)
I can also look around the room, or scroll through my media library on WordPress and find an image or an item that generates ideas, responses, and even stories. I scrolled through to find this image of the Gummi Bear, who was a brief internet sensation on YouTube a few years ago coming from German CGI cartoons that illustrated earworm music with dancing green gummy bears. There’s a lot a goofy writer like me can run away with inspired by a nonsense thing like that.
It is also possible to generate new ideas by deconstructing a metaphor in as humorous and convoluted a way as possible. This word-food thing is the result of writer’s lethargy of a while back.
Of course, there is always the ranting factor. This, I think, is a go-to method used by stand-up comedians. They will pick something that is deeply bugging them, like the rats that inhabit my attic and walls during a winter that hasn’t yet completely gone. And they start listing all the ways they can make funny stories about the time the rat appeared on the bathroom floor tiles while my daughter was on the toilet, or the time the dog killed a rat that was in the trap already, but not dead enough not to bite back with the dog’s nose conveniently within the reach of rat teeth. And then they can rant onward about how disgusting rats are. And how can anyone look at a rat face and think they are cute? You look at that evil, beady-eyed face and you don’t think Mickey Mouse, you think plague, disease, the Black Death, and how much the Bank of America lawyer who sued you looks just like that.
So, you can see that generating ideas is easy. And you can write something interesting even on days when you can’t think of anything … quickly. When you have, not writer’s block, but writer’s lethargy.
In Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley comics there is one old flivver-driving fool named Grandpa Futty. He is the slowest driver on the road. Rarely does he go over the breakneck speed of two miles per hour. He is so overly cautious, that if there are two lanes going his way, he takes the middle of the road and effectively moseys along in his putter-banger taking up both lanes. What is that you say, young whipper-snapper? You don’t know what a putter-banger is? Great galloping goat galoshes! It’s a car, dang it! You see them all over the metroplex. They are so ancient that when you start it up with the hand crank, the engine coughs and the muffler falls off in back. They were purchased as a used car two decades ago. The only thing more miraculous than the fact that the car still runs is the fact that the old goat driving it is still alive (though the local police routinely have to stop him to check and see if his heart is actually still beating. If it isn’t they have to fight with him about dropping him off at the nearest funeral home.)
So, if you haven’t guessed already, this post is about the generically named drivers I refer to as a Grampa Futty, and they are the exact opposite of the Texas Killer Grandmas I wrote about yesterday. Believe it or not, I think I have graduated into the Grandpa Futty class of driver. I can still see more than three feet in front of my car, but I do have a dumpy-lumpy body that hobbles around with a cane, and I do smell like Ben Gay Ointment and Vick’s Vapo-rub. (…And no, you can’t say Ben Queer Ointment and have it mean the same thing, young whipper-snapper! That joke is nearly as old as I am!) I am not entirely in that category of driver, though, because I still curse them with gusto and interjections like “dang it!” whenever I am behind one of that breed. And besides, the last time the cop stopped me to check my heartbeat, it was going strong.
Grandpa Futtys are a real road hazard in the obstacle-filled world of Texas city driving… if it were a video game like Super Mario Brothers, they would not be Bowser, but rather that annoying Koopa Troopa that you just can’t bounce on hard enough to get past. They are in the way, endearingly cute in an ugly-old-fart sort of manner, and potentially deadly as they put you in line for the easy kill by the nearest Texas Killer Granny. So I am seriously studying now how to avoid Grandpa Futty on the road next time I see him, and I am definitely studying how not to become him.
You know by now if you have read what I’ve written, or been around me when people make the mistake of letting me talk about what I want to talk about, that I am a kook. Yes, I believe things that you have been told that only crazy people believe. Why would you want to read any more of that nonsense now? Because it is true and it will impact our future.
I came into a wealth of secret knowledge when I wrote and published my first good novel, Catch a Falling Star. Of course, like most of the things you research on the internet, ninety-nine per cent of everything is big, black rubber hoo-haw lies. I researched a lot of things that I have always been fascinated by, but specifically I investigated UFO phenomenon. I already followed author Stanton Friedman and knew who Bob Lazar was before starting my research, but I wanted to dig deeper and find the truth. My novel, after all, is about close encounters of the third, fourth, and fifth kinds… including an invisible invasion of Earth from outer space. I wanted to portray such events as alien contact and alien abduction as realistically as possible. But then I found stuff like the Disclosure Project headed by Doctor Steven Greer. Did you know he has been collecting eye-witness and whistle-blower information in written and video form since the 1990’s and presenting it to members of congress? There is an immense database of information about contact with UFO’s and the government’s response to it that can be cross-referenced and even corroborates itself. There comes a point at which eye-witness testimony, even loony-sounding testimony, has to be accepted when there is a preponderance of evidence.
The thing that makes the case most strongly for me is the provable amount of cover-up and misdirection that the government has applied to this body of knowledge. They are still doing it. NASA footage and photographic records are open to the public and available online. Lots of people have examined the wealth of evidence very closely and have found things that the government apparently overlooked. There are also an even more impressive number of identified re-touched and faked photos of the Moon and Mars and especially the Earth from space. Things have been removed so that we the people will not see. Some nut-cases even believe we never actually went to the moon. Some of the moon footage and photos are provably fake. (But you can also spot the landing sites of the Apollo missions on the surface of the moon with some of the very good telescopes available now… The proof of our moon landings is there. The stuff was redacted and faked for different reasons… a different cover-up.)
So, why does this matter? Maybe we are better off being protected from this secret knowledge. We are too fragile to take it. There will be riots in the street and the economy will crash. We are safer being ignorant of all of this.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…no!
It’s time we were given the straight poop (because everybody hates crooked poop… at least they should.) Our world is dying from pollution and global warming, yet the alien technology can provide clean, free energy. Rich people are exploiting the poor and the middle class and so much suffering occurs that doesn’t have to happen if we embrace the potential for taking our place in a galactic community that apparently already exists and that we are excluded from solely on the basis of how dangerous our own ignorance makes us.
Catch a Falling Star 