Category Archives: humor

January 11, 2024 · 1:02 am

The Uncritical Critic Watches Another Quirky Movie

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Yesterday was a weird day.  If you looked carefully at the mental map I made of Mickey’s head the other day, you realize that Uncle Slappy’s Big Box of Weirdness occupies a key position in the top center.  I had a traffic accident in the parking lot of Long Middle School yesterday morning, banging bumpers with a lady named Vilma.  The sun was in my eyes, and she started to go, then suddenly stopped for no reason I could see.  No damage was done to anything but my pride.  My wife put her parents, Tatang and Inang, on an airplane yesterday bound for the Philippine Islands, going home for a visit.  Afterwards, my wife was feeling mortal, betting me that she was going to die before me even though I have the head start of six incurable diseases and surviving cancer once already.  There are no symptoms for her impending heart attack, so I will probably win that bet.  But the point is, it was a weird time yesterday to stumble weirdly over a weird and wacky movie on Netflix called Moonrise Kingdom.  It is a Romeo and Juliet sort of story about two twelve-year-olds who fall in love at first sight, and though their families try to keep them apart, they end up together.  Thankfully it is not a Shakespearian Tragedy where everybody dies at the end, though Sam is struck by lightning and the big storm nearly drowns all the boy scouts.  It is more like a Shakespearian Comedy where everybody gets married at the end, though the twelve-year-olds don’t get married at the end… rather, they are married by the middle.

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Wes Anderson is the genius director behind movies like;

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None of which I have seen, but now have to watch ALL of them sooner or later.  Kinda like the mad quest to see every Tim Burton movie ever made.  I am one of the few idiots out there who think Dark Shadows was a truly wonderful movie, and along with Edward Scissor-hands, one of the finest things Johnny Depp has ever done.

In Moonrise Kingdom Anderson uses tracking shots at the beginning that shift quickly from one room to the next in a way that invokes an old-time slide show.  The story is set in 1965 in Maine, and is filled with all kinds of iconic references to things we 60’s kids all vividly recall.

The movie also tells the love story of Sam and Suzy with a painter’s sense of iconic pictures that focus you on important plot points and themes.

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And there are numerous quotable bits that make the movie what we teachers refer to as a text-rich environment, complete with phony kids’ books and maps and notes.

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The all-star cast is pretty good, too.

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This is now one of my new favorite movies.  It is a happy-ending-type fairy tale with no fairies in it.  It is full of ineffectual and incompetent adults who have rules of behavior like grown-ups and motivations like goofy kids… just like real life.  The plot is driven by the notion that anything you do in life is a mistake, and mistakes have consequences, but you have to do them anyway because, well… that’s life.

Am I telling you that you should watch this movie too?  Well, you should… but, no.  I am simply gushing about this quirky movie because I like it, and yesterday was a very weird day.

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January 9, 2024 · 2:01 am

The Barbie Shelf

Goofy-guy doll collector, me, will now give you a grand tour of the Barbie Shelf.  This is a place in my home that was originally created by the previous owners of the house.  It was a place in the upstairs play room apparently meant for the things that needed to be kept out of little girls’ reach.  Maybe pampers and baby wipes.  Cleaning supplies.  And possibly toys that were not to be broken immediately and had to be regulated.  I don’t know why else you would grace a playroom with a shelf up near the ceiling and above the only door into the room.  It was, however, perfect for the plastic people who were destined to take it over as their own.

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It begins above the bedroom door.  My wife has a thing about keeping her dolls mint in box.  She has more of an eye to their value as collectible investments.  The fashion Barbie nestled above the door in her box is a recreation of a 1962 doll that was reissued in 1999.  You can also see the Teacher Barbie that the Princess once de-boxed and played with.  And there you can also see the start of the Wizard of Oz collection.  There are little munchkin dolls and the Ken doll dressed as the Cowardly Lion in the picture.

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In front of Dorothy and Glinda from Oz, you see some of the recycled Goodwill Barbies that I bought naked and abandoned, cleaned and dressed, washed and tried to brush out their hair.  One of them had some marker on her face that had to be soaked off with secret sauce to restore a more human look.  The one in the middle is a 1980’s Asian Barbie.  There is also a Cowgirl Barbie wearing an extra gun belt from a CA Lone Ranger set.

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The kids are protected by Eustace the purple pottery dragon who was fired in my mother’s kiln during the height of her doll-making hobby and painted by me.  The kids here include a tiny Tommy doll, three Skippers from the early 70’s, and Hermione from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  You can see the Scarecrow and the Tin Man in the back, and there’s also Goodwill Barbie that for some odd reason has purple hair.

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Ricky (a 1960’s boy toy for Skipper) sits with Ashley Olsen between more recycled Goodwill Barbies.  1980’s Skipper is trying to push poor roller-skate Barbie off the shelf.

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My newest My Little Pony in mutant almost human form, Rainbow Dash the Equestria girl, is the blue doll in the middle here.  Mary-Kate Olsen can be seen in the Blue dress.  All you can see of Britney Spears here are her legs and feet, probably a safety feature of this tour.  The topless ballerina Barbie is wearing a jacket, but I could not close it on her extra large Barbie mammaries.  Princess Jasmine, my daughter’s somewhat beat-up favorite begins Disney Princess Row.

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Li Shang is still mint in box, but Mulan isn’t even on the shelf any more.  Some of Mom’s dolls got played with by the Princess.  Mulan lost her hair.  There is one American Girl doll here, bought at a yard sale for 25 cents, but I found a dress to fit her at Walmart in a sale bin.  Unfortunately I can’t name her correctly yet and she is barefoot like most of the Goodwill dolls.

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Almost to the end of the shelf, you can now see Apple Jack and Twilight Sparkle, my other two mutant pony girls, discovered at an After-Christmas Sale at Toys-R-Us.  They are standing on Grandma Beyer’s home bingo set from the 1930’s, and Disney Princesses are lined up behind them.

20150112_145808At the tail end of the shelf you will see Twilight Sparkle again to take the focus off poor 1980’s nudist Skipper (I robbed her of her clothes for one of the older, more rare Skippers that are worth a bit more to collectors).  Seated between is Asian Rock n Roll Barbie (Leah actually).  You may have noticed I am careful not to over-identify any of the members of the collection.  I got taken to task on E-Bay about descriptions of which Barbie was which once.  There are people out there much more rabid about doll collecting than I.  The difference between a 1980’s Butterfly Tattoo Barbie and an Anniversary Edition Malibu Barbie can get you challenged to a duel… with rapiers… in France.  I had to talk him into balloons and blunderbusses (an idea borrowed from Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines), and I lost.  I had to settle for the price offered even though my own research suggested I was not wrong.  (Well, okay, maybe I didn’t really go through with the duel thing, but the argument was just as intense and just as silly as that.)

So that is my long-winded essay on the essentials of the Barbie Shelf.  I will be looking at it a lot for the next few years since it is in the room I am using as my bedroom.  (Not in perfect health, I needed a room that I could completely seal up at night in order to breathe better.)  I really didn’t think I could pull off 500 words about this one goofy shelf in the house, but I now realize that I have nearly reached 900.

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January 8, 2024 · 3:40 am

Dippy Dogs Must Die! (a Talking-Animal Short Story)

Pepe n Skaggs

My name is Skaggs.  I am a cat.  It is as simple as that.  I have to tell you, life is not very fair to cats.  In my last life I was an alley cat.  I lived on rats that bred and thrived under the water tower in the alley behind the small-town post office.    I was basically happy.  You have heard the old expression, “happy as a cat”, right?  I could kill and eat any rat I wanted at any time, no matter how big of a Mickey he thought he was.  I was good at ripping out rat guts and breaking mouse spines.  I was the baddest cat in the whole damn town.

But I had to share my alley with a dog.  That Barky Bill was an insane killer canine that the owner of the local restaurant and bar kept chained behind his Main Street building to keep the rats away from the restaurant garbage.   I hated that dog with a hate as great as a vampire has for the sun.   (What’s that you say?  You didn’t know that cats knew about vampires?  Silly human, how little you know about the things that should truly scare you in the world.  Cats, vampires, and Barky Bill are far more complicated issues in the world than you realize.)  Anyway, needless to say, I teased that dog on a heavy chain leash for the better part of three years when one day, to my utter horror, I discovered he was loose at the same time that I was totally focused on catching and eating a beautiful gold-colored squirrel.  I was so sure that the squirrel would be the finest thing that any cat had ever eaten, that I didn’t even notice, mainly because I had that squirrel right between my paws, toying with it before devouring it, that the dog was pouncing.  Barky Bill bit clean through my neck.  It was so shocking that even as I was being transported to life number seven, my severed head watched in confusion and fright as that ugly, smelly dog ate my finely tuned rat-catching body.

So, having been a bad, bad Leroy Brown sort of cat, I was sentenced to a next life with a crazy cat lady.   Miss Velma Proddy owned at least fifty cats.  I was reborn in an underwear drawer in her back bedroom, the one she kept for the company that she never had.   My mother was the cat called Pinkie, even though she was a milk-white cat.    My father was Proddy’s favorite, a tomcat called Tom Selleck.    He would’ve killed and eaten me soon after I was born because my mother was not a very dominant fighter and alpha cats like Tom could always sense when a cat filled with pure evil is born.   But Proddy was having none of that.  She rounded up all the kittens and raised them in a blanket box in the corner of the kitchen near the stove.  I owe that woman everything, which is why I don’t understand why she had to go and buy Pepe.

Pepe is more of a malnourished rat than a dog.   Like a lot of Chihuahuas he trembles a lot, and he blinks at you with those big round eyes of his.   Proddy thinks that everything he does is so cute.  She carries him around like a prize possession or a human baby or something.  In my past life I was a white cat like my mother.  (Everyone knows that when a cowboy wears a white hat, it means he’s a good guy, but when a cat has white fur, it means that it is evil.)  In this, my seventh incarnation, owing to the fact that my father was a gray tiger cat, I was a sort of white cat with gray tiger stripes.  It meant I thought like a tiger.  Pepe looked like a rat to me.  Pepe was prey.  Pepe was meat.  I was going to eat him.

“You tell this story so scary, Señor Skaggs,” says Pepe, “you make me so afraid!”

“Shut up, stupid dog.  I’m telling this.  And you are not afraid.  Remember what happened that time I tried  to drown you in the toilet?”

“Si.  I remember well.  That time with the super-fancy drinking bowl.”

“I saw you trying to hold on to the plastic toilet seat and dip your tiny little tongue into the water that was too far below you to reach.  Only your hind legs and stupid little tail were even visible.”

“Si!  And you jumped up to smack me on my cute little behind and push me in.  I remember.”

“But I was surprised that such a little dog could react so fast and leap so far.”

“Si, Señor.  I jumped right on that handle and flushed it.”

“Just as I fell into the water.  That would’ve been the start of number eight if Proddy hadn’t come along right then.”.

“Oh, you make me laugh so hard, Señor.  And she was so mad at you for playing with the toilet!”

“And you remember the time I almost got you with that pot of boiling water and hard-boiled eggs?”

“Si, Señor.  You got up on the kitchen counter right next to the stove.  I was sitting on the floor in front of the stove sniffing up all the smell of the bacon.  You tried to push the pot off the stove.”

“I still haven’t figured out how you planned it.  The bald spots I have all around my front paws are still there from my fur catching on fire.  You must’ve been sitting in the precise spot on the floor where I couldn’t knock the pot down on you without passing my paws through the flames.”

“You owe that one to Señora Proddy too.  She had that fire extinguisher next to the stove.  That saved you from being cooked cat-burgers.  And you looked so funny when she almost drowned you in that white foamy stuff.  Oh, you make me laugh so hard Señor.”

Well, I am guessing that I made my point by now.  This little underfed rat of a dog is more evil than I am!  The harder I try to kill and eat him, the more I suffer for it.  And I still don’t know how he does it!  He makes my life miserable.  He needs to die.

“Oh, you make me laugh so hard, Señor!”

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January 7, 2024 · 1:34 am

My School-Teacher Soapbox

It has been more than a semester now that I have not been a teacher.  I am missing it mightily.  I even miss the yelling and screaming, the name-calling and the crazy-eyed threats against life and limb.  And that’s just me.  I miss what the kids always did too.  This was driven home to me as I tried to move my middle child from one school to another.  We were hoping to get a bit of a break on his placement.  He is a gifted child with a penchant for bizarre and long-lasting obsessions.  He has a talent for building huge, monumental structures in Minecraft.  He is very computer-nerd and history-wonk.  (Yes, I know those are not pure predicate adjectives, but I am a retired English teacher and just don’t care any more.)  I was hoping they could overlook his burnout/blowout eighth-grade brain meltdown from the previous year and give him the chance to be a ninth grader for at least half a year.  No.  Arbitrary rules must be obeyed.  (That isn’t even how she said it.  More like, arbitrary rules MUST be obeyed).  That meant of course that he has to continue to repeat the mindless indoctrination of year number 9, (eight numbered grades plus K), (And Pre-K, come to think of it.)  Make that year number 10.  No high school yet, though he is more than mature enough, intelligent enough, motivated enough, and sweet-natured enough.  We are not loving and forgiving people.  We are strict and by-the-book people!  Forgive me, Lord.  I am writing my own book.  (In more ways than one.)

This is what we are doing wrong in Education;

1.   We are putting people in boxes.  (Little people.  Kids mostly.  We are calling those boxes things like ADHD, Special Education, trouble-maker, learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, disobedient, truant, and “in need of alternative education”… here meaning kid-prison.)

2.  We are sealing those boxes with heavy-duty red tape.  (Read special or remedial classes as waste-baskets for keeping the rabble and the riff-raff out of the good teachers’ hair.)

3.  We are routinely handing those boxes to the box-bangers and package manglers.  (The semi-incompetent teachers who have discipline problems because in teacher college nobody tells you what to do with the kid who sits in the corner and sings to himself instead of paying attention, or the girl who gets out of her seat every time the teacher turns his back to go flitting around the room like a bumble bee going flower to flower (except that it is a more hormonal attraction and goes boy to boy); or the competent teacher like me who incurs the principal’s disfavor for having classes that always make noise and are given such classes in boxes as a punishment because that kind of principal is too limited in intelligence to understand that those kinds of boxes are not really a punishment if you merely take a moment to examine the treasures they contain.)

4.  We keep the boxes air-tight so that no oxygen or light gets in.  (To suffocate learners under piles of worksheets and endless drill and practice is murder.  We are killing the precious learners with boring stuff and teaching them to be zombies who all act alike and hate learning because their brains are rotted masses of goo.)

This is what we must do instead;

1.  Open the boxes up again and thoroughly mix the contents.  (The rich suburban parents will resent the heck out of having their precious honors student sitting in class next to the poor black kid from the projects, but studies show that both kinds of learners do better when they are mixed together.)

2.  Notice, we don’t need two any more, because learners are already distributed to different and diverse boxes based on what they individually need and want to learn about and have talent for.  Groups should be more like the Shakespeare-loving group or the talkative-socializing group or the Tinker-toy builders group or the vampire-literature-writing group and less like groups of kids all the same color or all the same culture or all the same age.

3.  All the teachers need to be trained to handle all the possible… no, make that probable problems that may come up in the classroom.  Every classroom needs a proven veteran teacher and an enthusiastic young apprentice teacher.  Neither one should have to face the evil hordes alone.  And most important of all, any teacher who doesn’t love working with kids (and doesn’t love the kids in a way that will not lead to a prison term) needs be utilized in some way other than as a classroom teacher.

4.  Every classroom is a laboratory and every teacher is a creative and daring mad-scientist-type intent on trying new things and only re-doing things that really work well.  Forget this nonsense about standard curriculum goals and common core curriculum.  Those are only buzz words for suffocating learners and being too lazy to think on your feet in the middle of the every-day classroom battle in the on-going War on Ignorance.

Now you see… I have all the answers and I know everything.  The only mystery is… why don’t more people listen to me?

Tabron

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January 1, 2024 · 1:46 am

Mr. Happy

I know that I am probably the last person you would think of to ask for advice on how to be happy. I am a crotchety old coot, a former middle-school English teacher, a grumpy old-enough-to-be-a-grandpa non-grandpa, an atheist, a nudist, and a conspiracy theorist. You would expect someone like me to be out in his yard in his underwear yelling at pigeons for pooping on his car more than they do his wife’s car. Be that as it may, I am also basically happy.

You know what happy looks like, surely. After Christmas day is over you see two kinds of kids. One kind is miserable and grumbling in his or her room about their Christmas gift that they didn’t get, in spite of the five expensive toys they did get. Yeah, that one’s never going to be happy. Then there’s the other kind, the one happily breaking or playing with the few cheap toys their parents could afford, using more of their own imagination than the imagination the toy companies pay someone to put into their TV or YouTube toy commercials. That one is going to be somebody you can rely on for years to come. That’s the kind of kid I like to think I was. Of course, I’m probably wrong about that too. Being a middle-school teacher gives you plenty of opportunity to learn the lesson that you are actually wrong about everything in life, and like Socrates, you know absolutely nothing for sure about anything.

Years upon years of being a public school teacher, the butt of comedians’ best school-memory jokes, the target of Republican spending cuts for saving enough money to give massive tax cuts to billionaires, and having to be every kind of professional for every kind of kid, no matter how ugly and unlovable they are, teaches you where true happiness comes from.

A. You have to learn to love the job you are trying to do. And…

B. You need to do the job you love with every resource you can squeeze out of your poor, battery-powered soul.

I did that. I did the job all the way from deluded and idealistic days of youth to cynical and caustic old age hanging onto your job by the fingernails until you have to choose between dying in front of the whole classroom of horrified kiddos you have learned to love, or going kicking and screaming into retirement to maybe live a bit longer than you would have if you had stayed at your work station in the idiot-to-income-earner factory for young minds.

Being satisfied with the career you chose and the success or failure you made of it is not the only factor in being happy. Teachers don’t earn much compared to corporate informational presenters who do the same job for a lot more money in front of a lot less hostile audiences far fewer times a day. So, it helps if you can manage to need less stuff in life. After all, stuff costs lots of money. Especially stuff you don’t really need.

That is why being a nudist and not having to worry about how much you spend on clothes helps a lot with your basic level of happiness and peace of mind. Also, lots of vitamin D soaked up through your nude all-togetherness produces happy-hormones in the brain.

Being an avowed pessimist is good for being happier in life as well. After all, the pessimist is always prepared for the worst to happen. And since the worst rarely is what actually happens, the pessimist is never shocked and dismayed and is frequently pleasantly surprised.

And so, here is Mr. Happy’s secret to a long and happy life;

  1. Tell yourself that the job you have to do is the job you love to do often enough that you actually begin to believe it.
  2. Do that job you love as hard and as well as it is possible for you to do.
  3. Love the people you work for and the people you work with, even if you have to pretend really hard until it becomes real to you too.
  4. Be satisfied with the stuff you need, and try to need as little as possible. The man whose paycheck is bigger than his bills is happier than the man whose paycheck only pays for a portion of the interest on his wife’s credit cards.
  5. Wear fewer clothes. You don’t need them in a quickly warming world. And you should love the skin you’re in.
  6. Expect the worst possible outcome from everything in life, and then there is nowhere to go but upwards.

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December 28, 2023 · 1:39 am

Writing About Nothing and Nobody Being Nowhere

Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Walt Disney, and Edgar Allen Poe (the four clowns depicted above) all probably had times in their writing life when they didn’t really have anything to write about. Charles Dickens couldn’t think of anything but his time in the boot-black factory and the misery he felt as a child raised in poverty. So, what did he do? He created Wilkins Micawber as a stand-in for his ne’er-do-well father who always believed, “Something will presently turn up.” And he wrote the semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield.

William Shakespeare didn’t actually write anything with his grade-school education and limited knowledge of the world. But when the Earl of Oxford who used his name as a nom de plume could think of nothing, he thought of ending it all, and the “To-be-or-not-to-be…” play, Hamlet, poured out of his quill pen onto paper.

And when Walt Disney rode the train in defeat, having lost his best comic character for cartoons, Oswald the Rabbit, to his old boss, he doodled a mouse and named him Mickey, even providing Mickey’s falsetto voice for decades on the silver screen. Oh, and claiming the rights to any further characters his studios produced… to this day.

Poe looked at the bust over his chamber door… and saw a raven. Instantly, NEVERMORE.

Now it’s Mickey’s turn to write about nothing, and try to live up to the nothing-masters’ artistic masterpieces of yore. For instance, the boy in the picture. I drew him from a nude model in a black-and-white photo. Nobody in class, not even the one who brought the picture, ever told me his name. And the class was forty-four years ago now. So, assuming the picture wasn’t old back then, the boy is now older than fifty-four, and possibly significantly older than that now. So it is a picture of a nude nobody in front of an abandoned house in the snow however-many years ago in a place that is probably nowhere now. And I won’t even mention the imaginary puzzle pieces floating through the air for nobody to put together. What’s that? I just mentioned them? What did I mention? They are really just nothing.

So, there is a time and a place for writing about everything. Even if that everything includes nothing… and that nothing is nowhere… and is about nobody.

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December 26, 2023 · 1:05 am

Comic Book Heroes Who are Older Than Me

I don’t know if you know this, but I am in reality older than Spiderman. I am also older than the Fantastic Four. All of the Avengers except for Captain America are younger than me. Well, you could argue that Thor and Hercules were around longer than me. And the Sub Mariner, And the original Human Torch, the one that Ultron would eventually turn into the Vision. But I am turning 67 this year, and only the Golden Age comic-book characters are actually older than me.

Superman, from the date of his actual creation, not his first publication, is turning 90 this year. Schuster and Seigal drew the first Superman strips in 1933.

At the beginning of June 2024, the Spirit will be 84 years old. Created by Will Eisner in 1940 the Spirit got an entire full-color page in more than 20 newspapers with a total circulation of more than 5 million copies nationwide. Denny Colt got his super crime-fighting powers by basically being a ghost, back from the dead to punish his killers and other criminals every Sunday until 1952.

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Sheena, Queen of the Jungle is turning 86 this year, she was created in 1938 by Jerry Iger working with Will Eisner, among others. She looks pretty good for her age. But, consider this, she is based on the character Rima the Jungle Girl from William Henry Hudson’s 1904 novel Green Mansions. Rima, if she had become a comic book character too would be 119 this year.

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The Shadow, too, is pretty damn old. He celebrates his 93rd birthday this year if you consider his pulp fiction origin in 1930. He was also the narrator of a radio show before actually becoming a comic book hero. The old man of this essay was a billionaire who could become invisible thanks to his mind-control powers. And he also had peerless martial arts prowess. He is an obvious inspiration for Bob Kane’s Batman.

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Batman and Robin, as understudies to the Shadow are virtually the same age. Batman was created in 1939 in Detective Comics, and Robin would appear for the first time before the year was out. That makes them both 84 years old this year.

The first time they appeared in their own title was in 1940, so that makes the Joker, Alfred Pennyworth, and Catwoman 83 years old.

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Alex Raymond’s imitation of Buck Rodgers’s comic, Flash Gordon, first appeared in newspapers in 1934. That makes Flash, Dale Arden, and Dr. Zarkov all celebrate their 89th birthday this year.

The Green Hornet is 87 years old.

Wonder Woman is 82 years old.

So, even though I am old and creaky, reading comics with the older superheroes in them makes me feel like a kid again. An old, creaky kid.

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December 25, 2023 · 10:58 pm

Thinking About Thinking About Christmas

Yeah, I know… The title seems like a typo. But this pointlessly obtuse Mickian essay is actually about metacognition of the concept of having the “Christmas spirit.” In other words, I am writing about and analyzing how I think about Christmas. A nerdy thing to do done by a nerd who wants you to think he is smarter than he really is.

The Reason for the Season

Yes, I live in Texas, so I am constantly seeing the “Reason for the Season” signs in every Southern Baptist churchyard. So, what do I think is the reason? Yeah, you probably don’t want to know. I was a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses for 20 years. Not that I believed in the evils of celebrating Christmas. I only stopped following Witness commands when they abandoned me in times of spiritual need, but I do retain the belief that if Jesus was a real human being, he was not born on December 25th. If the shepherds were watching their flocks by night, then the latest it could have been was in October. Shepherds don’t graze their flocks in winter. The celebration is what the Christian bigwigs decided they would use to co-opt the pagan Saturnalia. The date represents the rebirth of the Sun after the Winter Solstice on December 21st. The Sun, not the Son.

But unlike Jehovah’s Witnesses, I don’t see the Christmas holiday as a bad thing. People, Christian or not, are nicer to each other this time of year. They are much quicker to think of others and take pity on those who are suffering or are in serious need of help. And they think about giving gifts to others. particularly family. Growing up a Methodist Christian, I never noticed any parents at all giving their kids lumps of coal. Even the really bad kids got cool stuff as gifts from Mom and Dad, or Grandma or Grandpa, or whoever else was lucky enough to have to put up with them daily throughout the year.

People actually willingly spend time with their family this time of year. They hear the minister occasionally when he reads aloud the Bible verses about what Jesus commanded concerning widows and orphans, the homeless, and the poor. And Jesus never said that their reduced condition was their own fault for not working hard enough or not being a good-church-goer enough. And people who choose to reach out and spend time with each other during the season of good feelings generally find they actually like those fellow human beings they chose to spend some of their time with. All people are generally good when they are not being swayed by a way to make lots of money or enraged and vengeful for the real and imagined hurts that others have inflicted on them. I think it is absolutely vital that people have a celebration when they have survived another year of life in which not all of their family and friends are dead and they may even have a little money on hand to celebrate with. If Christmas didn’t already exist, we would desperately need to create something just like it.

Vincent Price’s Christmas Tree again

Vincent Price’s Christmas Tree Explained

The picture above, a surrealist picture-poem of how I feel about Christmas now that I am retired and no longer a Jehovah’s Witness, has never really been explained by me. Now that I am baring my soul as a Christian Existentialist Nudist Atheist who believes in God, I should elaborate on what it means.

The picture is named after the photo-shopped Christmas Tree in the back corner. I photo-shopped it from a photo of Vincent Price, the horror-movie actor, in a TV Christmas special in the 1960’s. I photo-shopped Vincent out of the picture, of course, just clipping and pasting the tree itself. I spent a good share of my youth, including all of my teen years, nursing a terrible secret. I was sexually assaulted at the age of ten. I believed I was a monster. But the Christmas I created the picture and photo-shopped Vincent out, I had successfully made peace with the monster in my past. My story is not a horror story. So, horror-movie-star Vincent had to leave this party.

And part of that is represented by the Cotulla Cowgirl basketball player. Vivi here represents all my 31 years as a public school teacher. By serving the children of South Texas, and later the ESL kids of North Texas, I managed to prove to myself that I was a good and worthy person. I know because of the many things they told me over the years, that my students would mostly agree with my self-assessment that I am not a bad man.

I put myself in the picture as a happy, confident nude boy. This is a thing that I wasn’t able to be after the age of ten. Doubt, fear, and depression clouded my world from 1966 to 1976. When I spent time trying to explain to the high school counselor what was wrong with me, he had to admit that he knew something was wrong, but he did not know what it was nor how to help. And I could not at that time admit what had happened, as I could not even allow myself to remember the actual trauma. So, becoming a nudist in 2017 and coming to terms with the scars and trauma, was a gift to myself. The mental chains are gone.

Anneliese, the gingerbread girl, represents my mental linking with the German-American world of Aunt Selma’s Christmas parties in the 1960’s. The gingerbread cookies, the candy, and the Christmas stories she told with a charming German accent led to the writing of my book Recipes for Gingerbread Children. Christmas is a day full of gingerbread men… and now, making gingerbread houses.

And Annette Funicello is in the picture because Christmas always used to have a Disney-movie, happy-endings sort of theme. I needed that happy ending to every year to keep me going. It was an emotionally essential thing I counted on every year to be able to face a brand new year.

I am an atheist. And an Existentialist. Oh, and a nudist. But I need Christmas. It matters to me. And I know I am not the only one.

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December 25, 2023 · 2:06 am

‘Tis the Season…

Yesterday I posted one of my patented conspiracy-theory posts which was intended primarily to give my three kids more practice at using their Eye-fu skills. You know, that ancient Chinese martial art of using the dramatic eye-roll to combat the embarrassing way elderly parents have of saying what they actually think for the sole purpose of humiliating their much-more sensible offspring. So, today I need to humbly contemplate the many reasons I will not get any Christmas presents this year and begin to generate some holiday spirit to lighten the mood of what is likely to be a rather lonely Christmas season.

So, here’s a selfie from old Grumpy Klaus, wearing the aggravated countenance of the Jolly One looking at the Naughty List to determine who gets the bricks and who gets the lumps of coal… and who gets referred to Old Krampus.

Ho ho ho… kinda…

Having married a Jehovah’s Witness twenty-six years ago, I have gotten mostly out of the habit of celebrating Christmas. The Witnesses believe that holidays with pagan origins are from Satan, and bad for you. But it has been almost seven years now since they decided I was from Satan too, and so I stopped believing in knocking on doors and trying to get homeowners to reject their own form of Christianity because we are somehow more right than they are, and if they don’t swear off celebrating Christmas they are doomed. Among the many other things you have to swear off of for that religion. Like swearing.

Don’t get me wrong… Jehovah’s Witnesses are wonderful, loving people who care about others and whose religious teachings are more helpful than harmful over all… just like all other Christians who aren’t ISIS-level radicals. (The Westboro Baptists leap to mind for some reason.) If you really need religion, it is a good one to have. But even though my wife still needs to be one, I have begun to feel like I do not.

I personally cherish the holiday traditions I grew up with, and I really wish I could have shared those with my children. (This is another point for practicing Eye-fu right here.) I fear however. that like most devoutly religious parents, we managed to raise three devout agnostics and atheists. I have trained them in the last four years to like the tradition of making and eating gingerbread houses and gingerbread men. That’s probably of pagan origin too, but it’s too late now to save my sorry old soul from gingerbread.

Anyway, I am trying to look forward to the season of Peace on Earth once again. And though I will be celebrating mostly alone and ill and condemned by gingerbread, I do have pleasant memories. I can still reach my sisters and my mother by phone. They share some of those memories. And my kids will be around enough to eat the gingerbread castle I bought for this year.

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December 24, 2023 · 1:07 am

That Time of Year Again

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