Lately I have been having memory troubles. You know what I mean, when you walk through a doorway with a definite purpose in mind.and then, on reaching the other room, you have no earthly idea what that purpose was. It happens to me regularly. In fact, I can even start writing a sentences, and then I… What was I talking about? Oh, yes. I need to practice writing some more spectacularly bad poetry, before I forget how to do it.
Why did I use this picture? I don’t know. I have forgotten.
Re-minders
Sometimes…
My mind slips out of my left ear…
And I can’t remember things.
So, I have to search under the table…
To find my mind…
And then I remember that that’s not how a mind works.
Yep, I still obviously remember how to write spectacularly bad poetry. It is my contribution to literature. Virtually all poets will be able to say, “At the very least, I am a better poet than Beyer.”
Rogelio met Maria at the bus stop on the corner of Mockingbird Lane and Brookriver Drive just as they had planned in Mrs. Broadbent’s English class at the end of a long high-school day.
“You see it?” Rogelio asked, pointing across the street. “The toy store is right there, just like Fernando said.”
“Yeah, but nobody proved that it was the place where Yesenia disappeared.”
“They found her bloody clothes in the alley behind it. What more proof do you need?”
“Well, I’m going in to look around. Are you brave enough to go with me, Roge?”
“Anything you can do, I can do.”
The two high school freshmen walked across the street at the stoplight. The building was spookily in shadow in spite of the gray-white sunlight trying to penetrate an overcast sky.
As they entered the shop together, the old storekeeper looked up from his old, leather-bound ledger at the front checkout counter.
“Little old for toys, aren’t we?” the white-haired loser asked. It made Rogelio a bit angry.
“We came because of the disappearance of Yesenia Montemayor a month ago. We need to look around. They found her clothes behind this place.”
“So, here to solve a Hardy Boys’ Mystery, are we?”
“Do I look like a boy?” Maria said, now angry too.
“Hard to tell nowadays. Nancy Drew, then?”
“You are just so old and out of date!” said Rogelio.
“Why do you really want to look for clues in my store then?”
“Yesenia was his former girlfriend.” Maria’s glare was defiant.
“And you’re his new girlfriend?”
“Well… yeah, I kinda hope so.”
“Then you probably don’t want to go digging up his old girlfriend, eh? Not in your best self-interest, I’d say.”
“We need to find out what happened to her,” Maria said matter-of-factly. “…So people don’t keep saying one of us had something to do with it.”
“Hated her that much, did you?”
“No! I didn’t kill her and eat her or anything! And I intend to prove that.”
The old man looked at Maria with eyes magnified by his thick glasses. He looked like a Lechuza, a soul-stealing barn owl, that one. Rogelio gritted his teeth.
“Can we look around your store, or what?” he said.
“Help yourself. If you want murder clues, there’s an old decorative Day of the Dead skull by the back door. Pick it up and ask about the missing girl.”
“Tell the cops to do that too, didja?”
“Yep. They didn’t take me seriously though.”
Rogelio simply turned and walked towards the back of the store.
“Do you believe that guy?” Maria mumbled as she followed him.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I believe you either.”
“What… what do you mean?”
“Well, that remark about digging her up and you talking about killing her and eating her.”
“I said I didn’t do that. You believe me, don’t you?”
“Let’s see what that skull has to say.”
Eerily, the skull was right in front of them as he said it. It was a sort of Halloween decoration for the Hispanic holiday of the Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos in Spanish. It was a white papier-mâché skull with brightly colored flower blossoms painted on it for eyes, and an intricate vine design all over it in bright pink and orange outlined with green and dark blue.
“Hola, mi sabio amigo, ¿qué me puede decir sobre el asesinato de Yesenia Montemayor?” He used the Spanish because he knew Maria didn’t understand very much of it. She was raised in an English-speaking house with an Anglo stepdad.
“Ella no está muerta. Ella un juguete con el que juega Imelda.” The skull seemed to be speaking with no moving mouth.
“What? She’s a toy?”
Maria looked horrified. “Who are you talking to? And what’s this all about?”
“I… I don’t know. The skull says she is not dead. She’s a toy, being played with by someone named Imelda.”
“Ahora, Steven jugará contigo,” said the skull.
“Roge, the skull didn’t say anything.” Maria was as white as a ghost.
Rogelio’s mind, however, was being invaded.
“I am Steven, Roger. I will be playing with you until we find out what Imelda’s game really is.”
“Get out of my head!” Rogelio shouted. But his lips didn’t move. And he couldn’t put the skull down either. Instead, he walked to the back door and opened it. It did not open into the alley as it was supposed to. There was a dark room there, with a staircase going upwards, and at the foot of the staircase was Yesenia, naked as the day she was born. And her dark-brown hair was all bleached white like snow.
“Steven! No! You cannot be here. Not now!” shouted Yesenia.
“Stay where you are, Imelda. I am coming to you!” Rogelio heard his own voice say.
“No, Roge! Don’t go out there!” cried Maria.
Rogelio shut the door behind him so Maria couldn’t follow.
I think the expression, Iowegian as it is, comes from the expression “doing squat” which means “doing nothing at all” combined with “diddling around”, the non-sexual meaning of which is “dithering or only working in an ineffective way.”
I humbly confess that I am not that great of a researcher when it comes to linguistic facts and word origins.
I am much better at making things up and creating my own portmanteau words.
But I do have a very good ear for how people actually talk. Especially when it comes to Iowegian, Texican, Spanglish, and Educational Jargon-Gibberish. Counting English and Tourist-German, I speak six languages.
I also humbly confess that I make big mistakes. I have been working hard for a week on editing published books because of how an overreaction to one small inappropriate detail nearly destroyed one of my best books and now I have to deal with the impression some readers have that I write inappropriate stuff all the time.
Yes, I definitely erred…
I also realized I assume everybody accepts nudity as easily as I do.
They definitely don’t.
But naked is funny. And that is not a point about my writing that I am willing to concede.
Doing diddly-squoot can also result in really weird stuff like this Christmas-card composite of my artwork and Vincent Price’s 1967 Christmas tree.
They came in the mail every November in the 1960’s. Particularly important was the Monkey Ward’s catalog because there was a Montgomery Ward Catalog Store in Belmond on Main Street. Mom and Dad could order, pay for, and pick up things there, particularly Christmas and birthday gifts. The four of us; my little brother, my two younger sisters, and I would argue about who would get to look at it next for hours at a time (the catalog, not the store… although the man who ran the store sold tropical fish in the back, so I could look at that for hours).
I, of course, dog-eared different pages than my sisters Nancy and Mary did. And David was eight years younger than me and was into baby toys, blocks, and books.
Nancy owned the three on the left.
I was nutty about model trains… and so was Dad.
I am amazed at how cheap things were back then compared to now. Of course, things were more easily destroyed because of the cheaper plastics and simpler ingredients and materials common in the 1960’s. So, it is truly amazing how many of those toys I still have. And how many survived me only to be destroyed by my own children.
And it often wasn’t enough to look at just the Monkey Ward’s catalog. (Grandpa Aldrich always called it “Monkey” instead of “Montgomery”, a pretty standard old-farmer joke in the 60’s). Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich always got a copy of the Sears catalog. And we would pour over that to find treasures that Monkey Ward’s didn’t have. That was inconvenient for Mom and Dad. The nearest Sears store was in Mason City, 50 miles northeast.
I was 10 years old in ’66.
Mary Poppins was a 60’s Disney hit.
Just the mention of Christmas catalogs of old when discussing with sisters flashes me back to the time when I was in grade school and Christmas time was all about being good for Santa because… well, toys.
And old Christmas catalogs still fascinate me. I love to look back through ten-year-old Mickey-eyes at a simpler, kinder time. Although, if I’m honest with myself, it probably wasn’t really any better than now. I just choose to believe that it was.
Life seems to be getting harder and harder. And I realize that a big part of that perception is the fact that my health is deteriorating quickly. This is a humor blog, but it has been getting more and more serious and more and more grim as the grim reaper becomes more and more a central character in my own personal story.
My perception of reality, however, is best explained by a passage in a novel that spoke to me in college. It comes from the novel, the Bildungsroman by Thomas Mann called Der Zauberberg, in English, The Magic Mountain. In the scene, Hans Castorp is possibly freezing to death, and he hallucinates a pastoral mountainside scene where children are happily playing in the sunshine. Possibly Heaven? But maybe not. As he goes into a stone building and finds a passage down into the ground, he sees wrinkled, ugly, horrible hags gathered around a child’s corpse, eating it. And this vision explains the duality at the center of the meaning of life.
For every good thing, there is an equal and opposite bad thing that balances it out. There is no understanding what perfection and goodness mean without knowing profanity and evil. Just as you can’t understand hot without cold nor light without darkness. And you don’t get to overturn the way it is. You try your hardest to stay on the heads side of the coin knowing that half the time life falls to tails.
So, what good does it do me to think about and write about things like this? Well, it makes for me a sort of philosophical gyroscope that spins and dances and helps me keep my balance in the stormy sea of daily life. I deal with hard things with humor and a sense of literary irony. I make complex metaphors that help me throw a rope around the things that hurt me.
We are living now in the Spider Kingdom. Hard times are here again. The corrupt and corpulent corporate spiders are spinning the many webs we are trapped in. As metaphorical as it is, we wouldn’t have the government we currently have and be suffering the way we are if that weren’t true.
But no bad thing nor no good thing lasts forever. The wheel goes round and round. The top of the wheel reaches the bottom just as often as the bottom returns to the top. So, it will all pass if we can only hold out long enough.
Covid has thrown me for a loop this month. I am forced to rely on my Work in Progress for the NOVEL WRITING post for this work. My writing time has been seriously curtailed for a while, and I will get back to projects in their proper order as soon as I recover.
Canto 1 – The Toy Store on Mockingbird Lane
Hannah was ten, looking more like her Asian-born father than her Texas-born mother Brittany, but she definitely had her mother’s passion for things that were exotic, unusual, or simply out of place.
“Look at that spooky old toy store, Mom! Doesn’t it look like a haunted house? Can we go in there and look?”
The little building on 1300A Mockingbird Lane in Dallas was built like a Victorian house from the 1800’s. It was hard to tell if the place had been painted white so long ago that the peeling paint made it look like that, or if someone had intentionally painted it light gray with black speckles. Brittany’s curiosity was peaked.
“That store has been there for as long as I can remember. But I’ve never been in there. They used to tell me it only sold old, antique toys.”
“I don’t wanna buy anything,” pouted Hannah. “I just want to look for ghosts.”
Brittany laughed as she pulled into the parking lot that served the two office buildings that surrounded the toy store and kept it in perpetual shadow all during the sunniest of days.
“We don’t have long to do this. We have to meet Daddy at five so we can go to the movie this evening.”
“It won’t take long. I can almost hear the spooks calling to me.”
Brittany laughed again as she collected the parking ticket from the lot’s operator in his little booth.
“Businesses are closing soon, Ma’am. You don’t have long. I close the gate for the night at six o’clock.”
“It won’t take us that long. We are just going to look in that old toy store.”
“Aunt Phillia’s Toy Emporium? You don’t want to go in there. Nobody hardly ever goes in there. And when they do, sometimes, the police have to show up later for something bizarre that happened.”
Brittany looked at the old Hispanic-looking guy over the top of her sunglasses. He looked serious. But that really only made her want to have a look inside even more.
“I hope something happens that makes the parking fee worth the money.”
“You are braver than I am, lady. I remember when I was a kid, some white boy disappeared in there. They never found him.”
He was seriously trying to scare her out of going in. But Hannah was hopping in her seat, anxious to get out of the car.
“The parking spot is F13, over there in the southwest corner. You have to be out of here by six or your car is locked inside the gate.”
She laughed. “No worries!”
She managed to park, and Hannah burst out of the passenger seat, headed for the store. By the time she got to the front door, Hannah had already disappeared into the store.
Inside the front door, there was a man sitting behind the check-out desk. He had an antique-looking cash register there, and his clothes were definitely long out of style.
“That house monkey was yours, I take it,” said the man. He was apparently old… or old…ish. Somewhere between forty and a hundred and forty. He had a flattop haircut, white hair, and super-thick lenses on his glasses that magnified his eyes, making him look like an eerie sort of owl-man.
“That was my daughter, Hannah, yes…”
“She took off for the wooden toys in the back of the store. I’ve got nobody back there to supervise her, but what trouble can she get into surrounded by wood-goods?”
That struck her as funny. She laughed. “We’ll soon see.”
Looking around the store, she was fascinated by what she saw on sale there. One wall was covered by marionettes, all of them with unusually large and roundish eyes, and all of them hanging from their control strings. There were shelves of costumes and masks, stuffed toys that looked threadbare and poorly sewn together, metal wind-up toys that walked or rolled on wheels, bows with sucker-tipped arrows, porcelain dolls whose eyes looked positively real and alive, staring as if they wanted or needed something from Brittany, and a far wall lined with books, children’s books, classic books, and encyclopedias.
“Hannah? Remember, we were just supposed to be looking for a moment. Hannah?”
There was no answer. So, Brittany walked down the metal wind-ups’ aisle towards the wood-goods in the back.
Suddenly a child’s voice was screaming. “I’m on fire! My dress is on fire! Mommy! Help me!”
Brittany was instantly panicked. But it wasn’t Hannah’s voice. And Hannah had been wearing a Miley Cyrus t-shirt and blue jeans. Still, she ran to the back of the store.
Standing there in front of a wall of wooden cars, trucks, trains and train cars, carved wooden boats, and baseball bats was Hannah, completely naked, her black hair now completely snow white.
“Where are your clothes?”
“I had to tear them off. They were burning.” There were ashes and bits of burned rag on the floor around her. And most alarmingly, the voice coming out of naked Hannah was not Hannah’s voice.
“Hannah? What is going on here?”
“Oh, I am not Hannah. My name is Molly Beeman. I just have her body now.”
“What?” She also began to realize that her own clothes were different. The dress she now wore had puffy shoulder things on it. It was made of a patterned material that she thought was called “gingham.”
“Hannah, let’s get out of here.”
She pulled the naked girl to her, picked her up and carried her to the front. There she saw the same old ghost of a man, sitting and staring with his magnified eyes.
“I see you found what you were looking for…”
“What have you done to my daughter?”
“…Molly, you only have three months to play with it. Be wise and you may actually get your mother back.”
“What?” cried Brittany. “What are you talking about, you… you… crazy old man!”
She burst out of the store through the front door. But she was horrified to see that her car was no longer there. Neither was the parking lot, or the office buildings it served. In fact, there was now what appeared to be a linoleum store and Mexican Cantina where those things used to be. Then she saw an old-timey newspaper stand. It was abandoned and empty. She ran to it. There were newspapers there. She saw a headline about how the U.S. Eighth Air Force suffered the loss of 60 bombers on the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission. That happened on the 17th of August. World War II? The paper was dated August 24th, 1943!
Hannah cuddled against her, still naked in her arms.
“Just hold me, Mommy. Nobody has held me since I burned to death.”
Brittany stared at the pale Asian-American face with snow-white hair. This thing in her arms was no longer human. It was a porcelain doll, cuddling her with jointed, porcelain arms. It’s porcelain face smiled at her. This thing in her arms was no longer her daughter.
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.
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.
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? It convinces me that I need to work at becoming an angel too.
I have lived a life of irony. As a child, I was traumatized by a sexual assault, and it left me afraid to be naked in the presence of others. It was a nightmare in junior high and high school. But even though the physical education showers at the end of every P.E. class were a nightmare dance of towels and hands strategically being flung about because of the other sweaty boys present with mocking eyes and cruel comments, I slowly conducted a personal war within myself to avoid becoming a nudist over the entire course of my teaching career. And then, when I retired, I lost that war. And I became a nudist. I am now a member of the AANR Southwest. And I have been to nudist parks more than once.
You know how practically everyone has that nightmare where they are suddenly at school, in front of the class, and completely naked? Yeah, I had that dream about being both a teacher and a student. I have to say, I eventually learned that all students and all teachers are basically mentally and emotionally naked in the classroom all the time. Students can’t control themselves enough to wear mental clothing. And teachers can’t effectively teach with such barriers in place. Of course, education could not go fully nude without a total restructuring of society and a re-training of all teachers and kids from a very early age.
I can use myself as an example of why “naked is funny.” There is a lot of humor in life that stems from our need to keep certain things secret and the inevitable moment when we fail to keep others from seeing and learning the naked truth.
The picture here is me as I imagine I would have looked naked at ten, showing you everything I was terrified of having girls see, especially the dangly bits that would wiggle and waggle as you walked about naked. I actually wrote a poem about walking about naked as a seventh grader with a wiggling wiener. I, of course, tore that poem up into pieces that I distributed to three different trash cans so nobody could tape it back together. I was aware even back then that I was destined to be one of the world’s worst poets.
I did enjoy being a naked child before I was assaulted. I liked to ride my bike naked at the Bingham Park Woods south of town. There was never anybody else there to bother me. Whether or not anyone ever saw me there, I do not know. Nobody ever said anything about knowing my secret. And after I was attacked, I was always too afraid to try it again.
But being seen naked in nature was not what worried me the most. That naked-in-school nightmare was the one that actually embarrassed me and exposed my dangly bits to girls who knew me.
In P.E. Class once when I was a sophomore in high school, we were standing in a circle on the wrestling mat while the two wrestlers were grappling each other. The girls’ P.E. Class was sitting in the bleachers supposedly listening to whatever the girls’ coach was rattling on about. Of course, we could see they were really all watching the boys wrestle. I was worried that if it got to be my turn, the boy I had to wrestle, being better than me and on the wrestling team, might wrestle my pants off as sometimes happens with certain takedowns. There were cheerleaders in the bleachers that day. Oh, Lord preserve me!
But Jerry Kornbluth and Tom Klotny had an intense match going on… and on and on and on… and the coach was watching them intently as they each countered the other so well that no points were being scored. It lasted long enough that I was in no danger of having to wrestle Nelson, the former State champ in the 110 weight class. So, I stupidly let my guard down.
Boob Eekleboy was a bully and weird-sense-of-humor aficionado. He also was lurking behind me without me being aware of it at all. He was older than me. He was bigger than me. He was weaker than me. (I beat him in a wrestling match the week before, giving him a need for revenge.) And he had an evil mind.
When he took hold of my gym shorts, he apparently got his fingers under the straps of the athletic supporter.
The time between my pants going down and my face turning red as I pulled them back up was probably only about seven seconds. But my dangly bits had been totally exposed. And somebody who might’ve been a cheerleader giggled and squealed about something. Of course, I had that secret trauma that I was suppressing that nearly destroyed me at the time.
My mental problems didn’t let me enjoy this big reveal in any way at the time. But looking back on it, I can see the humor in it. I can actually laugh at it now, gobs of time having healed most of what ailed me then. And I would learn from a third-hand source that one of the cheerleaders that saw it happen liked what she saw and told others about the liking.
So, naked can be funny. I have come to accept that long ago. And it would fuss up some of my novels because they were supposed to be humorous, and I may have planned on using the naked thing a lot.
If you have the bad habit of reading this particular blog more than once, then you are probably aware that I used to be a public school teacher. Even worse, I used to be a middle school English teacher. Aagh! Seventh graders! It explains a lot about how life has warped my intelligence, personality, and world view. It also explains somewhat where I found such a fountain-like source for some of the worst jokes you ever heard.
Now, as to the question of why I have chosen in my retirement early-onset senility to become a humor-blogger… well, that is simply not something I can answer in one post… or even a thousand. But kids are the source of my goofball clown-brain joking around.
Kid-humor, you see, is stunted and warped in weird ways by the time period you are talking about. The eighties, nineties, two thousands, and the tens are all very different. And those are the various sets of students that I attempted to learn moose bowling from by teaching them English.
Still, there are certain universal constants.
Potty humor really kills. If you want to make a thirteen-year-old crack up with laughter, roll around on the floor, and maybe wet his or her pants, then you only need to work the “poop” word, or the “nickname for Richard” word, or the “Biblical word for donkey” word into the conversation. Of course the actual words, even though we all know what they actually are, are magical words. If you actually say them to kids in school as their teacher, those words can actually make you magically and permanently disappear from the front of the classroom. All kids are big fans of George Carlin and his seven words, even though most of them have never heard of him.
And violent humor is popular with kids from all decades. The most common punch line in the boys’ bathroom is, “… and then he kicked him in the Biblical word for donkey!” followed closely in second place by, “… and then she kicked him in the Biblical word for donkey!” I am told (for I don’t actually go in such scary places myself) that in the girls’ bathroom the most popular punch line is, “…so I kicked him right in the soccer balls, and he deserved it!” Why girls are apparently obsessed with soccer, I don’t know… or particularly care.
So my education in humor began with bad-word jokes, slapstick humor, put-downs, and rude noises coming from unfortunate places. Humor in the classroom is actually a metaphorical mine field laced with tiger traps, dead-falls that end with an anvil hitting you on the head, or being challenged to a life-or-death game of moose bowling. (Don’t know what moose bowling is? Moose bowling is a very difficult game that, in order to knock down all the pins and win, you have to learn to roll a moose down the alley.) Sounds like I spend too much time watching cartoons and playing video games, doesn’t it? Well, there’s more. And it gets worse from here. But I will spare you that until the next time I am foolish enough to try making excuses for my really bad jokes.
Now you finally get to sample a bit of my genius at historical analysis. I will lay on you one of the theories of history that I created, and which has had a profound effect on the whole debate over whether History is a Science, or merely a gathering of talking idiots and puppets of the governments who won the wars.
The theory is this; History is always about pirates. I know that statement probably alarms you, or makes you simply dismiss me as a loony, bald-headed goofball who just likes to talk and is meant to be ignored by you. Don’t be alarmed, and I am NOT a goofball.
History is never really written about the builders and creators who craft a society or a civilization. The occasional Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Gragg of Mars, or Googol Marou gets mentioned in a history book, but it is always the man, men, or peoples who see the civilization, want the civilization, and then either take the civilization for themselves or totally destroy the civilization who ultimately get the notice and the credit for making History happen. History is not about making something, but about taking something that is already there.
Consider how this played out in the history of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy. It truly began with the Ancients who colonized the entire galaxy and then, for reasons unknown, totally disappeared from it, leaving only powerful and dangerous artifacts behind. They were creators and makers, so the story could never really be about them.
The story then would have to proceed to the gentle alien folk called the Sylvani. Now, they may actually be the Ancients, we have no way of knowing, but they don’t actually make History happen either. They created jump drives and interstellar travel, particle readers and material synthesizers (as well as the Skortch beams and disintegrators that can be derived from them), and anti-gravity technology. They did not colonize the stars. They had the bad sense to leave everything as they found it and live their lives in relative peace. The fools!
The amphibianoid people known as the Tellerons were the first to colonize and make an empire in the Orion Spur. These prolific frog-men of Telleri spread their form of civilization to eleven worlds. They wouldn’t have been able to do this, however, if they had never made contact with the Sylvani people while the latter were peacefully exploring the world of Telleri. The frog-men imprisoned the Sylvani explorers and forced them to yield up the all-important space travel technologies they had created. It was an act of space piracy. They basically stole all the knowledge and equipment needed to make a star empire.
Now, the Tellerons were basically fools themselves. They were ruthless explorers and conquerors but were a bit shallow in the thinking end of their gene pool. They were not adaptable and had to carefully recreate their swampy home-world environment everywhere they went. Thus, they were easily conquered themselves when they met far more adaptable races like the Galtorrians from the Delta Pavonis star system and the Earthers from the Sol system.
Words are what basically conquered the Telleron Star Empire. When they reached the Galtorrian homeworld of Galtorr Prime, they got themselves hooked on an alien cultural anomaly caused by TV broadcasts from Earth. The Galtorrians had been receiving and decoding the television signals of Earth for twenty years. A virulent black market existed there for pirated episodes of a TV show called “I Love Lucy”. Reruns of that TV show became a model for both the Galtorrians and the Tellerons who tried to conquer them.
Truth be told, the Tellerons began worshipping the character of Fred Mertz being played by an actor named William Frawley. Frawley’s frog-like mouth and toad-like wit made the fin-headed frog-men think Fred Mertz was a god. The Galtorrians had already adapted the English Language from the show because it was similar in sound patterns to Galtorr-speak. It had become the language of, not only entertainment, but of commerce and diplomacy. Now, English is a twisted and demented sort of language, capable of double meanings, puns, and irony. There are no sacred rules of grammar, word-formation, or spelling, and so the language can be shaped to suit the nefarious purposes of those sinister professionals known as “writers”. Galtorrians were able to trick Tellerons with the so-called “Word of Fred Mertz” into giving them the secrets of space travel, Skortch rays, and material synthesis.
So, space travel and the Telleron Empire fell into the hands of the Galtorrians by piracy. They stole the empire from the rival alien race. They then ruthlessly expanded their new empire. Being a pirate was the thing that created the History.
Now, a very similar process also happened on Earth. Tellerons, easily tricked by Earthers, also lost control of their stolen technology when they tried to invade Earth in about the year 1990 A.D. They tried to invade using invisibility technology acquired by showing their Sylvani slaves old episodes of Star Trek with Romulans in them. The Sylvani succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of Gene Roddenberry. Of course, this backfired, because it is hard to intimidate someone you are trying to conquer with armies and weapons that cannot be seen. The Tellerons managed to lose their devices and Skortch themselves during an invasion that almost no one knew was happening. Again, the technology was pirated from them. I firmly believe that it was one of my own ancestors, a genius named Orben Wallace who reverse-engineered all the alien devices and brought the technology to Earth.
The empire of all humanoid and intelligent life forms in the Orion Spur would be taken and retaken using the stolen technologies and the stolen words of what would become known as “Galanglic,” Galactic English. So, you can see, I have brilliantly proven my theory. All History is about pirates.
William Frawley, the actor who first uttered the “Word of Fred Mertz”
Catch a Falling Star 
Living in the Spider Kingdom
Life seems to be getting harder and harder. And I realize that a big part of that perception is the fact that my health is deteriorating quickly. This is a humor blog, but it has been getting more and more serious and more and more grim as the grim reaper becomes more and more a central character in my own personal story.
My perception of reality, however, is best explained by a passage in a novel that spoke to me in college. It comes from the novel, the Bildungsroman by Thomas Mann called Der Zauberberg, in English, The Magic Mountain. In the scene, Hans Castorp is possibly freezing to death, and he hallucinates a pastoral mountainside scene where children are happily playing in the sunshine. Possibly Heaven? But maybe not. As he goes into a stone building and finds a passage down into the ground, he sees wrinkled, ugly, horrible hags gathered around a child’s corpse, eating it. And this vision explains the duality at the center of the meaning of life.
For every good thing, there is an equal and opposite bad thing that balances it out. There is no understanding what perfection and goodness mean without knowing profanity and evil. Just as you can’t understand hot without cold nor light without darkness. And you don’t get to overturn the way it is. You try your hardest to stay on the heads side of the coin knowing that half the time life falls to tails.
So, what good does it do me to think about and write about things like this? Well, it makes for me a sort of philosophical gyroscope that spins and dances and helps me keep my balance in the stormy sea of daily life. I deal with hard things with humor and a sense of literary irony. I make complex metaphors that help me throw a rope around the things that hurt me.
We are living now in the Spider Kingdom. Hard times are here again. The corrupt and corpulent corporate spiders are spinning the many webs we are trapped in. As metaphorical as it is, we wouldn’t have the government we currently have and be suffering the way we are if that weren’t true.
But no bad thing nor no good thing lasts forever. The wheel goes round and round. The top of the wheel reaches the bottom just as often as the bottom returns to the top. So, it will all pass if we can only hold out long enough.
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Filed under commentary, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, humor, metaphor, Paffooney, philosophy