Category Archives: insight

July 26, 2017 · 2:34 pm

Theme Songs for Living Life

You know how in movies and on TV they play a soundtrack behind the action of the show? And how, sometimes, if the movie or TV show is any good, it enhances and underscores whatever is happening to the main theme of story and the action that expresses it on the screen? Yeah, that. A complex idea that lies just under the surface of consciousness, a something that somebody sometime thought up that actually works and can work quite well. But why does it work?

Put as simply as I can say an idea that is so layered and complex, it is because that is how real life works. Yeah, there is music in the background of every life. It plays almost unnoticed until that point where you suddenly realize how it defines your very soul.

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Through childhood and junior high and high school, I used to joke with my two sisters that every song that came on the radio was my favorite song, my theme song. Every new Beatles’ song, or Paul Revere and the Raiders’ song, or Elton John musical fantasy was the song that defined my entire life. Yes, I really was that fickle. But I was also responding to a sense that who I was had to change into something new as often as you heard a new song on the radio or bought a new record album. (Yes, I know some of you have no idea what that is, but I am a child of the 60’s and 70’s, and I make no excuse for that. So deal with it.)

I hope you have listened to some of the YouTube song-thingies I have added to this post. They are not picked at random. They are some of the key theme songs of my goofy, pointless, and fantastical life.

The Astroboy opening theme is here to represent my early childhood. When I had the courage of the irrepressible imagination of childhood. I soared with Astroboy through every black-and-white episode I could get hold of in the 60’s. At times it met getting out of bed early to catch it at 6:00 am, just after Channel 3 came on the air in the morning. At times it meant rushing home as soon as school let out because it came on only half an hour after the last bell, and the school was on the north end of Rowan, while home was as far south as the town went. Astroboy

I really used to believe that I would grow up to lead a heroic life and make a name for myself that would inspire others to greatness too. We are uncommonly stupidly when we are children, and we need simplistic theme songs to wake us up to life gradually.

The Eagles provided the theme songs of my high school and college young manhood. Trying out life, at times boldly, and at most times timidly, I had to “Take It to the Limit” as often as I could manage. It turned out that due to irrepressible social awkwardness, my greatest presses against the walls of my existence were all academic in nature. We learn by doing… and failing… and trying again. The songs become more complex as they weave themselves into the background of your life story.

As a young teacher, shy and soft-spoken, it was impressed on me that discipline was about controlling behavior which you had to do by being stern and unyielding, good at rule-setting and handing down punishments. But with my goofy temperament and non-threatening clown face, I soon learned that that road only led to misery and heartache for both me and, more importantly, the students. In the 80’s I learned that you had to follow Bobby McFerrin’s philosophy of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. I learned that you don’t teach someone lasting lessons by pushing them from behind with paddles and switches, but by leading them forward with jokes and obvious joy in the lessons you are teaching.

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Now that I have grown old and awful in the winter of my life, the songs that express my personal themes are classical music and complex with snowflakian symmetry and stark, cold beauty. I would talk about a few more particulars, but I am now well past 500 words, and if you don’t have the idea yet, I’m sorry, you are probably never going to hear that music yourself. But don’t worry… be happy.

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Filed under artists I admire, artwork, autobiography, commentary, goofy thoughts, humor, insight, irony, music, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

July 23, 2017 · 2:40 pm

Becoming

The classic line from the visionary poet Theodore Roethke;

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But the truth is, before you can BE you must first BECOME.

I know what you are probably thinking. “What is this idiot rambling on about now?”

Well, sometimes you simply have to spout a lot of love and hoo-haw and just pretend it means something. That is the core, I think, of what philosophy is all about.

But maybe a list of what I have already become will get the idea knitting itself together. You know, a list of the things I can already just BE.

I have already become college educated. I have a BA in English and an MAT in Education (Master of the Art of Teaching). Those letters my college years bestowed upon me are only an “N” short of being an anagram for BATMAN. So I have almost become BATMAN.

I have also finished becoming a teacher. In fact, I have spent 31 years becoming a teacher. I have gotten so teacherfied over the years that I am actually now becoming a retired teacher. I haven’t learned the art of retired teacher yet. It is still gonna take a bit of practice to start getting it right. But I can get a kid to sit down and shut up with just a look. I can read the mind of a glum-faced student and know we are about to have a bad day. And I always know when to tell a really awful joke so that the students know their only hope of keeping their lunch down and retaining their sanity is to ask me to please get back to today’s lesson. So I can BE that, at least in theory. I am still BECOMING retired.

Why-ever would I draw myself as a naked boy? I have inexplicably weird urges sometimes.

I am a living, breathing human being. I have been that now for sixty years and eight months. I have practiced it enough that I can BE that without even thinking about it. Well, not now, just most of the time I don’t have to think about it.

But I did make a huge mistake fairly recently in applying for a chance to be a blogger for an AANR-affiliated website. Yes, that’s right, the American Association for Nude Recreation. I signed on to write about being a nudist.

I am asked to write a review of the nearest naturist park, the Bluebonnet Naturist Park in Alvord, Texas. I am hoping to find a day for a day-visit that won’t find a lot of people there. Ummm. How did I get roped into BECOMING a nudist? Is it too late to back out now? Or would that be UNBECOMING?

But most of all, I have labored long and hard at BECOMING a real writer. I have two books already published. Aeroquest and Catch a Falling Star. You can find them both on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. But don’t buy Aeroquest. Those cheap burgle-binkies don’t deserve to make any more money off of me. I have another book coming out soon from Page Publishing, Magical Miss Morgan. It is a book I am really proud of, though these foofy publishers have done nothing to help it and a lot to mess it up for me.
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But, I must admit, I have just finished reading Mitch Albom’s masterpiece, The Magic Strings of Frankie Pesto. It is a miraculous, engaging read that made me laugh and made me cry and made me fall in love with the story. And it is so far beyond what I can do that I must write a review on it, maybe tomorrow, and gush praises all over it. I can only dream of BEING a writer like that. It proves to me that I have a lot more BECOMING to work on. Sorry, Ted, I am just not there yet.

Seeing Things Differently

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Where do I begin? There are just too many ideas in this one topic to enumerate them all here. I just got turned down on another loan application. I am lost for what to do about the swimming pool. I can’t fix it myself. I can’t afford to pay anyone to fix it or remove it. I am suffering from how the world sees me. Debt to income ratio makes bankers see me as a deadbeat. The city pool inspector thinks I don’t work hard enough at keeping my property from falling apart. I don’t know what the doctor thinks any more. I haven’t gone in for a check up in two years. I can’t afford to go on insulin, so I simply don’t. This world seems to see me as a potential homeless person in a short amount of time. No chance that any one of those folks are going to let me define myself.

But suffering builds character. And, damn! I have a lot of character. Want some of the extra?

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Life for me has always been pretty much a long march into the darkness. I try to bring power and light and goodness with me as I march, but I know there is a final end to the journey, and it will not go smoothly. It will not end well. But I don’t see things the way other men do. I continue to fight the good fight, even though I will ultimately lose the war. “Rage! Rage against the dying of the light!” says the poet Dylan Thomas. The fight is everything. And I simply can’t be troubled with thinking about what lies over the last hill in this march toward the final battle.

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I think, ultimately, that the important thing isn’t winning or losing. It is about who or what we have become on the inside. I find solace in being able to laugh at life. A lot of depressing things have been happening lately. It can make the laughing harder to manage. But if life is not joy at its heart, then what is it? And what makes it worth living?

“Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.”
― Lao Tzu

Thus it is… Lao Tzu is wise. The Tzu part of his name means “teacher”. So maybe I need to learn from him. There has to be a way forward, at least until the path ends.

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Filed under feeling sorry for myself, insight, inspiration, irony, Paffooney

July 16, 2017 · 2:27 pm

Things I Must Tell You Before I Die

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I collect sunrises. The picture above is today’s, July 16th, 2017, looking east over the green belt park in Carrollton, Texas. Every new day is a miracle. I am sixty years and eight months old as of this sunrise. I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor since 1983. One of those diseases is diabetes, and I cannot afford to be put on insulin. There is no reason to believe I will have another sunrise tomorrow.

But I am not sad or angry. I am not afraid. I am thankful. I have lived a good life.

And here’s a secret nobody has probably ever told you before in these exact words; “Life is a miracle, and no matter how cruel it has been to you over time, or what terrible things have happened to you, the world is a better place because you have lived in it.”

Amazingly, those words apply even to Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. If you think about it, there was a backlash to all the misery, suffering, grief and death they caused. In a backhanded way, bad people make us come together, find the strength in ourselves to resist evil, and make the world better in ways it couldn’t have been if there had been no challenge or reason to do it. Think of all the heroes like Oscar Schindler that Hitler’s persecution of Jews created. Think of all the times a Satanic figure like Manson made you shudder when you confronted the darkness in your own soul, and how it made you vow to be a better person than he was. And how you kept that vow.

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It seems I may have become a nudist in my doddering old age. I signed up to blog for a nudist website associated with the AANR (American Association of Nude Recreation) and suddenly I have nudist friends who are encouraging me to take all my clothes off and go camping in spite of my little pink psoriasis spots. I haven’t actually gone naked camping yet, despite the invitations. But if I continue to blog about it, I will end up having to. Even though the pay per article is pretty paltry. Hmm. I still might not. But you can’t be any more naked with no clothes on than you are when you bare your soul by writing. If you have actually read my blog, you have seen things that are well beneath the very skin of me… all the way to heart and bone. And here is the secret I must impart about all of that nakedness stuff; “People are actually naked all the time. Clothes merely make us think that we are not.”

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Here’s a really important thing I have to tell you. I was a middle school teacher and actually loved it. Don’t tell the people at the Institute for Keeping Crazy People Off the Streets. They are probably still looking for me. Though I have reason to believe they may also be entirely imaginary. Teaching middle school kids will do that to you. I was an English teacher for 31 years in Texas public schools. I taught kids to read. I taught kids to write. I taught kids to laugh at Mark Twain’s story about a jumping frog and the people who bet on them. I taught kids to be amazed at the ways and words of William Shakespeare, to see language and stories as poetry and music and the “stuff that dreams are made of”. I taught them that Socrates supposedly invented school the way we do it now with teachers using the Socratic method. So I suppose, realistically, you would have to say that I taught over a thousand kids in South Texas to sincerely hate Socrates. But here’s a secret I must also tell you before I can die; “When it comes to learning about love and life and laughter, they taught me so much more than I could possibly have taught them. I loved being their teacher for the too-brief time it was my privilege to be that.”

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And there you have it. Three things I had to tell you in case I croak before sunrise tomorrow. I am not saying that is what will happen. Only that it could happen. But there is wisdom in telling secrets and not carrying them with you to the grave. Or was I supposed to admit that it is actually foolishness? Now I’m not sure any more. But it is one of those.

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Filed under autobiography, feeling sorry for myself, goofy thoughts, humor, insight, inspiration, Mark Twain, nudes, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, William Shakespeare, wisdom

July 9, 2017 · 3:44 am

Evidence There is a Living God

A humorist does well to remember that you should not joke about religion. God does have a sense of humor. But it is a sense of humor backed by the ever-present threat of being struck by lightning. And among religious types, a sense of humor is about as common as a nudist wandering into the midst of a porcupine convention just as the thistle-pigs begin arguing about whether or not God is actually a porcupine.

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On the question of God and whether we actually have one, or whether he’s alive or not, we often turn to philosophers for insight. Friedrich Nietzsche was a philosopher with a hard to spell name. People often turn to him for evidence of god and the accompanying God-thoughts.

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But it is entirely possible that Nietzsche did not get the absolute last word on the matter.

Nietzsche was a bit of a poozer when it comes to questions about God. He said that God is dead because the big guy in the sky didn’t seem to be active in the world. At least, not since Bible times.

And if we are supposed to believe that God Jehovah is real because he’s written down in a magic book that so very many people believe in, then why isn’t god Thor to be believed in anymore? He’s written down in some very old books too. And isn’t the story about how Thor almost drank the ocean dry on a bet just as impressive as Jehovah parting the Red Sea for Moses?

But Nietzsche wasn’t a complete and total poozer. He did have some wonderful things to say along with the klunky and hard-to-understand God stuff he said.

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It takes a big mind in a big head to think of making the stars dance just by generating chaos-waves in your big old head. That’s the kind of big idea that could become a religion of its own… if Nietzsche wasn’t already dead, of course.

But I tend to believe there really is a living God. My sister posted an old picture of some of the reasons why on Facebook today.

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My thing one, thing two, and thing three (in the baby carrier with her feet up) are all the reason I need to believe in miracles. Thing one was recently promoted to Corporal in the Marines. Thing Two has applied for a job at Walmart, and thing three will be a sophomore in high school this fall. Grandma Aldrich is in the middle between thing one and my sister’s girl. The little blond one on the left is my sister’s kid too. All of them are miracles in human form. Grandma Aldrich is gone now. She died not long after this picture was taken. But her life resonates through mine, and through me to my children and nieces and nephews also. I would not be me if it wasn’t for her.

So there is proof of a living God. Everything that exists cannot be erased from existence, even when it disappears from memory. So we are all eternal. We all have touched the stars… at least, in a metaphorical sense. And our bodies, science has proved, are made of star stuff in a literal sense. So it is not too much of a stretch to believe we can make the stars dance.

And if my quasi-religious joking around has God thinking about how to apply a good thunderbolt, well, I was making fun of Nietzsche… wasn’t I?

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Filed under commentary, family, humor, insight, inspiration, religion, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as autobiography, friedrich nietzsche, having faith, making fun of Nietzsche, religion

July 4, 2017 · 4:58 pm

Three Days Offline

This is actually Monday’s post… the last make-up post.

I am now working on the third consecutive day of being without internet service. I quickly see what a disaster World War Three, the Cyber-War, is going to be.

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I mean, there is plenty to do. I am trying to save my home from legal pillaging by the city trolls, so I must work in the yard. I must also desperately work on the pool. And since I may have to blog about it for nudists… I am going to try doing it wearing only sunscreen. (Not the yard work in the front yard… in the back yard that is fenced in and tree-filled… with the gates tightly locked, of course.)

This is me not actually nude… just joking around with my Cirque du Soleil clown nose and risking a sunburned back.

And I am reading a brilliantly funny book by Terry Pratchett called Raising Steam, about bringing steam trains and train travel to the fantasy medieval world he calls Discworld. I miss Terry Pratchett. He passed away and will never write another one. And there are only a precious few left that I haven’t gotten to read yet. But, he won’t be around for the third installment of the World at War Saga. I hope I am not either… but I am probably too stubborn to just die on my own. I am expecting now to be murdered by a Trumpcare death panel.

I am also trying ferociously to write and publish novels. I have so many stories left to tell, and not enough time to plant the fields of imaginative rough-draft fiction, water them with re-writes and editing, and then try to harvest them by publishing.

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I no longer suffer from childish illusions that my fiction is going to change the world for the better, the way Dickens’ once did. I know I am probably writing them only for the ash-pile, or the myopic alien squid-man that will uncover them as part of his psychotic obsession with xeno-archeology.

So there is plenty to do, but I can already see the problems that will come if everybody’s internet and electronic world breaks down at the same time. Especially if it ends up being permanent. I can’t pay my bills without internet banking and access to the websites I use to pay things I owe. I can’t do any further publishing work without being able to email the publisher. Not having internet is basically the end of the world I have been living in since I retired. No Netflix, no Google, no email, no Twitter (Hey, it’s not all bad after all, now is it?), no access to the website that is deciding whether to send me to Bluebonnet Naturist Camp or not (is this list of problems actually getting better?), no television, and a decided lack of communication with the outside world (which means no bad news about Trump and the crazy government. Woo Hoooooo!)

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So, while I can cope with not being online, how long can I really hold out if the Trumpian Troglodytes pitch us back out of the information age? Think of it… a new age of coal and Trump-branded real-estate all run by a narcissistic orangutan and his piratical racist banker boys. Not very long, I suspect.

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Filed under humor, insight, irony, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

June 25, 2017 · 2:26 pm

Followed by a Moon Shadow

Moonshadow by Cat Stevens

I first heard this song as a freshman in coll 20160424_181349 ege. It struck me that it was hauntingly beautiful… but maybe I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.

The song is about losing body parts and being okay with that.

That can actually be kinda creepy, right?

It is probably a song about gradually dying.

But that’s not really what it’s about.

I am there now. Peeling, cracking, drying out… my life has reached the downhill run toward the finish line. But I am not worried and not afraid. Life is so much more than hands and eyes and legs and feet. I can lose those things and have no regrets. I am so much more than merely the sum of those physical things.

My spirit soars. And my life is bound up in words and meanings that are now written down, and are at least as imperishable as paper. And may, in fact, be written on a few human hearts here and there.

Opening Windows on the Past

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This particular Iowa trip has me thinking hard about mortality and the cold harsh wind that blows toward us from the future. My cousin’s only son lost his battle with depression, and his family finally came to terms with the loss. But the sadness is past. The responsibilities of the living is what remains.

I was born while Eisenhower was President. I was alive and aware when Kennedy was assassinated and when men first walked on the moon. I was teaching in a classroom when the first teacher in space was killed on the exploding space shuttle. And I was also in the classroom when the twin towers fell on 9-11. It is an important part of the responsibilities I have for being alive to keep that past alive too.

My mother’s knickknack shelf.

The reason we collect and care about little extraneous things like porcelain eggs, angels, fine blue china plates, and the California Raisins singing I Heard It Through the Grapevine is because those little, otherwise unimportant things connect us to memories of important times and places and people. We keep old photographs around, many of them black and white, for the same reasons.

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The fiction I write is not contemporary. It is mostly historical fiction. It is set in a recent past where the Beatles and the Eagles provided the sound track to our lives. It does not cross the border into the 21st Century. The part of my writing that is not about the past is science fiction set in the far future, entirely in the universe of my imagination. It is my duty to connect the past to the future.

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And I share that duty with everyone who is alive. My great grandparents and grandparents are now gone from this world. But their horse-and-buggy memories about life on the farm before electric lights and cars… with humorous outhouse stories thrown in for comic relief… are in me too. I am steeped in the past in so many ways… And I must not fail to pass that finely brewed essence on to my children and anyone young who will listen. It is a grave responsibility. And it is possible to reach the grave without having fulfilled that important purpose.

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In times of great sadness and loss we must think about how life goes on. There has to be a will to carry on and deliver the past to the future. Every story-teller carries that burden, whether in large or small packages. And there is no guarantee that tomorrow will even arrive. So here is my duty for the day. One more window has been opened.

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Filed under autobiography, battling depression, blog posting, family, healing, humor, insight, inspiration

June 17, 2017 · 2:30 pm

This is How the World Ends…

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The T. S. Eliot poem “The Hollow Men” talks about the disappointing nature of human beings and ends with a dire four lines quoted more often than any poem’s end in the history of poetry.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Now I have revealed this particular truth more than once. I am not prescient. I am an idiot. And the only things I know for certain about the future are that I will die one day, and so will everyone else. But knowing those things is wisdom. Especially the idiot part.

And I can see how things are progressing. I know what people are like at their core. If humanity is doomed to die out in the next century, or even the next decade, it will not be because of nuclear war. It will be something sneakier, quieter, and more permanently lethal.

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It will be the fact that people are capable of heartlessness and cruelty. Adolf Hitler turned the full power of government-focused hatred on those he defined as less than human; Jews, gypsies, gay people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the mentally handicapped. He used that focus to burn those peoples out of existence. But many forces in the human character rose up to shield the victims, saving some and avenging the others. Hitler learned the hard way that he was not the end of the world… from a bullet, in a bunker, having lost an empire.

Now, the Republican clown show in the United States is turning into Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

They show lack of concern for anything but corporate profits. They will undo Medicare and cancel the Meals on Wheels program because, according to evil leprechauns in charge of the budget, we can’t afford to feed people, or educate people, or do anything to dry up the painful ocean of poverty capitalism is creating. No, we must bury our pots of gold and any magic they have left in them.

They have changed the laws on environmental protections to allow themselves to profit by pouring pollutants into rivers and water supplies. They pull out of world-wide agreements to work towards saving the environment from climate change.

They may have found a way to focus hatred through the lens of indifference. Hitler’s mistake was in thinking most humans could be manipulated only through fear and hatred for those who were different. Trump’s troll army has added stupidity and greed to the lenses the light can be filtered through. And so, they may well succeed where Nazis failed.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

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Filed under angry rant, humor, insight, pessimism, politics, self pity, sharing from YouTube

June 8, 2017 · 4:10 pm

Learning to Reproduce Art Digitally

I began this journey in 2013 as author of Catch a Falling Star, using a blog to promote the book at the prompting of my publisher. They basically set the blog up for me and then handed me the steering wheel. And I drove right into the deep pool of creative liquid filled with my own writing, artwork, and goofy thinking.

One thing that was critical was adding pictures, especially my own colored-pencil art, to the blog. And so, I had to start converting my portfolios full of colorful scribbling. I bought a digital camera and started my quest to reproduce in digital form the most important parts of my soul.

Here is an example of one of those first reproductions done in sunlight with my digital camera.

In the Land of Maxfield Parrish

It was acceptable enough to post, but look at the unicorn’s muzzle. Do you not see the glare? And how about the overall graying of the picture even at the most careful aperture settings? Not to mention the camera’s penchant for posting the date in the corner if I don’t ask it not to politely enough.

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This one is so much better, having managed the settings better, having bought a 100 watt and a 300 watt light to light it better, and having practiced repeatedly.

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This one is even a little better. It is done on my cell phone camera with a carefully selected and tested app that retains and enhances color so much more easily than the digital camera.

It is entirely possible you are looking at these three digital images and not seeing any difference. But the differences are noticeable to me. And I am proud of the progress I have made in four years, even if it is all in my stupid old head.

Category Archives: insight

Theme Songs for Living Life

Becoming

Seeing Things Differently

Things I Must Tell You Before I Die

Evidence There is a Living God

Three Days Offline

Followed by a Moon Shadow

Opening Windows on the Past

Learning to Reproduce Art Digitally

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