I was recently gifted with the eye-opening event of having my own personal soap bubble of beliefs, dreams, and hopes popped by an angry, dyspeptic orangutan. Yes, he got elected to the most powerful position of leadership on the planet Earth. And, as I was hurt in the fall from my rudely popped bubble, I began to think about the nature of the bubbles we live in and plot my evil revenge.
You see, people all live in bubbles of perception. There are limits to what you can see, hear, learn, accept, believe, and understand. Those limits are the walls of the soap bubble we create for ourselves in the empty warehouse of our own mind. I know I have just revealed that what I am talking about is completely metaphorical, but all you people out there who live in literal-minded, practically impenetrable bubbles need to be reminded that metaphorical truth is still truth.
In politics, there now seem to be two main classes of bubble that exist separately and prevent many people from seeing and understanding the perceptions of many other people. There are conservative bubble people. There are also liberal bubble people.
Conservative is supposed to mean that they like what they currently have and want to preserve it. I include here not just possessions, but values, goals, religions, hopes, and dreams. Liberal traditionally means that they are dissatisfied with what they currently have and want change. Looking at this construct carefully reveals that anyone who is liberal should be seeking change, but once they have it, should then become satisfied and change into a conservative. Similarly, if they are conservative, but things change into a new set of things that they don’t like, they should become liberals. But in our political system, these labels have become set in stone. And I should warn you, putting stone letters on a soap bubble will invariably pop it. Conservative bubble people have added concrete mix to the walls of their bubbles to harden it, so that it won’t pop. Liberals have done the same. Though, I believe Republican conservative bubble people have somehow found a concrete mix that, when it hardens, makes it impenetrable by facts, science, and logic. Not to be outdone, though, liberals have added bizarre chemicals to their mix that makes their bubbles impenetrable by feelings, emotion, and religion. The collective effect of all this bubble-fixing is that all bubble people’s bubbles have become dark and no longer transparent. You cannot see through them.
It is no wonder that when liberals look at conservative bubbles they think, “These people are just selfish, money-hungry, and evil, and will do anything for a profit. They don’t care what’s best for everybody.”
Conversely, conservatives look at liberal bubbles and think, “They are unfeeling control freaks who want to take away our freedom to do what we believe in. They want to tell us what we can do. They are trying to take away our rights.”
So, humorist and crack-brained nitwit that I am, I have come up with an evil plan to undo this opaque-bubble nightmare. I intend to look inside lots of bubbles and find ways to make them more transparent again. I also intend to invite everyone I know, and everyone who reads this, to do the same. That should help.
But I should warn you, I am not the only one looking to manipulate bubble people. There are a bunch of rich and cynical folks out there too who are busy playing billiard games with a majority of the fossilized opaque bubbles . Once bubbles start popping, more people will be hurt.
Sometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!… To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.
I have given you a picture Paffooney today of the tapestry created by the town of Rowan, Iowa for its centennial in 2002. I consider Rowan my home town. I was not born there, but it is the scene of most of my childhood. It shaped most of who I am and how I am and what I am. It is the scene of most of my fiction because that’s where the most valuable treasures of Truth are hidden, near the wishing wells of our youth. I keep it on my bedroom wall because, not only do Pooh and Fozzie like it to be there, it is a beautiful thing to look at and reflect upon. It keeps what is most important in my life in focus. I have a lot of physical pain from my six incurable diseases, and pain makes the focus blur at times. But pain is also the source of what wit and wisdom I have to offer. I will continue to contemplate and write and think and create… and draw. I will continue to post at least a portion of the results here. I do desire to make some money with my writing, but that is only a secondary concern. I am not really writing for the people who know me in real life. They already know me and made up their minds about me long ago. They might read this and that and recognize something of themselves, but they are not the ones I am speaking to at this moment. I am talking in prose to those who see my ideas for the very first time with new eyes, no preconceived notions about me. It is for them, the readers I do not personally know, that my magic spells are cast in words.
Catch a Falling Star 
Holy Bagumba!
I have just finished reading a wonderful book. It is a young adult novel bordering on being a children’s book. It won the 2014 Newbery Medal for best work of children’s literature. But it is a book of so many dimensions that it totally defies categories. Librarians with butterfly nets who want to pin this book down on their library shelves will be pointlessly waving their nets at it like they believe it’s a butterfly, but it will soar away from them like an eagle.
Flora & Ulysses (the Illuminated Adventures) is a combination book of many different things. G. K. Cambell’s cartoony paffoonies add to and amplify the story to the point that sometimes it becomes a graphic novel.
Flora herself is a comic-book lover and follower of the adventures of a comic-book superhero named Incandesto. Ulysses the squirrel is run over by a rogue vacuum cleaner and the accident graces him with super powers (the ability to fly and throw cats and write poetry). And Flora rescues and befriends this newly minted superhero and sets him on a path that pits him against the only super-villain available, Flora’s own mother.
At certain points, through metaphor, elegance, and supreme focus, the story itself becomes poetry. But, of course, when the poem ends with a line about the squirrel being hungry, it becomes humorous poetry, simply by the juxtaposition of the sublime with the ridiculous.
As a writer, Kate DiCamillo is a master of everything I want to be. She is as much a masterful story-teller as Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, or William Faulkner. But many people will be put off by the fact that she is a children’s author. They will ignore her stories because how could a children’s author affect their lives in any way? But if you are a reader who can think and feel about things in a book, she will make you laugh and make you cry and make you not afraid to die… for love of a good book.
Let me also suggest a few of her other wonderful, wonderful books;
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Filed under book reports, book review, commentary, good books, humor, metaphor, poetry, reading
Tagged as book review, Flora & Ulysses, Kate DiCamillo