Where do I begin? There are just too many ideas in this one topic to enumerate them all here. I just got scammed again in my bank account. A fake Microsoft account tried to rob me through my debit card number, and I have no idea how they got the number. I had to close both my debit card and checking account, with direct bill payments about to go out. I have to pray that the account changes go smoothly enough to make all the payments I owe. I am suffering from how the world sees me. Scammers must see me as the easiest possible mark.
I don’t know what the doctor thinks anymore. I seem to be going to the ER every two weeks. That and a week in the hospital mean that even with Medicare, I owe a lot of money. And who knows what President Pumpkinhead will do to the world economy in the meantime? This world seems to see me as a potential homeless person in a short amount of time. No chance that any of those folks will let me define myself.
But suffering builds character. And, damn! I have a lot of character. Want some of the extra?
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.
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.
Catch a Falling Star 
Imaginary Friends
When you know someone has an imaginary friend, something like Elwood’s six-foot invisible rabbit called Harvey, don’t you immediately think that person is crazy? I do. But I have imaginary people as friends. I think most writers do. So am I crazy? Probably. But hopefully it is a good kind of crazy.
It began with imaginary friends from books. The Cat in the Hat was my friend. Jim Hawkins was my friend, as was Mowgli and all the members of the Swiss Family Robinson. They entered my dreams and my daydreams. I told them my troubles the same way I listened to theirs through their stories.
I began to have imaginary friends that came from my own imagination too.
I used to tell my mere human friends about my friend Davalon from outer space. I told them that he was real and secretly visited me at night to talk about being able to learn about humans on earth by walking around invisibly and watching them. I got so involved with these stories that my sixth grade class began saying, “Michael is from Mars.”
When I was a teenager, I began having conversations with a faun. His name was Radasha. He was a creature from Greek Myth, a sensual Dionysian creature who, in his child body, was both younger than me and way older than me. I didn’t realize until much later in life that he was the result of my repressed memories of a childhood sexual assault that I was the victim of. I could talk to him about my fear of nakedness. I could tell him about my blossoming interests in naked girls and their bodies. I could talk to him about all the things I was somehow too terrified to talk to my male friends about, even though none of them had the same reluctance to discuss sex. Ra was imaginary. But he helped me heal.
Then the story-telling seriously began. I used Davalon as one of the main characters in my novel Catch a Falling Star. I created Torrie Brownfield, the baby werewolf to express the feelings I had as a boy about being a monster and secretly terrible and deformed. Torrie is a normal boy with a condition called hypertrichosis. I am working on The Baby Werewolf now. And then there’s lovely Valerie Clarke. She is the main character of Snow Babies which is a finished novel, edited and proofread and ready to publish. It is I book I will have to find another way to publish since the recent death of PDMI Publishing. She is not a me-character, based on my own thoughts and feelings. She is based on former classmates and students who told me things that express the sadness and isolation of growing up female. So she is even more imaginary than my other characters.
They become real people to me. They have their own point of view. They talk to me and I learn things from them. But they are imaginary. So am I crazy? Yes… as a loon. And happy as Elwood P. Dowd to be that way.
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