I now have 2,001 followers on WordPress. I’m almost sure my success as a blogger has peaked, but I am still making new readers guffaw, groan, or shout, “Eeuw!” and turn purple in the face. When I checked the history of views and visitors, I noticed that the trend during the height of the pandemic was about 50 or more views, 20 or more visitors, and 12 or more likes. The last two months, after the pandemic was receding in ferocity, I have noticed that the trend had gone down to 50 or less views, 20 or less visitors, and… well, you get the idea. So, I am headed over the hump and onto the downward slope of the bell curve.
I have reached the point of having 20 books published and still in print. Cissy Moonskipper’s novella is book #20. There are, besides that, two books of essays that come directly from this blog, and 17 Young Adult novels. Though, technically I have classified my nudist novel, A Field Guide to Fauns, as an adult literary fiction.
This weekend I finished the completed manuscript for AeroQuest 4 – The Amazing Aero Brothers. It will become book #21,
Of my published books there are 56 reviews that have been accepted as useful and legal by Amazon. They have, for reasons of their own, removed about six reviews, thus resulting in the current number of 56. There should be one more coming via Pubby, and I don’t anticipate they will remove any more of the existing ones… but you never know.
I make about $5 month on royalties. So, I guess my temperature as an author is not exactly hot. My thermometer reads, “Tepid.”
I have been feeling ill today. But my body temperature has not gone above 37.1 Celcius today. My cough has gone away for the most part, and no diarrhea since yesterday. So, I am not hot as a human being either.
Illustrations for fiction often work best with two characters together in the same picture. Then you not only have the two individuals. You also have a relationship. Valerie and Kyle are father and daughter.
But what’s the relationship between Leopard Girl and Dilsey Murphy (#81- Carl Eller’s Jersey)? Possibly Dungeons and Dragons character and player?
Brother and sister… the children of the superhero Muck Man (whose super power is his criminal-paralyzing body odor.) Muck Woman (NOT Muck Girl!) on the left, and Muck Lad (You can call him Muck Boy if you like. He doesn’t care.) on the right.
Two ESL students.David and Me, circa 1986.
Two ghosts on the coast at night… not to boast.
Blueberry Bates and her devoted boyfriend Mike Murphy.
Francois and Mr. Disney, the dream-clown from Zoomboogadoo.
It is actually a good thing I am atheist enough not to believe in the existence of Hell. If I believed in eternal punishment for saying bad words and having evil thoughts, I would surely find myself in the char-broiled section of Satan’s kitchen of charcoal justice. The reason for this thought that might rile both Catholics and Muslims is that I am a father of three grown children and a survivor of a collective twenty-one years’ worth of dealing with a teenager.
Yes, I have argued about when it is necessary to sleep, when it necessary to get up, why you have to go to school, why you shouldn’t sleep during school, why math is simple and worth knowing how to do, what causes zits on the end of your nose on very day of the big date, what condoms are for, what condoms are not for, why you should not say, “**** you” to your parents in the Willow Creek Mall, why you should not yell, “**** you” at your teachers during parent’s night at Newman Smith High School, why the stereo was not yours to sell at the pawn shop, why you can’t sell your brother at the pawn shop and shouldn’t even be trying, and why you can’t swim naked after midnight in other people’s backyard pools.
It does cause insanity. It does convince you that you are wrong about everything. And it condemns your immortal soul to the Hell I don’t believe in.
It is bad enough that I had to talk in a form of English that teenagers can comprehend for the thirty-one years of teaching middle-school and high-school, but I had to talk in simple sentences with no profanity, cussing, god-damning, or sacrilege for twenty-four hours a day during the entirety of my three kids’ teenagerhood. Gradually I lost control of my tongue. Now, as an aged and teenager-misbehavior-forged grumpy old coot, I can’t help but use profanity constantly. I have used the magic F-word and the magic S-word repeatedly on the family dog who grins her dog-grin and wags her dog tail supportively in response. I swear and use profanity as a necessity for relieving stress. And as a former parent of teenagers, I am permanently scarred and stressed for the rest of my life.
So, I contend that, since I survived those fateful years of being a parent of teenagers without actually killing anybody (that can be proven in court at any rate) I am not guilty of becoming evil. I take no personal responsibility for my use of foul language or my commission of evil acts. It is all somebody else’s fault. This is the lesson being a parent of teenagers has taught me.
I honestly hope you are not reading this blog to find advice on life, the universe, writing, or anything. That sounds more like something I myself might do, and I am goofy enough to think this purple paisley prosy thing is a humor blog. I don’t really give advice, good or otherwise.
Even as a teacher I didn’t tell students how to do things in a do-this, then-do-this, and then-do-this lecture format. If anything, I advised by showing them how I did things, leading by example. I taught skills and concepts by setting up tasks that let kids do things for themselves. Most people learn by doing.
This idea applies no matter what the learning goal is. If you want to do magic, you have to cast some spells for yourself. Roger Bacon’s students in the 13th Century learned to do alchemy and eventually chemistry by blowing up the laboratory repeatedly. If I am capable of any sort of artistical or literarical magic, I have achieved it only by trying to do it, trying to be creativical, and getting readers’ and viewers’ attention by being marketableical and somewhat ironical in my blogging with over-use of artificial -ical endings.
So, I treat this blog as way to generate ludicrous ideas and goofy content in order to fascinate readers and sometimes even make them laugh. And I have nothing more to write about than myself and my own experiences. It is obsessively self-inflicted observations about myself. Kinda like standing naked in front of the mirror and learning to laugh at warts and wrinkles. I believe in taking the clothes off of my life experiences and finding the naked truths that were previously hidden. And, no, that doesn’t really explain why it seems I like drawing naked people so much. It’s a metaphor, dang it!
Gilligan never realized how good he had it as the only realistically eligible bachelor on that island.
So, that’s what this blog is all about. I am explaining what this blog is all about. I am looking at my own experience of life, the embarrassments, the sad truths, the disappointments, the triumphs, all the most personal, private, and public stuff. And I am laughing loud and long. Because that’s what life is. Mastering that fundamental skill. Learning to laugh at life.
Here’s a brief summary of the only good advice you can possibly find by reading this blog. If you want to write well, start writing and teach yourself how to do it. And if you want to learn to laugh, look for what’s funny and laugh loud and long and clear.
Safely back at the newly-constructed Gaijinese Starport, Naylund, Sara, and Junior walked down the exit ramp from the space ship with Ged Aero, the White Spider. They were all four relatively quiet and somberly thoughtful.
“Are you sure you have no lasting effects from dividing yourself in two?” Naylund asked.
“Naylund, old friend, don’t worry about me. I could feel his thoughts when we first separated, but each of us came to terms with our new, separated identities rather quickly. By the time we were ready to leave, not only was the planet well under control, but we were each feeling like two separate people.”
“What did it feel like to split yourself in half like that?” Junior asked.
“It hurt a lot at first. He got the right half of my brain, and I got the left. But we each grew out a fairly perfect copy of the other half, me as Ged Aero, White Spider, and him as the new Grainmaster Aero. So, we are now both very different beings, me a human descended from Earthers, and him a Cornucopean Ear of Corn, controlling all the plant life on the planet.”
“It wasn’t really a fascist thing from the start, was it, Ged-dono.”
“No, Naylund. It was more of a hive-mind as if the entire planet could think as one plant-creature. And all of it flowed through the Grainmaster’s brain.”
They found themselves confronted on the Tarmac by three Blackhawk Corsairs, Razor Conn, the leader, Shad Blackstone, his second in command, and newly uniformed Dana Cole. They looked rather grim. And Ged knew immediately without telepathy or clairvoyance that they came bearing really bad news.
“So, what’s happened now?” Ged dared to ask.
The trio of Blackhawks explained about the death of the White Duke, the preparations for rebellion against the Galtorr Imperium, as well as the battle of Coventry and the war crimes of Trav Dalgoda.
“That’s almost hard to believe,” said Naylund.
“Except it was Trav. I’m afraid I have no trouble believing that,” Ged added.
“Trav died for his sins,” reminded Dana, “And the new creature he has become… well, I’ll personally work on reforming him.”
“And what about the Tesserah thing that Trav used to destroy half of a planet?” Ged asked.
“That’s what the new White Spider of the Space Lanes will be needed for,” said Razor Conn.
“We believe the thing is counting down to the destruction of the entire universe. We don’t want that to happen.”
“Yes, I agree that it does not sound like a very good thing to allow to happen,” Ged said.
“We need you and your students to take it away and destroy it,” said Shad Blackstone.
“You are the only one we believe can actually do it,” added Razor Conn.
“Me? I have no idea what to do.”
“It’s from the prophecy, Ged,” said Naylund. “It suggests that the new White Spider will destroy the Ancient Most-Evil by burying it in the heart of the black hole.”
“What black hole?”
“The one with an Ancient construct orbiting it, Little Swirl.”
“My holy God! That’s all the way Coreward on the other side of the Imperium.”
“It will be your greatest test, Ged. It will be the quest that establishes the reign of the new White Spider of Prophecy.”
“We are going to take a good long look at what this prophecy-thing actually says. And if there is any other way to accomplish it, we are going to consider that instead.”
“We will help you plan the mission, Ged,” said Razor. “But this whole prophecy thing has foretold everything without missing a single detail. I know it’s sorta spooky stuff, but it’s also real. And time is running out for the whole universe.”
“That sounds like a good plot for a whole book,” said Sara, smiling.
“Yeah… but we better take a lot of care about which dumb nut we let write the danged thing,” said Ged.
I, Googol Marou, the author of this book, swear to you, he actually said those words. And I only resent the “dumb nut” part of the comment a little bit.
When rationally considered, the number of stars and star systems out there statistically guarantees that there is other intelligent life out there in the galaxy besides us. And since many star systems are far older than ours, there statistically should also be civilizations far older and far more advanced than ours.
Enrico Fermi’s Paradox, simply stated is, “Since they should already be out there, where are they?”
Why don’t we see them through telescopes? Why haven’t they landed on the White House lawn and introduced themselves? Why haven’t they made themselves known to us and said flat out, “Hello, Earth people, so nice to EAT you.” Why aren’t they already here? Why aren’t we all on platters covered in ketchup?
Remember please, that this is a humor blog. The answers in my head are all fundamentally totally unserious.
But I am going to share them anyway. You know, just for laughs.
I think it is possible that they are no better at finding answers to Fermi’s Paradox than we are. I mean, isn’t it possible that they are no more inherently wise and capable of knowing the answers than we are?
I also mean, heck, I don’t know how to make my own television from parts I whipped up in the garage! I can barely handle learning new apps by watching YouTube videos about how to do them and then risking blowing the sparks out of my old laptop trying to trial-and-error the things I see those young whipper-snappers doing on videos until I accidentally stumble upon the right sequence of lucky guesses. The average Nebulon from the Great Nebula is probably only equally adept at doing the technologickalicky things her blue-skinned people do with space whales and brain-enhancing hairpieces. Our matching abilities to find each other in the vast oceans of stars and star systems in outer space probably are equally sucky.
Technology, after all, is only possible because we have learned things from the recorded results of other folks’ trial-and-error lucky guesses so that we don’t have to re-discover those things ourselves every single time we try something new.
So, we don’t connect with other so-called “intelligent” lifeforms in space, and they don’t connect with us, because when we do focus our fancy telescopes or radiation-recombining sindalblatt star viewers on each other, we don’t see that life over there as adequately intelligent… or intelligent at all… to be worth calling it intelligent life.
Of course the alternative explanation could be that they are already here and building underground and deep-sea bases, and our government is just not willing to tell us about it. Of course, says the horse, the government would never lie to us or cover something like that up just for the potential riches and power they could individually gain by keeping us in the dark about such things. And Bob Lazar is a fake human being, and the Roswell saucer was a weather balloon, and Barney and Betty Hill were just imagining getting probed by gray aliens, and Travis Walton’s missing days weren’t spent on a spacecraft, and the fact that he and other witnesses all passed lie detector tests about it only means that you don’t have to believe lie detector equipment when it gives you what you know in your little black heart is the wrong answer.
And maybe, just maybe, if they actually were incredibly smart enough to travel vast interstellar distances to the planet of the monkey people, who actually stumbled over the secret to blowing everything up with nuclear boom-a-booms, they will also be incredibly smart enough to not risk inciting the savagely stupid things the monkey people of Earth could do to each other, as well as to the smart aliens stuck with the awful assignment of living here and watching over us so that we don’t go all off-world and start wrecking the interstellar neighborhood.
Anyway, it’s a paradox, something there is no way to resolve with reasonable answers to reasonable questions. And physicists hate paradoxes. And this is a paradox created by a physicist. Gads! What a riddle within an enigma within a… grandmother’s cookie tin? No, that last one is a non sequitur. Stuff for another day.
Between the moment of inspiration and the publication of this novella there was only five weeks of time. It is the fastest I have ever completed a writing project for publication. Catch a Falling Star did the same complete process in a mere 36 years. Some things are just quicker than others.
This book, Cissy Moonskipper’s Travels, is a 55-page novella written for teenagers and inspired by the books, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoeand Slake’s Limbo by Felice Holman. It is a survival story about being stranded alone in space with a space ship and resources, but no way to make the space ship go anywhere and a knowledge that there are pirates out there who will looking for her to take her space ship away.
I am quite proud of this project and how it turned out. I invite you to see for yourself..
My boyhood in the 1960’s was complicated. There was fear and depression and growing awareness of violence and unfairness and evil in the world, starting in 1963 with the death of John F Kennedy.
There was magic and wonder in my childhood. I found comic-book heroes like Spiderman, fantasy movies like Captain Sinbad starring Guy Williams, and Science fiction movies like 2001; A Space Odyssey.
A sense of adventure and the wonders of the past came through reading. I read and loved Treasure Island and Kidnapped, both by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Of course boyhood is also the time in which we have to come to terms with sexuality and sexual identity. My battle was complicated by being sexually assaulted by an older boy. It took me a long time to sort out the fact that I was not a homosexual and being a victim does not make a boy into one. I was an untouchable child, but that didn’t stop me from obsessing about love and affection constantly.
What you learn to be in boyhood is what you end up being in adulthood.
Nurture is more important to development than nature.
Education is what makes a boy into a man. Your genetic makeup has its effects, but is only the blueprint, not the building.
Boyhood behavior might not go exactly as parents plan, but it has to happen anyway.
There is no such thing as a perfect boy.
Boyhood always was and still is an adventure. I should know. I’ve been a boy for 64 years.
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 our. 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.
One of the things that I repeatedly need to do is to reaffirm fundamental beliefs. My son and I were talking this morning about things that might be worth getting fired for because there are lines we won’t cross, not even if someone is trying to push us across.
All People Count as People
Our family is made up of Caucasian, mostly-German-American white guys on one side (my side) and Filipino Hispanic-Polynesian folks on the other side (my wife’s side.) We believe that all kinds of people are equally valuable. As a school teacher I had to learn to love Hispanic and Spanish-speaking kids, loud and mostly happy black kids, Asian kids with tiger moms, and, of course, white kids of a thousand varieties. It upsets me that a former president tried to deport Dreamers who’ve never known any other country than the US. It upsets me that the Texas legislature is trying to cut down on the right to vote for black, Hispanic, and Asian people, as well as any other group who might vote for Democratic candidates. I am directly opposed to any Fox-News comments about any group of people that makes it seem like they are worth less than rich white Americans. Grant us all our human dignity.
Children Deserve to be Protected
I think one of the most important reasons for me to become a teacher was that I was myself sexually assaulted as a ten-year-old. I made a secret pact with myself to do everything in my power to prevent such a thing happening to any other child.
Maybe I never got the chance to confront a sexual predator myself, but I did take steps to help in situations of neglect, suicidal depression, drug problems, and I mentored several fatherless boys.
If you do it right, you can nurture a child into becoming an excellent human being.
Making People Laugh in Tough Times is a Good Thing
I am devoted to the idea that humor is a solution to many problems in this modern world. Of course, my wife (pictured to the left as a Panda from the Pandalore Islands) disagrees with this notion. That is because I am the husband, and husbands are always wrong. It is one of those unwritten rules followed by wives everywhere.
But because of my weird sense of humor I can laugh at anything even if it is actually hurting me. Against the healing power of laughter, nothing truly terrible can stand.
And so, today’s incoherent tirade now comes to an end. Not because I am actually done talking about my myriads of essential beliefs, but because three main points makes a good, teachable essay. And I can’t think of a number four right now because my brain shuts down after three just like everyone else’s. In fact, just like yours.
Catch a Falling Star 
Obsessively Self-Reflective
I honestly hope you are not reading this blog to find advice on life, the universe, writing, or anything. That sounds more like something I myself might do, and I am goofy enough to think this purple paisley prosy thing is a humor blog. I don’t really give advice, good or otherwise.
Even as a teacher I didn’t tell students how to do things in a do-this, then-do-this, and then-do-this lecture format. If anything, I advised by showing them how I did things, leading by example. I taught skills and concepts by setting up tasks that let kids do things for themselves. Most people learn by doing.
This idea applies no matter what the learning goal is. If you want to do magic, you have to cast some spells for yourself. Roger Bacon’s students in the 13th Century learned to do alchemy and eventually chemistry by blowing up the laboratory repeatedly. If I am capable of any sort of artistical or literarical magic, I have achieved it only by trying to do it, trying to be creativical, and getting readers’ and viewers’ attention by being marketableical and somewhat ironical in my blogging with over-use of artificial -ical endings.
So, I treat this blog as way to generate ludicrous ideas and goofy content in order to fascinate readers and sometimes even make them laugh. And I have nothing more to write about than myself and my own experiences. It is obsessively self-inflicted observations about myself. Kinda like standing naked in front of the mirror and learning to laugh at warts and wrinkles. I believe in taking the clothes off of my life experiences and finding the naked truths that were previously hidden. And, no, that doesn’t really explain why it seems I like drawing naked people so much. It’s a metaphor, dang it!
So, that’s what this blog is all about. I am explaining what this blog is all about. I am looking at my own experience of life, the embarrassments, the sad truths, the disappointments, the triumphs, all the most personal, private, and public stuff. And I am laughing loud and long. Because that’s what life is. Mastering that fundamental skill. Learning to laugh at life.
Here’s a brief summary of the only good advice you can possibly find by reading this blog. If you want to write well, start writing and teach yourself how to do it. And if you want to learn to laugh, look for what’s funny and laugh loud and long and clear.
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