I have a confession. I am not faring well enough to continue putting out a page of Hidden Kingdom every Saturday. I know that may sadden one or two obsessive-compulsive fans of Prince Flute psychologically torturing his adventure-mates. But there it is. Arthritis and lack of funds slow me down.
I am not saying I am giving up trying to finish the graphic novel and publish it in some form before I croak (and I don’t mean in the way a bullfrog does it), but the schedule has to accommodate even more physical challenges.
I have to spend more time driving for Uber in return for slave wages and unfair criticisms from dyspeptic passengers.
My drawing hand is letting me down with weather-related stiffness and muscle spasms.
And there are other projects that have to get some priority too.
I am re-reading Recipes for Gingerbread Children, marking up my personal copy for changes I need to make, so that I can re-publish it in better form before I try to seriously promote the hell out of it (too much Hell in anything is not a good idea, so I have to get some of it out).
I am also nearing the end of finishing When the Captain Came Calling. Soon I must think about publishing that book as well. It is turning out better than I thought it was going to be.
And I know that means leaving the poor Rascal naked in the middle of the story, but you never know, he might enjoy becoming a nudist.
I will get back to cartoon page-making as soon as possible. But for now, we are on hold.
I have started re-reading my werewolf stories again as I intend to promote the heck out of the two books pictured here in the rest of 2019.
Both books are intertwined even though they are both stand-alone novels with different genre ties and different themes. They share the same characters, many of the same scenes (though seen from different viewpoints in each novel), many of the same plot points, and the same werewolf. I like to think that reading both books together makes a better, more nuanced story as a two-book whole. But each book is also a whole in itself. And you can read them in either order.
I started by re-reading Recipes for Gingerbread Children. This book is basically a fairy-tale story-collection contrasted with a Holocaust survivor’s story. It is about how a storyteller manages to shape the world around her to help herself and others make sense out of a cruel world filled with evil and betrayal.
Dunderella and the Wolf Girl (a random werewolf illustration not connected to either book)
The Baby Werewolf is a Gothic horror tale where the real monster is hidden by deeply buried secrets, and lies have to be pierced to protect the innocent. I will re-read and promote this book second. I love both of these books with a paternal sort of overlooking-the-warts-and-birth-defects love.
So, I have a plan. A hopelessly pie-in-the-sky plan. But a plan. And hopefully at least some part of the plan will work.
Drawing nudes is a risky business. People judge you more harshly when you draw a nude and don’t explain the context. What a pervert you must be. They forgive you a little when you explain that you are an artist and once you took an anatomy drawing class in college where you were drawing from actual nude models. But understand, artists probably take classes like that because they are perverts to begin with.
And you have the added complication of being a victim of sexual assault as a child, so you have a PTSD-sort-of fear of nudity and physical contact while at the same time having all the natural urges that flesh is heir to.
The nude above was drawn actually from a photograph, a Polaroid. The griffon (who represents the fear in your PTSD-inspired dreams) did not want to pose nude in real life. So, you were given a photograph in which she was actually holding on to her boyfriend’s shoulder. Oh, wait! You mean “he” not “she”. The griffon was a boy. But she smiled when she saw the picture. And she asked why there was an eagle in it.
“But that’s not an eagle, it’s a griffon,” you said. “It represents being afraid of being nude.”
Obviously you did not give her the version of the picture with the “eagle” in it. She was happier with the nude you did give her, though it wasn’t drawn as well as this one.
And you are always a little leery of posting nudes you have drawn over the years on your blog, but somehow they get more views than anything else you post, and while you have to wonder why these pictures are so popular among judgmental people who have told you that you are probably a pervert, you secretly know the real reason.
This picture of Karla gets lots of views. You have posted it three or four times before. (Of course, that is not Her real name.)
It is kinda the thing that started the college nude drawings. She was your roommate’s girlfriend, and she was looking at your drawings because Bill told her about your artworks and she was curious. She challenged you to draw her. It was the first nude model you ever drew outside of class. Bob sat in the room with the two of you and watched you draw. (Oh, wait. You called him Bill before. Change that. Bob Bill. There, that’s better.) You drew in pencil.
You did two versions of it. The pen and ink that you drew of it in 1996 was made from the one that you kept.
If you had never done that picture of Karla, the one of the griffon wouldn’t exist either. She had to go and show her picture off to her friends. After all the great cartoons you drew over the years, you might know that the biggest reputation you ever got as an artist came about because of a pencil drawing of a smiley nude girl. And she had a big mouth… both figuratively and literally. But she was nice, and you couldn’t be mad at her. She and Bob Bill got married, and she probably still has that picture in its little frame somewhere in her house.
My novel Snow Babies reveals things from my life that are only metaphorically nudity.
There was a time in my life, in fact, for a majority of my life, that all these things were pretty much secrets that I kept to myself. I didn’t show the nude pictures to others. I kept them in a portfolio in a closet. I never would’ve admitted to being a nudist at heart either. Or anything about being assaulted as a boy. Or told anyone about any of it in a blog post like this. I can only do that now that I am old and know that none of my sins are really that awful and need to be kept secret. There is a certain beauty in that. You don’t even really need to keep doing it in second person point of view, confusing the audience into thinking it’s about them and not about you. Sorry about the meta-messaging. I just find it funny that I can be completely open at the end of the essay of life, and no longer feel the need to hide all the things that we hide under our clothing. Sometimes there is beauty to be found in the depths of a risky picture.
You have to wonder when you pay attention to what people are actually doing in this world, if the human race needs to be exterminated once and for all.
I know that as jokes go, that one is a little bit dark. But as we may actually be faced with a tipping point into the funnel of human extinction in only twelve years, it seems to me we are more likely to go down that awful rabbit hole at the bottom of the funnel than not. And that is not a very nice flesh-eating bunny we are going to find in that particular hole.
Remember, please, that I am, in fact, a pessimist, both temperamentally and philosophically. I look at the worst that could happen. But I am chagrined to see that people are actively either ignoring the climate change problem, or working to bring it on even faster by deregulating polluters in the name of making higher short-term profits. So, when the Midwest becomes an inland sea, the oceans rise to make New York and Miami into underwater bubble cities like the Gungans have, and we will have to learn to eat dirt in underground tunnels as drought and heat eliminate farming completely, we may very probably be getting what we deserve.
Obviously we are not taking things seriously enough when we continue to let the criminal orange monkey sit in the White House in pile of his own political poo and tell us things like “The Green New Deal is the radical Democrats’ attempt to turn us into a socialist country!” He doesn’t even understand that the Green New Deal is merely a strongly-worded resolution not to die in a blaze of heat generated by greenhouse gasses, and to be willing to do whatever it takes or pay whatever it costs to stay alive.
Maybe the whole question shouldn’t matter to me. I will, after all, probably be dead before the end comes for the rest of humanity. Like the Koch Brothers, I probably don’t need to fear the consequences of what industrialists like the Koch Brothers have done to our world just so they can have more money to stuff under their silk cushions to sit on.
But I do care about the world I will be leaving behind. I have many children in it. Three of my own and over two thousand that were mine for a school year or two or three to nurture and teach and shape into real human beings. I will be leaving behind a literate culture that I love and have tried desperately to add to. The worst part of that is all the wonderful books that I will never get the chance to read and own and share with others.
But there is an answer.
Motivational Quotes Human Race and Mark Twain Love Quotes | Quotehd – DAILY QUOTE IMAGE
If we can laugh about it as the ship is sinking, we will be alright, no matter what the outcome.
It was Skaggs the cat that started the action. He stared at Valerie-squirrel with evil,
mismatched eyes. He licked his evil
cat-lips. Then he launched himself into
the air, intending to come down on top of Valerie-squirrel’s head.
Pidney-squirrel was having none of that. Faster than the eye could follow, he dashed
over to defend Valerie-squirrel, latching on to Skaggs the cat’s left rear
haunch with his sharp squirrel teeth.
“Yeeowehrrrrr-owwwerrrr!” screamed the cat as he tumbled over his wound into a very un-catlike pile of Pidney-squirrel-and-Skaggs-the-cat-awkwardness all wrapped up in a fight to the death.
“Chreee-chit-it-it-it!” cried Valerie, trying hard to say,
“I’ll help you, Pidney-squirrel!” but not managing it very well. She caught the tip of the cat’s tail in her
mouth and bit hard with her own sharp squirrel teeth.
“Have a care, cat!” said Oojie. “You can eat the boy-squirrel, but not the girl-squirrels. I need them alive!”
The enraged cat was, paws and claws, splayed out in agony in
four directions at once, spitting his fury and hatred at the squirrels who still
had him impaled with buck teeth.
“You will die, beautiful one!” swore Skaggs in the mental language Valerie-squirrel had come to think of as cat language. “I don’t care what the juju thing says. He is only someone’s servant! Not the witch-doctor himself.”
Mary-squirrel pulled at Pidney and made him let go of
Skaggs’ hind leg. She dragged him over
to the furnace fixture and up a pipe that was wrapped with black tape where the
squirrels could get a decent claw- hold.
Both Pidney and Mary squirrels shot up the pipe and out the open
basement window above it.
Valerie-squirrel realized too late that she should’ve let go
and followed them up the pipe. The evil
cat whipped his injured tail around and launched her toward the stairs. Mary Philips’ father always kept a waste
basket at the foot of the stairs, and Valerie-squirrel, head over tail,
spiraled into it.
“Get outside and get the other squirrels!” Skaggs commanded
the other cats. “This one is all mine!”
The other cats disappeared up the cellar stairs and out of
the house.
“You cannot kill the girl squirrel!” commanded Oojie with a
shout.
“Spare me, little familiar… for that’s what you are, only
the witch’s familiar, not the actual witch.
Magic flows through you, but it does not come from you. You can’t control me.”
Valerie-squirrel knew she was in deep and dire distress, so
she felt around in the darkness for possible weapons. But how does one wield a weapon with squirrel
paws? And then she realized that the
waste basket was made of wicker. She
quickly bit into the soft woody fibers with her amazingly sharp incisors.
“I am going to report you to the master!” Oojie said to the
cat.
“Go ahead. I will
have a nice squirrel lunch while you get him.
I have her trapped in this human trash thingy.”
The hole was big enough to squirm through. And with luck, there was a mouse hole in the
basement brickwork right near where she tumbled out on the dark floor. She wriggled through the opening and into the
hollow tunnel that was on the inside of the cinderblock wall. She could see light somewhere far above.
“Where are you, beautiful one? How can you be hiding under this paper and
string and old apple cores?”
Valerie-squirrel heard the basket being batted away and new
light flooded in the door of the mouse hole.
“Aha! So that is
where you have gone.”
The cat’s paw came reaching in through the hole, the only
part of Skaggs that actually fit. He
nearly got a hold on Valerie-squirrel’s bushy blond tail. She wasn’t used to having a tail the way a
real squirrel would be. She tucked it up
underneath herself just in time. Then
she began to climb up through the brickwork.
It was a long, hard climb basically going straight up, but she could
manage with four splayed squirrel legs.
“You haven’t escaped me yet!” cried the cat. “I will have you still.” Her tiny heart beat even faster as she climbed.
Wizards do magical spells. It kinda goes without saying. But to do magical spells, you have to know how the magic works… and why.
Me, imprisoned in my own crystal ball by my naughty familiar.
The secret is in knowing what the word “magic” actually means. It is not supernatural power, nor the creation of something out of nothing. It is entirely the act of uncovering and understanding the underlying truth, the actual science that most people don’t yet comprehend that underpins the thing you are trying to accomplish. Jonas Salk was a wizard. His polio vaccine was a successful magical potion. But magic can be evil too. Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer were wizards. And the atom bomb was an act of necromantic evil.
Me, in my early green wizard phase.
So, being a wizard, I have learned lessons over a lifetime that uncovered for me the secrets of practical interpersonal magic. Being a teacher has taught me far more than I taught to others.
So let me share with you some of my hard-won practical magic.
In a room full of rowdy children, most of whom are not minding any of the teacher’s directions, you can get their attention easily by shouting, “What the poop is going on here?” with the biggest evil grin on your face that you can manage. They will immediately quiet down like magic and look at you. Some will be wondering if their teacher is having a fatal stroke. Some will be wondering what punishments their behavior has earned as indicated by your evil grin (and here it should be noted, their little imaginations will cook up something much worse and much scarier than anything you could’ve thought of to unwisely threaten them with. A few will begin recording you with their cell phone cameras in hopes of future behavior they can post online and get you fired with. And the rest will laugh at the word “poop” and forget why they were acting out. At that point, with their full attention, you can ask them to sit down and look at page 32, and, not knowing what else to do, they will probably do it.
Here are some other rules of practical magic that apply to the wizarding arts of being a public school teacher;
Violence is never the answer. Change their actions and reactions by making them laugh, making them cry, or making them think about something else entirely. The last thing you would ever want to do is hit them, even if they hit you first.
Anything they can be forced to repeat eight times in eight different ways is something that will be fixed in their memory for more than just the duration of a class period. It moves things into their long-term memory, and that is itself a very magical thing.
Students laugh when you surprise them or present them with the absurd. Tell them they should imagine themselves as pigeons who have to act out Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. What costumes will they wear, and why? What stage directions are necessary to add to the play that are unique to pigeons, and how will they word them? How does pigeon Mercutio go about his death soliloquy when stabbed by pigeon Tibault? Will he have to say, “Look for me tomorrow and you will find me a very grave pigeon?” By the end of the lesson they will have learned more about this play they are supposed to learn about as ninth graders than they ever would have otherwise.
Being able to do any of those things is actually a manifestation of magical power, and only producible by a wizard. The simple fact is, every good teacher is a wizard.
Me, as a wizard in my blue period. The period at the end of this essay.
Mary, the leader of the Pirates, with Squirrel Valerie and Invisible Captain Dettbarn
I am now writing every novel as if it will be the last one that I ever write. So it is with my current work-in-progress, When the Captain Came Calling. It is a story that comes before my best novel, Snow Babies, already written and published, but was actually formed in my head and in my libretto long before I began putting Snow Babies down on the page. It is a good novel, but not the best I have ever written. I am very near to completing it.
But, unfortunately, I am also very near to completing my whole life. Pain is a constant reminder that my health is so poor, that each new day could easily literally be my last.
The IRS is trying their best to help me on towards the grave.
While I am currently dealing with the tax burden from 2018, they dug up another unpaid bill from 2017, a late-payment penalty they forgot to tell me about last December. More than $200 dollars worth. I am flatter than broke.
So, I am forced to Uber drive once more. Yesterday and today I picked up fares again for the first time in the last ten months. And I am not really well enough to do it. The curse is heavy.
But this grumpy old man ain’t quite dead yet.
One more novel to finish, and maybe another one after that.’
I followed the naked girl and her pet red panda about a mile
along the beach. She skipped and sang
songs in a language I didn’t recognize, but sounded a lot like the Filipino
language. The panda sported about like a
playful puppy, following her devotedly.
I didn’t think you found red pandas on small Pacific islands like the
one we were on, but it didn’t matter what I thought. I was no scientist or naturalist, so I didn’t
really know. I kept looking worriedly
out to sea. I mean, I did know for a fact that Chinooki the
mermaid could eat people.
“We have been coming to this house, my tahanan,” she said
proudly, showing me a beached submarine from World War Two. It had a large rising sun flag from the
Empire of Japan painted on the conning tower.
“You live in a submarine?”
“It is where Mangkukulan wants me to stay while we wait for
the volcano.”
“Oh. It’s like that,
is it? Well, show me. Do you have any guns aboard? Or swords?
Something to protect us from Chinooki?”
“Oh, silly captain man, Chinooki serves Mangkukulan. She will not be harming me. And she is ordered not
to be hurting you also.”
I was a little worried about the actual intentions of this
coo-coo man. I didn’t think he really
had Malutu’s best interests at heart.
Not if he meant to toss her naked into an erupting volcano. I followed her warily up the side of the
submarine and down into a hatch near the nose.
“My goodness, this is certainly rusty and rather dreary,” I
said as I surveyed the narrow candle-lit corridor in the center of the
submarine. I followed her into the
forward section where I really expected to see a forward torpedo room. I found, however, that it had been hollowed
out, lined with bamboo, and turned into a cozy and rather decent living
space. It had a bed in the center of the
not over-large room. There was a
potbellied stove that had obviously been put there for cooking. The room was also decorated with carved
wooden idols. They were the kind of Tiki
idols that you could buy in Honolulu if you were a tourist who liked kitschy
stuff to decorate your porch back in Iowa with.
Especially one large ugly idol with a man-like body and wearing a
frightful carved mask.
“You have a nice home here.
Didn’t you say something about clothes you could put on?”
“Oh, yes. Or… you
could be getting naked too, Captain.”
“No, no. Put on a
dress please. You need to be decent
around me.”
She pulled out a rather nice red cloth dress with a white
flower pattern on it. It was a Hawaiian
sort of wrap-around affair.
“This okay? Or are
you wanting the kimono?”
“That one is fine.
You are very beautiful like that.”
“Yes, I am being beautiful for you. It is being important that I get you to like
me very, very much.”
“Oh, yes?”
“I am liking you. But
I must be telling Mangkukulan that you are here now. Chinooki has done well.”
“Um, maybe we can hold off a bit on telling the coo-coo
man.”
“Why? I am supposed
to be telling him immediately… faster if it is being possible.”
“Are you sure that coo-coo man has our best interests at
heart? I mean, it seems to me like he
might be trying to hurt us in some way.”
I was imagining being tossed into the volcano along with the girl.
“Oh, no. This he will
not be doing. I will be sending the juju
to tell him you are here.”
She went over to the biggest, ugliest Tiki idol and tapped
his tattoos, once each until she had tapped them all. And she sang;
“Juju do dah goodah… oojie-magoober!” Purple smoke poured out of the top of the
Tiki’s head and filled the room with a smell like burnt sugar.
“Is that a magic spell or something?”
“Yes, it is being something.
We are wanting you to be very comfortable here, Captain mans. Will you not be taking off your clothes?”
“I most certainly will not.”
“Okay. We will be
doing the talking about it. You will
see.”
To my utter shock and horror, the Tiki man began to glow
with an unearthly greenish-blue light.
He moved as if he were alive and trying to shake himself awake.
“It’s alive?”
“Don’t be being silly.
It is made of wood. But,
Oojie-magoober, please be telling Mangkukulan that the Captain is here.”
“Juju doo dah! Yaya!”
said the wooden creature. Then it
scampered out of the room and out of the submarine.
“You are liking Malutu, yes?” she asked me.
“Yes. You are very beautiful.”
“Good-good! Now you will be taking off your clothes, Captain.” And just like that she had me naked. I was as much under her spell as the wooden Tiki man.
The next day Valerie had a chance to hang out with Pidney
and Mary again, so she took it. She road
into town on the school bus after school with Danny Murphy. They didn’t actually talk about anything the
whole way. Anticipation is often better
than the real thing. And it wasn’t often
that Mary and Pid were both off directly after school. Pidney had no football practice that
afternoon, and Mary canceled whatever school meetings she had planned that day
in order to come back to Norwall with him after school. The four Pirates were supposed to meet in the
Library for Pirate business.
“There’s Mary and Pid,” said Danny pointing as he and Val
stepped off Milo’s school bus.
“Yeah, but who is that?” Valerie asked, pointing at a
mysterious cloaked figure standing behind the tree by the Library door. She was instantly reminded of the cloaked man
she had seen the day they got the Tiki idol.
“Hey, Pidney!” Danny shouted, “who is that near you behind
that tree?”
Pidney was holding the door of his step-dad’s old 70’s
Lincoln Mercury to help Mary get out.
Mary carried a tall stack of books.
They had driven home from the high school in Belle City together.
“What man? Where?” The figure moved out of sight behind the
large fluffy pine tree.
“Look behind the tree!” shouted Valerie.
Pid walked around to where he could see behind the
tree. He looked back a Valerie and Danny
and shrugged. “Nobody here that I can
see,” he said.
“You guys need to see what we found in the high school
library,” said Mary waving them to come towards the Library building.
Valerie looked at Danny.
He shrugged. They both walked
toward the Library.
“I found some old high school yearbooks in the library,”
said Mary. “We can use them to get an
idea what Captain Dettbarn used to look like.
He’s kinda hard to describe any other way.”
“And there’s a book about the ship, Mary Celeste. It tells about the old ghost ship, not the
Captain’s ship, but I still think it is important,” said Pidney.
Valerie and Danny walked across the street from the bus stop
to join the two high school kids.
“Here’s the 1962 Belle City Bronco yearbook,” said Mary,
handing the black-bound thin book of pictures to Valerie. “The Captain is in the Junior Class in that
one. He had a beard then, just like the
one he had on his face the last time I saw him.”
Valerie opened to the page of Junior portraits and ran her
finger over the C’s and D’s until she got to Dettbarn. He was kind of a dumpy fat boy even then,
with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a derfy smile that showed his crooked
teeth. He had a rather ratty looking
beard, which was perfect for a rodent-like face, that, while it didn’t look
like a rat, it did look an awful lot like the face of a woodchuck, or some kind
of short-toothed beaver.
“He’s kinda funny looking,” Val said to herself, but loud
enough for all to hear.
“Now, see here! I
take exception to that remark!” said a cloaked and hatted figure stepping out
of the shadow of the evergreen tree by the door.
“Who…?” croaked Mary, leaping away from the figure and
towards Pidney.
“Help me…!” squawked Danny as he awkwardly leaped into
Pidney’s arms, the football muscles catching hold of the smaller boy easily.
“Don’t you get mad at me!” said Valerie hotly. “It is not like I was talking to you… whoever
you are!” She lunged toward the
stranger, grabbing his yachting cap and yanking it off his head.
But where the head was supposed to be… nothing at all there
except a pair of thick bifocal glasses hanging in the air like they were
weightless in outer space.
Valerie looked at the glasses, and then down at the yearbook
picture still in her other hand. Yes, it
was an updated version of the same style of thick glasses.
“Erm… Captain Dettbarn. It’s you!”
“Uncle Noah?” Mary said.
“What happened to your head?”
“Oh, um… it’s still there, Mary dear. Head-hunters didn’t eat it or anything. I am just the victim of a curse. A curse that makes my body completely
invisible.” He removed the cloak to
reveal a free-standing pair of pants, a short-sleeved red-and-white-striped
shirt, and empty neckerchief, and floating white gloves that didn’t seem to be
properly attached to the invisible dumpy body wearing the sailor’s clothes.
“Er, uh… sir?” asked Pidney, “What is all this purple smoke
coming out from behind the pine tree? It
has a funky smell, like burning sugar or something.”
“Well, I hate to say it, but that is an indicator that the
witchdoctor himself is watching us at the moment from somewhere not too far
away. That purple smoke always seems to
come around right before some evil magic happens.”
“Oh, that’s not good.
Maybe we better go inside the library before anything bad can
happen.” Mary was looking around the
street for signs of the evil witchdoctor.
Pidney put Danny on the ground and both boys headed up the
Public Library steps.
“Um, uh… Pretty girl, can I have my hat back. I want to go in the library in disguise. No sense in scaring the librarian.”
Valerie frowned at the invisible man as she handed him back
the hat and the disembodied gloves placed it back on top of his invisible
rodent-like head.
“Let’s go inside the Library,” said Mary. “We have things to talk about and questions
to ask… Lots and lots of questions to ask.”
Still being ill, I had time to go through old notebooks for scan-able pen and ink art. I found a dragon’s horde full in the notebooks I had for collections of Dungeons and Dragons pictures, from games of old played with former students in Cotulla, Texas in the 1980’s and early 1990’s.
That Damned Human Race
You have to wonder when you pay attention to what people are actually doing in this world, if the human race needs to be exterminated once and for all.
I know that as jokes go, that one is a little bit dark. But as we may actually be faced with a tipping point into the funnel of human extinction in only twelve years, it seems to me we are more likely to go down that awful rabbit hole at the bottom of the funnel than not. And that is not a very nice flesh-eating bunny we are going to find in that particular hole.
Remember, please, that I am, in fact, a pessimist, both temperamentally and philosophically. I look at the worst that could happen. But I am chagrined to see that people are actively either ignoring the climate change problem, or working to bring it on even faster by deregulating polluters in the name of making higher short-term profits. So, when the Midwest becomes an inland sea, the oceans rise to make New York and Miami into underwater bubble cities like the Gungans have, and we will have to learn to eat dirt in underground tunnels as drought and heat eliminate farming completely, we may very probably be getting what we deserve.
Obviously we are not taking things seriously enough when we continue to let the criminal orange monkey sit in the White House in pile of his own political poo and tell us things like “The Green New Deal is the radical Democrats’ attempt to turn us into a socialist country!” He doesn’t even understand that the Green New Deal is merely a strongly-worded resolution not to die in a blaze of heat generated by greenhouse gasses, and to be willing to do whatever it takes or pay whatever it costs to stay alive.
Maybe the whole question shouldn’t matter to me. I will, after all, probably be dead before the end comes for the rest of humanity. Like the Koch Brothers, I probably don’t need to fear the consequences of what industrialists like the Koch Brothers have done to our world just so they can have more money to stuff under their silk cushions to sit on.
But I do care about the world I will be leaving behind. I have many children in it. Three of my own and over two thousand that were mine for a school year or two or three to nurture and teach and shape into real human beings. I will be leaving behind a literate culture that I love and have tried desperately to add to. The worst part of that is all the wonderful books that I will never get the chance to read and own and share with others.
But there is an answer.
If we can laugh about it as the ship is sinking, we will be alright, no matter what the outcome.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Mark Twain, Paffooney, pessimism, philosophy
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