I went with the WordPress premium because even though I don’t have enough money to spend on medicine that is supposed to keep me alive (in theory), I need to be able to post new artwork to my blog. Picture-people like me need purple-paisley posting privileges because we live for color, form, pattern, and composition. I reached the three gigabyte limit on pictures with my free blog site, so I had to, like a starving drug addict, spend precious resources on feeding my habit. So expect me to play with the new toy in the coming month. I have some experimenting to do.
I have been suffering through bad day after bad day recently. I had a fender bender. My favorite football team got plowed into the turf in the playoffs. I have been suffering a great deal from weather-induced arthritis pain, low blood sugar, and viral infections. And I even reached the download limit on my WordPress account, meaning I will have to pay more money to post new pictures.
But this blog is percolating along at 30 views per day or more. I am being read and exposed to the light more than I ever have in my whole writing life. That doesn’t earn me a penny, in fact, it costs me money, but it has to be a very good thing. I deal with pain and hardship through creativity. I create things to make it better.
When I was a kid, there was a little old German lady that lived in our little town. She had a tattoo on her forearm. She had been in a concentration camp in Poland in the 1940’s. But , living as an Iowan, she was the most cheerful and loving old lady I knew. She gave me chocolate bars for holding the door open for her at the Methodist church. She gave homemade cookies to all the kids constantly. She did not have any children of her own for very sad reasons that no one ever talked about. She loved it when children visited her at her little tar-paper-covered house that we nicknamed “the Gingerbread House”. I vividly remember being there one cold winter night after choir practice when she gave us gingerbread cookies and hot chocolate. She told us on that snowy winter evening, “Gingerbread makes everything better.”
I have to believe that philosophy is essentially correct. My stories are like gingerbread. If I cook them just right, they will have that good ginger taste that soothes all hurts and longings. So, I started putting together a story in honor of her. She is already a character in several of my stories. But I needed one where Grandma Gretel was the main character. And it has to be about baking gingerbread and telling stories. In fact, I think I will bake a little magic into it. The gingerbread men she bakes will actually come to life. And I will put together a theme about overcoming the darkness with a smile and wink and a recipe for gingerbread.
Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.
The Iowa Caucuses delivered a result that was, to me, not unexpected, but definitely dreaded. Not that I am not happy that Bernie Sanders tied Hilary Clinton on the Democratic side. Sanders is a gruff and determined old grandpa-man who says what he means and has been pursuing ideas that I truly believe will benefit everybody for more than forty years. But my Iowa friends and Iowa family are more given to the conservative point of view. As a result, they have a tendency to accept as truth the lies they are told by the lizard people who have taken on human disguises and become the leaders of the Republican Party.
Apparently Grandpa Munster is the winner of the Republican half of the Iowa Caucuses. Not to say that it is a bad thing that Mr. Donald Trump did not win, for he would be a very bad president if elected. He does not represent all the people of this country, and does not even represent the interests of all the people who would vote for him. He is a greedy, ruthless business overlord who favors the rich and has distinct and harmful prejudices against most minorities. He has a terrible idea of what is good for all Americans. But, as orangutans will when given the reins of the stagecoach, he will promptly drive us into the nearest ditch and be replaced with a better driver.
Senator Cruz from Texas, however, is another beast all together. The noted conspiracy theorist, David Icke, insists many of the world leaders are actually serpentoid aliens able to take on human form, and are using their ability to control the world for sinister alien ends. Now, I certainly don’t believe that David Icke is anything more than a kook and a charlatan making obscene amounts of money lecturing about his conspiracy theories and bizarre fantasy life. Ted Cruz, in my experience, however, is a cold-blooded creature with nothing but his own appetites for power in his agenda. He portrays himself as an opponent to Obamacare and orchestrated an unnecessary, expensive, and needlessly destructive government shutdown to demonstrate his power. The fact that the Affordable Care Act is actually helping people with the nightmare of American health care and insurance access is irrelevant to him. He is a child of immigrants, yet he is opposed to giving hard-working would-be immigrants easy access to citizenship and fully documented acceptance. And the worst thing about the cold-blooded politician is that he has the power and ability to enforce his will if we make the mistake of electing him President of the United States. As a humorist, it is tempting to merely call the enemy names and cleverly insult him. You can probably tell that I enjoy doing just that. But I hope you see too that I am choosing against him for myself because of his stated policy positions and past actions. It is not the man… so much as the man’s potential for doing harm. I admit to prejudice against him. But sometimes you fear somebody for actual reasons… not just because he is a lizard man masquerading as a human being.
I am a Dr. Who fan. It is without a doubt, one of the most important factors of my Who-life. I started watching in the early 70’s when Jon Pertwee was the Third Doctor. We used to get Whovian re-runs on PBS on Friday nights. I watched every episode I could manage… Cybermen, Daleks, Silurians… the Master. It was fantastic sci-fi and imagination fuel of the highest octane. The Fourth Doctor was my favorite after I started watching his episodes. I still think of the image of Tom Baker’s Doctor whenever I think of Dr. Who.
It was during the 1980’s that PBS went back to the beginning and aired the Dr. Who serials from the very start with William Hartnell as the Doctor. My favorite Doctor turned out to be the little clown Patrick Troughton who played the Second Doctor and really sealed the formula of a wild and wacky adventurer through time and space who could make me laugh and keep me on the edge of my seat and sometimes even make me cry.
The order I watched the Doctors was 3-4-1-2-3-4-5-6-7 until the series restarted in the new Millennium. Then I watched 9-10-11-8-and a couple of episodes of 12. I used a combination of BBC America when we still had cable TV, and then I bought DVD’s to to try to fill in the blanks of what I missed. When he went to the Marines, my oldest son bought me a Netflix account (shared with the whole family) and I have been using that to watch new episodes that I haven’t had a chance to see before… even some of the old Classic Dr. Who episodes that I had missed along the way. I fell in love all over again with Dr. Who. David Tennant and Matt Smith became my new favorite Doctors.
But then came February 1st, 2016. Contract disputes took all the BBC shows off Netflix. I panicked. I bought Hulu on January 30th. Dr. Who was there up until this morning. Apparently they no longer have Dr. Who either.
The world is darker place this morning. My travels through time and space with the Doctor and his companions has temporarily been stalled yet again.
I hear rumors that it will be renegotiated, the way the CBS/Time Warner dispute was that took Big Bang Theoryaway from me for a year. But I have no faith in the possible curbing of corporate greed and the effects it has on my imaginary life. I mourn for now, and pray to the Doctor, hoping for relief.
“Kaw-Liga”
KAW-LIGA, was a wooden Indian standing by the door
He fell in love with an Indian maid over in the antique store
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.
He always wore his Sunday feathers and held a tomahawk
The maiden wore her beads and braids and hoped someday he’d talk
KAW-LIGA – A, too stubborn to ever show a sign
Because his heart was made of knotty pine.
[Chorus:]
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he never got a kiss
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he don’t know what he missed
Is it any wonder that his face is red
KAW-LIGA, that poor ol’ wooden head.
KAW-LIGA, was a lonely Indian never went nowhere
His heart was set on the Indian maiden with the coal black hair
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.
Then one day a wealthy customer bought the Indian maid
And took her, oh, so far away, but ol’ KAW-LIGA stayed
KAW-LIGA – A, just stands there as lonely as can be
And wishes he was still an old pine tree.
The quirky movie I reviewed, Moonrise Kingdom, reconnected me with a song I loved as a child. It was on an old 45 record that belonged to my mother’s best friend from high school. When the Retleffs sold their farm and tore down their house and barn, they had a huge estate sale. My mother bought the old record player and all the collected records that Aunt Jenny still had. They were the same ones my mother and her friend Edna had listened to over and over. There were two records of singles about Indian love. Running Bear was about an Indian boy who fell in love with little White Dove. They lived on opposite sides of a river. Overcome with love, they both jump into the river, swim to the middle, lock lips, and both drown. Together forever. That song, it turns out, was written by the Big Bopper, and given to Johnny Preston to sing, and released the year after the Big Bopper died in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.
Kaw-liga, by Hank Williams, was a wooden Indian sitting in front of a cigar store. His love story is even worse. As you can see from the lyrics above, he never even gets the girl. Dang, Indian love must be heck!
But I have come to realize that these aren’t merely racist songs from a bygone era. They hold withing them a plea for something essential. They are a reminder that we need love to be alive.
When I was young and deeply depressed… though also insufferably creative and unable to control the powers of my danged big brain, I knew that I wanted love. There was one girl who went to school with me, lovely Alicia Stewart (I am not brave enough to use her real name), that filled my dreams. We were classmates, and alphabetical seating charts routinely put us near each other. She had a hypnotic sparkle in her eyes whenever she laughed at my jokes. She was so sweet to me… sweet to everyone… that she probably caused my diabetes. I longed to carry her books or hold her hand. I cherished every time she spoke to me, and collected the memories like stamps in a stamp album. But like the stupid cigar store Indian, I never spoke up for myself. I never told her how I felt. I was endlessly like Charlie Brown with the Little Red-Haired Girl. Sometimes you have to screw up your courage and leap into the river, even if it means your undoing. Because love is worth it. Love is necessary. And it comes to everybody in one way or another over time. I look at pictures of her grandchildren posted on Facebook now, and wonder what might have been, if only… if only I had jumped in that stupid river. I did find love. And I probably would’ve drowned had I done it back then. Life has a way of working things out eventually. But there has to be some reason that in the 50’s, when I was born, they just kept singing about Indian love.
As terrible as my first published novel turned out to be, I have not given up on the idea of Aeroquest. I am interested in whipping a part of it into the shape of a graphic novel. So I bought a sketchbook and noodled down some Baby Mutant Space Ninjas gunk into it in full color. But it is only a rough draft. It is not finished artwork. I can’t get over how pretty and colorful it is turning out to be. I thought I would show you how it is going so far.
There are obvious signs that the dialogue and text boxes need to turned into a more finished form. And serious editing decisions probably need to be made about moon shots.
Here is what it looks like to use computer editing to try to fix some of the problems.
I will continue to work on it, but I needed something to post today. And sometimes you need to consider the work-in-progress warts and all.
One really weird thing that teachers do is think about thinking. I mean, how can a person actually teach someone else how to think and how to learn if they don’t themselves understand the underlying processes? Now that I have retired from teaching and spend all my time feeling sorry for myself, I thought I would try thinking about thinking one more time at least. Hey, just because I am retired, it doesn’t mean I can’t still do some of the weird things I used to do as a teacher, right?
This time I made a map to aid me in my quest to follow the twists and turns of how Mickey thinks and how Mickey learns. Don’t worry, though. I didn’t actually cut Mickey’s head in half to be able to make this map. I used the magical tool of imagination. Some folks might call it story-telling… or bald-face lying.
Now, a brain surgeon would be concerned that my brain maps out in boxes. He would identify it as a seriously deformed brain. It is not supposed to be all rectangular spaces and stairs. It probably indicates a severe medical need for corrective surgery… or possibly complete amputation. But we are not going to concern ourselves with trying to save Mickey from himself right now. That is far too complex a topic to tackle in a 500-word daily post. We are just discussing the basics of operation.
You see the three little guys in the control room? They are an indication that not only did I steal an idea from the Disney/Pixar Movie Inside Out, but I apparently have too few guys doing the job up there compared to the movie version. (It probably makes sense though that a young girl like the one in the movie has a much more sensible configuration in her brain than someone who was a middle school teacher for 24 years. Seriously, that job can do a bit of damage.) The three little guys are not actually Moe, Curly, and Larry, though that wouldn’t be far from descriptive accuracy. They are Impulsive Ignatz, currently in the driver’s seat (or else I wouldn’t be writing this), Proper Percy the Planner, and Pompositous Felixian Checkerbob, the fact-checker and perfectionist (also labeled the inner nerd… I am told not everyone has one of these). They are the three little guys that run around in frantic circles in my head trying to deal with a constant flow of input and output, trying to make sense of everything, and routinely failing miserably.
I shouldn’t forget the other two little guys in my head, Sleepytime Tim in the Dream Center, and little Batty up in the attic. I have no earthly idea how either of them function, or what in the heck they are supposed to do. But there they are. The other three run up and down stairs all day, locating magic mushrooms and random knowledge in the many file cabinets, record collections, book stacks, and odd greasy containers that are stored all around in the many nooks and crannies of Mickey’s mind. They collect stuff through the eyes and ears, and it is also their responsibility to chuck things out through the stupidity broadcaster at various inopportune times. It is also a good idea for them to avoid the lizard brain of the limbic system in the basement. It is easily angered and might eat them.
So now you should be able to fully understand how Mickey thinks. (Or not… a qualifier I was forced to put in by Checkerbob.)
When I was still alive and still teaching, maximizing and managing time was an incredibly important part of the day. You had to activate learners with an attention step, a lesson focus that grabbed them. Usually that had to follow a warm-up, something you got them to do as soon as you had smiled at them at the doorway, offered to shake their hand, and then pulled them into the classroom to do some work for you. fifteen minutes at the start of the class to rev up mental engines and get the gears turning… shake out the rust and the cobwebs that accumulate the instant the final bell rang in the previous class. I timed that part of class down to the second with my pocket watch… or phone in later years. Then, once the engines started, the focus is in place, you introduce the learning objective. Never more than ten minutes… timed to the second… you give the explanation, the road map of the day ahead, the instruction. Then for the next ten to fifteen minutes you let them discover stuff. In groups, with a partner, teacher to class, student to class, or (rarely) individually, they must apply what you pointed out and figure something out. It could be complicated, but probably it was simple. All answers are welcome and accepted… because all answers will be evaluated and you learn more from wrong answers than you do from correct guesses. Evaluation comes in the five to ten minutes at the end when you evaluate. “What have I learned today?” You try your hardest to pin something new to the mental note-board hanging on the brain walls of each and every student. Depending on how much or how few minutes you are given before the final bell kills the lesson for the day, you have to put the big pink ribbon on it. That tightly-wound lesson cycle goes on all day, repeated as many times as you have classes. In that time you have to be teacher, policeman, friend, devil’s advocate, entertainer, counselor, psychotherapist, chief explainer, and sometimes God. And you time it to the second by your pocket watch.
I miss being the rabbit holding the BIG PENCIL. Now that I am retired, I am no longer on the clock… no longer subject to careful time management. My pocket watch is broken and lying in a box somewhere in my library. I live now in non-consecutive time periods of sleep and illness and writing and playing with dolls. I have entered a second childhood now. Not really a simple one because of diabetes and arthritis and COPD and psoriasis and all the other wonderful things that old age makes possible. But a childhood free of school politics and mandates from the school board and from the State. A childhood where I can once again dream and imagine and create and play. That’s what this post is if you haven’t already figured it out. I am playing with words and ideas. They are my toys. Toys like this one;
This, of course, is Tim, the turtleboy of irony, holding his magic flatiron that he uses for ironing out irony. He is flattening it out now with a cartoony Paffooney and wickedly waggled words. Ironically, I have often taught students to write just like this, making connections between words and pictures and ideas through free association and fast-writing. Have you learned anything from today’s retired-teacher post? If you did, it is ironic, because you were never meant to from the start.
Sometimes life is just a flip of the coin. Heads for the good things. Tails for the bad. But because of the nature of random chance, even though the opportunities for good luck or bad luck are equal, tails twenty-seven times in a row can happen. Before my book is able to be published, my publisher is on the brink of shutting down. Their own roll of the dice has come up snake-eyes a few too many times. I and the other authors at PDMI are trying to rally around each other and do what we can to help. But the business is, for the moment, on hold. Good things can happen too, though. My novel, Magical Miss Morgan, is still in the running for the Rossetti Award from Chanticleer Book Reviews. That might turn out to be a real good heads up and help me with my publication goals. My blogging is going well. For some reason I seem to be scoring 60+ views on a single day at least one day a week for the last six weeks. I am now averaging 30 views a day instead of the old rate of 20. My blogging is being read by more actual readers than ever before. That’s a good thing, but also the result of dumb luck. There is no formula for success making it happen. I have to keep trying and trust that sometimes things will accidentally happen in my favor. I admit to being a little tired of things that accidentally cause me harm. Do I believe that God has a plan, and things work out the way they should? Of course I do. But I am not vain enough to think that I am important enough to the over-all plan to effect even a single flip of the coin of fate.
