Category Archives: philosophy

February 28, 2016 · 5:26 pm

The Cowboy Code

When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code.  The guy in the white hat always shoots straight.  He knows right from wrong.  He only shoots the bad guy.  He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can.  Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.

And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters.  People who make television shows never lie, do they?  In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.

Daniel Boone was a real guy too.  He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers.  And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode.  He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad.  Mingo was always on Daniel’s side.  And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared.  It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive.  Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.

So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code?  I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened.  Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology?  Didn’t they learn the code too?

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I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody.  But that was never the point of the cowboy code.  We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth.  We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad   We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands.  And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be.  But Daniel Boone was a real man.  Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.

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February 25, 2016 · 4:43 pm

Left is Right

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The finished portrait of Marla

With numerous health problems, I have difficulty with sleeping every night.  One of the worst problems I have is nocturnal acid reflux.  It makes me wake up in the middle of night with fire in my throat, like some sort of dyspeptic acid-spitting dragon.  I have to vault out of bed, arthritis and all, and go toss the contents of my stomach into the toilet.  Sorry to be so gross, but it is important to this theme to get a sense of just how bad it is to be on the wrong side.  What do I mean by that?  Well, I learned from a doctor recently that which side you lie on to sleep makes a big difference.  If you sleep on your right side at night, your stomach is oriented in a way that the top opening angles down towards the esophagus.  This leads to an unfortunate ooze of stomach acid that sets off the reflux crisis.  If, however, you sleep on your left side, the stomach is angled in a manner that allows gravity to work for you instead of against you.  I have been intentionally lying on my left side every night for a month.  It works.  No acid reflux.  Until last night.  But when I woke up gagging, I had unconsciously rolled onto my right side.  So it has become obvious to me,  the left side is the right side.

 

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The latest additions to my collection, January & February

Life has to be in balance.  But, unfortunately, it constantly shifts back and forth, up and down, and all around.  Keeping life in balance is a juggling act that may involve lying only on your left side while you sleep.

I worry too about the balance affecting the world as a whole right now.  We are very deeply mired in a time when political right and left are out of balance and have been for too long.  In politics, the right is the conservative belief that things should remain the same.  Since the Reagan administration, that has meant deregulating in the name of profits, free market capitalism, and letting Wall Street profit-makers do anything and everything they want to do to make higher profits.  The left is in favor of change.  When I was a kid, I can remember the left being a very bad thing.  They wanted communist-style revolution.  They robbed banks and blew things up.  But most of those leftists are now dead.  They still exist, but the far right is just as dangerous, the KKK, the militias, and they are far more numerous in this day and age.  The leftist agenda now is more what used to be the moderate position.  Senator Elizabeth Warren and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders want to re-regulate the Wall Street trends that caused the economic meltdown in 2008.   They want to promote progressive tax systems that move the money out of corporate profit-funnels and back into the hands of the middle class, and the institutions that benefit them.  There is a need to shift to the left.  There is need to restore balance.  Once again I think it is proper to say, the left side is the right side.

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Here is some of that leftist thinking from the socialist Public Television initiative.

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February 22, 2016 · 4:36 pm

Life Inside

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There is a certain amount of frustration that comes with age and arthritis and limited ability to move.  A good share of the time I am stuck within my bedroom/studio.  Bad weather and weather changes, as well as the strains of housework, stiffen my back into immobility.  So, I am stuck exploring not the outside world, but the inner world of stories, pictures, and my own imagination.

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Of course, one has to beware of a life lived in imagination and isolation.  Some of it can be kinda wicked and dangerous.  Okay, maybe not, but definitely in danger of overwhelming goofiness.  As you can see, I take a bit of my artwork and use photo-shop to make even goofier arty things.  I experiment and stick stuff together just for the heck of it.

I suppose this is probably evidence a good psychiatrist could use to keep me locked up for a while.  But I’m kinda stuck anyway in my little room.

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February 20, 2016 · 3:42 pm

A Growing Collection of Sunrises

I have been moaning and complaining in this blog for a couple of weeks.  I don’t have bad days.  I have bad weeks… bad months… bad years.  And making fun of my pain, making light of my suffering, is a way of making myself feel better.  Making light of serious stuff… it occurs to me that that is what God does every single morning when the sun rises.

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My most recent sunrise… 2016

You may be aware if you have read about me making light of my raging hoarding disorder that not only do I collect things that normal people don’t keep massive quantities of, but I also collect photos I have taken of sunrises I have seen.  As I woke this morning with an ache in my chest I really should see the doctor about again (I have seen a cardiologist twice in the last five years about the same nagging pain, and the best they can tell me is that it might be an arthritis pain in my lower rib cage) I thought melancholy thoughts again about my personal end of days.  One of the reasons I continue to collect sunrises is to celebrate the fact that I am still here, still witnessing God making light of the serious universe.  I really think that may be the most important thing in life… to live, and love, and laugh… to experience existence.  I am a tiny little creature on one small blue planet in a vast and seemingly never-ending ocean of space and stars.  The iron in my blood was forged in the centers of distant stars that were born, grew old and died, and littered the universe with their element-rich guts when they finally exploded in an amazing super-nova of stellar fart-gas that it is possible no living intelligent being ever witnessed.  I am insignificant.  And the universe will not miss me when I am gone.  And it may not even know I was ever here.  But I am here to see the sun come up.  That is a duty I continue to perform.

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I know it may look like I am endlessly snapping the same picture over and over again.  But every day the subtle pinks and purples and blues… the oranges and reds… make a different Jackson Pollack painting of the sky.  And I look at it carefully while the dog is impatiently tugging at the end of the leash because she wants to go piddie-paw and poo.  It is a beauty to be bathed in… and I apparently have earned one more to add to my collection.

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February 15, 2016 · 5:36 pm

Down and Blue

Life for me has always been a struggle with poor health and depression, ill fortune and difficult circumstances.  I have always been a “make lemonade” sort of life-gives-you-lemons problem-solver, but the more I make lemonade, the more my sorry old puss gets puckered.  I am having chest pains and breathing problems again.  I don’t have money for doctor’s visit co-pays and medication.  My car is in the shop with more than $6,000 dollars worth of damages, hit by a passing motorist going too fast while it was parked outside my house.  Insurance is probably not going to pay that much to fix a five-year-old car.  My family in Iowa have recently been buried under huge snowdrifts.  And the grim reaper has been knocking on my bedroom door asking if I want to play a game of chess.

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But I will tag this post as humor.  Because, ironically, humor is not always funny.  Sometimes it has the sour puckering effect of lemonade with too little sugar in the mix.  When you have worked hard all your life for very little reward, it’s hard to appreciate the tiny amounts of sugar you have been allotted.  I see myself ending much the way Mother Mendocino ended, except the community will not even hear about my passing.

My Jester

The more I sing songs, and rattle the boards, and try to make my puppets dance, the more arthritis crabs up my fingers and makes me ache.  Sometimes happy simply comes hard.  But self-pity is easy.  And I am a pratfall clown most of the time.  I use my injuries to make others laugh.  And there is still magic to be found here and there in my art.  Today’s paffoonies were all culled from my Postable Paffooney file.  They are all old artworks of which I am pathetically proud.

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Pathos is a part of humor too, you know.  You tell a story about someone whose been on a lonely journey, and he finally gets to come home to the ones he loves, and you smile at the end of that.  If you laughed at the clown for falling down, you smiled too when he got up again.  After all, he wasn’t hurt.  In many ways we are all made of spoof and rubber, and while the bullets don’t bounce off, we are more like Superman than we think.  There is definitely wisdom buried somewhere in this pile of old quilts I am calling an essay today.  I just wish I had the words to make it clearer than I do in this poor excuse for a paragraph.

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My sister reads posts like this and tells me they are too depressing, that I need to write happier stuff.  But don’t worry the way she does.  I do spend a lot of time writing about the low spots.  But I would like to point out that most of the time I am climbing out of holes.  So I may start the essay in a very low place, but the direction I am going is always up.

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Now I have said my 500 words for today, and while I still need bed-rest… there is no doubt the sun will come up again.

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February 3, 2016 · 4:03 pm

Gingerbread Recipes for the Future

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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.

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January 21, 2016 · 4:38 pm

How to Be Offended by Practically Everything

I have recently been told that I am too easily offended.  In fact, I have been repeatedly told that.  Apparently I overreact to things that should not upset me or should not be taken personally.   Apparently my humor is too flippant and insensitive.  I am told that I should not have an issue with people using the Confederate Flag on Facebook posts, even when they are insisting that their rights are being violated if they can’t fly that flag next to the U.S. Flag on Veterans’ Day… even though they are from Iowa and their ancestors fought and died for the Union.  I am told that I should not be upset that Donald Trump wants to deport almost all of my former ESL students because he thinks they are rapists and drug dealers.  He hasn’t met them.  And he even admitted that he “assumed some are good people”.  But he is going to protect us by eliminating all foreigners from our society.  No more of this “anchor baby” stuff with children being born here only so that their parents can stay.  People don’t deserve to live here if their ancestors weren’t born here.  And I shouldn’t let my foolish attachment to these interlopers, based on years worth of getting to know them so I could do my job as a teacher properly, color my response to the perceptions and pronouncements of “real Americans”.

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The Daily Edge’s photo.

I recently shared this movie poster on Facebook because I am disgusted and offended by the immigration policies of both of these “real Americans”.  I thought it was clever, and it made me chuckle, even though I am quite well aware that Jim Carrey might be livid about having his face replaced by Sarah Palin’s.  She does, after all say funnier and more nonsensical things than he does.

But I got blow-back.  An Iowegian Facebook friend, whom I remember as a sweet-natured little six-year-old that I held on my lap in the 1970’s, told me, “Just wait, you will be sorry” in the comments.  Now, you should probably know that Tommy grew up to be an illiterate jack of all trades who loves guns and hunting and is planning to vote for Donald Trump because he passionately hates the “Mexicans” that moved into Iowa to do the farm work that practically no one else is doing any more.  He is not above acting out his belief in Trump with a gun in his hands.  Will he hurt me over a Facebook post?  Probably not.  He’s not a genius, but he still remembers me fondly as the older boy that befriended him when he lived with his grandma in the house on the other side of our back yard.  I played card games and monopoly with him and his brothers, and often let him win.  But apparently, hatred of Mexicans and other “job-takers” Trumps hearts in the card game of life.

So I am left wondering if the people telling me that I am too easily offended aren’t actually the ones getting offended for the wrong reasons.

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I try to listen whenever Willy Wonka pops up on Facebook to smugly tell me how to live my life.  He is right when he says that you have to honestly consider the viewpoint of others and not be so completely convinced of the rightness and righteousness of your own point of view.

But those getting mad at me for being offended are offending me by saying and posting and doing hate-filled things that don’t treat others as people… just because their skin color and country of origin is slightly different than our own.  They post insults aimed at “welfare queens” and suggest those people deserve what they get out of life because they are lazy and take advantage of government programs.  Never mind that most of the suffering and poverty in this country is endured by the growing number of people with minimum-wage jobs.  And those people are always working hard when I see them at work.  Some of the people that offend me by suggesting we shouldn’t be generous to others are people that I know have no more wealth to draw upon than the people they are criticizing, and take some of the same assistance programs they are complaining about.  Maybe it is actually to everyone’s benefit to be offended by the kind of hurtful things and ideas that go around this country prompted by Republican Presidential candidates and Fox News.  Maybe I am not being offended enough?

We will have to wait and see.  I’m sure that sooner or later Willy Wonka will pop up on Facebook with the answer.  I do love that movie, and that is probably why his internet meme ideas always sway me.  (It is possible that this essay may not be exhibiting Mr. Spock levels of logic, but Mickey can only think like a Mickey always thinks.)

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December 26, 2015 · 4:31 pm

Roses at Christmas Time

When bad things happen, we can usually make something good out of them.  I have always believed this.  It is Midwestern pragmatism in action.  Hail destroyed the crops?  Martial your resources for the next growing season, or change from a farmer to something else more profitable.  There is always a way forward, even if you have to learn to be tougher and tighten the belt, or next year’s food supply depends on the farmer in the next county.  Global warming is threatening to cook us in our own juices?  Well, this year our confused roses in the yard are blooming like it was Springtime.  The part of the wheel at the bottom, crushed against the pavement, rises to the top again as we move forward on the bicycle of human life.

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All of these roses have bloomed during the Christmas holiday this year when temperatures sank no lower than the 50’s and got as high as 77 degrees.  It recalls a recent year when dorky daffodils poked their yellow heads out of the ground in January only to be murdered by snowstorm a week later.  Will these roses be subjected to the same fate?  Robert Herrick says, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…”  We will pragmatically enjoy them while they are here, no matter what happens.  I have been writing a science fiction novel about environmental and political Armageddon.  It is set on another planet, but that planet stands in for Earth in my book.  But the point is that the universe goes on even if we are dumb enough to destroy ourselves by pillaging the natural world.  Yet, I don’t believe that will happen.  I see movement towards renewable energy, and political change for the better is in the wind.  In the end, I think humanity will dig down deep for that magical force we all possess.  We will be able to change for the better when we are forced to.  I don’t expect to live to see it.  I don’t figure I have another whole decade left to live, and the course we are on won’t be decided before 2050… probably.  But, all speculation aside, I am here now to enjoy roses blooming at Christmastime… and to share that rare feeling with you.

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December 23, 2015 · 9:04 pm

Humbuggery

Technically I am not supposed to be celebrating Christmas.  Jehovah’s Witnesses have institutionalized “Bah, Humbug” and made it a religious offense to celebrate Christmas or any other birthdays.  And I have not yet been disfellowshipped from the JW religion.  That is, however, a mere oversight on their part.  They have not read this blog enough to be offended with my worldly views.  I have suggested here that I am a Christian existentialist… something that any JW who understands what that philosophical term means would call an atheist.

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Fozzie tells really bad jokes, which isn’t necessarily irredeemable, but Alf not only tells bad jokes, he also eats cats. How can they be saved by religion?

I definitely understand why atheists avoid proactive religions like the Witnesses.  For one thing, JW’s believe in the redeem-ability of the human race.  Open the door, listen to the proselytizer’s mini-sermon, read the infallible Bible verse, and paradise in an everlasting life on Earth is yours for the taking.  So, get out there and knock on some doors with a Bible in your book bag!  These redeemable Texans whose doors they knock upon being the same ones that have the police arrest Muslim clock-making teens for showing their project to a teacher, and throw hungry school children’s lunches in the trash in front of their friends if they owe $1.70 over the limit for their reduced lunches.  These redeemable Texans are also the ones who sent Ted Cruz to the US Senate and may help elect him president.  Despicable is too good a word for that type of human being… unless Sylvester the cat is the one saying it with extra sloppy spray coming out of the sides of his mouth.

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I confess that I have been working on a comedic science-fiction novel about a planet-wide civilization destroying itself for greed and despicableness.   I even put Ted Cruz in that story as lizard-man alien (which I am not sure if it is an insult or a complement to Cruz).  I also idolize Mark Twain, and often wonder if he isn’t right about the “damned human race”, and how Noah should’ve let them drown.  So I should be embracing humbuggery for so many reasons…

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Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.

But today I re-connected on Facebook with a former student from not so long ago.  Ronan Pablomia was an ESL student from the streets of Manila in the Philippines.  As a teacher, I normally love students, even the stinky ones, and I tried for three years to get through to this kid.   He was repeatedly in fights in school with other students.  He was disruptive in the classroom, saying intentionally horrible and insane things during class.  He was probably an un-diagnosed bipolar person, but he was definitely diagnosed as having a learning disability and a rage disorder.  He was hostile and made life so miserable for his classmates that they begged both the principal and me to expel his sorry behind from our high school.

Today he had the remarkable good sense to tell me on Facebook that I was the best teacher ever.  He said he finally acknowledged his fighting problem and got help (after getting out of jail).  He has a job now and is helping to support his parents.  He apologized for how stupid he acted in class, and I ended up reminding him that the best students are the ones that learned the most.  He was not the smartest kid ever, but he was bright, and if he has learned to control his bipolar temper, he definitely qualifies as one of kids who came the farthest down the learning path, and probably learned the most after all.

So Ronan gave me an excellent and unexpected Christmas gift.  He added one more hint that my career as a teacher was not in vain, and three years worth of patience and suffering did not go for nothing, even though he never graduated high school.  Maybe the aggressive and carnivorous primates that populate this planet are not all that irredeemable after all.  So have a happy Christmas.  Frohe Weinachten.  Feliz Navidad.  And God bless us, every one.

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December 11, 2015 · 7:53 pm

The Underdog

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Yesterday I failed to add to the list of magical powers I possess the ability to make football teams lose.  I have always believed that all I have to do is root for a team to win and they will lose.  I have tested out this power thoroughly over the years.  Through most of my life I thoroughly detested the Dallas Cowboys.  I hated the way they always seemed to have the advantage, the way they would always injure players on my favorite teams and force them out of football for the rest of the season, and they would always win.  Even after moving to Texas and, still rooting for the St. Louis Cardinals even after they moved to Arizona, I rooted against the Cowboys in every game they played.  I am amazed that they didn’t go undefeated for three decades.  But a little miracle called “General Manager Jerry Jones” happened to the Cowboys.  I moved to Dallas at a time when the team was being dismantled and dismembered by a magical ability of Jerry’s that seems very similar to my own.  The Cowboys became the underdog.  So much so that I actually began to root for them when they were not playing the Cardinals.  This, of course, magnified Jerry’s magical gifts tenfold.  The Cowboys became the same kind of perennial losers the Cardinals had always been.

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So, you can easily see that I am one of those superstitious nerd-body nincompoops who always pulls for the underdog.  I admit to helping the Boston Redsox win their first World Series at the end of “Babe Ruth’s Curse”.  Those perennial also-rans benefited from playing my beloved Cardinals’ baseball team.  So I rooted against them fiercely, and they won.  In fact, underdogs sometimes win even in spite of magical ability.  Some times they just have to win.  In 2006 the Cardinals won the World Series on the strength of Chris Carpenter’s throwing arm and Albert Pujols’ bat, along with a team of underdogs and ne’er-do-wells who all played far above themselves.  I rooted for them every step of the way.  And we lost some battles, but we won the war.  Such is the way it must be in this world.  The ultimate victory belongs to the Underdog, the unlikely superhero that is sometimes confused with a flying frog.

The football Arizona Cardinals came through for me again in the same way last night.  They were up against another good team in the Minnesota Vikings.  And in spite of the fact that I was rooting for them every step of the way, I saw them pull victory from the jaws of imminent defeat.  With mere seconds left, they created a fumble and recovered it, preventing a game-tying field goal that was practically in the bag.  The Cardinals are now in the playoffs with an 11 and 2 record, poised to make another run at the Superbowl.  That may not seem like an underdog to you, but if you look back over the years of rooting for a team that was often the butt of jokes and were usually losers like the current Cowboys are, then you can see that these are underdogs at the end of a long, long uphill climb.  And aren’t we all like that most of the time?  Aren’t we all climbing the mountainside in spite of numerous avalanches, storms, and falls?

Listening to the radio station KLUV doing their annual radiothon for Children’s Hospital while taking my daughter to school this morning, I heard the heartbreaking story of a little boy who is both autistic and epileptic.  Apparently he collapsed in school, and when taken to Children’s ER, was found to have leukemia as well.  I had to stop the car and cry for ten minutes.   It never seems fair to have to listen to stories like that.  You want to help the underdog to win.  But you feel totally powerless.  I don’t have enough money to pay my own medical expenses, and my daughter had to come home early with a fever.  But believe me, I had to donate $20 to Children’s Hospital.  It is a tiny, meaningless amount… but the magic is in the doing and the believing.  I will continue to use my goofy magic to the very best of my ability.

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