This is a detail from an angel portrait by the French Painter William Adolphe Bouguereau. One way to get better at art is to imitate and reinterpret the works of masters,
So, this is my copy and reinterpretation done in pen and ink. There are glitches here from arthritis that you can spot if you look carefully.
This is a portrait of a pretty young lady that I did from a photo aided by AI Mirror. It is a way to do a competent drawing that corrects the errors that arthritic hands are heir to.
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Before you go into panic mode, let me clearly state: No college or high school was actually foolish enough to invite Mickey to give the commencement address to its graduates. So, don’t worry about a generation of our youth actually taking to heart the advice Mickey is about to give and ruining our world for the next twenty years. This is just the insane drivel that Mickey would say if some superintendent, principal, or college dean were actually stupid enough to ask.
The most impressive commencement speech I remember from my life in education was given in 1974 by my favorite high school English teacher, Mr. Sorum. He was a gifted speaker and told a mean joke whenever a joke was needed to make the point.
He talked for forty-five minutes about “Taking the next bite of the hot dog.”
Of course, he was talking about a metaphor where the hot dog was a life of being a good citizen and living in service to the greater good. High school graduation, in this speech, was the first bite of the hot dog. Some of us were listening to what Mr. Sorum was actually saying. My second bite of the hot dog was to get an English degree from Iowa State University. My third bite was a teaching degree from the University of Iowa. The fourth was choosing a life of service by being a public school English teacher. So, I followed his advice.
Most of my class, though, took that speech to mean life was all about eating hot dogs. Was I wrong? Do I need to rethink my life?
If I am going to give advice to today’s graduates, the advice I would have to give is, “For God’s sakes, don’t choose to be a public school teacher! Do you have any idea how hard that job is for how little reward (practically none of it in money?)”
So, what advice do I have for actually doing something with your life that helps with the common good?
The most important one; “After you go to the bathroom, flush! Gol dangit! And afterwards, wash your danged hands!“
You wouldn’t believe what kind of bacteriological nightmares are being placed in your hand daily if you have a job where you are supposed to regularly shake hands.
Another key recommendation;; “Stop being so gosh-darned ugly!”
Of course, you know that this is not a matter of whether you have a pretty face or you scare rats in dark rooms. This is a matter of behavior. A matter of how many people you hate and treat with scorn and injustice, as well as who you routinely hate, and why you hate them. Hating anyone for any reason is not good for their health and is even worse for yours.
And a final thought about how to improve the world; “Figure out what and who you love in this world. Everyone needs to have something and someone to love and work at sharing your life energy with.” People need other people and they need a purpose, even if they have to forge that purpose out of cardboard, imagination, and thin air.
If, by chance, you can already handle all of these things that idiot Mickey is lecturing you about, especially if these things come naturally to you, then totally ignore that first dumb thing Mickey said. Think seriously about becoming a teacher. What you have we desperately need more of. And with your expertise passed on to others, we might just be able to make more of it.
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I was born and raised a Methodist. But I married into the Jehovah’s Witness faith. Yes, those annoying little people who come knocking at your door offering free Bible studies and wanting to talk to you about the “good news from God’s Word the Bible”. I was one of them for the better part of 20 years. And I want to tell you from the outset that I have been guilty of knocking on doors. I have been threatened to have the dogs sicked on me. I have been threatened with guns by Winchuks, Hickenloopers, and other rednecks. Laughingboy Larry, a seventh and eighth grade former student of mine even begged me to come to his door so he could throw a pie in my face. I requested lemon meringue pie because… mmm, lemon meringue! Jehovah’s Witnesses are not bad people. They are real honest-to-God Christians who believe and teach the essential lessons of Christianity, Love and Forgiveness. Some of the finest people I have ever met are self-sacrificing, hard-working Jehovah’s Witnesses. I would never speak against them. But this post has to explain why I no longer am one of them.
I have always been a reader of the Bible. I began seriously reading it in my youth when I was a victim of sexual assault and the life-threatening depression that can cause. A very thoughtful and loving Methodist minister, the father of my best friend, taught me how to use the Bible to seek answers and find comfort. As a Jehovah’s Witness, I have read the entire Bible cover to cover twice.
But I have also always been a Christian Existentialist, even before I knew what that was. I believe that existence precedes essence. There has to be a real, observable rock in front of me before I grant faith in the existence of a rock. I don’t accept “rock-ness” as something that is real because other people tell me that “rock” exists. If God is going to be the rock upon which I build my faith, then I have to observe that God is real. I need proof. Superstition is acceptance of something without proof. As far as I can tell, almost all religions… organized religions… are based on superstitions. “How do you know that Jesus loves me?” “Because the Bible tells me so.” “Why must I believe I go to Heaven when I die?” “Because your father and his father before him believed it.” “Can I accept these as real reasons… as evidence?” “Of course not. These things follow the patterns of superstition.”
“Kill the infidel! Die a hero’s death, and you will be granted 99 virgins in paradise.” “How do you know this to be true?” “Allah has told me in a dream.”
So, if you follow any of this (undoubtedly due to the same curse of relentless intelligence that plagues me), you are probably wondering why I don’t just come out and claim to be an atheist like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens? Well, because I believe in God. I have seen the proof. When I talk to God, he answers me. When I ask him to guide me, he sends signs and leads me to the answers I seek. He comforts me, even though it is only by helping me to find comfort in my own mind… my own self. He helps me find the power within me to do what is right and overcome what is wrong. Why, then, am I not still a Jehovah’s Witness? Why am I not still knocking on doors?
The truth, as I see it, is… each of us must find God for ourselves. Each of us must obtain the certainty we seek with our own efforts, or be satisfied with a perpetual state of not knowing all the answers. Either result is perfectly acceptable. Jehovah’s Witnesses will tell you that you can’t obtain eternal life unless you believe what they believe, do what they do, and accept everything just as they interpret it from their magic book. Personally, I believe there is no eternal life. I am made of star stuff (as Carl Sagan used to say, because science has mathematically proven it is true). When I die, the configuration of star stuff that is me will simply be no more. But I have existed. And my atoms will go through a large number of processes that disperse them and turn them into something else. My individual consciousness will be disbanded, but the overall consciousness of the universe will remain. The universe is greater than I am. In fact, the whole human race could wink out of existence in a massive fireball that consumes planet Earth, and the whole still remains. I don’t have to worry about any of it. I am the author of my own story. I am responsible for its content, both good and bad. And I am not sorry for any of it.
Most of the angels used in this post are by William-Adolphe Bouguereau…and one is by me.
Now you know the awful truth. Mickey is a humanist. He thinks for himself about everything… even matters of religion. How horrible!
“Tell me, oh great and powerful, Vishnu, will I be offered 99 virgins in paradise if I kill him for you?”
“No, Singh-Rama O’Malley. You are simply being stupid and superstitious. And besides, that particular superstition doesn’t belong to my religion. You are mixing things up.”
“Oh, sorry, Lord Vishnu. But is it okay if I don’t kill myself for my error?”
“Singh-Rama, you are a child of the universe… no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, the universe is unfolding… as it should.” (Note; These last words are the words of the poet Max Ehrmann in his wise poem, Desiderata.)
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Sometimes you simply have to plug in something you have been working on that is unfinished, poorly done, and thrown up here simply to hold a place in a consecutive sequence of blog posts, 14 days’ worth.
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I have spent a good many hours over the years painting metal miniatures and drawing illustrations for the old Dungeons and Dragons game. I love it, and simply can’t stop. So now I will inflict more colored pencil foofram on you…
Whitebeard began as a rumor, a character’s father who had long been lost at sea, a ship’s magical artificer who used wands and energy tools to make practical magic flow through the ship, a man with many secrets and a dark, buried past.
Of course, I borrow heavily and steal like a pirate to create characters. These two came from a cartoon show on Cartoon Network, a roguish waif and his blue goblin crony.
And there have to be bad guys. This sinister sightless mage came from a published adventure in Dungeon magazine. I heavily modified him and gave him powers the original author never intended.
These two are mirror people, having been trapped in a magic mirror for over a hundred years, a gold-digger barbarian wench and her actor/suitor who turned out to be a werewolf. The players in D&D can always be tricked into releasing the baddies just when you need them in the on-going story of sword and sorcery.
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When I started this whole blogging-every-day thing, I decided the rule had to be 500 words written in a day. And I meant to hold myself to writing 500 words somewhere in the writing day, whether it was my blog post or the novel I was working on, or a combination of both. I followed that rule religiously through more than 1,500 blog posts and five first draft novels. I found it easier and easier to surpass 500 words on a daily basis. There are all sorts of bits of time available and I collect ideas faster than a rich kid generates empty candy wrappers. The more I call on the well of words for more words, the more words are available. Now, it seems, writing only 500 words is the trick.
I suppose I have become an Old Man of Words. I know both the rules and the exceptions.
Knowing that I can write more than 500 words easily, then the question becomes, why don’t I? Well, the cardinal rule is “Say it short. Say it simple. And say it sweet.” That rule can generate a lot of wonderful writing, full of juicy ideas that splash with flavor when you bite into them. Ernest Hemingway knew that rule. Every poet knows it. Readers generally prefer the easily accessible idea expressed with elegance.
Now, I also have to admit a guilty pleasure in perpetrating purple paisley prose. That is the style of writing in which I generally write convoluted sentences with complex ideas that fold back in on themselves and over-use alliteration to criminal degrees. Charles Dickens liked to do that with descriptive details. Paragraphs about the boarding schools of London, the streets filled with child chimney sweeps and flower girls, and dingy mind-dulling workhouses could take up two or three pages per paragraph. And two pages further on, he layers more details on the same setting. Piles and piles of words and wordplay fill the pages of William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. And if you haven’t read at least something from each of those gentlemen, you will never know what you are missing. But you can prune your paragraphs like a greenhouse master florist with limited space will do to his orchids, and you can actually end up fitting great beauty and powerful content into something even more limited than a 500-word essay. In fact, if you take your ideas and distill them, and keep distilling them, over and over, you will eventually have pared the words down into poetry.
So, there you have it. The reason my essays are about 500 words. This one is four hundred and forty one words.
On Cartoon Network’s Looney Tunes show, Daffy Duck has decided he wants to be a wizard. He even had business cards printed to be one.
Being a wizard is almost as easy as that. But becoming one is not what Daffy thinks it is.
wizard (n.) early 15th century., “philosopher, sage,” from Middle English wys “wise” (see wise (adj.)) + -ard. Compare Lithuanian zynyste “magic,” zynys “sorcerer,” zyne “witch,” all from zinoti “to know.” The ground sense is perhaps “to know the future.” The meaning “one with magical power, one proficient in the occult sciences” did not emerge distinctly until c. 1550, the distinction between philosophy and magic being blurred in the Middle Ages. As a slang word meaning “excellent” it is recorded from 1922. http://www.etymonline.com
The word comes from wisdom. Being one requires wisdom. Being one requires you to look to the future and use your hard-won experience to predict how the future will unfold, and what you can do about it to benefit yourself and others. You know, “magic”.
But to become a wise-one, a wizard, requires hard experience. It is possible that Daffy has acquired some over time. He’s certainly been subjected to all sorts of slapstick cartoon injuries and insults over time.
Remember this one? Daffy swallows dynamite, drinks gasoline, this bottle of nitroglycerin, and then throws a match down his throat. The results are spectacular, but Daffy has to admit that he can only do the act once.
So maybe he hasn’t become a wizard yet. To be a wizard, you have to learn from your hard experience. You have to gain knowledge in order to work spells and do magic.
For instance, my struggles to breathe from COPD have taught me to use magic potions like ginger tea and French onion soup to open my air passages wider and make breathing easier. When the siding on the back of the house deteriorated to the point that the city wouldn’t tolerate it any more, and I couldn’t afford to pay a contractor to fix it, I googled spells for siding repair on the internet, using articles and YouTube videos to magically fix the damage myself. I also consulted other wizards at Lowe’s and Home Depot, where they are happy to give you advice if you buy supplies from them.
Unlike Daffy, I think I do qualify as a wizard. I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor. I taught in a public school for 31 years. I taught middle school children. I lived through the years of the Kennedy assassination, landing men on the moon, the Civil Rights Movement, Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics, and 9-11. I lived through the Cubs winning a World Series. And all those events and hard experiences have given me more wisdom than, perhaps, any sane person would want. Of course, I’m not sure in all my years I have ever actually met a totally sane person.
You may notice that I had to get a new magic hat. My old black Walt Whitman hat flew out the window on Interstate 35 the other day. This one is a fedora made of woven straw, a grandpa hat. Who knows? I am not a grandpa yet technically, but maybe one day before I curl up my toes and go for a long dirt nap… and grandpas count as wizards too, don’t they?
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Okay, I had accidentally stumbled across the un-shrink button on my computer for the last two posts, and then, somehow, my thumb accidentally found the shrink button again. I am trying to write this post on a microscopically small screen and squinting fiercely at the teeny-tiny letters all the while. So what do I do to avoid total mental meltdown? I call upon my minions. I have a picture file on my computer devoted entirely to minions. So I ought to be able to make a decent collage out of that;
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Okay, I reached a point where I had to punch random buttons without any response and my computer finally enlarged everything again. Ultron is obviously in the system though anti-virus software doesn’t detect him. I guess I am going to have think about a new computer. Meanwhile, a few more minions;
Filed under collage, humor, memes, Uncategorized
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It has been shown in a new study that there are actually more green leaves out there now as a result of industrial emissions of CO2. The world is becoming greener. This is not just Mickey telling stories. You can find a corroborating article from the BBC Here! So my war to keep my wife’s love of flowering plants from eating our house is not all in my head… mostly, but not ALL.
This rake-eating wisteria had climbed, entwined, and imprisoned one of our rakes. I rescued it from being eaten when the other rake broke during my endless battles with live oak leaves.
Texas weather in the month of May has been almost exclusively water from the sky. It has rained more days than it has been sunny. In fact, rainy days have been more than half the days in May. This is a distinct change from the year-after-year drought pattern that we experienced every year we have lived in North Texas up until two years ago.
The ground under our house after shriveling up with drought for eight years is now swelling and moving with the flow of mud and clay. That means the pool is cracked and unusable. The foundation is also cracked and shifting. If the plants don’t eat the house, the wet ground and the fracking earthquakes are going to knock it down.
The greening of our world is not entirely a good thing. It is true that plants turn the carbon dioxide into breathable air. And flowers are wonderful, even though the pollen they produce often makes my COPD chest pains ache and makes it harder to draw breath. But it is also evidence that the whole pollute-for-profit thing that industrialists do without conscience, is destroying our world and making it possible for the planet to pull down our structures and buildings with storms and erosion and earthquakes and general entropy.
Being an Iowa farm boy, I am in favor or the world being green. Even though, as Kermit always sings to us, it ain’t easy being green, if we can do it properly, being green will make our lives better. But we need to do it intentionally. We should not simply rely on the good graces of industrialists who make higher profits from not having regulations about how much green-house gas they can pump into the atmosphere per hour. Let’s see if we can make green a good thing.
Catch a Falling Star 