I am not particularly superstitious. But as a person who perceives the world synesthetically, I still find certain numbers to be eerily omenous. I am not a descendant of the Knights Templar, but I do know why Friday the Thirteenth makes them nervous. At dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307, the Templar Order was betrayed and arrested by King Philip of France because he sought to seize their vast treasury, which he did not fully gain control of. But he did use a lot of Templar Knights as firewood, burning them at the stake for supposedly worshipping Baphomet, a horned devil of Islamic origin.
The number thirteen appears black to me with an aura of evil around it. As a child, and after I was sexually assaulted, my terrible secret, I believed I would die on Friday the 13th. I worried intensely as each new Friday the 13th approached. But when it passed and left me still alive, I tended to think that any such date that did not end me was, in the long run, a lucky day. Some years, I had three whole lucky days.
This day, however, brings with it worries about blood pressure spikes and dives, possible heart attacks, or heart failures, and possible strokes. I may actually die this time. I spent a week in the hospital in May and had a pacemaker surgically attached to my heart. I still await the stress test that will reveal if there are any blockages in heart valves or clogged arteries. There is also a concerning spot on my liver that has yet to be tested, discovered anew by an X-ray taken during one of my three ER visits.
Do you think I can hold my breath for an entire day? Or will that only make matters worse?
Tiger Tammy, raised in the jungle by big cats, is a jungle wild child.
Doctors’ visits this week proved that I am still alive and probably will still be alive for a while yet.
The pacemaker is regulating my heart and working correctly.
I now have nine incurable diseases and conditions. And there is a spot on my left lung, and another one on my liver that will have to be checked once my heart is fully healed.
There are still worries and concerns.
I have been experiencing cracks in reality, though. I am told by spirit voices that when one is drawing close to the Reaper’s doorway, one can get glimpses of the last world and the next world through an increasing number of encroaching cracks. I should be concerned about seeing things that aren’t there yet, and hearing things said that no one here has spoken. But I am not. My life is nearly complete anyway, and I am not going back to the Emergency Room unless I have to.
If I am going to move to Iowa to live in the farmhouse until I die, then I have to take stock of the things I want to take with me. I have limits to what I can keep. Treasures to go through acquired since 1981. So, I will be posting a number of things as I sort through them. Above you find some of my horseback treasures. Left to right, Cowgirl Barbie, Roy Rogers, Lady Godiva Barbie, The Queen of Themyscira, Hippolyta, and her daughter, Diana, Wonder Woman. This is the first of many I will be evaluating, keeping, or discarding. What I have to leave, my wife and daughter will have to dispose of. Some of what I take may be denied me by my Spartan and frugal That will be disposed of in the Northlands.
This plan, of course, is easily thwarted if I die of heart failure before it can be done.
Today was spent in the ER pursuing what might have been a bad turn in my heart struggle. Fortunately, an x-ray, six or seven blood tests, a CT-scan, an EKG, and three hours of heart monitoring proved that it was nothing to worry about. It wasn’t wasted worry either. I went to the ER because of signs and symptoms that my cardiologist had warned me to be alert about. I happily turned out not to have any post-surgery blood clots, nor any further undetected blockages or bleeding following my new pacemaker being installed.
,So, being too tired to write more, here are two digital artworks I created with digital art tools, a Digital Drawing Pad app, AI Mirror app, and Picsart AI Photo Editor app, as well as the funky otter picture being created from a color-by-number cutsie picture from the Tapcolor Pro app.
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.
This is not Mickey. It is either George Applebee, or it is Red Skelton pretending to be George, depending on how literal or gullible your brain is.
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?
This is not Mickey either. This is Boris Karloff in makeup having a cigarette, or possibly being Frankenstein’s monster.
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.
This is Mickey. Or possibly a two-eyed cyclops giving the world the ultimate stink-eye.
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.
So, I am trying to use what I am learning from AI art programs to help me do a better job of promoting my writing adventures with the loopy, unrealistic goal of making money with books. I know… stupid Mickey thinks authors ought to make some money off the books they’ve published too. What a stupid guy that Mickey is. He doesn’t know that money made from books on Amazon goes 99% to Jeff Bezos. He’s the one risking death in space inside his super penis rocket. That means he deserves the larger share of any money my writing may have earned on his super, super-sized everything delivery service. All hail the penis-flying bald man who invented sending books everywhere by drones!
So, let me go ahead with the promotional picture I created for the nudist short-story collection, Adventures Without Clothes. My story, “The Kelpie” is in this book which sends all proceeds to Doctors Without Borders. Good book. Good story by me. Great nudist fiction by Ted Bun, Will Forest, Paul Z Walker, and other contributors from the naturist/nudist fiction creators from the internet. It is doing better profitwise than any other book that I am associated with, including my very best books..
You can see I posed naked in the mountains with the book to lend a sense of adventure to the promotion. I actually posed naked for this picture, since I am supposedly a nudist myself. My wife and daughter refused to have anything to do with the taking of this photograph. I had to learn how to make my computer tablet take the picture according to voice commands. And the mountains didn’t want to be in the picture either (Which caused me no grief since I didn’t want to freeze my personal dillybonger off.) I cheated by inserting the mountains with Picsart AI photo editor. Dillybonger saved, mountain and family not embarrassed to death.
So, naturally, you now want to click on the link above to get your personal copy of this wonderful book based on my fabulous naked promo picture.
So, let’s try that same thing again with another recent book, my book of Evil Poetry bound in paperback form under a black cover with a large skull on it. That’s the way to sell a book of poetry, right? By calling it evil and failing to scare you with another picture of my horrid naked self. The brown shirt is not photoshopped on. I was really wearing clothes this time. The waterfall is again an invention of Picsart AI.
Of course, good poetry is capable of many things. It can make you laugh. It can make you cry. It can make you hurt. And it can make you die (at least a little. Besides, cry and die rhyme a little.)
And nowhere am I claiming this is good poetry. It is probably, definitely not GOOD POETRY. I condemn it wholly as EVIL POETRY in the very title. You should try it anyway. I was good in the picture, wearing my clothes and everything. And if you like poetry there are some things you may like in this book. And if you hate poetry, you will definitely find things here to bolster that point of view. And it is illustrated with some good to mediocre artwork.
So, now you know what happens when a dumb guy is allowed to play with AI and digital tools. And also allowed to promote his own books with his own naked pictures and terrible jokes.
Yes, since my unfortunate heart event, I have been thinking about death too much. It is a reality we all face, and yet, it is not healthy to give in to it before it actually happens. Obsession is more like a disease to be avoided than a possible cure. But there is a lot of speculation on the nature or existence of an afterlife, both religious, philosophical, and scientific, that can be absorbed from the internet, books, and the wisdom of elders. In fact, there is a good deal of observation and learned conclusions I can draw from my own experience as a lifelong learner and seeker (a fancy way of saying an ancient know-it-all crazy coot.)
My inner self, having lived life naked in the snow.
So, here is what I believe… not what I know because I cannot prove it… But what I believe is based on how I put together everything that I have come to think is true.
All things come together as one thing. If there is a God, the entire universe is God. It is suggested by Quantum Physics that consciousness, in the form of fundamental information at the subatomic level, flows everywhere in the universe. The entire universe is the mind of God. Zeus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, and Odin are all the same God. The entire universe is alive and wise and we, each of us individually, are a tiny part of that whole.
A Shinto wise man summarizes it all this way,
You begin life as a drop of rain when you are first born. You drop down from the sky to the pavement below. As you grow and learn, you rise up in the sunlight like an evaporating raindrop. And when you grow old, you come down again, a raindrop heavy with experience. And when you die, you land back in the great wide ocean, a part of it all once again.
There is nothing to fear about death. I don’t need to be upset about its nearness. The universe is unfolding as it should. And I am not dead yet.
I am not dead. That cannot be reiterated often enough. But because I am not dead via surgery, putting a pacemaker in my chest and making me into a cyborg, I am now in a painful and very limiting recovery. I am going to have to give up driving a car. I am going to delay moving back to Iowa. But not forever. I want to die there in the land of my birth, where a majority of my ancestors and relatives are buried.
So, unable to do much beyond sleep, watch TV, and draw, I decided to make an art fart that reminded me of home on the farm.
Using my electronic stylus and the Digital Drawing Pad app on my touch-screen phone I worked on the essential figure first, doing considerable editing on the face, especially the eyes.
I roughed in more details so the boy wouldn’t be naked or bald.
.I spent time refining details, my arthritis still showing in the result.
;I then used the AI Mirror app to smooth out details and make the boy less aggravated in the area of his snarling puss. (Look up the word if you think it is being used inappropriately.)
I then used Picsart AI Photo Editor app to put him in a barn and slathered more detail work on it with my stylus.
So, it was something to do while recuperating, and gives me a chance to show you steps in the process of making a Paffooney. (Yes, a made-up word and still not inappropriate.)
Catch a Falling Star 