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Today I needed some chocolate to make it through Valentine’s Day.  Chocolate covered peanuts are perfect for diabetic depression.  Chocolate to bring me up, and peanuts to help me not spike or drop in blood sugar levels.  Depression and Valentine’s Day have always walked hand in hand in my recollection.  Maybe it was the Valentine’s cards that we used as kids that did that to me.  You know, the ones where your parents buy them in bulk, and after you pick that one for the special someone, you just put your classmate’s names on random cards from the pile for the rest.  And then later that special someone gives you an obviously random card in return.  Blues City!

I was, of course, a kid in the 60’s, in the Space Age of Mercury and Gemini Missions.  Those were the cards I picked from for her.

But what kind of weird messages did the other random cards send?  Some of them were absolutely bizarre.

What kind of love goes with socks with holes in them, and screwy boys with little pigs?  No wonder so many of us grew up a bit demented.

And how is being eaten by a giant cat not traumatizing?

Some cards were inappropriate, and some were all wet.  All of these are a bit perverted.

This one causes nightmares.

And boys should never have to get cards like these from a girl.  Knives and forks and wieners?  It makes me shudder just to look at them.

And what does love have to do with food?  At least, anthropomorphic food?  And food puns?

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These are just scary and weird.

And there were Valentine’s cards that were right for me, but I didn’t want them.  Enough eating of fuzzy worms on Valentine’s Day for me!

So it’s no wonder V-Day makes me blue.  I was trained to it from an early age.  Now, I just buy myself chocolate.

Family flu weeks make it difficult to think and difficult to write. But I am a writer. I believe I remember that clearly.  In fact, one could argue that I am a published author.  I found this pile of books laying around in my sick room that may actually count as evidence.  But it’s hard to think. It’s hard to write.  I have been working on gingerbread writing.  At least, I still have the recipes in my stupid old aching head.

These two gingerbread novels are nearing completion.  I mean, I have written the entire second draft of Recipes, and I am closing in on the end of the final draft of Baby Werewolf.  They are two interlaced novels, each with a different focus, and each with a different style, one a humorous Gothic horror story, the other a fairy tale with Nazis and naked girls in it.  But both happen at the same time to basically the same characters, though the shared scenes have to be reinterpreted through different viewpoints in each book.  See, now, that’s entirely too complicated to think about with a headache.

But I am temporarily fritzed out in the brain department.  I don’t even know how I am writing this.  I guess the autopilot is driving the word-mincing machine.

So I will hopefully be writing more coherently and publishing more books in the near future.  But for now, we are ill.  I don’t have a fever, yet.  But they do.  And I need a bit of rest.

Influenza 2018.  The Princess went to the doctor today.  No kid from this household went to school today.  Flu and headaches, cough and diarrhea, we needed a day off, I guess.  We are quarantined.  See you tomorrow or the next day, maybe.

It has been a year that assaults everything I stand for and everything I value.  A new government came in despite my wishes, my vote, and my best efforts.  They instituted attacks on most of the things I care about.

Betsy DeVos became Secretary of Education despite being totally incompetent and not qualified for the job.  I define myself as a teacher, even though I have been forced to retire by poor health.  I value public education.  President Pumpkinhead put the pinhead in charge of education to shift public money from public education to private school systems so that the benefits go only to the wealthy.  I am ready to fight.  I believe the battle is worth fighting for, and if we lose, we may never regain what we are now losing.

But on a brighter note, I could lose our family home in 2018.  The city forced me to remove the pool.  I couldn’t get it repaired to their specifications, even though I came close and exhausted myself in the process.  I spent all my money on the debacle in order to avoid a tax lien that would’ve eventually caused us to lose the house.  I filed for bankruptcy.  I am struggling now to pay this year’s property and school taxes.  The school tax has gone up due to the State cutting funding again to public schools.  Texas appears to have to try the Kansas experiment for itself.  And I get shafted in the meantime.

My publisher, the one I was counting on to publish my best work, died a gruesome financial death, leaving me with lots of worried writer friends, a lot of manuscripts, and only myself to be relied on to get them published.  I started doing so on Amazon, basically for free.  I am now headed for complete self-published status.

I did complete one final journey with a vanity press to get Magical Miss Morgan published.  I hope to make some progress with that too, though I have no confidence left in any publishing company.  They are all a dying, greed-wracked industry intent only on exploiting people who are authors and people who think they can be.

I had a nudist adventure this summer, actually going to a nudist park as a nudist for the first time in my life.  So, in a way, I guess I have come out of the closet as a nudist.  Though I am still basically a closet nudist.  One day in the sun does not a social nudist make.  I am prepared, however, to face life as a homeless, penniless person.  My clothing budget should prove affordable.

I have faced a lot of losses in 2017.  I have faced unfortunate reversals of fortune.  But the one thing that remains constant and true, is that humor can help you through anything.  As long as I can still laugh about it, then it will be okay.  The world is not a place of tragedy.  It is a place of comedy.  And sometimes the clowns fall down.  But we don’t laugh at them because they fell.  We laugh when we see them getting up again.  And even harder when we see them doing the double-take at the banana peel that got them.