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Johann Sebastian Bach may or may not have written his organ masterpiece, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in 1704. All we know for sure is that the combined efforts of Johannes Ringk, who saved it in manuscript form in the 1830’s, and Felix Mendelssohn who performed it and made it a hit you could dance to during the Bach Revival in 1840 made it possible to still hear its sublime music today. Okay, maybe not dance to exactly… But without the two of them, the piece might have been lost to us in obscurity.

The Toccata part is a composition that uses fast fingerings and a sprightly beat to make happy hippie type music that is really quite trippy. The Fugue part (pronounced Fyoog, not Fuggwee which I learned to my horror in grade school music class) is a part where one part of the tune echoes another part of the tune and one part becomes the other part and then reflects it all back again. I know that’s needlessly confusing, but at least I know what I mean. That is not always a given when I am writing quickly like a Toccata.

I have posted two different versions for you to listen to in this musical metaphor nonsensical posticle… err… Popsicle… err… maybe just post. One is the kinda creepy organ version like you might find in a Hammer Films monster movie in the 1970’s. The other is the light and fluffy violin version from Disney’s Fantasia. I don’t really expect you to listen to both, but listening to one or the other would at least give you a tonal hint about what the ever-loving foolishness I am writing in this post is really all about.

You see, I find sober thoughts in this 313-year-old piece of music that I apply to the arc of my life to give it meaning in musical measure.

This is the Paffooney of this piece, a picture of my wife in her cartoon panda incarnation, along with the panda persona of my number two son. The background of this Paffooney is the actual Ringk manuscript that allowed Bach’s masterwork not to be lost for all time.

My life was always a musical composition, though I never really learned piano other than to pick out favorite tunes by ear. But the Bach Toccata and Fugue begins thusly;

The Toccata begins with a single-voice flourish in the upper ranges of the keyboard, doubled at the octave. It then spirals toward the bottom, where a diminished seventh chord appears (which actually implies a dominant chord with a minor 9th against a tonic pedal), built one note at a time. This resolves into a D major chord.

I interpret that in prose thusly;

Life was bright and full of promise when I was a child… men going to the moon, me learning to draw and paint, and being smarter than the average child to the point of being hated for my smart-asserry and tortured accordingly. I was sexually assaulted by an older boy and spiraled towards the bottom where I was diminished for a time and mired in a seventh chord of depression and despair. But that resolved into a D major chord when the realization dawned that I could teach and help others to learn the music of life.

And then the Fugue begins in earnest. I set the melody and led my students to repeat and reflect it back again. Over and over, rising like a storm and skipping like a happy child through the tulips that blossom as the showers pass. Winding and unwinding in equal measure, my life progressed to a creaky old age. But the notes of regret in the conclusion are few. The reflections of happinesses gained are legion. I have lived a life I do not regret. I may not have my music saved in the same way Johann Sebastian did, but I am proud of the whole of it. And whether by organ or by violin, it will translate to the next life, and will continue to repeat. What more can a doofus who thinks teaching and drawing and telling stories are a form of music ask for from life?

Yes I will continue to coddiwomple for a while.  On my birthday in November of 2014 after retiring in May, I decided I would do a blog post every single day for at least a year.  Now, two years and four months later, I am still posting every single day.  I think that I shall continue for a while because there are real benefits to doing so.

• It keeps my seriously old and worn-out brain active, chugging along even though it is held together with mental duct tape.
• It challenges my ability to come up with new ideas.  I admit, sometimes I set down to write a post with nothing in my head but random snippets of music and empty space.  Yet, I have managed to increasingly create bizarre and exotic thought-artifacts at an increasingly volatile pace.  Perhaps soon the ideas reach critical mass and my writing goes boom like  a series of fireworks.
• It has increased my visibility on WordPress and the reach of my writing through social media.
• It has taught me how much I hate Twitter.  People tweeting in a rage at each other makes the world a birdhouse full of angry birds.
• It has also taught me to edit carefully and quickly because my writing time is theoretically limited, as is my target word-count.
• And I have learned that some days I need to do a simple and easy post like this to give my mind-muscles a chance to rest and grow.

So I will continue to post on WordPress, putting up pusillanimous Paffoonies to treat and entertain you.  (Yes, I know that “pusillanimous” means timid.  But the root words mean “small mind”, and my mind is nothing if not small.  And I also needed a multi-syllabic p-word to make the alliteration sound funnier.)

Yes, it’s true.  There is good news still happening in Donald Trump’s END OF THE WORLD TIMES.  Here is the link to the rap star’s efforts to power Africa with solar energy.

CLICK HERE for Akon

Believe me, there are still good things in the world worth knowing about.

I am still fighting diabetes wars and barely holding my own.  So rather than write through headaches, I am posting this today to keep my string of every-day posts going after two years and two months of posting every single day.  I need time to rest and regenerate thinking ability.  So here’s an old picture that like re-posting.  I like to think of myself as being the drummer boy in the lead of the march, but in reality, I am probably one of the wooden-heads plodding onward.

Snow for the first time this winter was a great big “Mehhh!”  It was cold, but by Iowa standards for winter weather, it was a mosquito-bite sized weather event.  That, of course, is not how everyone sees it.

He posted this selfie for the people back home on Facebook.

My eighteen-year-old nephew grew up in Saipan to Filipino parents.  He has never seen snow before.  Much like my wife’s first experience of snow twenty years ago, a little bit of snow was a very big deal.

You may recall that as a family project my children and I committed harrowing acts of gingerbread construction last holiday season, creating the quaint little hovel seen above, a domicile that both Hansel and Gretel would obviously love… to eat.

And then gravity promptly destroyed it within minutes after the pictures were taken.

Demonstrating our annual inability to learn from our mistakes, we did it again this year.  This time with a little less frosting and sugar, to save my diabetes from the consequences of my lack of self control  After all, if the gingerbread house falls down, you have to eat it, right?

So I started with a cheaper kit with far less added sugar froo-froos.  Less temptation to eat the extras while working, don’t ya know.

The Princess and I used butter knives to cut grooves in the end pieces, thinking in our own smug little way, “I bet that will help keep the thing from falling down before we get a decent chance to play with it and take pictures.”

Then we set about decorating the pieces.

And as we put it together, I thought of one more creatively goofy trick in a vain attempt to hold the roof on.  After all, we had completely forgotten to put notches in the roof pieces before weighing them down with icing and gumdrops.  Voila!  Crosspieces made with uncooked fettuccine noodles!

See the noodles?  Notice how they transfer weight stress directly onto the load-bearing walls?

And before you could say, “This is a wonderful little house for a witch to live in, one who eats children!” and make Hansel wet his pants, we had a frosted gingerbread house.

And then we began to wonder why the little witch house was so angry-looking.  We found out in about half an hour, the time it took this one to fall down and get eaten.

I am now on the recovery end of a six-day bout of flu that came to me as a Christmas gift.  Of course, as an aging diabetic, any encounter with flu is a brush with death.  And of course, it is not really over yet.  I still have to struggle to prevent pneumonia from setting in.  And diabetes can cause depression.  Especially since I have spent a majority of the holiday alone in bed while missing out on the time my number one son has been home for a visit on leave.  My other two children have both been sick too.  Isolation is not a helpful thing during times of illness.  We have to have our family and community in the real world to keep us alive and looking forward.  While I am glad that my son at least had his mother healthy to spend time with, and old friends from school, I mourn for me.  YouTube videos are not enough.  Though there are good ones out there like this one I found while writing this.

Hank and John Green need to be a part of everyone’s community, so I suggest you subscribe to Vlogbrothers on YouTube.  But he makes a very good point.  The internet is a good thing and making people more independent, but it is also eroding our real-world community.  Being retired from my teaching job should not mean I am cut off from the world.  But it does.  I may have to be nothing more than a cyber-person for a while until I can muster enough energy and wellness to burst out of the ground I am buried in and bloom once more in the sunshine.

Does that sound maudlin and depressed to you?  I have already pretty much decided that I believe that Earth is a doomed planet and humanity will soon be guilty of its own extinction.  I am not a born-again Christian looking forward hopefully to Armageddon.  But I do believe human life and all life on Earth has not been a wasted effort on God’s part.  We have added value to the universe.  I can put a wry, happy spin on almost any gloomy thought.  And in many ways, life is a great cartoon show.

When I had the flu as a kid, it meant getting to stay home and watch morning cartoon shows and eat lots of tomato soup with cheese sandwiches.

Yes, not just a cartoon show.  Life is actually an act of epic poetry.  Distilled and fermented and highly potent metaphor and meaning.  It is the reason God didn’t send the four horsemen and the angel of death a little sooner.  And who knows?  Maybe He is not actually done with us yet.  Maybe we will live for another year, and I will get healthier, and more breakthroughs will be made, and…

I am a hopeful pessimist.  The end may come tomorrow.  But likely it won’t.  And I still have more to say to this goofy old world…  But I think that is enough for today.

No, that is not a typo.  I only meant “gifts” in pun form.  Sometimes you don’t feel much like talking and, after all, the “picture can be worth a thousand words”, especially if the picture moves.

As you can see, I am spending the day with the Ghost of Christmases Past.  Have a wonderful holiday, however you may celebrate it.  I will offer more goofy stuff by Mickey after the Ghost of Christmases Future gets done with me.