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The New Discipline

I sit in the corner, a dunce cap on my head.

Behind me the class rises.  I miss recess in their stead.

And what was my criminality, that earned me this despise?

I told them that I loved them, and that was just not wise.

They tell me all are equal and each one’s on his own.

And if I can’t pull myself up, they must all leave me alone.

Thinking anyone will help me is an assumption with great risk.

The new order is the quiet that is whipped in with a whisk.

The Pumpkinhead is running amok, shutting down programs I want the government to continue with my tax dollars. I don’t approve of them spending a single penny of the three thousand and some dollars worth of taxes I pay out of my pension every year on tax cuts to billionaires and multi-millionaires. The Ultrarich class does less actual work in a year than I do as a retiree. They do not deserve to make even more money while sitting on gluttonous natural cushions built into their derrieres. They are the parasites that drag on our quality of life. Their money-sucking vacuum mouths no longer need to be attached to our jugular veins. The Immigrants working in farmer’s fields and the local McDonalds and two other jobs to make ends almost meet are not the takers in this society.

Personally, I have had a truly miserable start to 2025. I visited a dentist for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. I had to have a molar with a broken crown yanked out of the right side of my jaw. It was infected and took an hour longer to pull out than it was scheduled for. It hurt like they had tried to pull my whole skeleton out through my mouth. While recovering from that, my wife came home from her teaching job with a viral infection of some sort. I immediately caught it. Two weeks of illness followed. Towards the end of that infection I painfully passed four small kidney stones, too small to see when they were finally out. That painful weekend resulted in a urinary tract infection that could easily have turned septic and killed me. The urologist gave me a super strong antibiotic that stained my underwear neon green. And at the end of January, I had to have a second molar with a broken crown removed… apparently with the same ten-pound skeleton-hoisting pliers.

Trump is still rolling out outrages against schools, against the FBI, against women, against trans kids, and everyone else he can be relentlessly cruel to. Richard III of England solved his Winter of Discontent with murder. I sent a ghost post message to the parking lot in London where he was buried to inquire if he was at all interested in using the same procedure to replace the Pumpkinhead on the Throne of America. He booed back that he would think about it. American President is apparently not as cushy a post as the Yorkish King of England.

The girl who posed for this picture is an Asian beauty, chosen because she’s the spitting image of a former student from eleven years ago. This girl is actually 18 years old, though she looks twelve. The girl she reminds me of was 16 then, and would have to be around 27 now. This girl is Cambodian. That girl was Vietnamese. I like the picture. I love both girls, not in an inappropriate way. And what it comes down to is that I have kept my string of 196 daily posts in a row intact.

I have been down and out with a serious urinary tract infection the last two weeks. That overlapped the flu-like virus that had me down for the weeks prior. There is not a lot you can accomplish when you are too sick to even get out of bed. I watched a lot of streaming-service television and used my computer to do a lot of drawing. I really like the first final version I posted above. It is a picture of my posable plastic doll Ariel. I have two other similar-sized dolls, Nicole and Tom Sawyer, who are not posable and made out of porcelain. So, Ariel is my artist’s model more often than the other two.

I never had a fever while I was ill, but some of my medication caused dizziness and the inability to avoid passing out for five to ten minutes at a time. But initially, I created the outline directly above by putting the photo of Ariel on my drawing pad app and tracing features in the layer I placed on top.

This is, of course, the actual photograph used. I did draw over it leaving out Pluto and Mickey due to copyrighted character concerns.

I used colored paints in the drawing app to fill in the outline with color, but my arthritis in fingers and wrists makes it look crude and childish compared to what you see above. So, I use the anime-style overlay in the AI Mirror App to make it come out properly shaded and blended. The colors may appear a little off to you. But that would be because I am somewhat colorblind (red-and-green-scale colorblind) and can’t accurately judge between orange and carmine red, or rust brown and siena brown. I am doing a lot of guessing. You can also see that I change the background with Picsart AI Photo Editor.

Drawing in this way got me through a few difficult days.

I had a second broken molar extracted today. And I lived through it. One more day is the hope. One day at a time.

It’s getting harder to draw anything without artificial help. I drew this from an Instagram post by putting the photo on my digital drawing pad, putting a layer on top, and then outlining everything. But turning it into a drawing done entirely without the help of AI Mirror left me with something that looked almost ugly due to the misses and tiny mistakes that my arthritic hands can’t help but make. As it is, the AI misinterpreted the intent enough to give her an extra hairy chest instead of putting the gray frills on the front of the blouse.. It gets to be too much work to redo large portions of the picture. As it is I have to be satisfied with unintentional Rapunzel. But, it also means that I can do decent pictures still even though I would’ve given up drawing at this point were it not for how AI Mirror fixes the picture for me.

The expenses of my life have all gone up. Some of it is due to the Pumpkinhead President who has already inspired China to punish American farmers by closing our best marketplace and opening it up to Brazil instead. China did this, of course, because of the stupid clown threats of more tariffs. My car insurance is going up to $300 a month because of last summer’s accident. My Medicare premium is going up to $185 a month. The dentist is extracting two broken molars from my mouth this month and extracting $149 a month from my bank account for the next eighteen months. Oy vay! And next month’s heating bill will be over $300 again. I will have to downsize many things on my budget to get by. Maybe even giving up food. That’s one way to lose weight fast.

But that means simplifying my life again. After all, I am getting too old and sick to deal with complications.

The heart of the matter is this… It really takes less and less to be satisfied with life. I have already started giving up some of my massive collection of toys, books, and various collectible nonsense. I hope to pare it down to a manageable amount to move back to Iowa to live on the farm with my sister. My wife will remain in the Dallas area, teaching and becoming wealthy in miraculous ways. There’s goodness in the future despite the Pumpkinhead, and all the badness of the end of the world he is hastening. The important things in life can’t actually be taken away from me, unless God turns me into a walking compost heap of forgetfulness.

I have been married for thirty years now.