Category Archives: Uncategorized

January 14, 2025 · 1:19 am

An Autobiography of Mickey

 

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Last night I watched again Part I of Ken Burns’ Mark Twain.   I think it reminds me of who I am as a writer.  No, I am not being all big-head arrogant and full of myself.  I devoured certain writers as a youth, consumed them whole.  Charles Dickens was my first passion, followed by J.R.R. Tolkien, and then Mark Twain.  Of all of them, Samuel Clemens is the most like me.  He was from the Midwest, born and raised in Missouri along the Mississippi River.  I am from the Midwest, born and raised in Iowa along the Iowa River.  He endured hardship and tragedy as a youth, losing his little brother in a riverboat accident, and he dealt with it by humor.  I endured a sexual assault from an older boy, and dealt with it by… well, you get the picture.  We are alike, him and I.  We both draw upon the place we grew up, the people we have known, and the events of our youth to create stories.

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It is a pretty big responsibility to follow in his footsteps, and I will probably never live to see the success and the wealth that came to him.  But I have a responsibility to the people I knew and the time that gave rise to me to tell their story.  I need to build a network of stories that resonate the truth of existence that I have been witness to.  A big responsibility… and I probably will not live up to it.  But I have to try.

Being a writer is somewhat like being cursed.  The words burn inside, needing to get out, needing to be heard.   I have stories that need to be told, and they will be told, even if only to file away in the closet again.  Like Mark Twain, I am good at feeling sorry for myself.  And the Mickey part of me, the writer part of me, is just like Mark Twain, a writer persona, and not the real man himself.  I am simply the container for something that has to exist and has to tell stories.  It is not a bad thing to be.  But the more I get to know it, the more I would not wish the destiny on others.

Forgive how sad and bunglingly boorish this post is.  But sometimes there are thoughts I simply have to think.  And as a writer, I am bound to write down the silly things that I think.

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January 13, 2025 · 1:09 am

Cold Comfort

I don’t fear death, but I don’t seek it.

I had a lost crown on a molar that turned into a tooth crater that became infected. The dentist was happy. I took on almost two thousand dollars of medical debt to stop the pain. She extracted the molar and apparently, the infection is still there. After a week of antibiotics, it still hurts as if the infection is still there. Good opportunity for the Grim Reaper to use sepsis and a blood infection to do me in.

So, I am anticipating death in the near term, but hoping to avoid it. There are still several things I can do even if my dentist is a Sadist.

No matter what happens, my life is complete.

I was a teacher for 31 years. I managed to be an English department head, an ESL teacher, a teacher rated exemplary on evaluations many more times than the one time I was fired and treated like an incompetent. I made a difference for far more students than I failed. Many of them told me so later in life. I taught students whose parents I taught, and I almost lasted in one place long enough to teach a student whose grandparents were former students. I created an Odyssey of the Mind team for my Gifted and Talented students. I read to them. I even fed some of them on weekends.

I was married for thirty-plus years. I was a father of three, a band parent, a military parent, and a beloved parent.

I experienced life and art and music. I knew what beauty was. I know what wisdom is.

None of these things can the Grim Reaper or the Devil take away from me.

Any time the race actually ends, I am guaranteed to win. After all, I was only racing against myself.

Others may judge me as a fool, an egomaniac, or a buffoon. But I am okay with that. I learned early on to laugh at myself, even when others point at me and accuse me of my shortcomings. I wished to be a humorist after all. There is no one left behind me who has wronged me that I have not forgiven.

I am not ready to die, but Death cannot deprive me of anything.

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January 12, 2025 · 1:40 am

The Butterfly of Hope

The sad fact of it is that life on Earth is probably doomed. We elected the Pumpkinhead to be President again, and he will remove the limited climate change mitigations that Democratic administrations put in place. Things like the wildfires in California will be allowed to worsen beyond the power of humans to survive. We cannot work together enough to prevent a convicted felon, rapist, and con man from seizing the office of President for a second time.

We are flawed, and it appears it will be what we all get capital punishment for. But the human race deserves to have existed. Consider art, architecture, science, and philosophy. Religion? Shakespeare’s work, Emily Dickenson’s poetry, the paintings of Norman Rockwell, Vincent Van Gogh, and Leonardo DaVinci, the novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Der Zauberberg by Thomas Mann, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the Empire of the Incas, the City States of Hellenic Greece, and the glories of the Roman Empire? The Life of Christ. The humor of Mark Twain. The courage in battle of Sergeant York. The sacrifice of Joan of Arc. It is a good thing that life on Earth existed.

So, our time on this planet is further limited. It is bad fortune. But I will spend what I have left being happy and hopeful. We may not be totally doomed. And there is still laughter in the world. There is still beauty to be seen, truth to be told, and love enough to go around if we allow it to.

Butterflies have a limited lifespan. More so than we do. However, for now… there are still butterflies.

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January 11, 2025 · 1:58 am

Toothpocalypse

It began by chewing a Dorito nacho cheese corn chip. A piece of it went into the hole where the crown on the right-side molar used to be. Biting down caused another small piece of enamel to be chipped out of the bottom of the wrecked tooth. And so, the pain became a focus on the urgent need for some kind of relief. I did not want to replace the crown that had replaced that tooth because none of the three dentists who had worked on it managed to keep a crown on it for more than two or three years. It was more than a thousand dollars every one of the three times. They ignored other tooth problems to replace the work of the crowning dentists. I had a second cracked natural molar that didn’t get worked on until the last time I had the crown replaced before the pandemic. Ironically, that molar lost its one and only crown a couple of weeks ago.

So, not wanting to die of tooth pain, I went to an Epic Dentist who was an Asian lady with a penchant for scolding patients who didn’t care for their teeth well. I listened to her blister the air with orders to two other men who did not properly love their teeth while I was there at the dentist being worked on.

I had lost the molar I was there for during the pandemic, and I lost it for the third and last time. The Epic Dentist agreed that the tooth was destroyed. She also wanted to replace both crownless teeth, by digging them out of my jaw and screwing an implant in both of their places. The cost ranged from $1,700 to $27,000, all of which I could not afford in a lump sum. I thought I had talked her down to the cheapest price and only one molar (the one that was hurting,)

Well, things rarely go the easy way for me. I did pay only $1,777 through a finance deal that allowed me to split it up for 15 months. But she was definitely going to gouge out both molars with a dull instrument. Possibly with a rusty spoon.

She started on the sore tooth. It was, it turns out, seriously infected. And what’s worse, it was stubbornly rooted in my jaw.

“You shouldn’t feel any pain,” she said, “since I anesthetized you with enough numbing juice to make a moose unconscious. You will feel pressure, but not pain. And don’t worry when you hear bone snapping. The procedure is meant to do that.”

Of course, that was a lie. The rusty spoon, the gardening spade, and the jackhammer she used all made crunchy sounds and caused it to feel like she was driving the tool all the way through the bottom of the jaw. That “pressure” certainly felt like PAIN to me.

“Hang in there. You’re fine,” she said every time my back arched and I stifled my scream. “It’s just pressure. However, the root is stubborn and isn’t coming out easily.”

Fifteen minutes and thirty death screams by me led to a break.

Then we went on for another fifteen. I told them every military secret I had ever heard, all none of them. I promised the Devil my soul if it could just be stopped, but he was watching from the corner behind the dental assistant and enjoyed the show too much to stop it. Besides, my soul is only worth 75 cents. The first half of the root finally came out and I was given a recovery break while I trembled like I was going through an earthquake and whimpered like a whipped puppy.

The second half of the root came out easily. Apparently, Satan was satisfied with the three quarters he could get for my soul and absconded with it And I pleaded for another day before tackling molar number two. They gave me two weeks. I was in no shape to endure another Mongolian tooth torture session. So, now, as I sit on my bed at home during a blizzard in North Texas trying desperately to recover on antibiotics and aspirin, I have that one more molar extraction to look forward to (and have nightmares about.)

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January 10, 2025 · 1:08 am

Top This!

fuddy duddy

“Dad?” asked the Princess, “I heard a funny word in school today.  What does Fuddy-Duddy mean?”

“Oh, that’s a good word,” I said.  “It means an old fogey… a stick-in-the-mud.”

“A what?”

“A fussy old guy who likes to have everything his way.  Like, if you accuse your father of being one… which you often do… he’s a fuddy-duddy daddy.”

“Ooh!  I get it!” said Henry, chiming in.  “And if your father is evil, then he’s a fuddy-duddy baddie daddy!”

“Yes,” I said, “and if it makes him sad to be evil, he’s a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie daddy!”

“If you are not sure he’s really your father,” said the Princess adding a one-up, “he’s a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie maybe daddy!”

“Yeah!” said Henry.  “And if you suspect he may have fallen into a time machine and been turned back into an infant, he’s a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie maybe baby daddy!”

“Now that he’s a baby again he will surely want to watch his favorite TV show again,” I said with a tear of nostalgia in my eye, “he’ll be a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie maybe baby Howdy Doody daddy!”

“What’s Howdy Doody, Daddy?” asked the Princess.

“No,” said Henry, “now you’ve spoiled it.  It just ain’t funny any more.”

“Yes it is!  He’s become a funny bunny fuddy-duddy hoo-dad doo-dad saddie baddie maybe rabies hoo-dah doo-dah…”

“Just stop,” said Henry.  “You always carry things too far.”

“Right you are!” I said.  “See this grin?  It means I win!”

“AW, Daaad!” they both said at the same time.

 

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January 7, 2025 · 1:30 am

Exploring the Mind of Mickey

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One really weird thing that teachers do is think about thinking.  I mean, how can a person actually teach someone else how to think and how to learn if they don’t themselves understand the underlying processes?  Now that I have retired from teaching and spend all my time feeling sorry for myself, I thought I would try thinking about thinking one more time at least.  Hey, just because I am retired, it doesn’t mean I can’t still do some of the weird things I used to do as a teacher, right?

This time I made a map to aid me in my quest to follow the twists and turns of how Mickey thinks and how Mickey learns.  Don’t worry, though.  I didn’t actually cut Mickey’s head in half to be able to make this map.  I used the magical tool of imagination.  Some folks might call it story-telling… or bald-face lying.

Now, a brain surgeon would be concerned that my brain maps out in boxes.  He would identify it as a seriously deformed brain.  It is not supposed to be all rectangular spaces and stairs.  It probably indicates a severe medical need for corrective surgery… or possibly complete amputation.  But we are not going to concern ourselves with trying to save Mickey from himself right now.  That is far too complex a topic to tackle in a 500-word daily post.  We are just discussing the basics of operation.

You see the three little guys in the control room?  They are an indication that not only did I steal an idea from the Disney/Pixar Movie Inside Out, but I apparently have too few guys doing the job up there compared to the movie version.  (It probably makes sense though that a young girl like the one in the movie has a much more sensible configuration in her brain than someone who was a middle school teacher for 24 years.  Seriously, that job can do a bit of damage.)  The three little guys are not actually Moe, Curly, and Larry, though that wouldn’t be far from descriptive accuracy.  They are Impulsive Ignatz, currently in the driver’s seat (or else I wouldn’t be writing this), Proper Percy the Planner, and Pompositous Felixian Checkerbob, the fact-checker and perfectionist (also labeled the inner nerd… I am told not everyone has one of these).  They are the three little guys that run around in frantic circles in my head trying to deal with a constant flow of input and output, trying to make sense of everything, and routinely failing miserably.

I shouldn’t forget the other two little guys in my head, Sleepytime Tim in the Dream Center, and little Batty up in the attic.  I have no earthly idea how either of them function, or what in the heck they are supposed to do.  But there they are.  The other three run up and down stairs all day, locating magic mushrooms and random knowledge in the many file cabinets, record collections, book stacks, and odd greasy containers that are stored all around in the many nooks and crannies of Mickey’s mind.  They collect stuff through the eyes and ears, and it is also their responsibility to chuck things out through the stupidity broadcaster at various inopportune times.  It is also a good idea for them to avoid the lizard brain of the limbic system in the basement.  It is easily angered and might eat them.

So now you should be able to fully understand how Mickey thinks.  (Or not… a qualifier I was forced to put in by Checkerbob.)

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January 5, 2025 · 1:54 am

Ah, Finally Progress

I have written three chapters in the last week. Cissy Moonskipper Meets the Nebulons is back on the production line. I would tell you more, but I still have to curse the keyboard and arthritic fingers while typing the wrong thing and correcting it more times than any nudist ever typed the word “naked”.

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January 3, 2025 · 1:13 am

Doom Looms in the Near, My Dear

Life is a Gothic horror story now. We have to anticipate terror-filled things even more than we did the last time the Pumpkinhead King took up the scepter. The government may actually collapse this time when you consider the 2025 plan and what the evil minions have planned. The economy will collapse from tariff-fueled price inflation and the deportation of so many of the people who actually do the work in our society. The FBI is going to be overseen by a wild-eyed hate goblin with a mandate to hunt and destroy the Pumpkinhead’s enemies and critics. The secret factory will be run by a woman who delights in giving the poisoned tea to our friends and the goulash to our former enemies. The Department of Defense will be run by a drunk rapist who knows nothing about leading a squad, let alone an army.

We will be walking blindfolded into a future where another pandemic is lurking with the worst possible people in charge of protecting the nation’s health. The head of health is going to be an anti-vaxer with no medical education of any kind, one who not only doesn’t want to develop vaccines for the next pandemic but wants to invite POLIO back.

Elmo Muskmelon, a South African immigrant who appropriates other people’s inventions to make himself the richest and most important man in the world will take the role of viceroy regent who runs the country by fiat while the Pumpkinhead King farts around playing golf all day. The government will literally be looted by minions enriching only themselves.

Of course, climate change has the Doomsday Clock counting down to death by storms, death by wildfires, and the eventual elimination of breathable atmosphere at temperatures that will burn the birds and the bees right out of the sky.

The world will be filled with monsters, survivors who can afford underground bunkers and domed villages under the acidic sea, growing fat by eating everything they have stolen from those of us who did not survive, and probably eventually each other when resources run out. Or they will become mutants, gill men, wolfmen, and snake women. Hunting and hunting and then eating the luckiest of the rest of us who happen to last the longest as non-monsters.

Having read the Bible completely three times, I am well aware of the end of the world as predicted by the Book of Revelations. It is nowhere near as awful as the reality we will most likely be facing… If we don’t burn it all down ourselves before it can happen via nuclear war. Everything is gone or poisoned in a few flashes. A more horrible way to die? It’s quicker.

I fear there is not enough love left in the world to keep all this from happening. Sometimes it sucks to be a true pessimist.

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January 2, 2025 · 2:05 am

Begin Again

Picture created on the coloring-book app, Tapcolor Pro

Miraculously I am still alive and will be giving Donald Trump another potential four years to torture and kill me. He didn’t get me with Covid or the Tax Cuts that contributed to my bankruptcy in 2017 (I had to pay over $2,000 in taxes instead of getting back the $47 in tax savings that my conservative friends in Iowa got.) This time will certainly be worse. He means to deport my wife and take away my children’s birthright citizenship if he does what he crows about at his pep rallies. And eliminate the Department of Education, put Democrats in jail for being Democrats, and give more aid to Putin in Russia and our other dictator enemies.

But I will also have a chance to write more and draw more. So, there! I defy you to stop me, Pumpkinhead.

Here’s a picture of Ariel, my plastic doll, which I created today to show old Pumpkinhead how I will defy him by drawing.

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January 1, 2025 · 1:14 am

The Story Continues… 2025

It is a simple matter. As down and pessimistic as I have been in 2024, I am still here. I can still see. I can still think. I can still write. If there is a God, he has given me more time to work on the story. I mean not only the story of me but the story of us. I assume you are still here too. So, let’s see where this chapter takes us next.

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