Category Archives: Uncategorized
A Tongue in Cheek Thanksgiving
“China is already dropping more of its planned importation of corn and beans from America, buying more from Brazil and a lot less from us. Why, you ask? Ouch! I didn’t say his name, Lorita! You didn’t have to hit me that hard!”
“Our family farm may be at risk. We lose income from renting the land to local farmers and we won’t have enough to pay down the loan we took to pay for buying out our brother. The Pumpkinhead has screwed us over with his stupid tariff plans.”
“Excuse me, who is this Pumpkinhead guy?”
“That’s what Uncle Mickey calls the former and future president, Lorita, dear.”
Whack!
“Ouch! I never actually said the name Trump, Lorita!”
Whack! Whack!
“Well, Michael, it was your idea.”
“Yeah… the back of my head is regretting it. I thought we gave that girl a hollow whacking stick.”
“She’s ‘been building arm strength by weaving together Christmas wreaths at Butch’s Christmas tree farm.”
“Oh. Well that’s wonderful that you have a job, Sweetie. But you don’t have to hit me so hard if I accidentally say Trump’s name.”
Whack! Whack! Whack!
“Why did you hit me three times?”
“It’s the third time you said his name.”
“Actually, Sweetie, he only said the name twice.”
Whack! Whack!
“Did I get it right that time?”
“Yes, Sweetie. But you have given me brain damage.”
“Shall I kiss it, Uncle Mickey?”
“Yes, please. That makes it better.”
Smooch!
Okay, I confess it. This is all made up for laughs because the Pumpkinhead has done enough to make me mad. In truth, we did not get to go to the farm in Iowa for Thanksgiving Dinner at my Sister Mary’s place. My daughter is sick and confined to the house with flu here in the Dallas suburbs. My wife is still in the Philippines burying her mother. And Lorita is entirely imaginary. But some day we will look back on the end of the world and have a fond laugh… and maybe a wistful cry.
Filed under Uncategorized
Good Times
My wife’s mother passed away on my birthday. My wife is now in the Philippines. Tronald Dump is now going to be Pumpkinhead President again. Maybe when the funeral and affairs are settled, he won’t let her come home again. And my daughter is sick with severe flu and has no health insurance or job. I can’t afford one trip to the emergency room. So, we are walking the tightrope over a pit filled with red-bellied piranhas and the rope has been slathered with axle grease. The director of the scene hollers that the time has come to dance a ballet twirl. “But those are real piranhas!” I screech. “It’s in the contract!” he yells back. So, we twirl… as the wind comes up.
Metaphors can make you laugh… or make you squirm… depending on what happens next.
Filed under Uncategorized
The Promise
My time left on this Earth is limited. My art skills are deteriorated. Using AI art programs feels like cheating, because the drawings are mine, but they are worked on by computer programs that overlay someone else’s art skills on my drawings.
But I am determined to draw and paint as much as I can for as long as I can until the Grim Reaper finally beats me in that chess game that determines the final outcome. Bree in this picture won’t be there to watch the chess game. She’s not real. Like most people in my life at present, she’s imaginary, based on a memory and a photo from Instagram. The promise is that I will not give up drawing and making pictures, no matter what compromises I have to make, until Grim pries the art tool out of my cold, dead hand.
Filed under Uncategorized
I Am Not Happy… Nor Have I Ever Been
Both my father and my mother-in-law passed away on my birthday. My father in 2020 and my mother-in-law this past Sunday. I am not amused.
My health continues to deteriorate. Soon I will no longer be able to drive a car. I have Glaucoma and am slowly losing my ability to see. Tunnel vision and cataract cloudiness. My blood sugar levels are up even on Metformin. My blood pressure is finally stabilized by multiple meds.
Facebook deleted one of my WordPress posts because of nudity and sexuality. Of course, the illustrations in that piece, Nudist Notions, reveal no genitals, no female breasts, and depict no sexual acts or even sexualized poses. But I violated their nudity ban. They take revenge on that s**t. (Silt. That word is silt. Don’t ban this post.)
I prefer to write comedy. It has always been my go-to when faced with hideously terrible things. But I must confess that I have never been happy in the 68 years of my life. Not giddily, crying-for-joy happy. My secret is… I no longer hate myself and am satisfied with life. But not really capable of “happy.”
Filed under Uncategorized
An Old Man Gets Older
This old coot is now older by a year, having had a birthday on the day I wrote this, but yesterday to be technical about it. Celebrating the big 68 is not that joyful since my father died on my birthday in 2020.
The incoming President-elect has already caused China to shift its food buying from US markets to Brazil. Now, more than 71% of the farm business in Iowa is going to be gone because of Pumpkinhead’s threatened tariffs. The fact that I own 33% of the family farm in Iowa will make that change hurt my personal economy. That’ll be me in the future pictured above, penniless and naked in the snow… well, unless climate change reaches the point that snow never falls again.
But I have decided to outlive the Pumpkinhead President. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of robbing me of my joy. I like to be naked. I fancy myself a nudist. And I will write and say things I want to say. Pumpkinhead will never hear me. Jack-o-lanterns never have ears carved in them. And Trump doesn’t know how to listen.
And I still plan to make pictures every day that I’m still not blind.
Filed under Uncategorized
Anger Management Mickey Style
I am not happy. We should have been done with the Pumpkinhead Criminal four years ago. An insurrection is an act of treason. Look at how Putin dealt with his mercenary force, which simply marched back from the war front toward Moscow. Those guys are dead now. The law used to be that traitors were executed. This one gets to be a dictator.
In 2017 the Pumpkinhead really screwed me over. At that time I had been retired from teaching for three years. I had struggled to eliminate all my credit card debt and pay down medical debts. Pumpkinhead pushed through his massive tax cut for billionaires. There were also measures to raise taxes on certain classes of people who paid less taxes than the average worker. This included pensioners in education. So, even though my pension was funded by the money I paid into the pension system for teachers month by month for 31 years, he laid upon us increased taxes that went up by more than 100 dollars a month and would incrementally increase for five years after that. And then the rotted old gourd increased the massive wealth he and his billionaire friends got by retroactively making changes to the tax code apply to the entire year… from a tax law instituted in December. I suddenly had a $2,000+ tax bill that I could not pay off at tax time because no warning was given about how much more needed to be withheld from paychecks before the last month of the year. I had to file for a monthly payoff plan that lasted more than a year. I went bankrupt in 2017. Not the kind of bankruptcy that Pumpkinhead walked away from so many times, but a Chapter 13 bankruptcy where you have to have all your worldly possessions evaluated for possible attachment and make arrangements for a large monthly payout every month for five years. I have gone through this same period of rage before. I survived it by managing not to die in the pandemic and living longer than my parents to use a portion of my inheritance to pay off the bankruptcy. I also managed to outlast the Pumpkinhead who was defeated by Grandpa Biden in 2020. But now he has another impossible election win to blast me with.
I am through some of the stages of grief already. This last election was a cruel blow. I am already done with denial and bargaining. But ANGER? I would never seek to kill anybody. But I have been sorting through a number of murder fantasies. Many of them involve smashing pumpkins with hammers.
I am not, however, suited to long periods of rage and boiling anger. The clown dictator will not win against me. He can’t stop me from being a nudist because that occurs mostly in my imagination anyway. And he can probably throw me in prison for my books and my nude drawings. And he will probably deport my immigrant wife, even though she spent more than twenty years earning her US Citizenship. He cannot, however, spoil the bittersweet beauty of the poetry of life for me. I have lived a long and productive life. I have many more people who love and respect me than he does. And I do not suffer from his Narcissistic doubts and phobias.
The Pumpkinhead will not win against me. I will vote against him every chance I can get. I will testify against him before God. And I will no longer honor his MAGA Minions with responses on my Facebook and Instagram posts. I will no longer post on X. And I will get back to writing things that matter… at least to me. Firetruck You, Pumpkinhead. And I didn’t leave out the “iretr” part, so I didn’t use profanity.
Filed under Uncategorized
Things Are Not Fine in Carrot Castle
We were expecting Princess Kayflower to ascend to the throne after the sudden demise of King Brusselsprouts. King B had come to be referred to as Dark Sprouts because he kept foiling the evil former King Toadstoolsniffer in his evil attempts to overthrow and usurp the Throne. Rabbits, bunnies, and hares were all believing old Brusselsprouts would live forever. He was ancient, but he had a magical way of making the carrot crops bounteous and delicious, and he sometimes said stupid things in a way extremely old rabbits often do, but he gave off an undefeatable positivity that was reassuring to the older, wiser rabbits. And then he got brain freeze from an ice cream cone and suffered a bunny stroke.
Toadstoolsniffer leaped into action on King B’s demise, mostly because Kayflower was wrapped up in grief and funeral arrangements, and spewed forth a virtual geyser of misinformation and propaganda. The fat white bunny with orange powder on his face began claiming that there were weasels on the border, and that while he lived, King B had invited them into the city of Carrot Castle and let them eat bunny children wherever and whenever they wanted. This was not true. Only two weasels had shown up at the border, and the Royal Guard Hares easily chased them off with bucktoothed bites. Toadstoolsniffer then claimed that when bunny children went to bunny school, King B would have bunnies surgically changed into kittens, and baby rabbits surgically changed into puppies. The truth was that it was completely illegal to perform any kind of surgery on bunnies and baby rabbits without parental consent and medical need. It never happened. But the general rabbit population of the city-state tended to believe anything Toadstoolsniffer said because he said it in such a bigly white-rabbit way. And of course, everyone knew that white rabbits like Toadstoolsniffer were somehow superior to all others of rabbitkind.
So, in spite of all logic, loyalty, and adherence to the truth, the rabbits of Carrot Castle made Toadstoolsniffer the new king. He, of course, swiftly made an alliance with the weasels of Stoatia, letting them come wherever and whenever t.hey wanted into the city-state. They ate Kayflower first, then quickly reduced the rabbit population by breaking into the bunny schools and eating all the bunnies they claimed were now kittens and all the baby rabbits that were now puppies. And they all lived miserably ever after… unless they got eaten.
Filed under Uncategorized
Melancholy Music
I began this little free-writing by listening to Handel’s Water Music.
If you don’t recognize the writing-teacher term, free-writing is where you wing it and simply start writing, letting the mind go wherever it will. It is necessary today because of the jumble of thoughts and emotions swirling inside my stupid head since the criminal Pumpkinhead’s reelection to the world’s highest office. I simply need to write it down. I don’t live in a conservative’s fear-besotted, demon-haunted world. It is not normal to me, this paralyzing fear that the world is no longer in the control of rational people I more-or-less trust. I can no longer be sure that good things will happen in the future to offset the bad things that can’t be avoided.
Gregg Abbott, the Troll King of Texas, is just as bad as Don Cheetoh Trumpaloney when it comes to authoritarian tendencies. If he sees the Paffooney for this post, he’s going to think, “Child pornography! Throw this pervert in prison!” And I acknowledge that the plastic doll I used as a model was naked. He’s a vintage doll from Mattel that was originally sold wearing swim trunks which were lost to the original owner before she sold it to me on E-Bay. “Internet pornography!” screams Abbott. Everybody knows that pornography is banned on the internet in Texas (Well, sure, the Supreme Court ruled it protected by the First Amendment. But that’s no barrier to today’s Pumpkinhead-appointed Supreme Court.) Thinking bad thoughts without being a hard-right conservative will soon be illegal throughout the US. Of course, if you are a hard-right conservative who listens to Fox News, Mark Levin, and Tucker Carlson, thinking the gayest possible pornographic thoughts is okay… if you have Republican levels of money lying around at home.
“Here’s another nudist picture, Gregg, your evil majesty. I waited for thirty-four years to become a nudist because I didn’t want any morality protests during my time as a public school teacher. I have a right to think what I want to think, draw what I want to draw, and be what I want to be. These are all things that used to be legal back when the world was saner than it is now. Arrest me if you must.”
If the new dictator (Does that really mean a potato with a dick? Dicktater?) takes away Medicare and Evil King Gregg takes away teacher pensions, life will get harder. I hope to live long enough to fight back against what’s coming. Maybe even live longer than Trump and see him defeated. (Uh-oh, here comes Seal Team Six.)
,
Filed under Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 