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The song was a hit in 1973 when I was a high school sophomore, the time when I almost ended myself for the severe depression that the repressed memory of being assaulted at ten infected me with. And it was Jim Croce’s second number-one hit, top of the charts, released after he had already passed in a plane crash. It was a song about saving up time to spend with someone you loved more than life itself. A sad song, given the impossibility of putting time in a bottle, unfortunate considering Croce’s time ran out before the song even hit the airwaves.

We loved that song so much that it was the first choice for a Prom Theme the next year when I was a junior and in charge of the artwork for decorating the high school gym for Prom. Yes, doing all that art was one of the things that kept me from putting a knife in my own chest the previous Spring. I savored that song. I designed wall posters and backgrounds for the walls during the dance. And I did it all again when the theme was changed from “Time in a Bottle” to “The Circus.” I drew a leopard in a circus wagon life-sized. I captured a moment in time in tempura paint on a massive sheet of paper. I remember three of the girls fighting over the piece when the Prom was over. I wonder if someone still has that leopard somewhere. I don’t remember which girl won the fight.

My best friend in high school, Byron, who later went on to get a medical degree and become Dr. Bonte in Minnesota, is now gone. He died from muscular dystrophy a couple of decades ago. My mother and father are both gone now. Both of my father’s siblings, Aunt Jean and Uncle Skip, are also gone, along with their spouses. My mother’s older brother, Uncle Larry, is also long gone of cancer. In fact, my Uncle Don, and Uncle Larry’s wife are the only members of my parents’ generation in our family who are still living. They were all alive in 1973 when “Time in a Bottle” played at least five times a day on the Iowa rock and roll station on AM radio, WHO from Des Moines.

I guess all of that is in my Memory Bottle? I can’t actually spend any of the time with them. But I metaphorically can. And I have left the fruit of my experiences in 24 books so far, another Bottle Out of Time. 24 bottles metaphorically.

So, now that I am ill, almost seventy and definitely closer to the grave than the day of my birth, maybe I don’t need to despair. I can remember the song. I can open a bottle of vintage time. Somewhere it’s 1973 again. And someone is listening to a ghost voice on the radio singing,
“If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to do
Is to save every day till eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you“

That may be all we ever need to require of time. Once we’ve lived it, it is ours forever.

,

The planet is possibly doomed, definitely doomed if the Pumpkinhead President comes back into power. I am hoping that voters are smart enough not to give Don Cheetoh Trumpoloney a second term. But we have to face the fact that a large number of voters are conditioned by Fox News and Republican lies about how they will benefit by letting the oligarchs of American corporatocracy rob them blind laughing all the way to the poorhouse and… eventually the grave. While the lying fatcats and polluters move to Mars or underground bunkers with their ill-gotten gold.

I know that the odds have turned in our favor, the smarter folks, I mean, since Vice President Kamala Harris took over the campaign and blew up Democratic enthusiasm. Of course, the damage done since the Reagan Administration to our fragile environment may kill us all still. It still has to be reversed.

It is a time for gallows humor. I may not survive until the election. My fourth urinary tract infection this year nearly got me late Friday night. Do you realize that if you lose the ability to pee, your eyeballs fill up with yellow liquid and you will die of toxic shock, uremic poisoning, or sepsis in terrible ways they never tell you about in the cartoons where Huckleberry Hound’s eyeballs fill up with pee. I would end up de-lifed and not laughing, more like Jim Henson than Huckleberry Hound.

My sister Mary underwent chemotherapy on Wednesday. She is feeling miserable today. The doctors told her that she would be miserable until two-and-a-half weeks were up. And then when she gets to the three-week mark, she has to do it again. Every three weeks until the day before Thanksgiving. And then, when that last chemo is done taking all the laughter out of life, she will get the surgery that should rid her completely of the cancer. My sister, at least, gets the last laugh out of that one.

Truly, we have to keep laughing. We don’t give up. Every day is a fight for life. We must keep fighting and laughing, not go gentle into that good night… to paraphrase the Irish poet Dylan Thomas.

Oh, yeah, he said, “Rage! Rage against the dying of the light.” But I don’t rage. I laugh. Tragedy plus time… lots of time… equals comedy.

Flower Girl 2… Made from the same digital picture, with AI Mirror and Picsart AI Photo Editor

What will I do with this new picture? Well, prove that I can still draw well in pen and ink. A few flubs from shaky hands, but not glaringly awful. The story? That remains to be created.

Missteps are many as the dance begins,

No coins are in my pocket, but I can dance along.

Fortune rarely favors me, the stones are sharp directly underfoot.

I wonder how much longer the dance can last.

I know the tune, and it’s not overlong.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And yet, I whirl and enjoy the swirl of color, tone, and movement.

The faun’s recorder tweets and croons a beautiful refrain.

I step and sway and feel okay as my old heart thumps along.

I will enjoy it while it lasts even though the time has quickly passed,

And, hopefully, I will still be dancing right up until the end.

I am still writing this novella as a part of my Tuesday novel-writing demonstration. But this next chapter proves a difficult lump of story to carve into shape. Partly because the younger of my two sisters has cancer and my damaged car has to get fixed and the dermatologist used her dermatologist’s cancer-spot freezer to spray both of my temples and freeze my stupid head. I have been interrupted by other things. But the plot function this next part addresses is clear in my head. I just need another week to sort it out… after my frozen head thaws out.

I was listening to the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra in Poland performing Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Have you heard it? As classical music goes, it is thinking-candy. Honestly, I strongly recommend it.

y

I will attempt to share with you now a bit of hard-earned Stoic wisdom learned not from Greek philosophers, but from long years worth of trying with all my power to teach anything at all to twelve-and-thirteen-year-olds. Bear with me, I am not crazy. I am a retired middle school teacher.

*No matter how naturally gifted you are with teaching skills, you have to learn everything about teaching the hard way, trying and failing repeatedly until you get it right, or until the students kill and eat you.*

*The only person whose behavior you can control is you yourself. Student behavior is chaos.*

*While you can’t control student behavior, you can use your behavior to corral attention and lead them towards something that resembles civilized behavior. (But learning how to corral those little piggies can take forever.)*

*You will want to do everything “the easy way” because that is the only way you can reach classroom goals in a reasonable amount of time. Of course, it takes practically no time to learn that there is NO EASY WAY!*

*Most teachers rely on drill and practice, and this is why there are so few excellent teachers. Drill and practice is the most effective way to teach students to hate the subject you are trying to teach.*

*Students learn best in a “Laughing Classroom” where they talk to each other, activities are creative and sometimes loud, and learning becomes fun.*

*Many principals consider “Laughing Classrooms” to be a good reason to punish or dismiss a teacher.*

*Good teaching is a subversive act. Only the people who are supposed to teach or learn really want it to take place in most schools.*

*All of your students will misbehave at one time or another. Some only briefly and very mildly. Others for an endless period of time that you hope ends short of murder.*

*When a student misbehaves and you have to take them into the hallway to yell at them and/or murder them, you secretly tell them that you believe in them, describe the behavior and why it disappointed you, and then describe what they should have done instead. Follow that by asking them if someone else needs to get involved, parents, principal, police, or executioner, or if they would like to go back in the room and try again.*

*Your worst students are the ones who need you the most. You better learn somewhere along the way to love past the ugly.*

*Nothing you will ever do in your career will beat reaching the unreachable and teaching the unteachable. I pray that you will get to experience it at least once. And no one but you and that student will ever know about it.*

Now you can go be a school teacher and be all Stoic like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. And there was no secret code for anything evil in that last one. If you ever experience it, you will know then what I am talking about. Not everything you are proud of doing in life has to get a gold medal on a stage to be worth doing. But if you are a teacher, you already know that.

Being an essayist means thinking about things, ordering what you think about, and writing it all down in the best way you can manage. And so, there comes a time when you begin to think about philosophical stuff. Unfortunately, this is some of the stuffiest stuff you can think about or write about. Why do we exist? What is the meaning of life? What should we care most about? Why should we care about anything?

The proper time for me to think and write about this stuffy stuff is now. I am nearing the end of the story. The last page could be written at any time now, heart attack, stroke, car crash, or murder on the street by a teenager with an AR-15. Then the book will close and I will write no more.

But what even IS time? Do we know? Physically it can be measured only by the movement of a mass of particles through space. The minute hand ticks over from 12:01 to 12:02. We recognize that as time. Length, width, height, and the fourth dimension is time. What, though, if we were able to see it from a possible fifth dimension that we don’t at present have the ability to see? All in one big massive construct, our whole life at once, every movement, every thought, every change, every emotion all together at the same moment in fifth-dimensional reality? If we dare to believe in a higher power, a god, then isn’t that how he perceives everything?

So, I have put together in this essay several Paffoonies with no real background to them. Moments from my life. Kernels of Mickey-corn to stand in for the beginning, middle, and end of my story. I will use Paffoonies to wax philosophical about things as I still find myself with time for waxing stuffy-stuff. Probably Multi-paffoons if I am being honest. Even bad clowns like me have to deal with philosophical questions. The un-examined life was never worth living. So, it was never the path I chose.