Well, my wife dropped me off at the family farm in Iowa, the Beyer farm, the Aldrich farm (my grandparents), for a hundred years before that. Then she went back to the house in Carrollton because she is not retired from her teaching job in Texas for a few more years. And with my health having changed for the worse, I had to get out of the house, which needs ongoing weather-damage repairs.
The picture is of Ariel in our new bedroom. But don’t worry. My wife and I are not separated due to a pending divorce. We are still married. And Ariel is not our daughter or granddaughter. She is the largest plastic doll in my doll collection. She is fully poseable and was bought to be an artist’s model, as she is being used here. She is over three feet tall, slightly bigger than Tom and Nicole, the two porcelain dolls my mother made and gave to my wife and me. They are here to be protected from construction and to keep me company, in addition to my sister, who is the main owner of the house.
So, this is temporary. It may last as long as four years, if I can live that long.
I will take advantage of it, reconnecting with people I grew up with.
You see, I believe in God… but my God is a bit bigger than most people’s God. In fact, most of the people who come closest to what I believe are atheists. My God is all of existence, the good and the bad both. He is above my understanding, but it is my place to constantly try to reach for Him and know Him and, sometimes, even be Him. Things that are impossible to accomplish, and yet we all do it on a daily basis.
My God does not punish sin. My God does not reward faith. My God does not ask anything of me beyond being. But since I exist, and since I believe that love and beauty are good things, if I want the universe around me to manifest love and beauty, then I must make it so. I must live as a loving person and a singer of beautiful songs… even if I can only sing silently in words on a page.
However did someone as dopey as me come up with something as dopey as this? Let me tell you a story.
When I was ten, an older boy, a neighbor, trapped me, de-pants me, and abused me. It was not love in any way. It was sexualized torture. He made me feel pain. He took away my sense of well-being. He made me afraid to touch or be touched by others. He made me believe my own physical urges were a terrible thing that God would punish me for. I wet my pants in school more than once, because I feared the boys’ bathroom at school. I no longer tried so hard to make the other kids laugh. I sank into depression. And ultimately, I thought about ending myself in painful ways, ways I felt I deserved.
Reverend Aiken is the one in the cowboy hat. His son, Mark, was my childhood best friend.
But I was blessed. My best friend’s father was the minister of the Methodist Church and, eventually, both churches in our little town. And in the late 60’s, the Methodists decided to be very progressive on matters of human sexuality. When I was twelve, he taught all the kids in my age group about sex using a blackboard and a willingness to frankly discuss anything we needed to know. Of course, he never quite figured out what my terrible secret was, in fact, I couldn’t have told him about it if I wanted to, the memory was repressed and I couldn’t call it up until that day in college when it all came back to me at age 22. But he knew it was there. He is the one that taught me that faith in God is about love. It is not about punishment, especially not punishment for biological urges and physical needs. People need love, and should never be castigated or humiliated because they seek it. And he told me that I was not to blame for the acts of others. The notion of original sin, that we are all born despicable because Adam goofed, is nonsense. All people, even the bad ones, are God’s children and worthy of love. People can be redeemed from anything. And it is the job of worthy people to be the love that informs the universe. We must do good deeds and love, honor, and, most of all, render aid to others. Because that fills the universe with goodness and light.
Both the good Reverend Aiken and my abuser are dead now. I deeply love one, and I forgive the other. And it’s because that’s what God is… love and forgiveness. It has to be so.
Did you listen to that song from YouTube? If you made it this far through this rather difficult ramble without listening to it, I recommend you click on it and give it a try. It is about King David sinning with Bathsheba, and repenting his sin before God. And in the end, there was no punishment for him. So, I, too stand before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.
It is a new version of an old artwork that shares childhood baseball dreams. It is made with two colored-pencil figures on a Picsart AI Photo Editor background.
Here is a notion that I find disturbing, compelling, and totally fascinating. The world portrayed to us through history, current media, and what is assumed to be common knowledge of the facts is all warped and incorrect. The people who make the world go round, like Glinda the Good Witch, Dorothy, and the Wizard in Oz are all lying to us.
What? You thought I was talking about something more than the Wizard of Oz? Well, you were right. You cannot consider the real meaning of the story Frank L. Baum wrote without realizing that it has more than one meaning.
You understand that in this story we are talking about a girl who becomes an interdimensional traveler. She visits a dimension which contains the Land of Oz (a place you cannot find anywhere on a map of the Earth) first by means of an interdimensional Kansas tornado, and later, after learning how to use them properly, finds her way back to her own dimension by magic-heel-clicking ruby slippers.
Not only that but after she learns of the whole rulership of Oz by witches and wizards, she allows herself to be recruited as an assassinator of evil witches by a supposed “good witch”. Again, she kills the first one by accident, then learns by trial and error how to kill the second one despite the witch’s winged-monkey minions.
Nothing in Oz is, of course, really what it seems to be. The Scarecrow, representing the rural farm worker, has been convinced he is an idiot know-nothing who doesn’t even have a brain. Yet, in the story, his were the plans that led the group to successfully overcoming obstacles. The Tin Man, representing the modern factory worker, has been told he doesn’t have a heart. Yet he is the one with the most empathy, willing to make any sacrifice necessary for the benefit of those he loves. And the Lion, symbolizing the military, is told he is cowardly, and he believes it, though he is willing to face grave danger and bravely takes on Dorothy’s enemies in spite of his paralyzing fear.
And we all know the Wizard, the man behind the curtain, is a humbug and a con man, trying to deceive others to stay in control of every situation and potential problem. (I am actually surprised his face is not orange and he doesn’t have tiny hands for signing executive orders,)
So I believe I have definitely shown there is a conspiracy behind the whole Wizard of Ozthing. It becomes obvious if you match up the signs, symbols, and clues. But the biggest thing of all is the obvious evidence of making everybody wear green sunglasses in the Emerald City. The cover-up is the greatest giveaway that there is when something odd is going on in Oz that they don’t want you to know about. It is the biggest clue that George W. Wizard is actually the instigator behind 9/11. The Scarecrow is also behind the back-engineering of alien spaceships at Area 51. The Tin Man is behind the chemtrails in the sky that are trying to undo the damage of global warming. And the Lion led the assassination team of CIA shooters who killed Kennedy. I know it all sounds crazy. But still… if we are willing to believe little Kansas girls can ride tornadoes into otherworldly dimensions…
And we all know who really voted Trump into office in 2016 and again in 2024.
I have now moved from Texas back to Iowa, the land I was born in. It is a big change in my life, especially leaving my wife and daughter in Texas, not because of divorce but because I am retired and in poor health, while my wife is not done with her Texas teaching career.
I will live on the family farm with my sister and use Iowan healthcare to stay alive while my wife teaches for four more years. If we both still live that long, then decisions will be made again.
Tuesday, in the early morning, I was back in an emergency room bed for what I feared might be heart pain. It was bad enough to force me to spend more money on the ER, even though I had doubts about what was really wrong. Heart pain is not worth making a mistake on. I am not ready to be dead.
Fortunately, it was not my heart. That was the first thing they eliminated… for good reason. Suspect number two was one of my two gallstones, which might have been guilty of causing my atypical chest pain. They used a sonogram to determine that there was no inflammation around the dislocated gallstone. The third culprit turned out to be a hard possibility. My colon was clogged with hard poo, probably clinging to the poo pockets in my diverticulosis.
Diverticulosis is a common condition that can develop in your colon, especially as you age. It means that little pouches form in the inside lining of your colon. They usually don’t cause any problems. But rarely, they may bleed or develop an infection (diverticulitis).
So, this all gets nasty. Hard poop is distending my belly. Pooping, which used to be regular, daily, and easy, is now difficult, painful, and time-consuming. And possibly life-threatening. You can laugh, but for three days now, I have been straining, moaning, and sweating five separate times a day to push out tiny, hard packets of poo to keep my innards from turning green and causing me to die in a ball of pain and smelly poo.
I am taking four new medications, only one of which is a laxative, meant to help me stay alive long enough to spend lots of money on gastroenterologists.
Anita Jones is a character in several of my books, but she also represents a girl from my own childhood who was as much of a regret for me as she was for poor old Charlie Brown.
Anita Jones, of course, is not her real name. You can’t even look at the picture and tell by what she looks like who I am secretly portraying. But the thing is, she was definitely real to me. And I would still be horrified to have her find out how I really felt about her.
She was not my first crush. I mooned over the beautiful Alicia Stewart (also not a real name) from second grade through sixth grade. But Anita was always right there. Often right behind me and to my left whenever I turned around on the playground. Not looking me in the eye, but probably looking at me until I began to turn. I know I looked at her whenever she wore dresses or shorts. She had beautiful peach-colored legs.
There was a time when, in Music class, the boys were forced to ask a girl to be a dance partner in the square dancing lessons that Miss Malik was giving us. My best friend Mark had asked Alicia to dance with him, so my number one choice was already taken. And when it was my turn, Anita looked at me with those wonderful brown eyes and heart-shaped face. And I… was too embarrassed to pick her. Then everyone would know how I really felt about her. So, I picked my cousin instead. My heart was lodged in my left shoe for three days after the look I saw on her face. Not my cousin’s face. The brown eyes and heart shape.
Then later, when I was on the high school bus to Belmond, Mickey Schmidt (we never called him Michael because I was Michael) made a joke that embarrassed me.
“Have you ever been caught masturbating in the bathtub?”
“No,” I told him, in disgust. Anita was in the seat across the aisle listening.
“It’s a good place to do it in, then, ain’t it.”
I turned as red as any maple leaf ever managed in late fall. She was smiling at me.
“I would’ve liked to have seen that,” she said. “I bet you even have a lot of hair down there.”
I would’ve laughed if I hadn’t been so embarrassed that my head might’ve caught fire.
But thinking about that humiliating moment on the bus later, I realized that she had actually been brave enough to admit she was thinking about my genitals. I had never asked her on a date or sat beside her in Art Class as I should have. My life might’ve been very different if I had. Even if I had asked her to dance.
But somewhere in the Multiverse, a parallel me is probably married to a parallel Anita. And I bless them for what might’ve been. At least, it’s lovely to think so now.
Catch a Falling Star 
Over the Rainbow
Here is a notion that I find disturbing, compelling, and totally fascinating. The world portrayed to us through history, current media, and what is assumed to be common knowledge of the facts is all warped and incorrect. The people who make the world go round, like Glinda the Good Witch, Dorothy, and the Wizard in Oz are all lying to us.
What? You thought I was talking about something more than the Wizard of Oz? Well, you were right. You cannot consider the real meaning of the story Frank L. Baum wrote without realizing that it has more than one meaning.
You understand that in this story we are talking about a girl who becomes an interdimensional traveler. She visits a dimension which contains the Land of Oz (a place you cannot find anywhere on a map of the Earth) first by means of an interdimensional Kansas tornado, and later, after learning how to use them properly, finds her way back to her own dimension by magic-heel-clicking ruby slippers.
Not only that but after she learns of the whole rulership of Oz by witches and wizards, she allows herself to be recruited as an assassinator of evil witches by a supposed “good witch”. Again, she kills the first one by accident, then learns by trial and error how to kill the second one despite the witch’s winged-monkey minions.
Nothing in Oz is, of course, really what it seems to be. The Scarecrow, representing the rural farm worker, has been convinced he is an idiot know-nothing who doesn’t even have a brain. Yet, in the story, his were the plans that led the group to successfully overcoming obstacles. The Tin Man, representing the modern factory worker, has been told he doesn’t have a heart. Yet he is the one with the most empathy, willing to make any sacrifice necessary for the benefit of those he loves. And the Lion, symbolizing the military, is told he is cowardly, and he believes it, though he is willing to face grave danger and bravely takes on Dorothy’s enemies in spite of his paralyzing fear.
And we all know the Wizard, the man behind the curtain, is a humbug and a con man, trying to deceive others to stay in control of every situation and potential problem. (I am actually surprised his face is not orange and he doesn’t have tiny hands for signing executive orders,)
So I believe I have definitely shown there is a conspiracy behind the whole Wizard of Oz thing. It becomes obvious if you match up the signs, symbols, and clues. But the biggest thing of all is the obvious evidence of making everybody wear green sunglasses in the Emerald City. The cover-up is the greatest giveaway that there is when something odd is going on in Oz that they don’t want you to know about. It is the biggest clue that George W. Wizard is actually the instigator behind 9/11. The Scarecrow is also behind the back-engineering of alien spaceships at Area 51. The Tin Man is behind the chemtrails in the sky that are trying to undo the damage of global warming. And the Lion led the assassination team of CIA shooters who killed Kennedy. I know it all sounds crazy. But still… if we are willing to believe little Kansas girls can ride tornadoes into otherworldly dimensions…
And we all know who really voted Trump into office in 2016 and again in 2024.
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Tagged as ariana-grande, conspiracy theories, movies, musical, wicked, Wizard of Oz