I finished the final draft of this bug-boiler during the pandemic, before the end of 2022. It should have been published about three books ago. I have never run into a more complex writing experience than this one.
The first issue was arthritic. I wanted to continue using illustrations to short-cut character depictions. I like to illustrate these novels with comic-book-style pen-and-ink illustrations. But my fingers have lost so much dexterity that I can no longer match the old cartoons and things begin to look a little off. I tried to use pre-existing illustrations from my old notebooks full of such pictures. But my scanner became a problem because the controls of the thing were tied to my son’s computer… the one he gave to his older brother when he went into the Air Force. And my only computer linked to the scanner, which I can no longer link new computers to, is old and wearing out. It takes a week to scan things at times when I need to go faster than that. And the drawings don’t look that good anyway… though much better than any new work I do with pens on paper. And it is the part of the old book that I am rewriting as a series of five books where I have the most new plot and world-building to do… and then cross-check for consistency with everything I wrote back in 2007.
And then the ability to do digital art came along, something I would’ve loved to apply to this book. But the learning curve on that took more than a year. And yet, I am still trying to master the skills necessary to create science fiction art in a digital format.
And this entire last week was consumed with frustration over trying to create the new format Amazon requires with an interactive table of contents. I still have to skip the parts of that which Amazon will still let me skip because it is new.
Anyway, the thing was fun to write, fun to reread, and worth all the effort. You can see for yourself at the link above.
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads were all down today at various times. Not that I am such a loser that I spend all day on Facebook and can’t live without it. I like to use Instagram for posting artwork as I continue to noodle with digital art tools. The little girl I use as a model for pictures of my imaginary granddaughter posts on Instagram her little videos more than twice a day. I managed to get this drawing done today even though Instagram disappeared shortly after Facebook was completely gone. I didn’t need either social media site to create this picture as I already had a rough draft done, and from there it can all be done offline.
I didn’t need the Facebook group of sites for this practice picture at all. I made it from the most viewed photo on my WordPress blog, Catch a Falling Star, where you should be reading this post if you are not merely looking at the pictures.
Here’s the original photo with the little naked girl, her six fish in jars, and the black cat pretending not to be thinking obsessively about how to get fish out of jars. You can see how well… or how poorly I redrew the picture. I regret drawing the cat looking fatter and less hungry than the one in the photo.
And for good measure, here’s a picture of me and my plastic doll Ariel whom I constantly talk to while my wife is away at work and my daughter is occupied with college classes. She stands in for the grandchild I don’t have too. I even drew glasses on her to make her feel more like one of my myopic family.
And to finish up, I did a bikini picture. I like girls in bikinis. But, incredibly old coot that I am, I have more or less forgotten why I like bikini pictures so much. The model for this one was plucked from Instagram after the site came back to life. So, basically, I did more drawing, not less, on a day without Facebook.
Lawanda and Geoff, time travelers, visited me from the future today. They come from the 56th Century CE, precisely two hundred years before the beginning of the Xandar Empire, the Milky Way’s first galaxy-wide Star Empire.
Here’s the birth of the characters in the third draft of the picture, before I designed their uniforms and converted Lawanda into a female.
Here’s a fellow space traveler. Still no name for her.
Here’s a second draft of the space traveler portrait, before I learned she was from the future and outer space.
Here’s further proof that once you make a digital picture, it is so easy to edit details that you can make many versions of the same picture.
Yes I will continue to coddiwomple for a while. On my birthday in November of 2014 after retiring in May, I decided I would do a blog post every single day for at least a year. Now, two years and four months later, I am still posting every single day. I think that I shall continue for a while because there are real benefits to doing so.
It keeps my seriously old and worn-out brain active, chugging along even though it is held together with mental duct tape.
It challenges my ability to come up with new ideas. I admit, sometimes I set down to write a post with nothing in my head but random snippets of music and empty space. Yet, I have managed to increasingly create bizarre and exotic thought-artifacts at an increasingly volatile pace. Perhaps soon the ideas reach critical mass and my writing goes boom like a series of fireworks.
It has increased my visibility on WordPress and the reach of my writing through social media.
It has taught me how much I hate Twitter. People tweeting in a rage at each other makes the world a birdhouse full of angry birds.
It has also taught me to edit carefully and quickly because my writing time is theoretically limited, as is my target word-count.
And I have learned that some days I need to do a simple and easy post like this to give my mind-muscles a chance to rest and grow.
So I will continue to post on WordPress, putting up pusillanimous Paffoonies to treat and entertain you. (Yes, I know that “pusillanimous” means timid. But the root words mean “small mind”, and my mind is nothing if not small. And I also needed a multi-syllabic p-word to make the alliteration sound funnier.)
Johann Sebastian Bach may or may not have written his organ masterpiece, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in 1704. All we know for sure is that the combined efforts of Johannes Ringk, who saved it in manuscript form in the 1830’s, and Felix Mendelssohn who performed it and made it a hit you could dance to during the Bach Revival in 1840 made it possible to still hear its sublime music today. Okay, maybe not dance to exactly… But without the two of them, the piece might have been lost to us in obscurity.
The Toccata part is a composition that uses fast fingerings and a sprightly beat to make happy hippie type music that is really quite trippy. The Fugue part (pronounced Fyoog, not Fuggwee which I learned to my horror in grade school music class) is a part where one part of the tune echoes another part of the tune and one part becomes the other part and then reflects it all back again. I know that’s needlessly confusing, but at least I know what I mean. That is not always a given when I am writing quickly like a Toccata.
I have posted two different versions for you to listen to in this musical metaphor nonsensical posticle… err… Popsicle… err… maybe just post. One is the kinda creepy organ version like you might find in a Hammer Films monster movie in the 1970’s. The other is the light and fluffy violin version from Disney’s Fantasia. I don’t really expect you to listen to both, but listening to one or the other would at least give you a tonal hint about what the ever-loving foolishness I am writing in this post is really all about.
You see, I find sober thoughts in this 313-year-old piece of music that I apply to the arc of my life to give it meaning in musical measure.
This is the Paffooney of this piece, a picture of my wife in her cartoon panda incarnation, along with the panda persona of my number two son. The background of this Paffooney is the actual Ringk manuscript that allowed Bach’s masterwork not to be lost for all time.
My life was always a musical composition, though I never really learned piano other than to pick out favorite tunes by ear. But the Bach Toccata and Fugue begins thusly;
The Toccata begins with a single-voice flourish in the upper ranges of the keyboard, doubled at the octave. It then spirals toward the bottom, where a diminished seventh chord appears (which actually implies a dominant chord with a minor 9th against a tonic pedal), built one note at a time. This resolves into a D major chord.
I interpret that in prose thusly;
Life was bright and full of promise when I was a child… men going to the moon, me learning to draw and paint, and being smarter than the average child to the point of being hated for my smart-asserry and tortured accordingly. I was sexually assaulted by an older boy and spiraled towards the bottom where I was diminished for a time and mired in a seventh chord of depression and despair. But that resolved into a D major chord when the realization dawned that I could teach and help others to learn the music of life.
And then the Fugue begins in earnest. I set the melody and led my students to repeat and reflect it back again. Over and over, rising like a storm and skipping like a happy child through the tulips that blossom as the showers pass. Winding and unwinding in equal measure, my life progressed to a creaky old age. But the notes of regret in the conclusion are few. The reflections of happinesses gained are legion. I have lived a life I do not regret. I may not have my music saved in the same way Johann Sebastian did, but I am proud of the whole of it. And whether by organ or by violin, it will translate to the next life, and will continue to repeat. What more can a doofus who thinks teaching and drawing and telling stories are a form of music ask for from life?
=========== Soon I will get grumpy and forgetful and strange
And then I am going to die.
But my life, though it’s practically over, has been valuable.
And not just to me…
Or maybe you need to see 7 reasons why?
I was good at the things I chose to do in life. More students, principals, and school administrators thought so than saw me as a terrible teacher. For 31 years. Plus three years of substitute teaching.
I was never a vampire, zombie, ghost, or… if I was a werewolf in the 1990s. I am cured now.
I never had a broken leg, never drove a car off a cliff, never sank a ship, and never was mauled by a zoo animal that escaped its cage with hunting me on its mind.
No butterfly in China ever flapped its wings and caused a tornado that did anything more than damage the roof of a house I was in.
I knock on wood daily.
As a teacher, I lost a couple of critical battles… suicide and gun deaths, one case of AIDS, and one muscular dystrophy. And I cried at every single one of those final defeats. And yet, they all knew I was trying to help. And there’s a large number who live and love me still for what I was able to give them. The scales are heavy but balanced.
And I am 67 now. 24 years of diabetes. 49 years of arthritis. 70 will probably be the last 7 I can manage if I can manage any more than now. But I woke up alive this morning, and every new day is a precious gift. Painful or not.
And you are probably saying to me in your head right now, “Mickey, this is not a poem. It has no rhyme or rhythm”. It isn’t anything more than a paragraph with a list attached.
“Ah!” I say. “But I am claiming my whole life was a poem. One big, giant, evil poem Lived with more than a little special sauce on the meat of the sandwich. And can you truly say,
This life was not the shortest, clearest, best way to say something so profound it shook the bones of the Universe?”
Susu, my imaginary granddaughter loved it. (She’s imaginary because she was only a possibility for a few weeks and never got born.) And she’d give you a big hug if only she could.
Playing a piano recital completely naked is a nightmare some kids have when their piano teacher schedules their first recital. But it is something that is only a nightmare, not something a piano teacher would ever do in reality. Not require the piano student to perform nude, I mean. They will definitely schedule the recital and cause the nightmare.
The thing is, however, that the picture above is metaphorical, not literal. A performer on piano, or guitar, or doing stand-up comedy routines, or even teaching from the front of the classroom makes you feel exactly like that. You can’t do it by keeping even one square inch of yourself hidden away, concealed under clothing, lies, or misdirection. The contents of your inner heart has to be there on display.
I remember being naked in front of a classroom of mostly hostile and mostly illiterate eighth graders on the first day of classes in the Fall of 1981. I wasn’t literally naked. But they knew I didn’t speak or understand Spanish the way 85% of them did. They knew I was nervous and feeling awkward. They knew I didn’t know most of the truly terrible things they did to the poor teacher-lady who had tried to teach them English in that same classroom the year before. There were firecrackers under the desk, thumb tacks on the teachers’ chair, classroom fights, insults in Spanish and English directly to her face, classroom posters destroyed… they drove her out of the classroom screaming to the airport in San Antonio and out of teaching and the State of Texas probably for good. I had no armor, no experience, and only a few teacher tricks in my bag of… well, you know, tricks they had all seen already many times. I might as well have been literally naked.
I remember the advice I got in my college speech class about giving yourself confidence by imagining your audience was naked. But 25 thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, some with mustaches, some of the boys had mustaches too? Picturing them naked worked against me. They were scarier that way.
I never seriously entertained ideas of becoming a nudist back in my teaching days. I had to consider the morals clause in my endless string of one-year contracts. I had to consider my own post-traumatic fear of being naked after what happened to me at ten. But my encounters with nudists and nudist literature did get me wondering… did make me actually curious.
Like most Americans, I never thought of nudism as something for me, rather, a thing that could be tolerated about unusual people who lived in their heads too much and were often too much of an exhibitionist. But I did create nudist characters for some of my fantasy-comedy novels which I seriously began self-publishing after retiring as a teacher. Specifically, the Cobble Sisters and their family, based on twin girl students who claimed to be nudists in my classroom, though they may have been telling fictional stories themselves.
And then real nudists and naturists began finding my books and liking them. I became a part of the online Twitter-nudist community.
And while talking to a family psychotherapist, he suggested to me that I should deal with some of my problems by choosing one thing I was basically afraid to do, but might provide a thrill or other positive feelings. We talked about bungee jumping and sky diving, but those were out because of my health problems. And then he suggested I might profit from actually trying nudism.
One terrifying thing. A nudist website wanted someone to write a blog post for them about first-time visits to a nudist park or other nude venue. I applied for the job. They published my application piece and then asked me to follow through. I visited Bluebonnet Nudist Park on a Friday in July of 2017.
It was, in fact, one of the scariest things I have ever done on purpose. But once I was actually naked among other naked people, I really felt the power of my accomplishment. I overcame a childhood fear. I accomplished one scary thing. And it felt great. I would eventually do it again after the pandemic.
So, I am one of those unusual and somewhat crazy people now. My wife and children are mortified. I am driving away blog readers who think I must be nuts. And I feel good about it.
Catch a Falling Star 