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Believe me when I say that the teaching-life’s okay.

I survived it many days because I brought bananas to the fray.

I taught within the monkey house and now’s my time to grouse.

Sixth graders are the little monkeys

Small and fast and full of funkies

Seventh-grade are chimpanzees

Who grab and eat whatever they sees

And the eighth, well, they are the gorillas

Who throw their poop and make school thrillers.

And though it makes you crazy and mean

And you feel like life is full of beans

You learn to love the monkey house

Even the bully and the louse

Entertaining them with stories and tasks

Which makes them smile and drop their masks

You trick them into a little learning

And maybe keep the school from burning

And long years end with coos from doves…

They have become your little loves.

There is no doubt about it

As a writer, as a poet, as an author

I am absolutely nobody

I will never be famous

I will never be wealthy

Only a tiny, precious few

Will ever read me, ever know me

But that is entirely okay

That was never what my life was for

In fact, I am satisfied

Because you read this

And now you understand.

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.

So, Mickey has discovered how to use poetry for evil.

He can make dead people and poets return to life through poetry.

He can manipulate your feelings, make you laugh, make you cry…

He can even make you have ideas that began in someone else’s stupid head.

But does that mean we should punish him, maybe even execute him?

Well… Probably.

But does that also mean that you shouldn’t write poetry yourself?

In today’s modern internet age, many stupid people and AI machines

Are writing many stupid poems.

Good poems are lost in swamps of bad poetry.

Though, you should never let that stop you!

Life is poetry. And we must all write our own into being.

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.)

I am a burning candle,

Proof against the night.

The flame upon my wick,

Is good, but not real bright.

I’ve flickered in the darkness

For now, well, several years

Guiding children to the outhouse,

And allaying all their fears.

And the melting wax keeps running

From the wick now dripping slow,

And I keep on lighting darkness

Using every trick I know.

But no candle burns forever,

And my light is almost spent.

My light is just a flicker now,

And my wisdom, all now lent.