If I get the chance to start another Tuesday writing project, it will be a new Cissy Moonskipper story. It will be called Cissy Moonskipper Meets the Nebulons. She will be enveloped as a heroine by the strange starfaring blue-skinned people who are immune to radiation and travel in gargantuan space whales, filled with oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere and powered by living hearts of cold fusion. It will be a joy to write, and, hopefully, a pleasure to read.
But I despair increasingly about the future. The Mango-colored Hitler who pretended to be the 45th President seems poised to re-win control of this entire country. And he is spewing all kinds of bull-pucky dreams of authoritarian despotic rule that will make the Holocaust look like a visit to Walt Disney World.
If the giant angry Oompa Loompa does win, we will sooner die on an earthly heatscape since he will definitely install policies that will accelerate global warming. Don’t get me wrong, I believe this world is already doomed. He will just doom it and damn it faster.
On the other hand… or maybe the third hand… the pessimist within me does not discount all the good that life on Earth has managed. We have managed to add to the life of the universe and give it self-aware sentience… at least here, and at least for a short while.
This is supposed to be a portrait of Jennifer Ortega. The last one looked like Emma Watson. This one, I don’t know. I didn’t use Jenny’s dimples again and I guess that’s the only reason that this still does not look like the star of Wednesday on Netflix. The only reason. It is not because I am still getting used to drawing anime style with digital art tools. No, never that.
Today was another holiday spent alone. My mother-in-law is dying in San Antonio, so all those who could travel that far in my family went there. The dog and I are alone at least until Friday. And both of us are ill. I have a urinary tract infection that I managed to catch early enough to get in to see the doctor on Tuesday. Sulfa drugs for Thanksgiving dinner. The dog is also old and ill. She still goes for a walk, but her stomach rebels and she sleeps more than ever before. At 13 she’s an old-lady dog in her unlucky year of life.
But those are expected complaints and worries. There are looming things ahead that concern me far more. The high-heat heatwave of this summer, more than two weeks at 108 degrees Fahrenheit or more, was another thing like Covid that probably should’ve killed me. We survived as the air conditioners in the house all held on and the electric grid did not fail at fatal junctures. That kind of luck is not going to continue for long in preserving me. I did not die in the extreme cold. I did not die of Covid. I did not die of extreme heat. The government did not fail as a result of any of these unprecedented things. The food-production capacity of the midwest, where my family still owns a farm, did not fail either, in spite of drought and stormy weather. None of these instances of good luck saving our proverbial bacon can still be counted on the next time it comes up.
I am determined to vote for the good guys if I survive until November of 2024. But I fear the proto-fascist Mango Hitler, Donald Trump, is going to win the presidency again. Greedy-rich bloodsuckers who get tax breaks beyond the dreams of avarice support him financially and have so far prevented him from being executed for treason, murder, and malfeasance. Life will be even more of a hellscape than it was under his last reign of terror. And he will undo what little has been done to repair the world from climate crisis. If his election happens again, the planet will not survive as a living organism.
So, what am I actually thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day?
Hope is not yet gone. I may not live for very much longer, but the life I have lived has been richly satisfying, though ultimately not an easy ride. And if I can still complain about all these increasingly horrible problems, it means I can also still do things to keep hope alive.
Two sisters and their little dog too. Not only were they not supposed to have their dog at the mall, they were supposed to wear shoes indoors too. Needless to say, they got sent home.
At home, the sisters could go as naked as they wanted to. Of course, their other dog, the girl dog, decided to get between them and be naked too.
Sammy took this selfie with his phone at the beach. His Mom suggested that maybe he was trying to take a photo of something more than his own sassy face.
Ariel’s Blue Fairy is rather tiny, but she’s really powerful when using taxidermy-duck magic. Okay, a taxidermy duck is not that great when you wished for a soft pillow.
We are headed for massively tough times. Billions will die as a result of how the climate crisis will change the entire planet. Today I learned that the colonization of Mars and even the Moon is something that takes far more time than we have. And it is not the utopian answer some science fictionists tend to offer. We have to master living in fishbowls, contained environments, and terrarium-type reverse aquariums.
I am brainstorming my own survivalist fiction now thinking not about life in space, but about life in reverse aquariums… underwater at the bottom of the oceans.
Of course, to do this, we have a number of problems to overcome… yesterday. The oceans are turning to acid which is generally inhospitable to life… and to the things we would have to build underwater to survive. We don’t want those things to dissolve. So a massive effort at deacidification needs to be already underway. As large areas of land will be covered with water, there will need to be industrial-sized efforts to desalinate ocean water to create fresh water to sustain not only us but also all the non-salt-water breathing things we take with us under the waves. And living in fishbowls under the sea will take a concerted effort to compensate for the pressures experienced underneath tons and tons of water.
The technology already exists to build underwater domed cities, safe from surface weather. And it may soon be the only safe place to build. The problem is that we are way behind in building such habitats.
And we would have to adapt undersea farming, raising food fish, edible seaweed, and surface plants in bubble farms at the bottom of the ocean growing vegetables under artificial sun sources. Underwater tramsportation would need to be inserted; tube trains, submersibles, pressurized undersea suits, and amphibious vehicles that can transition from underwater travel to surface sailing and even land roving.
Our society would undergo significant changes as culture and behavior have to become sea centered.
So, there you have it. Sufficient notes to begin contemplating the science fiction stories of nautical life in the great undersea of a climate-disaster future.
It was as a young boy traveling with heroes in spaceships across time and space that I first realized that comedy is one of the greatest powers in the galaxy. Being able to laugh at things that so cosmically clash with what you want to do and where you want to go in life makes it possible to play the idiot and not get your head actually bitten off by the giant purple moon duck that thought your spaceship was an egg and crushed it by trying to hatch it. Comedy rewrites the script of life into something you can live through and learn from and laugh about instead of getting wounded from and scarred by and made to die from.
And how do you tell if something that happens is a comedy or a tragedy?
Well, if you go by the examples of Shakespeare’s plays, it is relatively easy. A comedy may suffer from terrible mixups and conflicts that are potentially life-threatening. But the problems get sorted out and solved. And then somebody… or even everybody gets married at the end. Plus the soliloquies are mostly wordplay and ridiculous metaphors, often including bawdy and ribald humor to titillate the peasants in the pit of the theater.
Tragedies are the opposite. The conflicts, though clearly foreshadowed, are relentlessly played out… unstoppable. Characters, especially heroes, have some tragic flaw that makes their downfall inescapable. And everybody dies at the end. The stage in the concluding scenes of Hamlet runs red with imaginary blood. Simple.
‘There are many theories of humor. But of the three most common ones, let us start with Incongruous Juxtaposition Theory. That’s the one where things that don’t fit with other things are forced together. Like the giant moon duck back in the introduction that wrecked my spaceship because it thought it was an egg to hatch. Or the seven pond frogs in Hollywood who see a Frank Sinatra movie on the local drive-in’s outdoor screen, and then decide that they can sing better than Frankie, so they form a barbershop quartet and become a huge hit by singing outside the local radio station.
A second common theory is the Superiority Theory. This says we like to laugh at the clowns because they show us things to make us feel like we are better than they are. So, we laugh when they fail at the things that they try, especially if they fall and get hurt in funny ways. I am not fond of this kind of humor since it is most commonly enjoyed by bullies, jackasses, and stupid people… you know, the people that even I can feel superior to. But I have to admit that this kind of humor is funny when the clown makes the same mistakes that I have made, and I am suddenly standing in his clown shoes.
A third theory, the one most relied on by Mickey, is the Relief Theory, the one that allows us to suddenly realize how silly some of our greatest fears truly are. My fear of being chased in my dreams by a duck with teeth becomes laughable when I stop quaking long enough to realize ducks don’t have teeth… not in real life… only in dreams and Warner Brothers’ cartoons.
So, Mickey’s Theory of Comedy barely rates a thought when stacked up against the comedic products of Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Mr. Bean, and George Carlin. But at least it’s simple.
Good comedy stories not only make you laugh a lot, but they make you cry a little too. Good comedy lets you climb inside the clown character’s skin, see the funny from the inside, and it all has a happy ending.
Good tragedy is the opposite. It makes you laugh a little, but it makes you cry a lot. You get inside the tragic heroes’ skin to suffer with them and deeply experience heartfelt hurt from the inside. And you probably get a sad or terribly earned ending.
So, there you have it. Mickey’s theory of comedy. It’s a real joke. A hootable, tootable, rhymie-timie joke. And how to make more.
