It’s easy to explain how… You just can’t…

But nonsense is a rubbery sort of sense. You can pull it like taffy, wind it around your neck, let it harden into one of those neck rings like some of those African women who put on more and more neck rings until their neck bones separate and they can never again take the neck rings off because they will die of a broken neck if they do.

That’s probably a racist joke. Although it is not really a joke, but more of a surrealistic observation. They really do wear those neck rings. The Ndebele tribe from the Transvaal Region of South Africa wear these things sometimes even without being in a Black Panther movie in the MCU. In Black Panther movies they are worn by the Dora Milaje who protect the Black Panther. And the words “Dora Milaje” mean the “Adored Ones.” And you have to adore them, or else they might kick your butt, or even break it into three pieces. They are very tough and determined ladies.

And then there’s the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. He wears crazy stuff too. But if he tried to join a nudist organization and become a nudist, he would disrobe and suddenly be transformed into a small haystack of straw. And what would that look like? A straw pile with two little white eyeballs laying at the peak of the pile?

And obviously that could be a racist joke too. But what race would we be running? And how slow would you have to be to be beaten in a race by a naked straw man?

But straw men are even more discriminated against than other men, nude or not. You see, politicians are constantly setting them up because when you are arguing with the other party, they are easy to knock down with your superior arguments. But, of course, the Democrats are always easier to knock down anyway, because they don’t rely on made-up facts and scare tactics. They only try to scare you with true stuff. And they are more likely to start wondering what a naked strawman would look like.

And then you take the rubbery nonsense and wind it all around the parts of this picture. It has a lot of real things in it, yet most of those things are not really real. Like Mickey Mouse. He’s real. I mean, there’s a real guy or girl inside the hot costume. But the outside is not really real. And you would be hard pressed to actually see the really real guy inside the suit because it is really hard to see what’s hidden inside a costume if it is currently in a colored-pencil drawing. In fact, Cissy Spasek is in the picture, but as the character who kills everybody in the movie Carrie. So, which part of that is most real? Carrie is a real book by Stephen King. And how many real people are in this picture? And how many fake people? That’s the thing about nonsense… It doesn’t make any sense.

I am waking up every morning amazed that I am still alive. Pain is a constant. Feeling ill from diabetes is a second constant. Too many constants in the equation means you can work out the math and predict the date you will have to play chess with the Grim Reaper again.

Fortunately for me, old Grimmy hasn’t figured out the King’s Indian defense that I learned in 1972 by reading Bobby Fischer’s column about chess in Boys’ Life Magazine. He falls for the Knight’s Gambit every single time we play.

I confess to being overly obsessed with death lately. That may have been partly due to promotions for the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3 that seemed to point to beloved characters dying in what was said to be the last movie in the trilogy. Well, they did almost die… but (Spoiler alert!) Nobody I cared about actually died. Not Rocket Raccoon, not Drax the Destroyer, nor Peter Quill’s Starlord character as well.

Even more, it seemed my writing results were indicating future writer doom. My blog activity was down. Book sales are down. When I die, nobody will have read and loved the works of novel art that I have been pouring my life’s blood into for over a decade. My stories will cease to be, unread and forgotten even by my relatives.

I haven’t even been able to write the usual 500 words a day for over two weeks. But, then, I cut back on Instagram activity, and voila! (a fancy French word that means, “There it is!”) I was able to write a blog post and write more on my book of essays as well.

So, maybe I have been obsessing about death too much. But I do find it useful as motivation for the limited number of things lazy old me still does to think that todary is the last day to get anything done. We shall see if I wake up deceased tomorrow or not.

Nope. I did not misspell a word in the title. There are blood-sucking ticks all over our government.

Our taxpayer dollars fund the Federal Government. Does it not follow then that those dollars should be spent to help all of us with the most critical problems we ALL face?

Not only favoring the 1%

And not tilting the tables toward Republicans…

Or Ted Cruz, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk…

and especially not Darnold Trumpalump!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Republicans cheat.

Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. States like Texas limit voting in such a way that it is much harder to vote if you are a member of a minority that usually votes for Democrats. And they are trying to take away more voting rights… but mainly from the left. They refused to consider Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court. They put the union-and-worker-hating Goresuch in his seat. They forced out the somewhat moderate Kennedy to put in the sex criminal Cavanaugh. They stole RBG’s seat by reversing their position used on Garland’s seat to insert Amy Coneyisland Barrett. And now, led by bag-of-corruption Clarence Thomas, they have begun rolling back the hard-won human rights of women, LGBTQ people, black people, school children, and anybody who doesn’t agree with their Fifteenth-Century morality.

Undo the Trump tax cuts and reduce the national debt by 25%!

The stupid Debt-limit Crisis should not interfere with climate-change mitigation, social safety net funding, Medicare, Social Security, and Veteran healthcare. And it should certainly NOT MAKE US DEFAULT ON OUR DEBT! Paying our debts should not be tied to Republican demands that undoes Democratic achievements of the past year.

The essential problem is that we have too many rich pigs in government that not only profit over mistreating the poor and middle class, but they enjoy the pain they inflict. And not all of the corruption is in the Republican Party. JUST MOST OF IT!

Sorry about the angry rant, but I needed to avoid exploding.

One of the most awkward things in a boy’s life is the onset of sexual attraction to girls. And it was doubly awkward for me after I had been assaulted and sealed the trauma away behind a wall of denial.

Fortunately for me, I had a couple of things going for me, although I did not count them as good things at the time. One thing was that, as the oldest grandchild in the Aldrich-farm family, I was literally surrounded by girls. Of all the grandkids, there were only three boys in the family of cousins outnumbered completely by the eight girls. I played Robin Hood and Zorro, and games in the goblin-filled canyons of the farmhouse basement. I was surrounded by girls filling in the roles of crew and companions and Merry Men all played by girls who giggled too much for the part. My little brother and Uncle Larry’s youngest child were the only other boys, and they were two of three youngest among us, seven and eight years younger than me. I really only had girls to play with and tell stories to (mostly lies, and some of them terrifying lies as the girls still tell me to this day.)

Sister girls and cousin girls are not potential romantic entanglements, and thus females you get to know as real people, not like the girls on TV, in movies, or (God forbid) girls in porn magazines. I can still honestly say that my two sisters are my friends and I can count on them.

Growing up mostly surrounded by girls was good for me in a number of ways. The embarrassment of seeing a girl naked, or worse, being seen naked by a girl, happened a lot less stressfully when the girl was a sister or a cousin.

And when in 1969 I had to move from the tiny elementary school in Rowan, Iowa to the much larger junior high in Belmond, it was Vicky sitting next to me in Art Class who befriended me and helped me to make it through the difficult adjustment to a place where boys bullied you and most girls made fun of you and I nearly cringed myself into a tiny tennis ball because of my terrible secret. She loved to watch me draw and was amazed at everything I did. It was something she did with a smiley, bubbly personality to the point that Mr. Thorpe, the Art teacher, got mad at her for always watching and talking to me rather than drawing the assignments he gave us. And it wasn’t romance. It was friendship. At least, it was as far as I knew.

And I think the point of it all is that the best thing that can happen to you in your sex life is having a childhood friend who is a girl. You get a chance to know and understand girls more than you would if you only hang out with groups of other guys until somewhere in high school you suddenly try dating one of that other species of human you know absolutely nothing about.

I saw it all in action as a middle school teacher. Kids beginning to have hormones and the regrettable behaviors hormones cause were always getting into fistfights with other boys, catfights with other girls, and eventually screaming fits and break-ups between a boy and a girl where things often really do get broken, and boys usually lose those fights.

But the couples that endured together for the entire time I knew them had a secret. Dave and Tamara were an unlikely pair, but both among the smartest kids I knew. So they stayed together to have someone to talk to who understood all the words they used. Very bright kids. Each with a huge vocabulary.

And Sweetie Jimenez and El Boy, not gang members, but rather, two cute little undersized kids with big heads and big eyes that hung together because they were too sugary sweet for any gang member to lay a hand on either one of them. In fact, the local gang leader made sure the gang protected them both. They had been friends since they were toddlers living next door to each other.

And that was their secret. Both pairs. They would tell you they were not boyfriend and girlfriend. They were best friends. And Sweetie and El Boy each eventually married their best friend. They have six kids. All little with big heads. (Those, of course, are not the kids’ real names. After all, they might somehow read this sometime, and I don’t want them to know I figured out their secrets.)

I need to explain something here which you may already know if you read this blog for any length of time. No, I don’t mean repeated viewing of my old-coot humor can cause cancer. (That study has not yet concluded.) I mean that I repeat things… repeatedly and often.

To be honest. I am getting old. My fingers hurt from typing. My eyes hurt from viewing the screen on my laptop through squinty eyes. I am also forgetful. If I told you that before, I’m sorry. I forget things. And it makes me repeat stuff. I repeat a lot because I am forgetful. Did I tell you I forget things? Well, I do. And I repeat things. Repeatedly.

And I see things differently from other people as shown in the Paffooney above. A Paffooney, in case you didn’t know, is a picture I created myself that illustrates something that is in my blog post. And if you use Google to image-search the word Paffooney, you will get a lot of those. For some reason. And they are all mine… except for the ones that confused Google image-search for some reason. Did I tell you what a Paffooney is already? If a goony babboonie Googles Paffooney and balloons the many spoons in the cereal bowl of the screen of your computer, on image search, you will almost have a Paffooney if… wait, what was I talking about again? Oh, yes! I repeat myself a lot. Sorry!

So, I repeat myself a lot. And when the writing of blog posts gets hard, I go back to the thousands of old blog posts I already posted and post those suckers again. Sorry!

I should be happier right now. The Republican Party is imploding rapidly, and Fox News is preceding them down the sewer drain.

But they continue on with their extremely bad badness caused by creepy, crazy corruption. We are running out of time to save the planet. They undermine attempts to convert to renewable energy. Alaska gets opened up to additional oil fields on public lands where they have long been forbidden to preserve the environment. And they continue to legislate in their States with gerrymandered super majorities to hurt trans kids for being trans, making gender-confirming medical care illegal, and forbidding them (all one or two of them) from being in sports with others of their chosen gender. And they pass laws against any kind of school talk about sex education or gender discussions or science class… And then History class. No more black history, or talking about the Antebellum period before the Civil War, or what the “War Between the States” was even about. The works of James Baldwin and Langston Hughes and biographies of Rosa Parks, Roberto Clemente, and Jackie Robinson have been banned or altered.

No one should be allowed to force you by laws to think and feel the same as everybody who is in charge… even if you strongly disagree with their beliefs.

But all Republicans are not like their grotesquely hateful and controlling leaders. The vast armies of the MAGA Minions are made up of people who are seriously misled by the conspiracies of Q-anon and the relentless propaganda of FOX News. Many of them follow the MAGA leaders because they want to believe the lies they are fed and don’t want to hear anything, even factual proof, that contradicts what they want to believe. But most of them, separate from their strongly clutched-to beliefs are wonderful, good people. If they met the two trans kids I encountered in 31 years of teaching, (especially the girl who didn’t commit suicide because her parents supported her chosen gender-identity) would love them. They were real people who acted like the real people they were. The gender issues they had were biological facts that have a basis in the science of genetics. XX and XY are not the only possible gender chromosomes. There are also XXY and XXX and many variations in strength of those genomic effects. They might even have liked the boy (whom, it was discovered, actually had a uterus and fallopian tubes on the inside) had his parents allowed him to be the girl he really was and loved him enough to keep him alive.

And if you talk to them about ice loss at the North Pole, the looming extinction of polar bears, and the death of the Great Barrier Reef, they do care about climate change, and will agree with you about oil companies being the bad guys.

But the hardest one is convincing them they shouldn’t hate the people they fear. They fear Muslims, Blacks, Hispanics, Antifa (who don’t exist in the form they fear,) and, apparently Black History. That comes about mainly because they have never had a chance to interact in a positive way with members of the groups they fear.

But what I am saying is that we must continue trying to separate good people from what the MAGA group has become. They are worth saving. And that’s the only way we can keep from ultimately losing everything to them.