What I am telling you now is a secret I have carried with me for at least 8 years. I have gone deeper into helping kids than most teachers do. I became experienced in helping kids with suicidal depression. Four different kids didn’t kill themselves because I found a way to help them. Two of them I sat in the emergency room with. Two kids, three emergency room visits, three hospital stays complete with regular visits by me. Another kid, a long night on the phone because he called me instead of the suicide hotline. That could have ended in the hospital too, but he made me promises and then kept them because he didn’t have a father and his mother neglected him, but I was willing to talk all night one Friday night. And another one was headed for suicide because her mother had committed suicide, and this I knew from the school counselor, but she had no hope and no connection to the world, and this I found out when she screamed it at me in the classroom, and then explained it to me in private conversation later in the classroom when no one else was there to hear. And I told her the stories of the ones I had helped. And she said, “If I had known them, I would’ve been their friend.” And sometimes the ability to cry in front of someone who understands is all it takes to save a life.

But this post is not an ego boost. I am not bragging. I am not batting a thousand. This is a crying post.

Up until this point I have not told you any names. Those kids have a right to keep their secrets, or tell their stories themselves when appropriate. But I will tell you Ruben’s name. He deserves to be remembered.

Ruben was a small eighth grader. He was rail thin and not very imposing. But Vernon was a gold-glove boxer, not a huge kid, but he had champion-sized muscles. And he bullied Ruben relentlessly. Ruben was in the same grade as his younger sister, a result of failing a lower grade. Vernon made numerous comments to make him feel stupid. And because Ruben was not athletic, Vernon pushed him around and told him he was gay.

“I will tell the principal what he has been doing to you in my class if you will back me up and tell the principal too,” I told Ruben after class.

“No. Don’t tell the principal nothing. You can’t fight my battles for me.” He made me promise not to tell the principal. I didn’t know at the time what a mistake that was.

The next year his sister told me that he had gone back to the barrio in San Antonio. He joined a gang. They were called the Town Freaks. They would later become the Latin Kings, an extension of the LA gang known as the Bloods. It made me sad. But it was not the end of the story.

Later that year I heard a news report from San Antonio. Eight members of the Town Freaks had stolen a pickup truck and taken it for a joyride. The police had chased them, the chase ending in the pickup crashing and rolling over in the ditch. All six of the kids in the back of the truck were killed. You know already how this story ends, don’t you. The name of the last kid killed they read out on the news was Ruben Vela.

I have cried for Ruben at least once every year since 1982. He was the first child I lost. And he was the one that made me committed to never let that happen again. Somehow I had to learn how to save a kid.

Of course, there was another loss as time went by. Suicidal depression can take them even after you think they’ve beaten it. I can’t tell you J.J.’s story now or I will not sleep tonight. But I was more of a surrogate father to that boy than most of the others I ever mentored or helped. And he ended himself by getting drunk, racing the train to the crossing, and then losing the race. He left behind a young wife and two little daughters… and a teacher who feels like a loser because one loss overshadows all the other wins.

I am not a hero. I would give anything not to have this particular story to tell about being a teacher stupid enough to give a damn. But when faced with the dark night of the soul, no matter whose soul it is, the only thing you can do is stand up and face the dragon. And you are likely to get burned. But what other choice is there? There’s only so much crying you can live with, and beyond that, your head dries up and turns to dust.

So, as I was playing with this post, I began to realize that Alan Watts is really the one wizard whose ultimate philosophy spell is cast with these words;

The whole purpose of being alive is…

Simply to be ALIVE. -Alan Watts, wiseguy wizard

I have been shouting into the stormwinds of late because… well, because I don’t have very much longer to live. Don’t get me wrong. I am not suddenly diagnosed with cancer and doomed to die next Thursday at 3 o’clock. But I am old. I have had arthritis for 48 years, diagnosed when I was 18. I have had diabetes for 23 years, diagnosed in Spring of 2000. I have four other relatively serious incurable diseases and conditions not even counting the fact that I survived cancer in 1983, malignant melanoma. Every morning I wake up alive now is a significant effort to get up and going, as well as being a miraculous escape from the clutches of the inevitable.

Well, far be it for me to question Master Alan Watts. But even though I am suffering daily, I am living in the here and now, making plans to look forward to, letting go any anger and blame I have against anyone for injustices against me in the past (Don’t worry. I don’t mean I have forgiven Don Cheetoh Trumpalonely.) And I am enjoying life in spite of the pain and difficulty. It is a Nietzschean appreciation for how the dark parts and the hard parts make the sunshine sweeter.

I live my life, I play with my toys, I enjoy my crayons and colored pencils (the crayons are particularly chewy, but the red ones don’t taste like cherries,) and I remember childhood by reliving it a second time.

“I am not dead yet,” said the 66-year-old little boy with the red crayon in his mouth.

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!