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Life is screwy. God, if there is one, made it that way on purpose. You have to hand it to Him, his sense of humor is bizarre.

My 771-day streak of consecutive posts ended when, ironically, I set my posts to publish last Friday too early on Thursday evening to post on what counts as Friday according to WordPress. So, Thursday had four posts and Friday had none. That means for the second time I have put together a string of consecutive posts that lasted for more than two consecutive years. But both runs ended on a technicality that made me miss a random publishing day.

At our house the plumbing has turned into a collection of raging geysers, forcing us to have the water turned off 99.9% of the time. And I, being the only member of the family still in an upstairs bedroom, have had to cope with life that doesn’t include a working indoor toilet. I have to get by with a pee spot out in the yard by the composting bin, a plastic jug in the waterless upstairs bathroom for nighttime pee, and a daily trip to the nearest public bathroom in the Winco grocery store for the solid stuff. Daily showers evolved into weekly… then monthly… to now, probably, yearly showers.

I know you are probably thinking, “Why doesn’t the dummy just hire a plumber?”

I did.

The plumber charged me $250 dollars to re-determine with his plumbing snake (exactly like the one I bought at Home Depot and used myself unsuccessfully before I called a plumber) that the toilet couldn’t be unclogged without digging up the floor and replacing all the disintegrating 60-year-old pipes. He quoted me thousands of dollars worth of repairs I will never be able to afford until my next life, or the next life after that.

So, we have to live for a while without running water in the house. Funny one, God.

My last free-book promotion for the re-edited version of the Necromancer’s Apprentice ended its five-day run without giving away a single copy. Nobody wants to read my book, even for free.

I choose to laugh at the screwiness of my current situation. Life is a comic strip with a new joke panel every day. What better thing can I do than laugh at it all?

I am posting this in the final hours of March, 2023. But WordPress counts it as being a post from April 1st. Still, 771 days in a row with at least one post.

The stories we tell need to be loaded with the truths and purpose and meaning of life as we see them, because… What else are we for?

What it means to never be sad, or never be afraid, or never be angry, is the same darn thing as never being happy, or never being brave, or never knowing love. Life requires balance, and an acceptance of every slice of the pie.

If you were hoping that, before the end of this post, you were going to get wisdom, or truth, or even just a good laugh… I apologize. You are stuck with Mickey-pictures and Mickeyisms.

Yep, they finally did it. The tangerine-colored monkeyflinger is finally indicted for at least one thing. May he rest in prison.

I have lately been feeling like the Grim Reaper is lurking somewhere near again. Can I whip him in a game of chess again? Debatable.

As a teacher, I have always been one of those who sincerely believes,

You must never give up on any student. They all can learn. They are all worth teaching.

And reflecting on that philosophy, in spite of the fact that I have been having a hard time getting things done and writing very little, I should not give up on myself.

I am not yet done telling my story. There is more to do, and more life to live.

I get sick easily. Because of weather, the air around here is thick enough with pollen to carve it into lightweight building blocks. Tree pollen, mold spores, and ragweed pollen. And sinus drainage can turn into regular flu. And there is still Covid lurking about. It mugged me twice in 2022 despite being fully vaccinated. So, I don’t know exactly what I have now. Blocked sinuses, sore throat, sore tongue, and body aches. I am bedridden yet again. But I still wrote this little something. And it doesn’t totally suck… it just mostly sucks. Hopefully I will still be alive in the morning.

The picture shows you some of what I have been doing when my brain is too buzzy to write, and the news is too depressing. I don’t want to write incomprehensible nonsense. I also don’t want to spend all my time crying. So, I do what art I can with my color printer, printer paper, scissors, glue sticks, and cardboard from the recycle bin. Here you see Shirley Temple, a classic paper doll from the 1950’s, Annette Funicello, made from my own drawing of the Disney Princess, a couple of antique paper dolls you can buy the images of online with a mere $1.50, a Francine doll, nude with cardboard butterfly wings, a puppy my mother cut out from one of our children’s books in the 1950’s, and a mint-in-box Rena Rouge doll from the cartoon series Miraculous, bought at Walmart at an after-Christmas sale price.

But I have to say, the title doesn’t really speak to literal paper dolls. I am simply distracting myself from the horrors going on in Ukraine. They try to save their children by putting them in a theater with a sign on the roof proclaiming they are children sheltering inside, and then Putin targets them for bombing? I cannot deal with that. I treat dolls in my collection as if they were people. But elsewhere in the world they don’t treat people as if they were people? No. I can’t accept that.

Here’s a REALLY DISTRACTING paper doll.

I am sorry for leaving Betty naked. The paper-doll dresses are still being made. I am creating them from scratch, drawing them myself, and the colored ink has run out on the printer. But Betty gets to enjoy the naturist thing I have been promoting, and this doll is nude, not pornographic. There is a difference.

Except in the minds of certain prudish fundamentalist Christians.

I have, this past month, made a lot of paper dolls while watching stand-up comics on YouTube and Netflix. And it is because I can’t deal with the emotional pain the news from Ukraine causes me. Forgive me. I am a former teacher, and the senseless murder of Ukrainian children has pretty much kicked my slats in. My heart is in my shoes. I am in pain in ways I can’t even explain. My only hope is to distract myself by making paper dolls.

This last winter was tough on me. I had Covid for the second time in December. I see less well and feel less well now on a daily basis. I have been invited to appear on a writer’s panel at the AANR Southwest Convention at the Star Ranch in McDade, Texas this June. It would mean travelling down to the Austin area and camping at the nudist ranch for multiple days. And I fear I am not well enough to do such a thing by myself. (I can’t even ask my wife to go along. She would be against it for religious reasons. She loves camping, but does not want to see naked people.) I am honored to be asked. and I will look into the possibility. But I probably won’t be able to do it.

The fact that the sunshine has come back to Texas and the weather is warming means life is getting better for me. Honestly, the sunshine gives you natural Vitamin D which positively affects both mood and mental health. It is even easier to get that sunshiny happiness when you are a nudist, baring your hairy old hide to the kiss of Mother Sun.

Maybe I will get to go to that convention… I can hope, can’t I?

Life has generally become an intrinsically unfair and unequal exercise in struggling just to stay the same, let alone trying to better ourselves.

But wealthy white folks need their tax breaks to fatten the money piles they sit upon. Like well-fed dragons on their treasure hordes.

And the angel weeps.

Beloved by Toni Morrison has been banned in Florida. As has Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and a biography of Rosa Parks, and George Orwell’s 1984, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and many other books, including books about the Holocaust like Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize graphic novel Maus.

And wealthy white so-called Conservative Republicans have failed to conserve these books, and smile, because they have managed to exert control over what other people are allowed to read and think, because they believe they have the right to tell others what is true and what is evil because it’s Woke… whatever that means.

And the angel weeps.

And a ten-year-old girl who was raped and is pregnant with a baby that will probably kill her if it is carried to term has to flee to another distant State to get the abortion that saves her life because the Supreme Court took away the legal precedent that was supposed to protect her.

But wealthy white evangelical so-called Christians smugly laugh and sing praises to those who made this happen. They got what they wanted for 50 years. The right to save a life by making babies be carried to term no matter the consequences. Of course, they won’t lift a finger to help once the child is born, even if it is born into a family that can’t afford to feed it. In fact they want to take away food stamps because those people are just lazy and need to learn how to pick themselves up without help from anywhere… no matter how hard they work at McDonalds because you can’t get food stamps without at least a starvation-wages job.

And the angel weeps! Why does nobody care about that?

I often wonder what the future will think of me… or if they will even think of me at all. Even my family may not remember the real me, particularly those who haven’t read anything I have ever written. My mother passed away in 2021 never knowing that I was sexually assaulted when I was ten. She didn’t want to know anything like that. She didn’t read this blog. She didn’t read any of my novels. But that is mainly because she never read any blog posts or any novels… ever. She was a career RN and read all kinds of things about nursing, health, and medicine. She had thick books of pharmaceutical knowledge and looked up every medication ever prescribed to any member of her family. But my personal inner truth, the things that I have written that define me in my own terms and my own inner mythos, are all available to anyone who wants to read them. They are all available on Amazon. One on Barnes and Noble. And I give e-book copies away for free every month. But hardly anyone takes me up on those things.

So, what does this issue matter to anyone but me? Diddly-poop. I would like to be remembered as a good writer after I am gone. But that is not something I have any control over. Neither did anyone who now has a legacy as a writer. Edgar Allen Poe and Franz Kafka died in extreme poverty. H.P. Lovecraft died in obscurity, horribly alone and mentally ill. The Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche died after having a mental breakdown over the beating of a horse. And their work left a legacy. The legions of unremembered authors have none. I will end up wherever I belong after I am gone.

I exist. Not even God can change that now. And I have written and published my writing on the internet. It has the potential to live on after me as long as there is an internet. The world probably has less than fifty years of life left as it is. So, for now, I have to be satisfied that you bothered to read this and look at my drawings, whether you bothered to register a like or not. That is my legacy, or a ghost of it anyway.

Self examination is a critical feature of living a stoic life. And I find Stoicism to be a workable philosophy. I do believe that I have no power to alter the world around me, only the power to control and change myself. I find it works fine as a teacher. A teacher with self control can lead most of the students in the classroom down the happy path. That leaves only a few weirdos that you have to knock on the brain with a rubber hammer (figuratively, of course.)

But tonight my blood pressure is 176 over 90 (go-to-the-ER level numbers.) My blood sugar is 153. I made the fatal mistake of eating spaghetti and meatballs from the microwave. I get tired of a strict diabetic diet. But I can’t afford insulin either. Sometimes I feel more like not examining myself in that particularly painful way and just risking eating what I like without worrying about sudden death that I can’t avoid anyway.

There are some things I feel like I have to write yet. But I find it is harder and harder to do it with glaucoma eyes and arthritically-challenged fingers to use for battling an overly sensitive and somewhat vengeful keyboard and word processor. I have a story in my head about an autistic boy who wants to live alone in the forest and hears music in his head that no one else can hear. I have a story about teenagers battling suicidal depression by sitting in a circle naked down by the river, eating marijuana brownies and talking to ghosts. I have another story about teenagers learning about love during a journey to the center of the Earth where a monster has imprisoned one of their girlfriends. I have a really weird Aeroquest Sci-Fi story with flower people as bad guys and space goons eating a space station out from under the heroes. It’s already done. I just need to proofread and publish.

And I probably won’t get any of it done. Writing The Haunted Toy Store is going molasses-in-January slowly.

But we have to have hope to continue. And I do have hope. She lives inside my head and thinks she’s the Leopard Goddess of the Wastelands most of the time. But she’s still there. Still real.

Yeah, still good.