Category Archives: Uncategorized

… I was born in the Eisenhower Administration to a family of loyal Eisenhower Republicans. Nevertheless, I am now a Liberal Democrat by virtue of still holding the same basic values.

… I sympathize over the troubles of your Great Leader with the spoiled-mango sheen and horse-food wig… but only as much as you sympathized with me when Hilary lost the election in 2016. Remember the happy dance you did while wiggling your butt in my face? I certainly do. How sad for you that your Glorious Person is indicted after being impeached twice and has committed crimes in the public eye that we all know he’s guilty of. Remember, “Lock her up!” in 2016? I do.

… I am a liberal, and I believe that word is not a bad word. It means I want to change the world to make it better. A conservative is someone who wants things to stay the same, supposedly because we have already found what works.

So, forgive me if I don’t understand why the governors of Texas and Florida want to CHANGE the laws to allow concealed carry without permits everywhere in the State for all gun users immediately after the shootings of school children in Uvalde, Texas and Tennessee?

… I also don’t understand why if someone acts in a way that is “WOKE,” it makes you so scared you need to pass laws against it? Really? Being awake to reality around you, especially if you and your children are black and could be beaten to death or shot to death by cops even if they aren’t white cops, is a bad thing? You want everybody who is not white, rich, and entitled to be asleep to reality? Easily fleeced and even destroyed because they are not awake to what’s going on? And don’t you need to be WOKE yourself if you are not also white, rich, and entitled? The powers that be don’t treat poor whites any better. They just lie to them more.

…Don’t think I don’t sympathize with your current predicament. You need to KNOW I don’t. You got what you voted for. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, and Kevin McCarthy… You deserve everything they will do to you. I think you should change your politics because you are valuable human beings and don’t deserve to live in hatred and fear. But you believe in making your own choices and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. So, good luck with that.

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?