Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

There are times when it is difficult to write.

I am having trouble with my eyes. Glaucoma. So I really want everything to be BIGGER.

And I try to avoid what I can’t really see.

My hands hurt too much to draw as much as my heart wants. So, I reuse a lot of old pictures that I love because I used to be pretty good at drawing.

Because I am old now, I can only seem to think about and fixate on a thing I can no longer do. And not just because Raquel Welch is now dead. The little soldier can no longer even stand up and salute a beautiful woman. And carrying out his essential duty is out of the question. I even make metaphors like a dirty old man now.

Dang it!

And I do not have a shortage of ideas to use. I had intended to write a biographical story about Walt Whitman being not only a poet, but the nudist kind of naturist according to his poetry. But diabetes assaults my thinking machine and putting together complicated themes and ideas becomes too hard to manage in the time I have available.

Of course, I am retired and have nothing but time available. But with all the other issues, I forget to use it before it is too late.

So, I wrote this… some of it large enough to actually see it.

I have to admit it because I am into all this “naked truth” thing… I am getting lazy in my old, old age.

Yes, I have valid excuses. My eyes are failing with glaucoma and the beginnings of cataracts (not the waterfall kind.) My fingers are slowed and interfered with by arthritis. And my computer with the good word-processor is all glitchy (Who knew that eating potato chips while typing is bad for your keyboard? Oh, that’s right. My know-it-all daughter, the Princess, lectured me about that before all the glitches.)

But I have one novel finished and not published for want of editing.

And I keep starting new projects instead of finishing the one I am currently working on.

Poppy’s story is almost finished in the complete draft, but stalled over a plot point.

Golden Wing is only one-third done. It’s stuck on the hospital scene, just because I have to go back and reread the whole thing to get back into working on it.

This one is started, but off to the slowest start of anything I have done so far.

I am cheating on this one, making it out of old blog posts and writing a new one about once a week.

And this is the one most likely to get finished before I die. I am posting it on Tuesdays. As you can see, I haven’t created an actual cover for it yet. Lazy me.

I have been reading about the high school boy who rang the wrong doorbell when he was supposed to pick up his younger brothers from a friend’s house and got shot in the head because he was black. And shot a second time when he was on the ground. He lived. But only because his guardian angel was helping.

The shooter, an old white guy, was taken into custody only to be released within 24 hours.

And then I couldn’t help but remember Emmit Till. From before I was born. And I cried for half an hour.

If I were to pick the five kids I loved the most in the 31 years I was a teacher, two of them were black. Only one was a white kid.

How could we not have learned from that picture of Emmit in his open casket? Thank God it is in black and white.

Forgive me. I can’t write more. I have to cry some more….

Life goes up and down, round and round, inside, outside, happy, to sad, and down to the bottom of the sea, and finally up to the highest height of the mountain peaks. And I am navigating it all in an airship with holes in its wings that also has to serve at times as a submarine with leaks in its hull.

How’s that for a tortured metaphor?

I know I don’t have many more years to be alive. I am in poor health and it is getting worse. We’re facing tornado times with global warming. The house I live in is falling apart. I am trying to live one day at a time and savor every moment I have left. But there’s a large amount of pain. I have an awful lot of frustration built up over how hard it is getting to do any real writing during the average day. It’s hard to make all of that funny and laugh it off.

Still, I have not given up. This blog post is evidence of that. I pecked this one out with arthritic fingers and a lot of bulldog persistence.

Here are the things I intend to force through to publication;

The Haunted Toy Store

I feel like I have been drowning at the very bottom of the sea. But I am struggling back to the surface for another breath of fresh air.