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Things are beginning to fail for me. I am old and getting older day by day. I am losing vision, mobility, and maybe the ability to write as clearly as I once did.

I finished my 45-book reading goal for the year on Goodreads today. So, I haven’t lost everything. Not yet.

So, have a Merry Christmas. And soon we will test the waters of 2023.

I have lately been pretty much housebound, since I came down with Covid Omicron for the second time. Wednesday, however, I did manage to get out and see Avatar : The Way of Water in the theater nearest home. My son, home from the Air Force for the holiday, and my daughter went with me. They both liked the movie, just as they liked the first one 13 years ago. I, however, didn’t like it… I mean I didn’t MERELY like it. I LOVED IT! IT WAS BETTER THAN THE FIRST ONE WITH MORE LAYERED CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, SERIOUSLY DETAILED WORLD BUILDING, AND MORE THEMATIC DEVELOPMENT THAT BUILT ON THE FIRST MOVIE! Okay, I overdid it with the yelling in all caps. Sorry. But the movie was brilliant. Better than Titanic or Aliens, or The Abyss. It was absolutely beautiful. I cried at at least eleven different points in the story before I lost count. And I laughed far more. It was a story that fed my soul.

And then I came home and spent the next two days watching YouTube critiques of it. Gol dang them trolls. Too many of them hate it. And not legitimate hate because James Cameron didn’t make a great movie, but petty personal poisons aimed at not liking a thing because others don’t like it and giving no real reason other than their audiences want to see hatred and insults more than anything else. That’s just how it is in this era of Trump, Republicans, people piling up on the border because Abbott doesn’t want to let brown-skinned folks to have the same access to things like asylum as white-skinned folks, and Covid pairing up with other serious flus and flu-like illnesses, and Elon flubbing Twitter, and… dang! Too many things!

This is a time for love rather than hate. For feeling connection with the universe instead of opposition to others. For regretting that I don’t have any grandchildren yet, and knowing that I probably won’t still be alive when they start to appear… if the world even allows it to ever happen.

We don’t celebrate Christmas in this household. My wife is still firmly a Jehovah’s Witness, the last in our family to still be that faith, but we still acknowledge over-commercialization and the ‘Biblical thing Witnesses believe about the evils of birthdays. Any Christmas spirit of any kind has to be kept silently in my heart. I still love and respect her, even though it is not always a two-way street.

I have been too ill to draw for a while, and I have gotten precious little written either. I made this art with the app listed in the corner. I have been reposting a lot of old posts to keep my string going. But I am still not dead. And still capable of thinking. Apparently opposite to the position the average YouTube movie reviewer is in. Umph. “Dead-brained trolls” is probably too harsh to say, but I honestly can’t think of another.

While I was sick with Covid Omicron I couldn’t do much writing or drawing or creative work. The disease robbed me of ease of movement through my arthritis. The fevers clouded my mind even though I was only experiencing the mildest of fevers. And that ultimately meant that my creativity imperative was nagging me constantly about wasting what life I have left.

The remedy I found for this came in the form of a phone app that allowed me to do color-by-number-coloring book pages. In this post, you can see how I filled my time by tapping on numbers on the touch screen. These are not original works of art by me. They are more like putting a puzzle together like I regularly do whenever I visit my sister Nancy living now in retirement on the family farm. Though they are not the creativity my mind craves, they kept me alive as I healed.

I did not do anything creative but choose which pictures to color and save. But I have to admit, I am pleased with the results I am left with now that I am better.

I admit that I tried out other versions of the coloring-book program as well… just so I could color sexy ladies.

It doesn’t matter what you believe in. This time of year is special. People are generally in a good mood, upward turns at the corners of the lips, singing out loud, or even singing in the heart alone. The magic we all believe in comes from the people we love and turning our attention to them.

After about seventy years’ worth of research and one positive result that proved to be unreproducible, scientists have now officially discovered a process for creating nuclear fusion energy. This may be the ultimate rescue of the human race and life on Earth. Of course, it takes ninety-two high-energy lasers to do it, and it produces only a couple dozen boiling kettles worth of energy beyond what was input into the process. It will probably take thirty years to implement the energy solution. And fossil-fuel industries will probably double pollution output to celebrate the achievement. There is still suffering ahead of us. But things are better than they were overall from a mere two years ago.

I have been a bit pessimistic in this blog of late, feeling my own personal impending mortality, and feeling at the same time that the whole planet Earth was coming to an end.

This long-looked-for nuclear solution finally being proven and possible through reproducible results has given the science fiction writer in me the hope of irrepressible imagination again.

Evil robber barons like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates are still hoarding wealth and letting the rest of us starve. And evil despots like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Ted Cruz are still planning to rule and exploit everyone who is not them. But the villain classes have run into roadblocks and bad fortune for a change. And since Elon Musk has not yet finished demolishing Twitter, I can still use it for now to promote this blog and my books.

My writing endeavors through blog posts and book publishing have been growing year after year. But this year has seen my flights of fiction drawn back down to earth. I am getting less interaction and response this year than last year. And it is only natural for such things to go up and down. But, probably because of readers’ reactions to nudes in my artwork and gobs of pessimism in my basic messages, only the nudists and the nihilists that read me are more enthusiastic than they were before.

And that is okay too. If the world gives my work more time to be discovered, then those who need to see it will. Life finds a way. The future is fascinating, even to those of us who probably won’t get to see it.

We face bleak things in the near future. Climate change is out of control. And we are arguing whether or not the crisis is even real.

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The people and organizations that have to change the most to preserve life on Earth are still firmly committed to short-term profits and keeping everything the same.

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If things don’t change drastically, we are doomed. There will be no future without massive adaptations of behavior.

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Life on Earth is a good and worthy thing. We have gone from primitive natural systems of survival of the fittest to reaching for the heights of equality, fraternity, and freedom that the greatest social-theory thinkers could imagine. And utopia is not achievable, but falling short in our efforts to attain it should not be viewed as an ultimate failure. We are born. We grow. We both suffer and thrive. And finally we die. There is no shame in the journey we all must take.

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We enter this life with nothing but our naked bodies and a mind capable of learning and understanding.

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Everything we have, everything we think, and everything that connects us to life in this world is the result of the choices we make or are made for us by someone who cares or should care about us.

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We absolutely should be choosing to protect life on Earth to give our children and all future generations a chance to have at least what we ourselves had. But the choice is not in my hands… not individually. And the most powerful hands always seem to belong to the hardest hearts.

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So, if we have no choice except to accept that even entire planets eventually die, at least we can choose to hold our heads up and be glad for what we did get out of life. If it all must end, then let it end with beauty. Let the final notes of the song send a thrill up and down our spines.

No, that is not a typo.  I only meant “gifts” in pun form.  Sometimes you don’t feel much like talking and, after all, the “picture can be worth a thousand words”, especially if the picture moves.

As you can see, I am spending the day with the Ghost of Christmases Past.  Have a wonderful holiday, however you may celebrate it.  I will offer more goofy stuff by Mickey after the Ghost of Christmases Future gets done with me.

I bought a gingerbread house kit from Walmart once again, and we put it together on Sunday while my oldest son was home on leave from the Marine Corps.  This little photo essay is inadequate for fully understanding the scope of the epic mess we made, the sugary sweetness of eating the thing as we built it, and the challenge it was to my diabetes and diet.

 

I did not realize when I bought this kit that the gingerbread house was already put together and glued in place with sugar paste.  So the first step this time was chocolate frosting and candy decorations.

 

Last minute special touches only cost $1.95.

 

My son the Marine did the Christmas tree on the side in green frosting, not realizing that we had a package of green marshmallow stuff in the kit for that purpose.

 

I am told that the best part of the process was tearing it all apart and devouring it at the end.  I even ate a tiny piece myself.

 

 

I have been ill. I came down with Covid Omicron for the second time, a new variant, almost two weeks ago. And the fever, body aches, and loss of appetite, though it wasn’t enough to kill me, really tore up most of my opportunities to write meaningfully. I got downright depressed with my inability to put words together. Chocolate helped. Walks in the park sapped my energy, by also helped. But due to diabetes and, you know…. being sick with Covid, I couldn’t do enough of either of those things. So, I turned to YouTube and got hooked on philosophers all over again.

If you have seen any of my philosophy posts before, you know who my go-to wise guys are. Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Soren Kierkegaard, Walt Whitman, and Danny Kaye can always give me philosophical bacon bits to chew on, even when I am suffering severe loss of appetite from having Covid again. (What do you mean Danny Kaye is not a philosopher? Have you seen the Court Jester? The Inspector General? You can live your life by the philosophies of the characters he plays… I mean, the mis-identified country bumpkins behind the puffed-up reputations of the popinjays the communities mistake him for.)

Being angry is easy. Being happy is hard.

While I was feeling sorry for myself and letting Crazy Freddy (Nietzsche) tell me, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” my blog fell off a log and into the bog in the fog. I try to get at least 50 views per day. But apparently too many reposted old blogs didn’t fill in for me when I was too ill to write. I haven’t gotten down to 0 since my first year of blogging. But I was down to 20 for the first time in four years. And I averaged in the 30s. I am therefore due to come back as strong as the Mighty Thor. Right?

The Stoics remind us that we really can’t control things like the blog’s readership and their enthusiasm or lack thereof. I have to learn to accept certain things about myself as a writer. Franz Kafka and H. P. Lovecraft during their lifetimes were writing in obscurity, never living to see their work catch on and be recognized. And both of them were talented writers. Both of them were better writers than I am. So, I should not fret about living in obscurity and being ignored by the reading public. Life and writing are not about wealth and fame. My books exist, at least for now, and that has to be enough.

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I have already written and published 21 books. I have to accept the fact that I won’t be able to create many more. But that is a good number to leave behind.

Philosophers eventually get around to telling me that life is meaningless unless you bother to make your own meaning. And, it turns out, I have already done that. I could die tomorrow fully fulfilled in life. What I have accomplished as a teacher and a cartoonist, and a writer, is enough.