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Bob Crachit and Tiny Tim were a key part of Charles Dickens’ masterwork that really helped create Christmas as we know it in this 21st Century time of troubles. I drew this with colored pencils back in the early 80s. It is still one of the artworks I am most proud to have created. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

You are probably already thinking, “What in the heck does Mickey mean when he says unvarnished truth?” And then also thinking, “For that matter, what the heck is Varnished Truth?” Which is a really good question.

Varnished truth could be like those decoupage projects from the early 70s that my two sisters did for 4-H projects to show at the county fair where you take a quote from somebody like Cardinal Richelieu or Senator Joseph McCarthy or Donald Trump or even Adolph Hitler and decorate it up fancy, glue it to a wooden plaque, and then varnish the bejeebers out of it. Of course, none of those would be true no matter how much varnish was sloshed over it… those names were chosen entirely for their comedic value.

Or you could decoupage the fake work of art I started this post with. I merely used a coloring-book app to fill in the colors by number, so it is not actually art by me. And layering varnish and polish over it would merely make the faux something seem more like real art. That’s Varnished Truth.

But the unvarnished truth often seems negative. It bursts bubbles. Like this unvarnished truth.

My new granddaughter is only pretend. She’s made of plastic. I have no actual grandchildren.

In point of fact, my whole life of late is pretend. I have been trying to negotiate with a small publishing company for two months to try to get my best books promoted at a book fair in New Orleans even though I couldn’t possibly be there in person due to health and wealth concerns. And, like all schemes from publishers nowadays, it is a little bit scammy with the amount of money they want me to pay for including my books and saying nice things about them to people who probably won’t want to buy them anyway. I am probably only a pretend author. And I spend my time mostly in my sick bed, talking to plastic dolls as if they were real children, even during a part of my Christmas holiday.

There are a number of things I want to say as unvarnished truths, but they are as hard to hear as they are to say.

There are rules in this world I live in that I refuse to follow;

1. Poor people, people of color, people of non-Christian religions, and anybody who is not both white and rich don’t count in this country. They exist only to serve and work for low wages to make the owners and investors wealthy. If they are unhappy with wages that don’t provide a minimal living, lack of healthcare, lack of decent education, or anything else they probably have a god-given right to, then it is their own fault. I learned this truth from George Carlin. And unfortunately, it is not only unvarnished… but true.
2. Fear and hatred are what are promoted by conservative media. They make their money that way. Health and happiness are not dollar magnets. So, if you are even a little bit happy, but not rich, you are probably what The Donald means by calling you “a loser.”
3. Corporations control everything in this country and most of the world. I control nothing. And if the corporations choose making high short-term profits over keeping the planet alive by battling climate change, I can’t do anything about it… except die when the time comes.
4. People who don’t believe in wearing clothes all the time are bad people, and Reverand Joel Osteen and Brother Jerry Falwell Junior won’t approve.

None of those are rules to live by. Only to suffer and die by.

And I choose to refuse.

I learned as a teacher of many years in public schools that there is something valuable and loveable in every child, no matter what color, religion, reading level, personality quirk, or general ickiness factor they happen to possess. And every adult was once a child just like that too. Sure, some of them grow up to be MAGA Republicans, but even Donald Trump deserves a second chance… after serving at least the two life sentences he so richly deserves. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet too… and I just need a little more time to think about Jeff Bezos. Irresistible evil probably does fly to space in a rocket shaped like a penis.

I can be a nudist if I want to. I can talk to my granddaughter who is made of plastic, and she doesn’t argue with me when I talk to her like the rest of the people do. And if badness is meant to overwhelm everything in the end, well, the point is to live your best life while you are alive. I know I will… even if it is only a form of pretending.

“December is a time of year when we used to think about family. What gifts to buy and who they were for… Looking at the lights in the neighborhood and thinking, “How can they afford all that electricity?” Already having the tree up and debating how long it will stay viable after New Year’s Day… And then we became Jehovah’s Witnesses and celebrating Christmas and birthdays made God hate us and want to destroy us… No, that’s not how they actually say it, but they don’t like holidays never-the-less…And so, we overcompensate and buy kids gifts at random times and end up spoiling them more than the once-a-year crowd does their kids… But the point was always to let the important people in your life know that they were impprtant and were loved.

Children grow up, however, and eventually move on to their own lives and their own families. And the generations above us that always took care of us and looked down with smiles upon us get too old to continue… And we must say the permanent goodbyes… And you have to leave the job you love because your own life has become fragile and desperately at risk… And you discover you no longer believe that someone can reward you with everlasting life if only you are careful to only say the right god-approved words… But that’s okay. We don’t really want to live forever if we are being honest with outselves. Life is good. But like a good book, it needs to have a beginning, middle, and end.

And so, we must make the effort to light up the smiles of those we love while we have the opportunity, and look back on the faces never-to-be-forgotten of those who meant the most to us, and not to overlook the near-forgotten and those we too often value far less than we should… But most of all be thankful that this world we live in and our chance to live in it happened at all. It didn’t have to happen. But it did. And there would’ve been nothing if it hadn’t happened. God bless you. Be Happy. The Universe is unfolding as it should… And word-salad like this is tastiest in Merry Christmas salad dressing.

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.