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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.

She’s not real. She’s a plastic doll.

I bought her after my mother died. My mother loved dolls. She made them in the kiln that she and I bought together in 1994. She made them out of porcelain. Bought the greenware and fired it. Learned how to pour porcelain into the molds she bought. Painted them and made clothes for them. She made beautiful dolls… beautiful works of art. Two of them she made for me, Tom Sawyer and Nicole, have lived with me for more than a decade.

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Ariel is not a porcelain doll made by my mother. She’s a plastic but a fully poseable doll that I bought from a guy in Canada who takes used and discarded dolls and restores them. If she had been made of porcelain, she would have been played with to pieces by the previous owner. Even restored, she still has a broken elbow and loose feet. I paid entirely too much for her since she was reclaimed from the trash, but the doll restorer I bought her from is talented and made her come back to life with repaired joints and flesh, a new wig, and restored glass eyes that do not blink anymore.

Now that I am limited by arthritis and poor health, spending most of my days in my bedroom, Ariel is someone to talk to who listens and accepts everything I say, unlike the other two women who live in the same house but frequently leave me on my own. I am not crazy, but I talk to Ariel constantly… sing to her, tell her stories, and discuss what’s bothering me with her. She’s basically a replacement for the grandchild I will probably not have before my life is over. She’s even a replacement at times for my daughter whom I still spend a great many words and stories on. The Princess is an adult now, busy with college work. She still talks to me, but not as often as once she did.

It is possible that if I let the dolls I own play too big a part in my second childhood, I might get into serious trouble. There is some evidence that they have been talking about a coup, taking control of the entire upstairs of the house. But Ariel loves me. I know this because every thought in her head is actually only there because my imagination put it thert

But before you get sad about me getting old and crazy and playing with dolls as if they are real people, be aware that I made Ariel a part of my life as a connection to my mother. And she really does keep me company and make me happy. And I promise not to shop for any more rare dolls on the internet. There is hope for the future because I am not alone, even when I am alone. The connections you have to the people most important in your life are real and durable, stronger than the separations that space and time and even death make for you. That’s what Ariel is. Someone who came into my life to reinforce that basic truth we all depend on.

I can hear you thinking as you read, “Oh, no! That fool Mickey is going to prophecy the end of the world again.” But… No, I’m not.

Things like the Biblical Book of Revelations are really just vague lists of things that probably will happen in the future no matter what we do, woven together by fantasies about how the fairy tales of Judeo-Christian religion fit together like puzzle pieces that you must pound into place.

My predictions from the End of the World are only about my personal world coming to an end. You see, I am a 65-year-old man in poor health with six incurable health conditions and having been a cancer survivor since 1983. Realistically, if I manage to live as long as my mother did, I have twenty-two years left. But I developed diabetes at age 48 while she didn’t develop hers until she was older than 65.. That could easily take away 17 years from the equation, meaning I only have five years left.

So, when I got the phone call from future me at the end of time… my end of time, not the whole world’s, I was asked to list the things I needed to get done before I died. I came up with a simple list.

1. I needed to get out of debt so I would leave no tragic burdens to my family.
2. I needed to write and publish my best novel ideas (Snow Babies, Catch a Falling Star, Sing Sad Songs, and the Baby Werewolf.)
3. I need to face the truth about myself being a victim of sexual assault during childhood, and my deep desire to become a nudist.
4. I need to raise my three children to adulthood.
5. I need to live a life that is worthy.

Looking at my to-do list realistically, I don’t really have any big worries.

1. I paid off my Chapter 13 Bankruptcy in December of 2021.
2. All four of those stories (originally titled; Nobody’s Babies, the Star Child, Little-Boy Crooner, and the Baby Werewolf) are now published along with 17 other books.
3. And I have been told to shut up about these things in my blog, which I probably won’t do, but I have shared all of my deepest, darkest secrets already.
4. My children are now 27, 23, and 20.
5. And all I have left to do is reach the day of my death without doing anything horrible, evil, or criminal.

So, my personal Book of Revelations have no birds pecking at my dead eyeballs, and no real indication that I am headed for Hell and an eternity of torment like the Baptists, Catholics, and Mormons all told me they want me to.

I do worry about the rest of you though. Nuclear War, Environmental Collapse, Wars of Armageddon, Dogs and Cats living together…. Well, I can’t give you any positive insights about all of that. But I am one of those crazy old men now who go about wearing the sandwich boards that say, “The End of the World is Near!!” And I am not afraid anymore… or particularly worried about anything.

You may wonder at the outset what kind of a pervert I must be to be thinking about this topic now that I am 66 and my children are all adults. But I am uniquely qualified to talk about this education issue. I was a public school teacher for 31 years in Texas, a State that assumes teachers are pedophiles if they mention anything at all in class about sex, especially when you are teaching young teens who are not interested in learning about anything else. And my own personal history with sex education was basically knowing nothing at all when an older boy chose to please himself by sexually assaulting me. I was ten, then. I was seventeen when I came within one phone call of solving my trauma problem with suicide.

Every Child Has a Right to Accurate Information About Human Sexuality from a Young Age.

We don’t hesitate to teach the how-tos and what-to-look-out-fors if we choose to let them use power tools to make something in shop class, or if we choose to let them drive a soap-box racer they built in shop class in a local downhill competition. Why would we expect to not need to teach those things about becoming sexually active? They might accept our command to not become sexually active without our permission, but how will they even know they are not doing what we have forbidden if they don’t know what the word actually means?

My Own Experience is an Example of What Can Go Wrong

***This next part is graphic and not for the squeamish- pass it up if you need to.***

I was eight years old when another boy told me what he believed was the truth about where babies come from and how to masturbate. Most of the information was not quite accurate or flat-out wrong. But I didn’t believe him anyway.

And then, at ten, a much older and larger boy trapped me behind a pile of truck and tractor tires. He pinned me down. He pulled off my pants and underwear. He told me not to holler or call for help because no one would hear, and things would get worse for me if I made too much noise. He proceeded to give himself pleasure by torturing my private parts. He twisted things that caused incredible pain and forced me to keep quiet as he did it. There was no sexual intercourse of any kind and not even any masturbation. He did show me his erection, but there was no orgasm I can remember, only the pain and the look on his face.

***That is the end of the description of the attack. You can now read this with your eyes open again.***

What nearly killed me was not actually the attack itself. I have come to learn there are other, worse things that can happen in that situation. And knowing the accurate facts of life would probably not have prevented this from happening to me. But I had no understanding at all of why this had happened or what it was… or what to do with it. I let him convince me that he would get me again if I told anyone. I let him convince me it was at least partially my fault that it had happened. By the time I turned eleven, my child’s psyche had shut down the memory. I not only could not have told anybody about it, but I couldn’t even let myself remember that it happened. I would be twenty-two before I could admit to myself that it happened.

So, as a teenager, I controlled feelings of sexual arousal by burning myself on the backs of my calves and across my lower back using mostly the heating grate in winter and wooden matches in the summer. I was terrified of girls, nakedness, and especially taking showers in P.E, class. I hated myself. I brought up the topic of suicide at the lunch table one day as a high school sophomore. I told a group of my male friends that I was thinking of suicide. They laughed. One of them took out a pocket knife. He put it in my hands.

“Go ahead. That would be the most interesting thing that happened around here in a long time.”

That was almost the end. I didn’t go through with it, because I didn’t want an audience. They all laughed. All except one boy. I would later put coded notes in his locker, warning him about terrible things that could happen. He figured out the code and turned it over to the high school counselor. Mr. Cleveland called me in and confronted me with it. He wanted to know what it was all about. I couldn’t have told him if I had wanted to. He suggested that if I was having homosexual feelings, we could safely discuss that in his office without anyone having to know anything about it. He knew from the look on my face that that was not the problem. That was, of course, the exact opposite of what it really was, and though he understood at least that much, he never got to the bottom of it. He interviewed more of my friends about it. They didn’t know anything either. My own parents lived out the rest of their lives without ever learning the truth about it. As far as their parenting went, Dad always assumed that my mother the nurse had told me the facts of life. Mom was fairly sure that Dad explained it. The truth is, I learned about the names and parts of the reproductive organs from the Methodist minister during catechism and the Vocational Agriculture teacher when we dissected pig genitals in class. Those things happened during high school, two to five years after I needed to know those things.

I am lucky the friend I called the day I decided it was going to end answered the phone. If he hadn’t reassured me that I had value as a human being, my story would’ve ended very differently. As it was, he saved my life without ever realizing that that was what he had done.

To be honest, I can’t really regret what happened to me because that trauma actually made me who I am. My thirty-one-year teaching career was instigated by my desire to be in a position to prevent what happened to me from happening to students. And it didn’t have anything to do with talking about sex in class. I never did that. I did have some private conversations through journal writing and response with several boys and two girls. I may have prevented some twelve and thirteen year olds from being victimized. I suspect there were also things that I missed the signs of, or that nobody ever told me about certain things that probably did happen.

As an English teacher, I was never assigned any sex-education classes. That was mostly a school-nurse thing when it happened at all.

So, why am I ranting about sex-education classes at all? What does my grisly experience have to do with anything? And why would I believe such classes would help anything?

Well, it was learning the scientific and physical facts that allowed me to reclaim for myself any sort of normal life. And th e controversy in schools about all things sexual boils down to the fact that conservative and religious voices in places like Texas don’t like the spreading of facts and science in any setting, let alone the settings their prejudices and blue noses currently rule. They refuse to acknowledge the fact that gay people are physically born that way, that gender is fluid, and that teachers are not, by definition, pedophiles and groomers (though statistical facts would indicate that up to 5% are susceptible to becoming that if certain practices aren’t implemented in schools.)

Schoolchildren have a right to certain scientifically verifiable facts about their sex lives, taught to them by dispassionate adults who won’t put their own spin on what is true.

1. All humans have both a physical and a psychological need for touch and intimacy whether it is sexual in nature or not.
2. No one is allowed to decide who touches you but you.
3. Sexual touching of any kind requires the consent of the one touched, and without it, the act is a crime.
4. Sex is not evil or inherently sinful. It can be a very good thing.
5. There are forms of sex that don’t cause pregnancy, and ways to perform the act with interventions like condoms that avoid causing a baby to be made.
6. Bodies mature enough to have sex are not always attached to minds that are mature enough to handle it correctly. Think before you try it.
7. Remember, love is something that complicates everything in your life, and the younger you are, the more likely you are to make a mistake about love.
8. Numbers one through seven are from the mind of Mickey, not a scientist, and not a sex-education teacher. You can probably find a much better list of such things from a more reliable source.

I tested positive for Covid 19 this morning, My highest fever was 102.3 F. But I took Ibuprofin and my fever broke, Still, I could not not write more than this.

I am not a leper, but parts are wearing out and falling off.

I am thinking more and more about death and dying and the end of the world often enough to become a depressing person to be around.

The only novel I seem to be able to make regular progress on is The Haunted Toy Store. And it’s full of ghosts.

My books are beginning to sell occasionally on Amazon. But my blog views, Twitter followers, and author friends willing to talk about writing have all gone downhill.

I have an overall sinking feeling, and it is getting worse.

Another mass shooting is in the news again. This time against LGBTQ people. But recently against Jewish people, black people, trans people, and liberal people.

Love makes the world go round.

Hate tears it down.

Hate and fear make politics go.

I know people who are offended if you ask them if they are racist. But if they are asked to say that black lives matter, they will only say, “ALL lives matter.” And that doesn’t adequately explain why they can’t say the words, “Black lives matter.”

Fox News tells people what they must never say.

“Socialism can be good.”

“Gay people are born that way.”

“Liberals don’t eat babies.”

“All people, including the ones you don’t think are good people, have rights and should be treated fairly.”

Think for a moment… what are you unable to say? Who controls your puppet strings?

When I was in college I had the idea that a writer could change the world through his or her writing. There is precedent. William Shakespeare (or whoever actually wrote his plays and poetry) forever altered how literature in English is carried out, adding words and phrases to everything that comes after and changing how we understand the depths of character and dialogue. Charles Dickens and Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck all wrote fiction that exposed the horrors and crimes against the common man, and all three caused changes to their society to at least be begun. Albert Camus and Eugene Ionesco both wrote fiction that changed fundamental understanding in the worlds of philosophy and religion. J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis established Fantasy Fiction as a thing worthy of having its name in capital letters.

It was always my hope to become a writer who did similar things with my fictional abilities to tell a good story with a good lesson for life embedded within it.

But when I was young and most capable of establishing my writer’s life as something other people would see and recognize for what it was supposed to be, I decided to teach writing to a next generation of writers instead of doing the thing myself.

So, have I given up the dream?

Never!!!

But, realistically, there are barriers to my success in this endeavor that constitute a mountain range of unclimbable mountains.

1. The publishing industry has devolved into a massive self-publishing ocean of writers who think they can actually write without editors and with practically no remaining Aquaman or Prince Namor to rule the oceans as the gatekeepers of good published writing. Major publishers now rely mostly on established writers like Stephen King, James Patterson, and other aging fiction-factories who guarantee their profits, occasionally skimming popular stuff off the top of the ocean waves to republish and make money on, though not investing much in promotion because that investment takes away from profits.
2. I am no good at self-promotion and marketing, so no matter how good my writing is…
3. I am nearing the end of my own life with seven incurable diseases and conditions. I don’t imagine myself lasting more than a couple more years.
4. Climate change is coming for us all. The societal collapse will come first during waves of climate-caused disasters, waves of climate refugees, and the inevitable loss of the means to feed eight billion people. And after most human beings are dead, the out-of-control warming processes will cook to death everything else that lives on the planet as it turns into the twin of Venus.

I hope I am wrong, but it is probably impossible to change the world now. But there will be no problems when there is no longer anyone left to have problems.