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Yesterday I gave myself a birthday present by taking my daughter to Black Panther : Wakanda Forever. I have never cried so hard in a movie. (Spoiler alert,) not only do we have to say goodbye to Chadwick Boseman, the actor who portrayed the Black Panther, but in the story, his other parent dies. Boseman died in 2020, followed by my father who died on my birthday in 2020. My mother did not last a full year after I lost my father, dying in September 2021. So, I was watching a movie that boiled my own sense of loss to the surface and left me completely drained by the end of the movie. But the Black Panther is not gone from our lives. Shuri, his little sister becomes the new Black Panther. And the next generation to follow was introduced at the very end. The story will continue.

My family story is similarly not ended yet. Though my personal chapters in the Great Comedy of Existence may be drawing to a close, the story continues through my children, my former students just as much as my biological children. There are many people in this world that I personally had something to do with the making of or nurturing of. And if climate crisis brings an end to all of that, the universe will go on without us. The universe is alive and conscious… through my existence, my children’s existence, and even the three-eyed green archeologist who digs up and decodes this post in the ruins of 6977 A.D. Ugna Whorleehee will become responsible for the continuation of the story in the distant future.

On this day in the year 1456, I hatched with a unique purpose in this silly universe.

I was meant to be a teacher.

The fireworks to celebrate my birth were launched from a flying carpet by my father’s friend, a trained pyromancer with a flame-finger spell.

Now, I am claiming that I was born 566 years ago. And I may indeed be exaggerating unconsciously by a few hundred years. But this is the way I always explained it to my seventh-grade English classes. They tended to believe me because… well, seventh graders.

I remember having young Willy Shakspar in my class. You know, the one who was so stupid he never learned to correctly spell his last name. He was a glove-maker’s son from Stratford on the river Avon. He was a terrible student but loved to be the classroom clown. I heard he later would become a successful theater owner. He also took credit for a series of very successful plays that he probably didn’t really write himself. I think his friend Eddie DeVere, a noble by birth, used Willy’s name as a pen name. I base this on the fact that I read Willy’s early attempt at writing a story. It was called Hamlet and Eggs on Toast. It had ghosts, witches, and kings in it. But the actors were given lines written mostly about ham.

Of course, by the early 1500s, teaching had already become a really hard job that didn’t pay very well. Especially when you taught in public schools taught mostly by monks who had taken a vow of poverty. This would become an unfortunate trend that stuck to education to this very day.

You could do better if you taught the children of a king. But they often expected you to sing the information. And if they didn’t like everything you taught their kids, they might cut your head off. Teaching is particularly hard without a head.

Over the centuries the career I chose as an English teacher only seemed to get worse. As public education became available to more and more of the public, teachers lost prestige, to the point that even the peasant’s children could cause your head to be cut off. Those of us who couldn’t grow the head back were really out of luck.

Soon I believe the world will be pitched back into the stone age. We will have to start all over again… unless we actually go extinct. In that case, the lizard people and the cockroaches will have to reinvent public schools. That will be fun. I think I will propose for matters of discipline that if a student misbehaves, or fails to laugh at the teacher’s jokes, you can cook them and eat them.

So, today is my birthday. I have reached the age of 566 years. (The margin of error is only 500.)

Think about it. A hundred years from today will be my 666th… the sign of the beast.

So much to look forward to in old age!

I was born in a November snowstorm in the middle of the 1950s. I am a child of the snow.

My best novel, Snow Babies, is based on a pair of week-long blizzards, one from childhood, and the other from when I was in high school. I endured both and learned that survival often depends on adaptability and a willingness to accept help from a close-knit community.

I have never had an easy relationship with cold and snow. I developed osteoarthritis at the age of eighteen. Iowa winters were hard on me from that point on. One of the key reasons my teaching career took place in Texas, not Iowa, was the fact that I was able to free myself from the crippling winter cold. Milder winters in Texas helped me a lot. I did, however, get lucky in the February Freeze of 2021. Our power company was not one of those whose natural-gas supplies froze. So, we never lost power, and our pitiful little space heaters kept us from freezing to death and becoming snow babies ourselves. Too many people died needlessly by freezing simply because Texas didn’t bother to prepare for the worst of winter. I could easily have left this life in a blizzard just as I came into it.

I have been particularly up against it the last couple of days. Temperatures in the 30s and 40s have frozen my knees and lower back to a state of stiffness that nearly makes me bedridden. Even my ribcage is aching every time I breathe. Ah, the joys of arthritic living. It is still possible that one day soon I will fall to the blinding white and be able to move no more. There is a symmetry to going out the same way you came in. But knowing me, I will probably die of heat stroke. At least, then, I will have irony on my side.

After the usurpation of the government by Don Cheetoh Trumpaloney and his Russian Trolls, I thought Prospero, in the form of Grandpa Joe Biden, had used some magic borrowed from Ariel to overcome the usurper’s evil plan. But, alas, there seems to be no magical weapon to fight off the monsters that the Republican Party have become. At this point, they haven’t actually won back control of the House and the Senate. But, the election now over, possibility remains that they will wrest control of both Houses away from Democrats and eliminate all progress for the rest of Biden’s first term.

It did not, however turn out as badly as it might have. Many election-denying candidates lost their races and the power they will have to subvert the 2024 election has been a bit mitigated. We will still probably all eventually succumb to death from catastrophic climate change because it is not profitable to the fossil-fuel overlords to save ourselves. They will pay gobs of money, possibly in the billions, to prevent Democrats from helping the majority of people in any way.

I try to be a humorist in my writing. Not a comedian-type joke-maker, but rather someone who portrays life in subtly amusing ways. But it is hard to be funny when the stakes are so high and consequences so serious. I will have to try harder. I will have to do better.

Perhaps I should’ve called this “Meditation while Procrastinating,” because I am having a hard time settling in to write down the words.

Or maybe I should have called it, “Procrastinating about Meditating,” because I am having a hard time even starting to think.

But, by thinking about how I am thinking and then writing about how I am writing, I have mostly stopped procrastinating, and the words are landing on paper… or, rather, they are being typed into the word processor.

The ideas are beginning to take shape.

Or, they would if my computer was kinder to arthritic fingers. Three typos so far as well as one new window opened accidentally as I sneexed… make that four typos. The correct word is “sneezed.”

But the harder it becomes to write something due to health problems, the more important it is to get it written. And the more I struggle with it, the better and more poignant the writing becomes.

I recently watched a YouTube video in which a screenwriting “expert” was saying that main characters in a work of fiction have a wound that they have to heal or overcome… or fail to overcome to make the story worth writing.

He also suggested that the wound has to reflect the author’s own reason for telling stories… the author’s own wounds.

This, of course, is utter nonsense. But it is also TRUE.

My most critical wound, the trauma I’ve taken a lifetime to overcome, was the sexual assault on my ten-year-old self. It robbed me of so many important things in my youth and later adulthood. And if I have overcome it, I did so mostly by myself, having kept my terrible secret a complete secret until I was in my thirties.

It is the reason that most of the characters in my stories are searching to overcome the difficulties of feeling loved and loveable, the heartache of dealing with irreplaceable loss and devastating trauma, and the fear of being nakedly honest in front of the judgemental eyes of the world.

I believe in facing the most fearsome things in life without armor.

Hence the reluctance to get started. The hesitation to make myself naked before the reading public, and the inability to even think of some of the most fearsome demons hidden in the land we must meditate on to get into.

So, now I have hemmed and hawed and eventually said what I came to say. You are seeing the naked me, even though no picture of my naked body appears here anywhere. It is my inner self I have shown you. The self I have meditated on deeply for many years. And it is only with reluctance that I expose my true self with my deepest thoughts and secrets. If I am going to get writing done… it has to be like this. I don’t struggle with writer’s block, whatever that is. Rather, it is the fear of the hidden monsters of self that force me to endlessly delay getting started on the archeological dig that is writing an essay like this.

I have been writing less and less for the last four months. I don’t know why. Maybe ill health and struggles to see through eyes hampered by glaucoma.

Right now I could name the three joints in my body that don’t hurt a lot faster than I could list a myriad of aches and pains that continue to slow me down. Cooler weather, air-pressure changes, and humidity all affect arthritis.

But my brain is slowing down too.

I don’t think as quickly as I once did.

I miss teaching.

And I am spending more time alone than I ever did in years past.

So, why am I so lazy?

I don’t know. But I am.

The question arises from this most recent illustration I drew, “Are you saying, Mickey, that kids can learn better if they go to school naked?”

No! Are you crazy?

I used to teach middle school students. Can you imagine kids from this current modern culture being given license to come to school starkers if they wish to do it? In the middle school world of half-brained sub-intellectuals passing judgement on everything? Especially judgments about appearance and attractiveness… or non-attractiveness? With brains fueled by hormones and the questionable values taught by TV and movies? Chaos! Fires being lit! Real and metaphorical! Windows being broken! Derisive laughter! Tears and sobbing from the offended! And that would just be the teachers.

But the truth is, if we look at the studies of B.F. Skinner and his recommendations for child-rearing in his Utopian propositions in the book Walden Two, children not taught to be ashamed of their nakedness from early on would develop more peacefully and naturally into perceptive and intelligent learners if allowed to be openly and happily naked.

Skinner, an experimental scientist, believed everything in life should conform to findings from scientific observations and scientific experiments. How loony is that? Why would we do something that is practical, natural, and beneficial just because it might enhance your ability to learn and enjoy your experience of the world?

In my illustration, I was actually intending to convey a notion of the relationship of openness and innocence to learning. The two children sharing the big danged book on the floor are nude because they are willing to approach the material with a sensory receptivity that can only be hampered by the barriers and limits we put on ourselves, like the clothing that we shield and limit our bodies with. So, I would never suggest it was appropriate to learn things while naked. Or even that, with the right training and cultural shifts, that going to school naked would be a good thing.

Even I have nightmares about being naked in school. In my dreams I sometimes dream about forgetting to put on clothes before going in front of a hostile classroom to teach something they all find boring and awful… while I am naked and awful myself. I still have that nightmare even now that I am retired.

No, I would never suggest that. Unless, somehow, you can suggest something by not suggesting it. Surely I am not tricksy enough to try to do anything like that. And remember, I was an actual teacher in an actual classroom for many years where I merely thought of them all as naked, because kids are all transparent about their lives and motivations and can’t keep a secret even if they didn’t want me to know everything about them, even the bad kids, and even things they wanted to hide from the teacher.

Here is a link to B.F. Skinner’s book, Walden Two; https://books.google.com/books/about/Walden_Two.html?id=lMpgDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false