Category Archives: Uncategorized

We are struggling as a country.

After Buffalo, how can we say we are post-racism?

Is this a racist picture?

The people are white. Blond. Blue-eyed. And in front of an American flag.

It shouldn’t be. The girl loves her father. But in a couple of months, she will lose him to suicide.

He fumbled finances for the family farm and lost his third of the family farm to the bank. That was in 1984. He was no longer alive in 1985. He only belonged to her for the first eleven years of her life.

This girl is Kim Fields. She was a child star on the TV show The Facts of Life through most of the 1980s.

Let me ask you a philosophical question.

If you had the power of God and could give Valerie back her father….

But in order to do it, you would have to sacrifice the life of Kim Fields in 1984 to have the power, would you do it?

If you can even give one serious thought to answering “yes” for a second or two…. and you are not actually God…

Well, I will never understand you. I had to battle myself just to write the stupid question. I suppose that’s why I will never understand what racism is. My picture is not racist. Kim is not racist. But… it’s in there somewhere, no matter who you are. And it kills people.

I have told you before that I am blessed with the mental quirk known as synesthesia. I get sensory impressions of things that they can’t possibly have, but my brain imposes them anyway. For instance, today is a Thursday, so it is a yellow-ochre day. You can’t actually see the colors of a day or a month, but I do. I have very strong impressions with crossed-up sensory input. Mondays are teal blue, except in the month of September which is sky blue, so they become a darker blue or indigo-color day every week. And this weird mental mini-illness also applies to fiction.

For example, the character of Atticus Finch, the lawyer and father of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird comes across to me as a beige character. He represents a hero who struggles to do what is essentially right in a difficult situation. He faces raising Scout and her older brother Gem in a time and place where racism and vindictiveness are often dominant, and fairness and a sense of equity is often lost in the face of those problems. Hence, I believe that if he was some kind of pure, saintly character, he would be pure white as a character. But he has to make compromises. He has to shoot the rabid dog. He has to accept food and other goods in lieu of fees from people who can’t otherwise pay a lawyer for legal help. He has to defend a black man from wrongful rape charges as a public defender. But he is definitely a good man. He understands and accepts the shortcomings of a damaged soul like Boo Radley. He defends Tom Robinson, the black man, as an equal, even as a friend. He has to defeat the Ewells in court, but he understands and feels sympathy for abused Mayella Ewell.

Atticus Finch is beige in color because he is a character of firm principles who is not perfect, and slightly browned by the compromises of a regular hard life.

Captain Ahab, from the novel Moby-Dick, is a very different character, though he is played here by the same actor, Gregory Peck. Ahab is a dark navy-blue character. Navy blue is a color associated with the sea and the Navy (well, duh!), but also represents the depths of the ocean, the darkness that can fill the deepest corners of the obsessive mind. It is not quite a black villainous color, but definitely darker than what is needed. Ahab is a main character in his story, but definitely not a hero. He is an obsessive-compulsive nightmare, which is also a navy-blue thing. He is a storm-cloud threatening to sink his own ship, which he eventually does, and also a navy-blue thing.

Captain Keith Mallory, the anchoring main character in the plot of Alistair Maclean’s novel The Guns of Navarone, is a Kelly green character.

Now, that, of course, is not a mere Irish association, although Mallory is probably an Irish name. The color, for me, smacks of military discipline, resilience, irrepressible life and hope, and responsibility. Captain Mallory is not the leader of the commando raid on the impossibly secure anti-ship gun site on the island of Navarone, but leadership is thrust upon him when Major Franklin is injured climbing the cliff towards the guns. He is forced to adapt and make incredibly hard choices, leaving Franklin behind to be cured of gangrene by the enemy while in possession of false information that Mallory intentionally made him believe, knowing it would be tortured out of him. He also must decide to execute the resistance girl who had been helping the commandos until it was revealed she was a plant and actually helping the Germans. He is a Kelly green character of life and hope because he finds a way to succeed in the mission and brings most of the group out of it alive, having struck a major blow to the Germans.

This essay is not about Gregory Peck, though he is in all the pictures. I am merely using him to illustrate the idea that characters in fiction have different colors for me. He is a very good actor to be able to change color so easily. But the colors represent for me the kinds and qualities of the characters. I know it is not an entirely rational thing. But like the synesthesia effects on the days of the week, the colors perceived by my irrational Mickey-brain for fictional characters mean something to me, and I am attempting to explain in the best way that an irrational Mickey can.

Diabetes is currently trying to kill me with a severe headache. So, the most cogent piece of advice I have right now is this; Don’t let diabetes explode your head!

I can also say that doing something distracting, like writing something really stupid in a blog post, can take your mind off the pain and make it easier to survive an exploding head.

Pain in your head can make you surly and mean. See the photo of my headache above? Try not to be as ugly on the outside as you are on the inside if your head is exploding.

If your head is doomed to explode no matter what you do, quickly search your memory for every cute girl you were ever fond of and quickly remember each and every cutie’s face. Try to scroll past any blue fauns in your memory. No good comes from that if your head is about to explode. That’s a complicated metaphor and likely somewhat sexual in an inappropriate way.

And don’t worry about becoming a ghost after your head explodes. Ghosts are not real. And you won’t have any worries after your head explodes because an exploded head can’t do any thinking, and worrying… especially worrying too much… is a waste of time because it is a form of thinking an exploded brain can no longer do.

That’s all I have to say about wisdom today… After all, I have a really bad headache.

On Cartoon Network’s Looney Tunes show, Daffy Duck has decided he wants to be a wizard.  He even had business cards printed to be one. 

Being a wizard is almost as easy as that.  But becoming one is not what Daffy thinks it is.

wizard (n.) early 15th century., “philosopher, sage,” from Middle English wys “wise” (see wise (adj.)) + -ard. Compare Lithuanian zynyste “magic,” zynys “sorcerer,” zyne “witch,” all from zinoti “to know.” The ground sense is perhaps “to know the future.” The meaning “one with magical power, one proficient in the occult sciences” did not emerge distinctly until c. 1550, the distinction between philosophy and magic being blurred in the Middle Ages. As a slang word meaning “excellent” it is recorded from 1922.  http://www.etymonline.com

The word comes from wisdom.  Being one requires wisdom.  Being one requires you to look to the future and use your hard-won experience to predict how the future will unfold, and what you can do about it to benefit yourself and others.  You know, “magic”.

But to become a wise-one, a wizard, requires hard experience.  It is possible that Daffy has acquired some over time.  He’s certainly been subjected to all sorts of slapstick cartoon injuries and insults over time.

Remember this one?  Daffy swallows dynamite, drinks gasoline, this bottle of nitroglycerin, and then throws a match down his throat.  The results are spectacular, but Daffy has to admit that he can only do the act once.

So maybe he hasn’t become a wizard yet.  To be a wizard, you have to learn from your hard experience.  You have to gain knowledge in order to work spells and do magic.

For instance, my struggles to breathe from COPD have taught me to use magic potions like ginger tea and French onion soup to open my air passages wider and make breathing easier.   When the siding on the back of the house deteriorated to the point that the city wouldn’t tolerate it any more, and I couldn’t afford to pay a contractor to fix it, I googled spells for siding repair on the internet, using articles and YouTube videos to magically fix the damage myself.  I also consulted other wizards at Lowe’s and Home Depot, where they are happy to give you advice if you buy supplies from them.

Unlike Daffy, I think I do qualify as a wizard.  I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor.  I taught in a public school for 31 years.  I taught middle school children.  I lived through the years of the Kennedy assassination, landing men on the moon, the Civil Rights Movement, Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics, and 9-11.  I lived through the Cubs winning a World Series.  And all those events and hard experiences have given me more wisdom than, perhaps, any sane person would want.  Of course, I’m not sure in all my years I have ever actually met a totally sane person.

You may notice that I had to get a new magic hat.  My old black Walt Whitman hat flew out the window on Interstate 35 the other day.  This one is a fedora made of woven straw, a grandpa hat. Who knows?  I am not a grandpa yet technically, but maybe one day before I curl up my toes and go for a long dirt nap… and grandpas count as wizards too, don’t they?

I have been watching Netflix shows, Outlander and Ozark, and have more or less gotten my fill of murder, torture, rape, and death enough to last the rest of the year. I need something simply softer. This is probably why I doodled this while watching these shows that start with “O” and make you say, “Ow!”or “Oh!”

I am running a free book promotion until April 26, 2022. So far, on the 3rd day, no one has clicked on it for a free copy. Of course, that is not surprising considering how much my writing of late is being thoroughly ignored. Numbers are down on WordPress, lower than at the lowest point during all of last year. And I only get noticed on Twitter by 2 or 3 other Tweeters despite over 3,000 followers.

Why the trend of a terrible week in a terrible month?

Who knows.

Sales are down. Notice isn’t taking place. I haven’t been able to get much real writing done.

Perhaps I’ve lost my mojo.

Perhaps I have become retroactively stupid.

………….

…………..

Perhaps I am no longer funny, and my sense of humor has died and grown smelly.

But I have been down and floundering for over two weeks now because of poor health. My miseries color my perception. If I am being realistic, I have been in this same spot before and will be again. I am still alive. I am now four-ple vaccinated with a second Covid booster. Hopefully I will still be alive when things get better. And they will get better for all of us. (And that is Mickey the Pessimist saying it.)