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Yes, I am a writer. I write poems. I write novels. I write and draw comics and comic-book-style stories. And that isn’t me in the first picture of this post. Although it is pretty close. But today, I am once again merely sitting down to the keyboard to monkey around and tap out something in writing to get the old writing practice over with. There is no over-arching plan to follow, no theme already in mind… just little old me sitting down and working at it to get ideas on paper.

And soon, unless the school district I applied to rejects my application for no foreseeable reason, I will be doing the work of a substitute teacher. Of course, that’s not me in the fuzzed up background of the picture. That is not even a real classroom. No classroom contains that many left-hand raisers. And if you could find one, no real classroom has that many hand raisers without having asked the question, “Who wants ice cream?” And a mere sub cannot possibly afford to ask that expensive question.

But that isn’t even the kind of work I meant when I lamely wrote that title. Lamely writing a title is work I have to force myself to do. And that is even harder when you write it first while having no earthly idea what you are even going to write about in the essay. I always told writing classes (the ones who actually never raise either hand about anything) that the best way to do it is to leave writing the title til last so you will already know what you wrote about and what to call it. But forcing yourself to follow through on a title you just pulled out of the air is one way to force yourself to get the necessary work done.

We will be on the road starting tonight and driving till probably some time in the afternoon tomorrow. Six of us in one RV Motorhome. My mother’s funeral starts just after midday on Friday. I am sad. But looking back on a life of 86 years and eleven months, it was definitely a rich, full life worth celebration.

My mother is gone. And I will recover from it… eventually. But today I am still sad.

My mother died today at 5:30 in the morning. Of course, she was in hospice care in Iowa, and I was stuck in Texas. Covid and my poor health stopped me from being there at the end. Fortunately, my two sisters were there. She wasn’t alone at the end.

My mother was an amazing person. She was born in the 1930’s in a little farmhouse in Iowa. She grew up on a farm. She and her two brothers grew up with Jack Benny, Arthur Godfrey, and President FDR’s fireside chats on the radio. It was a time before indoor toilets, television, and fluorescent lights were anything but a rare novelty in Iowa. She attended a one-room schoolhouse with grades one through eight taught by the same teacher. High school occurred in the brick schoolhouse built by the WPA and she played basketball in the building’s basement court for the Rowan Trojanettes.

She attended nursing school in Marshalltown where Aunt Jean was her classmate, and she was introduced to my father when he was fresh out of the Navy during the Korean Conflict.

They were married in January, 1956.

I was born in November of the same year. Nancy, my sister was born two years after that. Mary came along after another two years. David is eight years younger than me.

She was a registered nurse for more than forty years. She was married to my father for 64 years until he passed away in 2020. And she was always there for me, my entire life, until today.

God bless you and keep you, Mom. I love you. And I will love you still when this whole world is no more.

Yes, I am still ill, and still making new pictures out of old ones.

This makes consecutive daily post #193.

I have an unidentified form of flu. Headaches and bodyaches make writing and thinking hard. So I spent writing time today making the picture above. I had intended to write an essay today about solving the life-puzzles I face as my life and world are drawing to a close.

It is not Covid. And I think my vaccination may be making the flu go easier than it would have without it. But I still need rest and recovery.

Oh, and this post makes 192 daily posts in a row.

Sometimes you just have to write everything down that you’ve been juggling in your head. The pieces of the puzzle won’t fall together in order until long after you place them in front of you. I’m not suggesting that my mind is a literal blender, but, especially when I’m writing in a stream-of-consciousness style, I am really good at making idea milkshakes. There are several large pieces to the puzzle of life that are now on the table in front of me.

One jagged-edged puzzle piece that is going to be hard to solve into the larger picture is climate change. The latest IPCC Report states without a doubt that it is no longer within our power to keep the world temperature from rising beyond the critical 1.5 degrees threshold. The Arctic ice covering will soon be permanently gone, the Gulf Stream is breaking up and diffusing, the oceans are rising and turning to acid… dang!

But it doesn’t do any good to become a Doomer and Gloomer. If we give up we will be much deader than we need to be. There are things that can still be done to mitigate the worst of it. And Elon Musk is not going to save us by taking us all to Mars. And the politicians funded by massive fossil-fuel corporations aren’t going to solve the problems either. We as the majority of human life on Earth need to come together and insist on our right to live. We need to convert our energy use to non-fossil-fuel production schemes. We need to do for ourselves what the rich mother bookers won’t do for us to help us survive.

The recently deposed orange-faced King of America now needs to be held accountable for the things he did illegally while in office. In other countries, a corrupt leader guilty of what he is guilty of would’ve been stood up against a brick wall and shot by now. We certainly can’t let him run for Prexydint in 2024. We won’t survive another four years of the evil-clown kingdom. It will be the death of all of us. Literally.

And my son is ill again. The one who already had Covid once. And may now have the Delta variant in spite of being vaccinated. He is definitely ill with something.

All these things worry me. I have been mentally juggling these things in my head for too long. And now, screws are loose inside there. I need to puzzle it back together, not put the blender on puree.