Michelle is part of a naturist family and enjoys being nude. Still, when riding her bike to the flower shop and back, her preference for nudity is faced with the obstacle better known as the public indecency law.
After the cardiologist’s good report yesterday about my recent stress test, today’s visit to the dermatologist put a damper on my plan to move back home to Iowa before Labor Day. The last doctor’s visit before moving was supposed to say I am in good health in spite of the pacemaker operation in May, and ready to make the Interstate move.
The obstacle now is a biopsy report on something that could be the early stage of skin cancer. And if it is positive that the sore is malignant, more steps and more delay will ensue. Dang! Texas really doesn’t want to let go of me!
But I do plan on overcoming this obstacle and, like Michelle, I hope to ride, unencumbered and free, into the future.
Originally written the week of Robin Williams’ death by suicide.
The thing about depression is that it really is not very funny. That’s what makes it difficult for someone like me who relies on humor and wit to deal with every problem that attacks in life. Sometimes you have to stand toe to toe with the devil and look him square in the eye.
Robin Williams’ death is one of those things that can send you on a downward spiral into depression and darkness. Whenever someone loses the battle, you are reminded how hard it is to pull yourself out of the old black oubliette, the dark hole that is depression. I had to take some time this weekend to mourn and be alone. No one else can really do anything to help, other than to be there and be willing to listen. People think you have to say something to help someone with depression, but, in truth, talking makes it worse. If you tell the person you know what they are going through, or you know how hard it is, they might become violently upset. Nothing is more personal or individual than suffering depression.
Now, I know some skeptical sorts of know-it-alls out there are going to immediately think, “What the hell makes this guy a so-called expert?” And they are probably right to question it. But here is what you probably didn’t know. Of the five members of my immediate family, two of them have been hospitalized for depression a total of four times. One incident involved self-inflicted injury. We reacted quicker than is financially sensible the next three times. Two members of my family suffer from bi-polar disorder, though only one of those has been diagnosed by a doctor, and only one of those was ever hospitalized. We don’t get many visitors in our home any more. My wife is rightly embarrassed by all the holes that have been punched through the plaster of the walls. I have been thrown down the stairs once. I have had to hide all the knives in the house three times. One of my children had to dodge a knife that was thrown at them. We have called the police on at least one occasion, and been called in by child protective services once. Through it all, I have been the one faced with talking down the sufferer. You look them in the eyes and see their pupils dilate, and sometimes the eye-twitch, and you know, “uh-oh, it’s time for the hurting again.” There is nothing I can say. There is nothing I can really do. I just have to stay there (you can’t leave the sufferer alone for obvious reasons). I have to keep the sufferer safe, and hopefully calm, and wait it out. And I have to be ready to listen. No jokes are allowed. If you haven’t stopped reading this yet because it is too hard and ugly to consider, I can offer a little bit of light and hope. I have gotten so good at doing this, that when a girl in one of my classes had a suicidal bi-polar meltdown, I was the one who knew what to do. (All those hours spent with psychologists and therapists count for something.) The principals and the counselors helped to keep her safe, but I’m the one who allowed her to vent and have her say, who took the time to listen and assure her that she really was being heard. I’m also the one who got the thank-you and the apology for having to listen to how much she hated me and hated the school when she was at the bottom of the dark hole. I never asked for any of this, but I have come away with a rare set of skills. For now my children are safe and happy, and for now my worries seem to have come to a close… well, a temporary reprieve. These problems never go away. You get to keep them for a life time. But they are not 24/7.
So, you would think, with my ability to help others, I might not be totally without resources when battling my own depression. You would, of course, be wrong. You cannot beat back the darkness by yourself. Long hours of staying in bed and hating your life do not help. They are easy, but they do not help. So, I have to take to the keyboard and write. I fight back with words on paper. And more than that, I have to write for others to read, even if I have written personal things that really aren’t other people’s business and will probably be used against me if I ever try to do something totally stupid like run for public office. And from being a wordless wonder suffering in the bedroom yesterday, I have transformed myself into an eight-hundred-plus word fountain today. To get through life I have to sing and dance and tell jokes and write and play harmonica and write and spend time with my kids and write and write some more. Those things help when even the depression medication has no effect… when your favorite movie comedian loses his own battle.
I don’t know if you’ve seen enough of my colored-pencil Paffooneys to tell this, but for an old white guy, I draw a lot of Native Americans and am rather deeply in love with American Indian images. You may have seen this dream painting I posted before.
The girl in the painting is a combination of this warrior’s daughter and myself. I was naked in the dream and a female, facing this huge ghost-stag. The dream came while I was reading Hanta Yo by Ruth Beebe Hill. Maybe that book was the beginning of my Native American obsession. Who knows? I am a crazy dreamer. But that wonderful book turned me on to the rich spiritual life that the Dakota people lived. I identified with it so completely that I dreamed myself into their culture. I was also struck by the manner in which a Native American culture handles education. The grandfather is in charge of the boy’s learning. He teaches by story-telling. Here you see the grandfather in Sky Lodge teaching his grandson. The girls would learn very different things from their mothers and grandmothers.
I am also entranced by the life of the people expressed in dance and ritual. Dance has deeper meaning than we white guys normally assign to it. Dances could be magical. Of course, the notion of a “rain dance” is the result of too much simplification in movie scripts and ignorant popular white culture. Dance could connect you to the Earth, the Sky, and the Spirit World. That’s what this most recent Paffooney shows.
So, you can see, I don’t really understand the concept of moderation when it comes to my obsessions in the world of colored pencil art. Hanta Yo! Clear the Way! In a sacred manner I come!
Being an artist is a matter of genetics, luck, and loads of practice. I began drawing when I was only four or five years old. I drew skulls and skeletons, crocodiles and deer on everything. My kindergarten and first grade teachers were constantly gritting their teeth over the marked-up margins of every workbook and worksheet. I drew and colored on everything. I eventually got rather good, drawing in pencil, crayon, ink, and as you see here, colored pencil. I loved to draw the people and things around me. I also drew the things of my imagination. I drew my best girl, Alicia, and I drew the half-cobra half-man that lived in the secret cavern under our house. I drew a picture of the house across the underpass from Grandma Mary’s house. I drew cardinals, and I drew Snoopy cartoons. I drew my sports heroes in football and hockey, Donny Anderson and Gordie Howe. I drew monsters with fangs and fuzzy animals with huge soulful eyes. I still draw and it’s mostly the same things that I drew when I was a child. I will post more of the drawings here in the near future to dazzle you with my talents and ridiculous sense of the absurd.
I inherited art talent from my father’s side of the family. He could always draw fairly well, though he only used the talent to draw things he meant to build or create in his workshop. He was a practical man who loved to tinker and make things work in a useful manner. He had no love or need for that which is fanciful and fantastic. I suspect, though, that he encouraged my artistical flights of fancy because it spoke to an unfulfilled portion of his own creative instinct. My Great Aunt Viola was also an artist. She loved to paint flowers on porcelain and create delicate beauty in items like plates and vases. Her art was more fanciful than my Dad’s art, but it still had a certain Midwestern practicality at its roots.
I hoped early on to be a cartoonist or comic-book artist. I loved to draw wildly imaginative things. The first cartoons I created were all about outer space. I wrote stories and drew pictures of Zebra Fleet, a Star-Trek-like space force that kept peace in an area of space inhabited by dog-headed humanoids. It was fanciful and goofy at the same time. Since then I tried my hand at a Cowboys and Indians cartoon strip, built around the massacre of Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn. I researched the Indians of the Dakotah, Crow, Shoshone, and Hidatsa Tribes for my cartoon. I learned to love drawing feathers, totems, magic men, shamans, shirt men, and lovely Indian girls. Nowadays I draw the adventures of weird little Toons from Animal Town and the various strange places in Fantastica. Teenage Panda Girls go out for cheerleading and fail, seeking to wreak revenge on Animal Town. Hairy Bear is a Grizzly with a tiny body and a huge reputation earned by fantastical hair growths and the ability to make large hair-pieces. The Four Bares are a family of bears who live at Newt’s Naturist camp and turn Animal Town upside down when they insist on their right as top-of-the-food-chain predators to go anywhere they like naked. If you are lucky, I will never be a published cartoonist. I made a serious stab at it. I came close in two different job interviews and one major submission, but I have arthritis, and it attacked my hands at just the right time to make me a school teacher instead of a cartoonist.
Drawing has become for me a hobby and a lifestyle all about the color and the symbol. I try to cram as much story and meaning into every figure or picture I do. Each drawing is precious, and I must squeeze as much as I can from each one, because drawing has become so hard to do and is such a rare thing. I lean towards the blue in my cartoons. There is a certain Blue Period about my melancholy work and life. Things turn out wrong at the end of my stories and there is no happily ever after. When the nighttime comes, I have to go to sleep with the urge to draw more. I’ll draw more in the next life, or maybe in my dreams.
Mister R. Rabbit is a school teacher. He is not the scariest animal in the world, but he is quick and eats carrots, and for thirty-one years he started off the first week of school as the one holding the BIG pencil. He was the one that planned and carried out the lessons. He was the one with the carrot of irony in his pocket and the carrot of good humor tucked away in his desk drawer. For thirty one years he stood in front of the class just as you see him here.
But tonight, he is contemplating the end of the first week of no school. This week, this school year, Mr. Reluctant R. Rabbit has no class. He is now retired. No more F’s and no more A’s. No more students standing on desks to get a different perspective a la The Dead Poet’s Society. No more giant pencils. No more carrots of irony in the pockets.
This bit of a classroom rules poster is from 1982. The old rabbit had it on his classroom wall for most of the first five years that he taught. She didn’t know it at the time, but this girl is a colored pencil portrait of one of the quietest little mice that he ever taught. She didn’t know it was a picture of her, but many others recognized her. When he taught her son twenty two years later, the boy asked because he thought he recognized her. Mr. Rabbit lied and said it was somebody else in the picture.
Mr. R. Rabbit has stopped crying about it now. You can’t plant carrots of wisdom in your garden forever, and sooner or later the carrots of irony get chewed. But he still misses it mightily. He still wonders if he couldn’t have lasted one… more… school… year…
I think I posted this picture once before and told you it was inspired by William Blake’s poem The Tyger! That is still true. I wasn’t telling a lie, at least, I don’t believe I was. So the poem goes like this;
The idea is that the Tyger represents some unknowable evil that we must fear and respect because it is beyond our understanding. But the kid in the picture seems to be unafraid. Was that a mistake? Or was I really thinking this?
Apologies to Bill Watterson for stealing his cartoon for this post. I needed a more dangerous-looking Tyger than the one I had.
As I get older, I am entering the territory of having Parkinson’s Disease and possibly dementia related to that. Of course, that assessment is not from a doctor; it is my own conclusion based on evidence that may or may not be simple paranoia. Of course, paranoia is a symptom of both Parkinson’s and Parkinson s-related dementia.
Lately, I have made some paranoia-inspired decisions that negatively impacted my life. In February, I thought I was going to die from sepsis caused by a kidney infection I had after passing two small kidney stones and getting a urinary tract infection from the lovely experience. A few hours in the ER revealed that my urologist had completely healed the infection the week prior, and I was simply reacting to the burning sensation as I emptied my bladder, which was later cured by the urologist giving me pills that turned my pee blue and made the burning go away. Overreaction to a symptom that didn’t mean what I thought it meant.
In May, I had been routinely monitoring my blood pressure and got a reading of 40 for a heart rate. 40 beats a minute is possibly going to be fatal, according to my experience of listening to my mother, a registered nurse of 40-plus years, telling about her ER nurse experiences. I also didn’t feel very well. So, knowing I was probably overreacting again, I went to the ER again. Five days later, I was home from the hospital having had surgery to install a pacemaker. That time I got turned into a cyborg and discovered that I was right about something due to my paranoia. It probably saved my life.
But then, two weeks later I was back in the ER because of lightheadedness. a thing clearly listed on my doctor’s orders as a thing to go back to the ER for. This time is was only dehydration. So, again, not as bad as I thought it was.
Then, a week ago, I had a charge on my checking account that I couldn’t account for. It was supposedly Microsoft billing me for something. So, I called the number provided to ask them what it was for. Well, the number was not in service, and it was recently canceled. So, I called the bank’s online security number. My debit card was stopped, and a replacement was put in the mail. And he asked about lost checks. I told him about one of those that disappeared from the mailbox, and my checking account was closed and transferred to a new account number too. Perfect for end-of-the-month bill paying. I finally have access to money again since yesterday’s mail.
Having paranoia is a bad thing concerning things yet to come. Like dementia. But it isn’t all bad. It made me potentially head off worse things. There really are bad things that can happen from online scammers and identity thieves, though it turns out the charge was legitimate, the Microsoft folks just refuse to identify it through my Google Chrome email. And certain concerning symptoms often lead to worse outcomes than I managed to have, though the low heart rate really could have stopped my heart.
Okay, what Will Eisner’s Spirit tells Moitel’s Delicatessen probably needs more explanation to be funny. But that is for another day. I have my bank account back, though the mistake was mine.
As you get older and closer to the last page of the novel of your life, it is entirely appropriate to take stock of the treasures you have accumulated in a long and rewarding life. In fact, you will probably have heirs looking to reap their inheritance after your long-awaited passing.
My children, unlike those of certain Republican politicians, don’t have much to gain by discovering the perfect untraceable poison. In fact, if I don’t live long enough to pay off my hospital bills, they may only inherit medical debt and the rapt attention of Banko Merricka’s relentless debt-collecting agencies. (Since originally posting this essay, I have paid off my bankruptcy and inherited a third of the family farm. So, it is time to start letting the dog taste my food before eating it.)
But, as I am taking stock, what exactly do I need before I get the final handshake from Mr. G. Reaper? It turns out, I probably don’t need anything else. I have written more novels than I ever expected to. My children are grown into adulthood and take care of themselves now. And I am confident my wife, at eight years younger than me, will find somebody new to berate and explain to the myriad reasons that the new person is wrong about everything, and always will be… even if what they said was something she said was true the previous week.
Sure, if I had all the access to medical care and medicine that most other countries see as a human right, I might live longer. But my medical condition is bad enough that I would be seriously prolonging the pain and suffering. I enjoy being alive, but every day is a painful challenge, and, over time, that tends to get you down.
But what more do I want out of life?
Grandchildren would be nice. But none of mine are married yet, and only one of them seems to have found one he permanently likes. The countdown clock is ticking on that matter.
Well, recognition as a writer would also be nice. I came close to winning in a couple of novel-writing contests. A few readers have read and loved some of my books. Only one person ever hated my writing that told me about it, and he was a voice in my own head. There was also one reader who was not me that was somehow traumatized by one of my lesser books. But I have published way more books through four different publishers than I ever believed possible two decades ago.
But I was a successful teacher for three decades. I touched more than two thousand lives with my work in four different schools in three different districts and ten different classrooms… teaching four different subjects. I have no regrets about how I spent my life and what I got in return.
So, I am writing this believing this is not a maudlin topic. I don’t think I am actually going to pass away this weekend. I will probably get to finish at least one more work in progress. But nobody can say for sure that we will survive next month. Or next decade.
But pessimist that I am, things always turn out better than I think they will.
And afterthoughts?
If I had a magic lamp with a genie in it, my three wishes for the future would be;
That Americans would invent a pill that makes everybody into a genius filled with empathy for all creatures, even the vilest, human beings. And they would share it for free with the whole world.
That we would handle the climate crisis and all the future crises at least as well as we handled the nuclear crisis of the ’60s, the Cold War, the Coke vs Pepsi War, the Bugs vs Mickey War and every other war that didn’t wipe us out as a species in the past.
There will be no Monkey’s Paw consequences for our wishes being fulfilled. So, that’s how it is.
Catch a Falling Star 