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Teachers like me often say, “There are no bad kids.”

And, boy! Are we ever wrong when we say something as dumb as that.

To be fair, when teachers like me say something like that, a clueless liberal-minded comment that reveals fatal levels of idealism, morality, and even faith in God, we are really saying that there is way to reach every kid and make the difference for them… if only we are given the tools, the time, and a decent amount of incentive. To go in front of a hostile audience five, six, or seven times a day, up to thirty of them in a classroom made for twenty, and teach them something worth learning requires an unquestioning belief in miracles, and a foolish notion that somehow goodness and light always win out. And often they do. But exceptions prove the rule… And the need for rules. Because there are some very bad kids in this world.

The first hour of the first day of my very first year as a gringo teacher in a mostly Spanish-speaking junior high school in deep South Texas contained two eighth grade boys who would die violently from gunshots.

Osvaldo “Ocho” Sotello put a gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger after finally getting released from prison after serving five years of a sentence for armed robbery. He was guilty of that crime and many others he was never caught doing. But he was put in prison at eighteen, and repeatedly raped by other members of the Mexican Mafia because he had given himself teardrop tattoos by his right eye and had never killed anyone to earn that gang sign.

And Lorenzo “El Loco Talan” Marquez would die in a hail of bullets from the guns of rival drug dealers on the streets of Encinal, Texas. His family watched in horror as it happened. Neither of the names I gave those boys in this essay are their real names. But the gang names are real. And their life outcomes are real. And I even had to teach the son of El Talan when he reached eighth grade.

Both of those boys are proof of the idea that there really are bad kids out there. Evil kids even. But those two boys were both sixteen in the eighth grade because they failed seventh grade twice and had been “placed” in the eighth grade especially to welcome me into the jolly world of classroom management and discipline. Those were tough kids. They refused to do anything I asked of them.

They were disrespectful to me in both Spanish and English. And I am grateful for their tutoring of me in a wide range of profanity and swear words in Spanish. At one point, walking them back to class from another campus after lunch, El Talan picked up a metal fence post and was going to use it on me like a club because I tried to hurry them up and interfered with their plans to ditch afternoon classes.

Some kids are bad kids because they have been mishandled, mistreated, and misunderstood by all of their parents, relative, teachers, coaches, and classmates before you even meet them for the first time. Their paths are already set in stone. Fossilized footprints made rock-hard-certain a million years before they should’ve been set in stone. I had no chance to make any improvements on them.

Another bad kid I had my very first year of teaching was not really named Alonzo Angel Diablo (but certainly should’ve been named that.)

Alonzo was the older cousin of a kid in that class, Fernando, that I really liked and tried hard to help through two years in the eighth grade. But Alonzo was definitely too old and set in his criminal ways to be reached. Alonzo’s problem was that he was a gay young man living in a Catholic/Hispanic culture that actively persecuted gays. His own family had disowned him and treated him like a criminal. So, he was one. I had to get him expelled from school by reporting him for threatening the life of another student. Prior to that incident the boy had harassed me at the Halloween Carnival (a fund-raising event that the Baptist Church later made us rename the Harvest Festival.) He forced Fernando to sexually proposition me, and when I rebuffed that nonsense, he offered to do it himself. It would lead to a later discussion in which he revealed to me his sexual orientation and asked me for forgiveness. He was relentlessly bad. But he later contacted me as an adult and thanked me for being his teacher. I never taught him anything, but it was important to him to show me that he had a job and had achieved adulthood without further violence or jail time. If he’s still making his way in this world more honestly than he did before, I am happy for him. But It was all his own doing. I could do nothing for him as a teacher.

There very definitely are bad kids. But they are not all irredeemable. And I know conservatives and Old School types would prefer that we just threw all of them in jail to rot forever. I, however, like to think there is still room in this world for stupid liberal notions of making kids less bad through education, patience, and the Grace of God.

the Real Post for Today

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Today I needed to write something short and sweet to be done with it, and yet, actually do it. This was because my head was hurting with a blood-sugar headache, my computer keyboard is still acting up and interfering with writing, and my ability to actually concentrate is seriously impaired.

On Pubby I have started getting reviews on my book of essays, Laughing Blue. They have shown evidence that people who actually read my book, like it a lot. Today has not been all bad news.

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The real news for today is that I am almost finished with my work in progress. The Wizard in His Keep is now past the climax of the plot and winding down. I am at the moment around 42,000 words. I am thinking only two Cantos (Chapters) more.

But I didn’t plan on having to learn a whole new WordPress editing system on a day when my head is aching. So, it ends here for today.

WordPress gave me a new toy to play with. Dang! I couldn’t resist. But this is just a playful practice post. I hope it doesn’t become metaphorically fattening.

This was not the picture I was looking to post. This is not the article I intended to write. But sometimes writers and their glitchy computers have different ideas about what to do.

I am having keyboard issues. The enter and the control key both stick and things pop up on the screen while I am composing an essay that I never intended, and some things I ask the computer for never happen.

But for now, Poppa is home. I am tired of writing stuff over three times. It recently made me recreate an entire 300 word passage in my current work in progress.

So, I’m tired of fighting to type coherently. This will be enough for today.

Today I almost skipped writing a blog post. And why? The air outside in Texas is gray with smoke from fires in California. It makes it hard for people like me to draw breath. I know it is important to practice going without actual air to breath in order to be prepared for the future. But I guess I am too much of an addict to fresh air to go too much longer in a de-regulated future where you have to be born wealthy to afford air.

And COVID still has me down. My son has returned to the job of guarding the prisoners in the jail of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office where he got infected once already, and may be risking re-infection. And my wife is back in the classroom now with students who have no other options than to go back to the brick and mortar school. She has diabetes. They may be infected but have no symptoms. Nothing to worry about, right?

But writing is like breathing. Once you’ve developed a metaphor-making gland in the primitive part of your brain, you have to be able to let it out. If you only breathe in by reading and watching old movies, and never breathe out, your lungs will at some point explode. Or you will drown in your own similes which only writing something can be a ventilator for.

Don’t get me wrong. I live for reading good books and watching good movies. But I don’t feel really alive on days when I don’t write anything.

So, the result is a post like the one for today. It is writing something… but it seems slightly off, slightly askew.

I have been watching a mega-binge of Don Knotts movies, and other old movies that I haven’t seen in some time… some since childhood. I have been pretty much isolated and alone in my bedroom since March. No more Uber driving… ever. No more substitute teaching. Not even taking someone to school in the mornings on school days.

And my father is dying. He is in hospice care, suffering from dementia when he’s awake, the result of Parkinson’s Disease. He is sleeping most of the time now. They don’t know when… but they think it will happen soon. And I will be stuck here in Texas while he’s in Iowa. My sisters in Iowa and Missouri are planning to take care of Mom and most of the arrangements are already done. But it is still going to be very hard.

For right now, things are a little off. My full-color, technicolor life is in black and white for the time being. My computer is crashing once a week. I am having to re-type the letter “o” so often it becomes a habit to type “oooo” and then delete any extra “o”s that may appear. But taking a day off from writing does not seem to be an option.

I face times in my life when the words just don’t come easily. And yet, I never suffer from writer’s block. The ideas float in a semi-coherent soup in the soup-bowl of my mind. It’s just that I have trouble making the spoon work properly.

I have a severe headache this morning. My blood-sugar is out of whack. I could always go to the store and buy more whack… but, oh yeah, quarantined. But that is almost done. My son is so much better. And the other three in the house, my wife, my daughter, and I have not gotten the disease. The disinfectant in the bathroom, the hand-washing, the wearing of masks in the house, has been mind-numbingly hard, but it has kept us safe. We are going to come through this.

But the school district I was subbing for last school-year is going to re-open and they are desperate to get subs back to the battle, especially subs who had no reported problems and even some good comments in their folders. They want me back. But my health has drifted down the ladder rungs of life from acceptable to moderately poor, and then slipped to daily suffering. I can’t go back at this time. In fact, I fear I haven’t the super-power left in me to ever go back to it. The Kryptonite has permanently taken me down.

And I am heartbroken. No students to yell at ever again? No captive audience to laugh and groan at my jokes… ever again? No more angry glares? And no more smiles? You can’t know how hard it is to say goodbye to those… unless you’ve been a teacher too.

But the time has come to make that decision. Risking my life in the pandemic to do one of the world’s hardest jobs for $100 a day is no longer something I can do.

My head hurts. There was something I wanted to say. But hopefully, I’ve already said it.

Some days it seems like I am losing because it simply isn’t a fair fight. What fight am I talking about? Well, all of them.

Right now I am quarantined in the same house and sharing the same bathroom with my son who is sick with COVID 19. With my incurable diseases and health conditions, that is a life-and-death fight. If I get infected, my already-compromised lungs will fill with liquid and I will drown in my own natural juices.

Of course, I am trying to fight off that possibility as if my life depended upon it. My mother, the Registered Nurse of 40 years, sent a box of masks express mail. She also recommended spraying down the bathroom with Lysol every time one of us uses it. We, of course, couldn’t get the brand-named stuff because there are shortages of cleaning supplies everywhere. We had to settle for a generic bottle of imitation Formula 409. And we have to make it last. My eldest son is still free to roam the earth, so he was drafted to get us the supplies we need. But he only manages to get part of what we need most at more expensive prices than we are used to paying. Still, at four of us in the house, only the original one is sick at the moment.

But, being stuck in the house in separate rooms from everybody else gives me lots of time to work on my career as a storyteller. I am about at the halfway point of writing The Wizard in his Keep. And re-composing the old AeroQuest stories is coming along nicely too, as you can see from yesterday’s Canto excerpt from AeroQuest 4 : The Amazing Aero Brothers. Amazingly, I had my best day ever on a free-book promotion of AeroQuest 2 : Planet of the White Spider. For some reason I don’t understand, 18 people all clicked on a free copy of the book in about one hour on Sunday. I set a personal record that day for books given away.

But my success as an author still has to be evaluated as… a good novelist who hardly anyone has ever read. Including relatives. The review service, Pubby, is so far a bust. I got one five-star review. And that one is suspect because the reader’s eight-word review had one spelling error in it… unless “complexing” is a word that I am just not aware of. The next two reviews that I earned with points for my reviews of the work of others are both going to have their deadlines expire without reviewing the book (Snow Babies).

And it doesn’t matter how hard I work at marketing according to the rules, my books have no chance. If you are not paying a major book publisher to get your book published, as I did with Catch a Falling Star with I-Universe/Penguin Books, they are not otherwise accepting unsolicited manuscripts. Good agents don’t accept new unknown clients either. Being a writer in 2020 means working hard at your craft so other people can make more money off the content you produce than you do. In fact, you are mostly telling stories for free to mostly nobody.

But this old wizard is not defeated until he is dead, or even longer, as wizards often cast spells that linger long after they are gone. The problem is, he may be dead by next week.

Yeah… Life is mostly not fair. Today I had to take number 2 son to the testing site near Parkland Hospital in Dallas. He got the COVID test because a prisoner at the county jail where he works as a guard tested positive, and then Henry started showing symptoms at home, and was too sick to work by Wednesday evening. The Sheriff’s Office is very concerned. He got in for a test faster than most people can, and the Sheriff’s Office is paying for it.

Of course, I am already exposed. And I have three health conditions normally associated with COVID deaths in people my age. Still, I don’t feel sick yet. And I had H1N1 twice, both strains of it. It is possible that I have leftover resistance and t-cells from that. But I am done feeling sorry for myself. Time to get more writing done.

It is not an easy thing to have to wait for bad news.

You know what’s coming. You know why it will happen. You know how it will happen. The only thing you don’t know is when.

My father is in hospice car. The doctor doesn’t believe he will last much longer. I will still be in Texas when it happens… probably. My mother is planning a cremation and later service when the pandemic has released its grip on us all. Of course, it is a nightmare for her. Not being able to visit the man she has loved and been companion to for 64 years. No kisses. No hand-holding. Only looking at him through a window with a mask on. And most of the time he doesn’t even know who she is. Last week he asked for her, wanting her to come to him. By the time she got there, he didn’t remember what he had wanted… or again, who she even was. There is nothing for any of us, my mother, myself, my two sisters, my younger brother… to do besides wait.

And of course, there is more than one dread thing I have to await. This pandemic is highly likely to bring an end to me. My number two son, in his new job working for the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office, had to deal with a prisoner who has COVID 19, and he was wearing his mask, but three days later he is not feeling well. And I have been sick since last weekend, and started coughing and sneezing today. It may just be that both of us are having a bad reaction to mold from the rain, but if it gets worse, I may end up being tested again so I can wait on pins and needles for another seven days before finding out the verdict. I am too susceptible, and the virus is too relentless. It will eventually have me before it’s run its full course.

So, here I am dreading the impending visits from the Grim Reaper. Why then do I choose to illustrate with cartoon villains? Well, Snowboy is a robotic device originally created to be an assassin by alien beings working for the US Government. He was wrecked by an individual given the power to do so by his future time-travelling self after a good-hearted scientist tries to bring him back to life in the form of the son he had previously lost in a fire the robot had caused. And, much as we all do in a life plagued with random tragedies and ill fortune, he spent time (and lots of it, thanks to his time machine) trying to figure out what he will do and why he should do it (though most of us can’t use WWI German Fighter Pilots and man-eating chinchillas to do it.)

Timothy Trollhammer uses his handy hammer to win himself a beautiful barefoot princess for his wife. But the trick for old noggin-bopping Tim is to keep her once he’s won her. And that’s a problem he can’t solve by bopping it with a hammer. He has to learn patience, and kindness and… maybe even love. The lesson does not go without its moral to the story.

As much as we may fear what’s coming very near,

We must be ready to to pay the price,

It’s certainly very dear

And though it’s something not so nice,

The due date now is here.

What more is there to say? I await God’s twisted sense of humor when it comes to my fate and the fate of my father. And waiting is all there is to be done.