The basketball weekend was wild and wicked and mostly unsatisfying. ISU advanced to the Sweet Sixteen. But Iowa was taken out easily by Villanova. And the UNI Panthers fought the Texas A&M Aggies to a two-overtime loss. It was a better showing than last year. Better than Iowa has done in a long time. Still, it would’ve been better if there had been even one more victory. Sorry. Success makes me greedy. Maybe the Iowa State Cyclones can win again and make it better.
Over the weekend I discovered that giving up taking the blood pressure medicine I was on because of rising drug prices may have saved my life. The drug they put me on reduces blood pressure by suppressing adrenaline. It has side effects that robs the body of energy. It has also been proven to elevate certain chemicals in the body that collect in the lungs and hamper lung functions. This explains why I have COPD. It also explains why I have been feeling better after I stopped taking the medication. Maybe I have to start thanking my piratical health insurance company for refusing to pay for anything and forcing me to give up medication that may have been killing me.
I have been getting viewer traffic on this blog at higher rates than ever. I just went through a period of ten straight days of 50-plus views per day. I went as high as 150 on Sunday the 13th and hit over a hundred one other time as well. I am looking at it as a good thing because I don’t actually believe the NSA takes my conspiracy theory posts seriously and isn’t closely monitoring me as a potential tinfoil-hat problem. (You know the tinfoil hat is supposed to make it harder for the government to read your mind, right?) So, there is some degree of confidence that I am getting away with stuff because I am hiding behind the mask of writing humor.
Anyway, today’s post is merely a time-waster meant to keep my string of every-day posting alive and keep me in practice writing down words and ideas. There is never a guarantee that they will be funny ideas, or thoughtful ideas, or even coherent ideas. That is the nature of writing. You can’t always be Tolstoy. Even Tolstoy wasn’t Tolstoy sometimes. (Except that technically he was always Tolstoy. You know what I mean.) Now let’s see what the NSA makes of that.
I am trying to bounce back. Yesterday I survived the possible end of the world. No heart attack. No asteroid hitting the Earth. But also no writing contest win. A huge delay in the publication of my novel. My writing world is in danger of expiring because my life is winding down to its finale, and I’m running out of time. I can still do it, though. I have come back from down and out before.
In 1983 I had a mole removed from my face. It wasn’t a vanity-type thing. Removing it wasn’t going to cure ugliness or anything. But it had gotten larger and had a strange color change. So, my ancient and doddering Czechoslovakian doctor removed it just to be sure. As with any such removal, the excised tissue was sent to the lab for analysis. Malignant melanoma in the very first stages. At the time, the survival rate for such a cancer in Texas was less than fifty per cent. But most cases were not discovered so early in the crisis. I went back in for more surgery. They ended up cutting a hole through my right cheek and stitching it back together again. The new tissue underwent very close scrutiny and it was determined that all the dangerous cells had been removed during the very first surgery. No evidence anywhere of creeping metastasizing cancer death. It was decided that chemo-therapy would only do harm and would not help anything. So I got to keep my hair. It did eventually mean the removal of two more moles and three lumps, but they were all benign. Cancer was fought off and beaten 33 years ago this month. I am a cancer survivor.
I often marvel at the fact that I am still alive and still able to write. I have had innumerable near misses. Car accidents that didn’t happen by a matter of inches. The skidding truck on the icy street in Iowa City missed the front tire of my bicycle by about three inches. Facing down irrationally angry youths with weapons intending to strike out in anger, and somehow having the right words to calm them and prevent the tragedy. One of them told me it was because he looked me in the eye and saw no fear there that he couldn’t do it, couldn’t strike me down. By rights, I should be dead. It is a supreme irony of life that an almost-atheist like me believes in guardian angels.
I don’t know what the ultimate goal is. I don’t expect to be a wealthy published novelist like Stephen King. I don’t know if it is even important that I break through the bookstore barriers and get my work on the shelves for a few paltry dollars. It is really only important that I write. This blog has become important to me because I have developed a small readership that actually reads and provides feedback. I do occasionally reach the heart of people I don’t actually even know. And I have made friends and relatives a little bit misty. I have written 849 posts, posting every single day of 2015, and every single day of fifteen months in a row. I have written six complete novels and gotten two actually into print with an ISBN number and everything. My writing, like me myself, exists, and it will survive. I am a survivor.
In college I took classes in oral reading and acting because I was nutty about drama and play-writing, even though I was much too terrified of being put on a public stage to ever try out for a part. But in Oral Reading 101 I was given the gift of a professor who actually was the head of the ISU Drama Department. One of the things he made us do was a soliloquy from a Shakespeare play. I was assigned the opening soliloquy from Richard the Third.
Good God! Is that man ever a villain and a monster! He’s more sinister and evil than Snidely Whiplash or Dick Dastardly… and certainly no less cartoonish. Here is the best I can still do to recreate my old college performance of “The Winter of Our Discontent” soliloquy.
To pull off this assignment (On which I received an A grade from a professor known for imperious F-giving) I had to do a lot of research on King Richard III to be able to walk around in his skin for three whole minutes. I had to learn about him from books and articles and drama critiques. I spent a couple of weeks in the library (There was no internet or Google in 1978). I learned that he was a complex man involved in the deeply troubled time of the War of the Roses. He was from the house of York, the House of the White Rose. His elder brother, Edward, had been victorious in both battle and royal intrigue, and, with Richard’s help had secured the throne of England that had been wrested from the hands of Richard II to begin the struggle between House Lancaster (the Red Rose) and House York… both of which had blood-relationship claims to the throne. Once in the hands of Richard’s brother Edward IV, the crown did not really rest peacefully on Yorkish heads. Edward became ill and died in 1483. The crown was to then go to twelve-year-old Edward V who was placed under the care of Uncle Richard’s regency. At the time of his coronation, the legitimacy of Edward IV’s marriage was declared null and void, making the boy no longer eligible to be king. Richard seized the title. Young Edward and his younger brother were taken to the Tower of London and they were never seen publicly again. According to Shakespeare, Richard did, in fact, have them killed. But, the crown did not stay on Richard’s head for longer than two years. In 1485 Henry Tudor came back to England from France. Richard was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field and died in battle there.
I do actually understand Richard in ways that are difficult to admit. I know what it feels like to be convinced you are unworthy by factors beyond your control. Richard was a hunchback, plagued with severe scoliosis of the spine. He lived his life in pain and was ridiculed for his deformity in a time where it was believed such things were a punishment from God for sins of the parents, or even sins the child himself was born with. I can relate. I was always so far above the other kids in my class at school that I was treated like a Martian, unloved and unlovable because I could not speak a language they really understood. And on top of that, I was secretly the victim of a sexual assault, a condition that I feared made me a monster. I could so easily have become a monster. I could’ve set my mind to it in the same way Richard did, because vengeance for his differences consumed him utterly. Thankfully, I did not choose a path of evil. Drawing and telling stories proved to be the pick and shovel I used to dig myself out of my own pit of despair.
Richard III’s long-forgotten grave was rediscovered in 2013, and a DNA match with relatives proved the skeleton with scoliosis was him in 2014.
The real Richard III may not have been the monster Shakespeare portrayed him as, either. He was demonized after his defeat and death by the Tudors to strengthen their shaky claim to the throne. There exists some evidence that he was a progressive king and a friend to his people, but horribly betrayed by some of his own followers, and certainly made the scapegoat by succeeding generations.
A recreation of what Richard III looked like based on the skull found and portraits from the time period.
There is also some evidence that Shakespeare wrote the play as a political diatribe against the hunchback in the royal court of his day. Sir Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury was also a hunchback with scoliosis. And by his sometimes sinister-seeming machinations, he rose to power as Secretary of State for both Elizabeth I, and after her, James I. He had a part to play in making James the King after Elizabeth’s long reign, probably an instrumental part. He also uncovered the Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes and friends, and rumors persisted that he had more to do with it than merely revealing and foiling it. Nothing was ever proven against him. Though Elizabeth called him “my pygmy” and James referred to him as “my little beagle”, he held power throughout his lifetime and foiled the work of his many enemies against him. In fact, it is the similarities between Shakespeare’s Richard III and Robert Cecil that first made me begin to believe that Shakespeare was actually someone other than the actor who owned the Globe Theater and never spelled his own name the same way twice. Knowing about Cecil surely needed to be the act of an insider in the royal court. I balked at first when it was suggested to me that Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by Francis Bacon… and I continued to doubt until I learned more about the Earl of Oxford, Edward deVere.
So what is the point of this soliloquy about the soliloquy of Richard III? Well, the point is that at one time I had to be him for a short while. I had to understand who he was (at least the character that Shakespeare created him to be) and think as he thought. That is what a soliloquy truly is. Sharing from the character’s mind to my mind… and back again if I am to perform him… or even write him in some future fiction.
“Potpourri” is a word I learned in 5th grade from Mrs. Reitz, my 5th and 6th grade teacher in Rowan Elementary School. It means a mixture of flower petals and spices put together in a cloth bag or in a bowl, placed in a room to make it smell better in a perfumed sort of way. But on her yellow bulletin board in dark blue letters, she taught us that it meant a mixture of things put together to make things better. And she told us that education was a kind of potpourri because it took many different things all put together to truly educate a child.
So, why am I writing about a goofy word like that? Well, thanks to Mrs. Reitz with her 1960’s polka-dotted old-lady dresses, her black and very staid cat-eye glasses that magnified her eyes, and her sensible shoes… I know that potpourri is the real secret to good writing. That is my excuse for why this blog is so full of a variety of excessively goofy and off-the-wall things. But it is not easy to do this every day, cherry-picking excessively goofy stuff out of my library, or out of my memory, or out of my own teaching experience, or even my nightly nightmares to post as another interesting bug in my butterfly-collection-style blog. Therefore today’s post will be one of those gawd-awful list posts that gives you fair warning about what my fevered old retired teacher brain is trying to cook up for the daily lesson.
It is time to do the happy dance because my curse worked. For the 107th straight year the Chicago Cubs will not win another World Series. The Mets beat them in four straight games. I did it by switching my allegiance temporarily from the Cardinals to the Cubs. They have always been either my second or third favorite team in all of baseball. Yet, every time I want them to win something, they lose. Important regular season games, playoff games after the Cardinals are eliminated, or even happen-to-be-watching Saturday afternoon games between the Cubs and a team I hate like the San Francisco Giants, the Cubs always lose. (I know it is not nice to hate anybody, but really, what is baseball good for without teams to hate like the Giants, the Yankees, and the Reds? There have to be hated foes for the good guys to overcome.) Me rooting for the Cubs to win is a much more effective curse than anything Bill Sianis’ stupid pet billy goat could ever conjure.
I watched a PBS Frontline documentary about the struggle in Congress to create immigration reform and the unsuccessful Herculean efforts of Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez from Chicago to build a consensus in the House of Representatives.
Representative Luis Gutierrez of Illinois
Immigration is important to me because my wife is an immigrant. So far, after 20 years of marriage she is still not a U.S. citizen. And with Donald Trump preaching venom against anchor babies, we could end up having my wife and kids deported to the Philippines simply because all the mean old white guys in Congress (and possibly Ben Carson) hate foreigners on principle and only allow them as means to high profits. This is an issue I care about because of my family and so many of my ESL students whom I love and treasure. And this is an issue that can potentially be combatted by cartoon. Trump and Congressman Trey Gowdy (with a football-shaped head) and basset-hound-looking Paul Ryan (and possibly Ben Carson) are all already cartoon characters who I would only have to draw realistically to make them into funny cartoons. They are also key players in this ring-around-the-rosy-all-fall-down debate.
I also need to tell you more stories about wonderful teachers like Mrs. Reitz and Mrs. Mennenga. And about kids I have taught who lit my pants on fire (both figuratively and metaphorically), made my blood pressure rise, and touched my heart. It goes without saying that those stories are probably the most valuable things I have hoarded over the course of my career as a teacher. They will lose all their value if they go unshared before I die.
I want to tell you about some of my cartoonist heroes. I haven’t blogged anything yet about Walt Kelly, the wonderful Disney veteran who created Pogo and Albert Alligator.
comicsalliance.com
I plan to go on and on like this in bumblebee fashion, from flowering idea to blossoms of insight to posies of great beauty… flower, to flower, to flower… making potpourri.
Troubled hearts can be soothed with words. In 1Samuel 16:23 David plays the harp and his singing was a relief for Saul and the bad spirit departed from upon him. In the same way, the written word can touch the soul of the reader and, like Saul, free the reader from the demons besetting him. That is power. That is responsibility.
Of course, I am the last person to claim that I can teach you to write with power… I can’t even claim that I can write with power myself. But I know how to write well enough to make myself laugh, cry, and feel through my writing. And occasionally someone else reads my writing and agrees. Through years worth of being a writing teacher, I do have some thoughts about how it may be done.
First of all, I am not wrong to choose David’s harp playing, inspired by Jehovah as it was, as a metaphor for writing power. It is in the very sounds of the words that a great deal of emotion and meaning is embedded. One can evoke a very bitter and angry feeling by describing a cruel woman not as a “mean girl” but as one whose laughter is “like the crass cackling of devious old witch”. Mean girl has too soft a labial sound, even with the hard g, to be as ugly and staccato as the repeated k sounds added to the tch and the fact that “devious” comes so close to “devil”… a related word. A happy feeling can be created by describing a smile as “a sudden sunburst of white teeth and happiness”. That almost makes me laugh…unless you add “shark’s” between “white” and “teeth”… and then I am convinced I am about to be eaten. The s sounds in the description are like a sizzling burn that leads into the firework display at the end of the word “sunburst”. To write with the music inherent in words, at some point you have to hear it out loud. I always hear the words in my head when I write, spoken in a wide variety of voices. But to truly get it right, I have to read aloud to hear with my ears… which I have already done three times to this paragraph alone.
In order to have power, writing must manipulate feelings. I don’t mean by using the word “manipulate” that it is some sort of Machiavellian bad thing. Simply put, a writer must control the feelings of the reader, not by sound alone, but by the depth of meaning of the words. You must be able to weave a paragraph together not only with the simple meanings of the words themselves, but all the connotations and denotations in those words. You must use metaphor and simile, comparison, allusion, and sensory details. Ernest Hemingway had a working style almost completely devoid of metaphor and the writer’s own personal commentary… but that only worked because all his themes were about dispirited people suffering tragedy and loss and a pervasive sense of disconnectedness. Hemingway is a powerful writer… but his books never make me laugh. Purple prosey over-describers like Charles Dickens can make me laugh with a simple list of things. “The boy’s desk had a nearly dry ink bottle, several pens that needed new nibs and were chewed about the grip, and a small stack of papers crammed full of ink drawings of skulls and skeletons.” It is that last startling detail in the list that makes the mundane suddenly funny.
I suppose to do today’s topic true justice, I should write about it in book length. There is so much more to say. But I have bored you long enough for one post with writing nuts and bolts. It is enough to say that I believe in the magic of words, and I think that if, like any good Dungeons and Dragons wizard, you study your books of magic long enough, you can soon be casting fireballs around the room made up of nothing but words.
There is no doubt about it, being a writer is like getting naked in public. It never used to really sink in before I published books, and when no one read my writing or listened to me when I talked. Suddenly, I am being read… and even… frighteningly, being believed.
I now have 678 followers, a number of whom actually read and comment on my posts. I do my best to entertain and make them laugh, but it is the nature of real writing that the contents of my life as a whole spill out for all to see. I try to keep private things private, but it is becoming more and more obvious that I need a much bigger purple teddy bear. Readers of my blog know that I was a public school teacher for thirty-one years. They also know that I did not want to leave that job, but I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor, and my health let me down. They may also know that I was the victim of a sexual predator when I was a child and recovery has taken a lifetime… in fact, it is still going on. They may know that my family life has become difficult because health issues affect an entire family, especially when the costs of care are turned into gigantic scary monsters by an increasingly greedy and corrupt health-care industry (not doctors and nurses. mind you, but the higher-ups who really make all the money off drugs, tech, and insurance.) There are no longer skeletons in my closet. All my darkest secrets become fuel for writing and bubble out of my cauldron, transforming into butterflies, who may have started as worms, but have worked themselves into filigreed winged creatures that flit about in the sunlight. I turned one of my most horrible experiences into a post for https://www.facebook.com/groups/1000Speak/. It was the story of Ruben Vela, and it was about my inability to prevent a tragedy. Here is the link; When Compassion Fails. Gobs of sobs from readers in the comment section. I usually try to make them laugh… but crying is a part of the reading game too.
And where are the Trolls? I see them on the internet everywhere. I know other bloggers who have cut off comments because of Trolls. They don’t seem to come around me with their leg-breaking, gut-busting insults and four-letter-wordy mayhem. Do I not deserve that as much as anybody else? But I know better than to actually wish for what I don’t really want. It is okay, Trolls, if you decide you’d rather apply the soul-crushing efforts elsewhere.
The point is, while I have always wanted to be a writer and have some experience with naturists and nudists, I have never before now had to come to terms with dancing naked in the sunlight in front of God and everybody… but continuing to write means dealing with it now.
I get goofy ideas for blog posts when I am reading other blog posts, when I am reading books, and when I am letting television suck the smart out of my brain cells. I was first inspired by reading this blog post from In My Cluttered Attic. He was talking about why he chooses to blog in the face of a plethora of common-sense reasons not to. “Good idea for my own blog post!” said the insane voice that inhabits the dark space behind my mind’s own creative filing cabinet #42 in the second dungeon under my memory. I immediately filed the idea away in that cabinet because the cabinet was close at the time and I might never find it again later. Then I leaped to a post by The Off Key of Life in which I found a beautiful song beautifully sung that made me trip over another file cabinet that was behind the mechanical letter-sorting machine on the stairway landing to the sub-basement of the second dungeon.
Some old memories spilled out on the stone steps because I used to sing that song to my three babies when I rocked them to sleep twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, and thirteen years ago. That song, and “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Disney’s Pinocchio. Both of those songs are about one day finding the key to happiness… or possibly the key to understanding… but definitely about the search for the key. I always believed that those songs would give my children sweet dreams… and I prayed that the songs would never become the source of nightmares.
And then I was watching Hulu, an episode of Arrow in which Oliver Queen must decide on the reason why he was doing the whole superhero-vigilante thing and risking his life constantly. Unfortunately I didn’t find the file box that has superheroes in it that I was looking for in hallway leading to Area 51 in the upper dungeon. But I knew the topic was going to be “Why I Blog”. That settled, I began to write and paste in all sorts of random stuff.
“What is the meaning of 42?” you ask? How clever of you to ask that! In Douglas Adams’ seminal series of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books
42 is revealed to be the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Practically everything that he adds to that epic trilogy of five-or-so books is basically random. And yet, it is not. He is telling us about the apparent randomness of Life, the Universe, and Everything while carefully explaining how all this random madness that is Everything actually fits together in a very random-mad way. There is a certain asymmetrical symmetry about it all that has a certain contradictory sort of beauty, if you get what I mean. (A certain ugly beauty if you don’t get what I mean.)
So why do I blog? Good question. I don’t really have an answer to it. I blog because my first publisher told me I had to do it to promote my book, Catch a Falling Star. My book has netted me $28 so far, as long as I am not fool enough to start subtracting all the money I have spent trying to advertise and promote my book. I’m not fool enough. I stay out of that corridor in the maze of my complicated little mind. I blog because I can share all the private drawings and poems and insane nonsense that fills the filing cabinets in my mind without paying a hefty psychiatrist’s fee. Your underwear drawer needs to be aired out once in a while even if you do remember to wash your underwear. And it is liberating to walk around figuratively naked in front of an audience that potentially includes little old church ladies, God, and everybody. I blog because writing is something that I do, have always done, and will continue to do until they put my smelly corpse in a pine box and bury it under the garbage pile out back. All that scribbling has to count for something sometime. And maybe that sometime is now. If you are one of those poor souls suffering from Serial-Mickey’s-Blog-Reading Disorder (a condition the CDC has taken to labeling SMBRD… not to be confused with small-bird flu), and you actually read the posts and look at all the random junk piled into those mad paragraphs, you may just accidentally stumble across that key we have all been searching for for eons… and unlike the majority of the world, you will be giggling insanely for a reason!
Catch a Falling Star 