Catch a Falling Star

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 a way to reach every kid and make a 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, relatives, 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 to 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, whom 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 throw 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.

I was born in the middle of the 1950’s. So, I am a Boomer. (Born as part of the World War II baby boom.)

I am philosophically a pessimist. So, I am a Gloomer. (Someone who believes that what is most likely to happen is the worst thing that can happen, therefore I always prepare for the worst.)

I like to investigate and play around with conspiracy theories. So, I am a Rumor-Lover. (Though I don’t declare anything absolutely true without absolute proof. Unlike Alex Jones, I am still in pursuit of whether Oswald acted alone and whether 9-11 wasn’t an inside job.)

And I have no faith that the monkey-flinging billionaires will give up polluting with fossil fuels to make short-term profits long enough to save life on Planet Earth from global warming. So, I am a Doomer. (Yes, we really are on a path to extinguish life on Earth even though we have the technology to mitigate and reform it.)

If I sing it,

“I’m a Boomer!”

“I’m a Gloomer!””

“I’m a Rumor-Loving Doomer!”

“We are dying… everyone!”

I have confidence that the human race will survive what’s coming. But it won’t be a fair thing. Those most likely to survive in their Mars colony or underground and undersea cities are the wealthy monkey flingers who caused the problem. Billions are going to die. The world population will be greatly reduced and forced to evolve biologically… probably with the aid of science. I know the clean energy technology is available to solve the world’s problems. But I also know that vast piles of wealth in billionaire tax havens corrupt the wealthy sons and daughters of fat money hogs. It makes them incompetent. Something their servants will kill them for when the small groups of survivors will have secured their existence.

So, I sing my Doomer song. You guessed it. To the tune of “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band.

Do I think what I think is inevitable?

No. But I will be living out my life doing everything in my power to grow trees, clean trash out of everywhere but the proper receptacles, and curse the bones of those dead old billionaires who did this to us. I hope the Devil puts some extra hot coals under John D Rockefeller in the seventh circle of Hell.

I will be writing and drawing as much as I can until the end of me. It will probably come long before the rest of you face that final chess game with the Reaper. And I don’t expect my work is going to save any of you. But it will help me make meaning out of my life.

I hope I am wrong about everything for the sake of the children.

But this old pessimist is rarely shown by life to be wrong.

Here I am making progress with the new picture project. I have had to rethink details on the fly as my arthritic hands make flubs in ink. Unlike on the computer, I had to fudge a new crook to the elbow and push a flower’s edge under the nearby flub instead of over the top.

This fast and furious edit for possibilities to redirect the problem was created with the AI Mirror that suggested possible changes to the finished project.

Here is my finished colored-pencil drawing. This is the best I can do with my hands and my color blind eyes. It’s not that bad. Still, I can now use the AI program that will obviously one day become a Terminator android murder-bot to sort out the crappy stuff and make it better.

Still not perfect. It tried to turn my black-eyed susans into sunflowers. But I like the highlights and the back lighting on the hair.

Here is the pen and ink drawing that is my latest work in progress. I drew it first in pencil as a structural sketch with details penciled on top of it. I then inked the best lines and then took the excess pencil marks away with an eraser. I haven’t scanned it yet. What you see here is a photo of the drawing with my phone camera, hence the gray color rather than white. I will put the colored pencil on it next and show you the result when done. I will then turn it into something digital by putting the scan into my phone to use the digital art app and the AI editor.

This is some playing around with the photo of the pen and ink copy messed on with the digital art tools and the AI editor (which tends to give my drawing an even more Manga look than it had originally.)

This is the photo of Sally Field I used for the previous practice.

This is the result of loading it into my digital art app and tracing over it with my electronic stylus on my touchscreen phone. I know it doesn’t look like her. I couldn’t get the eyes to look right, and I settled for the smiling eyes that my AI editor gave me.

Yes, I published the book that has all my closet skeletons in it. I kept the secret of being a victim of a sexual assault from the age of ten to the age of thirty before finally sharing my pain with a girlfriend as described in the book. I tell about my entire transformation of someone totally shamed by my body to someone who embraced being a nudist. So, I have reasons for publishing this book.

1. I needed to get the worst of the secrets that chewed on my innards for over fifty years out of the closet to do their informative skeleton dance for any who might need to hear it. My mother and father both died without ever knowing what happened to me as a child. In 2020 and 2021 And not because I hadn’t revealed it to anyone. My sisters both knew. But they didn’t read my books and they really didn’t need to face that sadness since I had dealt with it myself years before.

2. I have collected many artworks that I have done over the years with my fascination with the nude human form revealed in it. I needed to air out some of that art. I got the added benefit of digital art coming along to help me translate my pictures into more realistic and dynamic art, unaffected by my arthritis.

3. I needed a place to put more of my truly terrible poetry. This book is a place to put some of what I have learned about blank verse by my fascination and obsession with Walt Whitman.

I talk about Walt Whitman, other artists and writers, and my personal philosophy of education here.

4. This book was also a place to experiment with AI tools and digital art in ways I had never done before. This picture above is created with a photo of a boy with clothes on, some drawing on top of it to change the face and alter the details necessary to make him a nude figure. Of course, my arthritis left numerous flubs and smirches all over it, so I used the AI Mirror program to turn the whole thing into a much better version with the colors better blended and the awkward lines smoothed out. I have to admit, though, the correctable lines and color swatches go down more easily than colored pencil lines. See the differences in quality in the arthritic version below, uncorrected by the AI editor?

5. And the most important reason of all is that this book purges my soul and gives me peace to face the last years of my life with. I am old enough to seriously think about how I want to face the end of everything for me. And what I really wanted to do is go into the coming night bare of all secrets and mental baggage. Just like any good nudist, I am hiding nothing at all as I stride to the end of the story..