Olfactory Story Telling
My dog Jade
While walking the dog yesterday, we struck up a conversation about writing and being a writer that proved once and for all that DOGS REALLY DON’T KNOW HOW TO WRITE!
She turned around on the end of her leash and looked at me with that woeful you-don’t-feed-me-enough look on her little well-fed face. “You know, I was reading your blog today, and I think I know how to make you a well-known writer and best-selling author.”
“Oh, really?” I said. “Since when do you know anything about being a writer or marketing fiction?”
“Well, you do remember that I wrote a couple of blog posts for you already.”
“True. But I can’t afford to do that again. You type with your tongue and it leaves the keyboard all sticky. I haven’t gotten it truly clean and working properly again since that last time. If you are asking to write another post, you can forget it.”
“Well, sorry about that. But I do think I know how to make your writing more popular with a bigger audience.”.
“Oh? How could you possibly know that?”
“Hey, talking dog here! That has to count for something, doesn’t it? Don’t you think people would be amazed to learn about things from a dog’s perspective?”
“Nobody’s going to believe I have a talking dog. That isn’t something within the realm of what is normal. They are all going to think I am just a crazy old man.”
“Well, you are a crazy old man. I can’t help that. But what if you told stories from a dog’s perspective? You know, things that only a dog could’ve come up with?”
“Oh, like what, for instance?”
Why does the neighbor’s dog always smell like burritos?
“Well, you know that more than half of what a dog perceives about the world she gets through her sense of smell?”
“Okay…”
“Like that spot on the grass over there. Boy dog. Handsome border collie… ate three hotdogs about four days ago. Ooh! He smells perfect!”
“You’re talking about poop smells again, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes. But I can also tell you about the pigeons that were in that live oak tree there yesterday.”
“Oh? What color were they?”
“I don’t know… gray maybe?”
“Bird doo. You are smelling old bird poop! You want me to write about poop more?”
“Well, no… not exactly. But if you could tell your stories through the sense of smell more… that would be unique and different. People would like that a lot because it’s never really been done before.”
“You do understand that I can’t use my laptop to write smells? There are no words I could use that will automatically put smells into the reader’s nose.”
“Well, but if you could invent one…”
“According to you, it would be mostly poop smells anyway. Who wants to sniff that?”
“It would make your blog more popular with dogs.”
“But dogs don’t read!”
“How do you know for sure? You believed me when I said I read your blog today.”
“Well, you certainly got me there. Now, don’t we have some important business to take care of?”
“Yes, but… You see that squirrel over there?”
“Yes, so?”
“So one day soon, I’m gonna eat him!”
The Reds and the Blues
Lord, grant me peace
In times of great violence
Grant me wisdom
As everything around me burns in ignorance
Let the cold blues
Be tempered with warm reds
Let me juggle life’s fortunes and misfortunes alike
Red balls over blue balls
Yellow, purple, and green
Over and under
The spiraling path
I’ll keep written records
In journals with pictures
And share my discoveries
With any who’ll listen
And I’ll always keep close in my heart
The people and places and memories
That mattered and shattered
The whole color wheel
Because Shakespeare once showed us the whole color wheel
Is necessary for magic to form on the page
And though yellow is also a primary too
It’s the reds that warm life as the color of blood
And the blues let us chill as the deeper color of ice
But let there no period be
To stop the color progression
Of this warm/cold blank verse
Nor rhythm or rhyme sully
The Reds and the Blues
Thanksgiving 2023
Today was another holiday spent alone. My mother-in-law is dying in San Antonio, so all those who could travel that far in my family went there. The dog and I are alone at least until Friday. And both of us are ill. I have a urinary tract infection that I managed to catch early enough to get in to see the doctor on Tuesday. Sulfa drugs for Thanksgiving dinner. The dog is also old and ill. She still goes for a walk, but her stomach rebels and she sleeps more than ever before. At 13 she’s an old-lady dog in her unlucky year of life.
But those are expected complaints and worries. There are looming things ahead that concern me far more. The high-heat heatwave of this summer, more than two weeks at 108 degrees Fahrenheit or more, was another thing like Covid that probably should’ve killed me. We survived as the air conditioners in the house all held on and the electric grid did not fail at fatal junctures. That kind of luck is not going to continue for long in preserving me. I did not die in the extreme cold. I did not die of Covid. I did not die of extreme heat. The government did not fail as a result of any of these unprecedented things. The food-production capacity of the midwest, where my family still owns a farm, did not fail either, in spite of drought and stormy weather. None of these instances of good luck saving our proverbial bacon can still be counted on the next time it comes up.
I am determined to vote for the good guys if I survive until November of 2024. But I fear the proto-fascist Mango Hitler, Donald Trump, is going to win the presidency again. Greedy-rich bloodsuckers who get tax breaks beyond the dreams of avarice support him financially and have so far prevented him from being executed for treason, murder, and malfeasance. Life will be even more of a hellscape than it was under his last reign of terror. And he will undo what little has been done to repair the world from climate crisis. If his election happens again, the planet will not survive as a living organism.
So, what am I actually thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day?
Hope is not yet gone. I may not live for very much longer, but the life I have lived has been richly satisfying, though ultimately not an easy ride. And if I can still complain about all these increasingly horrible problems, it means I can also still do things to keep hope alive.
Filed under Uncategorized
Messing Around
Two sisters and their little dog too. Not only were they not supposed to have their dog at the mall, they were supposed to wear shoes indoors too. Needless to say, they got sent home.
At home, the sisters could go as naked as they wanted to. Of course, their other dog, the girl dog, decided to get between them and be naked too.
Sammy took this selfie with his phone at the beach. His Mom suggested that maybe he was trying to take a photo of something more than his own sassy face.
Ariel’s Blue Fairy is rather tiny, but she’s really powerful when using taxidermy-duck magic. Okay, a taxidermy duck is not that great when you wished for a soft pillow.
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Affirmation
You are a wonderful person,
And this is my message to you,
Whether or not you believe it,
I want you to know this is true.
All people in their own way are special,
And you are the very best you.
Filed under announcement, healing, poem
Fishing For Answers
We are headed for massively tough times. Billions will die as a result of how the climate crisis will change the entire planet. Today I learned that the colonization of Mars and even the Moon is something that takes far more time than we have. And it is not the utopian answer some science fictionists tend to offer. We have to master living in fishbowls, contained environments, and terrarium-type reverse aquariums.
I am brainstorming my own survivalist fiction now thinking not about life in space, but about life in reverse aquariums… underwater at the bottom of the oceans.
Of course, to do this, we have a number of problems to overcome… yesterday. The oceans are turning to acid which is generally inhospitable to life… and to the things we would have to build underwater to survive. We don’t want those things to dissolve. So a massive effort at deacidification needs to be already underway. As large areas of land will be covered with water, there will need to be industrial-sized efforts to desalinate ocean water to create fresh water to sustain not only us but also all the non-salt-water breathing things we take with us under the waves. And living in fishbowls under the sea will take a concerted effort to compensate for the pressures experienced underneath tons and tons of water.
The technology already exists to build underwater domed cities, safe from surface weather. And it may soon be the only safe place to build. The problem is that we are way behind in building such habitats.
And we would have to adapt undersea farming, raising food fish, edible seaweed, and surface plants in bubble farms at the bottom of the ocean growing vegetables under artificial sun sources. Underwater tramsportation would need to be inserted; tube trains, submersibles, pressurized undersea suits, and amphibious vehicles that can transition from underwater travel to surface sailing and even land roving.
Our society would undergo significant changes as culture and behavior have to become sea centered.
So, there you have it. Sufficient notes to begin contemplating the science fiction stories of nautical life in the great undersea of a climate-disaster future.
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Thinking About Another Birthday
I was born in a blizzard during the middle of the 1950’s. Dwight Eisenhower was President of the United States. John F. Kennedy had written the book Profiles in Courage. Elvis Presley was pushing Rock and Roll to new heights. My father was a Korean War veteran who served in the Navy aboard aircraft carriers. My mother was a registered nurse. And all of that made me a Baby Boomer, a Midwestern child of the middle class, benefiting from Roosevelt’s New Deal, and more than a decade of economic boom, and I was in many ways truly blessed.
I think the Baby Boomer generation has a lot to answer for. As a group, we have not taken our blessings for what they truly are and selfishly did not give back as much as we were given. Self-sacrifice and service were considered unintelligent things to pursue. Wealth and power were the things universally pursued. And averting climate disaster fell within our power. And we didn’t do nothing to help the problem. We actively made matters worse.
Hopefully, however, we have more than our share of people who followed the kind of path I did. I chose teaching as the way to serve my society and my country. I put in over thirty years working with kids, teaching them to read and write and helping them to transform from children into young adults. And I did it in spite of the fact that investment culture and the drive to earn massive wealth tended to make people look down on teachers. We didn’t get the respect and the monetary rewards that we actually deserved. I don’t have to feel dissatisfied with my role. But I do regret the consequences we face because of it. If you denigrate teachers and education in general, you are going to raise a generation of stupid people.
So, let me give you what little wisdom I have gained in the struggle of my 67 years on this less-than-perfect planet.
The only wisdom I can offer that I am absolutely certain of is this, I am basically a fool muddling my way through the labyrinth the best way that I can. We are all fools. And those that don’t admit that do me the favor of proving there are bigger fools than me.
The former President of the United States number 45 is a criminal. Even a fool like me can see it. He needs to be removed and the people who have enabled him need to be voted out.
He may, however, survive it. He may even win another four years. After all, the foxes have been running the hen-house for years now. And the party in charge cheats at election time.
We may have flubbed our stewardship of the planet so badly that all life on Earth will be wiped out by atmospheric changes. Fossil fuel corporations have won a Pyrrhic victory.
But even if we have no future as a species, our lives have been valuable. Every child is born good and loving and worthy of love. And even though some are too soon taught evil ways or too soon robbed of their birthright, the story of the human race is a good one. We did great things. We took serious dilemmas and solved them. We wrote good morals, and more often than not, we finished writing the sentence of our lives correctly. We had a right to be here. And even if our collective candle flame goes out, the brief time that it was shining made the universe a brighter place.
I am a pessimist by nature. I don’t expect to survive until another birthday passes. I didn’t expect to reach this one alive. If I do, I have a right to be both pleased and amazed. I can make no promises for the future. But I do know this, everything in the past was worth it.
Catch a Falling Star 
A Frosty Full Moon in a Pink Dawn Sky
Under the Full Moon
The air is cold in the age of old.
We’re no longer brave, in the moonlight wave.
Day has ended, night impended,
And darkest dawn looms for the faun.
We cannot wake with a sudden shake.
Our sacred lore responds no more.
Silence abounds on the frosty ground.
And the final score has left us poor.
A more reasonable paragraph;
This is actually a 2019 post from before the pandemic. The creepy poetry, however, still applies.
I am not, at this writing, feeling very spry anymore. I substituted for an ESL teacher in Irving yesterday. I enjoyed it. But the frosty cold weather took its toll on me, as did the misbehavior of clownish 11th graders. I am left exhausted and thoroughly convinced that huge high school classes averaging thirty kids in them are not something I am well enough to deal with anymore. I probably need to decide against taking any future high school sub jobs. They make me deathly tired and inspire creepy poetry about mortality in me. Anyway, it caused me to do some picture-making, and some silly poetical complaining.
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