November 20, 2025 · 3:35 am

The Big Questions

I have now embarked on my seventieth year of life. I have had a thirty-one-year career as a public school teacher. I have been married for thirty years. I have three grown children. I wrote and published 25 books. You would think that as my life nears completion, I would have answers to some of the big questions. I do not. I do, however, know enough to ask them.

  1. Is mankind and his (or her) civilization going to survive?
  2. Will AI computer programs destroy us rather than help us?
  3. Will aliens a board 3I Atlas destroy us rather than help us?
  4. Will the massive caldera under Yellowstone Park explode as a super volcano and wipe out life in North America?
  5. Why are so many of the big questions about destruction and dying?
  6. Why is the Pumpkinhead President not dead or in prison yet?
  7. Why is art important, and why is my art a defining part of me?
  8. What comes next if the world does end?
  9. Why does any of this matter?

So, let me take a stab at some answers…

  1. Probably not. Humanity’s civilizations have broken apart or been destroyed before.
  2. AI programs are still fairly stupid, though smarter than certain American voter groups. If they kill us, it will be a side effect, not a goal.
  3. The alien things are almost too massive to be mere hoaxes. Science fiction movies suggest it will not end well.
  4. Skip this one for fear of not enough relevant details.
  5. Because old people think a lot about dying. No passes possible on this one.
  6. You’ve seen the smug smirk on his orange clown face. He’s too big of a criminal to get caught in the act.
  7. Art comes from the soul, and it makes it possible to shape your entire life and its meanings.
  8. A Vogon Insterstellar Bypass will be built.
  9. It probably doesn’t matter, and my answers are all wrong anyway.

There we go! Solved it!

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November 19, 2025 · 1:30 am

What Are You Reading, Mickey?

Well, I have a thing for collecting old books. This one is 100 years old. It is a modern edition, though, re-published in 2003.

Here’s my Goodreads review;

This book is an ancient treasure in many ways, being now more than 100 years old. The illustrations by John O’Neill, too, have a very antique charm. The book is a little short on plot. Dorothy wanders off from the Kansas farm, meets the hobo Shaggy Man, and Button Bright, one of the stupidest little boys in literature. They meet old friends along the way; Jack Pumpkinhead, H.M. Wogglebug T.E., the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, the Hungry Tiger, Tik Tok the mechanical man, Billina the Talking Yellow Chicken, and the living Sawhorse. And they all end the story at Princess Ozma”s birthday party where Santa Claus is the favorite guest. This is a potboiler novel for Baum, obviously written only because the readers all begged for it, and it has a lot in it to be enjoyed by true fans of Oz, but not much in the way of suspense or excitement. It can easily be summed up in the words of Button Bright, “I don’t know,” which he says in answer to every question.

I find the illustrations more compelling than the story itself, but I have to admit that the story itself is incredibly visual.

I love this book, even though I don’t respect it much as a storyteller myself. But it is the fourth Oz book I have read since childhood. And it isn’t because of the story. Frank L. Baum is a genius at creating loveable and memorable characters. And these illustrations are wonderful. The Shaggy Man with the head of a donkey? Absolutely fabulous! You can’t beat that. (Well, you can. But whether he’s a donkey or a man, it’s still a crime. )

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November 18, 2025 · 2:19 am

Blogging Advice

The only advice I am actually qualified to give here is… don’t take any blogging advice from me as worth more than diddly-squoot.

Life is like moose bowling because… In order to knock down all the pins, you have to learn how to throw a moose.

That being said, my blog views are going up amazingly this year.  I am followed by readers all over the world, and some of them actually read my blog regularly, rather than just looking at the pictures and occasionally hitting the like button.

I have not yet, however, learned to throw the moose.  I started this blog in order to promote my published writing.  I now have twenty-five published books available on Amazon.  I made $45.00 in royalties during 2025 so far.  So, as a marketing ploy, it has been a relative failure.

But as a tool in my writing life, here are some things I definitely count as benefits;

Writing a blog post every day makes the ideas flow more easily and does away with any threat of writer’s block.  I have also developed a backlog of good posts that I can repost to new viewers and readers.

Writing every day is practice and it makes me a better writer.

I have learned how to engage with an actual audience.

I am able to try out various writing ideas without worrying about success or failure.

So, all of these things add value and keep me at this blogging thing, which didn’t exist in my early life when I was planning to become a writer as I left teaching.

If you are tempted to make the huge mistake of following my advice and emulating me, I would warn you, I do not make a living as a writer, and I never will.  I am a writer in the same way I am a diabetic.  I can’t help it.  I wouldn’t change it even if it were possible.  I have a body of work that I intend to continue to build up until I am no more.  The creation of it is a necessity of my existence.  And I certainly don’t regret a single syllable, though what happens to it when I am gone is not important to me in any way that matters.  I hope my children will keep it as a legacy, but I only do it because it shapes the story of my life.

And so, I continue to throw meese (or mooses… or moosi… or whatever the hell the funniest plural of “moose” is) and continue not knocking down any pins.

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November 17, 2025 · 12:32 am

69… Begin the Climb

It is not the final destination. It is the possibility inherent in the joy of the journey.

I was born in 1456, 569 years ago.

Some may think a life that long is too long.

Some few may think even that it is not long enough.

I think you live what you live and see it as what is right.

There are no accidents or random outcomes.

Being is what is meant to be.

God does not play dice with the universe.

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November 16, 2025 · 1:16 am

Hidden Kingdom (Chapter 1 Complete)

Chapter 1

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November 15, 2025 · 1:01 am

Winsor McCay

One work of comic strip art stands alone as having earned the artist, Winsor McCay, a full-fledged exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  Little Nemo in Slumberland is a one-of-a-kind achievement in fantasy art.

Winsor McCay lived from his birth in Michigan in 1869 to his finale in Brooklyn in 1934.  In that time he created volumes full of his fine-art pages of full-page color newspaper cartoons, most in the four-color process.  

The New Year’s page 1909

As a boy, he pursued art from very early on, before he was twenty creating paintings turned into advertising and circus posters.  He spent his early manhood doing amazingly detailed half-page political cartoons built around the editorials of Arthur Brisbane,  He then became a staff artist for the Cincinnati Times Star Newspaper, illustrating fires, accidents, meetings, and notable events.  He worked in the newspaper business with American artists like Winslow Homer and Frederick Remington who also developed their art skills through newspaper illustration.  He moved into newspaper comics with numerous series strips that included Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland.  And he followed that massive amount of work up by becoming the “Father of the Animated Cartoon” with Gertie the Dinosaur, with whom he toured the US giving public performances as illustrated in the silent film below; 

The truly amazing thing about his great volume of work was the intricate detail of every single panel and page.  It represents a fantastic amount of work hours poured into the creation of art with an intense love of drawing.  You can see in the many pages of Little Nemo how great he was as a draftsman, doing architectural renderings that rivaled any gifted architect.  His fantasy artwork rendered the totally unbelievable and the creatively absurd in ways that made them completely believable.

I bought my copy of Nostalgia Press’s Little Nemo collection in the middle 70’s and have studied it more than the Bible in the intervening years.  Winsor McCay taught me many art tricks and design flourishes that I still copy and steal to this very day.

No amount of negative criticism could ever change my faith in the talents of McCay.  But since I have never seen a harsh word written against him, I have to think that problem will never come up.

My only regret is that the wonders of Winsor McCay, being over a hundred years old, will not be appreciated by a more modern generation to whom these glorious cartoon artworks are not generally available. 

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November 14, 2025 · 2:01 am

Elsie the Cow

I was a boy back when the milk man still came around in his blue-and-white panel truck delivering bottles of milk with Elsie the Cow on them.  I don’t remember clearly because I was only 4 years old back when I first became aware of being a boy in this world instead of being something else living somewhere else.

There were many things I didn’t know or understand back then.  But one thing I did know was that I loved Elsie the Cow.  And why would a farm boy love a cartoon cow?  There were many not-so-sensible reasons.

For one thing, Elsie the Cow reminded me of June Lockhart, Lassie’s mom, and the mom from Lost in Space.

Lassie’s Mom, June Lockhart


 It may be that June Lockhart’s eyes reminded me of Elsie’s, being large, soulful eyes with long black eyelashes.  It may be that she starred in a TV commercial for Borden’s milk in which Elsie winked at me at the end of the commercial.

Or maybe it was because Elsie had calves and was a mom.  And June Lockhart was Lassie’s mom and the mom of Will Robinson, so I associated both of them with my mom, and thus with each other.

      Elsie gave you milk to drink and always took care of you that way.  Milk was good for you, after all.  My own mom was a registered nurse.  So they were alike in that way, too.

And she was constantly defending you against the bulls in your life.  She stood up to Elmer to protect her daughter more than once.  Of course, her son was usually guilty of whatever he was accused of, but she still loved him and kept Elmer from making his “hamburger” threats a reality.

And you can see in numerous ad illustrations that Elsie’s family were basically nudists.  Although she often wore an apron, she was bare otherwise.  And though her daughter often wore skirts and her son wore shorts, Elmer was always naked.  And that didn’t surprise me, because no cow I knew from the farm wore clothes either.  From very early in my life I was always fascinated by nakedness, and I would’ve become a nudist as a youngster if it hadn’t been soundly discouraged by family and society in general.

Proof that Elsie’s family lived the nude life.

Puppets from a Borden’s commercial

So there are many reasons why I have always loved Elsie the Cow.  And it all boils down to the love of drinking milk and that appealing cartoon character who constantly asks you to drink more.

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November 13, 2025 · 2:09 am

Why I am full of Art

I started drawing with crayons and pencils sometime before I was five. I started telling stories around age seven and thoroughly scared my sisters and girl cousins. I became an exiled alien living in secret on Earth in second grade. I won an art contest in my fourth-grade class during fire-prevention week. That got me interviewed on television by Channel 3, KGLO TV from Mason City. From a very early age, I was a sponge, soaking up colors and shapes and weird connections, beautiful things, scary things, and taxidermied jackalopes that cost twenty-five cents to look at. And it filled me up to overflowing and spilled out on drawing paper and took up most of the pages of the spiral notebooks I was supposed to be using for school.

What came out of me was art.

I can’t claim to be a professional artist. I have to admit that most of the money I have made in life was earned by being a school teacher, babysitting in the monkey house and taming other people’s house apes for over three decades. I may have sold a hundred books as an author, but less than two hundred. I have never made a dime just for drawing or painting and making visual art pictures. Any art published in media by me has been for nothing more than exposure to the publication’s audience. So, can I truly claim to be an artist?

My entire life has been lived for art. I became one of the world’s all-time worst poets. I became one of the’ best story-tellers that nobody ever reads. And I enthralled over two thousand kiddoes as a teacher who told stories and intentionally made kiddoes laugh in class and try to tell stories themselves.

Why am I full of art? That’s what I WAS BORN TO BE.

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November 12, 2025 · 1:40 am

Reboot as Needed

So, my new life in Iowa is going slowly. Unable to drive a car. Unable to stay in writer mode for more than a few minutes at a time. I am basically just getting by. Paying bills on time. Staying alive one day at a time. Reposting old posts on WordPress most of the time instead of writing new ones.

We have gotten snow on the ground since Saturday. You can see it is going away. The snow is sublimating, going from snow crystals to water vapor in the afternoon sun. This picture of the actual yard and snowy cornfields beyond is what I used AI tools on to make the first Paffooney in this post.

None of the planned novel writing I meant to do has started. I have been drawing and playing with digital art tools, but even that has its arthritic limitations, and it takes AI manipulations to make the junk into gems.

I made this snowy butterfly gem while my sister was working on making holiday Christmas wreaths at Butch Aldrich’s Christmas Tree farm. I haven’t told her about seeing the ghost again, nor what the ghost told me, if ghosts are real and really do have telepathic abilities. The ghost could be lying.

I have been seeing things that aren’t really there a lot recently. Grandpa Aldrich’s black cat, Midnight, hopped up on the bed two weeks ago, though Midnight died at twenty-two years of age more than twenty years ago. If ghosts are real, he still prowls and protects the farm house in a spiritual sense.

Two nights ago I fell asleep in the easy chair while watching TV with my sister. I awoke with a start. An old woman with gray hair in a bun was shaking my right arm and asking, “Are you alright?” I realized with a sudden shock that it wasn’t my sister, Nancy. And as I realized it, she dissolved right before my eyes. That same night, I got up in the middle of the night, went out to the kitchen, and suddenly saw the same old woman standing over the ironing board that Nancy had left set up in the dining room. She was holding an old flat iron of the kind you heat up on the wood-burning stove before using, like Great Grandma Hinckley had shown me about sixty years ago. She was looking at me. Not moving. And fading away into nothing as I watched her with my mouth hanging open. That might’ve been a dream, but an extremely vivid one.

And last night I saw her again through the open bathroom door as she stood in the living room. She told me without opening or moving her mouth, “Don’t be afraid. I am watching over you. You are family. I love you though you were born after I passed on.”

I know it could’ve been another dream. It was more likely the onset of Parkinson’s Disease. Hallucinations are a symptom of that disease. It is how I rationalize seeing the ghosts of the ghot dog in Carrollton, and the ghost of my late dog, Jade before I moved to Iowa. But more intriguing is the notion that it is someone who lived and died in this house, my Great Grandma Emily Brannen, Grandpa Aldrich’s mother. That notion is more appealing than Parkinson’s or dementia.

Sometimes when you get to be moldy old and decomposing you have to stop and have a rethink about the meaning of certain things. You have to let the computer in your head reset, reboot, and download the various needed patches in the old software. It is the only way to move forward and get things done.

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November 11, 2025 · 1:53 am

Giving and Taking Stupid Advice

Let’s begin with some stupid advice. I don’t have time to write a lot today because the Princess is ill and must go see the doctor in Plano.  So the advice is; Set aside time for writing and always allow plenty of time for it.  You will probably notice already that I am giving you advice that I am not taking myself this morning.  So don’t follow that advice.  It is stupid advice.  I have given it to creative writing classes for years and thought I meant it.  But looking back on real life, I realize, it has never been true for me.  My best ideas, my best writing, always seem to come in the middle of the pressure-cooker of daily struggle and strife.  I have battled serious illness for most of my adult life.  I have the luck of a man who tried to avoid letting a black cat cross his path by crashing his bicycle at the top of a hill covered in clover with only three leaves each and then rolling down the hill, under a ladder, and crashing into a doorpost which knocks the horseshoe off the top.  The horseshoe lands on my stupid head with the “U” facing downward so the luck all drains out.  Bad things happen to me all the time.  But it makes for good writing.  Tell me you didn’t at least smile at the picture I just painted in your mind.  You might’ve even been unable to suppress a chuckle.  I am under time pressure and misfortune pressure and the need to rearrange my entire daily schedule.  So it is the perfect time to write.

Val in the Yard

This essay, however, is about bad advice.  And I am a perfect person to rely on as a resource for bad advice.  I am full of it.  Of course, I mean I am full of bad advice, not that other thing we think of when someone tells me I am “Full of it!”  So here’s another bit of writing advice that is probably completely wrong and a bad idea to take without a grain of salt, or at least a doctor’s prescription.   You should stop bird-walking in your essay and get to the damn point!

 I know a lot about the subject of depression.  When I was a teenager, I came very close to suicide.  I experienced tidal waves of self-loathing and black-enveloping blankets of depression for reasons that I didn’t understand until I realized later in life that it all came from being a child-victim of sexual assault.  Somehow I muddled through and managed to self-medicate with journal writing and fantasy-fixations, thus avoiding a potentially serious alcohol or drug problem.  This is connected to my main idea, despite the fact that I am obviously not following the no bird-walking advice.  You see, with depression, Bad advice can kill you.  Seriously, people want to tell you to just, “Get over it!  Stop moping about and get on with life.  It isn’t real.  You are just being lazy.”

I have been on the inside of depression and I know for a fact that not taking it seriously can be deadly.  In fact, I have faced suicidal depression not only in myself, but in several former students and even my own children.  I have spent time in emergency rooms, mental hospitals, and therapists offices when I wasn’t myself the depression sufferer.  One of my high school classmates and one of my former students lost their battles and now are no longer among the living.  (Sorry, have to take a moment for tears again.)  But I learned how to help a depression sufferer.  You have to talk to them and make them listen at least to the part where you say, “I have been through this myself.  Don’t give in to it.  You can survive if you fight back.  And whatever you have to do, I will be right here for you.  You can talk to me about anything.  I will listen.  And I won’t try to give you any advice.”  Of course, after you say that to them, you do not leave them alone.  You stay by them and protect them from themselves, or make sure somebody that will do the same for them stays with them.  So far, that last bit of advice has worked for me.  But the fight can be life-long.  And it is a critical battle.

So taking advice from others is always an adventure.  Red pill?  Green pill?  Poison pill?  Which will you take?  I can’t decide for you.  Any advice I give you would probably just be stupid advice.  You have to weigh the evidence and decide for yourself.  What does this stupid essay even mean?  Isn’t it just a pile of stupid advice?  A concluding paragraph should tell you the answer if it can.  But, I fear, there is no answer this time.

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