Can you tell who it is that I am trying to draw a picture of? I’ll give you a hint… movie star who also dances. Not Ray Bolger, not Tom Holland, not Hugh Jackman… but may have been a costar with two of those three. Guesses will be answered in the comments. If no one knows, my apology for bad portraiture will be found there.
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One of the things I discovered by relentlessly playing outer-space D & D is the unique setting for fiction presented by the basic interstellar starship. Here you have a cookie-cutter setting with a basic set of requirements that can’t really change. It takes the crew as the primary cast from one possible site of adventure to the next, offering a complete barrier to carry-over conflicts and interactions, and also providing a setting for forced internal conflicts that can have profound story consequences.
Starships are an enclosed environment where you cannot simply run away from your troubles. Especially when you are alone aboard with a hungry flesh-eating alien and surrounded by empty, airless, interstellar space. You have to confront both inner and outer demons face to face. There is no mileage available to put between you.
It has a certain set of requirements for who is on board and available to be hero friends or friends turned adversary. There must be a pilot. Somebody has to know how to drive the thing. There must be an engineer. Somebody needs to be able to fix things and keep things running. Somebody needs to know how to manage food and drinking water and the general odor of this enclosed place. That last is a position that is too often overlooked in movies and science fiction novels. Scotty cannot be expected to clean the toilets on the Enterprise. And somebody needs to be in charge.
Express boats in Traveller are one-man-crew affairs, basically in the service of carrying information between the stars, an interstellar postal truck of sorts. These can be the setting of man-versus-himself sorts of conflicts. If starships are in our future, and it is obvious with global warming we don’t have a future without them, then we are going to have to confront the concept of living with boredom. Boredom can become mindless or it can become raving insanity. This is why, in my Traveller games the X-boats all carried the current favorites among episodes of I Love Lucy reruns. Aliens have been watching that stuff for years now in real life. It will one day be a galaxy favorite.
Starships are also filled with a fascinating complexity. There will be times when there is no gravity so up and down can become irrelevant. If the heat goes out, deep space can freeze you solid. If you go outside, you need a space suit so you don’t blow up from your own internal pressure suddenly released in a pressure-free environment. And you have no air outside the spaceship. James Holden’s favorite coffee maker could malfunction and foul the air with poisons from burned plastic, causing a serious problem-solving situation that could result in you needing to get really, really, a thousand times really good at holding your breath.
And, of course, there is the obvious conflict of meeting another starship with lasers and meson cannons and nuclear missiles all controlled by a captain who is a homicidal maniac and knows your sister and really, really wants to get revenge on her whole family for what she said about his zilfinbarger back on Metebelius III.
So, as a role-playing gamer, and as a creator of science fiction, I really, really love starships. I will probably talk about them a time or too more until it gets really, really annoying… almost as annoying as the whole “really, really” thing.
Veterans day is here again. It means something different now that my son is a Marine. It was always a solemn and somber occasion in the past. My great uncle on my father’s side died in World War II, a training accident inside a Navy gun turret. My great uncle on my mother’s side was part of the second wave on the beach in Normandy. He was injured by a German grenade and moderately disabled for the rest of his life. I never got to hear war stories. He was too damaged to ever talk about anything that happened in the war. My mother’s cousin was flying a plane in the Viet Nam Conflict. It went up, and didn’t come down again. You think of those things, and wish it could be different. You pray that it will be different for your son who is a soldier.
But when the worst that can happen comes to pass… there are no regrets. Whatever future we have is rooted in the past. Pain and suffering are difficult to manage, but when you manage them, it leaves you stronger… better as a person than you were before. So I don’t take anything for granted. I was not a warrior in this life. I was a teacher, a story-teller. And I made some mistakes along the way. I have lost some whom I cared about very deeply. Ruben, Fernando, and J.J. are all gone tragically. I will always feel I should have done more to help them when they were boys and needed help. Miraculously with the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq I have lost no former students to war, though many of mine have fought. I pray that my luck continues to hold.
But there are no regrets. And “you can listen as well as you hear”, so listen to this. I love you.
Yes, I am talking to sons and daughters, to former students, to former colleagues, to everyone I have ever known. And even if I don’t know you, never met you, even if you never get a chance to hear this message… I am talking to you also. We are all one. We all live and love and strive together, and even if we disagree to the point of war… we still belong to each other. Thank you for being you. You needed to hear that at least as much as I needed to say it.
My son is coming home on leave for Thanksgiving. I will be giving thanks.
Filed under commentary, healing, insight, Paffooney, sharing from YouTube
I have been drawing a plethora of pictures on my cell phone using the apps cited above, an electronic stylus, and every editing feature the phone’s gallery and Google Photos can provide me. My arthritic hands are making the pencil and pen methods I have used forever far too time-consuming and permanently flub-filled. And I am trying to do as much art as possible before the end of everything which I increasingly fear is coming for me soon.
I am not using the new AI art stuff the way others are using it. I am not telling the AI to make a picture for me according to my written description. I can’t do artwork with that little control. What I do actually undertake is the redrawing of many of the pictures I have already done in pen and ink and colored pencil. I retrace the work the best I can. Mistakes can be undone with one click. I redo the colors, shading, and details using the functions of the drawing app. In the end, I use the AI Mirror to edit it, blending the colors better than my color-blind eyes can manage unaided and giving it that anime/manga style that is recognizably different than my original style.
Digitally redone. I let the AI have its way with the contents of the quilt box since the AI couldn’t figure out the structure of a crazy quilt. It decided that the things in the box were fancy gift boxes with an unreadable brand name. (The AI will not risk violating any real trademark or logo.)
I admit to being overly obsessed with drawing girls and girls’ faces… and maybe belly buttons. But I am a lonely old man spending lots of time in bed doing little but waiting for death to find me. The Grim Reaper is still trying to beat me at chess. I thought he would win with game with Covid’s help in 2020. The heat was probably going to be the death of me this last summer, but Grimmy couldn’t figure out how to attack the King’s Indian Defense I learned from Bobby Fischer in an article in Boy’s Life magazine in the early 70s.
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“Mickey, why can’t you be more serious the way smart people are?”
“Well, now, my dear, I think I take humor very seriously.”
“How can you say that? You never seem to be serious for more than a few seconds in a row.”
“I can say it in a high, squeaky, falsetto voice so I sound like Mickey Mouse.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“I can also burp it… well, maybe not so much since I was in junior high.”
“I distinctly remember getting in trouble in Mrs. Mennenga’s third grade class in school for pantomiming pulling my beating heart out of my chest and accidentally dropping it on the floor. She lectured me about being more studious. But I made Alicia sitting in the row beside me laugh. It was all worth it. And the teacher was right. I don’t remember anything from the lesson on adding fractions we were supposed to be doing. But I remember that laugh. It is one precious piece of the golden treasure I put in the treasure chest of memories I keep stored in my heart.”
“I always listened to the words Groucho Marx was saying, even though he said them awfully fast and sneaky-like. I listened to the words. Other characters didn’t seem to listen to him. He didn’t seem to listen to them. Yet, how could he respond like he did if he really wasn’t listening? In his answers were always golden bits of wisdom. Other people laughed at his jokes when the laugh track told them to. I laughed when I understood the wisdom.”
“Laughing is a way of showing understanding. Laughing is a way of making yourself feel good. Laughing is good for your brain and your heart and your soul. So, I want to laugh more. I need to laugh more. I love to laugh.”
Ask yourself, “Why does anybody want to be a writer?”
It is not an easy thing to answer. Writing is hard. It tears at the edges of your mind until it leaves sores, infections, and permanent damage. Well, those of us who rewrite ourselves because of childhood trauma suffer from that anyway. And every horror and gut-twister and tear-jerker that you have written about haunts you again with every reread, proofread, secondary reread, and final edit. Unless, somehow, you don’t do those steps and it turns up real writing instead of horse-turd fertilizer by some minor but repeatable miracle. There are writers like that. They write about sparkly vampires and Mr. Gray’s sex dungeon.
I’m one of those writers who spuriously claims that I write because I have to. And that is not right either, I write because I HAVE TO!!! (IN ALL CAPS AND 3 EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!)
As a lifelong avid reader, I have read so many other people’s lives… so many other people’s stories, that I have lived a thousand lives and learned so much from each that it is my duty to put pencil and paper together to tell the tales that only I can write… or draw pictures of.
I am the man from the setting sun. I come from the future to deliver the past. -by Mickey
Whatever the hell that means, I have to say it. My writing may never get really read and understood because the world may come to an end too soon for anything I write to ever endure. And yet, the key to everything… to the survival of the human species… of life on Earth… may be buried somewhere in one of my ridiculous books. I may be the one to give ultimate meaning to everything that is or ever was on this little blue marble in the middle of all time and all space. Or maybe in one of the ridiculous plays by the man (whoever he really was) who wrote the works of William Shakespeare. It doesn’t matter who really wrote it. That key is out there somewhere. And it changes everything if found and understood.
So, the reasons I must write have to do with the philosophical horse-doo-doo that the Existentialists taught us. That nothing means anything… until we give it meaning. Even this sentence I write here and now means nothing unless I give it meaning. This is what we need writers for. To make everything mean something. It is a sacred duty.
I must make you laugh a little, cry a little, and feel a lot of fundamental things. And you must do that too if you are meant to be a writer. Believe me, it is the only gift God gives a man that is also a lifelong curse.
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**This is a repost of my prediction from 11/2/2016 that Trump would win the presidency in 2016, posted again because Pogo and I are concerned he is on track to do it again from prison in 2024.
Yessir, the Cubs have a chance to win their first World Series since 1908 tonight. They have not won the title since Tinker to Evers to Chance was the double-play combo of poetic proportions. They have never won in my lifetime, and I am quite old. So, there is proof positive the world is about to end.
Yes, I can even describe the mechanics of the thing. Donald Trump will be elected President of the United States thanks to Mr. Comey’s timely reveal of more scandalous emails that he has not read and chuckled about yet. You know, the ones that he couldn’t have actually read yet because they come from potential pedophile Anthony Weiner’s computer, and he had to have a separate warrant from a judge to read anything that may have to do with Hillary, even though probably none of them contain nude pictures from Hillary, and she probably didn’t even write those emails. The world had to know about that right before the election, especially members of the Republican House Committee for examining Hillary’s every boo-boo. So, the Donald will win, because nobody is doing any press conferences on the FBI investigation on his ties to the Russian government through the biggest bank in Russia. ‘Taint important, Pogo.
And once the great orange pumpkin-head is our next president, our health care will no longer be under the misguided protection of Obamacare. Instead, it will will be taken care of by “something terrific” that will make high profits for somebody, and make certain that I will never be able to pay another medical bill (since those who are deceased rarely do).
And, of course, President Pompadoodle will be able to declare that we no longer have to believe in the climate change hoax. The result being that we will soon be able to buy beachfront property in Iowa and Missouri, be able to purchase our breathable air in factory-made brick-form, and possibly grow a helpful third eye from the mutating effects of nuclear radiation.
And, lastly, I would like to thank the late great Walt Kelly for illustrating today’s post. One wonders how a cartoonist can look so far ahead from the 1960’s to do such a fine job of illustrating the problems of 2016? Will miracles never cease? I mean, really, we could probably do with a few less of these industrial grade miracles made out of recycled elephant poop.
I have just finished reading a wonderful book. It is a young adult novel bordering on being a children’s book. It won the 2014 Newbery Medal for best work of children’s literature. But it is a book of so many dimensions that it totally defies categories. Librarians with butterfly nets who want to pin this book down on their library shelves will be pointlessly waving their nets at it like they believe it’s a butterfly, but it will soar away from them like an eagle.
Flora & Ulysses (the Illuminated Adventures) is a combination book of many different things. G. K. Cambell’s cartoony paffoonies add to and amplify the story to the point that sometimes it becomes a graphic novel.
Flora herself is a comic-book lover and follower of the adventures of a comic-book superhero named Incandesto. Ulysses the squirrel is run over by a rogue vacuum cleaner and the accident graces him with super powers (the ability to fly and throw cats and write poetry). And Flora rescues and befriends this newly minted superhero and sets him on a path that pits him against the only super-villain available, Flora’s own mother.
At certain points, through metaphor, elegance, and supreme focus, the story itself becomes poetry. But, of course, when the poem ends with a line about the squirrel being hungry, it becomes humorous poetry, simply by the juxtaposition of the sublime with the ridiculous.
As a writer, Kate DiCamillo is a master of everything I want to be. She is as much a masterful story-teller as Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, or William Faulkner. But many people will be put off by the fact that she is a children’s author. They will ignore her stories because how could a children’s author affect their lives in any way? But if you are a reader who can think and feel about things in a book, she will make you laugh and make you cry and make you not afraid to die… for love of a good book.
Let me also suggest a few of her other wonderful, wonderful books;
Filed under book reports, book review, commentary, good books, humor, metaphor, poetry, reading
This is a repost from 2016, the beginnings of terrible times under a pumpkinhead president.
The Trumpkins and Trolls won the battle and are now busy eating their prisoners… along with the puppies and kittens for dessert. And as far as I can see, the war is over. We had a chance with the Paris Climate Accords to repair the damage to the life of this planet, even though it was a very eleventh-hour plan to avert the end of life on Earth. The Trolls and Trumpkins are peeing on that fence too, shorting it out and preventing it from saving us from being eaten by the heat-wolves of corporate polluters.
I myself wasn’t expecting to live through another decade in any case, but now, I fear the lives of my children and grandchildren will be cut short as well. You can’t poop where you eat on a regular basis and expect not to get sick and die. I predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series because they stole key talent from the Cardinals and had a young, rising club to add them to. I got that one right. I predicted that Trump would win the presidency because I know a lot of the Trump-voter kind of former middle-class white people who are seriously in financial and existential pain, and I knew who they were going to blame it on. If I am right about this last thing too, then we are all doomed. 
“Jeez, Mickey! You don’t call that humor, do you?”
Well, I guess I do, because humor comes from being able to laugh at the darkness and make fun of the dumpy-lumpy lumbering bears of bad fortune that are about to eat you. We are going to have a laugh or two before the end at the expense of Trumpkins and Trolls because they make world-shaking decisions based on faith in false facts. The irony and stupidity of it all is a very laughable absurdity that will build BS mountains taller than Everest. And those mountains will collapse upon them, burying them in poop. Never mind that we will also be buried. They brought it on themselves by the choices they made. Seeing them get their comeuppance has to be worth a laugh or two.
I have pretty much let Will Rogers speak to this current election result through the memes I have chosen to accompany this gloomy-doomy essay. I think it is significant that wisdom from a hundred years ago still applies so completely to the politics of today. With democracy and elections we get what we deserve… not what we want. We need to change to face the future, if we even get to have one. But the past clearly shows that we haven’t learned our lessons very well. I guess there’s nothing left to do but laugh about it… and try to love each other a little better before the bitter end.
Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, irony, Liberal ideas, politics, self pity
Catch a Falling Star 
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.
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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Filed under artwork, autobiography, battling depression, commentary, compassion, Depression, empathy, healing, insight, Paffooney, sharing from YouTube, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as depression, writing advice