August 10, 2023 · 1:22 am

Books That Make You Hurt

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Yes, I read this book.  Yes, it scared the poop out of me.  Yes, it made me cry.  This is a uniquely horrific horror story that is so realistic that you know that it has actually happened in real life somewhere, sometime.  Only the names of the characters would be different.

I have a deep abiding respect for Richard Peck as a writer.  He earned that with his books A Year Down Yonder and A Long Way from Chicago.  Those books made me laugh so hard it blew chocolate milk out of my nose.  And, yes, I was drinking chocolate milk at the time.  They are so realistic because the people in those stories are real people.  I know those people personally.  Of course, they have different names in real life.

But Are You In the House Alone? is a very different book from those other two masterpieces.  It tears your heart out and eats your liver because it is a first person narrative in the voice of a high school girl being stalked by a sexual predator.  Everything that happens to Gail in the high school, at home, and at the house where she babysits is hyper-real with horror movie levels of attention to detail.  I don’t wish to be a spoiler for this well-written book, but the narrator does not die in the book and it definitely does not have a happy ending.  For anyone who has the amount of empathy I do, and in many ways becomes the narrator-character by reading, reading a book like this can physically hurt.  A teacher like me has lived through horrible things like this happening to students before, it even happened to me as a boy, and it adds the slings and arrows of those things being re-lived as you read.

This is not the only book that has ever done this sort of damage to my heart strings.  I remember the pain from the conclusion of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop.  You root for Little Nell and boo Daniel Quilp.  But the bad guy wins.  No happy ending can linger in the harp-strings of your memory-feeling song as long as a tragic outcome does.  I was there with Scout in that ridiculous costume in the dark when Bob Ewell was attacking her brother Jem in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  That story was filled with wise and laughable things, but the stark horror of that climactic moment nearly wiped all the good feelings away, if not for the heroics of ghostly Boo Radley whose timely intervention brings it all back before the novel ends.  It horrifies me to admit it, but I was there, too, in the moment when the boys all turn on Simon on the beach with their sharpened sticks in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  They mistook him for the monster.  I still haven’t fully recovered from that reading trauma.

The thing about books that hurt to read which makes it essential that I never try to avoid them, is that they can add more depth and resonance to your soul than any light and fluffy piece ever could.  Life is much more like Lord of the Flies than it is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  I am sadder but wiser for having read Are You In the House Alone?  I am recommending it to other readers like me who don’t so much live to read as they read in order to live.  Not because it is easy and good to read, but because it is hard and essential to read.  It will hurt you.  But it will leave you like it leaves its narrator, damaged, but both alive and purely resolved to carry on.

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August 10, 2023 · 1:19 am

As If It Weren’t Enough…

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THE WISDOM OF THE LITTLE FOOL

A fool can’t really sum up all of life in a sentence.

But a fool tries.

A fool can’t really say something in immortal words.

Because a fool dies.

A fool can’t really do the job of the wise.

But never-the-less, the fool applies.

But a fool can write a really dumb poem,

And let it sit to draw some flies.

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August 9, 2023 · 12:39 am

Uncle Michael, Why Is There Tinfoil On Your Head?

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The impact of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination was decisive for me.

Why-ever would a relatively rational and aware intellectual embrace the idea that human society is based on lies and the truth lies buried out there?  In my case, I would claim it is because I am relatively goofy and prone to believing things because I am wholly deceived by a core belief that all human beings are by nature good, and have to be taught to be evil.
But while I have a misguided misconception about the goodness of people, I also have a dark side… a faith in my own ability to dig into facts and controversies and make sense of them with powers of reason.  My world changed forever in 1963, when I was seven years old.  I have never forgotten how wrenching the assassination was to my Iowan family and Iowegian friends.  I remember how the world can be turned upside down and feelings of love and security can be totally usurped by fear and irrational feelings.  You have an innate desire to believe the grownups will put things right again and the world can go on as before.  Accept what the authorities say, and all will be just as it was.

I don’t know if you are aware of this or not, but E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglar and CIA dirty-tricks operator confessed to the part the government played in the death of JFK.  He died shortly there-after.  About the only benefits he could get from telling this story was a conscience that would have been about one per cent less black and horrible as he died.  There are numerous ways to cast doubt on this deathbed confession, but as you follow and research each line of evidence about what Hunt says, you find that far more of these details are accurate than there are details that seem slightly questionable.  I know that in the conspiracy world that “if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it’s probably an ostrich”.  But the one thing conspiracy theorists say that gives support to their position is, “You can do the research for yourself.”

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So why, if it is so clear that the CIA, FBI, and LBJ got together to kill Kennedy for a variety of nefarious reasons, is the information not common knowledge and plastered all over the headlines in every major newspaper?   Well, the Inquirer and its ilk are a big part of the reason.  Sensationalist journalism is not above making stuff up and distorting what is real.  It leads my relatives and friends to think I am so convinced about the guilt of the CIA, FBI, and LBJ only because those letters keep coming up on my word tray during Scrabble games.  I do actually cross-reference things and look for books and articles that have verifiable footnotes.  I am always more convinced by things stated by writers who source their details.

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Jim Marrs, the author of Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, offers detailed notations on his research and interviews numerous sources on YouTube.

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This red-faced bozo only offers the research of others, and often distorts it when he uses it.

So, when you look at these things with a rational and thoroughly inquisitive mind, you begin to find a number of things about Roswell, 9/11, and Elvis faking his death that are quite unnerving and threaten your cherished worldview.  I continue to put tinfoil on my head to protect me from alien mind-reading powers because… Dang!  Some of that crap is TRUE!

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August 9, 2023 · 12:34 am

The Family That Slays Trolls Together…

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As a family, we play Dungeons and Dragons.  Well, all of us, that is, except Mom.  It’s basically against her religion and means the Jehovah’s Witness version of Hell for us. (Which is a spiritual condition where God refuses to talk to you, and play checkers with you, and then you die.)  But let’s not discuss that here.  I don’t need her to start thinking about reasons to divorce me.  She accepts that it is a thing we do and like and keep mostly to ourselves.  (I just rolled a 15 on a twenty-sided dice to succeed in that charm-enemy spell and avert disaster.)

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As a family we have chosen to use the Eberron campaign available from Wizards of the Coast, the company that now publishes all official D&D stuff.  It is a medieval/Renaissance sort of setting where magic is every-day common and takes the place of science in the real world.

I get to be game master and creator of the basic plots and stories.  My three kids, Dorin, Henry, and the Princess are the player characters who interact with the world and determine the outcomes of the adventures through the rolling of Dungeon Dice.

I want to assure you at this point that my eldest son does not actually have a watermelon for a head.  Maybe metaphorically, but he is easily the smartest and most likely to be a leader of my three kids.  His character routinely pursues ideas like replacing his arms with magical metal arms, or grafting additional arms on his body.  He has chosen the phoenix to be the symbol on his personal flag and coat of arms, but his artifice roll to create the magical ship’s flag turned out to make it look more like a pigeon that someone set on fire.  (You have to watch out for those rolls of “1” on a 20-sided dice.)

Henry, my middle child, likes to play a halfling.  The little hobbit-like character is the one called upon to disarm all the tiger traps and poison-arrow traps that line the dungeon tunnels ahead.  He is a problem-solver in real life.  And he wants to be an architect.  In D&D games, he is often the first one to run up to danger and look it in the blood-shot eye.

Every D&D group needs a wizard or some other magic-user.  Ours has Mira, the Kalashtar mind- wizard.  My daughter’s character can use mind powers to float in the air, pick up and throw things with her mind alone, and figure out ways to do things using as little physical effort as possible.  Oh, and she loves to eat chocolate.  (The character, I mean… or is it actually the daughter?  I don’t know.  It is sometimes hard to tell them apart.)

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In our last adventure, we went to investigate the evil doings going in Evernight Keep, a castle in the country of Aundair.  We were able to not only defeat the evil mind-flayer, Dr. Zorgo, who had turned everyone into golems in the castle, but also to win the castle and the title of the Duke of Passage.  Now that they own a castle, my little band of adventurers will have to defend it, and I know of one old game master who will definitely throw all kinds of evil challenges at them.

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August 8, 2023 · 2:00 am

More Digital Practice

Tik Tok Dance Ninjas with their legs tangled.

Harun the Charmer, young wizard

A portrait of Jenna Ortega that doesn’t look like her. Oh, well. I tried.
A portrait of somebody whose name I don’t even know.
Somebody else I don’t know who doesn’t really look like this.

Dance Ninjas untangled.

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August 8, 2023 · 1:01 am

The Many People That Are Me

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Yes, I am a wizard.  That is a complicated thing to say.  It is complicated because a wizard has to be a wise man, and wisdom has to begin with the idea that you know practically nothing about anything… but you can find out.  So one version of me has to be my wizard D&D character, the wizard Eli Tragedy.  This is because I know practically nothing about anything… but I am willing to not be stupid and look stuff up before I tell you anything and pretend it is a wise thing to say.

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I have been thinking about who I am because I want to re-do my About the Author page.   And that leads to the difficulty of explaining who Mickey actually is.  You see, I am actually lots of different people in my head.  Mickey is the cartoonist, the humorist, the clown.  He is not the every-day me.  He is the goofy and foofy and lovey-to-drawie part of me.  And yes, I know some of those are not real words.  Mickey is like that.  He speaks Mickian Goof Speak.  I have no control over that part of him.  I am not certain where this Mickey-part of my soul originated, but it may be the result of too much TV when I was a kid.

And of course there is the Teacher-Me, Reluctant Rabbit, the person who stood in front of groups of twelve-thirteen-and-fourteen-year-olds for three decades and tap-danced, told stories, stood on my head, and begged them to internalize at least a lesson or two of what I tried to teach them.

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Teacher

And the wizard part of me was just barely wise enough to realize that a teacher can open doors, but you can’t shove a kid through.  They have to take the critical learning step themselves.  They have to want to learn something.  But even though they actually do the learning themselves, they will come back to me in later years saying, “Oh, thank you, you taught me so much!” when really all I did was be a guide on the side and stayed out of their way.

And, of course, there is the Cowboy Me.  I live in Texas.  I was a Belmond Bronco in high school, but I became a Cotulla Cowboy for 24 years of my teaching career.  I ended up as a Naaman Forest Ranger.  I have worn the hat a lot in my life, being as much of a straight shooter as the Shakiest Gun In The West can be, always trying to shoot the six-guns out of the bad guy’s hands rather than shoot people.

So how do I explain a thing like that?  Probably the way I just did it (ironically).  I should use Paffoonies I have created over time and waffle about stupid stuff that might make people laugh when they realize how self-contradictory it is.  And I should say it like I mean it… because I probably do.

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August 8, 2023 · 12:53 am

Sculpture Anatomy

Here is a collage that represents one of my hoarding-disorder collecting diseases enabled by the internet.  The rules for this collection are basically;

  1. Only photographs.
  2. Only human bodies, or people parts.
  3. Only artistically created people parts made of non-people stuff.
  4. Naked is not only allowed, but preferred.
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    1. This is a porcelain doll, not a real girl… just so you know I didn’t break any rules.

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    The point is, art is a depiction of us.  No matter how you create it, what it visually portrays is a reflection, like the one in the bathroom mirror every morning.  Beautiful, grotesque, sexy, repulsive, adorable, or disturbing… it is who we are.  The point is also, it allows me to point, click, and save and create a collection that I don’t have to hide from my wife.  Because, well, you know… it’s art.

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August 7, 2023 · 2:50 am

Dark Mickey, the Blackest Secrets

This is a post about every evil thing that Mickey has done and kept secret (or things that Mickey has been accused of even if he didn’t really do them.) he

Starting with the Werewolf lie. Mickey (as the teacher known as Mr. Beyer, Mr. B, the Batman, and Mr. Gilligan’s Island) is not now, nor has ever been… a werewolf. The excessive growth of facial hair, especially around the full moon, is just an inherited family trait. NOT LYCANTHROPY! Mickey has never eaten a student, not even the bad ones who disappeared from our school. (They were removed by law enforcement and continued their education in prison.)

Emmalina, pictured above, was not really a werewolf either. She did not eat her boyfriend when he tried to dump her. She never threatened to bite Mickey if he didn’t give her A-plusses in English class. She never bit Mickey trying to turn him into a werewolf too. She’s a character in a fiction story. She doesn’t really exist. And the the real girl Mickey based the character on was not a werewolf either… at least, not that Mickey can prove.

Mickey is also a liar. He lies every time he sits down to his computer to work on his W.I.P.. He tells extensive lies that last between 15,000 and 75,000 words, but average around 35,000 words. He tells these lies about real people that he has known, though he lies about their names and calls them something way different than their real names. And the events he says happens to them in these extended lies didn’t really happen. So, basically, these are all fiction. In fact, their technical designation is either novella or novel.

Mickey does have some things to confess. He really is a horrid little goody-two-shoes that has always been too timid to actually ever commit a crime of any kind. He has been known to tell some lies that were not merely fiction. The big lie when he was a kid was, “I’m fine. Really, nothing is wrong.” If you have read much of this blog, you probably already know why that is a big lie.

Mickey does not have a very good marriage. He has been married for 28 years. That is really five good years, twenty tepid and kinda boring years, and three really bad years. Religious differences were the first problem that made it not great to be married. Mickey had great difficulty accepting that he was evil and detestable in God’s eyes. Mickey’s wife pointed out specific Bible verses to prove it. And somehow the verses in Proverbs that explained how a good wife acted were always invisible whenever Mickey looked them up during family Bible study.

Mickey is now an atheist who believes in God. Mickey understands that to mean he is a Christian Existentialist. His wife understands that to mean he is going to Hell when he dies… if only Jehovah’s Witnesses believed in Hell. But the reward ultimately is that she won’t have to share household space with him in Paradise, since he won’t be there.

But Mickey isn’t upset about any of that. The two of them have three wonderful kids who were all terribly bad in some way or other growing up, but now that they are responsible adults, they generally do good things… even if the good things they do somewhat resemble the way their evil dad taught them to be.

Mickey has one imaginary granddaughter. She’s imaginary because she didn’t make it all the way to the point where she would’ve become a real granddaughter… or grandson. But that’s also okay. It could’ve been worse. We could’ve lost two instead of one. And Susu is a lovely imaginary granddaughter.

And Mickey is also a nudist. He writes stories about naked people. And he visits places where naked people gather. This embarrasses the rest of the family. They choose not to remember when the children were younger and we had a pool and we did skinny-dipping at night with the underwater lights on in the pool. It was fun. And their embarrassment about it is still fun.

So, Mickey has lived a terrible, sordid life. It is a shame that he deeply regrets… with only a little laughter in the background.

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August 7, 2023 · 1:01 am

Why School Should Be Cool

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I was a school teacher for thirty-one years, and in spite of the immense amount of brain damage that builds up over time, especially as a middle-school teacher, I think I know what we’ve been doing wrong.

We need to take a look at an education system where things are working better than they are here.

Now, I know you probably didn’t click on the boring video about school.  Heck, you probably aren’t even reading this sentence.  But I can summarize it and put it in easy-to-understand words.  Finland does not have to educate as many poor and disadvantaged kids as this country does.  The video gives five ways that Finland does it better, but all of them boil down to the basic notion that the country is more homogeneous and uniformly middle-class than ours is.  Still, we can learn things from them.

The first of the five ways that Finland does it better is a difference in government.  While U.S. governmental safety-net programs blame people who need food stamps for being lazy (even though some of them work 40-hour work weeks in minimum-wage jobs), Finland gives a huge package to parents of everything they might need as soon as their child is born.  As long as the child is in school, the government does many things to support the family’s efforts to educate them.  Imagine what we could accomplish here if we invested some of the vast fortune we give to corporations in subsidies into educating poor black and Hispanic children instead.  Children have a hard time learning in school when they come to school hungry.  If we could only feed them better, the way the Fins do, we would revolutionize our classrooms.

The second point the video makes is the biggest suds-maker every time I get on my teacher’s soap box.  They don’t give kids homework and they only give them one standardized test when they leave high school.  I have recently covered this topic more thoroughly in a post in which I was able to ridicule Florida governor Rick “Skeletor” Scott.  (Boy, did I enjoy doing that.)  But I won’t go into all of that again here.

The third thing is respecting teachers.  In Finland they treat teachers with the kind of respect that they give to doctors and lawyers.  How cool is that?  In Texas, calling someone a teacher is an epithet.  If a teacher is liked or even loved by their students, administrators are encouraged to keep a closer eye on them to figure out what’s wrong.  Students are supposed to hate their teachers and sit all day filling out mind-numbing test-preparation worksheets.  Imagine what it could be like if teachers weren’t the scum of the earth.  They might actually have students convinced that learning goes on in their classrooms.

The fourth point is that Finland does not try to cram more and more memorized details into young brains so they can spit it all back out on a test.  They take students thoroughly into the subject of study, and at a slower, easier pace.  They dive deep into the river of learning instead of wade through the wide and shallow parts.  All questions get answered.  And by that, I mean, student questions, not teacher questions.  The learning is student-centered.

Finally, the video states that Finland simply has fewer social ills in their country to get in the way of good quality education.  But even though the work is harder in this country, the potential is really there to go far beyond what Finland is capable of.  We have a natural resource that is totally untapped in this nation.  We don’t develop the minds of a majority of our children in any meaningful way.  And I can tell you from having done it, you can teach a poor or disadvantaged child to think.  You can give them the tools for academic, economic, and personal success.  You can make them into valuable human beings.  But you should never forget, they are already precious beyond measure.  We just ignore and trash that inherent value.  So, the information is out there about how to do a better job of educating our children.  We need to follow through.

Here endeth the lesson.

 

 

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August 7, 2023 · 12:56 am

Coca-Cola Mind Control

If you’ve read very much of my goofy little blog, you’ve probably run across the fact that I am something of a conspiracy theorist and strange-twist believer… sometimes referred to as a tinfoil-hat-wearer, or that old uncle you don’t want your kids sitting next to at the Thanksgiving dinner table.  And I’ve got another one for you.  I discovered while obsessing about nostalgia and old ads in the Saturday Evening Post, that the Coca-Cola company is probably  responsible for warping my mind as a child.

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My plan in revealing this hideous conspiracy is to take a look at ads and illustrations that I saw as a kid addicted to reading Saturday Evening Post every week at Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich’s farm.  I will scour them for hidden meanings and try to reveal to you the insidious plot underlying these mind-altering illustrations.  Keep in mind that you should probably take everything I say in this article with a grain of salt.  No, really, salt can protect you from subtle mind-control messages.

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And, yes, I realize that not all the messages are that subtle.  Sometimes they shout at you, “Drink Coke and you will have more sex!”  And you have to remember we are trying to avoid that kind of mind control.  We have to fight every instance of ad companies trying to take control over us by exploiting our baser animal urges.

So, let me take a momentary interlude, a break if you will.  I have this big glass of Diet Coke I just bought at QT, and…

Well, that was good!

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Coca-Cola has been at this for a while.  This ad from the  1940’s is apparently attempting to win World War II through choice of soft drinks.  Look at this feisty brew the soldier is about to quaff.  It is actually struggling in the cup to get out and go bite some German soldier’s face off.  Any American soldier who can choke this stuff down is tough enough to take on the Axis powers, Napoleon after Hitler dug him up and used Frankenstein’s scientific breakthroughs to re-animate him, and even several countries we weren’t actually at war with.  Even Rush Limbaugh and his weird lesbian-farmer-subsidies theory can’t compete with Coke on this level of propaganda wars.

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I also think Coca-Cola ads may have something to do with why I became a Cardinals fan when I lived in a place full of Cubs and Twins fans.  I admit, I added the dialogue and the commentary, but I used to do the same thing in my head when I was eight and the Cardinals went to the World Series… and the Cubs could not win it all even with Ernie Banks on their team.  The Cardinals beat the Yankees in 7 games!

I blame Coca-Cola.  Especially their ad department.  Cause the generic manager is telling the generic Oubs player to “Relax… take it easy.”  But the Cardinals won because Bob Gibson had that laser-intensity stare that bored holes through Mickey Mantle’s bat!  (It is Oubs, not Cubs, by the way.  Look at the big “O” on his jersey.)

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And you can’t tell me that the Coca-Cola ad seen here, the one with the white-haired goblin child casting a spell on you with his crazy eyes and pointing at your dark, delicious master isn’t seriously trying to mess with children’s minds.  There used to be a big five-foot-tall metal sign with this very picture on it in the one and only alley in Meservey, Iowa.  The one time I went to the barber there to get my hair cut I had to sit in that barber chair and stare at this evil thing staring back at me from the alley across the street.  It warped me.  For one thing, I never went back to that barber shop again… at least until I was in college and the sign was gone.

So, I seriously believe Coca-Cola was messing with my mind as a child.  They did it through subversive ad illustrations in Saturday Evening Post Magazine.  And if I’m completely crazy now, I blame them.  You don’t see that kind of thing going on today, do you?  Well, I mean, we should be very worried.  Because it probably means they have gotten better at it.

 

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