June 11, 2023 · 12:35 am

Lazy Sunday Silliness

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Imagination is always the place I go in times of trouble.  I have a part of my silly old brain devoted to dancing the cartoon dance of the dundering doofus.  It has to be there that I flee to and hide because problems and mistakes and guilt and pessimism are constantly building un-funny tiger-traps of gloom for me to rot at the bottom of.  You combat the darkness with bright light.  You combat hatred with love.  You combat unhappiness with silly cartoonish imaginings.  Well… maybe you don’t.  But I do.

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When reading the Sunday funnies in the newspaper on lazy Sunday afternoons, I spent years admiring Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes for its artistry and imaginative humor, believing it was about a kid who actually had a pet talking tiger.  I didn’t get the notion that Hobbes was actually a toy tiger for the longest time.  That’s because it was basically the story of my own boyhood.  I had a stuffed tiger when I was small. He talked.  He went on adventures with me.  And he talked me into breaking stuff and getting into trouble with Mom and Dad. It was absolutely realistic to me.

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I have always lived in my imagination.  Few people see the world the way I view it.  I have at least four imaginary children to go along with the three that everybody insists are real.  There’s Radasha, the boy faun, my novel characters Tim Kellogg and Valerie Clarke, and the ghost dog that lurks around the house, especially at night.  That plus Dorin, Henry, and the Princess (the three fake names that I use in this blog for my three real children).

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Have you noticed how Watterson’s water-color backgrounds fade into white nothingness the way daydreams do?  Calvin and Hobbes were always a cartoon about turning the unreal into the real, turning ideas upside down and looking at them through the filter-glasses of Spaceman Spiff.

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Unique and wonderful solutions to life’s problems can come about that way.  I mean, I can’t actually use a bloggular raygun to vaporize city pool inspectors, but I can put ideas together in unusual ways to overcome challenges.  I almost got the pool running again by problem-solving and repairing cracks myself.

 

So, I am now facing the tasks of working out a chapter 13 bankruptcy and having a swimming pool removed.  The Princess will need to be driven to and from school each day.  I will need to help Henry find another after-school job.  And the cool thing is, my imaginary friends will all be along for the ride.  Thank you, Calvin.  Thank you, Hobbes.  You made it all possible.  So, please, keep dancing the dance of the dundering doofus.

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June 10, 2023 · 3:17 am

This is How the World Ends…

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The T. S. Eliot poem “The Hollow Men” talks about the disappointing nature of human beings and ends  with a dire four lines quoted more often than any poem’s end in the history of poetry.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Now I have revealed this particular truth more than once.  I am not prescient.  I am an idiot.  And the only things I know for certain about the future are that I will die one day, and so will everyone else.  But knowing those things  is wisdom.  Especially the idiot part.

And I can see how things are progressing.  I know what people are like at their core.  If humanity is doomed to die out in the next century, or even the next decade, it will not be because of nuclear war.  It will be something sneakier, quieter, and more permanently lethal.

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It will be the fact that people are capable of heartlessness and cruelty.  Adolf Hitler turned the full power of government-focused hatred on those he defined as less than human; Jews, gypsies, gay people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the mentally handicapped.  He used that focus to burn those peoples out of existence.  But many forces in the human character rose up to shield the victims, saving some and avenging the others.  Hitler learned the hard way that he was not the end of the world… from a bullet, in a bunker, having lost an empire.

Now, the Republican clown show in the United States is turning into Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

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They show lack of concern for anything but corporate profits.  They will undo Medicare and cancel the Meals on Wheels program because, according to evil leprechauns in charge of the budget, we can’t afford to feed people, or educate people, or do anything to dry up the painful ocean of poverty capitalism is creating.  No, we must bury our pots of gold and any magic they have left in them.

They have changed the laws on environmental protections to allow themselves to profit by pouring pollutants into rivers and water supplies.  They pull out of world-wide agreements to work towards saving the environment from climate change.

They may have found a way to focus hatred through the lens of indifference.  Hitler’s mistake was in thinking most humans could be manipulated only through fear and hatred for those who were different.  Trump’s troll army has added stupidity and greed to the lenses the light can be filtered through.  And so, they may well succeed where Nazis failed.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

 

 

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June 9, 2023 · 1:38 am

The Grand Rose of Dark Thinking

I have no idea how much longer I have to live on this Earth. By the odds, I should have died during the pandemic with the health problems I have. But I went to the doctor today for an annual check-up, and I am surprisingly good compared to where I should probably be with my six incurable diseases and conditions, as well as being a cancer survivor since 1983.

Walking 7,000 steps a day, measured by my Samsung fitness app, combined with a 1500-calories-a-day diet, is keeping me off insulin… at least until the the bloodwork comes back with my current A1C.

I have given up nudism, at least for now, since I have very few places to be naked in, and more places that bleed and must be kept covered and out of the sun on the thing I want to be naked with. I am no longer the boy in the illustration anywhere in reality other than my imagination and nightly dreams. I have given up travel. When my family travels to Florida to spend the July 4th holiday with my son in the Air Force, the dog and I will be staying home where long hours in a car won’t further cause stress and pain in my lower back.

But despite the long, slow degradation of my health due to age, I am doing well. My house is not in order. My body is a painful mess. But there is still sunshine and life to look forward to.

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June 9, 2023 · 1:04 am

Saturday Night D & D on Sunday

Yesterday I forgot that it was Saturday.  But that doesn’t matter much in a D & D campaign.  You may not play at regular times… or at all, like this week.  But you do what you can when you can.  Just like in real life.  So let me share a character gallery, in order to give me my weekly dose of fantasy sword and sorcery nonsense.

These illustrations all come out of my D & D notebook.  They are done in colored pencil on colored paper.  Many are copied from models in catalogs, action movie stills, comic books, and illustrated Dungeons and Dragons products, but always interpreted in my own style and costumes.

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June 8, 2023 · 12:35 am

The Secret Gallery in Grandma’s Closet

After years of being stored away, I discovered that my mother had hidden a hoard of my old artworks in the upstairs closet in Grandma Aldrich’s house (now my parents’ house).

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This oil painting was done on an old saw blade at the request of my Grandpa Aldrich.  He wanted a farm painting on it, like the one he’d seen in a restaurant during a fishing trip in Minnesota.  I chose as the subject Sally the pig.  Sally was a hairlip piglet that had to be bottle fed and raised in a box by the stove until later in life she became a favorite pet.  Believe it or not, pigs are smarter than the family dog.  She became a pig you could ride.  And Grandma had taken a precious old photo of my mother and Uncle Larry riding the pig.  I used that photo to make this painting.  It was also the painting I wanted to find on this trip to Iowa.  Searching for it led to finding all the others.

These two are among the earliest paintings I did.  They were both done on canvases that I stretched over the frame myself in high school art class.  The purple one is a scene from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The blue one doesn’t have a title, but you can see what it is.  It is an ancient shibboleth water monster lurking under a dock, fishing for young boys to eat.

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This drawing was done on the front porch in the house in Rowan.  It would be years before mom framed it.  It is another example of what I could do as a high school kid.  In fact, I composed it from art-class sketches I did my senior year in school.

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The Boy in the Barn was painted on the remains of an old chalkboard that my sisters, brother, and I had used in grade school.

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Grandma Aldrich asked for this picture to hang over the sofa in the farmhouse living room.  It stayed there for many years.

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Great Grandma Hinckley passed away in 1980.  I created this portrait from a combination of photos and memory.  It was too good.  It was never hung anywhere because it always made her daughter, my Grandma Aldrich, tear up.

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This pencil drawing won a blue ribbon at the Wright County Fair in the late 70’s.

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This picture is called First Years are Hard Years.  It was painted in 1982 after my first year of teaching at the junior high school in Cotulla, Texas.   I painted mostly the good kids.  The girl on the lower right would later go on to become a teacher for our school district.  I can’t claim to be the one who inspired her, but she did make straight A’s in my class.

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This is called Beauty.  It is done in oil crayon on canvas.  I did it for my mother to hang in the hallway in the house in Taylor, Texas.

So, it turns out, I unearthed art treasures by searching for the one painting.

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June 8, 2023 · 12:29 am

Followed by a Moon Shadow

Moonshadow by Cat Stevens

I first heard this song as a freshman in college.20160424_181349It struck me that it was hauntingly beautiful… but maybe I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.

The song is about losing body parts and being okay with that.

That can actually be kinda creepy, right?

It is probably a song about gradually dying.

But that’s not really what it’s about.

I am there now.  Peeling, cracking, drying out… my life has reached the downhill run toward the finish line.  But I am not worried and not afraid.  Life is so much more than hands and eyes and legs and feet.  I can lose those things and have no regrets.  I am so much more than merely the sum of those physical things.

My spirit soars.  And my life is bound up in words and meanings that are now written down, and are at least as imperishable as paper.  And may, in fact, be written on a few human hearts here and there.

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June 7, 2023 · 1:47 am

Spinning Plates with Arthritic Hands

The circus acts of being a writer are all swiftly breaking down. The man spinning plates on spindles is dropping more and more of the cheap white circus plates. They, of course, are made of plastic so they cannot break. Arthritis keeps me from performing the simple juggling tasks of using the keyboard, erasing and retyping the mistakes, and formatting the pages and reformatting the pages when the computer fails to save those details.

And as things continue to break down, I have to notice the circus tents of being a writer have lost more than half of their population of clowns. It worries me when there is less laughter than moans and tears and heavy sighs. The ideas are still coming fast and furious. But they are not getting transformed into paragraphs and chapters.

So, I’m still trying. The words are coming slower. But they are still coming.

I am never going to be a famous writer. My family hasn’t even read my stories.

Time is running out. The elephants are starting to take down the big top tents.

The circus of being a writer is shutting down.

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June 7, 2023 · 1:19 am

Dragons

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Dragons in the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games are the central monsters of the story.  In our Eberron campaign they not only rule an entire mysterious continent, but they are credited with the very creation of the world and everything.  Not only monsters, but also gods, is a pretty big order for a   character to fill.

Skye, the Blue Dragon to the left above is a dragon who believes that human people are the most important part of fulfilling the Dragon Prophecy.  Therefore the characters can rely on him as an ally, and sometimes even a patron.  He is a blue chromatic dragon with lightning breath, and the Blue Dragon Aureon, his great great grandfather,  is an important leader of the god-dragons worshiped as the Sovereign Host.

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Phaeros, the great crested red dragon, is a servant of chaos who actively opposes all that is good.  He works with orcish dictators and priests of the Dark Six to accomplish vast swaths of damage, destruction, and war.

He is a big bad villain that has to come at the end of a campaign, because dragons are not only powerful fire-breathers with monstrous monster-damage capability, they also know far more magic than even the wisest of wizards.  My players have not crossed him yet, but if they start finding the missing dragon eggs, that will happen soon.

You may notice that my dragon pictures are mostly coloring-book pictures repeated with different colors, but in many ways dragons are like that.  They all have the cookie-cutter qualities of a dragon, but with different-colored personalities and powers and ideas of good and evil.

Penny Dragon

Pennie is a copper dragon with divided loyalties and the soul of a clown.  She never takes the adventure at hand too seriously.  But if she decides to help the player characters find the missing dragon eggs, no ally will prove stronger and more helpful than her.  And she knows things that the players need to learn from her to find the missing eggs.

So dragons come in many forms and personalities.

In fact, the search for the missing dragon eggs will be critically affected by the fact that the eggs have all five hatched and dragons instinctively protect themselves when young by using their polymorph self magic to become some other creature.  And someone has implanted the idea of using human form as the default even though the wormlings have never actually seen a human being in real life.

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This is a double portrait of Calcryx, both as a white dragon wormling and a young girl.

So, playing games with dragons is fun and archetypal story-telling, and I will continue to do it, even if it means getting burned now and again.

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June 6, 2023 · 1:49 am

Telling Lies

Every day of my life I have dealt with lies.  After all, I was a public school teacher for 31 years and taught middle school for 24 of those years.  

“Please excuse Mauricio from writing the essay today.  He was chopping ham for me yesterday and his hand got numb.”  

“I have to go to the bathroom at 8:05, Teacher!  Not 8:10 or 8:00!  And no girl will be waiting by the water fountain… oh, ye, vato!”  

“Can’t you see I have to go home sick?  I have purple spots all over my face!  It is just a coincidence I was drawing hearts on my notebook with a purple marker.”

Teaching rabbit

But now the classroom is quiet.  I am retired.  

Okay, I know, the first part of that is a lie.  The classroom is not quiet.  I am retired and don’t go there any more.  Some other teacher (or long-term substitute after the rookie teacher ran out screaming after the first week of school) is now listening to the lies.

So, nothing but the truth now, right?  Who is around during the day to tell me lies?   The dog?  Well, yes…  when she wants to go outside and pretends the poop and pee are bursting out of her, but really only wants to sniff the street lamp and all the male dogs who have peed there.  

But there is also me.  Yes, me!  I am working at being a writer now… so I tell myself lies… and not little ones, either.  Whole episodes of my past have come pouring out in my stories… and I am not always the good guy or the main character in the tale.  Sometimes I was the villain, the mistake-maker, or the fool.  I’m definitely not perfect now, nor was I then, but I’m a writer now.  I can change it.  I tell lies.  I can make it work out in ways that never happened in real life.

I put lies in this blog.  For instance, I may have suggested, a few posts back, that because of psoriasis in my usually-covered region, I sit around naked all day when I type this post.  Not true.  I suggested that for comedy value at the time.  Well, it’s mostly not true.  I don’t know how much you know about severe-plaque psoriasis, but it only flares up at times.  Some days, like today, a half hour in a steaming hot Sitz-bath with extra salt allows me to wear clothes for quite a while after.  So I merely exaggerated because I thought making you picture plump and pasty-skinned old me sitting around nude and typing a blog was funny… but… okay, maybe that was just weird.  Still, a good lie is always at least twelve cents better than the ugly truth. (I must note, the truth of this paragraph has changed since I originally wrote this post. Now I am more of a nudist and enjoy being naked while I type. But that now being a lie does not spoil the point of this essay.)

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And the fact that my stories are filled with little-boy liars, giant rabbit-men who can talk and cook vegetables like people, and invading invisible alien frog-people, derives naturally from the fact that I have been a highly imaginative liar since childhood.  Just ask any of my grade school classmates.  I used to make them believe there was an evil clone Michael out there somewhere trying really, really hard to get me in trouble.  I told them that I was in contact with a race of blue-colored people that lived in an underground world deep beneath our little Iowa town.  I even showed them the knotty old stump that was the doorway to the tunnel that led to the Blue World.  Of course, the key was never available when I showed them. And my friends were not completely gullible.  In fact, I suspect that once in a while, they knew I was… lying.

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June 6, 2023 · 1:37 am

The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 25

Canto 25 – Dealing with the Devil

Stanley was determined to get both hands around Eule Gheist’s stupid neck, and squeeze until he gave up a solution to saving Maria’s life.  He bulled his way into Aunt Philia’s Toy Store.

Before he could shout out the first threat and demand, he was stopped dead in his tracks by the other man standing beside the Owl Man’s check-out counter.

“Hello, Stanley. We’ve been waiting for your return,” said the mysterious stranger with the ice-blue eyes.

“You know I want my daughter back?  You are going to give me a way to go where she is and bring her back home?”

“Oh, no.  Our offer is far more complicated than that.”

“What kind of a place is this?  You trap and kill your customers.”

“You have it all wrong, Mr. Mensch.  We always give our customers exactly what they pay us for.”

“Maria never paid you to kidnap her and put her life at risk.”

“Oh, you are confused about who our customers are.”

“What do you mean?  You never actually sell any of these toys.”

“We have never harmed a customer.  We couldn’t possibly kill them since they are already dead.”

“And you sell them these toys?”  Stan’s arm swept around in a circle indicating the whole collection of dust-covered antique toys.

“We sold Maria to Esperanza for five years’ worth of spirit life.  We don’t sell these toys from the store.”

“Maria is a toy?”

“Basically.  We provide the other side with humans to play with.”

“So, how do I get to where Maria is?”

“You don’t.  No member of the story she is playing in will want you to be a part of it.  You don’t fit the story.”

“So, what’s to prevent me from throwing a fit and wrecking this store?”

“Pick up a toy and destroy it.”

Stanley picked up a wooden rocking horse and slammed it into the floor with the full force of his anger and frustration.  Almost immediately the fractured pieces disappeared and the rocking horse rematerialized on the shelf, even wearing it’s dust covering.

Stan stopped and stared, feeling totally stunned.

“Everything is set in spirit life.  It will still be here even after a nuclear missile from Russia blows Dallas into vapor.”

“I don’t… I mean… ah…”

“I know you are stressed about your family’s situation.  We have a possible solution to offer for a price.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can guarantee Maria’s survival.  And I can cure Bonita’s cancer.”

“How… how do you know about that?”

The Owl Man grinned.  “This is the store’s owner.  Mr. Mephisto.”

“The dark man from the Shandra and Mark story?”

“Exactly,” said the gimlet-eyed man.

“So, I’m making a deal with the Devil.  What will it cost me?  My soul?”

“We want you to become the new manager of the Toy Store.  You are a very resourceful man.  And you have a good heart.”

“And I am due to return to my owl form,” said Eule.

“If I refuse?”

“You have to make the choice, of course.  But the job has perks.  The spirit life will make you immortal.  And Maria and Bonita are both saved.”

“And if I refuse to accept the job, what happens?”

“You trust to luck for the outcome you seek.”

Stanley could do nothing but stand there and try desperately to think.

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