Catch a Falling Star

F. Scott Fitzgerald, when he was ill and nearing the end, said he could only write a single page in a day. But it was an excellent page.

I am now entering that end-of-it-all Fitzgerald territory. Some of the best writing I have done, but very little of it.

I have been writing on the essay project, Naked Thinking.

And so, I am delving deep into the darkness inside. And there sits that never-ending festering battle between light and darkness. A writer knows how to accurately depict the hellish reality of things he has always kept locked away inside. H. P. Lovecraft found a lot of racist hatred and existential terror inside. Dickens found regret in love misplaced and the cruelty of men to lesser men. Mark Twain found grief at outliving most of his children and his beloved wife. There is a lot of yeast applied to leaven the bread of life in the interior of every writer. And most of it ranges from unpleasant to deeply disturbing.

And so I am nearing the end. I do not know how close. But I am writing like the dervish whirls, fast and furious and knowing I will do it until the dance is over.

It is highly probable that, based on this summer’s historically all-time high temperature records, we will very probably die in the future of way-too-much sunshine.

“Grandpa Mickey, you gotta be more positive!” said my imaginary granddaughter. “We don’t have any choice but to face the future the way it is. And the way it is is gonna be hotter for a while.”

Okay, she has a point. They have been predicting the end of the world for years and years. It was supposed to end in 2012 according to the Mayan Calendar. It was supposed to end with Y2K in the year 2000. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were expecting the end to come in 1978. And a majority of Christian humanity was watching for signs of the Second Coming in the year 1000 A.D.

We have come through existential crisis before. Two world wars, a nuclear Cold War, the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, Covid 19, and Great Aunt Selma’s Christmas fruit cake.

“Fruit cake, Grandpa?”

“If you were brave enough to eat it, Susu, there were grave consequences…”

“Oh.”

“But you are always talking about being a nudist, right, Grandpa? That’s a solution to hotter weather. We can take our clothes off to be cooler.”

There are things that we will have to do if we are going to recover from global warming. Granted, getting naked is not really a step we will be forced to take, though it couldn’t hurt. I can make a list of things that need to be underway as a method of battling climate-change Armageddon.

We need to start with the whole “Eat the rich!” thing. I don’t recommend that we literally eat them. Food poisoning would surpass heart disease, cancer, and Covid if we did. But the climate change crisis is their fault. They made profits by polluting, slashing expensive safety and environmental protection restrictions to line their pockets with more wealth than they could ever spend. So, since fighting the climate change battle is going to be hugely expensive, they should pay most of it. They would be investing in a future where we can all live happily a while longer and not even think about killing them, roasting them, and serving them for lunch. We could wait for the Devil to do that part in his kitchen.

We need to adapt to frequent severe storms and rising oceans. Cities will need to evolve into sealed domed environments, many of which will eventually be underwater anyway. The oceans will need to be de-acidified. That’s because we will have to replace cattle ranches and field crops with seaweed farms and fish ranches. Restoring coral reefs will be critical. Many of us will swim to the worksite, or travel in robotic underwater crawlers, speeders, and swimming vehicles. In the city, inside the underwater vehicles, and in water where we don’t need pressurized suits, we really don’t need clothing. Susu and I will thrive there.

We will also be building many carbon sinks of different kinds upon the land. We have to not only put purified oxygen and nitrogen back into the air on land, but we have to suck an awful lot of carbon out. Vertical forests will become a thing, where skyscrapers of many stories will be enclosed by trees on every level. We will need to become like Mowgli and Young Tarzan, naked in the jungle and at one with a new form of nature, one scientifically balanced and controlled. Weather control and air scrubbers will join windmills and solar panels on much of the Earth’s surface.

Of course, majority rules. If you all decide that a lifeless thousand-degree boneyard is the better choice so you can have your big cars, super yachts, and penis rockets for the short while that the world is burning, Susu and I are not strong enough to stop you.

“Don’t think about the bad stuff, Grandpa. You and I will be good together in the future you talk about. See, I’m naked and ready already!”

“This is Texas, Princess. It’s illegal for you to be naked on the city streets where old church ladies will see you. I’ll end up in jail.”

“But they won’t catch me. I’m not real. Remember? I will only ever exist in the future.”

“Yes, I know. But I am already nearer to 70 than I am to the average first-time-grandpa age. And my children are not likely to have any more children in the near future.”

“Don’t be sad. We’ll be together one day. I promise.”

Well, it doesn’t hurt to be positive. The future looks pretty bleak. But sunshine has a way of finding even the bluest souls. And warming them up. And a granddaughter is not impossible.

As Yogi Berra once wisely said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

Lately, I have been getting good signs from my book-sales dashboard at Amazon.. People have started buying and reading my books, at least, the ones with nudist characters in them. A Field Guide to Fauns and Recipes for Gingerbread Children lead the way with more than a thousand pages read on Kindle Unlimited between them. I have already made more than $8.00 total this month in only the last two weeks.

Like the male cardinal who shows up in our yard when good things are happening, it is a sign that it is not all done for nothing. $8.00 will make no real difference to my bank account. But it does show that people are reading my books. I know that this does not sound like the results of lots of readers reading, but remember, publishers, especially Amazon, always screw writers out of most of what they deserve when books are sold.

The most expensive of the books that are actually being bought are priced at less than $3.00, of which, most of that money goes towards Amazon’s e-book-making expenses (whatever those are). If I needed to make myself rich, I would never have become first a teacher, and then a fiction writer. Having readers is the thing. And these are a couple of my best books that are getting read.

So, I take it as a good sign. A symbol that I really am an author.

I took pictures that I drew back in the 70s and 80s and updated them with digital art, redrawing the pictures with a stylus, a touch-screen phone, and an AI digital assistant. I took pictures I drew of real-life people I knew and updated them. I can’t make them look much like the real people. I have turned most of these into fictional characters anyway, but I won’t use any real names.

Clint was a student whom I loved to hate. He held classroom farting contests in my fourth period class with his mindless minions. He gave me no end of trouble for two years. But when I finally got the relief of his graduation from 8th grade, he was the kid I hugged the hardest, hoping to make it hurt, and the kid I missed the most.

Shelly Cobble, one of the twin Cobble Sisters, was both a member of the Pirates and a nudist at home.

Sherry Cobble, the self-proclaimed smarter twin, was also a Pirate and even more of a nudist than sister Shelly. And, no, they are not based on my twin cousins. Yes, I am pretty sure that’s true.

Sherry again as a high school senior, still a member of the Pirates’ liars’ club and still a nudist.

Shelly again, same grade still, nudist still, Pirate still, but maybe the nicer sister.

Edward-Andrew Campbell, better known as the Superchicken, still in Junior high at the time of this picture.

Andrew Doble, Pirate, liar, not a criminal according to him, most likely a criminal to local law enforcement.

Dennis.

And so, I run out of time for more. But I like what I have done.