I am waking up every morning amazed that I am still alive. Pain is a constant. Feeling ill from diabetes is a second constant. Too many constants in the equation means you can work out the math and predict the date you will have to play chess with the Grim Reaper again.

Fortunately for me, old Grimmy hasn’t figured out the King’s Indian defense that I learned in 1972 by reading Bobby Fischer’s column about chess in Boys’ Life Magazine. He falls for the Knight’s Gambit every single time we play.

I confess to being overly obsessed with death lately. That may have been partly due to promotions for the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3 that seemed to point to beloved characters dying in what was said to be the last movie in the trilogy. Well, they did almost die… but (Spoiler alert!) Nobody I cared about actually died. Not Rocket Raccoon, not Drax the Destroyer, nor Peter Quill’s Starlord character as well.

Even more, it seemed my writing results were indicating future writer doom. My blog activity was down. Book sales are down. When I die, nobody will have read and loved the works of novel art that I have been pouring my life’s blood into for over a decade. My stories will cease to be, unread and forgotten even by my relatives.

I haven’t even been able to write the usual 500 words a day for over two weeks. But, then, I cut back on Instagram activity, and voila! (a fancy French word that means, “There it is!”) I was able to write a blog post and write more on my book of essays as well.

So, maybe I have been obsessing about death too much. But I do find it useful as motivation for the limited number of things lazy old me still does to think that todary is the last day to get anything done. We shall see if I wake up deceased tomorrow or not.

Nope. I did not misspell a word in the title. There are blood-sucking ticks all over our government.

Our taxpayer dollars fund the Federal Government. Does it not follow then that those dollars should be spent to help all of us with the most critical problems we ALL face?

Not only favoring the 1%

And not tilting the tables toward Republicans…

Or Ted Cruz, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk…

and especially not Darnold Trumpalump!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Republicans cheat.

Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. States like Texas limit voting in such a way that it is much harder to vote if you are a member of a minority that usually votes for Democrats. And they are trying to take away more voting rights… but mainly from the left. They refused to consider Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court. They put the union-and-worker-hating Goresuch in his seat. They forced out the somewhat moderate Kennedy to put in the sex criminal Cavanaugh. They stole RBG’s seat by reversing their position used on Garland’s seat to insert Amy Coneyisland Barrett. And now, led by bag-of-corruption Clarence Thomas, they have begun rolling back the hard-won human rights of women, LGBTQ people, black people, school children, and anybody who doesn’t agree with their Fifteenth-Century morality.

Undo the Trump tax cuts and reduce the national debt by 25%!

The stupid Debt-limit Crisis should not interfere with climate-change mitigation, social safety net funding, Medicare, Social Security, and Veteran healthcare. And it should certainly NOT MAKE US DEFAULT ON OUR DEBT! Paying our debts should not be tied to Republican demands that undoes Democratic achievements of the past year.

The essential problem is that we have too many rich pigs in government that not only profit over mistreating the poor and middle class, but they enjoy the pain they inflict. And not all of the corruption is in the Republican Party. JUST MOST OF IT!

Sorry about the angry rant, but I needed to avoid exploding.

One of the most awkward things in a boy’s life is the onset of sexual attraction to girls. And it was doubly awkward for me after I had been assaulted and sealed the trauma away behind a wall of denial.

Fortunately for me, I had a couple of things going for me, although I did not count them as good things at the time. One thing was that, as the oldest grandchild in the Aldrich-farm family, I was literally surrounded by girls. Of all the grandkids, there were only three boys in the family of cousins outnumbered completely by the eight girls. I played Robin Hood and Zorro, and games in the goblin-filled canyons of the farmhouse basement. I was surrounded by girls filling in the roles of crew and companions and Merry Men all played by girls who giggled too much for the part. My little brother and Uncle Larry’s youngest child were the only other boys, and they were two of three youngest among us, seven and eight years younger than me. I really only had girls to play with and tell stories to (mostly lies, and some of them terrifying lies as the girls still tell me to this day.)

Sister girls and cousin girls are not potential romantic entanglements, and thus females you get to know as real people, not like the girls on TV, in movies, or (God forbid) girls in porn magazines. I can still honestly say that my two sisters are my friends and I can count on them.

Growing up mostly surrounded by girls was good for me in a number of ways. The embarrassment of seeing a girl naked, or worse, being seen naked by a girl, happened a lot less stressfully when the girl was a sister or a cousin.

And when in 1969 I had to move from the tiny elementary school in Rowan, Iowa to the much larger junior high in Belmond, it was Vicky sitting next to me in Art Class who befriended me and helped me to make it through the difficult adjustment to a place where boys bullied you and most girls made fun of you and I nearly cringed myself into a tiny tennis ball because of my terrible secret. She loved to watch me draw and was amazed at everything I did. It was something she did with a smiley, bubbly personality to the point that Mr. Thorpe, the Art teacher, got mad at her for always watching and talking to me rather than drawing the assignments he gave us. And it wasn’t romance. It was friendship. At least, it was as far as I knew.

And I think the point of it all is that the best thing that can happen to you in your sex life is having a childhood friend who is a girl. You get a chance to know and understand girls more than you would if you only hang out with groups of other guys until somewhere in high school you suddenly try dating one of that other species of human you know absolutely nothing about.

I saw it all in action as a middle school teacher. Kids beginning to have hormones and the regrettable behaviors hormones cause were always getting into fistfights with other boys, catfights with other girls, and eventually screaming fits and break-ups between a boy and a girl where things often really do get broken, and boys usually lose those fights.

But the couples that endured together for the entire time I knew them had a secret. Dave and Tamara were an unlikely pair, but both among the smartest kids I knew. So they stayed together to have someone to talk to who understood all the words they used. Very bright kids. Each with a huge vocabulary.

And Sweetie Jimenez and El Boy, not gang members, but rather, two cute little undersized kids with big heads and big eyes that hung together because they were too sugary sweet for any gang member to lay a hand on either one of them. In fact, the local gang leader made sure the gang protected them both. They had been friends since they were toddlers living next door to each other.

And that was their secret. Both pairs. They would tell you they were not boyfriend and girlfriend. They were best friends. And Sweetie and El Boy each eventually married their best friend. They have six kids. All little with big heads. (Those, of course, are not the kids’ real names. After all, they might somehow read this sometime, and I don’t want them to know I figured out their secrets.)