May 10, 2023 · 1:07 am

The Politicks Problem

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.

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May 10, 2023 · 12:07 am

Critiques in Color

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I recently posted about being synesthetic and discovering how I am different from normal people.  Here is the post if you are interested..   Then I discovered that Kanye West is also synesthetic as he gushed some southern-fried crappie-doo about how wonderful he is as an artist because he sees the colors of his music.  Well, now I don’t want that mental affliction any more.  I don’t wish to be anything like him.  Of course, it has to be incurable, doesn’t it.

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Now I am wasting today’s post on another metacognative thinking-about-thinking style of paragraph pile when I could be rhapsodizing about the humor of Dave Barry or the wisdom of Robert Fulghum, the author of

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Here it is on Amazon.

I could be shamelessly promoting the work of artists whose works I love instead of examining the random filing cabinets in the back rooms of my stupid old head.  But I can’t because I now need to explain myself to myself again.  Self doubt and self examination are features of being an artist.  We reach a point where we have to think about how we do what we do, because if you don’t know where the magic comes from, you might not be able to call on it the next time you need it.

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I am a self-taught artist.  I have had art classes in high school and college, but never professional art training.  I know how to manipulate the rule of thirds, directional composition, movement, perspective, and lots of other artsy-craftsy techniques, but it is all a matter of trial and error and an instinct for repeating what works.  I have had a good deal more professional training as a writer.  But I do that mostly by instinct as well.  Trained instinct.  I have reached a point where my art is very complex and detailed.  And I don’t mean to suggest there are no flaws.  In fact, I am capable enough to see huge, glaring mistakes that really skew my original intent and make me feel hopelessly incompetent.  But others who see it and don’t know the inner workings of the process can look past those mistakes and not even see them.  Given enough time to look at my own work with new eyes, I am able to see at least some of what they see.

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Now that I have totally wasted 500-plus words on goofy talking-to-myself, what have I really accomplished beyond boring you to death?  What’s that you say?  You are not dead yet?  Well, that’s probably only because you looked at the pictures and didn’t read any of my sugar-noodle brain-scrapings in loosely paragraph-like form.  And if you did read this awful post by a colorblind artist who doubts his own abilities, you probably didn’t learn anything from it.  But that’s not the point.  The point is, I care about doing this, and I need to do it right.  And I managed to learn something… how to ramble and meander and make something that is either a hot mess… or something that vaguely resembles self-reflective art.

 

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May 9, 2023 · 1:50 am

The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 21

Canto 21 – The Burned House

“This is all that is left of the house that Momma and I were living in,” said the doll in Brittany’s arms.

It was a brick foundation full of burned wood and charcoal.  It was mostly black and smelled of ash and extinct wood fires.

“What good does it do to bring me here and show me this? 

“You will see when the Lonely One that was my momma shows up at midnight.  I will then be able to show you everything.”

“So, we’re waiting for a ghost?”

“No.  Momma is not a ghost.  She’s a Lonely One like me.”

Brittany did not trust the doll any longer.  She was feeling repeatedly tricked, repeatedly lied to, confused, and definitely kidnapped… yes, that was the word.  Taken without her consent, kidnapped.

The sun was long past set.  The witching hour was at hand.  And Brittany was shivering in the cold night air.

It was at that moment that a glowing ball of red light came down the street from the north.

“There she is,” the doll said.

The light moved to the burned-out ruins of the house.  As it approached the place where the front of the house had been, a sudden growth of red bricks, becoming a red brick wall with a red front door in it, and widened out into the red front of a modest two-story home.  An eerie red ghost of a house stood before the woman and the doll.  Brittany put the doll down, letting her stand on her own two porcelain feet.

“Let’s go in.”

“It’s only a ghost of a house.  There’s really a big hole there to fall into.”

“You are not in your former world.  The rules of this world are different.  We can go into this house and watch what happened there in the past.  You will see what I need you to see.”

Reluctantly, Brittany let the doll lead her towards the front door.  The doll opened the door and ushered Brittany inside.

The living room was typical of a home in the 1940’s and reminded Brittany very much of Great Aunt Tilda’s home when she was a child younger than Hannah.  But everything was lit in an eerie red light.

Brittany took in a sudden, sharp breath when she saw the ghostly image of the momma.  It looked like a duplicate of Brittany herself but dressed in 1940s fashion and with a grim expression on her face that Brittany hoped no one in her future life would see on her own face.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” asked the doll.

“Did she really look like me?”

“No.  You look like her.  That’s why I chose you.”

“Can she see us and hear us?”

“No.  This is an echo of the past.  She has no idea that the two of us are here.”

Then there was the sound of small feet on the stairs.

“Here I come wearing…” began the doll, but trailing off into saying nothing.

Molly came skipping down the stairs wearing a lovely and extra-frilly dress.  She looked exactly like Hannah.

“No!” shouted the momma.  “You should not be wearing that dress!”

“B-b-but it’s a gift from Daddy.”

“It’s cursed.”

“It’s not.  His letter said it was a gift from the lady.”

“You mean the Italian lady?  The one he saved during a battle?”

“Yes… that one.”

“She had the dress to give him for you because her own daughter was killed in the war.”

“But…  It’s my beautiful blue dress.”

Brittany turned to the doll and whispered, “It looks red to me.”

“Everything in Momma’s world was red.  Mad red.”

“Take the dress off.  I should burn the thing.  It is the dress of a dead girl.”

  Molly began to cry.  Then she stormed back up the stairway apparently to take the dress off again.

“Your mother seems overly angry,” Brittany said to the doll.

“My Daddy was the one who really loved me,” said the doll.

Brittany silently bit her lower lip.

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May 9, 2023 · 1:23 am

Boyhood

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Fifty years ago when I was ten, the world was a very different place.  Many people long for the time when they were young.  They see it as a better, more innocent time.  Not me.  Childhood was both a blessing and a nightmare for me.  I was creative and artistic and full of life.  And my family encouraged that.  But I was also a victim of a sexual assault and believed I had to keep a terrible secret even from my parents so that the world would not reject me as something horrible.  We were on the way to the moon and the future looked bright.  But President Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963, and Apollo 1 would end in a fiery tragedy in 1967.  I look back with longing at many, many things, but I would never want to go back to that time and place without knowing everything I know now.  I am grateful that I survived.  But I remember the nightmares as vividly as I do the dreams.

 

As a teacher, I learned that childhood and young adulthood defines the adult.  And the kid who is coddled and never faces the darkness is the one who becomes a total jerk or a criminal… or Donald Trump.  I almost feel that the challenges we faced and the tragedies we overcame in our lives are the very things that made us strong and good and worthy.

 

When you are a boy growing up, hating girls on the outside and pining to get a look in the girls’ shower room on the inside, you can’t wait to grow up and get away from the horrors of being a child.  Except, there are good things too.  Tang, of course, wasn’t one of them.  We drank it because the astronauts drank it, but it was so sweet and artificial it tasted bitter in that oxymoronic way that only fake stuff can achieve.  Quisp is nasty-tasting stuff too… but we begged for it because, well, the cartoon commercials were cool.  I only ever choked down about two boxes of the vile stuff.  You went to school a little queasy on mornings when you ate Quisp in milk for breakfast.  But one box had a toy inside, and the other had an alien mask on the back that you could cut out, but not actually wear.

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But when it comes down to how you end a goofy-times-ten-and-then-squared essay like this one, well, how do you tie a proper knot at the end of the thread?  Maybe like this; It is a very hard thing to be a boy and then grow up to be a man.  But I did it.  And looking back on it, the pie was not my favorite flavor… but, hey!  it was pie!

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May 8, 2023 · 2:08 am

Walk the Walk with Diabetes

Today during the school-drop-off downpour, I was forced to pull into the Walmart parking lot and pass out for a few rainy minutes.  Good times, huh?  But life is like that with diabetes.  I have been a diagnosed diabetic since April of 2000.  I have learned to live with my sugars out of whack, my mind potentially turned into Swiss cheese with cream gravy at any moment, and a strangely comforting capacity to weather headaches, both the heartbeat in the temples like a timpani kind, and the red-hot needles of Nyarlathotep boring into my skull kind.  I suffer, but I also survive.  In fact, the terrible incurable disease most likely to kill me is, in some ways, a sort of a back-handed blessing.  I certainly don’t take life for granted with it.  I am more conscious of how food can affect me and make me feel.  I have had to learn how to take care of myself when taking care of myself is tricky like an Indiana Jones’ adventure  in the Doomed Temple of Mickey’s Body.  I take going to the doctor seriously and have learned what questions to ask.  I have been to the heart specialist and the endocrinologist and the dietitian more than most people, though not more than most people should see them.  I have also learned how to make fun of dread diseases… a skill I never imagined I might develop later in life.

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My first experience of diabetes wasn’t even my own illness.  Back in 1984 I had a boy in my seventh grade class who seemed to be falling asleep constantly.  He was a shy little Hispanic boy with curly hair who was usually whip-smart and very charming.  But I couldn’t seem to keep his head off his desk.  So I asked him what the matter was.  He was too shy and worried that he had done something wrong to answer me.  So I asked him to get some water to wake himself up.  The reading teacher across the hall told me, “You know, Juanito is diabetic.  His blood sugar might be low.”

So I asked him, “Is that your problem?”

He nodded and smiled.

“The office keeps some orange juice in the refrigerator for him,” the reading teacher said.

So, I saved his life for the first time in my career without even knowing what the problem was or how to solve it.  He came back from the office perky and smiley as ever.  And I realized for the first time that I needed to know what diabetes was and what to do about it.

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Juanito became one of a number of fatherless boys that adopted me and spent Saturdays hanging out with me to play video games and role playing games.  He was one out of a pack of kids that swarmed my home in the off hours and would do anything I asked in the classroom no matter how hard.  He was a juvenile diabetic, the son of a woman with severe type-two diabetes (adult-onset).  His older sister had become a nurse at least partly because of the family illness.  Juvenile diabetics, though their lives can be severely at risk, have the capability of growing out of it.  As a seventh grader he didn’t really know how to take care of himself.  Teachers who unknowingly offered candy as a motivator could’ve put him in a coma because he was too polite and shy to say no.  But I fed him a few times, befriended him a lot, encouraged his interest in sports, and he grew up to be a star defensive back on the high school football team.  He gave me the portrait I share with you here for attending so many of his football games and rooting for him to overcome the odds.  When he visited me at the school years later, he was basically diabetes-free.

Juanito’s story gives me hope.  I know I will not overcome the dreaded Big D disease of South Texas.  I will live with it until it kills me.  It caused my psoriasis.  It gives me episodes of depression and chronic headache.  But at this point, I am still controlling it through diet and exercise, not taking insulin or other drugs.  (In fact, it was one of those other drugs that was making me pass out at work constantly from low blood sugar.  Diet works better than pharmaceuticals.)  One day it will give me a fatal infarction or a stroke and be the end of me.  But until that time I will continue to do the difficult dance with it  and get by, because, after all, dancing is exercise, and exercise overcomes the effects of the disease.  Just ask Juanito.

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May 7, 2023 · 12:49 am

A Thing That I Know…

You probably guessed it just from the title.  I started this post without any idea at all what I was going to write about.  And so I had to rummage around in the back rooms of my silly old brain looking for stuff to put out there that wasn’t too moldy, but definitely had been thoroughly cooked and stored away for a while.

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So here is something I know…  If you want to make someone pay attention to you, make a joke.  You can do that by surprising people with something that they immediately recognize and realize that it is totally backwards to what they saw before.  In other words, when I say or write things that make people wrinkle their noses at me, I am not merely being weird.  I am being a humorist.

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Here is something else I know…  If you want to have an idea that is worth having, you need to look at things from a totally different angle.  If I want to know myself better, I need to reflect on how Charles Schultz would draw me.  I would be half Linus and half Charlie Brown because I am most profound when I have my blanket to comfort me, but things constantly go wrong for me and I see myself as a loser… but I have people who love me, and a dog that battles the Red Baron.

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Another thing I know… If you want to make something, you have to follow the rules, and only occasionally break them.  This post began with a simple enough rule.  It had to have simple statements of things I have learned over the course of my life, and the pictures all had to come from a randomly selected picture file on my laptop.  I save all kinds of weirdly chosen and goofy things in my art and memes files.  So how dangerous can that rule be?  Of course, I also want to put up a bit of my own artwork, and this file that I chose doesn’t seem to have any in it.  So, I have to break the rule… but only this one last time.

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Now, I know you will probably look at this and think to yourself, “What the hell is wrong with you, Mickey?”  Or maybe you will say it out loud in your most disgusted voice.  But I do know this…  If you are old and you have lived long enough to have learned a thing or two… or possibly three, you can simply start writing and the ideas will be there.  And it might turn out to be something you will be glad you wrote and shared.  This is simply a thing that I know.

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May 6, 2023 · 1:43 am

A Boy and a Girl, Hands and Hearts

This is not really a girl and a boy. They are Snow Babies, spirits of the dead who tend to those souls who freeze to death.

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.

I was never a nudist like Jeff here when only a boy. But I do believe now that having naked friends who were girls like Bunny is Jeff’s friend, would have been good for me and would’ve made romance easier and more real.

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.)

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May 6, 2023 · 12:04 am

I Love to Laugh

It began in childhood with the Red Skelton Show.    Every Wednesday night it was a refuge for me.  And refuge was a critical idea for me.  I was a child hiding a terrible secret from the entire world.  At times I hated myself.  Twice as a teen I came very close to choosing suicide over life.  The person I most needed to hide from was myself.  And humor helped.  Red Skelton’s gentle humor helped me to not only escape from myself for a while, it taught me to laugh at my own foibles and not take things quite so seriously.

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In my college years I discovered humor in written form.  Mark Twain swiftly earned my utter devotion as I read not only Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but Roughing It, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Mysterious Stranger, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain.  You know, there are a large number of things in Mark Twain’s humorous books that make you cry, that make you angry, and make you think deep thoughts.  I basically discovered that humor is a way that smart people choose to think of things which helps to keep you sane and basically un-suicided.

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A beautiful portrait by artist Emily Stepp

It is obvious that some people become very skilled at humor because they have used it all their lives to fight the darkness .  Robin Williams is only few years older than I am.  In many ways his life has paralleled my own (obviously minus the wealth and fame in my case… but what would’ve happened if Robin had become a school teacher?)  I have depended on Robin Williams’ movies to keep me going, giving me insights in how to talk to kids, how to be a parent, and how to empathize with others.  Of course, I haven’t yet taken some of his movie advice.  I never put on a mask and a dress to deceive my own children.  But only time will tell.

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I obsess about humor and how you create it.  I gorge on things like the works of Dave Barry.  Do you know who he is?  Florida newspaper columnist who writes books about everyday life and the fools who live it?  I have to do a post on Dave Barry, because he makes me laugh so hard that milk shoots out of my nose, sometimes when I am not even drinking milk… believe me, I don’t know how that works either.

A bust of Herman Munster
Doofy Fuddbugg here is an example of what a “Nolt” is.

I love to laugh.  It makes the world right again.  I have laughed an awful lot for almost an entire lifetime now.  I treasure all the funny people I have known.  And I need to continue to try to make people laugh up until the very end.  Because the world is too often not a funny place.  It can be full of badness and sadness and suffering.  And as Mark Twain  so aptly pointed out, “Against the assault of laughter… nothing can stand.” 

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May 5, 2023 · 12:22 am

Where We Go at Sunset

The sun is finally going down,

And shadows lengthen o’er the town.

And all the kids from their playgrounds fled,

To places where they’ll lay their heads.

Will ‘morrow come and bring new dreads?

The king refuses to put down the crown.

And aldermen steal the treasures from town.

So now our hope is in our dreams,

And we dream tomorrow’s not as bad as it seems.

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May 4, 2023 · 11:53 pm

Dave Barry

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I threatened to write a post about Dave Barry and the writing gods apparently thought that was a very very bad idea.  They have tried to prevent me from carrying out this idle threat by attacking my computer with gremlins.  Now my WordPress page is shrinking practically out of sight.  I can barely  see what I am typing.  You don’t believe me?  Here’s what it looks like at the moment;

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They obviously tricked me into pressing the secret shrink button on my computer, and I have no idea where to find the un-shrink features.  Not only that, but my Facebook page is automatically translating everything it can into French.  They really don’t want me to tell you about Dave Barry.  And why do you suppose that is?

Well, Dave Barry may actually be me from a parallel dimension.  He started writing for The Miami Herald in the early 80’s, at about the same time I started teaching.  He retired from that in 2004 after winning a Pulitzer Prize and started writing humorous novels…. the same thing I started doing when I left the job I loved and was good at.  Okay, so I am stretching the analogy to the point that all the buttons are popping off its shirt… but the point is, we are alike in some ways and I admire his work and I steal things from it whenever I possibly can.  Like this post.  I deeply admire the way he can say witty and pithy things.  Like some of these quotes;

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So, you see, he is very good at doing what I want to be good at.  He is a humor columnist and all-around imitation Mark Twain.  And I have read and loved his novels.  Especially the Peter Pan things he writes with a partner.

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Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

So, I will leave this post here even though I could talk for hours about how Dave Barry makes me laugh.  I have to stop.  the words on the screen keep getting smaller and smaller, and my old eyes are about to fall out of my head.

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