April 17, 2023 · 2:07 am

From an Alternative Point of View

These are not my two sons. The picture was drawn fifteen and ninteen years before they were born. Yet they were my two sons in the cartoon story this picture was lifted from.

Am I literally able to fortell the future? Of course not. But as an overly-sensitive artistical type one could argue that there is evidence in my art and writings that my reality now was at least partially embedded in my consciousness many years ago.

Estellia the Demoness

And truthfully, looking at the truth of things based on empirical evidence is what this point-of-view post is all about. We cannot always rely on the traditional concepts of good and evil as they have been taught to us. Sometimes you have to look at how the evidence stacks up properly, and just plain intuit a new way of seeing the whole picture. Yes, this is a portrait of a fifteen-year-old former student of mine. And she was definitely evil and difficult to deal with. But she went into nursing after high school. She works in the ER where her decisive ways and ferocious insistence on having things work out in her favor because that’s the way the established rules say it must be done turn into positive qualities that are probably saving lives in a Texas hospital as we speak. It is all in how you perceive the truth of a situation and then apply it.

Comedy, of course, depends greatly on rearranging your point of view. If you are going to make a joke about something, you have to re-mix and un-match the details in ways that still make a sort of sense to the reader or the hearer of the joke. I have taught at schools like Dudwhittler’s. If you are a teacher, you recognize that that school bus carries not only that which is funny, but also that which is very true. The teacher driving the bus is a tin man who easily rusts and cries too much, thus rusting further, but you can see he has earned his heart, even if he has to drive the bus on top of teaching so he will have enough money to buy food.

But probably the most anticipated thing from a new perspective that you were expecting since reading the title is a new perspective on the Coronavirus shut-down and economic depression. That alternative take is simply this… the pandemic, though extremely hard and painful, is a good thing that happened at the right time.

I am willing to say this, even though the way the virus has been mishandled in this country is going to very likely be the death of me, because there are benefits that we simply don’t recognize without a thorough punch to the gut and another to loose teeth.

It is a good thing because it will make it harder for Herr Fuhrer Pumpkinhead to win the next election, and he will probably take a number of corrupt Republicans down to the bottom of the sea with him.

It is a good thing because it is proving to us that we can survive on less and still make our way out of the bad situation.

It is a good thing because kids get extra time off from school, and probably also the chance to spend more time with the people who really teach them things we need them to know… like parents, grandparents on Zoom, teachers who don’t fear distance-learning technology, and trolls on the internet (Yes, I know that last one is risky and mainly learning the hard way, but it is also true from before the virus hit).

It is a good thing because the air is cleaner. And we have proven that we can make radical adjustments when it is a matter of life and death. And the environmental crisis is actually a matter of life and death.

So, now I’ve had my twisted say about my pretzel-minded perspective. And so you can now trash it, or possibly learn to like pretzels.

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April 17, 2023 · 1:53 am

The Truth About Naked Thinking

The Cobble Sisters, Shelly and Sherry were raised as nudists. At home they are always naked. They wish they could be naked everywhere they go.

Naked thinking as the main idea of this post is about more than taking all your clothes off like the Cobble Sisters do. It is about allowing yourself to think anything it is possible to think about no matter how others might react. And then publishing this thinking, sharing the uncloaked thoughts no matter what they are about. I know that some of you will probably read no further than this. But others will read on because, like me, they are attracted to the notion of the truth laid bare. They want to see it, no matter how much shock and ugliness is being risked. And don’t worry that I am going to post pictures of my own naked carcass because the naked truth about that is that I am not a very social nudist like the Cobbles, especially not Sherry, and I am certainly not an exhibitionist.

I will, however, show you artwork that is not in any way pornographic, but does show you the private parts of people both real and imaginary who do feel like sharing their naked truth visually. (And also, hopefully, tastefully. However, that is entirely up to the whims and prejudices of the viewer.)

At this point in the on-going story of Mickey’s incredibly awkward notions of nudism and naturism, I am totally going to share with you the distressing and undressed topics that my essay collection will attempt to lay bare. I know some things about being a survivor of sexual assault. And also as a result of that first distressing thing, I can also lay bare the truth about being suicidal, struggling with sexual identity, and the need for sex education before such things can befall mere children.

As a school teacher, I have learned a great deal about students’ thoughts about sexuality. I have heard stories straight from the students’ own words, both verbally and in writing, about dealing with homosexuality, transgenderism, body image, and relationships. I won’t reveal anybody’s actual names, but I can lay bare the facts as they were presented to me. A whole lot of naked ugliness, gracefulness, and even on rare occasions, beauty.

And I have naked thoughts about how I believe these things might actually be dealt with in the future, the how-tos and whens of sex education, how society might benefit from laxer rules about public nudity, how schools might be beneficially conducted in the nude, and other wacky notions that might get me banned in Florida and Texas, but might also be worth at least thinking about.

Basically not porn, even though the red panda is naked.

Thinking realistically about the times we are living in, I do know that Mickey-thoughts about nudity and naturism are a potential place for things to go way wrong, especially when books are being banned and schoolteachers can be fired for thinking that students should know about Rosa Parks, Roberto Clemente, and Harvey Milk. But I am old, and have practically no time left to me to get into “good trouble” for the good of the people and institutions I care about. And I am retired, so they can’t fire me. And having one of my books banned would probably be really good for me as an author. So, there is that. And besides, with my art, I hope to prove that the nude human body can be beautiful… even if it’s ugly.

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April 16, 2023 · 12:37 am

Sinking to the Bottom, then Rising to the Surface

Life goes up and down, round and round, inside, outside, happy, to sad, and down to the bottom of the sea, and finally up to the highest height of the mountain peaks. And I am navigating it all in an airship with holes in its wings that also has to serve at times as a submarine with leaks in its hull.

How’s that for a tortured metaphor?

Baby Butterfly Girl, Fish Boy, and Moana helping me obsess about the news.

I know I don’t have many more years to be alive. I am in poor health and it is getting worse. We’re facing tornado times with global warming. The house I live in is falling apart. I am trying to live one day at a time and savor every moment I have left. But there’s a large amount of pain. I have an awful lot of frustration built up over how hard it is getting to do any real writing during the average day. It’s hard to make all of that funny and laugh it off.

Still, I have not given up. This blog post is evidence of that. I pecked this one out with arthritic fingers and a lot of bulldog persistence.

Here are the things I intend to force through to publication;

The Haunted Toy Store

I feel like I have been drowning at the very bottom of the sea. But I am struggling back to the surface for another breath of fresh air.

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April 16, 2023 · 12:06 am

Obsessively Self-Reflective

I honestly hope you are not reading this blog to find advice on life, the universe, writing, or anything. That sounds more like something I myself might do, and I am goofy enough to think this purple paisley prosy thing is a humor blog. I don’t really give advice, good or otherwise.

Even as a teacher I didn’t tell students how to do things in a do-this, then-do-this, and then-do-this lecture format. If anything, I advised by showing them how I did things, leading by example. I taught skills and concepts by setting up tasks that let kids do things for themselves. Most people learn by doing.

This idea applies no matter what the learning goal is. If you want to do magic, you have to cast some spells for yourself. Roger Bacon’s students in the 13th Century learned to do alchemy and eventually chemistry by blowing up the laboratory repeatedly. If I am capable of any sort of artistical or literarical magic, I have achieved it only by trying to do it, trying to be creativical, and getting readers’ and viewers’ attention by being marketableical and somewhat ironical in my blogging with over-use of artificial -ical endings.

So, I treat this blog as way to generate ludicrous ideas and goofy content in order to fascinate readers and sometimes even make them laugh. And I have nothing more to write about than myself and my own experiences. It is obsessively self-inflicted observations about myself. Kinda like standing naked in front of the mirror and learning to laugh at warts and wrinkles. I believe in taking the clothes off of my life experiences and finding the naked truths that were previously hidden. And, no, that doesn’t really explain why it seems I like drawing naked people so much. It’s a metaphor, dang it!

Gilligan never realized how good he had it as the only realistically eligible bachelor on that island.

So, that’s what this blog is all about. I am explaining what this blog is all about. I am looking at my own experience of life, the embarrassments, the sad truths, the disappointments, the triumphs, all the most personal, private, and public stuff. And I am laughing loud and long. Because that’s what life is. Mastering that fundamental skill. Learning to laugh at life.

Here’s a brief summary of the only good advice you can possibly find by reading this blog. If you want to write well, start writing and teach yourself how to do it. And if you want to learn to laugh, look for what’s funny and laugh loud and long and clear.

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April 15, 2023 · 12:04 am

I Don’t Believe in Ghosts… Except for Some Ghosts

As an atheist who believes in God, paradoxes and contradictions are something I am entirely comfortable with. So, it should come as no surprise that I don’t believe in ghosts… with notable exceptions.

Cool song, right? Did you listen to it? It’s a song about ghosts. It’s a lot older than I am. And the singer here, Burl Ives, has been dead since April of 1995. Hearing it today, at random, proves that Burl Ives is a ghost I believe in.

He came back to haunt me today as I am recovering from pink-eye, reminding me of my childhood and youth when he was the snowman in Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer on TV around Christmas time.

He is also haunting me because 1995, the year he died, was the year I got married. I was married to my wife in Dallas in January. In March, we found out that we were going to have our firstborn child before the year was over. And we also found out that my grandfather was dying.

I was not able to make it from Texas to Iowa to see Grandpa Aldrich before he passed away. But he was told while he was in the hospital that we were expecting at about the same time that he got to hold my cousin’s newborn second son. Grandpa loved the music of Burl Ives. In many ways he was like Burl Ives. He even vaguely looked like Burl Ives. And we did get to attend his funeral. (My Grandpa, I mean.) And shortly after that, Burl Ives died and I saw the announcement on the news. This is one sort of ghost I believe in. He came to commune with me as I lay on my sickbed thinking about death. And on a day after finding out that my son, now in the Marines, is about to be discharged after five years and will be home next week. He is ghost of memory. A vibrant and talented spirit of the past who lives on through his work. And he brings with him the ghost of my Grandpa Aldrich, They are both no longer living, but lingering still in the echoes of memory, and still affecting life.

Dean Martin and Perry Como are also ghosts of memory.

Then, of course, there’s the whole matter of the ghost dog. Yes, I continue to see flashes and images and shadows of a brown dog in our house, larger and browner than our own dog, that disappear as soon as you look directly at them. My oldest son has said that he has seen the very same thing, so it is not merely brain damage or impending insanity on my part, unless it is something that also runs in the family. And it has been suggested to me by an elderly neighbor that two families ago, a brown family dog lived in this house and may be buried in the yard.

I believe it is possible that life and love in a family leaves its imprint in many ways on a house, a home, an inhabited place.

I know it can easily be put down to misinterpretations of things seen in peripheral vision, or even mental misinterpretations responding to subtle suggestions. I doubt that there is actually a protoplasmic or energy form that continues after death. But if there is something there, it is benevolent rather than malevolent. Ghosts, if they exist, are a good thing, not a bad one. It doesn’t scare me to live in a place that has a soul capable of absorbing and incorporating a faithful family dog.

Basically, I am insisting that the existence of ghosts is irrelevant. I do not require the artificial reassurance of belief in a life after death to make me unafraid of facing death. I am a part of everything that exists, and I will continue to be a part of it even after my body is dissolved and my consciousness is silenced. Even if life on Earth is extinguished, the fact of my existence is not erased or invalidated. The poet says, “You are a child of the universe. No less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, the universe is unfolding as it should.” -from Disiderata by Anonymous

So, I am ill and thinking about death, for it is not very far away now. And I do not fear it. As I do not fear ghosts. For I don’t believe in them… except for the ones I do.

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April 15, 2023 · 12:02 am

King of the Jungle

Be careful of this tiger kitty

He rules with an iron paw

And every rat and egg and bird

Can end up in his maw

He pees where he likes

And buries poo in your garden

And sings to the moon off-key every night

And never begs of you pardon

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April 14, 2023 · 1:55 am

Old and Grumpy

Suppose being grumpy was a super power, and we could, as a grumpy old brotherhood of geezers, coots, and conservative uncles, could change things just by complaining about them.

No woman would ever leave a toilet seat down again. The Dunkin’ Donuts on Frankford Road would magically reopen and never run out of donuts again. And liver spots and wrinkles would suddenly be attractive to beautiful young women whether they were linked to fortunes or not.

But what if, in order to make better use of this unexplainable super power, we start telling old coots like the fool in the picture that they have to prove they will use this super power only for good, or we will raise their taxes? Or we would forbid them from ever eating bacon again? Either of those things would definitely motivate them.

Of course, the biggest problem with geezers, old coots, and conservative uncles that no one wants to sit next to at Thanksgiving is that they don’t generally get smarter and nicer with age. It is probably not wise to give them a super power that can alter reality. Yes, they are generally quite literally mean-spirited and unqualifiably dumb. And it isn’t really a matter of whether they could ever actually have a super power like that. The real problem is that they already have it. They proved it in 2016 when they elected a gigantic orange-faced Pillsbury Doughboy with mental flatulence to lead our government. And it wasn’t the dumb part that did it. It was the literally mean part. Trump is a walking, talking old coot-complaint given to us by mean old men to tell us, “We are unhappy geezers, coots, and conservative uncles who would rather blow up the government than lift a single tax dollar (especially from a rich dude) to try and fix it”.

What we truly need to do is harness a bit of that grumpy-old-man complaining power, a truly misunderstood and misused super power, to tackle problems like making public schools better, cleaning the environment, and electing smarter leaders (not the stupid ones who actually represent the majority of us). But of course, we will first have to turn off the spigots in the brewery of prejudice and ignorance that is Fox News, and brand all the greedy and stupid people with a red letter “R” for Trumpian Republican. That way, knowing who to vote for to make things better will become easier to the point that even us geezers, old coots, and conservative uncles can do it right.

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April 14, 2023 · 1:46 am

Learning from Bad Writing

So, I just finished reading this book from my leftover pile of classroom reading books that represent my time as a public school reading teacher.

This is book six in the best-selling Charlie Bone series. I didn’t read the previous five books. I have a copy of book one somewhere, but this one is one I picked up for my reading fix last week.

Let me begin by saying, as an obvious Harry Potter imitation, it is a very inventive and enjoyable story.

I read the whole book even though I had difficulty with several things that I have come to recognize as glaring, reader-tripping problems.

Now, to be completely honest about my assessments, Jenny Nimmo, the author of the Charley Bone books, has an impressive resume. She has not only been an English teacher, but she worked for the BBC as well as an editor, director, and other creative endeavors. And her books, unlike mine, are best-seller enough to be picked up by Scholastic Books, a major publisher. She has undoubtedly made a lot more money with her books than I have with mine. And, I confess, I find the story entertaining.

But the story is guilty of writing sins that I am familiar with by having overcome them in my own writing.

Most noticeable is the lack of a sense of a focus character. It is done as a third-person omniscient narrative that goes in and out of different characters’ heads telling what they think and feel. It will go from Charlie Bone’s main-character-thoughts to his nemesis Dagbert Endless’s feelings to the thoughts of the dog that lives in the school and then veers into the bird that is actually Emma, one of Charlie’s female friends with special “gifts of magic” handed down from their common ancestor, the Red King. You end up, as a reader, trying to keep things separate in your awareness about too many characters with too many mental reveals to keep straight. And who all knows what about whom? In one scene a character seems to know already what another character said and did in a previous scene that the knowing character wasn’t present for and hasn’t been told about.

This focus problem is compounded by having too many characters with too little development in the current story. I get it that we are supposed to have met the characters in previous books in the series. But it has to have a more stand-alone quality about it to even work as a separate book. The writer has to keep in mind that readers won’t know everything about every character in previous books because they have either forgotten, or the author has only assumed they would know without being told.

And the scenes and chapters in this book are way too ranging and free-form. A scene that begins in the end of chapter two rambles across to the beginning of chapter three without really concluding and then morphs into another scene entirely when the narrative follows a single character from the conversation in one room into an encounter in the next room. There is a lack of chapter structure to rationalize why those words belong in that chapter rather than the next.

And numerous plot lines are just left hanging at the end of the book, seemingly forgotten rather than set up for the probable sequel. The book does not end with a sense that it is the final end of the saga.

So it is a book that both Hemingway and Dickens would’ve cringed to have written. Never-the-less, I did like this book. The old uncritical critic, you know. I would’ve neither finished reading it, nor written this essay about it if I didn’t find merit in the story. I learned things by reading it. Things to avoid, things to correct when I find them in my own stories, and things that make me go, “Hmmm… I’d like to try that myself.”

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April 13, 2023 · 2:37 am

They Are Real

I have always believed as Carl Sagan taught me in the 1970s, “Extraordinary claims like the existence of aliens requires extraordinary proof.”

Well, we are seeing extraordinary proofs from eye witnesses, military videos, and accounts from whistleblowers.

The main reason I can say I am now 95% certain that we are being visited by intelligent entities from other worlds or other realities is because the American government has finally admitted on the record that there are things buzzing our aircraft-carrier fleets that we have video recordings of that we don’t know how they fly and do the other impossible things that we have them on record as doing. The gentleman pictured above, Luis Elizondo, was formerly the leader of an intelligence project for studying these Unidentified Arial Phenomena (UAPs for short.) The government has identified him as the person he says he is, a person who left his job in order to make all of this public and to get the government, especially congress, to take it all seriously. He has evidence that the visitors are a definite national security threat and safety concern for our airborne military and civilian air travel.

Extraordinary proof. Of course, I believed before based on the work of Stanton Freedman, Richard Dolan, George Knapp, and numerous other competent and believable investigators (but NOT the Ancient Aliens guys.)

And I am not the only one who has had his long-held beliefs vindicated. This gentleman, Bob Lazar, has been a much-maligned and persecuted whistleblower since the 1980s. He had his identity erased by the government. His former bosses at the Los Alamos Research Facility disavowed that he ever worked there. His college records were expunged. They even deleted his birth certificate. All of this because he worked at a secret base in Area 51 called S4. He was tasked with reverse engineering the craft pictured above. And, during the time that he was working on that, he took friends and credible witnesses out to a secure area to witness test flights of the aircraft he was supposed to be working on. And, of course, he got caught. He turned to TV journalist George Knapp to broadcast the information he was blowing the whistle on, not to make money, but to spread the truth and make himself too visible for the government to simply kill him and make him disappear.

More people believe Bob Lazar now than ever did before. He is somewhat vindicated as a real whistleblower. It has been proven that the rare element, 115, is real, though it was an unknown element when he broke the story forty years ago. There is now also undeniable video of similar crafts provided by the US government.

It will probably never be 100 % certain. The people profiting off the technology gained from the 1947 Roswell Incident will not compromise their cash cows… or their money-making anti-gravity drives either. And our government has been lying and covering up things since before Washington’s Presidency. But I believe we now know… we are not alone in the universe.

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April 13, 2023 · 1:16 am

Human Beans

People are not really vegetables… even though I have seen IQ scores as a teacher that might say otherwise. But I often use the pun of calling them Human Beans.

Your basic human bean.

Western style beans

Of course, being a Texan means having a healthy appreciation for beans as a staple food. Cowboys used to live off of beans and beef jerky, and if Louis L’Amour is to be believed, they even made tea from mesquite beans. That makes your average cowboy made up of over 50 per cent beans. Of course the rest of him is mostly gas caused by the beans in his diet, whether it comes out as a fart or as a Texas tall tale… And yes, I admit it, I get a lot of my writing ideas from eating beans.

A Boston baked bean

We must also be aware that Texas has no corner on the beans market. We all know Boston baked beans by reputation. They, like the ever-hapless Cubs, had a habit of never winning the World Series. And now, in the last two decades, it has actually been difficult for the other teams to keep them from winning it all. But we shouldn’t mix up beans with baseball metaphors. Baseball is like life. Full of long and boring parts punctuated by intense moments of hitting, scoring, committing errors, and player versus player individual drama. And concession stand food! Beans, however, can taste good in chili draped over the ballpark hot dogs which cost more than a restaurant meal at most reasonable restaurants. And I promise you, you will never hit a home run over the fence by hitting it with a bean.

A Mexican style re-fried bean

And I wish to point out that this last human bean is not a racist cartoon. Beans are not part of the human race. They only have legs in cartoons and would come in last even when racing a snail. And all beans are created equal in the sight of God. Kidney beans, butter beans, navy beans, string beans… all beans are just beans, no matter what the color of their skin is, and no matter how they add flavor to a casserole. All beans are just in it to live life the best they can, and if that’s not enough… they can be planted as seeds to raise the next generation of human beans.

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