January 12, 2023 · 2:52 am

Exploring the Mind of Mickey

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One really weird thing that teachers do is think about thinking.  I mean, how can a person actually teach someone else how to think and how to learn if they don’t themselves understand the underlying processes?  Now that I have retired from teaching and spend all my time feeling sorry for myself, I thought I would try thinking about thinking one more time at least.  Hey, just because I am retired, it doesn’t mean I can’t still do some of the weird things I used to do as a teacher, right?

This time I made a map to aid me in my quest to follow the twists and turns of how Mickey thinks and how Mickey learns.  Don’t worry, though.  I didn’t actually cut Mickey’s head in half to be able to make this map.  I used the magical tool of imagination.  Some folks might call it story-telling… or bald-face lying.

Now, a brain surgeon would be concerned that my brain maps out in boxes.  He would identify it as a seriously deformed brain.  It is not supposed to be all rectangular spaces and stairs.  It probably indicates a severe medical need for corrective surgery… or possibly complete amputation.  But we are not going to concern ourselves with trying to save Mickey from himself right now.  That is far too complex a topic to tackle in a 500-word daily post.  We are just discussing the basics of operation.

You see the three little guys in the control room?  They are an indication that not only did I steal an idea from the Disney/Pixar Movie Inside Out, but I apparently have too few guys doing the job up there compared to the movie version.  (It probably makes sense though that a young girl like the one in the movie has a much more sensible configuration in her brain than someone who was a middle school teacher for 24 years.  Seriously, that job can do a bit of damage.)  The three little guys are not actually Moe, Curly, and Larry, though that wouldn’t be far from descriptive accuracy.  They are Impulsive Ignatz, currently in the driver’s seat (or else I wouldn’t be writing this), Proper Percy the Planner, and Pompositous Felixian Checkerbob, the fact-checker and perfectionist (also labeled the inner nerd… I am told not everyone has one of these).  They are the three little guys that run around in frantic circles in my head trying to deal with a constant flow of input and output, trying to make sense of everything, and routinely failing miserably.

I shouldn’t forget the other two little guys in my head, Sleepytime Tim in the Dream Center, and little Batty up in the attic.  I have no earthly idea how either of them function, or what in the heck they are supposed to do.  But there they are.  The other three run up and down stairs all day, locating magic mushrooms and random knowledge in the many file cabinets, record collections, book stacks, and odd greasy containers that are stored all around in the many nooks and crannies of Mickey’s mind.  They collect stuff through the eyes and ears, and it is also their responsibility to chuck things out through the stupidity broadcaster at various inopportune times.  It is also a good idea for them to avoid the lizard brain of the limbic system in the basement.  It is easily angered and might eat them.

So now you should be able to fully understand how Mickey thinks.  (Or not… a qualifier I was forced to put in by Checkerbob.)

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January 11, 2023 · 4:50 am

The Bottle Imp Implementation

I gave you a list of places where my ideas for fiction come from, and in the end, I failed to explain the thing about the bottle imp. Yes, I do get ideas from the bottle imp. He’s an angry blue boggart with limited spell powers. But he’s also more than 700 years old and has only been trapped in the bottle since 1805. So, he has about 500 years of magical life experience to draw from and answer my idea questions. Admittedly it would be more helpful if he were a smarter imp. His name is Bruce, and his IQ in human terms would only be about 75. But, then, I don’t have to worry about misfired magic. If I asked him to, “Make me a hamburger,” he wouldn’t immediately change me into a fried, ground-beef patty because he is not smart enough to do that high of a level of magic spell.

But he is just barely intelligent enough to tell me a truthful answer if I asked him a question like, “What would happen if I put an alligator’s egg in a robin’s nest as a joke, and the robin family decided it was their own weird-looking egg and then tried to hatch it?” The answer would be truthful according to his vast knowledge of swamp pranks. And it would also be funny because he’s too dumb to know better. In fact, he told me about a mother robin who worked so diligently at hatching an alligator egg that a baby alligator was hatched. She convinced it that it was actually a bird. And when it came time for the baby birds to learn to fly, the baby alligator couldn’t do it… until she talked it into flapping madly with all four legs. Then, a mother’s love and faith in her child got an alligator airborne.

Yeah, that hasn’t proved to be a very useful story idea. I put it into a story I was writing during my seven years in high school, and then lost the manuscript. (I was a teacher, not a hard-to-graduate student.) But it was proof that you can get your writing ideas from a bottle imp.

So, if you decide to use bottle imps as an idea source for fiction, the next step is to find and acquire the right sort of bottle imp. I got mine from Smellbone, the rat-faced necromancer. I bought it for an American quarter and three Canadian loonies more than a dozen years ago. I found it at his Arcana and Horse-Radish Burger Emporium in Montreal. But I am not sure how that information helps you. Smellbone died in a firey magical-transformation accident involving an angry Wall-Street financier and a dill pickle. The whole Emporium went to cinders in an hour.

If you are going to try to capture the bottle imp yourself, which I strongly do not recommend, you are going to need a magical spell-resistant butterfly net, a solid glass jar, bottle, or brass urn. A garlic-soaked cork to fit the bottle. A spell scroll ready to cast containing at least one fairy-shrink spell. And an extremely limited amount of time to actually think about what you are doing.

Now I have told you how I get writing ideas from a bottle imp. Aren’t you glad I did not include this idea in the post about where ideas come from? After all, I am a fiction writer. I get my jollies from telling lies in story form. And bottle imps, especially angry blue bottle imps named Bruce, or Charlie, or Bill, are more trouble than they are worth. They can curse you with magical spells of infinite silliness and undercut your serious nature for a lifetime.

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January 10, 2023 · 3:36 am

The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 4

Canto 4 – The Marionettes

Shandra was waiting for him with a paper bag full of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.  She was running away from home.  There was no other choice about it.  They were never gonna beat her ass again like that, whether she deserved it or not.  And she was eight now.  She could damn well take care of her own self.

But Mark mattered.  She was gonna need him to run away too.  Through all the darkest times in first grade, Mark sitting next to her in Miss Immelmann’s class was the only reason she was still alive.  You don’t let go of somebody like that once you find them.  And he claimed he liked her too, didn’t he?  Enough that when she asked him, he showed her his little pink mushroom cap of a dick.  And he didn’t ask to see her little black coochie in return.  That was like love or something from a white man.  Even if he was just a little boy.  And when she asked him about running away together after school got out, he said yes, didn’t he?

But where the hell was he?  School was over three hours ago.  And still no sign.

And then he was there, pedaling up on his shiny silver bicycle.  He was wearing that blue jacket of his.  And a baseball cap covered his wavy blond hair.  That beautiful blond hair.  Shandra loved how it felt when he let her comb it with her hand.  And he smiled at her as he used his bike chain to secure his bike to the lamp post on Mockingbird Lane.

“What took ya so long?”

“Mom asked too many questions.  I had a bad time sneaking out.  I didn’t tell her about you or the plan or anything.”

“That was smart of you.”

“You aren’t mad are you, Shandra?”

“Well, sure I am!  I worked hard making all these sandwiches to bribe you with.  I used all Poppa Dark’s peanut butter, so he’ll kill me if the cops catch us and take me home.”

“You didn’t have to bribe me.  I said I’d follow you anywhere, and I meant it.”

“Well, we are gonna need food on this journey.  We ain’t never coming back home again if we can help it.”

“Where are we going to run away to?”

“Well, I ain’t figured that out yet.”

“Let’s go in that toy store and look around while we think about it.”

“That’s the Haunted Toy Store, Mark!  Nobody goes in Aunt Phillia’s Toy Emporium unless they want to disappear from the face of the earth.”

“Well, we are running away to Europe or Mexico or somewhere…  Maybe it’s a good place to start laying low so the cops don’t know where we are.”

“Yeah, they would never think of finding a kid in a toy store.”  She frowned at him and let that last statement sink into his little, thick head.

“…But, a haunted toy store.”

“Good point.  Let’s go.”

She took him by the hand and, carrying the bag of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the other hand, she led him into the store.

The spooky old guy at the counter grinned at them and blinked his owl eyes.

“We’ve been expecting you.”

“What?” said Mark, sounding shocked.

“How did you know we were coming here?” Shandra said sharply.

“A little mouse told me.”

“Oh, yeah?  Did he say why we were coming here?”

“He said you were trying to escape from a bad situation, and he knew this shop specializes in helping out in such situations.”

Shandra was a bit stunned by that.

“You know what marionettes are?” said the creepy guy.

“Puppets,” said Mark.

“Puppets controlled by strings.  Some people are like that… controlled by strings, I mean.”

“Yeah, so?” challenged Shandra.

“So, go see the marionettes.  That will be of help to you.”

Shandra led Mark by the hand around the corner to where the marionettes hung on their strings.  It was a wall full of creepy, round-headed people with big, round eyes.  They were staring down at Shandra and Mark.  There were kings and queens, goofy-looking idiots with buck teeth, spindly men with bushy beards and what were probably soldier’s uniforms, ballerinas, clowns, flowers in flower pots with leafy arms and big-eyed faces on their blossoms, lots of ridiculous things like that.

“They are telling us to look at the big trunk there on the floor,” said Mark.

“I didn’t hear them say anything,” said Shandra.

“They want us to get into the trunk.”

“Why?”

“They say they will help us find a new home.”

Shandra didn’t want to believe a word of it at first.  She didn’t hear the wooden heads say anything at all.  This weren’t no fantasy movie with magic and junk in it.

“They say it’s the only way,” Mark pleaded.

So, only because they were desperate to escape the city…  And Mark seemed to think it was a good idea.

The trunk was big enough for both of them to sit in it if she faced Mark and put her legs over his legs.  They both leaned towards each other, and the lid came down by itself.  The lock clicked as if someone had turned a key.

“Uh-oh,” said Shandra, “We’re screwed!”

Then the lock clicked again.

“So, Mr. Mephisto, how about these?” said the creepy guy who ran the store.

“Ah, perfect!” said Mr. Mephisto, lifting the two puppets, Mark and Shandra, out of the trunk by their strings.

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January 9, 2023 · 2:26 am

Where Do Ideas Come From?

When you make the mistake of admitting to others that you are a writer, they immediately assume you know things that are kept secret from “normal” people. For instance, they will simply assume that you can tell them where you get your ideas for writing. Well, I am fairly sure that I got the idea for this post from watching a YouTube video in which the Master, Neil Gaiman, says that every author has a joke answer for that one with enough sarcastic wit in it to punish the asker with public humiliation.

I asked the dog if she knew any jokes like that which I could use to prepare for someone asking me that question in public. She said, “You could tell them that your family dog tells you what to write every day.”

“No,” I said, “people would never believe it.”

“Well, it is supposed to be a joke. But you are right. No one would ever think you were actually smart enough to write down what a dog tells you.”

“Yes, it’s a good thing for me that you know how to speak in English. I could never translate and transcribe Barkinese.”

So, I began thinking of where some of my best ideas came from.

Dreams

Some of my stories come directly from dreams that I had. The nightmare about being chased down a street in Rowan at midnight by a large black dog with red eyes was an actual dream I had in the 1970s. So was the nightmare of the werewolf climbing out of the TV during a late-night viewing of Lon Chaney in The Wolfman.

Those two dreams together were the start of the story that became my recently published novel, The Baby Werewolf. Both dreams visit the protagonist in the story I wrote almost as if they were his dreams and not actually mine.

Events

Snow Babies, the best novel I have ever written, was based on two different blizzards I experienced, first as a child in the 1960’s, and then again as a high school kid in the 1970s. Each blizzard involved being snowed in for a week at someone else’s house. As a child, I was stuck at Grandpa’s farm place until the snow plows could finally do their work and open the gravel roads. As a teen, I was stuck in Great Grandma’s retirement apartment near the high school in Belmond.

That novel also is based on the next source of ideas;

Characters

I can’t think of any story I have written that isn’t based on real people I have known in one way or another. Valerie in the novel above is based on three different girls I have known or taught. One of those three is my own daughter. The four orphans on the bus in that story are all boys from my junior high classes in the 1980s.

Lucky Catbird Sandman, the hobo who wears the quilted coat of many colors, is based on the poet Walt Whitman, whom I knew well in a past life, and my own shiftless, storyteller self. Some characters are just so key to a story idea that they themselves are the reason for a book to exist.

In conclusion, the dog doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. None of these things are really where I get my ideas. But I am out of time. I will have to write about the bottle imp another day. No, really. A magical imp trapped in a bottle. You can make one of those give you ideas for novels with only a slight risk to your life and soul.

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January 8, 2023 · 12:40 am

Drawing Nudes

The three figures in this painting were all drawn from photographed models. The girl was actually nude, skinny-dipping with friends.. The buck deer was photographed by a wildlife photographer with a telephoto lens. The warrior was drawn from a photo in National Geographic. They were put together to create meaning in this picture. It is a spirit-animal encounter in a lightning dream as talked about in the novel Hanta Yo by Ruth Bebe Hill. It depicts a spiritual experience. But it depends on my ability to draw figures anatomically correctly. And to accomplish surrealism with any realism requires practice drawing actual nude figures.

I was an English Major in college at Iowa State from 1975 to 1979. And during that time I took a lot of art classes. Every drawing class they had I took and excelled in most of them. But art was a part of the Home Economics curriculum at the time and you couldn’t actually take a minor in Art. So, when I was a junior, I became eligible to take the Anatomy Drawing course based on my success in all the other drawing courses. And, of course, I was the only student artist in the class who was not an Art Major. So, it was a class where the other 25 ladies and 3 guys in the class were all Art Majors and all resented my presence.

Of course, a fact of my life was that at the point when I entered that class with its nude models and highly demanding, anal-retentive art professor, I was still repressing my own memory of being a sexual assault victim. Dr. Lou Bro demanded that we all were very aware that we were doing art and not porn. She made eye contact with each of the four males in the class as she said it. It was all a matter of point of view, what you focused your drawing on, and what you emphasized, consciously or not. Porn drawings could fail you. And you had to know the difference.

It was explained to us that the nude models would come from among the art students. We could earn ten dollars for posing for an hour, and though she planned on using mostly senior art students from outside the class, she needed some of us to sign up to fill in some slots, especially if we were male, and especially if we were willing to pose for the whole two hours on a Tuesday or a Thursday during winter quarter. And the intention was to have the model pose completely nude.

.Pressure was put on each of the four males in the class. I was not really expected to volunteer since I was not an Art Major, but the ladies were bullying each of us to take the plunge. The girl who was nicest to me warned that Dr. Bro only gave about three or four A’s in any of her classes and lots of students who didn’t make A’s didn’t pass. She also encouraged me by telling me that volunteer models got points added to their grade as well as the monetary reward. So, being nagged and, in one case, sweetly encouraged, I made the mistake of putting my name on the list. Two of the other guys got bullied into it as well. I found myself shivering a lot that December, and not all of it was from the cold.

There comes a time with every repressed memory when it suddenly all comes rushing back. It happened to me during the course of this nude drawing class. I fell victim to the flu virus running around campus, and I ended up reliving the entire horrible event on my dorm-room bed. And, my turn as a nude model happened to come up on the Thursday after I got sick, and so, it was my good fortune to acquire a note from Student Health Services signed by a doctor that said I was excused from classes for a week, and longer if my fever stayed high.

And so, I did not have to get naked in front of 25 females plus Dr. Bro. She graciously accepted my doctor’s note. I eventually got a C in the class. So, I don’t know for sure that I didn’t get a grade penalty, but she was nicer to me than the other two guys who didn’t show up for their turns either. Neither of them were sick. And when we did finally get a nude male model, he was a senior Art Major who had also been ill a couple weeks before he posed, so he was actually wearing a long-underwear shirt and bluejeans.

So, I learned to draw nudes in that somewhat traumatic but also humorous situation in college. I learned that it had nothing to do with sexuality, and everything to do with seeing how light and shadow plays across the surfaces, and how that gives depth and a sense of form to the body you are drawing. And the genitals do not have to be depicted, but if they are they are not the focus of the work of art. And clothing is a whole other layer of complexity that you can’t possibly get right if you don’t know how everything underneath fits together. I also learned that Dr. Bro was stern and demanding because getting it right matters. Some of the Pre-Med students took that class (though none during the quarter I took it) because they needed to develop their hands and fingers to become surgeons, and you also don’t want surgeons who don’t know how it all fits together.

All of today’s artworks were chosen because they were drawn from real models. The third one, Her #2, is the only one where the model posed for me in person. Her boyfriend was my roommate in an efficiency apartment that had separate bedrooms and studies. She posed in his bedroom while he was also there. The one I have posted here is the copy of the pencil drawing, Her #1. I gave the original to her personally. She loved it.

The rest of these nudes were from photos of the model. The seventh and eighth pictures weren’t completely nude in the picture. The boy was wearing a very brief swimsuit, and the girl was wearing the bottom part of a bikini. I enjoy drawing nudes. And some of my nudist friends know that and appreciate it. But I am always careful about drawing from real people. Privacy issues and propriety issues make things complicated.

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January 7, 2023 · 5:25 am

Dippy Dogs Must Die! (a Talking-Animal Short Story)

Pepe n Skaggs

My name is Skaggs.  I am a cat.  It is as simple as that.  I have to tell you, life is not very fair to cats.  In my last life I was an alley cat.  I lived on rats that bred and thrived under the water tower in the alley behind the small-town post office.    I was basically happy.  You have heard the old expression, “happy as a cat”, right?  I could kill and eat any rat I wanted at any time, no matter how big of a Mickey he thought he was.  I was good at ripping out rat guts and breaking mouse spines.  I was the baddest cat in the whole damn town.

But I had to share my alley with a dog.  That Barky Bill was an insane killer canine that the owner of the local restaurant and bar kept chained behind his Main Street building to keep the rats away from the restaurant garbage.   I hated that dog with a hate as great as a vampire has for the sun.   (What’s that you say?  You didn’t know that cats knew about vampires?  Silly human, how little you know about the things that should truly scare you in the world.  Cats, vampires, and Barky Bill are far more complicated issues in the world than you realize.)  Anyway, needless to say, I teased that dog on a heavy chain leash for the better part of three years when one day, to my utter horror, I discovered he was loose at the same time that I was totally focused on catching and eating a beautiful gold-colored squirrel.  I was so sure that the squirrel would be the finest thing that any cat had ever eaten, that I didn’t even notice, mainly because I had that squirrel right between my paws, toying with it before devouring it, that the dog was pouncing.  Barky Bill bit clean through my neck.  It was so shocking that even as I was being transported to life number seven, my severed head watched in confusion and fright as that ugly, smelly dog ate my finely tuned rat-catching body.

So, having been a bad, bad Leroy Brown sort of cat, I was sentenced to a next life with a crazy cat lady.   Miss Velma Proddy owned at least fifty cats.  I was reborn in an underwear drawer in her back bedroom, the one she kept for the company that she never had.   My mother was the cat called Pinkie, even though she was a milk-white cat.    My father was Proddy’s favorite, a tomcat called Tom Selleck.    He would’ve killed and eaten me soon after I was born because my mother was not a very dominant fighter and alpha cats like Tom could always sense when a cat filled with pure evil is born.   But Proddy was having none of that.  She rounded up all the kittens and raised them in a blanket box in the corner of the kitchen near the stove.  I owe that woman everything, which is why I don’t understand why she had to go and buy Pepe.

Pepe is more of a malnourished rat than a dog.   Like a lot of Chihuahuas he trembles a lot, and he blinks at you with those big round eyes of his.   Proddy thinks that everything he does is so cute.  She carries him around like a prize possession or a human baby or something.  In my past life I was a white cat like my mother.  (Everyone knows that when a cowboy wears a white hat, it means he’s a good guy, but when a cat has white fur, it means that it is evil.)  In this, my seventh incarnation, owing to the fact that my father was a gray tiger cat, I was a sort of white cat with gray tiger stripes.  It meant I thought like a tiger.  Pepe looked like a rat to me.  Pepe was prey.  Pepe was meat.  I was going to eat him.

“You tell this story so scary, Señor Skaggs,” says Pepe, “you make me so afraid!”

“Shut up, stupid dog.  I’m telling this.  And you are not afraid.  Remember what happened that time I tried  to drown you in the toilet?”

“Si.  I remember well.  That time with the super-fancy drinking bowl.”

“I saw you trying to hold on to the plastic toilet seat and dip your tiny little tongue into the water that was too far below you to reach.  Only your hind legs and stupid little tail were even visible.”

“Si!  And you jumped up to smack me on my cute little behind and push me in.  I remember.”

“But I was surprised that such a little dog could react so fast and leap so far.”

“Si, Señor.  I jumped right on that handle and flushed it.”

“Just as I fell into the water.  That would’ve been the start of number eight if Proddy hadn’t come along right then.”.

“Oh, you make me laugh so hard, Señor.  And she was so mad at you for playing with the toilet!”

“And you remember the time I almost got you with that pot of boiling water and hard-boiled eggs?”

“Si, Señor.  You got up on the kitchen counter right next to the stove.  I was sitting on the floor in front of the stove sniffing up all the smell of the bacon.  You tried to push the pot off the stove.”

“I still haven’t figured out how you planned it.  The bald spots I have all around my front paws are still there from my fur catching on fire.  You must’ve been sitting in the precise spot on the floor where I couldn’t knock the pot down on you without passing my paws through the flames.”

“You owe that one to Señora Proddy too.  She had that fire extinguisher next to the stove.  That saved you from being cooked cat-burgers.  And you looked so funny when she almost drowned you in that white foamy stuff.  Oh, you make me laugh so hard Señor.”

Well, I am guessing that I made my point by now.  This little underfed rat of a dog is more evil than I am!  The harder I try to kill and eat him, the more I suffer for it.  And I still don’t know how he does it!  He makes my life miserable.  He needs to die.

“Oh, you make me laugh so hard, Señor!”

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January 6, 2023 · 3:20 am

Poor Ol’ Wooden Head

“Kaw-Liga”
KAW-LIGA, was a wooden Indian standing by the door
He fell in love with an Indian maid over in the antique store
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.

He always wore his Sunday feathers and held a tomahawk
The maiden wore her beads and braids and hoped someday he’d talk
KAW-LIGA – A, too stubborn to ever show a sign
Because his heart was made of knotty pine.

[Chorus:]
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he never got a kiss
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he don’t know what he missed
Is it any wonder that his face is red
KAW-LIGA, that poor ol’ wooden head.

KAW-LIGA, was a lonely Indian never went nowhere
His heart was set on the Indian maiden with the coal black hair
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.

Then one day a wealthy customer bought the Indian maid
And took her, oh, so far away, but ol’ KAW-LIGA stayed
KAW-LIGA – A, just stands there as lonely as can be
And wishes he was still an old pine tree.

“The Complete Hank Williams” (1998)

Magicman 3

The quirky movie I reviewed, Moonrise Kingdom, reconnected me with a song I loved as a child.  It was on an old 45 record that belonged to my mother’s best friend from high school.  When the Retleffs sold their farm and tore down their house and barn, they had a huge estate sale.  My mother bought the old record player and all the collected records that Aunt Jenny still had.  They were the same ones my mother and her friend Edna had listened to over and over.  There were two records of singles about Indian love.  Running Bear was about an Indian boy who fell in love with little White Dove.  They lived on opposite sides of a river.  Overcome with love, they both jump into the river, swim to the middle, lock lips, and both drown.  Together forever.  That song, it turns out, was written by the Big Bopper, and given to Johnny Preston to sing, and released the year after the Big Bopper died in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.

Kaw-liga, by Hank Williams, was a wooden Indian sitting in front of a cigar store.  His love story is even worse.  As you can see from the lyrics above, he never even gets the girl.  Dang, Indian love must be heck!

But I have come to realize that these aren’t merely racist songs from a bygone era.  They hold within them a plea for something essential.  They are a reminder that we need love to be alive.

When I was young and deeply depressed… though also insufferably creative and unable to control the powers of my danged big brain, I knew that I wanted love.  There was one girl who went to school with me, lovely Alicia Stewart (I am not brave enough to use her real name), that filled my dreams.  We were classmates, and alphabetical seating charts routinely put us near each other.  She had a hypnotic sparkle in her eyes whenever she laughed at my jokes.  She was so sweet to me… sweet to everyone… that she probably caused my diabetes.  I longed to carry her books or hold her hand.  I cherished every time she spoke to me, and collected the memories like stamps in a stamp album.  But like the stupid cigar store Indian, I never spoke up for myself.  I never told her how I felt.  I was endlessly like Charlie Brown with the Little Red-Haired Girl.  Sometimes you have to screw up your courage and leap into the river, even if it means your undoing.  Because love is worth it.  Love is necessary.  And it comes to everybody in one way or another over time.  I look at pictures of her grandchildren posted on Facebook now, and wonder what might have been, if only… if only I had jumped in that stupid river.  I did find love.  And I probably would’ve drowned had I done it back then.  Life has a way of working things out eventually.  But there has to be some reason that in the 50’s, when I was born, they just kept singing about Indian love.

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January 5, 2023 · 4:04 am

Treading Water is Not Drowning

I am still having a hard time writing words daily. I used to pump out a good 1,000+ words daily. Now, there are some days with a re-posted old post and only a couple of lines of something new for an entire day. Glaucoma, arthritis, post-Covid depression, and glitchy laptops keep me from being as productive as once I was.

This post is less than I wanted to write, but today I finished another writing project for a book of short stories about nudists that I am writing for another group project organized by a nudist writer in France. I don’t know if the surge of words in the last couple of days will cure the problem, but as the title says, I am still swimming in the sea of sentences.

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January 5, 2023 · 3:41 am

Here is My Heart

Yesterday I posted another maudlin doomsday post. I probably gave you the opinion that all I do with my time is mope around and think about death. And maybe write a little creepy black Gothic poetry. But that’s not me. I am a lover of the humor in stories by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Kurt Vonnegut. I am a former teacher that managed to teach the entire zoological range of possible middle school and high school students in Texas and did it without being convinced to hate them rather than love them. Yes, my heart is full of mirth and love and memories of weird kids and troubled kids and kids that could melt the meanest of hearts.

My passion is writing fictional stories about the kids I have taught, including my own three, and setting it in a fictionalized version of my little town, the place in Iowa where I grew up. And I put them in plots of impossible fantasy and science fiction in a way that can only be explained as surrealism.

Nobody reads my books. So far, at any rate.

But that isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that, despite my illness and deteriorating quality of life, my books now actually exist. I put off being a full-time writer for 33 years as I finished my teaching career. A writer has to have something to write about. So, teaching came first.

Writing novels was always the ultimate goal, however. I am a story-teller. The story itself is in the very center of my heart.

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Filed under autobiography, cartoony Paffooney, humor, Iowa, kids, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, surrealism, teaching, telling lies, writing

January 4, 2023 · 6:01 pm

My School-Teacher Soapbox

It has been more than a semester now that I have not been a teacher.  I am missing it mightily.  I even miss the yelling and screaming, the name-calling and the crazy-eyed threats against life and limb.  And that’s just me.  I miss what the kids always did too.  This was driven home to me as I tried to move my middle child from one school to another.  We were hoping to get a bit of a break on his placement.  He is a gifted child with a penchant for bizarre and long-lasting obsessions.  He has a talent for building huge, monumental structures in Minecraft.  He is very computer-nerd and history-wonk.  (Yes, I know those are not pure predicate adjectives, but I am a retired English teacher and just don’t care any more.)  I was hoping they could overlook his burnout/blowout eighth-grade brain meltdown from the previous year and give him the chance to be a ninth grader for at least half a year.  No.  Arbitrary rules must be obeyed.  (That isn’t even how she said it.  More like, arbitrary rules MUST be obeyed).  That meant of course that he has to continue to repeat the mindless indoctrination of year number 9, (eight numbered grades plus K), (And Pre-K, come to think of it.)  Make that year number 10.  No high school yet, though he is more than mature enough, intelligent enough, motivated enough, and sweet-natured enough.  We are not loving and forgiving people.  We are strict and by-the-book people!  Forgive me, Lord.  I am writing my own book.  (In more ways than one.)

This is what we are doing wrong in Education;

1.   We are putting people in boxes.  (Little people.  Kids mostly.  We are calling those boxes things like ADHD, Special Education, trouble-maker, learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, disobedient, truant, and “in need of alternative education”… here meaning kid-prison.)

2.  We are sealing those boxes with heavy-duty red tape.  (Read special or remedial classes as waste-baskets for keeping the rabble and the riff-raff out of the good teachers’ hair.)

3.  We are routinely handing those boxes to the box-bangers and package manglers.  (The semi-incompetent teachers who have discipline problems because in teacher college nobody tells you what to do with the kid who sits in the corner and sings to himself instead of paying attention, or the girl who gets out of her seat every time the teacher turns his back to go flitting around the room like a bumble bee going flower to flower (except that it is a more hormonal attraction and goes boy to boy); or the competent teacher like me who incurs the principal’s disfavor for having classes that always make noise and are given such classes in boxes as a punishment because that kind of principal is too limited in intelligence to understand that those kinds of boxes are not really a punishment if you merely take a moment to examine the treasures they contain.)

4.  We keep the boxes air-tight so that no oxygen or light gets in.  (To suffocate learners under piles of worksheets and endless drill and practice is murder.  We are killing the precious learners with boring stuff and teaching them to be zombies who all act alike and hate learning because their brains are rotted masses of goo.)

This is what we must do instead;

1.  Open the boxes up again and thoroughly mix the contents.  (The rich suburban parents will resent the heck out of having their precious honors student sitting in class next to the poor black kid from the projects, but studies show that both kinds of learners do better when they are mixed together.)

2.  Notice, we don’t need two any more, because learners are already distributed to different and diverse boxes based on what they individually need and want to learn about and have talent for.  Groups should be more like the Shakespeare-loving group or the talkative-socializing group or the Tinker-toy builders group or the vampire-literature-writing group and less like groups of kids all the same color or all the same culture or all the same age.

3.  All the teachers need to be trained to handle all the possible… no, make that probable problems that may come up in the classroom.  Every classroom needs a proven veteran teacher and an enthusiastic young apprentice teacher.  Neither one should have to face the evil hordes alone.  And most important of all, any teacher who doesn’t love working with kids (and doesn’t love the kids in a way that will not lead to a prison term) needs be utilized in some way other than as a classroom teacher.

4.  Every classroom is a laboratory and every teacher is a creative and daring mad-scientist-type intent on trying new things and only re-doing things that really work well.  Forget this nonsense about standard curriculum goals and common core curriculum.  Those are only buzz words for suffocating learners and being too lazy to think on your feet in the middle of the every-day classroom battle in the on-going War on Ignorance.

Now you see… I have all the answers and I know everything.  The only mystery is… why don’t more people listen to me?

Tabron

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, teaching

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