I think the expression, Iowegian as it is, comes from the expression “doing squat” which means “doing nothing at all” combined with “diddling around”, the non-sexual meaning of which is “dithering or only working in an ineffective way.”
I humbly confess that I am not that great of a researcher when it comes to linguistic facts and word origins.
I am much better at making things up and creating my own portmanteau words.
But I do have a very good ear for how people actually talk. Especially when it comes to Iowegian, Texican, Spanglish, and Educational Jargon-Gibberish. Counting English and Tourist-German, I speak six languages.
I also humbly confess that I make big mistakes. I have been working hard for a week on editing published books because of how an overreaction to one small inappropriate detail nearly destroyed one of my best books and now I have to deal with the impression some readers have that I write inappropriate stuff all the time.
Yes, I definitely erred…
I also realized I assume everybody accepts nudity as easily as I do.
They definitely don’t.
But naked is funny. And that is not a point about my writing that I am willing to concede.
Doing diddly-squoot can also result in really weird stuff like this Christmas-card composite of my artwork and Vincent Price’s 1967 Christmas tree.
They came in the mail every November in the 1960’s. Particularly important was the Monkey Ward’s catalog because there was a Montgomery Ward Catalog Store in Belmond on Main Street. Mom and Dad could order, pay for, and pick up things there, particularly Christmas and birthday gifts. The four of us; my little brother, my two younger sisters, and I would argue about who would get to look at it next for hours at a time (the catalog, not the store… although the man who ran the store sold tropical fish in the back, so I could look at that for hours).
I, of course, dog-eared different pages than my sisters Nancy and Mary did. And David was eight years younger than me and was into baby toys, blocks, and books.
Nancy owned the three on the left.
I was nutty about model trains… and so was Dad.
I am amazed at how cheap things were back then compared to now. Of course, things were more easily destroyed because of the cheaper plastics and simpler ingredients and materials common in the 1960’s. So, it is truly amazing how many of those toys I still have. And how many survived me only to be destroyed by my own children.
And it often wasn’t enough to look at just the Monkey Ward’s catalog. (Grandpa Aldrich always called it “Monkey” instead of “Montgomery”, a pretty standard old-farmer joke in the 60’s). Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich always got a copy of the Sears catalog. And we would pour over that to find treasures that Monkey Ward’s didn’t have. That was inconvenient for Mom and Dad. The nearest Sears store was in Mason City, 50 miles northeast.
I was 10 years old in ’66.
Mary Poppins was a 60’s Disney hit.
Just the mention of Christmas catalogs of old when discussing with sisters flashes me back to the time when I was in grade school and Christmas time was all about being good for Santa because… well, toys.
And old Christmas catalogs still fascinate me. I love to look back through ten-year-old Mickey-eyes at a simpler, kinder time. Although, if I’m honest with myself, it probably wasn’t really any better than now. I just choose to believe that it was.
Life seems to be getting harder and harder. And I realize that a big part of that perception is the fact that my health is deteriorating quickly. This is a humor blog, but it has been getting more and more serious and more and more grim as the grim reaper becomes more and more a central character in my own personal story.
My perception of reality, however, is best explained by a passage in a novel that spoke to me in college. It comes from the novel, the Bildungsroman by Thomas Mann called Der Zauberberg, in English, The Magic Mountain. In the scene, Hans Castorp is possibly freezing to death, and he hallucinates a pastoral mountainside scene where children are happily playing in the sunshine. Possibly Heaven? But maybe not. As he goes into a stone building and finds a passage down into the ground, he sees wrinkled, ugly, horrible hags gathered around a child’s corpse, eating it. And this vision explains the duality at the center of the meaning of life.
For every good thing, there is an equal and opposite bad thing that balances it out. There is no understanding what perfection and goodness mean without knowing profanity and evil. Just as you can’t understand hot without cold nor light without darkness. And you don’t get to overturn the way it is. You try your hardest to stay on the heads side of the coin knowing that half the time life falls to tails.
So, what good does it do me to think about and write about things like this? Well, it makes for me a sort of philosophical gyroscope that spins and dances and helps me keep my balance in the stormy sea of daily life. I deal with hard things with humor and a sense of literary irony. I make complex metaphors that help me throw a rope around the things that hurt me.
We are living now in the Spider Kingdom. Hard times are here again. The corrupt and corpulent corporate spiders are spinning the many webs we are trapped in. As metaphorical as it is, we wouldn’t have the government we currently have and be suffering the way we are if that weren’t true.
But no bad thing nor no good thing lasts forever. The wheel goes round and round. The top of the wheel reaches the bottom just as often as the bottom returns to the top. So, it will all pass if we can only hold out long enough.
Covid has thrown me for a loop this month. I am forced to rely on my Work in Progress for the NOVEL WRITING post for this work. My writing time has been seriously curtailed for a while, and I will get back to projects in their proper order as soon as I recover.
Canto 1 – The Toy Store on Mockingbird Lane
Hannah was ten, looking more like her Asian-born father than her Texas-born mother Brittany, but she definitely had her mother’s passion for things that were exotic, unusual, or simply out of place.
“Look at that spooky old toy store, Mom! Doesn’t it look like a haunted house? Can we go in there and look?”
The little building on 1300A Mockingbird Lane in Dallas was built like a Victorian house from the 1800’s. It was hard to tell if the place had been painted white so long ago that the peeling paint made it look like that, or if someone had intentionally painted it light gray with black speckles. Brittany’s curiosity was peaked.
“That store has been there for as long as I can remember. But I’ve never been in there. They used to tell me it only sold old, antique toys.”
“I don’t wanna buy anything,” pouted Hannah. “I just want to look for ghosts.”
Brittany laughed as she pulled into the parking lot that served the two office buildings that surrounded the toy store and kept it in perpetual shadow all during the sunniest of days.
“We don’t have long to do this. We have to meet Daddy at five so we can go to the movie this evening.”
“It won’t take long. I can almost hear the spooks calling to me.”
Brittany laughed again as she collected the parking ticket from the lot’s operator in his little booth.
“Businesses are closing soon, Ma’am. You don’t have long. I close the gate for the night at six o’clock.”
“It won’t take us that long. We are just going to look in that old toy store.”
“Aunt Phillia’s Toy Emporium? You don’t want to go in there. Nobody hardly ever goes in there. And when they do, sometimes, the police have to show up later for something bizarre that happened.”
Brittany looked at the old Hispanic-looking guy over the top of her sunglasses. He looked serious. But that really only made her want to have a look inside even more.
“I hope something happens that makes the parking fee worth the money.”
“You are braver than I am, lady. I remember when I was a kid, some white boy disappeared in there. They never found him.”
He was seriously trying to scare her out of going in. But Hannah was hopping in her seat, anxious to get out of the car.
“The parking spot is F13, over there in the southwest corner. You have to be out of here by six or your car is locked inside the gate.”
She laughed. “No worries!”
She managed to park, and Hannah burst out of the passenger seat, headed for the store. By the time she got to the front door, Hannah had already disappeared into the store.
Inside the front door, there was a man sitting behind the check-out desk. He had an antique-looking cash register there, and his clothes were definitely long out of style.
“That house monkey was yours, I take it,” said the man. He was apparently old… or old…ish. Somewhere between forty and a hundred and forty. He had a flattop haircut, white hair, and super-thick lenses on his glasses that magnified his eyes, making him look like an eerie sort of owl-man.
“That was my daughter, Hannah, yes…”
“She took off for the wooden toys in the back of the store. I’ve got nobody back there to supervise her, but what trouble can she get into surrounded by wood-goods?”
That struck her as funny. She laughed. “We’ll soon see.”
Looking around the store, she was fascinated by what she saw on sale there. One wall was covered by marionettes, all of them with unusually large and roundish eyes, and all of them hanging from their control strings. There were shelves of costumes and masks, stuffed toys that looked threadbare and poorly sewn together, metal wind-up toys that walked or rolled on wheels, bows with sucker-tipped arrows, porcelain dolls whose eyes looked positively real and alive, staring as if they wanted or needed something from Brittany, and a far wall lined with books, children’s books, classic books, and encyclopedias.
“Hannah? Remember, we were just supposed to be looking for a moment. Hannah?”
There was no answer. So, Brittany walked down the metal wind-ups’ aisle towards the wood-goods in the back.
Suddenly a child’s voice was screaming. “I’m on fire! My dress is on fire! Mommy! Help me!”
Brittany was instantly panicked. But it wasn’t Hannah’s voice. And Hannah had been wearing a Miley Cyrus t-shirt and blue jeans. Still, she ran to the back of the store.
Standing there in front of a wall of wooden cars, trucks, trains and train cars, carved wooden boats, and baseball bats was Hannah, completely naked, her black hair now completely snow white.
“Where are your clothes?”
“I had to tear them off. They were burning.” There were ashes and bits of burned rag on the floor around her. And most alarmingly, the voice coming out of naked Hannah was not Hannah’s voice.
“Hannah? What is going on here?”
“Oh, I am not Hannah. My name is Molly Beeman. I just have her body now.”
“What?” She also began to realize that her own clothes were different. The dress she now wore had puffy shoulder things on it. It was made of a patterned material that she thought was called “gingham.”
“Hannah, let’s get out of here.”
She pulled the naked girl to her, picked her up and carried her to the front. There she saw the same old ghost of a man, sitting and staring with his magnified eyes.
“I see you found what you were looking for…”
“What have you done to my daughter?”
“…Molly, you only have three months to play with it. Be wise and you may actually get your mother back.”
“What?” cried Brittany. “What are you talking about, you… you… crazy old man!”
She burst out of the store through the front door. But she was horrified to see that her car was no longer there. Neither was the parking lot, or the office buildings it served. In fact, there was now what appeared to be a linoleum store and Mexican Cantina where those things used to be. Then she saw an old-timey newspaper stand. It was abandoned and empty. She ran to it. There were newspapers there. She saw a headline about how the U.S. Eighth Air Force suffered the loss of 60 bombers on the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission. That happened on the 17th of August. World War II? The paper was dated August 24th, 1943!
Hannah cuddled against her, still naked in her arms.
“Just hold me, Mommy. Nobody has held me since I burned to death.”
Brittany stared at the pale Asian-American face with snow-white hair. This thing in her arms was no longer human. It was a porcelain doll, cuddling her with jointed, porcelain arms. It’s porcelain face smiled at her. This thing in her arms was no longer her daughter.
I have friends and relatives that believe in angels. Religious people who believe in the power of prayer and the love of God. And I cannot say that I do not also believe. But I also happen to believe that angels live among us.
My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was, as far as I am concerned, an angel. Born in the late 1800’s, she was a practical prairie farmer’s wife. She knew how to make butter in a churn. She knew how to treat bee stings and spider bites. She knew how to cook good, wholesome food that stuck to your ribs and kept you going until the next meal rolled around. She knew how to cook on a wood-burning stove, and knew why you needed to keep corn cobs in a pile by the outhouse door. Or, in the case of rich folks, why you needed to read the Sears catalog in the little room behind the cut-out crescent moon.
She also knew how to head a family. She had seven kids and raised six of them up to adulthood. She sent a son off to World War II. She had nine grandchildren and more great grandchildren, of which I was one of the not-so-great ones, than I can even count on two hands and two feet, the toes of which I can’t always see. Great great grandchildren were even greater. Tell me you can’t believe she was a messenger from God, always knowing God’s will, and making the future happen with a steady hand, and eyes that brooked no nonsense from lie-telling boys.
Mother Mendiola was an angel too. I met her at my first school, Frank Newman Junior High in Cotulla, Texas. She was the seventh grade Life Science teacher. She had been a nun before becoming a teacher, and she was a single lady her whole life. But she was a natural mother figure to the children in her classes. She’s the one who taught me how to talk to fatherless boys, engage them in learning about things that excited them, and become a lifelong mentor to them, willing to help them with life’s problems even long after they had graduated from both junior high and high school. She was not only a mother to students, but she nurtured other teachers as well. She showed Alice and I how to talk to Hispanic kids even though we were both so white we almost glowed in the dark. She went to bat for kids who got in trouble with the principal, and even those who sometimes got into trouble with the law. She had a way of holding her hand out to kids and encouraging them to place their troubles in it. She even helped pregnant young girls with wise counsel and a loving, accepting heart, even when they were seriously in the wrong. When they talk about being an “advocate for kids” in educational conferences, they always make me picture her and her methods. I can still see her in my mind’s eye with clenched fists on her hips and saying, “I am tired of it, and it will get better NOW!” And it always got better. Because she was an angel. She had the power of the love of God behind her every action and motivation. It still makes me weep to remember she is gone now. She got her wings and flew on to other things a long time ago now.
Some people may call it a blasphemy for me to say that these people, no matter how good and critically important they were, could really be angels. But I have to say it. I have to believe it. I know this because I saw them do these things, with my own two eyes, and how could they not be messengers from God? It convinces me that I need to work at becoming an angel too.
I had been promising my daughter for a while that we would build the gingerbread train. I was looking forward to it as an art project. She was impatient to eat it. So, on December 27th, I was finally feeling well enough to do the deed.
So, we prepared the work space on the kitchen table. We laid out the items that we could use for assembly. I made my daughter promise to stop eating elements of the train before we could actually put it together.
I started decorating the Christmas trees that go into the baggage car. My daughter ate several of the sugar-ball decorations.
The baggage car was assembled first. I call it the baggage car because even though it is in the tender position for a steam train if we called it that, that would mean that the engine burned Christmas trees instead of coal. My daughter snuck a few more decorations as we argued about that.
It was encouraging that the first part came together without looking too incredibly terrible.
My daughter decorated a majority of the engine and only ate a few more of the decorations while doing it. This was no small thing given how much she loves to eat gumdrops.
It ended up looking vaguely like the picture on the box. We had a great deal of fun making it. And the last time I checked, portions of it still were uneaten… something I am confident won’t be the case for much longer.
I have lived a life of irony. As a child, I was traumatized by a sexual assault, and it left me afraid to be naked in the presence of others. It was a nightmare in junior high and high school. But even though the physical education showers at the end of every P.E. class were a nightmare dance of towels and hands strategically being flung about because of the other sweaty boys present with mocking eyes and cruel comments, I slowly conducted a personal war within myself to avoid becoming a nudist over the entire course of my teaching career. And then, when I retired, I lost that war. And I became a nudist. I am now a member of the AANR Southwest. And I have been to nudist parks more than once.
You know how practically everyone has that nightmare where they are suddenly at school, in front of the class, and completely naked? Yeah, I had that dream about being both a teacher and a student. I have to say, I eventually learned that all students and all teachers are basically mentally and emotionally naked in the classroom all the time. Students can’t control themselves enough to wear mental clothing. And teachers can’t effectively teach with such barriers in place. Of course, education could not go fully nude without a total restructuring of society and a re-training of all teachers and kids from a very early age.
I can use myself as an example of why “naked is funny.” There is a lot of humor in life that stems from our need to keep certain things secret and the inevitable moment when we fail to keep others from seeing and learning the naked truth.
The picture here is me as I imagine I would have looked naked at ten, showing you everything I was terrified of having girls see, especially the dangly bits that would wiggle and waggle as you walked about naked. I actually wrote a poem about walking about naked as a seventh grader with a wiggling wiener. I, of course, tore that poem up into pieces that I distributed to three different trash cans so nobody could tape it back together. I was aware even back then that I was destined to be one of the world’s worst poets.
I did enjoy being a naked child before I was assaulted. I liked to ride my bike naked at the Bingham Park Woods south of town. There was never anybody else there to bother me. Whether or not anyone ever saw me there, I do not know. Nobody ever said anything about knowing my secret. And after I was attacked, I was always too afraid to try it again.
But being seen naked in nature was not what worried me the most. That naked-in-school nightmare was the one that actually embarrassed me and exposed my dangly bits to girls who knew me.
In P.E. Class once when I was a sophomore in high school, we were standing in a circle on the wrestling mat while the two wrestlers were grappling each other. The girls’ P.E. Class was sitting in the bleachers supposedly listening to whatever the girls’ coach was rattling on about. Of course, we could see they were really all watching the boys wrestle. I was worried that if it got to be my turn, the boy I had to wrestle, being better than me and on the wrestling team, might wrestle my pants off as sometimes happens with certain takedowns. There were cheerleaders in the bleachers that day. Oh, Lord preserve me!
But Jerry Kornbluth and Tom Klotny had an intense match going on… and on and on and on… and the coach was watching them intently as they each countered the other so well that no points were being scored. It lasted long enough that I was in no danger of having to wrestle Nelson, the former State champ in the 110 weight class. So, I stupidly let my guard down.
Boob Eekleboy was a bully and weird-sense-of-humor aficionado. He also was lurking behind me without me being aware of it at all. He was older than me. He was bigger than me. He was weaker than me. (I beat him in a wrestling match the week before, giving him a need for revenge.) And he had an evil mind.
When he took hold of my gym shorts, he apparently got his fingers under the straps of the athletic supporter.
The time between my pants going down and my face turning red as I pulled them back up was probably only about seven seconds. But my dangly bits had been totally exposed. And somebody who might’ve been a cheerleader giggled and squealed about something. Of course, I had that secret trauma that I was suppressing that nearly destroyed me at the time.
My mental problems didn’t let me enjoy this big reveal in any way at the time. But looking back on it, I can see the humor in it. I can actually laugh at it now, gobs of time having healed most of what ailed me then. And I would learn from a third-hand source that one of the cheerleaders that saw it happen liked what she saw and told others about the liking.
So, naked can be funny. I have come to accept that long ago. And it would fuss up some of my novels because they were supposed to be humorous, and I may have planned on using the naked thing a lot.
Before now I have never talked about my childhood friend Jimmy Crafton. It took a long long time to build up enough courage. Writing this on Christmas Eve 2017 makes it easier. Yes this is a very important re-post.
It is not a terrible story. I can’t think of anybody that fits the idea of a “hero” any more than Jim. I remember him as a pale-faced little boy with a thousand Watt smile full of tiny white teeth. He was two years younger than me. He was in my sister’s class at Rowan Elementary. He was outgoing and funny. And he was a hemophiliac. He had the rare condition of having too little of the essential blood-clotting proteins in the blood that the vast majority of us get to take for granted. Every day for him was a risk of having an ordinary injury like a bruise or scrape cause him to bleed to death. He missed great gobs of school days with injuries and crippling pain and the need to go to the emergency room in Mason City for life-saving blood transfusions. We were told when I was eight that he probably wouldn’t last past his tenth birthday. The teachers all gave us strict rules for playing with him on the playground… what not to do, what to immediately report, and what not to allow him to do. I remember one time he decided to wrestle both Bobby and me at the same time. He had a deep and passionate love for the sport of wrestling, big in the high schools of Iowa. He aggressively took us both down and pinned us both with minimum effort. And you should stop laughing at how wimpy that makes me sound. Remember, I had to play the game by different rules than he did. Bob and I both had to live with the consequences if bad things were to happen.
The miracle of Jim Crafton was that he did not die in childhood due to his genetic medical difficulty. In fact, he grew up, went to college, and became a doctor all because of the gratitude he had towards the doctors and medical professionals who helped him conquer hemophilia in childhood. He got married. And he even had a son. Those were things he accomplished in life that no one believed were possible back in the 1960’s.
But now we get to the part that I can’t write without typing through tears. A hemophiliac relies on regular transfusions of blood to supply the clotting factors that he cannot live without. And there was no effective screening technique for HIV in blood supplies before 1992. Further problems arose from the blood bank practice of mixing blood donations together by blood type. That meant that even clean blood donations were likely to become tainted through mixing. Far too many of the hemophiliacs in America were given infected blood and became AIDS sufferers at a time when a diagnosis of HIV was basically a death sentence. And worse, AIDS sufferers were often isolated and treated like lepers for fear of contracting the disease from ordinary contact with them. You might remember the sad case of Ricky Ray in Florida. He and his two brothers were all hemophiliacs. They all were infected. They were expelled from school. They even had to live in hiding after loving members of their community burned their house down. We were horrible to people who were dying of AIDS.
But I can’t leave this essay on such a sad note. My friend Jimmy was a hero, a doctor, and a dad. He lived a life worth living and worth knowing about. His life was a gift to all of us lesser beings. And this is the time of year for remembering those we have loved and lost. Jim died of AIDS decades ago. But he still lives in my heart and my memory. And if you have read this little story, he lives in you now too. That is a sort of magic, isn’t it? I only wish I had more powerful magic to give.
While I was sick with Covid Omicron I couldn’t do much writing or drawing or creative work. The disease robbed me of ease of movement through my arthritis. The fevers clouded my mind even though I was only experiencing the mildest of fevers. And that ultimately meant that my creativity imperative was nagging me constantly about wasting what life I have left.
The remedy I found for this came in the form of a phone app that allowed me to do color-by-number-coloring book pages. In this post, you can see how I filled my time by tapping on numbers on the touch screen. These are not original works of art by me. They are more like putting a puzzle together like I regularly do whenever I visit my sister Nancy living now in retirement on the family farm. Though they are not the creativity my mind craves, they kept me alive as I healed.
I did not do anything creative but choose which pictures to color and save. But I have to admit, I am pleased with the results I am left with now that I am better.
I admit that I tried out other versions of the coloring-book program as well… just so I could color sexy ladies.
If you have the bad habit of reading this particular blog more than once, then you are probably aware that I used to be a public school teacher. Even worse, I used to be a middle school English teacher. Aagh! Seventh graders! It explains a lot about how life has warped my intelligence, personality, and world view. It also explains somewhat where I found such a fountain-like source for some of the worst jokes you ever heard.
Now, as to the question of why I have chosen in my retirement early-onset senility to become a humor-blogger… well, that is simply not something I can answer in one post… or even a thousand. But kids are the source of my goofball clown-brain joking around.
Kid-humor, you see, is stunted and warped in weird ways by the time period you are talking about. The eighties, nineties, two thousands, and the tens are all very different. And those are the various sets of students that I attempted to learn moose bowling from by teaching them English.
Still, there are certain universal constants.
Potty humor really kills. If you want to make a thirteen-year-old crack up with laughter, roll around on the floor, and maybe wet his or her pants, then you only need to work the “poop” word, or the “nickname for Richard” word, or the “Biblical word for donkey” word into the conversation. Of course the actual words, even though we all know what they actually are, are magical words. If you actually say them to kids in school as their teacher, those words can actually make you magically and permanently disappear from the front of the classroom. All kids are big fans of George Carlin and his seven words, even though most of them have never heard of him.
And violent humor is popular with kids from all decades. The most common punch line in the boys’ bathroom is, “… and then he kicked him in the Biblical word for donkey!” followed closely in second place by, “… and then she kicked him in the Biblical word for donkey!” I am told (for I don’t actually go in such scary places myself) that in the girls’ bathroom the most popular punch line is, “…so I kicked him right in the soccer balls, and he deserved it!” Why girls are apparently obsessed with soccer, I don’t know… or particularly care.
So my education in humor began with bad-word jokes, slapstick humor, put-downs, and rude noises coming from unfortunate places. Humor in the classroom is actually a metaphorical mine field laced with tiger traps, dead-falls that end with an anvil hitting you on the head, or being challenged to a life-or-death game of moose bowling. (Don’t know what moose bowling is? Moose bowling is a very difficult game that, in order to knock down all the pins and win, you have to learn to roll a moose down the alley.) Sounds like I spend too much time watching cartoons and playing video games, doesn’t it? Well, there’s more. And it gets worse from here. But I will spare you that until the next time I am foolish enough to try making excuses for my really bad jokes.
Catch a Falling Star 
Living in the Spider Kingdom
Life seems to be getting harder and harder. And I realize that a big part of that perception is the fact that my health is deteriorating quickly. This is a humor blog, but it has been getting more and more serious and more and more grim as the grim reaper becomes more and more a central character in my own personal story.
My perception of reality, however, is best explained by a passage in a novel that spoke to me in college. It comes from the novel, the Bildungsroman by Thomas Mann called Der Zauberberg, in English, The Magic Mountain. In the scene, Hans Castorp is possibly freezing to death, and he hallucinates a pastoral mountainside scene where children are happily playing in the sunshine. Possibly Heaven? But maybe not. As he goes into a stone building and finds a passage down into the ground, he sees wrinkled, ugly, horrible hags gathered around a child’s corpse, eating it. And this vision explains the duality at the center of the meaning of life.
For every good thing, there is an equal and opposite bad thing that balances it out. There is no understanding what perfection and goodness mean without knowing profanity and evil. Just as you can’t understand hot without cold nor light without darkness. And you don’t get to overturn the way it is. You try your hardest to stay on the heads side of the coin knowing that half the time life falls to tails.
So, what good does it do me to think about and write about things like this? Well, it makes for me a sort of philosophical gyroscope that spins and dances and helps me keep my balance in the stormy sea of daily life. I deal with hard things with humor and a sense of literary irony. I make complex metaphors that help me throw a rope around the things that hurt me.
We are living now in the Spider Kingdom. Hard times are here again. The corrupt and corpulent corporate spiders are spinning the many webs we are trapped in. As metaphorical as it is, we wouldn’t have the government we currently have and be suffering the way we are if that weren’t true.
But no bad thing nor no good thing lasts forever. The wheel goes round and round. The top of the wheel reaches the bottom just as often as the bottom returns to the top. So, it will all pass if we can only hold out long enough.
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