Catch a Falling Star

Another mass shooting is in the news again. This time against LGBTQ people. But recently against Jewish people, black people, trans people, and liberal people.

Love makes the world go round.

Hate tears it down.

Hate and fear make politics go.

I know people who are offended if you ask them if they are racist. But if they are asked to say that black lives matter, they will only say, “ALL lives matter.” And that doesn’t adequately explain why they can’t say the words, “Black lives matter.”

Fox News tells people what they must never say.

“Socialism can be good.”

“Gay people are born that way.”

“Liberals don’t eat babies.”

“All people, including the ones you don’t think are good people, have rights and should be treated fairly.”

Think for a moment… what are you unable to say? Who controls your puppet strings?

When I was in college I had the idea that a writer could change the world through his or her writing. There is precedent. William Shakespeare (or whoever actually wrote his plays and poetry) forever altered how literature in English is carried out, adding words and phrases to everything that comes after and changing how we understand the depths of character and dialogue. Charles Dickens and Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck all wrote fiction that exposed the horrors and crimes against the common man, and all three caused changes to their society to at least be begun. Albert Camus and Eugene Ionesco both wrote fiction that changed fundamental understanding in the worlds of philosophy and religion. J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis established Fantasy Fiction as a thing worthy of having its name in capital letters.

It was always my hope to become a writer who did similar things with my fictional abilities to tell a good story with a good lesson for life embedded within it.

But when I was young and most capable of establishing my writer’s life as something other people would see and recognize for what it was supposed to be, I decided to teach writing to a next generation of writers instead of doing the thing myself.

So, have I given up the dream?

Never!!!

But, realistically, there are barriers to my success in this endeavor that constitute a mountain range of unclimbable mountains.

1. The publishing industry has devolved into a massive self-publishing ocean of writers who think they can actually write without editors and with practically no remaining Aquaman or Prince Namor to rule the oceans as the gatekeepers of good published writing. Major publishers now rely mostly on established writers like Stephen King, James Patterson, and other aging fiction-factories who guarantee their profits, occasionally skimming popular stuff off the top of the ocean waves to republish and make money on, though not investing much in promotion because that investment takes away from profits.
2. I am no good at self-promotion and marketing, so no matter how good my writing is…
3. I am nearing the end of my own life with seven incurable diseases and conditions. I don’t imagine myself lasting more than a couple more years.
4. Climate change is coming for us all. The societal collapse will come first during waves of climate-caused disasters, waves of climate refugees, and the inevitable loss of the means to feed eight billion people. And after most human beings are dead, the out-of-control warming processes will cook to death everything else that lives on the planet as it turns into the twin of Venus.

I hope I am wrong, but it is probably impossible to change the world now. But there will be no problems when there is no longer anyone left to have problems.

Yesterday I gave myself a birthday present by taking my daughter to Black Panther : Wakanda Forever. I have never cried so hard in a movie. (Spoiler alert,) not only do we have to say goodbye to Chadwick Boseman, the actor who portrayed the Black Panther, but in the story, his other parent dies. Boseman died in 2020, followed by my father who died on my birthday in 2020. My mother did not last a full year after I lost my father, dying in September 2021. So, I was watching a movie that boiled my own sense of loss to the surface and left me completely drained by the end of the movie. But the Black Panther is not gone from our lives. Shuri, his little sister becomes the new Black Panther. And the next generation to follow was introduced at the very end. The story will continue.

My family story is similarly not ended yet. Though my personal chapters in the Great Comedy of Existence may be drawing to a close, the story continues through my children, my former students just as much as my biological children. There are many people in this world that I personally had something to do with the making of or nurturing of. And if climate crisis brings an end to all of that, the universe will go on without us. The universe is alive and conscious… through my existence, my children’s existence, and even the three-eyed green archeologist who digs up and decodes this post in the ruins of 6977 A.D. Ugna Whorleehee will become responsible for the continuation of the story in the distant future.

On this day in the year 1456, I hatched with a unique purpose in this silly universe.

I was meant to be a teacher.

The fireworks to celebrate my birth were launched from a flying carpet by my father’s friend, a trained pyromancer with a flame-finger spell.

Now, I am claiming that I was born 566 years ago. And I may indeed be exaggerating unconsciously by a few hundred years. But this is the way I always explained it to my seventh-grade English classes. They tended to believe me because… well, seventh graders.

I remember having young Willy Shakspar in my class. You know, the one who was so stupid he never learned to correctly spell his last name. He was a glove-maker’s son from Stratford on the river Avon. He was a terrible student but loved to be the classroom clown. I heard he later would become a successful theater owner. He also took credit for a series of very successful plays that he probably didn’t really write himself. I think his friend Eddie DeVere, a noble by birth, used Willy’s name as a pen name. I base this on the fact that I read Willy’s early attempt at writing a story. It was called Hamlet and Eggs on Toast. It had ghosts, witches, and kings in it. But the actors were given lines written mostly about ham.

Of course, by the early 1500s, teaching had already become a really hard job that didn’t pay very well. Especially when you taught in public schools taught mostly by monks who had taken a vow of poverty. This would become an unfortunate trend that stuck to education to this very day.

You could do better if you taught the children of a king. But they often expected you to sing the information. And if they didn’t like everything you taught their kids, they might cut your head off. Teaching is particularly hard without a head.

Over the centuries the career I chose as an English teacher only seemed to get worse. As public education became available to more and more of the public, teachers lost prestige, to the point that even the peasant’s children could cause your head to be cut off. Those of us who couldn’t grow the head back were really out of luck.

Soon I believe the world will be pitched back into the stone age. We will have to start all over again… unless we actually go extinct. In that case, the lizard people and the cockroaches will have to reinvent public schools. That will be fun. I think I will propose for matters of discipline that if a student misbehaves, or fails to laugh at the teacher’s jokes, you can cook them and eat them.

So, today is my birthday. I have reached the age of 566 years. (The margin of error is only 500.)

Think about it. A hundred years from today will be my 666th… the sign of the beast.

So much to look forward to in old age!