Like many writers, I have a plethora of weird voices in my head, constantly criticizing me, making jokes out of me doing ordinary things like brushing my teeth with the old brush my daughter used to scrub mud off her sneakers, characters who have actually come to life in my head and are constantly telling me stories about themselves… Good golly! Maybe many writers don’t hear these voices and I am simply nearly insane.
But, this is to be expected. I am a Baby Boomer. A child of the ’50s. So, I was raised by the black-and-white television. “I Love Lucy“, “My Three Sons“, and “The Munsters” taught me morals and an ability to laugh at myself. I learned about History, Politics, and the World from Walter Cronkite, the ultimate neutral news commentator. I also learned a lot about story-telling from old movies on Saturday afternoon. Television gave me empathy, knowledge of the world, and a boost to my imagination that I wouldn’t have had if I had been a child a generation earlier. Of course, I know it would also have been very different if I had been an internet child like my own children are. There is presently such a flood of free facts available that our information-soaked little brains are often drowning.
So, why am I talking about television today?
This coming week is a week spent alone. I was left behind with the dog as the rest of my family took a trip to Florida. It was my own choice. I am not capable of sitting in a car for long enough to make the car trip from North Texas to Central Florida. And I did not want to keep them from going. Days of good health are long ago and fading from memory.
So, I am left behind with time to write and time to watch whatever I want to on Netflix.
And this is useful because… well, I am a child of good television. I can work on my two WIP projects at once with Netflix series and movies in between word-munching sessions. I can be totally immersed in the writing act. I can write naked anywhere in the house (with the windows closed) without hearing complaints or distress from my non-nudist wife and my embarrassed-by-their-parents kids. It is almost as good as being well enough to go with them.
And Netflix (as well as, soon I hope, Disney Plus) affords me a chance to select exactly what I want to watch in ways that television on three networks, the way it used to be, could not provide. It is a chance to time-travel, to explore, to reach new levels of laughter and understanding… as well as tears. And I can watch TV too.
That phrase, “the Reds and the Blues,” is important to me because Red means “Happy” and Blue means “Sad.” Opposites that make a whole when taken together. This picture is of a boy that might have been my son if I had married the blond girlfriend that was closest to me (at times) in the 1980s. It is called, “Long Ago It Might Have Been.”
But Red also means “Anger.” Here’s a band of red-uniformed soldiers marching into the threatening darkness of the future. They are leaving the Blue mountains of sadness behind where Blue also means, “in the distance.”
Red, of course, is also symbolic of “Love.”
Blue can also mean, “Magic and Mystery.”
Blue can also mean, “Cold and even Depression.” While Red can mean a “Cardinal, the symbol of Resilience and Hardy Constitution.”
Red, Blue, and Yellow, especially when supported by the other colors, mean, “Completeness.”
The only advice I am actually qualified to give here is… don’t take any blogging advice from me as worth more than diddly-squoot.
Life is like moose bowling because… In order to knock down all the pins, you have to learn how to throw a moose.
That being said, my blog views are gradually going up year after year. I am followed by readers all over the world, and some of them actually read my blog regularly, rather than just looking at the pictures and occasionally hitting the like button.
I have not yet, however, learned to throw the moose. I started this blog in order to promote my published writing. I now have seven published books available on Amazon. I made $2.60 in royalties during 2018 so far. So, as a marketing ploy, it has been a total failure.
But as a tool in my writing life, here are some things I definitely count as benefits;
Writing a blog post every day makes the ideas flow more easily and does away with any threat of writer’s block.
Writing every day is practice and it makes me a better writer.
I have learned how to engage with an actual audience.
I am able to try out various writing ideas without worrying about success or failure.
So, all of these things add value and keep me at this blogging thing which didn’t exist in my early life when I was planning for becoming a writer when I left teaching.
If you are tempted to make the huge mistake of following my advice and emulating me, I would warn you, I do not make a living as a writer, and I never will. I am a writer in the same way I am a diabetic. I can’t help it. I wouldn’t change it even if it were possible. I have a body of work that I intend to continue to build on until I am no more. The creation of it is a necessity of my existence. And I certainly don’t regret a single syllable, though what happens to it when I am gone is not important to me in any way that matters. I hope my children will keep it as a legacy, but I only do it because it shapes the story of my life.
And so, I continue to throw meese (or mooses… or moosi… or whatever the hell the funniest plural of “moose” is) and continue not to knock down any pins.
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.
This is a portrait of my great-grandmother, Nellie Hinckley, who died in 1980 in her 90s.
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.
One work of comic strip art stands alone as having earned the artist, Winsor McCay, a full-fledged exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Little Nemo in Slumberland is a one-of-a-kind achievement in fantasy art.
Winsor McCay lived from his birth in Michigan in 1869 to his finale in Brooklyn in 1934. In that time he created volumes full of his fine-art pages of full-page color newspaper cartoons, most in the four-color process.
The New Year’s page 1909
As a boy, he pursued art from very early on, before he was twenty creating paintings turned into advertising and circus posters. He spent his early manhood doing amazingly detailed half-page political cartoons built around the editorials of Arthur Brisbane, He then became a staff artist for the Cincinnati Times Star Newspaper, illustrating fires, accidents, meetings, and notable events. He worked in the newspaper business with American artists like Winslow Homer and Frederick Remington who also developed their art skills through newspaper illustration. He moved into newspaper comics with numerous series strips that included Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland. And he followed that massive amount of work up by becoming the “Father of the Animated Cartoon” with Gertie the Dinosaur, with whom he toured the US giving public performances as illustrated in the silent film below;
The truly amazing thing about his great volume of work was the intricate detail of every single panel and page. It represents a fantastic amount of work hours poured into the creation of art with an intense love of drawing. You can see in the many pages of Little Nemo how great he was as a draftsman, doing architectural renderings that rivaled any gifted architect. His fantasy artwork rendered the totally unbelievable and the creatively absurd in ways that made them completely believable.
I bought my copy of Nostalgia Press’s Little Nemo collection in the middle 70’s and have studied it more than the Bible in the intervening years. Winsor McCay taught me many art tricks and design flourishes that I still copy and steal to this very day.
No amount of negative criticism could ever change my faith in the talents of McCay. But since I have never seen a harsh word written against him, I have to think that problem will never come up.
My only regret is that the wonders of Winsor McCay, being over a hundred years old, will not be appreciated by a more modern generation to whom these glorious cartoon artworks are not generally available.
I was born in a November snowstorm in the middle of the 1950s. I am a child of the snow.
My best novel, Snow Babies, is based on a pair of week-long blizzards, one from childhood, and the other from when I was in high school. I endured both and learned that survival often depends on adaptability and a willingness to accept help from a close-knit community.
I have never had an easy relationship with cold and snow. I developed osteoarthritis at the age of eighteen. Iowa winters were hard on me from that point on. One of the key reasons my teaching career took place in Texas, not Iowa, was the fact that I was able to free myself from the crippling winter cold. Milder winters in Texas helped me a lot. I did, however, get lucky in the February Freeze of 2021. Our power company was not one of those whose natural-gas supplies froze. So, we never lost power, and our pitiful little space heaters kept us from freezing to death and becoming snow babies ourselves. Too many people died needlessly by freezing simply because Texas didn’t bother to prepare for the worst of winter. I could easily have left this life in a blizzard just as I came into it.
I have been particularly up against it the last couple of days. Temperatures in the 30s and 40s have frozen my knees and lower back to a state of stiffness that nearly makes me bedridden. Even my ribcage is aching every time I breathe. Ah, the joys of arthritic living. It is still possible that one day soon I will fall to the blinding white and be able to move no more. There is a symmetry to going out the same way you came in. But knowing me, I will probably die of heat stroke. At least, then, I will have irony on my side.
Bernie Wrightson in 1972, when I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, created for D.C. comics the character known as The Swamp Thing.
Of course,
being a stupid kid at the time, I totally ignored his genius with pen and ink, ink and brush, and fascinatingly dense forests of intricate detail.
I didn’t really get it until he joined The Studio with Jeffery C. Jones, Michael Kaluta, and Barry Windsor-Smith (whom I idolized for his work on Conan.)
And while in college, consuming everything available by The Studio that I could find and afford, I fell in love with his deeply dark and brooding illustration work for a new edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Frankenstein had 50 illustrations by Wrightson that firmly established the fact that by drawing with black ink you could show in startlingly real ways the qualities of white light. That appealed to me both literally as a way to make beautiful art and metaphorically, as that last thing was what I was doing with my own life, drawing the darkness to get to the beautiful light.
Most of his work
was drawing monsters; werewolves, zombies, the creatures of H.P. Lovecraft, and numerous things from nightmares.
But it has a definite beauty of its own. Darkness, evil, and corruption brings out the quality of what is light, righteous, and pure. There is truth in approaching reality from the dark side of the equation.
Of course, he would also do work on heroes like Batman, because the darkness breeds its own defenders of justice.
I am not so much a fan of monsters as I am a believer of taming the monsters who beset us as we try to make a worthy life for ourselves. But I can definitely see where Bernie Wrightson has been doing exactly that with his brilliant pen-and-ink artwork. Sadly, he will be doing no more of it since we lost him in 2017. But it is a legacy he left behind that will make his light continue to shine forth from dark places for a long time to come.
The fight had been almost boring as the waves of rot warriors shambled forward, trying to aim their various spears, guns, and lasers, and then being disassembled by the student Psions of Ged Aero’s Dojo. Shu Kwai had been the most destructive, able to rip out electronic controls with a mere thought. Phoenix had also laid waste, melting the circuitry out of the Mechanoid-zombie army of Mong the Unmerciful. The minions of Mong had melted like margarine in a microwave. Ged had found himself in his armored cat form with nothing to actually do.
The invaders soon found themselves virtually in control of the Ruined Palace of David King. Jackie teleported back to the Celestial Dragon and picked up Gyro. The little Neulon whiz kid hooked up some software in an injector device he had pulled together by rearranging molecules with his mind. He then linked it to an uncrushed rot-warrior skull and pulled out a map of the complex through the skull’s control link to the building’s computer system.
“What’d you find there, Smurf?” Phoenix asked almost immediately.
“I am finding Emperor Mong in his suite surrounded by rot-warrior generals trying to destroy two guys called Triumvirs with an even bigger horde of rot warriors than we just polished off,” said Gyro, grinning at his own manipulative genius at controlling computers without relying on Junior’s special Psion power.
“What?” said Phoenix, frowning.
“He’s telling you he found the Emperor in his private living quarters focusing his attacks on somebody besides us,” said Shu Kwai with an icy superiority.
Phoenix frowned at the nearly naked boy in his white loincloth. Ged could feel tension building again between the two.
“Okay,” said Phoenix, “so what do we do now, Ged Sensei?”
“We go pay Mong a little visit,” Ged answered, now back in human form and dressed in the jumpsuit and fedora hat he had brought with him.
“Has he detected us?” Rocket asked Gyro.
“I don’t know for sure, but maybe not. He is in… I don’t know how to say it in Galactic English. The kapooiac.”
“I have a feeling that means the fresher… or restroom… probably,” suggested Phoenix.
“Let’s go quickly,” ordered Shu Kwai, “so we can maintain as much surprise as possible.”
Gyro led the way through bone-littered corridors. The whole place had the feel of an old black-and-white monster movie. This wasn’t surprising, since the Galtorrians had based much of their culture on the TV programs they intercepted from ancient Earth in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, Galactic English had become the norm in the Orion Spur due to the fact that the Galtorrians worshipped the TV comedyI Love Lucy. Through artificial cobwebs and gray stonework, they wound their way down into the bowels of the palace. Finally, Gyro stopped them before a blank stone wall.
“There is a secret door here,” he said with a sweet blue smile.
“Good,” said Phoenix. “I’ll open it!”
A wall of flame swelled outward from Phoenix’s fingertips. The wall of artificial stone and plasticrete melted away before them, revealing Mong on his personal throne. It was not his throne of office, either, but rather the natural place one goes when he can no longer keep his bowels from emptying from fear.
“Eeuw! Gross!” cried Jackie, staring at the emperor with his pants down.
Mong was cringing while staring out from under his golden skullcap with the carved dragon as its crest. His Fu Manchu moustache was wet with tears of fear.
“Oh, great Ged Aero! You are the one my agents have been telling me about, aren’t you?” Mong’s voice was squeaky and timid, surprising from so sinister a caped figure, even with his pants down on his throne and toilet paper in hand. Shu Kwai, Rocket, Phoenix, and Gyro all laughed about this man they had so recently dreaded.
“Mong, I have come for her,” said Ged. “I want Tara Salongi back.”
“What? I don’t have your young lady! But you have to defend me! Protect me from those clowns and I will gladly give her back to you!”
The pitiful evil emperor was pleading in such a sniveling, groveling manner that Ged couldn’t bear it.
“Do you have her? Or don’t you? All I require from you,” said Ged, “is to lead me to Tara and then flee this planet for your pitiful life. If I don’t get her back, I will hunt you down and tear you to pieces.”
There was a large, startling crash as someone tore the fresher door on the opposite side out of the wall.
Ged’s eyes flashed with anger, an emotion that none of the students present had ever actually seen in him before. It chilled them all to the bone.
An armored clown stepped through the hole. He was obviously a cyborg, but far more sophisticated than any rot warrior they had yet encountered.
“So, Mong is not out of champions yet!” declared the Harlequin menacingly.
Catch a Falling Star 
Writing and Netflix
Like many writers, I have a plethora of weird voices in my head, constantly criticizing me, making jokes out of me doing ordinary things like brushing my teeth with the old brush my daughter used to scrub mud off her sneakers, characters who have actually come to life in my head and are constantly telling me stories about themselves… Good golly! Maybe many writers don’t hear these voices and I am simply nearly insane.
But, this is to be expected. I am a Baby Boomer. A child of the ’50s. So, I was raised by the black-and-white television. “I Love Lucy“, “My Three Sons“, and “The Munsters” taught me morals and an ability to laugh at myself. I learned about History, Politics, and the World from Walter Cronkite, the ultimate neutral news commentator. I also learned a lot about story-telling from old movies on Saturday afternoon. Television gave me empathy, knowledge of the world, and a boost to my imagination that I wouldn’t have had if I had been a child a generation earlier. Of course, I know it would also have been very different if I had been an internet child like my own children are. There is presently such a flood of free facts available that our information-soaked little brains are often drowning.
So, why am I talking about television today?
This coming week is a week spent alone. I was left behind with the dog as the rest of my family took a trip to Florida. It was my own choice. I am not capable of sitting in a car for long enough to make the car trip from North Texas to Central Florida. And I did not want to keep them from going. Days of good health are long ago and fading from memory.
So, I am left behind with time to write and time to watch whatever I want to on Netflix.
And this is useful because… well, I am a child of good television. I can work on my two WIP projects at once with Netflix series and movies in between word-munching sessions. I can be totally immersed in the writing act. I can write naked anywhere in the house (with the windows closed) without hearing complaints or distress from my non-nudist wife and my embarrassed-by-their-parents kids. It is almost as good as being well enough to go with them.
And Netflix (as well as, soon I hope, Disney Plus) affords me a chance to select exactly what I want to watch in ways that television on three networks, the way it used to be, could not provide. It is a chance to time-travel, to explore, to reach new levels of laughter and understanding… as well as tears. And I can watch TV too.
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Filed under autobiography, being alone, commentary, humor, novel plans, TV as literature