October 16, 2022 · 9:15 pm

So, What Does God Think About Atheists?

It is a question I can’t help thinking about even though I am an atheist. Although, to get technical about it, it is a question I think about because I am technically an agnostic. I do not know if God exists or not. So, when I pray to him and ask the question, “God, are You real?” He says loudly, “Don;’t be stupid, Mickey! That is the least important question in the universe!”

I have to wonder at that. If God will punish me forever in a firey pit where I will have to listen to Ben Shapiro talk endlessly while I am lying naked on a bed of broken glass and maggots for not believing in God and not using the proper name for God or not singing the right songs and not talking about the right holy stories about God’s chosen people, then I might want to avoid that outcome.

Then God declares from on high, “Stupid Mickey! There are no rewards or punishments coming from God. How hypocritical would I be if I declared myself a God of Love and Forgiveness and then set the universe in motion only to destroy or torture sentient beings who do things I don’t like, or reward behavior I do approve of? If I really exist, I am beyond trying to correct any supposed flaws in creation. If I did that I would not be God, and therefore not real.”

So, if that’s true, and admittedly I got that truth from loud voices in my own head, then how can I be good without religion?

“Stupid Mickey! You simply do what you know you should do due to the totality of your experiences and education.”

But that pronouncement from God leads me to wonder, “What if my experiences and education lead me to decide to do bad things? I did turn myself into a nudist after I retired as a teacher.”

“But if you believe that what you have done is evil and wrong, you would correct the behavior, would you not? You drew that portrait of a nudist girl with love and care for what you should not violate about her young life. She was pleased by it. Nothing you did in the process was sexual.”

“Are you saying, God, that what I did was actually good?”

“You are the only one who can answer that question, Stupid Mickey. After all, if God had wanted people to be nudists, He wouldn’t have had everyone be born fully dressed in clothing.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke, God?”

“Stupid Mickey, I am just a loud voice in your head, remember?”

“Oh, right.”

Several moments of silence follow.

“So, is it okay with you that I believe I am an atheist who believes in God?”

“You need to tell me.”

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October 16, 2022 · 2:21 pm

A Little Bit .Gif-fy… Not Goofy

Sometimes life gets a bit tough when you are old and diabetic and grumpy all the time… and your kids are still teenagers… and you have to spend four hours a day driving them to two different schools in two different Dallas suburbs… and it rains one day and swelters you in Texas heat the next… and the drive home occurs during rush hour… and you just can’t think beyond loud thoughts like; “Why does that stop light turn red right before I get there?” and “Why can’t somebody teach teenagers how to drive in a high school parking lot?!” and “Why is the sun so bright and in my eyes going BOTH DIRECTIONS?!?” and “Why is the worst driver in Texas always the one right in front of me?!?!!!”

And then you realize, you can’t think any more to make a decent post for your blog.  You are dead tired and out of ideas, though still able to type… even though you are apparently dead according to this sentence.  So what do you post?  You need some chocolate and iced tea for your brain.  And you decide it is better to come out of the closet for being .gif-goofy and collecting .gif’s.  You heard right.  I mean .gif’s.  I am not talking about peanut butter.  And I didn’t misspell goofs.  I mean those crazy moving things on the internet where the motion is repetitive and the promotion of the motion is mindless.  Yes, those moving-picture things called .gif’s.

Like this one;

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Rainbow Dash is really going after that guitar riff in this guitar-riff .gif!  And I didn’t steal this from Deviantart.  I stole it from somebody else who stole it from Deviantart.

And then I have an audience for her solo;

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And these .gif’s make me happy.  Happy like a frog;

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And why do these minor miracles of motion make me happy?  I don’t know.  But they do.

And I must not be the only one.  Somebody went to a great deal of work to create some of these:

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And one might wonder if it is an evil thing to be happy about being .gif-goofy.  But in my experience, they  only fascinate the eyes for a short while and alter my mood in goofy weird ways.

 

 

 

 

So now that I’m all goofed up, let me end with one more.

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So, now, these .gif’s have tamed me, and I am unique in all the world.

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October 15, 2022 · 7:06 pm

Female Figures on Art Day

Zora the Sea Witch, Captain of the Blue Skull Bearer Fleet of Pirates
Valerie Clarke, daughter of Kyle
Leopard Girl and her alter ego, Dilsey Murphy
Zam, the Leaf Witch, Sylph Queen of Cornucopia
Poster Girl for normalizing naturism
My daughter, the Princess
PoppenSparkle the Fairy Butterfly Child
Blueberry Bates
Maggie the Knife, Space Pirate
A nudist girl who reads Mickey’s books on the nude beach.
Taffy King, Space Ninja

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October 15, 2022 · 4:44 am

The Creature I Have Become

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I identify as a humorist, writer, cartoonist, and certified fool (Yes, I have a certificate from the Children’s Writer Institute that proves I once foolishly believed I could learn how to make money as a writer).  But my current novel project is a horror novel, The Baby Werewolf, which I twice before tried to turn into a completed rough draft novel. This time I followed through to the bitter end.  I published it on Amazon.

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Torrie Brownfield, hypertrichosis sufferer and possible werewolf.

In order to reign in the goofiness enough to deal with the issues in this novel, I have been doing a lot of horror reading. I have also undertaken the reading of a very good author examination of the life of Edgar Allen Poe.

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Poe’s life was highly instructive.  You may not have realized this, but most of the giants of American Literature prior to and contemporary with Poe did not make most of their money as writers.  Emerson was a clergyman.  Nathaniel Hawthorne worked as a customs clerk. Poe, the first to try to make a living solely on work as a writer, editor, critic, and poet, was subjected to the horrors of poverty, illness, and want.  His wife was chronically tubercular and ill.  He never made the money he was obviously worth as a creator of popular horror fiction, poetry, critical essays about other authors, and as an editor for profitable magazines of the day.  Other people made loads of money from his work.  Poe, not so much.

It is instructive to a writer like me who can’t seem to land any sort of income from my own creations.  There is no demand because there is no recognition of my work.  I have come close, having my work praised by editors and fellow authors, and being a finalist in novel writing contests twice.  The goal is good writing.  I will probably never see a return on my investment in my lifetime.  My children may not acquire anything by it unless one of them really devotes a lot of effort to it.  Like Poe with his drinking problem, chronic depression, and ill wife, I face physical limitations and poor health, grinding financial issues, and family factors that make it near impossible to put marketing effort into my literary career.

And this novel is a hard journey for me.  I was sexually assaulted by an older boy when I was ten.  A lot of the fears outlined and elucidated in this particular story leap right out of that iron cage in my psyche where they have been contained for fifty years.  Fear of nakedness.  Fear of sex.  Fear of being attacked.  Fear of the secret motivations in others.  Fear of the dark.  And, most of all, fear of what fear can make me become.  Fear of being a monster.

But I have not become any of the dark and terrible things that fear can make me into.  Instead, I became a school teacher, and mentor to many.  I became a family man, a father of three children.  I became a nudist, hopefully not a dark and terrible thing in itself.  I became Mickey.

This novel will become my Halloween free-book promotion later this month. Probably next weekend rather than Halloween.

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October 14, 2022 · 10:47 pm

Good List, Bad List

I like to complain a lot in this blog, especially when I’m sick and feeling as rotten to the core as I do today. But I have to remember that for every bad thing I list on my pile of grouchy ole coot rants, there is usually one or more good things to offset it. So, I will endeavor to test that by making two lists.

Good List;

  1. I sold three books today on Amazon I also reached a page total of 672 read on Kindle Unlimited for the month of October which is only half over so far.
  2. The US Government has finally struck out to battle climate change, spending lots of money to promote actual clean, renewable energy sources, actually working towards taking carbon dioxide out of the air and reentering the international climate change initiative. We may now be able to actually save our planet from imminent heat death.
  3. The Texas government, if it falls into the capable hands of Beto O’Rourke, will fully fund public schools once again and provide free and fairly equal education to all regardless of income level, race, religion, or who your friends are.
  4. I have watched and loved every single Marvel Movie and TV series they have put out on Disney+ and the movie theaters. Most recently Hawkeye, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk, Attorney at Law. I have also watched and mostly loved all their Star Wars movies and series.

Bad List

  1. The number of books I sold today is the highest number I’ve ever sold in a single day when I was not buying the books myself. So, I am still the mostly ignored author of some books that I think are actually very good in quality and content. The same asterisk applies to the Kindle pages read. Most ever in a month, though it is not the full equivalent of probably about five books. It is a good thing I don’t rely on the money I make by writing to live.
  2. The Republican Party (or more accurately, the SIth Empire,) are poised to retake both legislative bodies in the US Government. That will lead to legislative efforts to undo any and all climate-change repair efforts because the Koch Brothers want to continue raking in high fossil fuel profits until after they are both dead when they don’t really care if the rest of all life on earth dies as well.
  3. Republicans cheat, so they will also win the governorship of Texas, meaning that Emperor Abbott will continue to deprive school districts of the money it takes to succeed in teaching everybody, will then declare that public schools are failing, and move all education into for-profit learning factories where white people with money will get only the best (except in science class, and maybe history) while everybody else will have to study from books they make themselves with Dollar Store crayons and newsprint paper.
  4. All the YouTube review videos seem to hate and cut down everything on Disney+. The critics seem for the most part to have an, “I hate women” and “I hate woke agendas” and “I prefer perfect white American heroes” mindset. Their opinions are nonsense doo-doo. And I don’t watch anything I know I am not going to enjoy. So, why do they? I only watch their videos when they trick me into thinking they are not going to be like that.

So, I guess things are equal. But why are the bad things all in larger paragraphs?

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October 14, 2022 · 3:13 am

Small Town Inspirations

Pesch Street

I grew up in a small rural town in North Central Iowa.  It was a place that was, according to census, home to 275 people.  That apparently counted the squirrels.  (And I should say, the squirrels were definitely squirrelly.  They not only ate nuts, they became a nut.)  It was a good place to grow up in the 60’s and 70’s.  But in many ways, it was a boring place.

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Yes, there were beautiful farmer’s daughters to lust after and pine for and be humiliated by.  There was a gentle, supportive country culture where Roy Rogers was a hero and some of the best music came on Saturdays on Hee Haw where there was a lot of pickin’ and grinnin’ going on.  There were high school football games on Friday nights, good movies at the movie theaters in Belmond and Clarion, and occasional hay rides for the 4-H Club and various school-related events like Homecoming.

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I lived in a world where I was related to half the people in the county, and I knew at least half of the other half.  People told stories about other people, some of them incredibly mean-spirited, some of them mildly mean, and some of them, though not many, that were actually good and actually true.  I learned about telling good stories from my Grandpa Aldrich who could tell a fascinating tale of Dolly who owned the part of town called locally “Dollyville” and included the run-down vacant structure the kids all called the Ghost House.   He also told about Dolly’s husband, Shorty the dwarf, who was such a mean drunk and went on epic temper tirades that often ended only when Dolly hospitalized him with a box on the ear.  (Rumor had it that there were bricks in the box.)

And I realized that through story-telling, the world became whatever you said that it was.   I could change the parts of life I didn’t love so much by lying… er, rather, by telling a good story about them.  And if people heard and liked the stories enough, they began to believe and see life more the way I saw it myself.  A good story could alter reality and make life better.  I used this power constantly as a child.

There were invisible aliens invading Iowa constantly when I was a boy.  Dragons lived in the woods at Bingham Park, and there were tiny little fairy people everywhere, in the back yard under the bushes, in the attic of the house, and building cities in the branches of neglected willow trees.

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I reached out to the world around me as an artist, a cartoonist, and a story-teller and plucked details and colors and wild imaginings like apples to bake the apple pie that would much later in my life feed the novels and colored-pencil pictures that would make up my inner life.  The novels I have written and the drawings I have made have all come from being a small town boy who dreamed big and lived more in stories than in the humdrum everyday world.

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October 13, 2022 · 7:47 pm

Today I Feel Like Complaining

Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright, and Albert Pujols are all potential Hall-of-Famers. This season was probably the last for all three. Certainly the last with the Cardinals. But they are swept out of the playoffs in the very first round by the wild-card Philadelphia Phillies. I am bummed.

And yesterday I woke up with flu-like symptoms (though my last Covid test was negative.) Today I am down and out, sick in bed. The appointment with the eye doctor had to be rescheduled. I am double-bummed.

And I have watched more of the January 6th Committee hearings. There is so much evidence that Donald Trump is guilty of election manipulation, fraud, obstructing justice, and citing an insurrection while trying to overturn the last election. There is more credible evidence, testified to by Republican officials than got Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed for treason. It leads me to grumpily wonder why the orange one is not also on trial and destined to be executed. More people testified against him than the Rosenbergs. More people directly died from the insurrection violence than died from the transmission of nuclear secrets the Rosenbergs allegedly enabled. Maybe that will change if Putin uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, but Trump has ties to that too. He had nuclear documents about the defenses against nukes from some unnamed country (possibly France) that Putin would pay handsomely to see. The stolen documents in Mar a Lago scandal is only one more reason to try and execute the malevolent orangutan.

And why are you so angry at Trumpalump today, Mickey?

Well, duh… I am sick. I have a low-grade fever, a headache, and the bleching blahs.

And as I try to mend while watching TV, all the talking heads are bemoaning that, though Biden’s presidency has done a lot to repair the damage the orange president created, and he has given us many benefits that no one reasonably expected, the Republicans will take back the House and the Senate and proceed to try endlessly to impeach Biden, until a Republican wins the Presidency again in 2024. And then public schools will be privatized, the fossil fuel industry will be deregulated, Medicare and Social Security will be legislated away, and the entire planet will become a lifeless, post-industry hellscape.

I feel awful today.

But not just because I am ill.

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October 13, 2022 · 3:03 am

The Encounter

Life, like a good Dungeons and Dragons game, is basically controlled by rolling the dice of random encounters.  Even if there is a great over-arching plan for this reality in the brain of the Great Dungeon Master in the Sky, it is constantly altered by the roll of celestial dice and ultimate random chance.

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Thusly, I managed a D & D encounter in the middle of the night last night.

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I generally have a sleeping skill of only +1.  That means, that if sleeping is a simple skill, I can add my +1 to the roll and only have to get a 6 or higher on a twenty-sided dice.  At 3:10 a.m. I rolled a 3.  I had to get up and wander bleary-eyed to the bathroom, a -2 for terrain effects to successfully to make it to the bathroom and pee through a prostate that is swollen to the size of a grapefruit, most often a difficult task, requiring a 15 on a twenty-sided dice.  I got lucky.  I rolled a 19.  Then, on the way back to bed, the dog rolled a natural 20 on her get-the-master’s-attention roll and let me know she had to go to the bathroom too.

I have to tell you at this point, that since I am trying to be more of a nudist, I seriously considered taking her out naked (by which I mean me, not her).  Dressing up in the middle of the night can be daunting.  And no one was going to see in the dark of the park at 3:15 a.m.  But I thought it probably wasn’t a good idea to go adventuring without armor in the darkness, so I at least put on shoes and a magic +4 bathrobe.

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So, we went out to let the dog poop in the park, a thing she can do profusely on a roll of 3 or higher.  We got it accomplished with little fuss.  Oh, there was some complaining and growling, but the dog managed to ignore me when I did it.  Then we had to find our way safely back to the house, and bed…. but we had a random encounter roll that didn’t go in our favor.  I am always on the lookout in the dark for aliens or black-eyed children or even the onset of the zombie apocalypse.  But what I got was the monster from under the bridge.

One of the denizens of the city suburbs that most enjoys the nightlife in the city and thrives even though it isn’t human is the horrorific creature known as a raccoon.  She’s a sow that I have seen a number of times before at night.  She lives under the bridge in the park and often has three or four cubs trailing behind her in the spring.  And she has nothing but contempt for humans with dogs.  She immediately launched into her fear-based hiss attack.  And coming from a possibly seven-foot tall monster sitting atop the pool fence and hissing in the night, it seized the initiative with a very effective attack.  She rolled an 18.  The attack succeeded.

I tried the ever-popular pee-your-pants defense, but failed, rolling a 2.  The reservoir was previously emptied, and I wasn’t wearing pants.  The dog bolted for the kitchen door and dragged me with her.  Her magic bark attack wasn’t even tried.  We were in the house before my heart skipped its third beat.

Surviving the encounter in this way is probably good for the heart.  It beat really hard for a bit and got thoroughly exercised.  But I went back to bed and reflected on the fact that random encounters like that are entirely dependent on the roll of the dice.

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October 12, 2022 · 2:02 am

Novel Writing in Novel Ways

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There are many ways to tell a story.  I have yet to try them all.  But I don’t intend to stop trying until I either get a lot nearer, or I am fertilizing the flowers.

So let’s start with the Snoopy way.

We start with a cliche, and goof it up to make it more interesting.

It was a dark and stormy night…  

And that was because the lights went out at George’s house while he was arguing with Mabel.  There was lightning involved.  Mabel got so mad about George watching football that she stabbed the toaster in a fit of uncontrolled anger.  Unfortunately, she stabbed it with a metal fork and it was plugged in.  Her hair never stood up so high and never glowed that particular color before.  Her eyes shown like car headlights.  And she was the main reason it went dark.

Okay, maybe not.  Let’s try again.

It was a dork and smarmy knight…

Sir Jiggs Giggly was a knight from King Percy’s Royal Court, but his manners were so bad that he drove all the women away from the court.  The other knights all decided that their choices were limited.  Either they had to reform Sir Jiggs, or they all had to become gay.  So, they went to the wizard. The wizard’s name was Wizzyfritz.  And Wizzyfritz had a boy working for him who also happened to be his legal ward.  So Wizzyfritz the wizard assigned his Wizzyfritz ward to be the watcher over the wastrel Jiggs. And so, well… that wizard ward was a dork.

Yeah, not this one either.

It was a stark and dormy night…

At Tilbury College in the women’s dormitory, there was a party.  There was lots of beer.  And the local fraternity decided that when they attended the party, they would show up as streakers and be stark naked.  Unfortunately, the Sigma Frakka Pi fraternity were all skinny geeks who wore glasses and had no body hair.  So a large number of women in that dorm died laughing.

Nope, that isn’t it either.

Hmmm…. maybe there’s a good reason this particular story-telling method is always shown in a cartoon as part of a joke.

 

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October 11, 2022 · 2:07 pm

Wielding the Big Pencil

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The guy holding the big pencil used to be me.   I know you are thinking, “But, Mickey, you are not a rabbit!”  Well, that’s true, but it is also true that the whole thing is a metaphor, and metaphorically I was always Reluctant Rabbit, pedagogue… teacher… the holder of the big pencil.  It is a writing teacher thing.  The best way to teach kids to write is to have them write.  And the best way to show them what you mean when you tell them to write is to write yourself.  You learn to read better by reading a lot.  You learn to write better by writing a lot, reading what you wrote, and reading what other people wrote, especially if those other people were holding the big pencil in front of the class.

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I was recently reminded by people who know me that once I held the big pencil in the front of the class.  They both asked me, “Really?  You were a teacher?”

I suppose it is hard to believe when once you’ve gotten to know me, at least a little bit.  I don’t strike people as the sour-faced, anal-retentive English-teacher type.  I smile and laugh too much for that.  They can’t believe that someone like me could ever teach.

But over the years, I got rather good at holding the big pencil.  I learned, first of all, that anyone can be a good teacher.  You only have to be competent in the subject area you are trying to teach, and open to learning something new about teaching every single day for the rest of your life.

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Here’s something you have to learn about teaching to be any good at it; Discipline is not about making kids behave.  You can shout, stamp your feet, and hit them with a ruler and you will never get them to do what you want to them do.  It has to be about limiting the choices they have for what they will do.  Yes, one of those choices is to be removed from the classroom to go have fun sitting in the uncomfortable chair next to the assistant principal in charge of discipline’s desk, but the good teacher knows you should emphasize that they can either sit like a lump and imitate a rock, or they can participate in the activities presented.  And in my classroom, activities led to jokes and laughing and trying new stuff… some of it hard, but most of it easy.  Kids don’t end up having a hard time making the right choice.

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Here’s something else you absolutely have to learn to be any good at it;  You have to like kids.  Not just the well-behaved teacher-pleasers, but also the class clown who’s too smart to sit still for stuff he already knows, the shrinking violet who is a wonderfully complex well of deep thoughts who is only a little bit too scared to actually speak in class and share her thoughts, and the dark snarky demon who is quietly plotting the next outburst that will make your life a living hell so he or she can spend time with their old and dear friend, the chair in the assistant principal’s office.  If you don’t like them, you can’t teach them, and driving dynamite trucks in war zones is an easier job.  It pays better too.

I often try to picture Donald Trump teaching English to seventh graders.  What a slapstick comedy that would be.  The man doesn’t know anything.  He is always angry.  And he hates everybody except his daughter Ivanka.  My fourth period class wouldn’t merely eat him alive, they would skeletonize him faster than a school of piranhas could ever hope to match.  And it might be entertaining to watch (assuming it was metaphorical, not literal).

And I sincerely wish I could hold the big pencil in front of class again.  It was the act that defined who I was and what purpose I had in life.  But it isn’t gone since I was forced by ill health to retire.  I held the big pencil for over two thousand students in the course of thirty-one years.  And I will always hold the big pencil in their memories of it.  It is a sort of immortality for teachers.

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