I have now posted something on Catch a Falling Star for 600 days in a row. I have done this before, but maybe this time I can push on beyond two straight years of posting every day. Possibly three years? We’ll see. I’ve never done that before.
AeroQuest 5… Canto 150
Canto 150 – Trav Goes Hunting
The reanimated thing that had been Trav Dalgoda was still tinkering with repairing himself using what computer pieces he could acquire in Castle Orpheum’s under-water dome’s marketplaces.
“This goop percolating in the terrarium-thing is actual Trav-Dalgoda flesh being cloned?” asked Dana Cole, staring at the amorphous blob of Traviness as it wriggled with life and growth.
“That’s right, old Dana jester. I need actual living tissue to create the new me. But I need some other things as well that I can’t get on this planet without getting wet.”
Dana was a bit stunned. “You just called me jester?”
“That I did. You know me. I always talk like that because nobody else in the universe does.”
“Am I still talking to Tyrrix? Or is this Trav?”
“Well, now… that’s complicated. I guess you’d have to say that I am a bit of both. The Trav part of this brain is very good at absorbing and taking over the Ancient personality. But that’s because the old brain and the new are so basically compatible. Tyrrix was the trickster mind in the Crown of Stars. And the Trav mind fits into that mind like puzzle pieces made of clay that molds to fit into the spaces where Tyrrix is basically missing parts of his old noggin. I definitely feel as much like I’m Trav as I do Tyrrix.”
“Oh, no!”
“But you love me as Trav, don’t you?”
“Yes, but… my gawd!”
“Yes, I can answer to that too. I have big plans.”
“So, what did you mean about getting wet?”
“Well, Dancer is not only a water planet with no dry land at all, it is also the site of an Ancient library. I am going to have to go out underwater and find the Ancient minds that are archived there.”
“Um… oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. And while I am at it, I need some more robotic-synthetic parts too.”
“…And you’ll get that from the library?”
“No, I will get the parts I need from Sorcerer 13.”
“He’s here in Castle Orpheum? This underwater city?”
“No. He’s out there looking for the same prize I am going after. We will intercept him. Kill him. And borrow his parts.”
“We? You said we will do it?”
“Oh, yes. You can’t survive underwater without a pressurized diving suit. But there are plenty of those in this city.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Of course not. That part of Trav is mostly in control of this body now.”
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction
Traveller
For much of my role-playing-game lifetime, I did not play the actual Dungeons and Dragons game. I played with a lot of kids from my classes in the South Texas middle school where I spent the majority of my teacher-life. And while most of my players were Catholics, it was the Southern Baptists, including the county sheriff, who were intent on policing what kind of thought went on in the minds of the people in their town. D & D had demons and devils in it.
So, I had to make a significant shift in my story-telling games. The Baptist preacher’s son and the sheriff’s son were two of my most avid players. I also had the high school physics teacher’s son on my adventurers’ team. So, we turned wizards and warlocks into astrophysicists and mad scientists, rogues into space scouts, and knights into space knights. We started playing Traveller, a science fiction role-playing game.
That is where the stories that eventually became Aeroquest came from. My players instantly took a liking to the game and star journeys into the unknown reaches of the Spinward Marches, a fictional region of the Orion Spur of the Sagittarius Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy (our actual address in space). Real science, astronomy, physics, and biology went into adventures that were easily as swashbuckling and exciting as Star Wars, Star Trek, and every other sci-fi show we stole ideas from.
The stars were the limit with a simple gaming system that required only a set of six sided dice and lots and lots of graph paper… and plenty of imagination for fuel.
Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, science fiction
How Things Are Changing
The picture, “That Night in Saqqara,” is about youth and age, life and death. One of the things I intend to discuss as a change is the way my life has tilted on the scale of life and death. The weights are health problems, environmental problems, and social problems. And all of those weights seem to go on the death plate of the scale.
My scale has arthritis, diabetes, high risk of heart attack or stroke, and diabetic depression on the death plate. By contrast, the pharoah above only had advanced age and death prior to the picture on his death plate. Of course, the fact that he’s already dead should be a heavier weight than any of mine. But obviously the pharoah also has mummy-necromantic magic working in his favor on the life plate of the scale. And me, being now a serious Christian Existentialist (an atheist who believes in God,) I can’t even claim a faith in some mythical afterlife where I will have wings and a harp and can be a nudist all I want since many artists have depicted angels as nudists.
But the boy in the picture is faced with the same weight imbalance as both me and the pharoah. He has youth and health and a brass ahnk necklace that symbolizes life on his life plate. But if he’s alive today, his prospects for life are skewed too. Climate change may cause his death from heat or storms at almost any point between now and the climate Armeggeddon that the Koch Brothers have been nurturing with their fossil-fuels-carbon emissions in order to score higher profits before everybody on earth dies (something that won’t affect their lives since they both plan on being dead before it happens. One of them is already dead.).
And, of course, in the United States generally, and Texas especially, there is the whole gun-rights debate that loads massive lead weights on the death plates of young and old alike. After the Newtown and Uvalde shootings (excuse me… 15-minute break for weeping… I spent 31 years being a teacher) not even elementary-school classrooms are safe places for children.
This, of course, is a very significant change in the way the world is. More than half of my teaching career occurred before the Columbine school shooting. Before that point we had no plan for dealing with an active shooter on campus. Afterwards we discussed, changed policies and procedures, and practiced what we were supposed to do… lockdowns, hiding kids, keeping them silent in the dark… and deciding for ourselves, “They will not kill my students until after I am already dead.”
So, what are the current changes I am bemoaning in this post?
I am currently closer in fate and time to the pharoah rather than the ahnk-wearing boy. I will not be around for more than another decade at the most. But I am not alone being under threat.
The world is ending in flames and hurricanes because of greedy people valuing their wealth over everybody’s lives, I hope you all live long after I am gone myself. But I have doubts about how long we collectively have.
And politics and gun-culture have grown toxic. We could be ended by a bullet at any time, in any place. And it is a scary thing that we have no power over that at present.
As always, I prepare for the worst, and I then hope and pray it doesn’t happen that way.
Filed under angry rant
Dancing Towards the Brighter Light
In Texas a little girl who has cerebral palsy committed the crime of crossing a border patrol station near Laredo on the way to having life-saving gall bladder surgery. So the border patrol followed her to the hospital, waited until the surgery was finished, and then took her to a detention facility for deportation. Wow!
We are a heartless people. We elect heartless representatives to congress to make heartless laws to punish people for being poor, or not being white, or not being patriotic enough at football games during the playing of the national anthem. We elected an orange-faced creature with bad hair to the presidency rather than electing a human being with a beating heart. And why did we do that? Because too many people were in favor of health care laws and regulations that help people we don’t like. We elected him to send a message to all the people we don’t like. That message was, “Screw you, why don’t you just die already?” We like that message because we are a heartless people.
But while we are only thinking of ourselves and vowing to let everybody else go to hell, somewhere the music of the dance begins to play. Hear it yet?
Somewhere children are laughing.
Somewhere Santa Claus is real.
Holidays are approaching and, with indictments sealed and in the hands of prosecutors, possible impeachment looms. The happy dance is about to begin again.
Or maybe it never really went away. People did care, do care, about the crisis in Puerto Rico. After the hurricane, Dippy Donald Dimwit tossed paper towels to survivors, apparently suggesting that all he needed to do was that to symbolically get all the people cleaning up while holding on to their own bootstraps and pulling with all their might. Apparently heartless people believe you can levitate if you pull upwards on bootstraps. But Tesla gifted the city of San Juan with solar panels and batteries and started set-up of an island-based solar power grid to get Puerto Rico back online in the modern world. And Elon Musk is taking the steps towards building the future that the pumpkinhead in chief can’t even conceive in his empty pumpkin head. The music sways and builds. The dancers circle each other and first steps in ballet shoes begin.
We are a heartless people. We suffer in our cubicles alone, angry at a heartless world. “Why don’t you love me?” each one of us cries, “aren’t I worthy of love?” But crying never solved a problem. No, counting our regrets and hoarding the list of wrongs done to us never started a heart to beating. But the music builds. Try smiling at that hard-working clerk who takes your information at the DMV, and then thanking them at the end for their hard work even though they have to deny you the permit because there are more bits of paperwork that have to be found and signed. Try making a joke in line at the post office that makes the other hundred and ten people actually laugh while waiting interminably. Do your best to bring light to the darkness, not for yourself, but for other people. The music builds. Do you know the steps to the dance? No? Well, the steps won’t matter if you begin to move to the music, begin to glide… And the heart starts pumping, and we begin to feel alive again. Hallelujah! We are dancing towards the light again.
More New Photos of Old Artworks
I have been working on creating new digital photographs of some of my artwork that didn’t get photographed well with older less-capable cameras I used to use.
Reading Twain for a Lifetime
I wish to leave no doubt unturned like a stone that might have treasure hidden under it. I love the works of Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.
I have read and studied his writing for a lifetime, starting with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer which I read for myself in the seventh grade, after seeing the musical movie Tom Sawyer starring Johnny Whittaker as Tom. I caught a severe passion, more serious than a head-cold, for the wit and wisdom with which Twain crafted a story. It took me a while to acquire and read more… but I most definitely did. I took an American Literature course in college that featured Twain, and I read and analyzed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I also bought a copy of Pudd’nhead Wilson which I would later devour in the same thoroughly literate and pretentious manner as I had Huck Finn. Copies of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Mysterious Stranger were purchased at the same time, though I didn’t read them cover to cover until later during my years as a middle school English teacher. I should point out, however, that I read and re-read both of those, Connecticut Yankee winning out by being read three times. As a teacher, I taught Tom Sawyer as an in-class novel assignment in the time when other teachers thought I was more-or-less crazy for trying to teach a 100-year-old book to mostly Hispanic non-readers. While the lunatic-inspired experiment was not a total success, it was not a total failure either. Some kids actually liked having me read parts of it aloud to them, and some borrowed copies of the book to reread it for themselves after we finished as a class.
During my middle-school teaching years I also bought and read copies of The Prince and the Pauper, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi. I would later use a selection from Roughing It as part of a thematic unit on Mark Twain where I used Will Vinton’s glorious clay-mation movie, The Adventures of Mark Twain as a way to painlessly introduce my kids to the notion that Mark Twain was funny and complex and wise.
I have also read and used some of Twain’s most famous short fictions. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” are both masterpieces of Twain’s keen insight into the human psyche and the goofy and comic corruptions he finds there.
And now, retired old me has most recently read Tom Sawyer Abroad. And, though it is not one of his finest works, I still love it and am enthralled. I reviewed it and shared it with you a few days ago. But I will never be through with Mark Twain. Not only is there more of him to read, but he has truly been a lifelong friend.
Confessions on the Prairie
Some songs are so beautiful and so true, that I cannot listen without tears in my eyes and burning fire in my heart.
“I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn‘t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the lord of song
With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah”
lyrics from “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen
You see, I believe in God… but my God is a bit bigger than most people’s God. In fact, most of the people who come closest to what I believe are atheists. My God is all of existence, the good and the bad both. He is above my understanding, but it is my place to constantly try to reach for Him and know Him and, sometimes, even be Him. Things that are impossible to accomplish, and yet we all do it on a daily basis.
My God does not punish sin. My God does not reward faith. My God does not ask anything of me beyond being. But since I exist, and since I believe that love and beauty are good things, if I want the universe around me to manifest love and beauty, then I must make it so. I must live as a loving person and a singer of beautiful songs… even if I can only sing silently in words on a page.
However did someone as dopey as me come up with something as dopey as this? Let me tell you a story.
When I was ten, an older boy, a neighbor, trapped me, de-pants me, and abused me. It was not love in any way. It was sexualized torture. He made me feel pain. He took away my sense of well-being. He made me afraid to touch or be touched by others. He made me believe my own physical urges were a terrible thing that God would punish me for. I wet my pants in school more than once, because I feared the boys’ bathroom at school. I no longer tried so hard to make the other kids laugh. I sank into depression. And ultimately, I thought about ending myself in painful ways, ways I felt I deserved.
Reverend Aiken is the one in the cowboy hat. His son, Mark, was my childhood best friend.
But I was blessed. My best friend’s father was the minister of the Methodist Church and, eventually, both churches in our little town. And in the late 60’s, the Methodists decided to be very progressive on matters of human sexuality. When I was twelve, he taught all the kids in my age group about sex using a blackboard and a willingness to frankly discuss anything we needed to know. Of course, he never quite figured out what my terrible secret was, in fact, I couldn’t have told him about it if I wanted to, the memory was repressed and I couldn’t call it up until that day in college when it all came back to me at age 22. But he knew it was there. He is the one that taught me that faith in God is about love. It is not about punishment, especially not punishment for biological urges and physical needs. People need love, and should never be castigated or humiliated because they seek it. And he told me that I was not to blame for the acts of others. The notion of original sin, that we are all born despicable because Adam goofed, is nonsense. All people, even the bad ones, are God’s children and worthy of love. People can be redeemed from anything. And it is the job of worthy people to be the love that informs the universe. We must do good deeds and love, honor, and, most of all, render aid to others. Because that fills the universe with goodness and light.
Both the good Reverend Aiken and my abuser are dead now. I deeply love one, and I forgive the other. And it’s because that’s what God is… love and forgiveness. It has to be so.
Did you listen to that song from YouTube? If you made it this far through this rather difficult ramble without listening to it, I recommend you click on it and give it a try. It is about King David sinning with Bathsheba, and repenting his sin before God. And in the end, there was no punishment for him. So, I, too stand before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.
Filed under Uncategorized
So, What’s Wrong With Mickey Now?
I know you read the title and immediately thought, “Oh no! Not another self-reflection post where maudlin Mickey complains about what he thinks is wrong with himself and is usually eerily right on the money, although it is strange and bizarre and will probably never be corrected.”
But it is what successful authors do. I have seen Stephen King reflecting on his own career and writing process. I have seen Seinfield complain endlessly about every little thing that happens around or to him. And so, I plan to do it too. Though I probably will do it wrong and be terrible at it, so it will work the same way as my terrible poetry, making great poets better by comparison.
That which is pretty bad about me now includes the fact that my productivity has really fallen off. In the last decade, from 2012 to 2022, I have written and published 21 books. I have written this daily blog almost every day, and I have drawn, colored, or painted more pictures of various kinds than I could possibly ever keep track of.
But my storytelling has slowed in a molasses of forgetfulness, confusion, and lost thoughts. My drawing has slowed by arthritis pains in my fingers and hands. And if I can claim that less output is made up for by distilled and concentrated power, maybe I can pull out of the triple-bummer tailspin I’m in. But I am also pressed to prove that the concentrated stuff is actually better.
My following on WordPress is dropping as more and more I reveal the real me in these goofy little essays. I am being followed more and more by nudists. But the more nudists follow me, the more normal people who wrongly believe nudists aren’t normal people will unfollow me and swear off following any more Mickey-like nudists. And the irony is that less and less, because of health conditions, can I be actually naked. But more and more I am being emotionally, spiritually, and candidly naked. Naked in my beliefs. Naked in my soul. More and more leads to less and less which become more and more again. Maybe my followers on WordPress will do that too. I am linked to and followed by the AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation) and https://histonudismo.wordpress.com/. I seem to be making more sales of my nudist stories thanks to Twitter nudists who gleefully share everything they like about nudism.
And I have been really having a time about being the unluckiest human being that somehow managed to survive every dark turn in 66 years of life on earth.
The car that I was hoping would be the last one that I would ever need was destroyed by a Dallas pothole. Its replacement is giving me a hefty car payment I was hoping to never have to pay again. My wife’s bedroom ceiling collapsed on her bed. The plumbing in our house is seriously malfunctioning and beyond my pocketbook to repair. As is the bedroom ceiling. So, the luck part of my personal mojo is up to its lifelong bad old tricks.
But the baseball Cardinals have won their division this year. And Aaron Judge hit 62 homers in the American League this season. It ain’t all bad.
Filed under angry rant, autobiography, humor, Paffooney, self pity, self portrait
Tricks With Lazy Goals in Mind
As a writer, my goal is to create wisdom and new ideas and stuff that makes a reader feel happy, or sad, or angry, or even slightly insane. But thinking is hard when your head hurts and your body aches and your sixty-sixth birthday is just around the corner. (Yes, this Mickey is nearly 66, but can you believe that that other Mickey is going to be 94 on the day after I turn 66?) Sometimes you just want to say, “Never mind that I wanted to post every single day for the past two years. Just curl up in a ball and go to sleep.” But there are ways to get something done even if your mind is full of the Sandman’s leavings and old, rotted dreams.
You can always get by with posting somebody else’s wisdom… somebody else’s thinking. You don’t have to work too hard to paste things together. After all, why else did you have to look at so many cut-and-paste essays over the years in middle school and high school?
And you can rely on the work you have already done collecting computer files full of colorful crap and stuff you like enough to steal to complete your cut-and-paste scrapbook post. You don’t have to feel like you erred and are about to have your head cut off by an angry Groo.
And you know you can get a lot of cheap likes on Facebook with some of the stuff you have available to put in this post. You have been working at the “Be funny!” thing for a long time and have gotten almost good enough at it to be funny on the fly. And when you’ve gotten more than halfway to the goal, you can rest a bit. Take a nap. Regenerate the crazy things in your head so you can do this all again another day.
And if you can have a laugh before you are finished, even if no one else in the world gets the joke… well, at least you will feel a little bit better yourself.
Catch a Falling Star 