I admit it. Even though I collect pictures of sunrises to glory in the fact that I still have another day of life in this world, I rarely snap a picture of the cloudless sunrise. It is very possible that this has something to do with what ultimately gives life value and makes it worthwhile to live one more day.
If there is no pattern, no color-changes, no contrast, no variation… then why bother? And this doesn’t only apply to living your life. It applies to taking pictures of the sky too. Solid blue or solid yellow are about as interesting as a minimalist painting. (Have you ever seen the big beige squares and red squares that fill entire walls of the Dallas Art Museum? Like a picture of a polar bear in a fierce blizzard or an extreme close-up of the side of a tomato.)
Yes, sunshine and happiness are all well and good… but you don’t get a satisfactory skyscape without some clouds in it. In fact, rain clouds provide the most fascinating patterns and colors. What would the picture be without a little drama splashed here and there to make a center of interest or a counterpoint to the happy ending? They say that variety is the spice of life. And when they say that they probably mean cayenne pepper rather parsley or oregano. If that’s not what they mean, then why the hell did we bring food into the discussion?
So, I am thinking, there have to be clouds. (Notice, I said “clouds”, not “clowns”, because… according to the song, there “oughtto be clowns”, not “have to be clowns”.)
It is true that clouds can mean sadness… that the rain is coming, that your vision is obscured, that something has come between you and God’s eye. But without clouds, the sky would be plain and boring. Better to burn bright and explode in a short amount of time than to linger over a plain pale blue.
Yep, Sunset Village is the place where I am living now, the series of houses settled in the valley of pain and deterioration where soon the sun will go down and the world will end.
If we are lucky as a country, it will end for me some night in my sleep of natural causes. And it will not end for everybody in the world. But we can’t re-elect leaders who will burn it all down in the name of profits over people. And Donald Trump, a known hater of windmills and other renewable energy, was rescued from indictment over the documents he was keeping in Mar-a-Lago to share with guests and employees curious about nuclear secrets by a Trump-appointed judge in Florida.
Dang! End-of-the-world stuff! I hope you all are comfortable here in Sunset Village as the sun goes down behind the mountains.
I have always loved using weird, wild, and goofy words to describe things when I am trying to be funny. But recently I was saddened to learn that a word I have liked using in the past, “dingleberry”, is actually a poo-poo word. I am very much on the Red Skelton side of the question of using bad words. I mean, I don’t find direct use of obscene language and harsh Anglo-Saxon swear words to be very funny. Shock humor and gross-out humor do not appeal to me the way more whimsical word-play does.
Betelgeuse is a funny word because it is the name of an actual red-giant Star in the Milky Way Galaxy, while at the same time sounding like juice made from beetles. And, of course, there is the little matter of a hilarious Tim Burton movie about a gross-out ghost with an evil agenda. The parts of a word can make or break the comic gravity of the word. As much as I previously liked “dingleberry” as a goofy insult word, the “dingle” part is giving me pause. I have discovered that a “dingle” is not only the v-cleft in a valley between two mountains, it is also derived from “dung”. A “dingleberry” describes a dangling “berry” of poop like the ones sometimes found on the fur of my dog’s behind. Yetch! I can’t even use a label like that on a detestable buffoon like Donald Trump. It bothers me that it suggests the color brown rather than the proper orange. Trump requires a word that translates to something more like “flaming orange Kool-aid man”.
So, I guess I need to focus on other weird, wild, and goofy words as I continue to try to be funny. The dinglebunnies of my comic fantasies need to be “kerpoppled”… the act of “poppling”, to move in a tumbling, irregular manner, as in boiling water. Do away with poo-poo humor, Mickey, old lad! You need some new goofy words.
When learning to write, you have to learn the rules. And then you start writing, and you learn that you have to break all the rules to do it well. But what do I know? You have to be pretty desperate to get your writing advice from a Mickey. After all, it’s not like Mickey was a writing teacher for over thirty years… oh, wait a minute… yes, he was.
Okay, so I decided to write today about the K.I.S.S. rule of writing. That’s right, Keep It Simple, Stupid. Other writing teachers tell me it should be, Keep It Simple, Sweetie, because you can’t say “stupid” to a kid. Okay, that’s mostly true. But I use “stupid” when I use the rule myself. I’m talking to Mickey after all.
So, I better stop “bird-walking” in the middle of this essay, because “bird-walking”, drifting off topic for no purpose, is the opposite of keeping it simple.
I try to write posts of no more than 500 words. I write an introduction that says something stupid or inane that speaks to the theme I want to talk about. Then I pile in a few sentences that talk more about the theme and do a good job of irritating the reader to the point that they can’t wait to get to the conclusion. Finally I finish up with a really pithy and wonderful bit of wisdom to tie a knot in the bow of my essay. I save that bit for the end as a sort of revenge for all the readers who don’t read all the way to the end, even on a short post like this one. Of course, I could be wrong about how wonderful and pithy it is. What does “pithy” even mean? It can be like the soup in the bottom of the chili pot, thicker and spicier than what came before… or possibly overcooked with burned beans.
That was another bit of “bird-walking”, wasn’t it? See, you have to break the rules to make it work better.
So, in order to keep it simple, I guess I need to end here for today. Simple can be the same thing as short, but more often you are trying to achieve “simple and elegant” and pack a lot of meaning and resonance into a few lines. And I, of course, am totally incapable of doing that with my purple paisley prose. And there’s the knot in that bow.
Tiki Astro, the robot boy, sat at the control console of the Ancient Red Dragon Space Craft. As a synthetic, computerized being, he was really the only one who could take over the monitoring of the Dragon’s travels when Junior Aero slept. Tiki didn’t have the Psionic ability to read mechanized minds that Junior had, but his computing powers in his psychotronic brain were almost the equal of Junior’s Psion ability to read computer minds via telepathy.
The panel in front of Tiki was a complex sea of buttons, lights, levers and a myriad of labels and warnings written in an indecipherable Ancient script that nobody alive in the present universe could read. Tiki was trying to decipher it in the back of his computerized brain, as he had for a month now. While doing so, he could also look out through the Dragon’s eyes, the bridge of the space craft actually being inside the head of the Dragon, and see the passing stars as the Dragon leaped through jump space into the interior of the Imperium.
“So, Metal Head, how’s it going?” asked Phoenix as he walked onto the bridge.
“My head is not made mostly of metal. Synthetic flesh is composed of elements like…”
“Save the lecture, Tiki. I know what you are. You are the robot trying to be a real boy.”
“Unlike the other boys on this ship, I am only a little over two years old. Three if you count the day my head was activated as my original birthday.”
“Yeah. We are all very different on this flight crew. It makes it all the harder to figure things out.”
“What things?” Tiki asked the flame-haired boy.
“Well, a lot of things are on my mind. I mean, who among us Disciples of the White Spider should be the leader after Sensei Ged Aero?”
“I always assumed it was between Junior Aero and Sara Smith. They are the first two students of the Dojo.” Tiki looked at Phoenix with expressionless eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that. I know it is wrong to be jealous of anyone. But…”
“But you were a leader rather than a follower when you were a student of the Black Spider.”
“Well, yeah… I mean, I was trained by them to be a tactical leader and the commander during combat.”
“And you don’t want to turn over leadership to telepaths and healers?”
“It isn’t just Junior and Sara. I acknowledge that they are my equals in many ways. But there is also the Gaijinese boy, Shu Kwai. He knows how to lead from the front. And his telekinesis is almost as powerful as my pyrokinesis. And when it comes to telepathy, no one among us can keep Hassan Parker out of our heads if he wants to take over our minds. How am I supposed to handle that?”
“What kind of answer are you asking me for?”
“If it came to a fight over who’s in command, would you, as a rational robot, be on my side?”
“Sensei Ged Aero is in charge of this mission.”
“But if something were to happen to him…”
“If it did, we would be in serious trouble already. I would follow the leader with the best plan for whatever the situation is. Maybe you. But also, maybe not you.”
“That’s the kind of answer I expected, Metal Head. But if it came down to it, and the mission was on the line, I would certainly pay attention to who you choose to follow. I know you calculate the odds better than anyone else can.”
“That’s what happens when you make a pocket computer like me into an almost-real boy.”
The conversation ended there, but Phoenix continued studying the stars ahead as he continued to stand behind Tiki and look out the Dragon’s eyes at what was coming into view.
The thing I find to be most witlessly true about both poetry and life is that things can be funny, and make you laugh, and at the same time make you cry on the inside. Humor is hard to write because it can be both happy and sad at the same exact moment. How do you define that quality? The bitter-sweet nature of nature? That’s saying it in a way that is both contradictory and odd. It can give you a wry smile at the same moment it both confounds and confuses you. So better just to shrug your shoulders and tell yourself you know it when you see it… and this either is or isn’t it. Sorry if I made you think too hard, cause I know that sometimes thinking hurts.
Mickey at the Wishing Well of Souls
I found a country well, and I thought I had a quarter,
But I fished in pockets hard, and found nothing for the warter,
And since I had to warp a line to make the poem rhyme,
I figured I would just look in, because I had the time.
I looked into the warty water which sat there still and deep,
And could not see the bottom, and I began to weep.
The water was clear and dark and black,
And the only thing I saw… was Mickey looking back.
And nothing of the wishing well, its magic could I see,
For only there just staring back, the secret thing was me.
I apologize for inflicting poetry on you when you probably came here looking for goofy stuff to laugh at. But my poetry is just like all my word-mangling and picture-crayoning. It tends to be goofy and weird and walking a tightrope over a shark tank between chuckle-inducing and tear-jerking. You probably can’t even tell which is the poetry and which are the burbled brain-farts of commentary that pad this thing out to five hundred words. Four hundred and ninety six, actually.
Life is a slapstick comedy. And when it’s me on the stage, I always seem to be the slappee, not the slapper.
I have had an excitingly terrible week. On Tuesday my car broke down. It had been showing a check-engine light on the dash off and on for over a week. Probably caused by a construction pothole that I hit really hard in mid-August. It was running okay until last weekend when it started coughing and kicking and letting me know in no uncertain terms that it might be dying. We chugged into the Five-Star-Ford service center where it may have breathed its last. The service supervisor told me that they are booked solid until October, so it will be sitting in their overflow lot until then.
But while my wife is still in the Philippines attending her sister’s wedding celebration, we still had her car to use, right? But then we found out that our number two son, who bought that car from my wife, is finishing his Air-Force MOS training and will need that car in Florida to do his first assignment. So, we go from a two-car family to a no-car family by Thursday. Then on Friday, that car also breaks down. I call Triple-A for a tow truck, but they send a battery specialist instead. (Well, I did tell the computer voice that my car wouldn’t start before I talked to a real person, so, my fault.)
But when the battery specialist arrived, he talked me into letting him check the battery. Sure enough, the battery was among the evil dead. And he had a battery with him to give us for free as AAA members. Aha! We temporarily have a car again.
And it was a good thing we had a car on Saturday. My daughter woke up with so much pain in the kidney area of her back that we had to go to Primacare to see a weekend doctor. But she has brand new health insurance. And Primacare couldn’t take that. So, they sent us to the Baylor Hospital Emergency Room. We were headed to a very expensive place with possibly no insurance coverage.
Well, we lucked out again. The hospital did, apparently, take her insurance. They did bloodwork and an MRI to determine it was a urinary tract infection easily treated with generic antibiotics, and no kidney stones showed up on the MRI. So, now, on Sunday night, she is comfortably recuperating in her own bed.
And I will have to solve the car problem by buying myself a new car, something I can actually afford to do since I paid off my bankruptcy debts last year.
If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.
But the question remains, why does this ping-pong game of endless crisis management always seem to happen to me?
First of all, the older I get, and the more my arthritis and my diabetes slow me down and make me clumsy, the more I find Physics, and Gravity, in particular, are now my enemies. I have to walk with a cane everywhere to prevent falling down. And, of course, I fall down anyway. I run into things when I try to move around them. Acceleration, impacts, collisions, and other actions that Physics applies to my locomotive powers erratically are a constant source of ill luck, worry, and pain.
If Statistics evens things out like the Statistics professors say it should, I have enough good luck coming to me to win the lottery three times and then live to a hundred and ten years of age to balance the scales of good and bad luck.
How long have I been a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals? Since Bob Gibson and the World Series victories of the 60’s. When will it end? I have to know if there is baseball in Heaven before I can tell you. And I believe there is.
A true baseball fan never abandons the team he or she loves. They live and breathe and die with the team. In the 1960’s I got to experience my Cardinals win the World Series against the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. I got to experience the defeat in seven games by the Detroit Tigers and Mickey Lolich their star pitcher in 1968. And I followed them mostly by the sports page in the Mason City Globe Gazette. And sometimes second hand when I listened to the Twins’ games on radio with Great Grandpa Milo Raymond. I followed the individual players and their numbers. Curt Flood, the center fielder was a vacuum cleaner with legs in center field. Lou Brock could steal a base, though he was even more amazing at it in the 1970’s with veteran savvy and know-how on his side. Gibson was extraordinary as pitcher. And I followed the others too. Dal Maxvill at short stop, Tim McCarver at catcher. Mike Shannon at third. And a fading Roger Maris in right field, having never reached the heights again as the Yankee slugger who hit 61 home runs in 1961.
I watched and waited in the 1970’s, when I could follow them on television at least occasionally. I didn’t get more World Series victories that decade, but I listened to the ball game on radio when Bob Gibson pitched his no-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates. I was giddy about the base stealing record that Lou Brock set in the 70’s, later to be eclipsed by Ricky Henderson. I followed Ted Simmons, the catcher, and Joe Torre the third baseman.
The 1980’s brought more World Series with victory in 1981 over the Milwaukee Brewers, and losses against the Kansas City Royals and Minnesota Twins. I invented some new cuss words the night the Royals came from behind to win the sixth game of the series because an umpire blew the call at first base that would’ve given the Cardinals the series win. That bad call (the runner was clearly out at first) changed the series from a Cardinals’ win in six games to a Royals’ victory in seven games.
In the late 1990’s I cheered for Mark McGwire to break Roger Maris’ single season home run record. I watched on TV as he did it, holding my young son in my lap and cheering loudly enough to scare all the cockroaches out of the house in South Texas. It burned me later that the steroids scandals and Barry Bonds would later tarnish that moment. But I lived it never-the-less, and it was a highlight of my life as a Cardinals’ fan.
And now, this year, as everything is going wrong in my life and my body is breaking down more often than my car does, the Cardinals are surging again. They could win a hundred games this year. They could win World Series number twelve. We have history, this team and I. And I am a devoted fan. I can no more explain my love of the team to you than any baseball fan anywhere could ever explain to you why they love baseball. Or what the heck Fredbird is all about. But there it is. We don’t wait til next year. Not the Cardinals.
Jun 9, 2015; St. Petersburg, FL, USA; Los Angeles Angels first baseman Albert Pujols (5) reacts at home plate after he hit a solo home run during the fifth inning against the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports
Albert Pujols will always be a Cardinal in my mind. We won it all in 2011.
The cartoon portrait exaggerates and calls attention to things that are not ordinarily something to be proud of. MAGA Man’s defiance, Doofy Fuddbugg’s toothless grin, or Dorothy’s threatening presence can all make us laugh and enjoy the funny thing that no one else can give us.
Evil EddyThis portrait has two faces. Which one is the girl’s real persona?And which of the two faces is really the persona of the boy?I can do me funny too.Some people are just naturally part Mr. Bean.He is so bald for a smart man.
I decided I wanted to be a novelist because of Charles Dickens. I loved the way he told a story with vivid characters, rising and falling crises, and story arcs that arrive at a happily-ever-after, or a how-sad-but-sweet-the-world-is ultimate goal. Sometimes he reached both destinations with the same story, like in David Copperfield or The Old Curiosity Shop. I have wanted to write like that since I read The Old Curiosity Shop in 9th Grade.
Thomas Hardy has a lot in common with Chuck. I mean, more than just being old Victorian coots. Hardy knows the Wessex countryside, Blackmoor and Casterbridge with the depth and understanding that Dickens bestows on London. Hardy can delineate a character as clearly and as keenly as Dickens, as shown by Diggory Venn, the Reddleman in Return of the Native, or Tess Durbyfield in the novel I am reading at the moment. These characters present us with an archetypal image and weave a story around it that speaks to themes with soul-shaking depth. Whereas Dickens will amuse and make us laugh at the antics of the Artful Dodger or Mr. Dick or Jerry Cruncher from a Tale of Two Cities, Hardy makes us feel the ache and the sadness of love wrecked by conflict with the corrupt and selfish modern world. Today I read a gem of a scene with the three milkmaids, Izz, Retty, and Marian looking longingly out the window at the young gentleman Angel Clare. Each wants the young man to notice her and fall in love with her. Sad-faced Izz is a dark-haired and brooding personality. Round-faced Marian is more jolly and happy-go-lucky. Young Retty is entirely bound up by shyness and the uncertainty of youth. Yet each admits to her crush and secret hopes. Tess, meanwhile, overhears all of it, all the time knowing that Angel is falling in love with her. And worse yet, she has sworn to herself never to let another man fall in love with her because of the shameful way Alec D’Urberville took advantage of her, a quaint old phrase that in our time would mean date rape. There is such bittersweet nectar to be had in the characterizations and plots of these old Victorian novels. They are more than a hundred years old, and thus, not easy to read, but worth every grain of effort you sprinkle upon it. I am determined now to finish rereading Tess of the Durbervilles, and further determined to learn from it, even if it kills me.
Catch a Falling Star 
Skyscapes of the Cloudy Mind
I admit it. Even though I collect pictures of sunrises to glory in the fact that I still have another day of life in this world, I rarely snap a picture of the cloudless sunrise. It is very possible that this has something to do with what ultimately gives life value and makes it worthwhile to live one more day.
If there is no pattern, no color-changes, no contrast, no variation… then why bother? And this doesn’t only apply to living your life. It applies to taking pictures of the sky too. Solid blue or solid yellow are about as interesting as a minimalist painting. (Have you ever seen the big beige squares and red squares that fill entire walls of the Dallas Art Museum? Like a picture of a polar bear in a fierce blizzard or an extreme close-up of the side of a tomato.)
Yes, sunshine and happiness are all well and good… but you don’t get a satisfactory skyscape without some clouds in it. In fact, rain clouds provide the most fascinating patterns and colors. What would the picture be without a little drama splashed here and there to make a center of interest or a counterpoint to the happy ending? They say that variety is the spice of life. And when they say that they probably mean cayenne pepper rather parsley or oregano. If that’s not what they mean, then why the hell did we bring food into the discussion?
So, I am thinking, there have to be clouds. (Notice, I said “clouds”, not “clowns”, because… according to the song, there “ought to be clowns”, not “have to be clowns”.)
It is true that clouds can mean sadness… that the rain is coming, that your vision is obscured, that something has come between you and God’s eye. But without clouds, the sky would be plain and boring. Better to burn bright and explode in a short amount of time than to linger over a plain pale blue.
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Filed under clowns, commentary, foolishness, humor, photo paffoonies
Tagged as clouds, humor, metaphor, sunrises