Catch a Falling Star

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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Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, metaphor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, teaching, writing teacher

October 11, 2022 · 2:20 am

600 Days in a Row!!!

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.

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October 11, 2022 · 2:12 am

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.”

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Tagged as AeroQuest 5

October 10, 2022 · 3:10 am

Traveller

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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.

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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.

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October 9, 2022 · 8:42 pm

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.”

This is called “Magic Carpet Ride,” though it could be called, “No Fortress is Safe Anymore.”

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.

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October 9, 2022 · 5:41 am

Dancing Towards the Brighter Light

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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.

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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.

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Filed under compassion, empathy, forgiveness, healing, insight, inspiration, strange and wonderful ideas about life

October 8, 2022 · 6:53 pm

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.