The field on which I have printed these supposedly poetic words is part of the farm that I and my two sisters have inherited. The land belonged first to my great grandfather, Friend Aldrich. His son, Raymond Aldrich, was my grandfather, the father of my mother. Now that my parents are both gone, one-third of this farm is now mine. But I don’t own the land. The land owns me.
I have endured with my roots in this land for more than 65 years. The old cottonwood tree on the corner has been there longer than that. You see the cottonwood in both of the pictures so far used in this post. They say that the total root system of this old tree is just as large and spread out as the part of it you see above ground.
Ironically, my roots are here where the ancestors who came before me planted them in the 1800s. Ironic because my life now blooms in the Dallas, Texas suburbs, almost 750 miles away from my roots. That is a deeper and larger root-connection than the cottonwood has.
I don’t farm the land myself. Another local farm-owner rents the land and farms it for us, increasing his yield and profits in order to keep his own farm producing food for the world. My own crop consists not of corn or soybeans, but rather words, memories, statements, stories, and meanings distilled from more than 65 years of brewing them from the things that formed me, the things that came from farm and family, and resulted in the poetry that is my life.
Yes, it is poetry written by a fool and a notable terrible poet. But it makes people laugh and sometimes cry and reaches out from the center of my soul to communicate the wisdom of a life that has been lived and is now almost done. How is that not poetry? A poem written by a fool.
I first heard this song as a freshman in college. It struck me that it was hauntingly beautiful… but maybe I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.
The song is about losing body parts and being okay with that.
That can actually be kinda creepy, right?
It is probably a song about gradually dying.
But that’s not really what it’s about.
I am there now. Peeling, cracking, drying out… my life has reached the downhill run toward the finish line. But I am not worried and not afraid. Life is so much more than hands and eyes and legs and feet. I can lose those things and have no regrets. I am so much more than merely the sum of those physical things.
My spirit soars. And my life is bound up in words and meanings that are now written down, and are at least as imperishable as paper. And may, in fact, be written on a few human hearts here and there.
There isn’t a great deal of actual meaning in this title. It is kinda nonsense.
Looking at it through a magnifying glass, I can see a really big capital “R” and a really large, small “eco.” The rest of it looks ordinary, but I am probably looking at it with the other eye. See what I mean about nonsense?
It’s like a Republican telling you the election was stolen and Biden has ruined the economy. The truth is… the Pumpkinhead President failed to steal it, though he tried. And the Republicans ruined the economy by botching the pandemic response, and Biden has been slowly trying to fix it even though the Republicans and Joe Manchin have been throwing monkey wrenches into the efforts.
It doesn’t help anything to start shouting at Republicans and other sheep-like Fox News viewers, coloring the inside of my mind with a fiery red anger color. That color, if kept hot and intense enough, can cause scar tissue on the inside of my thought processes.
It is better by far to realize you cannot move stupid people to let go of tightly held beliefs. Maintain, rather a cool blue, but factual, color in the quiet part of your mind.
If you are going to effectively regather your energy for the next fight over solving the world’s problems, you need to think in many colors and puzzle them together in a way in which no single color dominates overmuch. Being a liberal means being open to new ideas, but only accepting them if they are actually workable and useful. Leaving it to the conservatives to throw monkey poo and accusations of being a pedophile into the process means liberals don’t get their hands dirty, and, hopefully, there will be enough non-stupid people coming along to recognize which side of the argument stinks.
So, I am actually advocating you deal with the Evil Empire the way Obi-Wan did, by laying low, going by another name, and eventually helping Luke Skywalker to rid the galaxy of the evil old Spider Emperor while helping blow up the Death Star.
Sometimes the creative brain gets a little too hot and needs time to cool. That means I need a meaningless filler post to maintain my every-day posting. So, I give you a picture of Mike Murphy carrying his girlfriend, Blueberry Bates’ books home from the bus stop on a country road in Iowa. And, of course, they happen to meet an alien named George Jetson, whose father named him after a character on his favorite Earther TV show from the 60’s. It is a strange thing to have your brain over-heat from too many creative neurons firing at the same time. But it can lead to notions of intergalactic peace and cultural exchange… or racist comments like, “Tellerons have heads that look like giant boogers!” But I should be able think more rationally tomorrow. I hope that turns out to be a good thing.
As the group continued to ride the roosters, little Schtinker could not stop talking. Poppy talked to him as soothingly as possible, hoping to calm him and quiet him.
“We is headed to badness!” insisted Schtinker.
“You should say, We are headed for trouble,” corrected Poppy.
“We are headed for trouble. That knight don’t care bout ennybuddy but his own self.”
“You mean, That knight doesn’t care about anybody but himself.”
“See there? You know it yourself!” said the exasperated Schtinker.
“You know,” said Flute leaning over from his rooster saddle to look Schtinker squarely in the eyes, “This kid is learning to speak better almost instantly.”
“This kid can thinks bedder dan he ever does before. Troll thinking comes hard and slow. But my mind is getting faster da more I uses it.”
“Let’s make for that abandoned barn over there. We need to study this polymorphed little phenomenon a little bit closer.” Flute pointed at the huge rotting structure that had once been the kind of fortress for cows that Slow Ones called a barn.
“But it is urgent that we get to Castle Cornucopia fast,” warned Tod.
“I have an idea that we may benefit more by what Poppy has learned to do with her magic than any sword swings or fireballs we could add to the battle to come.” Flute grinned as he spurred Tannehauser towards the run-down old barn.
“You is no knowing what you is doing, Prinz-guy. Dat barn be da home of Gobbuluns!” warned Schtinker.
“Yes, I know. But tell me, Stinky, do you really want to become a Troll again? Or would rather stay a Sylph boy?”
Schtinker got suddenly wide-eyed and serious. “You mean I can be dis permanent-like?”
“He can, can’t he, Poppy?” Flute asked.
“I would have to make a difficult spell translation to turn him back into a Troll, and I like him better like this.” PoppenSparkle smiled at the wiggly former Troll.
Schtinker gave her a hug for the sheer joy she had apparently filled his little Sylph body with.
Once inside the old barn Flute made the group dismount and gather in a circle amidst the old tractor-tire ruts on the barn’s dried mud floor.
“Poppy, I need to cast a rather invasive spell on you to measure things in your mind. You will have to disrobe for me to do it,” Flute said. He was not asking for permission.
“Sure. I prefer to be naked.” Poppy had no trouble slipping off the bikini-like armor that protected her from mind spells. Her butterfly wings magically unfurled.
Flute pulled a scroll out of his pouch attached to his loincloth. “Messen Sie die Metriken in ihrem Kopf. Finschole!” Sparks flew out of his fingertips and embedded themselves in her forehead. Poppy’s field of vision turned into multicolored clouds.
“Aha! It’s just as I thought. Her polymorph spell not only reshapes the body, it boosts the intelligence in the parts of the brain of the subject that serve the principles of light. It’s a mix of changing the shape and changing darkness into light.”
“So, what does that mean?” asked Tod.
“Let me test the boy to make certain of it.” Flute cast the same spell on young Schtinker.
“Just as I thought. We can turn Gobbuluns of various sorts into Sylphs, Elves, or Brownies simply by turning their inherent darkness into light.”
“Weez doan no wut you iz talkin’, but weez tanks you for bringin’ us chickie meatz an Fairy bodeez to eats!”
Four Gobbuluns gathered together atop a rotting hay bale with mushrooms growing on it. They were armed with spears that were basically sharpened sticks.
Prinz Flute looked them over humorlessly, then broke into a huge smile. “Poppy, I think we may have just found some recruits for the upcoming battle. Can you morph them the same way you did Schtinker? Please?”
Poppy leaned into the spell and enveloped the three Wartoles and one Cyclopes in her spell cloud.
The Gobbuluns didn’t even have time to scream. The cloud dispersed leaving behind three Sylph warriors with iron-tipped spears and one Elf with an Elven bow and quiver of arrows.
I was born and raised a Methodist. But I married into the Jehovah’s Witness faith. Yes, those annoying little people who come knocking at your door offering free Bible studies and wanting to talk to you about the “good news from God’s Word the Bible”. I was one of them for the better part of 20 years. And I want to tell you from the outset that I have been guilty of knocking on doors. I have been threatened to have the dogs sicked on me. I have been threatened with guns by Winchuks, Hickenloopers, and other rednecks. Laughingboy Larry, a seventh and eighth grade former student of mine even begged me to come to his door so he could throw a pie in my face. I requested lemon meringue pie because… mmm, lemon meringue! Jehovah’s Witnesses are not bad people. They are real honest-to-God Christians who believe and teach the essential lessons of Christianity, Love and Forgiveness. Some of the finest people I have ever met are self-sacrificing, hard-working Jehovah’s Witnesses. I would never speak against them. But this post has to explain why I no longer am one of them.
I have always been a reader of the Bible. I began seriously reading it in my youth when I was a victim of sexual assault and the life-threatening depression that can cause. A very thoughtful and loving Methodist minister, the father of my best friend, taught me how to use the Bible to seek answers and find comfort. As a Jehovah’s Witness, I have read the entire Bible cover to cover twice.
But I have also always been a Christian Existentialist, even before I knew what that was. I believe that existence precedes essence. There has to be a real, observable rock in front of me before I grant faith in the existence of a rock. I don’t accept “rock-ness” as something that is real because other people tell me that “rock” exists. If God is going to be the rock upon which I build my faith, then I have to observe that God is real. I need proof. Superstition is acceptance of something without proof. As far as I can tell, almost all religions… organized religions… are based on superstitions. “How do you know that Jesus loves me?” “Because the Bible tells me so.” “Why must I believe I go to Heaven when I die?” “Because your father and his father before him believed it.” “Can I accept these as real reasons… as evidence?” “Of course not. These things follow the patterns of superstition.”
“Kill the infidel! Die a hero’s death, and you will be granted 99 virgins in paradise.” “How do you know this to be true?” “Allah has told me in a dream.”
So, if you follow any of this (undoubtedly due to the same curse of relentless intelligence that plagues me), you are probably wondering why I don’t just come out and claim to be an atheist like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens? Well, because I believe in God. I have seen the proof. When I talk to God, he answers me. When I ask him to guide me, he sends signs and leads me to the answers I seek. He comforts me, even though it is only by helping me to find comfort in my own mind… my own self. He helps me find the power within me to do what is right and overcome what is wrong. Why, then, am I not still a Jehovah’s Witness? Why am I not still knocking on doors?
The truth, as I see it, is… each of us must find God for ourselves. Each of us must obtain the certainty we seek with our own efforts, or be satisfied with a perpetual state of not knowing all the answers. Either result is perfectly acceptable. Jehovah’s Witnesses will tell you that you can’t obtain eternal life unless you believe what they believe, do what they do, and accept everything just as they interpret it from their magic book. Personally, I believe there is no eternal life. I am made of star stuff (as Carl Sagan used to say, because science has mathematically proven it is true). When I die, the configuration of star stuff that is me will simply be no more. But I have existed. And my atoms will go through a large number of processes that disperse them and turn them into something else. My individual consciousness will be disbanded, but the overall consciousness of the universe will remain. The universe is greater than I am. In fact, the whole human race could wink out of existence in a massive fireball that consumes planet Earth, and the whole still remains. I don’t have to worry about any of it. I am the author of my own story. I am responsible for its content, both good and bad. And I am not sorry for any of it.
Most of the angels used in this post are by William-Adolphe Bouguereau…and one is by me.
Now you know the awful truth. Mickey is a humanist. He thinks for himself about everything… even matters of religion. How horrible!
“Tell me, oh great and powerful, Vishnu, will I be offered 99 virgins in paradise if I kill him for you?”
“No, Singh-Rama O’Malley. You are simply being stupid and superstitious. And besides, that particular superstition doesn’t belong to my religion. You are mixing things up.”
“Oh, sorry, Lord Vishnu. But is it okay if I don’t kill myself for my error?”
“Singh-Rama, you are a child of the universe… no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, the universe is unfolding… as it should.” (Note; These last words are the words of the poet Max Ehrmann in his wise poem, Desiderata.)
I was originally planning to have AeroQuest 4 published by now and AeroQuest 5 well underway as my regular novel-writing segment on Tuesdays. The manuscript for 4 is written and formatted, awaiting only a final edit. And half of 5 is already written. It is only the expanded first part of this manuscript that has yet to be written.
But since finishing the manuscript for 4, all I have managed to do is work on other projects. I have added nothing to it since February.
My Fairy stories have taken over my writing time.
The Education of PoppenSparkle has taken over the Tuesday slot in my supposedly structured blogging week. I am enjoying writing it, yet, it is only happening on Mondays every week. The last-minute nature of that writing style is producing a lot of adrenalin and obsession with deadlines, but it is also draining the creativity out of writing time every other day of the week. I haven’t failed to post something for my daily blog, but even the writing I do get done lacks the luster of older posts.
I need to get back to writing on my main work-in-progress, He Rose on a Golden Wing. That book continues to grow and get more complicated as it marinates in the creative juice of my overly juicy mind.
So, there it is, me writing about something I was not supposed to write about on this Memorial Day. I am not suffering from writer’s block, for I am writing every day. But I am suffering from doldrums with the sailboat of progress not having any wind in my sails. How do I get the wind back? I will find a way.
It is a Biblical question. After Cain killed Abel, God came asking for Abel’s whereabouts. And Cain stupidly answered, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Stupid Cain! Did he not know that God already knew the answer?
And stupid God. Why did he ask a question to which he already knew the answer? And why did he ask stupid Cain whom he must’ve already known was stupid?
But the answer to the question in this bit of Biblical moral mythology is supposed to be, “Yes, Cain. You are your brother’s keeper.”
So, why am I, a confirmed Christian Existentialist (an atheist who believes in God), trying to tell you something from a Biblical story?
Well, the matter is simple. As I will very likely die soon from Coronavirus (which I am not yet infected with, but, you know, the kindness of fate…), I am trying like heck to impart what little wisdom I have gathered in my life so that I may leave something behind me that has worth.
This current pandemic is itself a demonstration of the truth behind the claim that I am my brother’s keeper.
I wear a mask everywhere I go now because a mask protects not only me but it also protects others from me. After all, I have no access to testing. I may have the virus and just not know it. Then my exhalations would contain droplets of water that have viruses swimming in it. The mask, combined with six feet of distance, keeps my exhalations from reaching the lungs of uninfected others, and potentially slaying them as Cain did to Abel.
It is because of Texan prejudices against mask-wearing and social distancing that I know I will probably be infected before this pandemic is over. And my diabetes, blood pressure problems, and previous difficulty with bronchitis and COPD insure that I am not part of the 80 percent of people who will survive the virus. I will get pneumonia and die.
When I suggest, however, that we should each take on the responsibility for the safety and well-being of others, I do not mean that we should become a zoo-keeper, and keep them all safely in cages (the Senator Cruz method of keeping Mexican immigrants safe). You cannot presume to control the thoughts and behaviors of others. You must only adopt the way of love and brotherhood. You put the interests and needs of others before your own. You lead by example, not by decree.
Before you start complaining in the comments about how stupid I am in this essay because I blaspheme against God, and at the same time don’t see people for how they really are, remember that I used to be a school teacher. You don’t do that job because you want to be rich and powerful. You do that job for love of others… specifically, other people’s children. And it is true that everybody has their bad points. Everybody is thoughtless, or wicked, or deeply troubled at times. But everyone also has qualities about them that make them beautiful, or kind, or noble, or selfless, or… well, the list of good things I have seen and nurtured in other people’s children is far longer and more profound than the bad things. No matter who they are, no matter what color or culture or religion they are, my brothers and sisters and their children have worth.
So, here I am, declaring that I am, most definitely, my brother’s keeper. (And unlike Cain, I did not kill him. He and his wife live along the Texas coast, near Houston. And they are not in a cage.)
And here is the question most critical to my survival…
I managed to finally return to Bluebonnet Nudist Park on Saturday. It was a Memorial Day weekend crowd, so I got to meet a lot of naked people. Of course, I only saw one kid the whole time I was there, and he looked to be high-school-aged. So, don’t let the first picture in this post fool you. Most nudists at the park were closer to my age than the girls in the picture.
But it was freeing of spirit to actually gather around a swimming pool and have an all-you-can-eat hot-dog lunch with 50-plus other naked people. I can’t explain why that strange alchemy can work. But it does.
Having been around nudists at different times for the majority of my life, I can honestly say I have observed nudists to be happier people than the rest of us. Of course, that is a generalization, and not true of every individual nudist. But they are comfortable in their own skin and connected to the natural world the way most of us are not. I found that most of these people knew they were nudists since childhood. Like me, if their families did not already embrace being nudists, they sneaked off to the woods when they could to get naked in nature.
Am I alone in thinking that this is not a mental aberration, but rather, a natural instinct that was trained out of us (or in my case, almost trained out of us,) in childhood?
I don’t have any pictures from the nudist park to post, so I use the usual collection of innocent-seeming illustrations and pictures to add a sense of beauty and youthfulness to the idea of going to a nudist park for recreation. You know its not really the way the pictures show it. I am not the exhibitionist-sort of nudist whose whole desire is to be seen by the world naked. I, for the most part, am a solitary nudist. Not too proud of my lumpy, wrinkled, and sore-covered carcass so that I am obsessed with others seeing me, but also not ashamed of my corporeal self to the point of not allowing myself to be seen nude by other like-minded nude people. Most of my nudism occurs when I am alone in private places where only peeping Toms and computer-camera hackers can see me. I am, however, proud that I have now been to Bluebonnet twice and have a membership in AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation.)
While I was there, a journalist who writes books on American culture used in sociology research at the college level, was there taking pictures and interviewing folks. He spoke to us, confessing that it was the first time speaking to a group of naked people, and also his first time speaking to a group while naked. He explained that he was recording and documenting interesting and important social organizations in an area only 100 miles wide, but stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian border through the middle of the US. He felt that there were important things to learn about American life from the Bluebonnet Nudist Park just as there were to learn from the Dallas Police Department which he had scheduled for the upcoming week (and he specified he would be wearing clothes for that next part.) Even though I was there for his research, I did not get asked to sign any consent forms for photographs or interviews, so I will not be in that book of his in any way.
I am definitely more confident now in identifying myself as a nudist. I never embraced the idea of actually being one while I was a school teacher in Texas. Texans are suspicious of even letting a Democrat be a public school teacher, let alone someone who purposely goes to a public place with no pants on. I know I have lost Twitter followers and Facebook friends who found out I was actually a nudist. And I feel like I may have lost some of my WordPress followers over it as well. They can’t take seriously someone who walks around with no clothes on.
But my answer to that is… Who in the heck takes Mickey seriously anyway? Get real!
Eating pencils when you are supposed to be writing something isn’t a recommended learning strategy, but is more useful in South Texas than having blue hair.
When I was a rookie teacher in the Spring of 1982, I had to take two busloads of eighth graders nearly a hundred miles to see the State Capitol in Austin for their annual 8th Grade Field Trip.
If you don’t see the potential for disaster in that, well, you are in for a tougher life going forward than the one I am about to complain about.
Anyway, it was an extra-warm sunny Texas day and we had an endless-hours journey in an un-air-conditioned bus with sixty kids and four teachers per bus. And I was the new teacher filled with sizzling rage from enduring eight months and fourteen days worth of get-the-new-teacher tricks by fourteen-and-fifteen-and-sixteen-year-old kids (I didn’t have to rage at the eighteen-year-olds on the field trip because the same things that kept them in the eighth grade until they were eligible for Medicare were the things that disqualified them from going on the field trip). And because the principal was convinced that you could prevent death by throwing things on a bus by having a teacher sitting near the perpetrator, or the potential target, the teachers had to spread out and sit with the kids. Of course, our bus had 59 perpetrators and one potential target (Tomasso, the kid nobody could stand). And the coaches got to sit by the vatos locos most likely to fling metal and hard food. I, of course, got Tomasso.
So, I sat for five hours on the way up to Austin practicing trying to kill apple-core tossers with my best teacher’s stink-eye while ducking gum wads, wrapper balls, and half-eaten Rice-Krispies Treats. And I was also listening to Tomasso’s endless weird questions and comments about penguins that made him the popular target. I got extra practice recognizing bad words in Spanish and resisting the urge to call them “pendejos” in return.
And we got to Austin tired, sweaty, and hungry because it took extra time in both San Antonio and San Marcos traffic, and we missed our lunch connection in a parking lot in central Austin. The kids were mostly not hungry. They were full of chips and hot Cheetos and other salty, unhealthy snack food. Instead of hunger, they were dying of thirst. And while the History teacher in charge of the trip and the coaches were consulting maps and trying to reach the lunch connection with a walkie talkie, I spotted a herd of students going over a wall into a nearby parking garage. I followed to see them walking over the hoods of parked cars to get to a fire hose that they were using as a watering hole.
We were, of course, unable to single out any individuals for punishment. They were dying of thirst, and it was a three-hundred-degree-in-the-sunshine parking lot where we were waiting.
We got to the Capitol and walked around, bored by the tour guide, and found the one entertaining fact about the Texas Capitol Building. Governor Hogg once had two daughters named Ima and Ura. Their pictures hang in an upstairs display case. Kids laughed and called them “pendejos”. Even the white kids.
Then, the way home took an additional seven hours. All of the coaches fell asleep on the way home, and I was the only teacher awake and standing between unpopular nerds and death by de-pantsing. I was told that somewhere in the middle of the writhing masses of eighth grade arms and legs and ultra-loud voices, a shy kid the teachers all liked lost his virginity to one of the more sexually aggressive girls while the other kids close enough to see in the general darkness watched. Was it true? When he got asked in the classroom, he just grinned.
I remember a lot of “Oops!” School Stories happening on field trips. I went on more than twenty of the big trips like that one, and I only remember a handful that went smoothly. But this one stands out in my memory because it was the first. And first experiences set the standard the rest are judged by. And I tell you this because, this time of year, if things were still like they used to be, and there was no pandemic, field trips to hell like that one would be going on for first-year teachers.
ege. It struck me that it was hauntingly beautiful… but maybe I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.
Catch a Falling Star 
Living Life as a Poem Written by a Fool
The field on which I have printed these supposedly poetic words is part of the farm that I and my two sisters have inherited. The land belonged first to my great grandfather, Friend Aldrich. His son, Raymond Aldrich, was my grandfather, the father of my mother. Now that my parents are both gone, one-third of this farm is now mine. But I don’t own the land. The land owns me.
I have endured with my roots in this land for more than 65 years. The old cottonwood tree on the corner has been there longer than that. You see the cottonwood in both of the pictures so far used in this post. They say that the total root system of this old tree is just as large and spread out as the part of it you see above ground.
Ironically, my roots are here where the ancestors who came before me planted them in the 1800s. Ironic because my life now blooms in the Dallas, Texas suburbs, almost 750 miles away from my roots. That is a deeper and larger root-connection than the cottonwood has.
I don’t farm the land myself. Another local farm-owner rents the land and farms it for us, increasing his yield and profits in order to keep his own farm producing food for the world. My own crop consists not of corn or soybeans, but rather words, memories, statements, stories, and meanings distilled from more than 65 years of brewing them from the things that formed me, the things that came from farm and family, and resulted in the poetry that is my life.
Yes, it is poetry written by a fool and a notable terrible poet. But it makes people laugh and sometimes cry and reaches out from the center of my soul to communicate the wisdom of a life that has been lived and is now almost done. How is that not poetry? A poem written by a fool.
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