This beautiful song, an operatic aria by Puccini, is from the comic opera Gianni Schicchi. But, more important than that is what the song actually means in context.
In the opera, Gianni Schicchi is a con man intent on swindling a family out of their inheritance and knowing all along that he will be destined to go to hell when he dies. The family is gathered for the reading of the rich man’s will, which is, because this is a comic opera, lost for the time being. Their main concern is for the money, which rumor has it has all been willed to the church. But one among them is actually worthy of inheriting the money, Rinuccio the son of the rich man’s cousin. And, as luck would have it, as it always does in comedies, Rinuccio is the one who, during the manic and desperate search for the will, actually finds it. And assuming he comes out well in the will, he secures a promise from his mother that if he inherits money, he can marry Schicchi’s beautiful daughter Laurretta whom he truly loves.
But when he reads the will, he is devastated. The money all goes to a monastery. He begs Schicchi to help him convince the family that he should marry Laurretta anyway. This Gianni Schicchi tries and finds it harder than turning water into wine. So Schicchi is about to give up when Lauretta finally speaks up for herself through the song,
O Mio Babbino Caro (My Beloved Father)
At this point Schicchi is moved by the beautiful song and even more beautiful love his daughter has surprised him with. He not only agrees to help, but executes a bizarre plan, hiding the rich man’s body and pretending to be him come back to life to rewrite the will. Now the will favors Rinuccio, and over the protests of the family, he inherits the money and marries his true love, Schicchi’s daughter. The opera ends with Schicchi singing his case to the audience, telling them in song that going to hell is worth it to aid true love.
And this, then, is the truth of O Mio Babbino Caro.
Love, expressed through the surprise of hidden talent suddenly revealed, is the most persuasive argument there is.
Whether it is the love in the music suddenly discovered in the overwhelming voice of a little girl like Jackie Evancho or Amira Willighagen, or the late great Maria Callas who also sang the role, or even the singer of Puccini’s greatest work who is yet to perform it and make silly old men like me weep for beauty’s sake, the song is the most persuasive argument there is in favor of true love.
That is a thing I desperately want to capture in the novel I am writing now, Sing Sad Songs. Love expressed in music. Love that reverses loss. Love that heals all things. And Love that moves all people. The love that is masterfully sung in O Mio Babbino Caro.
That book is now published and available on Amazon.
I do not claim to be prescient. But like any overly smart and perceptive person, I often see what’s going to happen before it happens. Sometimes it is almost as eerie as a Vincent Price movie. Sometimes eerier. After all, on the 60’s Batman TV show, Price played the ridiculous villain Egghead, and was completely creepy while doing it, but still, you know… Egghead.
One thing that I have to predict about the coming darkness is about politics. I mean, the current Republican administration, where it is decisions by all Republicans all the time, has become nothing more than a monster movie. Not merely a bad monster movie, but a super-creepy-bad monster movie with a gigantic orange rubber rooster as the main monster.
This is what the great orange rooster looks like in black and white.
The reason it is bad is because, basically, to become a member of the Republican Party’s elected elite, you basically have to have your heart removed. Heartless, soulless monsters have a tendency to do things like take away Meals on Wheels for invalid seniors, health-care services from Planned Parenthood, and any hope of ever having affordable health insurance that actually pays for health care.
Senator Ted Cruz grinning about taking away Obamacare
And now, the monsters who have taken control of the theater are pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement because… well, apparently clean air isn’t good for decaying, desiccated monster skin and shriveled monster lungs that don’t breathe air anyway.
So here are my predictions for the coming darkness.
What people like me will look like in the future. That’s me in the middle.
I won’t live to see it. My body is breaking down at age 60. My lungs are compromised by years of bronchitis and flu. I am diabetic, so my very body chemistry is betraying me. There is a family history of heart disease. And I have already gone broke once on health care bills that the health insurance people really don’t pay for. (They are in the business of collecting premiums, after all, not making people well.)
What a lovely oxygen-free environment we will have!
As the climate changes take away large parts of our food production and resources, and the sea rises to take away land and major cities, people will be at war increasingly over diminishing resources vital to a population of seven billion souls. Graveyards and unburied bodies will become a part of every monster-movie scene.
Kiss me, Baby!
Love will become more complicated, because people who are selfless and put others before even their own life will die out first. The heartless, selfish, and often stupid ones will have the best chance for survival because they put themselves ahead of everyone else, and so have an unfair advantage over those who are not content with mere survival and exhibit self-sacrificing love.
You’ve never had a friend like me. And I can always eat you later if need be.
So, if you find my black-and-white monster movie post upsetting with the darknesses I am sincerely predicting, please remember, this is a satire post in a humor blog. The way it is supposed to work is that you wake up to the factors that make it upsetting and decide to do something for yourself to change them. Everybody doing a lot of the same little thing to make the world better can move mountains and fly to the moon. Big things don’t happen without everybody taking a hand. Maybe we can dream dreams once again and make some good things come true.
I do not believe in ghosts. I need further evidence for most supernatural monsters. I don’t believe evil lives within phantoms, other-worldly beings, mutants, demons, chupacabra, and evil spirits.
But it does live within people.
People hurt other people. Sometimes even without meaning to. People are not perfect, and many mistakes they make have terrible consequences that kill, maim, and destroy people’s lives. It would be nice if we were a little bit better protected from some of the mistakes made by people with guns.
I am not haunted by ghosts. But the faces of the dead children at Sandy Hook and Robb Elementary haunt me. And former students who have left us too soon because of domestic violence, car accidents, drunk driving, and gang violence haunt me too. There are real monsters. But they have human faces.
There are at least three students I loved when they were alive that are now only sad faces in my nightmares. And there are at least four young adults I worry about because of the ravages of depression and the possibility of suicide that attends it. They are never going to be truly safe in the whole of their lifetimes.
But here’s the thing that lets me fall back to sleep when the ghosts in my nightmares are finished saying, “Boo!” and haunting me. If you ever loved someone, they still live in your heart. Their lives were not meaningless. You know for sure they touched at least one heart… yours.
I wish I could’ve saved you, Ruben. That gang did not protect you. And, J.J., you should not have had anything to drink before deciding whether you could beat the train to the railroad crossing. Alyssa, I am sorry you ever met him. You all three still live in my heart. Haunt me as much as you need to. You can never scare me again, and I would love to see you again, even if only as a face in a nightmare.
We live in a haunted world. We are viewed from the darkest corners by haunted eyes. But in the end, we have nothing to fear. Ghosts are not real. And there are no monsters, if only we choose not to become them.
After years of being stored away, I discovered that my mother had hidden a hoard of my old artworks in the upstairs closet in Grandma Aldrich’s house (now my parents’ house).
This oil painting was done on an old saw blade at the request of my Grandpa Aldrich. He wanted a farm painting on it, like the one he’d seen in a restaurant during a fishing trip in Minnesota. I chose as the subject Sally the pig. Sally was a hairlip piglet that had to be bottle fed and raised in a box by the stove until later in life she became a favorite pet. Believe it or not, pigs are smarter than the family dog. She became a pig you could ride. And Grandma had taken a precious old photo of my mother and Uncle Larry riding the pig. I used that photo to make this painting. It was also the painting I wanted to find on this trip to Iowa. Searching for it led to finding all the others.
These two are among the earliest paintings I did. They were both done on canvases that I stretched over the frame myself in high school art class. The purple one is a scene from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The blue one doesn’t have a title, but you can see what it is. It is an ancient shibboleth water monster lurking under a dock, fishing for young boys to eat.
This drawing was done on the front porch in the house in Rowan. It would be years before mom framed it. It is another example of what I could do as a high school kid. In fact, I composed it from art-class sketches I did my senior year in school.
The Boy in the Barn was painted on the remains of an old chalkboard that my sisters, brother, and I had used in grade school.
Grandma Aldrich asked for this picture to hang over the sofa in the farmhouse living room. It stayed there for many years.
Great Grandma Hinckley passed away in 1980. I created this portrait from a combination of photos and memory. It was too good. It was never hung anywhere because it always made her daughter, my Grandma Aldrich, tear up.
This pencil drawing won a blue ribbon at the Wright County Fair in the late 70’s.
This picture is called First Years are Hard Years. It was painted in 1982 after my first year of teaching at the junior high school in Cotulla, Texas. I painted mostly the good kids. The girl on the lower right would later go on to become a teacher for our school district. I can’t claim to be the one who inspired her, but she did make straight A’s in my class.
This is called Beauty. It is done in oil crayon on canvas. I did it for my mother to hang in the hallway in the house in Taylor, Texas.
So, it turns out, I unearthed art treasures by searching for the one painting.
Prince Flute’s rooster riders made a mad dash for Castle Cornucopia. They all knew that their presence was desperately needed. But more than ever was their presence required since Poppy’s new spell provided an answer to the war problem that the Fairies never had before. Bad guys could be changed into allies by magic. And once having a taste of life as a Sylph or an Elf, the Gobbuluns definitely preferred to stay in their new bodies on the side of the Fairies.
“We promise to fight hard for the Cornucopians,” said the Elf, the fastest learner of Fairy English. “There is no going back for us. And even if we have to fight and kill our former friends, they are such low and horrid creatures that we will not shed a tear over them.”
“Not ebben for me wifey!” added one of the Sylphs. “She be too uglee and stoopid for keepin’.”
They all rounded the final turn, and Castle Cornucopia was laid out before them. It was, of course, actually a Slow One’s barn with Fairy ramparts and towers added to all the wooden walls, but disguised by magical glammers that made the barn appear to be a normal functioning palace for milk cows.
But the truly unbelievable part was the fact that the entire defense force, instead of manning the fortified walls and ramparts, were out in the middle of the field to the east of the castle, surrounded by a sea of raging green Gobbuluns and enemies from the Unseely Court.
“What’s this? Why is Lancelot attacking rather than defending the castle?” Prinz Flute was shocked.
“He be mad, dat one!” called out Schtinker.
“We have to help them survive. That is the entire defense force of the castle about to be slain!” cried Tod.
“No, no, no…!” called out Glittershine.
Flute turned to Poppy and put a hand on each of her arms. “Can you polymorph a really large number of Gobbuluns into Fairies?”
“I… I don’t know. That takes an immense amount of power. It will completely exhaust me, and I doubt I can change enough of them to make a difference.”
“Can you try, please? As many as you can, on the side closest to the castle so the encircled army has a way to escape.”
“I will do the best I can…”
PoppenSparkle gathered all the energy her tired body could hold. It wasn’t enough because she hadn’t absorbed enough sunshine since she had changed the four from the abandoned barn. But it would change a few dozen completely. She crackled with the summoned charge of energy, and then carefully spied out the area of fighting Gobbuluns she meant to target.
The power left her fingertips as soon as she uttered the trigger word and formed into a lightning bolt before becoming the transformational cloud over the writhing Gobbulun bodies. They twisted and morphed as if they were made of clay and became mostly naked and poorly armed Sylphs, Elves, and Butterfly Children.
“Men of Cornucopia! Follow me back to the castle!” shouted Prinz Flute, dashing forward to toss fireballs with his wand into the crowds of green Wartoles that hadn’t been touched by the polymorphing cloud.
“No! Hold your ground men! We will be covered in glory this day, even if we all die.” Lancelot seemed outraged at Flute trying to take command.
“Look at all these new Fey Children on our side, Lord! We now have a chance to hold the castle. Why should we still go through with the plan to sacrifice ourselves? We don’t have to die now! And you will not die in any case.” The Rascal was obviously defying his master. But it was effective. The Sylphs under Lancelot’s command broke ranks, fighting only to protect their escaping brethren. The mass of Fairy warriors flooded back towards the castle, carrying Flute’s rooster riders and all the newly made Fairies with them.
At the castle gate, Lord Lancelot, King Mouse, and Prinz Flute all pulled up short of it to shout at each other.
“How dare you countermand my battle plan?” roared Lancelot.
Prinz Flute, taken aback, quickly replied, “How dare you try to get everyone killed in spite of the fact that I provided you with a means to survive the day, and possibly win the war?”
King Mouse was a Pixie, of the kind that take on the partial form of woodland creatures. His head and paws and tail were all very mouse-like, while his body was very hunman-shaped and capable of wearing a suit of Fairy armor.
“I know your status as Tellosian Hero means you outrank me, Lord Lancelot, but as King of Cornucopia, I side with Prinz Flute on the question of whether today is the day we all die or not.”
“Well, we can’t exactly reform the troops and attack again now. But I would rather take the fight to them than hole up for a siege and defensive last stand.”
Prinz Flute seemed to be actively trying to calm himself. Poppy appreciated how calm he could make himself in dire situations. “You must come in and listen to the new plans I have formulated. I have made a breakthrough in magical research that might win the day for us without fighting battles against foes that outnumber us.”
Angry as Lancelot still seemed, he nodded his assent.
The Rascal ran up to him to make a report on the retreat into the castle.
Lord Lancelot eyed him coldly. “I have no time for disobedient underlings. Rascal, you are dismissed from my service.”
Crestfallen, the boy turned and walked back into the castle without making a report.
“Now that we have more men to defend the walls with,” said King Mouse, “let’s retire to the throne room and discuss further strategy.
Flute signalled to Poppy, calling her to him. “You have saved the day yet again, PoppenSparkle.”
“I only did the magic. You made it happen.”
“You look exhausted, little one.”
She smiled. She was actually taller than Flute, but not about to contradict him. He put his arm around her to guide her.
Lord Lancelot stood in the gateway, looking at the stupidly confused horde of Gobbuluns. He finally turned and entered too so that the gate could be shut and barred.
Trying and making mistakes is how we learn. Trial and error built empires, created revolutions, and changed the very nature of reality. How do I know this? I tried. I failed. I tried again.
If I am not satisfied with the way things are, I must take steps to change the way things are.
Small steps at first.
But bigger things come along in time.
For today, I try again to get the tall grass cut in the yard. I walk the dog. I plan what I am going to do about the sorry state of air conditioning in the house. Every problem has a solution if only you can find it.
Right now, the world around me is direly concerned with mass shootings and how to control them. Especially after Uvalde lost 19 kids and two teachers to bullets from an AR-15.
Gun laws would help. But a Republican-controlled government refuses to regulate them sensibly.
Voting the morons and the evil, corrupt bastards out of office would be a good start. Men like Representative Louie Gohmert, Senator Ted Cruz, Governor Greg Abbot, and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, one moron and three bastards, have to no longer be in control. And voting in good, capable people like Beto O’Rourke would help. But too many idiots, fools, racists, and evil people have the privilege of voting, while minorities and people of good conscience face increased barriers to voting.
My privileged white friends and relatives I knew well in my school years long ago, have developed powerfully potent hate glands from listening to racist fears and hate-filled propaganda from FOX News and various elected leaders who’ve duped them into buying the bull-puckie.
So, what do I do about it?
Remind them who they used to be. Remind them they don’t want school children to die from bullets in their classroom on the next-to-last day of school anymore than I do. Remind them that I am a friend and a relative of some of them who will continue to listen, continue to care, and continue to point out where they are allowing their preferences to become prejudices and their fears to foster cruelty to certain groups of “others.”
Even though I have been retired for eight years now, I am still a teacher. I believe every kid and every adult who was once a kid has value and needs to be treated as an equal and worthy individual. I also believe in responsibility, and holding people responsible, but not in punishing someone for failing to live up to a responsibility… rather, letting them pick themselves up to try again to do it better.
The Toonerville Post Office and Bert Buchanan’s Toy Store.
Toonerville is not only a wonderful cartoon place created by Fontaine Fox in the 1930’s, but the name of the town that inhabited my HO Train Layout when I lived in South Texas and had the Trolley actually running nearly on time. The train layout has not been restored to working condition for over a decade now. The buildings which I mostly built from kits or bought as plaster or ceramic sculptures and repainted have been sitting on bookshelves in all that time. I still have delusions of rebuilding the train set in the garage, but it is becoming increasingly less and less likely as time goes on and my working parts continue to stiffen up and stop working. So, what will I do with Toonerville?
Wilma Wortle waits on the station platform for her train at the Toonerville Train station. I built this kit in the 1970’s, hence the accumulations of dust bunnies.
Loew’s Theater has been awaiting the start of The African Queen for more than twenty years.
Main Street Toonerville at 2:25 in the afternoon. Or is it three? The courthouse clock is often slow.
Grandma Wortle who controls all the money in the family likes to park her car near the eggplant house when she visit’s Al’s General Store.
But I may yet have found a way to put Toonerville back together through computer-assisted artsy craftsy endeavors.
A two-shot of Bill Freen’s house and Slappy Coogan’s place on the photo set to start production.
Bill Freen’s house lit up with newfangled electricical. (and I do believe that is the way Bill spells it all good and proper.)
Bill Freen’s house cut out in the paint program.
So I can make composite pictures of Toonerville with realistic photo-shopped backgrounds. Now, I know only goofy old artsy fartsy geeks like me get excited about doofy little things like this, but my flabber is completely gasted with the possibilities.
Bill Freen’s house at sunset… (but I don’t get why there’s snow on the roof when the grass is so green?)
I suppose it is my own fault. This is the second straight spring and summer where my views and traffic on this blog site have plummeted to depths not reached since 2015.
Before the pandemic, my daily views never dropped below 50. The number of likes averaged about 12 per post.
Now I have only topped 50 three times in the last 3 weeks.
My two posts yesterday averaged 7.5 views apiece. Each one garnered only 3 likes.
Ah, if I only had a brain…
My favorite hockey team won their first-round playoff series. But then they lost in the next series… though the team that beat them looks like they are going to sweep into the Stanley Cup and maybe win it. I am still celebrating the St. Louis Blues’ 2019 Stanley Cup victory. Perhaps it is enough to be happy with that.
Come to think of it, last year my views ballooned in late July and August through October after going through a very similar dearth of attention last spring and early summer.
Hmm… If I only had a brain!
So, maybe the Spring Doldrums are something that I have to get used to now. I have been posting two blogs a day, an old classic post with a new one. I know from past experience that that can both spark more interest and dampen interest. Maybe patience is the only thing I need to apply. What other tools are there for gaining readers’ interest? More nudes and maybe porn? No… I don’t think that’s reader interest worth pursuing. Nobody is reading and reviewing my book on Pubby either. And I am not changing anything about my fiction style in a weak and waffling attempt to improve my ratings.
So, I am well aware of my own weirdness enough to realize that not everybody wants what I have to tell. Don’t listen or read if that’s what your heart tells you. I can live with that. But, if I do die from it, it’s not me that has to live with the guilt. That’s entirely on you. (Unless you DID read this far. Then, hurray for you! Leave a like to prove how wonderful you are, and I will try to stop complaining so much.)
It pretty much goes without saying that, since I am an author of fiction, determined to be a storyteller, I spend most of my time talking to people who exist only inside my goofy old head. Sure, most of the imaginary people I create to keep me company are at least loosely based on real people that I either once knew, or still know. You can tell that about Millis, the rabbit-man, pictured here on the right, can’t you? Sure. I had a New Zealand White pet rabbit that I raised as a 4-H project. His name was Ember-eyes… because, well, yeah… red eyes. It just happens that my goofy old memory transformed him into an evolution-enhanced science experiment in my unpublished novel, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. But he was a real person once… ’cause rabbits are people too, right?
Anita Jones, a character from my unpublished novel, Superchicken, is based on a real person too. I admit, there was a girl in my class from grades K through 6 that I secretly adored and would’ve done anything to be near, though every significant event I remember from my life that involved an encounter with her, involved red-faced embarrassment for me. That’s why I remember her as having auburn-colored hair. Charley Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl… duh! I would’ve died sooner than tell her how I really felt, even now, but by making her into one of a multitude of imaginary people who inhabit my life, I can be so close to her that sometimes I am actually inside her mind. There’s a sort of creepy voyeurism-squared sort of thing.
Dorin Dobbs, the main human character of my published novel, Catch a Falling Star, is an imaginary character based mostly on my eldest son, though, in fact, I started writing that novel five years before he was born. Like most of the imaginary people in my life, I talk to Dorin repeatedly even when the real Dorin is half a world away in the Marine Corps. And even though the Dorin I am talking to is not the real Dorin, he is still constantly using language that is extra-salty far beyond his years, and is often defiant of my fatherly wisdom, and always argues for the exact opposite of any opinion I express. That’s just how it is to be the father of an imaginary son.
Realistically, I have to admit that even the flesh-and-blood people in my life are imaginary. No one ever actually inhabits another person’s head except through the magic of imagination. Even though I am talking to you at this moment, you are only an imaginary person to me. I don’t even know your name as I write this. And I am the same to you. You may have read my writing enough to think you know something about me… but you really only know the Mickey in your mind that I have worked at putting there with my words. And I really have no idea what that imaginary Mickey you have in your head is like. He is probably really the opposite of who I think I am.
I am, after all, married to this girl panda, Mandy Panda from the Pandalore Islands, and my three children are all Halfasian part-panda-people. Yes, this is the imaginary person who is my real-life wife. The secret is, we only ever know the imaginary people we have in our goofy little heads. We don’t know the real person behind anyone in our lives, because it is simply not possible to really know how anybody else thinks or feels, even if they write out their lengthy treatise about how all people are imaginary people. That stuff is just too goofy-dippy to be real.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Darkest of the Coming Darkness
Egghead might be slightly batty.
I do not claim to be prescient. But like any overly smart and perceptive person, I often see what’s going to happen before it happens. Sometimes it is almost as eerie as a Vincent Price movie. Sometimes eerier. After all, on the 60’s Batman TV show, Price played the ridiculous villain Egghead, and was completely creepy while doing it, but still, you know… Egghead.
One thing that I have to predict about the coming darkness is about politics. I mean, the current Republican administration, where it is decisions by all Republicans all the time, has become nothing more than a monster movie. Not merely a bad monster movie, but a super-creepy-bad monster movie with a gigantic orange rubber rooster as the main monster.
This is what the great orange rooster looks like in black and white.
The reason it is bad is because, basically, to become a member of the Republican Party’s elected elite, you basically have to have your heart removed. Heartless, soulless monsters have a tendency to do things like take away Meals on Wheels for invalid seniors, health-care services from Planned Parenthood, and any hope of ever having affordable health insurance that actually pays for health care.
Senator Ted Cruz grinning about taking away Obamacare
And now, the monsters who have taken control of the theater are pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement because… well, apparently clean air isn’t good for decaying, desiccated monster skin and shriveled monster lungs that don’t breathe air anyway.
So here are my predictions for the coming darkness.
What people like me will look like in the future. That’s me in the middle.
I won’t live to see it. My body is breaking down at age 60. My lungs are compromised by years of bronchitis and flu. I am diabetic, so my very body chemistry is betraying me. There is a family history of heart disease. And I have already gone broke once on health care bills that the health insurance people really don’t pay for. (They are in the business of collecting premiums, after all, not making people well.)
What a lovely oxygen-free environment we will have!
As the climate changes take away large parts of our food production and resources, and the sea rises to take away land and major cities, people will be at war increasingly over diminishing resources vital to a population of seven billion souls. Graveyards and unburied bodies will become a part of every monster-movie scene.
Kiss me, Baby!
Love will become more complicated, because people who are selfless and put others before even their own life will die out first. The heartless, selfish, and often stupid ones will have the best chance for survival because they put themselves ahead of everyone else, and so have an unfair advantage over those who are not content with mere survival and exhibit self-sacrificing love.
You’ve never had a friend like me. And I can always eat you later if need be.
So, if you find my black-and-white monster movie post upsetting with the darknesses I am sincerely predicting, please remember, this is a satire post in a humor blog. The way it is supposed to work is that you wake up to the factors that make it upsetting and decide to do something for yourself to change them. Everybody doing a lot of the same little thing to make the world better can move mountains and fly to the moon. Big things don’t happen without everybody taking a hand. Maybe we can dream dreams once again and make some good things come true.
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Filed under angry rant, battling depression, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, horror movie, humor, monsters