On my computer I keep a lot of picture files for inspiration both as an artist and a writer. One of those files is labeled simply the “Wrong File”. Everything in that picture file is in there for the wrong reason. Or does a wrong file need to be filled with the wrong stuff for the right reason? I don’t know. There is a lot wrong with this world. The fact that I am going to post stuff from the “Wrong File” is merely proof of that.
Liking Grumpy Cat posts on Facebook is an oxymoron of the lowest order. It is an example of what is wrong in the “Wrong File”.
Certain puns are just so wrong in a fundamental way. That’s right. They are both fun and mental. So that’s wrong.
As an educator I am aware that this thing we thought was true is now an untrue fact. That’s wrong also. My left brain tells me so. But my right brain tells me it feels right.
Yes, these things are wrong. Just wrong.
Why did I put this in here? This is not wrong. This is right. So I must’ve put it in the wrong file. So that’s all right, then.
Putting this in a file my wife could find on my laptop… Yes, that was wrong.
Saddle shoes have been wrong for many years now. I still draw them on the feet of kids, especially girls, especially school-age girls, and that is especially especially wrong because it means I am just too old and out of fashion.’
Boy! Is that wrong!
These things are all older than me, but I remember two of them. Is that wrong?
I’m not sure I believe this is wrong. So is that wrong? To believe that it is right, I mean? I’m probably wrong.
My wife constantly tells me I am wrong… about everything. And I probably am. So that is not right. And if you think that’s my wife in the picture, you would be wrong. She’s much larger than that in real life.
And many people find surrealism is wrong. Surreal is when you put wrong things together on purpose to make something that almost seems right.
So that’s what odd about the “Wrong File”, It is so wrong that it is right.
Every Dungeons and Dragons player, especially game masters, know about the oubliette. In the foundations of towers in the castles of the French you often find a windowless room with the only entrance in the ceiling. It is a dark hole where you throw captives you want to simply forget. In fact, the name comes from the word in Middle French, “oublier” which translates to “forget”. Now, of course, as a former school teacher, I know about oubliettes. I have been in one more than once. I have tossed bad kids in there more than once. But the thing I had to learn about “forget holes” is that there is always a way out.
I had a principal who decided I had betrayed him because he overheard me talking sympathetically to a teacher he had been berating for asking that he discipline students she sent to him for disruptive behavior. He overheard me saying that he would be more understanding if he tried to manage a class himself once in a while. For my indiscretion he took away my gifted class and gave me in its place a class composed entirely of students who had been repeatedly sent to him by teachers for being disruptive and unmanageable. It was a class from hell. Really… from hell… Satan’s stepson was the first student he put in that class. I was told I would have to discipline them entirely without help from him. But as tough as it is teaching twenty dysfunctional learners at once with no outside help, it was do-able. In fact, I liked some of the kids in that class. (Hated some too, though, because you can’t always like every kid no matter how crappy they act.) I didn’t manage to teach them much English. They all spoke Skuggboy fluently the whole time. But I did endure. In fact, when that principal was suddenly jobless two-thirds of the way through the year and replaced by a new principal, I got a chance to get some back. She overhead Satan’s stepson doing his comic stand-up routine in response to my specific directions and came in to remind him who was in charge in the classroom and who deserved respect. That reminder lasted for a good fifteen minutes and was a prelude to a parent-principal conference that same afternoon. I saw his evil smile turned upside down for the first time that school year.
Whenever I put a student in the oubliette (asked them to stand outside the classroom door until I could talk to them about their bad behavior) I never left them there more than five minutes. I would quickly give the class the directions they needed to continue on their own, and then I would go out to execute the prisoner. It usually was an explanation of how I wanted them to behave, and then giving them a choice, whether they wanted to go back in and do the right thing, or they wanted to visit the office with a written explanation by me of exactly what they did wrong. Even though nothing would probably happen to them in the office, they rarely chose that option.
So, there is always a way out… but there are many forms of the oubliette, and no one is immune to being sent there.
It was not the kind of ride in the country that I really wanted to take. The skeleton walked with a really random sort of limp-and-jerky motion that pitched me regularly out of my seat in the skull.
“Kackenfurchtbar, can’t you control these stupid bones better than this?” I asked the little moron severed demon-head.
“Derfentwinkle, you expect too much! All I am is a head. I have to control this entire skeleton with phantom muscles made out of what little demon telekinesis I have left in my broken little skull.”
“Kronomarke put you under my control and this pile of loosely connected bones is what you are supposed to be in control of.”
“I am doing the skunky best I flipping can!”
I know, I know… You did hear that right. One of the few actual spells the dorky necromancer taught me was how to turn demon swearwords into euphemisms. My name is actually Derfentwinkle. I am a two-and-a-half-inch tall Sylph, six-slow-one-years old, but all the Fey children tend to age two years for every one year a human child would age. So, I am a girl Sylph on the verge of becoming a Sylvan woman.
After the last jolt, I picked myself up and sat back on the pile of dandelion blossoms that I used as a seat to look out on the cornfield we were trying to navigate through. The left eye socket of the empty human skull had a hole through the back that Kronomarke had carved out to serve as a pilot’s window. Being a severed head, Kack needed to see out of the skeleton through my eyes.
“All I can see is corn,” Kack complained.
“Well, you don’t want me to make you walk out on the gravel road, do you?”
“Kronomarke says that the last apprentice did that and got blown to pieces by a slow-one farm hand with a shottygun. That doesn’t sound like a good thing that we might want to happen to us.”
“Shottygun?”
“It’s like a slow-one magic wand. It throws lots of high-speed pebbles at you at very high speed.”
“Did the apprentice survive that?”
“Why do you think the master had to kidnap you?”
“Slow ones are not used to seeing walking skeletons, are they?”
“No, definitely not.”
“Look, we are coming out of the cornfield. Straight ahead is the slow-one village named Norwall.” I pointed as I said it, but the gesture meant nothing to the stupid severed head.
“Good, good. We have almost reached Cair Tellos. It is built into the willow tree on the north side of town.”
“But that thing straight ahead that we have to cross is the Shiggway Drei.”
“Don’t use the gobbellun name for it. Call it Highway Three in English,” Kack said smugly.
“Right. When we cross the thing the zoomdahs ride on… er, the cars drive on… we will be seen by everyone. Including farm hands with shottyguns.”
“But the reason we are walking in an animated human skeleton is that it scares humans as well as the Fey children. We will scare them out of our path.”
At that moment, the walking skeleton we were trying to steer into the human village stumbled into the fence around the cornfield. The fence was made with two strands of barbed wire along the top.
The skull was pitched forward at such an angle that I was nearly vaulted out of the eyehole. “Pull us back a bit, Kack. We’re getting tangled in the barbed wire.”
“Isn’t it called bobbed wire?”
“Only by the dumbest slow-ones I’ve seen. They have to be the dumbest ones if I know English gooder than they do.”
Kack used his magical mind-strings to pull the puppet skeleton upright again. But as we climbed over the fence, the barbs in the wire pulled at the ghost-flesh and ligaments that held the bones together. A lower leg popped off, and Kack had to make the skeleton hop on one leg bone as it reached down, retrieved the leg, and popped it back on the dismembered knee joint.
Then we stumbled across the pavement, hurrying the last twenty yards because a big, big truck zoomdah came roaring at us from the west.
Lurching into town and spinning over another fence, we found ourselves in a field of soybeans. We stumbled on towards the abandoned school yard where the willow tree stood.
Two human boys, each towering at least four feet in the air, were playing a ball-tossing game on the old ball-tossing field.
“Ah! The zombie apocalypse has started!” cried one slow-one.
“Bobby, that’s just a skeleton, like the one that killed you in the Swords and Sorcerer’s game last night. They are only six-hit-point monsters. We could kill it with our baseball bat.”
I was personally very alarmed. I did not know that slow ones had any control-bat spells. And I had never heard of the species known as a baseball bat.
“No! Let’s go get your brother and his squirrel rifle. Zombies are dangerous!”
“We’re doomed now, aren’t we?” I asked Kack.
“Probably. You should’ve worn that armor the necromancer gave you.”
“Nonsense! I’m a Sylph, not an Elf. Sylphs are meant by the god Pan to be naked. Especially the female ones.” I know they only gave me the armor to protect me, but I wasn’t feeling like wearing anything at the moment that I wasn’t willing to die in.
“Well, turn towards the willow tree. If we must die, let’s go out fighting.”
We turned the skeleton towards the tree with the fairy castle in it. We started to run. We were doomed.
I returned from my trip to Iowa to attend my mother’s funeral to find a Twitter friend has given me a few glowing reviews on books I was not expecting to earn any reviews at all with.
Gerardo Cisneros is a nudist from Twitter who not only reads and enjoys my nudist-related stories, but my other books, including YA novels as well.
Gerardo Cisneros-S.@gcs_nudista Nudist since 1996, founding and former Board Member of the Federación Nudista de México, A.C.; AANR member since 2000. #NormalisingNaturism#NormalizingNaturism
He retweets my Twitter blatherings and promotions and does a lot to help promote my work. The review on Catch a Falling Star was really unexpected. That book, still under contract with I-Universe, is over-priced even in e-book form. Gerardo does a better job of promoting my work than the I-Universe publicists that I had to pay for their work ever did.
Amazingly he even read these two books in their proper sequence, a thing no one else has ever done despite a few of my books having sequels and companion books.
He even read and reviewed the messy first novel I ever completed while still being a teacher in deep South Texas.
Horatio T. Dogg, Super Sleuth is the novella I most recently published.
I write novels because it allows me to deal with the deepest, darkest things in my life. I have trauma as a sexual assault victim from my childhood. I have lost loved ones. I have been a long-time teacher of middle-school-aged kids. Some of whom I grew to love deeply with only the most proper of teacher-child connections possible. I have lost some kids that I loved to violence, accidents, suicide, and one to AIDS. I have been on the dark doorstep of suicidal thoughts more than once myself. I have been broke and broken and bankrupt and mortified. And all of that makes me write novels with humor, imagination, poignance, and love. I have labored hard to turn darkness into light.
And it all becomes worth it when I connect with a reader and give them something of myself that brings a smile to their face. Or a truly heartfelt tear to their eye, because that can be a beautiful, artful thing too.
Gerardo CIsneros, Ted Bun, and other Twitter nudists have done more to fulfill my purpose in life than even my other literary Twitter friends and publishing acquaintances. I am blessed with wonderful readers.
Do I believe in the little people? Of course not. If Tinkerbell depends on me, she is dead meat… or maybe dead fairy dust.
But if they do exist, then they are like the rooster riders in my picture, exploiting the world in the same way the big old slow ones do.
They are not our inferiors or our superiors. They are us. They mirror us and our beliefs, our dreams… our nightmares, and all the things deep within us that could ever possibly go bump in the night.
Dad died on my birthday in 2020. The pandemic kept me from attending his funeral in person.
Mom’s funeral came almost a year later. Today, October 1st, 2021.
Sad as we are, there is finally a sense of closure. We celebrated both of their lives today. It was a beautiful service. And loads of people were there.
It was also a time to mourn. Grief at such a time is proof of love. And the evidence was there of how much both of them were loved… by neighbors… by friends… And by family.
Have you ever gone swimming in a giant bowl of beef stew? No? That’s what I am doing at the moment.
I am in Iowa right now. My laptop computer is in Texas. I am writing this on an old Samsung Android that royally screwed up my WordPress editor in the last software update.
While desperately trying to add pictures to the first attempt at today’s post, I randomly reposted two old posts by accident.
Ànd I still can’t add a picture.
Ah, life! Swimming in stew. Running head-first into the potato chunks of misfortune.
Yes, I am a writer.
I write poems.
I write novels.
I write and draw comics and comic-book-style stories.
And that isn’t me in the first picture of this post. Although it is pretty close.
But today, I am once again merely sitting down to the keyboard to monkey around and tap out something in writing to get the old writing practice over with.
There is no over-arching plan to follow, no theme already in mind… just little old me sitting down and working at it to get ideas on paper.
And soon, unless the school district I applied to rejects my application for no foreseeable reason, I will be doing the work of a substitute teacher. Of course, that’s not me in the fuzzed up background of the picture. That is not even a real classroom. No classroom contains that many left-hand raisers. And if you could find one, no real classroom has that many hand raisers without having asked the question, “Who wants ice cream?” And a mere sub cannot possibly afford to ask that expensive question.
But that isn’t even the kind of work I meant when I lamely wrote that title. Lamely writing a title is work I have to force myself to do. And that is even harder when you write it first while having no earthly idea what you are even going to write about in the essay.
I always told writing classes (the ones who actually never raise either hand about anything) that the best way to do it is to leave writing the title til last so you will already know what you wrote about and what to call it. But forcing yourself to follow through on a title you just pulled out of the air is one way to force yourself to get the necessary work done.
We will be on the road starting tonight and driving till probably some time in the afternoon tomorrow. Six of us in one RV Motorhome. My mother’s funeral starts just after midday on Friday. I am sad. But looking back on a life of 86 years and eleven months, it was definitely a rich, full life worth celebration.
My wife constantly tells me I am wrong… about everything. And I probably am. So that is not right. And if you think that’s my wife in the picture, you would be wrong. She’s much larger than that in real life.
Catch a Falling Star 