Yes, I am still ill, and still making new pictures out of old ones.
This makes consecutive daily post #193.
Leftovers in January
You reach a point after a hard month has lingered long where you have to eat the leftovers and accept what is. I face challenges in the new year at least as large as the challenges of 2017. When faced with such a situation, I need pie.
So here are some of the things left in my January file for use in this blog. The only reason they are here is because I haven’t used them yet and the ideas have not been knitted together for any rational purpose.
This will be a crazy quilt blog post. But crazy quilts keep you just as warm in winter as any other kind.
My newest Facebook friend is the daughter of my wife’s cousin. I have only known her as the sweet-faced little smiler at Filipino-American family gatherings who sometimes gets my attention by squirting me in the ear with a water gun. Her father is from Greece and teaches Math in San Antonio. Her mother, like my wife, is from the Philippines. I won’t tell you her real name, but we used to call her “Sweetie” because of her resemblance to the little pink Tweety-bird character from Tiny Toons Adventures.
I have also spent considerable time writing to and for nudists I have connected with through their various websites and on Twitter. These two lovely works of nude art were shared with me on Twitter. I have collected a number of nude pictures from Twitter nudists that I can’t use on WordPress because I am still entirely too modest to be the unrestrained naked person that some nudists are. I can’t really claim to be a complete nudist myself. But I do have stories to tell about naked people, and I have been working on them diligently.
Of course, I still miss being a teacher. I was a teacher of English for 31 years. I taught reading and writing in English to over 2,000 kids. I also learned how to stare in Klingon. It is a useful skill for keeping students in line and keeping them from becoming a disappointment to the empire. I miss teaching kids, especially talkative kids. Far fewer people talk to me during a day of retirement than used to talk to me in a single class at school. Those interactions were precious.
And several things are just too confusing for my old brain to explain.
But I do like this picture I found on Facebook of Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor, playing with multiple kittens. I don’t know why, but it makes me happier.
Filed under artwork, blog posting, Dr. Who, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, nudes
#192 Being Sick Again
I have an unidentified form of flu. Headaches and bodyaches make writing and thinking hard. So I spent writing time today making the picture above. I had intended to write an essay today about solving the life-puzzles I face as my life and world are drawing to a close.
It is not Covid. And I think my vaccination may be making the flu go easier than it would have without it. But I still need rest and recovery.
Oh, and this post makes 192 daily posts in a row.
Filed under Uncategorized
Irreverence
It is a difficult thing to be an atheist who believes in God. Sometimes it takes an oxymoron to find the Truth. And you often have to go heavily on the “moron” portion of the word.
The thing I find most distressing about faith is the fact that those who have it are absolutely convinced that if you don’t agree with them and whatever book of fairy tales they believe in and interpret for you, then you are not a True Believer and you do not have real Faith.
I remember being told by a Mormon girl in one of my classes that I was her all-time favorite teacher, but she was deeply distressed that, because of my religion (I professed to be a Jehovah’s Witness at the time) I was doomed to burn in Hell forever.
Hey, I was raised in Iowa. I have experienced minus 100 degree Fahrenheit windchill. I am among those who think a nice warm afterlife wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
But I am no longer actually a Jehovah’s Witness. So I guess that helps with the whole Hell-burning thing. The Witnesses are a religion that claims to understand the Bible is full of metaphorical truth, and yet insist that it is literally true. They don’t believe in Hell, which, honestly, is not actually mentioned or explained in the Bible as we have it now. But they do believe your prospects for eternal life on a paradise Earth are totally contingent on knocking on doors and telling other people that they must believe what you believe or experience eternal destruction. I have stopped being an active Witness and knocking on doors because I got old and sick, and all the caring brothers and sisters in the congregation stopped coming around to visit because number one son joined the Marines, and the military is somehow evil hoodoo that cancels out any good you have done in the past. Being a Jehovah’s Witness was really hard work with all the meetings (5 per week), Bible reading (I have read the entire Bible two and a half times), door-knocking, and praying, and you apparently can lose it all for saying, thinking, or doing one wrong thing.
According to the Baptist preachers, Jehovah’s Witness elders, religious zealots, and other opinionated religious people I have known and dealt with in my life, if I do not believe what they believe and agree with them in every detail, then I do not know God and am therefore an atheist. So, okay, I guess I am. If I have to be an atheist to believe whole-heartedly that everyone is entitled to sincerely believe whatever the hell they want to believe, then I’ll wear that label.
On a personal note, my favorite verse of the Bible has always been 1 John 4:8, “He that does not love has not come to know God, because God is love.” That is why I claim to be an atheist who believes in God. I know love. I love all men, women, children, animals, sunrises, artwork, paintings of angels by Bouguereau… everything that is. And I even love you if you exercise your freedom to tell me, “Your ideas are totally wrong, and you are going to burn in Hell, Mickey, you bad guy, you!” Mark Twain always said, “I would choose Heaven for climate, but I would prefer Hell for company.” I am not going to worry about it. I will be in good company. Some things are just bigger than me. And trying to control things like that is nonsense. Sorta like this post.
Surreal Self-Portraits
What you see is basically me.
It is said by somebody who wasn’t basically me that any time an artist draws a picture of someone, or paints a picture of someone, or twizzles a twizzle-snoot of someone… they are basically making a picture of themselves.
So, this Paffooney that I paffooned of a purple mouse in a Don Martin-esque style, is supposed to be Mickey the cartoonist. And Mickey is supposedly, basically me.
And here I am as Muck Man, the superhero. It is me because the super power he has is his horrible, non-adorable, and unrelenting stench. The horrible smell of him renders villains and bad people unconscious or worse… sometimes straight to the hearse. And using his olfactory assaults on evil as a way to make something terrible into something with a -someness of awe, makes him indubitably, indelibly basically me.
And here is a picture of a boy who might’ve been my son if only I had been given enough good sense to fall in love with that first blond young lady who first had thoughts about making babies with me. I didn’t. I’m stupid. And now she has only girls. That makes it a picture too of basically me.
And this little not-me was me all along, and as the boy who sees colors, it’s really not wrong. Synesthetic they call it in a name that’s not long, but is resoundingly deep like the words of a song.
And you might argue this one and say that it’s true… “This one is too pretty to be a picture of you.” But you would be wrong on this basis, you see…
The monster inside me is basically me
And here I am all magic and purple, and I just blew the rhyme again, so this isn’t another danged verse. I drew this picture of Milt Morgan from an old school picture of me.
I often say the character in the stories is based on the Other Mike, the other boy I grew up with who was named Mike in my little home town.
But he thought like me, he acted a lot like me. He even looked like me, at least a little bit. So, if I am portraying him, I am depicting basically me.
And this is the naked me, as a nudist back in childhood in Rowan, Iowa, which I never was… not like this… but still am. Because I am a writer. And writers always write about their naked selves, showing the whole world what saner and more prudish people keep secret. If they were truly smart and wanted to keep their secrets to themselves, artists would never draw or paint or write about or twizzle about themselves. In fact, they would make no art at all.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, Paffooney
Puzzle Pieces in a Blender
Sometimes you just have to write everything down that you’ve been juggling in your head. The pieces of the puzzle won’t fall together in order until long after you place them in front of you. I’m not suggesting that my mind is a literal blender, but, especially when I’m writing in a stream-of-consciousness style, I am really good at making idea milkshakes. There are several large pieces to the puzzle of life that are now on the table in front of me.
One jagged-edged puzzle piece that is going to be hard to solve into the larger picture is climate change. The latest IPCC Report states without a doubt that it is no longer within our power to keep the world temperature from rising beyond the critical 1.5 degrees threshold. The Arctic ice covering will soon be permanently gone, the Gulf Stream is breaking up and diffusing, the oceans are rising and turning to acid… dang!
But it doesn’t do any good to become a Doomer and Gloomer. If we give up we will be much deader than we need to be. There are things that can still be done to mitigate the worst of it. And Elon Musk is not going to save us by taking us all to Mars. And the politicians funded by massive fossil-fuel corporations aren’t going to solve the problems either. We as the majority of human life on Earth need to come together and insist on our right to live. We need to convert our energy use to non-fossil-fuel production schemes. We need to do for ourselves what the rich mother bookers won’t do for us to help us survive.
The recently deposed orange-faced King of America now needs to be held accountable for the things he did illegally while in office. In other countries, a corrupt leader guilty of what he is guilty of would’ve been stood up against a brick wall and shot by now. We certainly can’t let him run for Prexydint in 2024. We won’t survive another four years of the evil-clown kingdom. It will be the death of all of us. Literally.
And my son is ill again. The one who already had Covid once. And may now have the Delta variant in spite of being vaccinated. He is definitely ill with something.
All these things worry me. I have been mentally juggling these things in my head for too long. And now, screws are loose inside there. I need to puzzle it back together, not put the blender on puree.
Filed under Uncategorized
I Really Kinda Like That Kid
As a retired school teacher who retired for health reasons, I have a limit to how much I can teach. As I substitute, mostly for teachers who planned on being out for in-service training or special educational meetings, I can usually only do two jobs a week. That limits the number of kids you have contact with, especially the more gifted and talented sorts of kids. But that doesn’t really matter much. As a regular classroom teacher I always focused more on making connections with kids, especially the challenging ones. My two jobs this week consisted of sixth grade Science all day on Tuesday, and seventh grade AVID classes on Thursday.
Sixth graders are the rabid squirrel monkeys of the middle-school monkey-house. They are the ones who jump around the most, scream at each other the most, and swing from the light fixtures the most. And if you think of it as being only metaphorically true, you don’t really know much about sixth graders and modern education.
But the coach I was subbing for is very good at discipline. He gave them an article on the organ systems of the human body and told them to to use the annotation marks on his close-reading poster. Now, you and I both know that coaches don’t really walk sixth graders through note-taking and reading-comprehension drills regularly. There’s a reason coaches are more likely to teach Science, History, or even Math before taking on English or Language Arts teaching assignments.
So, I did a quick-teach using the two-page article on how to circle key words, underline main idea sentences, and how to do a SWBS (Somebody-Wanted-But-So Charts) analysis to summarize the article. They, of course, did not do that before in science class, or even in English that they could remember. I basically simplified his fifty-minute busy-work assignment into a simple twenty-minute reading assignment that would take the slow readers longer. So, I had to occupy the smart, quick, and evil kids with something else while I helped the stragglers finish. I drew a cartoon rabbit, a cartoon duck, and a Disney-esque Goofy on the white board, challenging them to copy it.
I got to work one-on-one with several slow readers. Xavier, a hyper, mouthy kid who had dyslexia was tickled pink to learn he could pick out and put together key words and main ideas. He was unable to write the summary, but he annotated correctly, possibly for the first time ever. And that was a break-through for him. I subbed with him in other classes where he was one of the awfullest chandelier swingers, so that connection made a huge difference for him for at least fifty minutes of his school life. Malik the Mouth who never does anything but insult the others, and gives somebody else’s name to the sub when he gets in trouble, actually kept his bargain with me from the last time he was baby-sat by me. He stayed in his seat and kept working all period. The only time I had to make him give me his name was at the end of class so I could leave a good-job note for the coach after class ended. I actually like those sorts of kids who other subs routinely blow up at and send out of class. Xavier and Malik (possibly not their actual names) are both a hoot to teach. And they help add to my list of funny classroom anecdotes when they lose control and get in trouble with me. I always try to turn those into teachable moments.
But when the coach came in at the end of his smartest class, saw everybody was done, and saw cartoons on his board, he got mad at them. I had to take the blame for them and explain why they were not simply blowing the assignment off and playing around. Coaches don’t usually understand that classroom learning can be fun.
Thursday I was subbing for AVID classes again. These are special classes where at-risk kids are put in college-prep courses and treated like gifted kids. The program is misused as a warehouse for failing discipline-problem kids by this school district. But the Field Middle School has their act together for this program. The kids were working with college-level education students as tutors, and had to fill out self-examination forms that evaluated how they were doing in working with their tutors.
These are well-trained, smart, and seriously funny kids. Xochitl (an Aztec name pronounced ZOACHIE for a Hispanic girl that I have suprisingly encountered more than once in Texas) was a giftred complainer and procrastinator who was too lazy to lift a pencil, yet did the actual work in a few short minutes when she finally got around to it. She had time to tell the kids at her table, one of the tutors, and me about a time when she knocked the head off of a cucaracha (a cockroach who speaks Spanish) and tried to wait for an entire day for it to finally die so she could pick it up and flush it. The thing is, a cockroach only needs its head to eat with and see with. It is perfectly fine otherwise until it starves to death or gets eaten by a rat. So, when she went to pick it up with salad tongs, it was still alive and wiggly. She pantomimed how she threw the thing across the kitchen in surprise, and when it landed in the sink, she nailed it with the garbage disposal. This girl is a gifted story-teller. She had us all laughing. And her school grades were all A’s and B’s.
I admit it. I love kids like that. They are the best things about teaching. And whether they are Aaargh! Sixth Graders! or Uggh! Seventh graders! (the chimpanzees of the middle-school monkey-house) I actually love them. (But PLEASE don’t tell them that!)
A Memorable Day at School
**Please note** This is a fiction story. It absolutely did not happen in real life. So, no real-life school administrators should be fired over it. And the author is a RETIRED school teacher, so it is not necessary to hire a hit man to protect future students from evil ideas like the ones presented in this story.
Rudy was miserable as he sat in the counselor’s office staring at the note from his teacher. Miss Nactarine. the sympathetic young counselor, sat behind her desk praying silently that the poor boy would be able to overcome his extreme shyness for long enough to explain what the problem really was.
“Well, um… you see, Miss…. I, uh…”
And then, once again, he simply stopped talking. She waited for several minutes.
“Rudy, just take a deep breath and let it all come out. You were sent here for sleeping in class. Tell me why that happened.”
“Okay, Miss. I been having bad dreams.”
“Oh? They’ve been keeping you from sleeping at night? What are the bad dreams about?”
“Um, well… In my dreams, I keep forgetting to put my clothes on before coming to school. I end up having to give a speech in Miss Burkett’s class standing naked in front of everybody. And the girls were laughing.”
“Oh, I see. Hmm. And what do you suppose is causing these dreams?”
He didn’t hesitate even for a moment. “P.E. Class!”
“Why P.E. Class?”
“Well, because… when it’s over, sixth graders have to take a shower. You have to get naked and go into the shower room where everybody can see.”
“But there are only other boys in there.” She knew as soon as she said it why that didn’t matter to Rudy. Even as she said it, she could see this shrinking-violet child trying to disappear in his chair.
“What do you think we should do about this problem?” She was thinking swim-suit for showers or something.
“Can we cancel P.E. Class?”
“Honey, that’s State-mandated curriculum. You can’t pass to the seventh grade without taking that class.”
“Can we cancel showers?”
“Young men in the sixth grade begin to have body odor. You know how that smell would affect learning?”
Rudy was dissolving in front of her.
“You are a vary brave young man. The best way to overcome this problem is to simply make up your mind not to let it affect you. The next time you have to take a shower, just face your fears head on. Take your clothes off and act like you want everybody to see you naked. Once you have endured the worst that can happen, you won’t have that bad dream anymore. You will know that you can do anything by being brave enough to try.”
Miraculously, Rudy seemed to brighten up, as if he had finally come to terms with the problem.
“Thanks, Miss. That helps a lot.”
As she dismissed him back to class, she couldn’t help but congratulate herself on saying the right thing at the right time.
The next morning, as students who walked to school from the neighborhood gathered in front of the school, Rudy showed up striding purposefully towards the front door wearing only a hat.
Most of the girls squealed in response, and then broke out into laughing conversations.
One of the most popular seventh-grade cheerleaders said loudly enough for everyone to hear, “I think he looks really cute like that! I wish all the boys were brave enough to come to school like that.”
“We would if all the girls did too!” hollored some invisible boy from somewhere in the back of the crowd.
Principal Eirohnee quickly brought both naked Rudy and Counselor Nacterine into her office.
Rudy was very comfortably nude as he stood in front of the principal’s desk and explained.
“It really cured my problem,” Rudy said. “From the time I made up my mind to do this I have felt nothing but confidence. If I can come to school naked, I can do anything!”
“Intend to go to all your classes today naked, do you?” asked the Principal.
“Yes, if you let me. If you don’t, it was still worth it.”
Full of pride for her part in Rudy’s transformation, the Counselor said, “I think we should allow it.”
“Well, isn’t that precious. Why don’t we just change the dress code for the day and have everybody go to school today naked?”
“I’d be willing to try that,” Miss Nacterine said.
**Author’s note** You could argue that the Counselor was fired for not understanding what sarcasm was, but, more likely, it was because of how the majority of the students showed up the following day.
The Philosophy of Bad Poetry
I do write poetry. But I must admit, I am not a serious poet. I am a humorist at heart, so I tend to write only goofy non-serious poems like this one;
So here is a poem that rhymes but has too much “but-but-but” in it. A poem about pants should not have too many “buts” in it. One butt per pair, please. So this is an example of spectacularly bad poetry. Why do we need bad poetry? Because it’s funny. And it serves as a contrast to the best that poetry has to offer.
As a teacher I remember requiring students to memorize and recite Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”. Now this sort of assignment is a rich source of humorous stories for another day. Kids struggle to memorize things. Kids hate to get up in front of the class and speak with everybody looking at them. You get a sort of ant-under-a- magnifying-glass-in-the-sun sort of effect. But in order to truly get the assignment right and get the A+, you have to make that poem your own. You have to live it, understand it, and when you reach that fork in the road in your own personal yellow wood, you have to understand what Frost was saying in that moment. That is the life experience poetry has a responsibility to give you.
Hopefully I gave that experience to at least a few of my students.
Bad poetry makes you more willing to twirl your fingers of understanding in the fine strands of good poetry’s hair. (Please excuse that horrible metaphor. I do write bad poetry, after all.)
But all poetry is the same thing. Poetry is “the shortest, clearest, best way to see and touch the honest bones of the universe through the use of words.” And I know that definition is really bad. But it wasn’t written on this planet. (Danged old Space Goons!) Still, knowing that poetry comes from such a fundamental place in your heart, you realize that even bad poetry has value. So, I will continue writing seriously bad poetry in the funniest way possible. And all of you real poets who happen to read this, take heart, I am making your poetry look better by comparison.
Filed under humor, insight, irony, philosophy, poem, poetry, Uncategorized
Found Poetry
Found poetry begins with three found things
Picked up at random
Like three pictures from my internet gallery
Plagiarized from somebody’s fandom
And then you have to sit and have a thought
About how it fits together
To make a stupid poem you’ve wrought
That’s not about the weather
You must pretend the very best you can
There’s sense in what you’ve found
And it fits together as if you had a plan
That was always quite profound.
———————————————————————————————–wow!-a-weird-divider————————-
Writing a found poem
Okay, this is the essay part. That first part is a terrible poem written by me to illustrate how to make your own found poem. Of course, you should know that I was not a natural-born poet. I am among the lower percentages of America’s worst-possible poets. Right there somewhere between the poetry books of Farley Bumbletongue and the Collected Musings of Hans Poopferbrains of Snarkytown, Wisconsin.
But I take great pride in my abilities as a terrible poet. You see, what I mainly was, truly was, was an English teacher of middle school and high school kids. And found poems were an activity in the classroom intended to teach writing skills, creativity, and an appreciation of what a poem actually is.
I needed a large usable picture file cut out of Christmas catalogs, Walmart advertisements, newspapers, magazines (“What are those?” is the most common comment you would get out of today’s classrooms,) grocery-store bargain flyers, outdated calendars, and any other non-pornographic picture sources available.
I would hand out three random images pulled out of the picture file without looking at them to each student (or small groups of students) and then require them to create a poem of at least twelve lines with an optional rhyme scheme and rhythm.
I would have to remind them not to eat the pictures, even if they were pictures of food. And with middle school students I would have to have extra pictures for the next class to replace the ones they ate anyway.
I would tell them there was a time-limit, specified to be much shorter than the actual time I planned to give them, and then let them create horrible poetry. Near Vogon quality in its horribleness.
When all of this was done, we would have a good long laugh by sharing the pictures and poems, and find out who the truly wacky and perverted poets were.
Now, don’t go telling parents that we teachers are wasting their children’s precious learning time this way, but it is not I lesson I created. Simply a lesson I used at least once every year.
But the real question on my mind is, “Given three random pictures, what kind of poem would you write?” Feel free to share.
Catch a Falling Star 