As a boy, drawing girls was always important to me. I didn’t understand them. I couldn’t control them other than to make them dislike me. I couldn’t get away from them… but I could draw them. I could completely control what the picture looked like. And I could make them be whatever I wanted.
Lines and shapes and contours… a smirk on the lips… a twinkle in the eye.
Before you go into panic mode, let me clearly state: No college or high school was actually foolish enough to invite Mickey to give the commencement address to its graduates. So, don’t worry about a generation of our youth actually taking to heart the advice Mickey is about to give and ruining our world for the next twenty years. This is just the insane drivel that Mickey would say if some superintendent, principal, or college dean were actually stupid enough to ask.
This is not Mickey. It is either George Applebee, or it is Red Skelton pretending to be George, depending on how literal or gullible your brain is.
The most impressive commencement speech I remember from my life in education was given in 1974 by my favorite high school English teacher, Mr. Sorum. He was a gifted speaker and told a mean joke whenever a joke was needed to make the point.
He talked for forty-five minutes about “Taking the next bite of the hot dog.”
Of course, he was talking about a metaphor where the hot dog was a life of being a good citizen and living in service to the greater good. High school graduation, in this speech, was the first bite of the hot dog. Some of us were listening to what Mr. Sorum was actually saying. My second bite of the hot dog was to get an English degree from Iowa State University. My third bite was a teaching degree from the University of Iowa. The fourth was choosing a life of service by being a public school English teacher. So, I followed his advice.
Most of my class, though, took that speech to mean life was all about eating hot dogs. Was I wrong? Do I need to rethink my life?
This is not Mickey either. This is Boris Karloff in makeup having a cigarette, or possibly being Frankenstein’s monster.
If I am going to give advice to today’s graduates, the advice I would have to give is, “For God’s sakes, don’t choose to be a public school teacher! Do you have any idea how hard that job is for how little reward (practically none of it in money?)”
So, what advice do I have for actually doing something with your life that helps with the common good?
The most important one; “After you go to the bathroom, flush! Gol dangit!And afterwards, wash your danged hands!“
You wouldn’t believe what kind of bacteriological nightmares are being placed in your hand daily if you have a job where you are supposed to regularly shake hands.
This is Mickey. Or possibly a two-eyed cyclops giving the world the ultimate stink-eye.
Another key recommendation;; “Stop being so gosh-darned ugly!”
Of course, you know that this is not a matter of whether you have a pretty face or you scare rats in dark rooms. This is a matter of behavior. A matter of how many people you hate and treat with scorn and injustice, as well as who you routinely hate, and why you hate them. Hating anyone for any reason is not good for their health and is even worse for yours.
And a final thought about how to improve the world; “Figure out what and who you love in this world. Everyone needs to have something and someone to love and work at sharing your life energy with.” People need other people and they need a purpose, even if they have to forge that purpose out cardboard, imagination, and thin air.
If, by chance, you can already handle all of these things that idiot Mickey is lecturing you about, especially if these things come naturally to you, then totally ignore that first dumb thing Mickey said. Think seriously about becoming a teacher. What you have we desperately need more of. And with your expertise passed on to others, we might just be able to make more of it.
In order to write a novel, once the idea develops staying power, I have a need to make a cover for it. So, today, I am fashioning a cover for He Rose on a Golden Wing.
I started with this image which took me three weeks to put together with pen and colored pencil It is a picture of Valerie Clarke, not wearing any visible clothing and smiling with a Mona Lisa, not-quite-identifiable smile.
I then swiped and altered a couple of Pinterest winter scenes to alter and use as backgrounds. This does not adequately portray the crucial frozen Iowa pond setting from the novel. And red is not the color I need for a matte.
Here is a second attempt. Blue is better.
Here is the same cover with a more readable title.
And here is what it will look like if the Amazon cover-creator will allow it.
One never knows what mysteries can be uncovered inside the bird house. The plot of the story depends on what happens next in the picture.Details make the real story clear.Pictures tell a story even if the story-teller falls asleep in the process.A picture can spin a fairy-tale even if it doesn’t show a plot. Pictures easily establish a setting.Pictures can allude to many, many other things.
I might be going blind. With a year and a half to go to finish paying off my Chapter 13 bankruptcy, I don’t have the money to pay off the eye specialist the ophthalmologist referred me to in order to get my glaucoma treated.
Odin traded one eye to gain wisdom.
What do you suppose I can get for two?
If you look someone in the eye, you can see revealed the light and the darkness that person carries within. You can tell if someone is thoughtful and intelligent or reckless and stupid by gauging it in their eyes.
Look at these eyes above. What do you see?
One has warm, brown eyes, looking directly at me… evaluating, pondering, imagining me.
The other has chilly blue eyes, looking past me… probably seeing only what’s in his head… not actually me.
If I go blind, I will no longer be able to see that, appreciate that, or even draw that anymore.
Of course, the power of that depends more upon the mind doing the looking then the eyes that take in the light and the details.
I have a chance to be okay on that second score, the mind behind the eyes. I have a good one that has had a lot of practice interpreting the world I see. And I have learned more than a few things that I can still teach and pass on to those I leave behind me.
Thirty-one years as a public school teacher means I have already taught a lot of things to a lot of people.
And I now have 19 books published, with two more I may be able to finish and publish before May of 2021 is through.
Those represent things that I can do to continue to teach the world even after my eyes are no longer working… or even if my light has entirely left the world in the near future. Of course, a lot depends on people reading what I wrote. Still, I feel good about that. I got a five-star review on Amazon from my book The Baby Werewolf just today. And the comments prove the reader actually read the book and liked it for its good qualities.
Wisdom, of course, has little value if it is never passed on. How much have you benefitted from the wisdom of Soren Kierkegaard? Do you even know who he is? Notice too, the students of Chiron in the picture, do not seem to be paying any attention at all to the lecture from the scroll of ancient wisdom. Heracles is practicing with his bow. Theseus is grinning to himself about wrestling. And Jason and Achilles are telling each other jokes about guys that have a horse’s butt instead of a man’s. ( Teaching, of course, is always like that.)
But the man with one white eye, one blinded eye, Odin, has earned his wisdom. And he gives it freely as a gift.
So, just think what wonderful gifts I might be able to provide by next Christmas if I lose both eyes. (Of course, I am not suggesting I am secretly Santa Claus… And if you can prove that I am, well… that puts you on the Naughty List.)
The White Spider Disciples gathered around Ged to make a final stand in defense. They set up a circle around him, ready to go down fighting to defend him.
“Explain to me what just happened?” Ged implored the telepaths.
“In the future there will be two Ged Aeros. During a combat, you will be sliced into two pieces. One piece will regenerate as you, the other, without a brain of its own, will regrow into Bres,” explained Hassan.
“He is opposed to you because he didn’t get your memories and experience. He hates you as the lucky half that got all the good things from being you,” added Sara.
“But he knows you won’t be killed here. He is merely hoping to strip you of some of us, especially Hassan. He thinks he has no chance of defeating you in the future if we all survive this battle.” Billy Iowa wiped sweat from his brow as his report took more energy out of him than the other telepaths expended. Apparently clairvoyance is harder than just telepathy.
“But is there a way to save you all?”
“There is if you can find it within yourself, Ged-sensei,” said Billy.
Within himself? What did Ged Aero have within himself? Well, he had the remains of the Grainmaster in his stomach. And, holy crud! He had gained ninja powers by eating a ninja, hadn’t he? So, the Grainmaster’s powers were…
“I’ve got the answer!” Ged morphed into the shape, body, and brain of the deceased Grainmaster. He became an ear of corn with arms and legs and two black, corn-kernel eyes.
“All right, minions! I am the new Grainmaster now. The Grainmaster reborn. I will guide you all and restore this planet to the way it is supposed to be.
He reached out and reanimated the many wilted flower people with what his mind could only perceive now as “Green Power,” and pumped it into the Throckpods as well.
The difference was, now, instead of Bres’s willpower guiding the Throckpods, it was Ged’s empowering mind. The Throckpods were now kindly helping the flower people recover and regrow themselves.
The problem seemed solved. And yet…
“Ged Aero-sensei? How will you control this flower planet and be our White Spider too?” asked Gyro.
“He has a point, Ged-sensei,” said Hassan.
“You are needed here now to control the plant-people of Cornucopea,” added Sara. “They rely on you to gather and redistribute all the photosynthesis and plant energy on the planet.”
“But we need you too,” reminded Junior Aero.
“How is it that part of me becomes Bres?” Ged asked.
“You have a portion of your torso and right leg cut off in battle, during which the headless piece falls into a chasm below you. That part turns into Bres.” Billy nodded as he said it, apparently sure of his future-facts.
“Okay, then, I can do this without creating my own enemy. At least not today.” Ged, in the corncob body of the corn-creature, split himself exactly down the middle. One Ged, the Grainmaster Aero, morphed back into a complete corn-based ruler of the planet. The other half of Ged returned to his White Spider form.
“I realize how dangerous it is to make two of myself. I have no idea what the consequences will be,” said Grainmaster Aero.
“But since I killed and ate the rightful ruler of this planet, I must not only return to my duties as the White Spider of Prophecy, but I must provide a new Grainmaster too,” said Ged the White Spider.
“Cornucopea will now become a member of the New Star League as well as an independent, non-fascist world,” said Grainmaster Aero.
“I hope you are doing the right thing, Sensei,” said Sara Smith.
This is the updated version of that last post. I have written more books. I have published more books. And I have gotten more people to read and like my work since 2018.
Here is a better idea how things currently stand;
And of course, I left out the book I was using to copy the list from, The Wizard in his Keep.
So, now I stand revealed as the published author, hard-working writer, and total fool that I am.
And here’s a link to the book I forgot. Only a dollar if you’re interested.
With the conclusion of Stardusters and Space Lizards, I have now completed a novel nine times. The seven titles above are the ones I am actually proud of having written. I am beginning to feel like a novelist.
I should point out that I don’t claim to be a professional novelist. I have spent a lot more money than I have earned by writing. But I am not a hobbyist. After teaching ended as the career that defined my life, writing became my life’s work. I am trying to become a published novelist. But “published” is becoming an increasingly complex idea.
Catch a Falling Star is published and available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and I-Universe, the actual publisher. I-Universe is an Indie publisher, but connected to Penguin Books, and so owned by one of the big five. Aeroquest is published by Publish America, but I could’ve copied from the encyclopedia and they would’ve bound it into a book form. I am embarrassed to even own up to having written it. Snow Babies was a contest finalist manuscript and supposed to be published by PDMI Publishing LLC, but that publisher folded after the editing was done and so it never found its way into print. Magical Miss Morgan is currently with Page Publishing, a vanity press operation that already collected their fees and don’t seem to be publishing my work. I am looking into the process of suing in case they don’t come through on a process that is already a year overdue. And I am determined to see the rest of my books in print if that is in any way possible. Who knows? Someday somebody may actually read and like my books… by which I mean somebody that I haven’t paid to read it. The last one I paid to read one wrote the review on somebody else’s book by mistake and then corrected the error by writing a fudged book report on the back cover blurb. My luck as an author is reminiscent of Vincent Van Gogh’s luck as a painter.
My life is a book. I am still writing it. And I will never let go the pen while I still have life enough to hold it in my hands..
When I was but a young teacher, unmarried, and using what free time I had to play role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller with students and former students and fatherless boys, I came across a game that really creeped me out. And it was quite popular with the kids who relied on me to fill their Saturday afternoons with adventure. It led me on a journey through the darkness to find a fascination with the gruesome, the macabre, and the monstrous. The Call of Cthulhu game brought me to the doorsteps of Miskatonic University and the perilous portals of the infected fishing village of Innsmouth. It introduced me to the nightmare world of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
“H. P. Lovecraft, June 1934” by Lucius B. Truesdell
Old H.P. is as fascinating a character as any of the people who inhabit his deeply disturbing horror tales. He was a loner and a “nightbird” but with little social contact in the real world. He lived a reclusive life that included a rather unsuccessful “contract” marriage to an older woman and supporting himself mostly by burning through his modest inheritance. As a writer, he got his start by so irritating pulp fiction publishers with his letters-page rants that he was challenged to write something for a contest article, and won a job as a regular contributor to “Weird Tales” pulp magazine. He was so good that he was offered the editorship of the magazine, but true to form, he turned it down. He resembled most the dreamer characters who accessed the Dreamlands in various ways, but let their mortal lives wither as they explored unknown continents in the Dreamlands and the Mountains of the Moon. He created a detailed mythos in his stories about Cthulhu and Deep Ones and the Elder Gods. He died a pauper, well before his stories received the acclaim they have today.
I have to say that I was so enamored of his stories that I had to read them as fast as I could acquire them from bookstores and libraries all over Texas. My favorites include, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Dunwich Horror, and At the Mountains of Madness. But reading these stories lost me hour upon hour of sleep, and developed in me a habit of sleeping with the lights on. In Lovecraft’s fiction, sins of your ancestors hang like thunderheads over your life, and we are punished for original sin. A man’s fate can be determined before he is born, and events hurl him along towards his appointed doom. H.P. makes you feel guilty about being alive, and he shakes you to the core with unease about the greater universe we live in, a cold, unfeeling universe that has no love for mankind, and offers no shelter from the horrors of what really goes on beyond the knowing of mortal men.
Loving the stories of H.P. Lovecraft is about deeper things than just loving a good scare. If you are looking for that in a book, read something by Stephen King. H.P. will twist the corners of your soul, and make you think deep thoughts to keep your head above water in deep pools of insanity. I know some of his books belong in yesterday’s post, but we are not talking about happy craziness today. This is the insanity of catharsis and redemption.
Yesterday I wrote a post about religion that revealed my lack of connection to organized religion (I am still in recovery from fifteen years of trying to be a good Jehovah’s Witness) and my deep connections to God and the Universe and That Which Is Essential. I feel that it is good evidence for the theory that being too smart, too genius-level know-it-all goofy, is only a step away from sitting in the corner of the asylum with a smile and communicating constantly with Unknown Kadath in his lair in the Mountains of Madness (a literary allusion to H.P. Lovecraft’s world). And today I saw a list on Facebook pompously called “100 Books You Should Read If You’re Smart”. I disagree wholeheartedly with many of the books on that list, and I have actually read about 80 per cent of them. So it started me thinking… (never a good thing)… about what books I read that led to my current state of being happily mentally ill and beyond the reach of sanity.
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee is the first book on my list. The Facebook list had no reasons why to argue with, so here are my reasons why. This book is written from the innocent and intelligent perspective of a little girl, Scout Finch. It stars her hero father, Atticus Finch, a small-town southern lawyer who has to defend a black man from false charges of rape of a white woman. This book makes clear what is good in people, like faith and hope and practicality… love of flowers, love of secrets, and the search for meaning in life. It reveals the secrets of a secretive person like Boo Radley. It also makes clear what is bad in people, like racism, lying, mean-spirited manipulations, lust, and vengeance. And it shows how the bad can win the day, yet still lose the war. No intelligent reader who cares about what it means to be human can go without reading this book.
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell is the second book on my list. This is really not one book. It is a complex puzzle-box of very different stories nested one inside the next and twisted together with common themes and intensely heroic and fallible characters. Reading this book tears at the hinges between the self and others. It reveals how our existence ripples and resonates through time and other lives. It will do serious damage to your conviction that you know what’s what and how the world works. It liberates you from the time you live in at the moment.
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini is the third book on the list. This will give you an idea of how fragile people truly are, and how devastating a single moment of selfishness can be in a life among the horrors of political change and human lust and greed. No amount of penance will ever be enough for the main character of this book to make up for what he did to his best and only friend… at least until he realizes that penance is not all there is… and that it is never too late to love.
The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak is number four. This book is about an orphan girl, the daughter of an executed communist, living in Nazi Germany in the early 1940’s. It is a tear-jerker and an extremely hard book to read without learning to love to cry out loud. Leisel Meminger is haunted by Death in the story. In fact, Death loves her enough to be the narrator of the story. It is a book about loving foster parents, finding the perfect boy, and losing him, discovering what it means to face evil and survive… until you no longer can survive… and then what you do after you don’t survive. It is about how accordion music, being Jewish, and living among monsters can lead to a triumph of the spirit.
Of course, being as blissfully crazy as I am, I have more books on this list. But being a bit lazy and already well past 500 words… I have to save the rest for another day.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Man with One White Eye
I might be going blind. With a year and a half to go to finish paying off my Chapter 13 bankruptcy, I don’t have the money to pay off the eye specialist the ophthalmologist referred me to in order to get my glaucoma treated.
Odin traded one eye to gain wisdom.
What do you suppose I can get for two?
If you look someone in the eye, you can see revealed the light and the darkness that person carries within. You can tell if someone is thoughtful and intelligent or reckless and stupid by gauging it in their eyes.
Look at these eyes above. What do you see?
One has warm, brown eyes, looking directly at me… evaluating, pondering, imagining me.
The other has chilly blue eyes, looking past me… probably seeing only what’s in his head… not actually me.
If I go blind, I will no longer be able to see that, appreciate that, or even draw that anymore.
Of course, the power of that depends more upon the mind doing the looking then the eyes that take in the light and the details.
I have a chance to be okay on that second score, the mind behind the eyes. I have a good one that has had a lot of practice interpreting the world I see. And I have learned more than a few things that I can still teach and pass on to those I leave behind me.
Thirty-one years as a public school teacher means I have already taught a lot of things to a lot of people.
And I now have 19 books published, with two more I may be able to finish and publish before May of 2021 is through.
Those represent things that I can do to continue to teach the world even after my eyes are no longer working… or even if my light has entirely left the world in the near future. Of course, a lot depends on people reading what I wrote. Still, I feel good about that. I got a five-star review on Amazon from my book The Baby Werewolf just today. And the comments prove the reader actually read the book and liked it for its good qualities.
Wisdom, of course, has little value if it is never passed on. How much have you benefitted from the wisdom of Soren Kierkegaard? Do you even know who he is? Notice too, the students of Chiron in the picture, do not seem to be paying any attention at all to the lecture from the scroll of ancient wisdom. Heracles is practicing with his bow. Theseus is grinning to himself about wrestling. And Jason and Achilles are telling each other jokes about guys that have a horse’s butt instead of a man’s. ( Teaching, of course, is always like that.)
But the man with one white eye, one blinded eye, Odin, has earned his wisdom. And he gives it freely as a gift.
So, just think what wonderful gifts I might be able to provide by next Christmas if I lose both eyes. (Of course, I am not suggesting I am secretly Santa Claus… And if you can prove that I am, well… that puts you on the Naughty List.)
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Filed under commentary, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney, philosophy, wisdom