I have really done it now. I have published my 19th book. This is the second book-length compilation of essays from this blog. This one is a little less bizarre than Laughing Blue, but it is also a little more autobiographical, which is probably worse.
I successfully got away with publishing a lot of photos in color in the e-book which made it cost $2.99. But the extra two dollars should be worth it. Especially because it has a lot of rememberries in it, and berries are fruit. Therefore, it should be viewed as a healthy part of your reading diet.
These days my head works overtime, filling itself up with memories, fears, complicated notions, and problems that need to be solved.
Today I need to uncomplicate the clutter in the entryway to the thinking room (what you might call a study) in the quaint little labyrinth of my stupidly dense and moronic, overworked little mind.
Today I am simply going to re-compose my 1965 letter to Santa to ask for things I should’ve wanted, rather than the junk I asked for.
Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots! Yes! Those would help me relieve that 9-year-old’s stress I earned by a foolish insistance on spelling words the way they sounded instead of the way that would get it right on Miss Mennenga’s spelling tests.
Punching things more might’ve made it easier to cope with a 9-year-old life.
But there are things in the 1965 Monkey Ward’s Christmas Catalog I saw, and maybe would’ve played with more than the G.I. Joe junk I was obsessed with, and would’ve been better for me in the long run. The rubber G.I. Joe scuba suit I got that Christmas melted a couple of years later in the box I was keeping it in when I left it on the back window ledge of the 1961 Ford Fairlane. I could’ve tried…
Gumby, dammit!
He wouldn’t have melted. He would’ve simply galvanized into a brick-hard substance that would never bend again, the way my little sister’s red Gumby did a couple of years later. Maybe a brick hard green Gumby couldn’t have been played with either. But it would’ve been useful for throwing at sisters when I was mad.
And I could’ve gotten my own Barbie and Ken.
Then I wouldn’t have had to borrow my sister’s dolls to look at them naked and marvel at how much they didn’t look like real people naked. Or practice making hangmen’s nooses from bright-colored yarn, sentence them to hang by the neck from the bottom rails of the upper bunk, and blame it all on my little brother. (Really he should get all the credit anyway, since he and my littlest sister actually got caught doing it the first time by my other sister, and I just stole the whole idea from him.)
I definitely could’ve learned more about the world of 3-D cartoon characters if I’d gotten one of these. In fact, we, the four of us kids, did get one two Christmases later. I know a heckuva lot about 3-D Woody Woodpecker, looking at those six discs a thousand times each.
And building toys like these kept us fascinated for hours.
And we argued for hours more whenever Mickey built a helicopter or a submarine or a windmill that he didn’t want the other three to take apart again to build something else.
This thing was great at teaching patience and focus. You wouldn’t believe how easily the pen would slip, or the little gear teeth wouldn’t mesh properly. The few bad words I actually knew in 1967 got practiced too often for these very reasons. It would be two more years in the future that we got one of these to share too.
In 1965, Dear Santa, you should’ve thought more about how to train an evil little mind than how to make a little G.I. Joe-obsessed boy happy.
Although, you sure did get it right in 1966 with that Mercury Capsule for G.I. Joe.
We descendants of Germans all understand something you all probably don’t know, and might have a hard time actually accepting. Germans and German Americans like to simply call things what they are… but we do it with remarkably silly words so you don’t take things as seriously as you probably should.
Seriously… Pumpernickel bread looks an awful lot like a cow pie. Don’t know what a cow pie is? That’s because you don’t speak Iowegian. Remember that post? A cow eats grass, digests it for a while, bakes it in the secret methane chambers embedded secretly within every living cow, and then the old garbage shoot plops out the cow pie. Flies love to eat it. The grass grows fiercely after absorbing what the flies and maggots leave behind. Yeah, that.
The bread originated in Germany where, as I have so graciously pointed out to you, they call things simply what it is. Pumpern in German means to break wind. Nickel is a variant of Nicholas or Nick, which is the name der Teufel, err…the Devil often goes by. So the bread is called, in its simplest translation, “Devil’s fart bread”. Isn’t that rich? And it tastes good too.
But what’s the point of praising pumpernickel? Well, it brings to mind in Mickey’s mangled mish-mash of a mind an old Daffy Duck cartoon.
Yes, the tale of the Scarlet Pumpernickel has been playing out in Monkey Town where the Great Orange Buffoon in charge of it all is busy making Nixon noises.
“Yes, my lord, there is an investigation into the Russian connection between your henchmen and Vladimir Putin,” said Director Comey.
“Hmmm… Fake News! Very Sad!” moaned the Buffoon. “Comey, I appreciate you smearing Clinton and all you did to help the greatest most historic election ever… but you’re fired!”
“Aha!” says Comey, revealing himself to be the infamous hero, the Scarlet Pumpernickel “…now I have you, my lord! But, wait! Fired, you say? Um, you do have the authority to fire me, don’t you.”
“Now, clear out your desk, loser!”
“Ah, but this action makes you look guilty, my lord. Perhaps the sting of my sword of justice will prick you in the behind yet!”
“Sessions! Defeat this loser for me! Very sad, sick man!”
“Me thinks you have not heard the last of the Scarlet Pumpernickel!” cried Comey as he leaped out the tower window into the chasm with a river at the bottom far below.
What happens in the next episode of the saga of the hero named after devil fart bread? Only time will tell.
Interesting way to introduce my latest Monkey President cartoon attempt to depict Trump… no? You do realize he’s a German American too?
You have to use them while they’re fresh because they quickly start to smell bad, and they then can make you ill.
He never should’ve won in the first place. He lost the popular vote. FBI Director Comey and the Russians gave him boosts over the finish line that he didn’t deserve. And after he got away with stealing the election, he went on a crime spree that went completely unchallenged by his own party. In fact, as the party totally in power, they supported some of the very worst offenses he committed against the average people of the United States. He took away environmental regulations to hurry along the killing of our atmosphere, and eventually the biosphere of the whole planet. He struck damage into renewable energy initiatives, pulled out of the Climate Accords, and championed polluting coal over anything sensible in the name of bringing back coal industry jobs, which he promptly failed to bring back.
He undercut farmers by taking away Chinese markets with tariffs, thereby contributing to hunger in China, bankruptcy for family farms, and a boom in China sales by Brazilian farmers.
He then screwed over DACA recipients who are basically raised to be Americans, kidnapped children from asylum seekers at the Southern border, and spewed hate-and-fear rhetoric all over the American media mindset.
He has subverted the basic values of not only the Republican Party, but the whole of the United States as well.
So, we used our voting power. And a record number of votes were cast to bring him his karmic reward.
But my question now is simple. Are we really gonna let him run again in 2024? He committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Shouldn’t we lock him up rather then let him continue to steal money from Republican donors, throw anti-election tantrums, and produce the touring company of the Rudy Giuliani Clown Show?
Pat Bagley / Salt Lake Tribune
Any other worker fired for total incompetence would immediately be shown the door and the replacement would immediately get the chance to start fixing the damage his incompetence caused.
Can’t we do that now? Why does this cat get to poop in the government sandbox for another month and a half? Do we really have a shortage of turds in Washington? Flush him already!!! If he were anything but a Republican, he would’ve been down the toilet hole after his first year.
They say you don’t get the government you vote for; you get the government you deserve. But what did I ever do wrong to deserve this?
I was amazed when I awoke this morning, not stuffed-up and apparently dying. I really expected this last bout of flu to be the end of me. I figured I had only lasted this long by sheer luck and the grace of whatever gods really do flit about us and don’t ignore us completely. I figured Covid would claim me by the end of this week. After all, I have COPD, genetic heart issues, high blood pressure, and diabetes. But if it was Covid 19, which most likely it was not, it turned out to be one of the milder flus I have endured in the last decade. Yesterday, the fifth day, was the worst day. And, like has happened more than fifteen times since 2008, the following day sees me feeling almost completely better. I had H1N1 twice according to the flu tests I took. Once for each f the strains of that particular epidemic. I have had severe bronchitis three times, and spent a week in the hospital with pneumonia once. The biggest surprise was that I hadn’t succumbed to this whole awful virus business before now. Every extra day I am given is a new surprise.
I had some other surprises. I got the results back from a book review I requested through the Pubby book-review cooperative I am working with. The Pubby author’s desktop had told me the review for Magical Miss Morgan was going to be a four-star review. The actual review, once Amazon approved it, was actually only a three-star review. The reviewer was apparently a former teacher who took issue with some of Miss Morgan’s classroom decisions and also objected to some name-calling in the book. Name-calling? The only name-calling I recall comes from students making jokes about unpleasant teachers’ names, and some fairy racial slurs used against other fairies. The fire-wisps are known for a lack of intelligence since their bodies are literally made of magical fire, leading inescapably to the whole race being hot-headed.
I am not upset about the poor rating. I expect some people not to like my books for any number of reasons. And it is refreshing to see a reviewer giving a specific criticism and proving she actually read the book. That is much better than the reviewer of Recipes for Gingerbread Children, a book about a Holocaust survivor who makes her peace with the world by telling fairy tales to children, who gave it five stars for having “very good recipes for gingerbread cookies.” That faker not only didn’t read the book, he didn’t even look at the basic information in the review request.
It would’ve been nice, though, if Pubby had been more accurate about reporting the number of stars. That’s not the kind of surprise I really enjoy, even if I did learn from it.
The third surprise I had today was how easy it was to reclaim my Hulu account. I have been paying for it right along, but I lost access to it when the last TV in the house burned out its screen. I couldn’t transfer it to my laptop because I was sharing the account with my eldest son who doesn’t live in our house anymore. I could not change the password because he was still using it, and the account would not recognize my laptop without changing the old password. Finally, a month after my son got his own account, I was able to reach Hulu programming once again by resetting the password. I was really surprised that a months-long problem was dispatched in less than ten minutes.
Surprises, both good and bad, actually shape our lives. The performers I used as illustrations all entertained me by surprising me. I learned things from them my whole life… and I am still learning from them. In Chaplin’s case, I even learned from the surprise of who he turned out to really be. Not such a mice man. I was also surprised by how good of a person Fred Rogers turned out to actually be. And it is surprising how much Red Skelton’s difficult life and heart-felt comedy actually helped make me be the kind of man I came to be, whether you think that is good or bad in itself.
And that is all I have to say abut that. Surprise!
Today I am totally bloogelbombardoed. Seriously, there is not a better word for how I feel at the moment. I have a viral infection with no fever. Just body aches, a bad case of the blahs, and sinuses that won’t let me rest, or even stop leaking out the nose for more than fifteen seconds at a time. My trash is full of used Kleenex and toilet tissue that took over when the Kleenex box ran out.
I have to seriously worrywarticize the whole problem because my wife and daughter have returned from the Florida Disney World Reunion of the Filipino Sisters during the Thanksgiving Week, which they technically should have canceled due to Covid Crisisism.
I am staying warm, trying unsuccessfully to rest in bed, and drinking lots and lots of Mickenlooney Go-Juice (the Mickian words for Diet Dr. Pepper.) Fortified and warmalized by frequent cups of sugar-free hot chocolate. Carefully monitoring how close or how far I am away from deathualization.
But here’s why it shouldn’t actually be Covid 19. No fever. Good sense of smell. No vomiting. No breathing problems that weren’t there already before I got sick.
Still, my plan is to get tested if I am still sick after Friday (the seventh day after exposure and the fifth day of feeling bloogelbombardoed.) My wife will be mad at me for it, because it will put her on homebound quarantine again from school and her classroom. But, I figure that is a fair enough thing, because if I am Convidinated, either she or my daughter, the Princess, brought it home to me. Just because you may be asymptomatic, that doesn’t make you virus free.
If it is the pandemic virus, then so far my body is handling it rather well, underlying conditions and all. I know that could change quickly, and this post may be my swansong singy-thingy, my goobye-seeyalater to the world. But I hope not.
Did you learn any Mickian words from this blog-posty-thingy? If you did, I hope you never try to use them. It’s not that I hold a copyright or anything, but these words are generally frowned upon by the society we live in. And I have it on good authority that factory warranties of these words have all expired, so they might break down, blow up, or just generally make English teachers and editors mad. Oh, and Kleenex is not emboldicized because it is NOT a Mickian word. Some stupifyingly stupid corporation is guilty of that wildly Mickianesque weird spelling. But you knew that already, didn’t you?
“What do we know about the unknown ship?” Ged asked Naylund.
“Very little. Scanners don’t get normal life-form readings. We can’t identify the craft by its design or visible features. It is a mystery apparently come from deep space in the unknown.”
“Monsters from outer space?” asked Sara with an ironic smile.
“Possibly. You and Junior should go with Naylund and I to look it over out there.” Ged put a hand on her shoulder. “Who else among the students would prove useful?”
“Billy Iowa’s clairvoyance can help us anticipate dangers and see beyond walls. And he probably won’t go without Gyro. But Gyro’s molecular transmutations could come in handy too maybe.”
“You have become quite an insightful leader,” said Naylund. “You make me proud.”
“Thank you, Daddy. But part of what we have been learning is how to rely on multiple leaders who can shift responsibilities as needed on the spur of the moment.”
“Go find Junior, Billy, and Gyro and give them the orders,” Ged commanded Sara.
“Yes, Sensei. By your command.” She scampered off towards the Akito House.
“Do you know where we can get workable vacuum suits?” Ged asked Naylund.
“Yes. There a little bit steam punk and a little bit old-fashioned, but they are serviceable Tech Level Nine. They are actually from my old starship that brought me here over a century ago.”
“Okay… Then I imagined they are thoroughly broken in.”
“Yes, but hopefully not too broken. Space travel has not been a common thing on this planet for over a thousand years.”
“Something we probably should’ve thought of when we borrowed the Ancient Hammer to build our space port.”
“You are probably right.”
The walking and talking ended in front of the Super Rooster on the old-fashioned launch gantry that Junior, Gyro, and Taffy King had created for it. It was a strange-looking craft that made Ged long for even the Megadeath to look at it. It had none of the elegance of the Leaping Shadowcat.
Gyro met them in front of the launch gantry. He was also all smiles, but with none of the irony Ged had detected in Sara’s grin.
“I built this thing, Sensei,” Gyro said proudly.
“I know you did. But you built it for Shen-Ming-sama, did you not?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps I better ask him to borrow it.”
“You know it is the only other spaceship besides the Red Dragon that we have available, and that Ancient thing could be way too dangerous to use for this mission,” reminded Naylund.
“You go on ahead. I need to ask…”
Ged turned back towards the Palace of a Thousand Years and focused his signal on Shen’s Tower to avoid the message being intercepted.
“What is it, my son?” Shen Ming asked when Ged keyed the commo-dot on his. neck.
“I need to borrow the car keys, Dad.”
“The keys to the Rooster, you mean. By all means. But drink no gargleblasters and wreck it not. Until the new ones are designed and built, it is the only car we really have.”
“I promise. Not a scratch or a dent.”
“Go with my blessing, then.”
Ged turned back to where Gyro was watching for his return.
You know what a contradiction is, don’t you? It is whatever comes out of your wife’s mouth whenever you make a statement asserting that whatever you said is factually true. She will promptly and always explain to you how wrong you are… loudly… and in great detail. No matter if you happen to be provably right or not.
What’s that, you say? I’m wrong about that too? Of course, I am, dear. I only deserve the catfood cookies.
The fact is, if you raise your hand and give the teacher the correct answer often enough, you get a certain reputation amongst your classmates. Instead of continuing to call you, “dumbhead,” or “stupidhead,” or the simplified form of “caca-poo-poo-head” like they endearingly call everybody else, they begin calling you pejoratives like “Einstein,” or “Brainiac,” or “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” And they begin pointing out in detail everything that is wrong about you. How you dress… how you talk… especially how you laugh. You have become the enemy. You must be contradicted.
“You are wrong, Mickey!”
“So, I get to be Dumbhead again?”
“No. you are still “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” But you are wrong. We all think so, so that must be right.”
The truth is, Life itself is a contradiction. Considering the violence and hostility of the physical universe towards life, it is a miracle that anything at all is alive in the universe. The chaos of everything guarantees that if you are born into the miracle of life, then at some point, caused by a nearly infinite variety of possible aids to chaos, you will die. Order is whittled away into chaos. Civilizations fall eventually. Things die all the time.
But if all order must, by physical laws of the universe, be broken down into chaos, then, how is it that we have any order at all in the first place? Where does order come from? I’d give you a possible answer. But I would just be contradicted by the majority
Except for fundamentalist Christians who would say, “Let me think for a moment about why you are still wrong… and then I’ll tell you what I think the Bible says about why you are actually still wrong.”
One thing about being “only book-smart, but without common sense” that makes being contradicted all the time worth it, is that the more challenged the answers you come up with are, the more deeply you dig into them, and the more of a real-world understanding of why I am wrong about everything begins to make a bit more sense. Or not. Because I’m probably wrong in your estimation anyway.
Yes, today is another in a long, tepid series of Art-Day posts, but it is also about metacognitive thinking. Specifically thinking about thinking using pictures to think with. (Maybe that title should say, “Free-Thought Thinker” rather than, “Thought-Free.”)
To start with, what does a person actually see when they close their eyes? My brain does not color everything on the inside of my eyelids black. Even in the dark of night with no nightlight so that nothing shines through my eyelids, my brain interprets the dark as shapes, patterns, and colors. Hence the inspiration for this picture.
But my brain is never satisfied with raw shapes, colors, and patterns. It has to interpret ideas into them. The mass of yellow and black resolves into a butterfly, or a sunflower, or an etude by J.S. Bach. The pink mass becomes a blond girl playing the music in my head…. a girl from piano-lesson days in the early 70’s. But naked. The way I always thought about her while sitting and waiting for my piano lesson and listening to hers. How else does a boy think about a pretty girl when he is fourteen?
And as the items in the picture take shape, they do also begin to tell a story. Who is this Dr. Seabreez? Is he a shaman of the Republic of Lakotah People? Is he a white man? Seabreez is not a Native American name. The naked boy by the tent flap has a crutch, and there is a mouse silhouetted nearby. Does that make him a medical doctor? A veterinarian? A professor of Native-American Studies? The mind begins to piece together a script.
But here we see that Dr. Seabreez has set up a new practice in Japan. Again the boy near the door has a crutch and there is a silhouetted mouse near him. But now the other boy has horns on his forehead. Why horns? And pointed ears? Is he a Doctor of Magic and Wizardry? Demonology perhaps? And what is an anthropomorphized panda doing in Japan? That’s clearly a Japanese castle in the distance. The collar Kanji is definitely Japanese in character.
And now there are horns again. Three of them by my count. And another naked character. But a Grecian background. The mind is here making connections between the pictures, noticing patterns. Appreciating colors. And turning every detail over in the mind’s eye, evaluating and analyzing.
Art, especially on Saturdays, totally engages the mind. That is one of the reasons we keep art around to look at again and again. It is the purpose of art to make us see something. And not just once, superfluously. We must see it in depth, looking beyond the surface.
No man is an island. John Donne the English poet stated that. And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it. We need other people. I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.
When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan. My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island. This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!” By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan. But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island. And no man is an island. Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.
You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be. It was who I was as a teacher. Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan. Being a teacher gave me an identity. And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger. Not a bad thing to be. And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.
But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here. Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now? We never really find the answer. Answers change over time. And so do I.
Catch a Falling Star 
Contradictions
You know what a contradiction is, don’t you? It is whatever comes out of your wife’s mouth whenever you make a statement asserting that whatever you said is factually true. She will promptly and always explain to you how wrong you are… loudly… and in great detail. No matter if you happen to be provably right or not.
What’s that, you say? I’m wrong about that too? Of course, I am, dear. I only deserve the catfood cookies.
The fact is, if you raise your hand and give the teacher the correct answer often enough, you get a certain reputation amongst your classmates. Instead of continuing to call you, “dumbhead,” or “stupidhead,” or the simplified form of “caca-poo-poo-head” like they endearingly call everybody else, they begin calling you pejoratives like “Einstein,” or “Brainiac,” or “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” And they begin pointing out in detail everything that is wrong about you. How you dress… how you talk… especially how you laugh. You have become the enemy. You must be contradicted.
“You are wrong, Mickey!”
“So, I get to be Dumbhead again?”
“No. you are still “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” But you are wrong. We all think so, so that must be right.”
The truth is, Life itself is a contradiction. Considering the violence and hostility of the physical universe towards life, it is a miracle that anything at all is alive in the universe. The chaos of everything guarantees that if you are born into the miracle of life, then at some point, caused by a nearly infinite variety of possible aids to chaos, you will die. Order is whittled away into chaos. Civilizations fall eventually. Things die all the time.
But if all order must, by physical laws of the universe, be broken down into chaos, then, how is it that we have any order at all in the first place? Where does order come from? I’d give you a possible answer. But I would just be contradicted by the majority
Except for fundamentalist Christians who would say, “Let me think for a moment about why you are still wrong… and then I’ll tell you what I think the Bible says about why you are actually still wrong.”
One thing about being “only book-smart, but without common sense” that makes being contradicted all the time worth it, is that the more challenged the answers you come up with are, the more deeply you dig into them, and the more of a real-world understanding of why I am wrong about everything begins to make a bit more sense. Or not. Because I’m probably wrong in your estimation anyway.
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