I told you I would do it. And then I basically did.
My daughter and I got it up in the air.
The sun, the wind, and the kite all worked together to help me overcome the blues.
We got it up so high that all the kite string was played out.
But then it finally came down.
And still… I was happier.
Filed under battling depression, happiness, Uncategorized
One of the side “benefits” of having diabetes is that it often comes with an extra helping of diabetic depression. I had the blues really bad this week. I am not the only member of my family suffering.
So, what do you do about it?
Or, rather, what does a goofy idiot like me do about it?
Especially on a windy day when the air is saturated with pollen and other lovely things that I am absolutely, toxically allergic to?
Well, for one thing, I used the word toxically in this post because it is a funny-sounding adverb that I love to use even though the spell-checker hates it, no matter how I spell or misspell it.
And I bought a kite.
Yes, it is a cheap Walmart kite that has a picture of Superman on it that looks more like Superboy after taking too much kryptonite-based cough syrup for his own super allergies.
But I used to buy or make paper diamond kites just like this one when I was a boy in Iowa to battle the blues in windy spring weather. One time I got one so high in the sky at my uncle’s east pasture that it was nothing more than a speck in the sky using two spools of string and one borrowed ball of yarn from my mother’s knitting basket. It is a way of battling blue meanies.
And I bought more chocolate-covered peanuts. The chocolate brings you up, and the peanut protein keeps you from crashing your blood sugar. I have weathered more than one Blue Meanie attack with m&m’s peanuts.
And I used the 1957 Pink and White Mercury of Imagination to bring my novel, The Baby Werewolf, home. I wrote the last chapter Monday night in the grip of dark depression, and writing something, and writing it well, makes me a little bit happier.
And I have collected a lot of naked pictures of nudists off Twitter. Who knew that you could find and communicate with such a large number of naked-in-the-sunshine nuts on social media? It is nice to find other nude-minded naturists in a place that I thought only had naked porn until I started blogging on naturist social media. Being naked in mind and body makes me happier than I ever thought it would.
And besides being bare, I also like butterflies and books and baseball and birds, (the Cardinals have started baseball season remember) and the end of winter. “I just remember of few of my favorite things, and then I don’t feel so bad!” Oh, and I like musical movies like The Sound of Music too.
The monsters of deep, dark depression are being defeated as we speak.
Canto 17 – Wraiths and Pinwheels
Trav was the kind of guy who easily gets led by the nose if a pretty woman decides she wants him to do something for her. Dana Cole with her strawberry-blond hair and luminous blue eyes was perfect in the role of that kind of woman. She got Trav from Flintstone land into the clutches of the dangerous and powerful Synthezoid, Sorcerer 3. She got him to reveal the location of the Crown of Stars. She led him by the nose to Sorcerer 3’s hidden starship in a back alley of a slum in the outskirts of Bedrock.
“We will help Sorcerer 3 by giving him the Crown of Stars, and then he will help us get the Hammer of God,” said Dana in Trav’s ear.
“Sounds good,” said Trav, nodding his doody-head stupidly.
“You know,” said the artificial man with a bright electrical spark orbiting his head, “The Crown really belongs to us anyway, since it was stolen from one of our starships at Mingo Downport.”
“Oh, well… ah…ah,” stuttered Trav, “It was actually Tron’s idea. I’d never heard of Ancient artifacts before that.”
“Yes,” hissed the Synthezoid with a red spark in his pupil-less eyes, “we forgive you for that.”
The spaceship, hidden behind piles of trash cans, was a sleek black merchant clipper, built for traveling fast in the outer darkness and well-defended from pirates with an impressive weapons array.
Sorcerer 3 turned to face Rocko Slaghoople and his two goons, Thing and Thog. “You know I don’t have room enough for the three of you in this ship. You told me where to find the Hammer of God, and I need to make sure no one else finds out where it is. I think it’s time I gave you your rightful reward as we discussed.
“Uh… Thank you,” said Rocko stupidly.
“How nice! I rarely get thanked for this kind of service!” He plucked an illegal Skortch Raygun out of his robe and popped the beam three times, once into the head of each of the three cavemen. All three of them disintegrated with looks of ignorant surprise on their faces.
Trav was a great fan of extremely destructive weapons. He recognized the weapon for what it was.
“Ooh! Can I see that Skortch Ray? I’ve always wanted one of those. You do know they are illegal in the Galtorr Imperium?”
“Yes, Trav. I know about Skortch Rays. They come from a time when only the Telleron Frog People of the Planet Telleri could travel faster than light and that at a very slow pace. You may not see it just now, however. We are in a hurry. I promise to show you exactly how it works after we have retrieved the Crown of Stars.”
“Well! Let’s get there then, old Jester!”
The sleek black craft was up and out of the planetary gravity well in a matter of minutes. It effortlessly pulled itself into docking range with the rebuilt space station.
“I’m impressed by what you did with the place in the short time you’ve been here,” said Sorcerer 3.
“Oh, I didn’t do much. I got Frieda to do it for me!”
“Hmmm, tell me more about your invisible friend Frieda.”
“Oh, well, I…”
Suddenly they realized that the newly opened starport was surrounded by Pinwheel Corsairs. Now, a Pinwheel Corsair is a deadly fighting vessel. Each of the spinning pinwheel arms rotating around the cockpit bore a large, ship-to-ship laser. The green beams could bore a hole in the side of its victims large enough to fly into, and boarding parties could deploy in vacuum suits. The only defenses against pinwheel lasers were really thick ablative coatings that evaporated as they absorbed the laser fire, and really large sand-casters that could cloud space with opaque bits to block the rays. Neither defense would work after the first couple of hits.
“So, Trav,” came the familiar voice over the commo system, “this is where you and the Aeros leaped to?”
“Ah! Tron, old Jester! I am so happy to see you here.” Trav put on the view screen before Dana or Sorcerer could stop him. The one-eyed face of Tron and the beautiful face of Maggie the Knife glared down at them. “This is my new playmate, Sorcerer 3, and my girlfriend Dana Cole.”
Tron lifted an eyebrow at the sight of Trav’s new friends. “You again!” He sighed. “Goofy, you are playing with the worst kind of fire.”
“And you’re too near the dynamite, love,” added Maggie.
Three pinwheels opened up on the sleek black space clipper. The boring beams came down from three different angles, blazing bright green light and deadly heat. Then, by some miracle of technology, the skin of the black clipper absorbed it like a bikini babe soaks up sunlight on the beach.
“Hey, cool!” said Trav. “How did you do that? We should be dead by now.”
“Ah, no,” growled Sorcerer 3. “Tron Blastarr is the one who needs to sweat now!”
Forty black ships materialized out of nowhere. Wraith Corsairs! They de-cloaked on cue and took Tron’s pirates by surprise. Three pinwheels were blasted into debris and dust in seconds, before they could react. Tron himself was moving from the moment he first spotted Sorcerer 3. There was no better pilot than Tron Blastarr. He immediately began taking the wraiths to school.
“Why don’t you just die, Tron?” said Sorcerer with a sneer.
“It’s still your turn, Sorcie, old buddy!” Tron growled back.
The battle had only just begun.
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
Ah, me… just when things are going fine, it all turns to worry and badness yet again. Internet scammers won’t leave me alone. Facebook friends of friends of friends spotted me as an easy mark, a liberal who believes in helping others. So they become Facebook friends with me as an impoverished youth in Ethiopia begging me to send money so starving brothers and sisters can eat… but Facebook ends up deleting the account due to repeated fraud. I didn’t give them any money, but I wasted a lot of time listening to lies on messenger.
Yesterday was the last day of Spring Break. Today both the Princess and I woke up feeling ill. She misses another day for too many times. After the flu leveled her in January, she will struggle to pass her sophomore year of high school. I have to struggle with chest pain and worry about going to the doctor and ending up with another huge hospital bill. And of course, illness prevents earning extra bucks from Uber. The chest pain is probably the result of acid reflux that woke me in the night after eating enchiladas too late in the evening yesterday. I hope that is what it is. I can’t afford more than that. And yes, I know acid reflux can be a sign of onset of a heart attack.
So I am resting today and getting very little done. I hope I can still be alive to feel better tomorrow.
Filed under Uncategorized
Being a role-playing-game dungeon master, you have to be familiar with how to absorb and implement the many, many game-playing books that are published to help you keep the adventure humming along towards epic goals. I have to admit to being a book addict. That is true for all books, but particularly game books. I collect them obsessively. I still troll Half Price Books looking for old and out-of-print D&D books and other game books.
Every role-playing game has certain necessary basic books. There is a book full of advice for the game master. It will tell you how to run an adventure and how to plan or map-out your events. There is a guide book for players that advises them on how to create a character, develop that character over time, and how to use the rules to create success. There is also usually some kind of enemies compendium, a monster book, filled with the characters you will have to defeat, slay, or outwit during the course of the adventure. Then there are game supplements that provide detailed settings, often complete with maps. They can give you non-player characters, adventure seeds, extra statistics, and sometimes additional useful tables. Equipment books are a thing as well.
I have a huge collection of Dungeons & Dragons books going back to TSR and continuing through their current publisher, Wizards of the Coast. I have practically every Call of Cthulhu book, a game system to turn H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction into RPG adventures. I have almost all of the Talislanta books, a D&D-like game with no elves, dwarves, or humans in their game. I have practically everything put out by Game Designers’ Workshop for Traveller. I have a few books from the Rifts RPG, a time-and-dimension bending science fiction game. I have practically all of the Star Wars RPG books. I have a lot of Star Trek books. I have some G.U.R.P.S. books (Generic Universal Role Playing System), some d20 RPG books, and many other odd books, including a boxed set of Rocky and Bullwinkle’s RPG, complete with hand puppets.
So, please don’t file paperwork on me with the authorities who put insane people in white jackets with extra long sleeves. I am a collector who suffers from hoarding disorder. And I love books. I just can’t help it.
Filed under collecting, Dungeons and Dragons, humor, monsters, old books, wizards
I am not a politician. I am not a political writer. But I have opinions about the policies that affect my life and livelihood. And my opinions, though often expressed poetically, or even humorously, are based on real troubles never-the-less.
I am disturbed by the problems I see in education. Teachers are not paid what they are worth. Anyone with half a brain can see that, for the level of education required of them, the professionalism expected of them, and the ever-increasing responsibilities foisted upon them, they are not compensated for their work in a manner comparable to people who do the same work in the corporate world. And those comparable workers never have to endure the conditions of a teacher’s job, overloaded with students, forced to stand and deliver to a hostile audience whose behavior you are responsible for controlling six or seven times a day, and then being evaluated by how that audience does on tests that often measure the wrong thing with financial punishments waiting for failure and rarely any rewards waiting for success.
I started teaching in 1981 in South Texas for a salary of $11,000 dollars a year. That was below the poverty line in 1981. If I had a family at that time, we would’ve been eligible for food stamps. The highest I ever earned was $55,000 with a master’s degree, 28 years of experience, and a summer of teaching summer school. Some one who delivers similar forms of information to a receptive audience in a boardroom, only has to deliver maybe once per day, and is paid upwards of twice that highest amount is treated far better.
And when teachers strike in West Virginia for being the lowest paid in the country, or a teacher complains on social media by revealing their actual yearly salary from Arizona, or a teacher is forced to move from Oklahoma to Texas for higher pay even though they were the teacher of the year in the State the year before, there is blow-back. There are stupid people out there that think teachers are overpaid. They think all teachers have to do is talk to kids every day, and they have only 185 work days a year, they have the summer off, and their job is one anyone can do. These stupid people have less than half a brain. What makes a guy who sits in an office all day with his feet up making decisions about stocks and bonds and business deals worth thousands of dollars a minute? Teachers, in my amateur political opinionater’s opinion, are underpaid.
To quote the Beatles’ 1969 animated movie, the Yellow Submarine, “It’s a blue world, Max.” Unfortunately, in the world of education, the Blue Meanies are now in charge.
Dawn of March 14, 2018
Spring Break this year has quietly come and is now more than half over. I have used the time to review and reorient. A number of things have to change. The Daylight Savings Time came in on the first weekend, so I have basically been sleeping late by following the same schedule I was the week before. I will have to somehow adjust everything by an hour before next Monday. I may be retired, but I still have kids in school and responsibilities that require following a schedule.
I re-read my novel Magical Miss Morgan, and I decided that if I had to make the mistake of using a vanity press again, at least I did it with a book worth the investment. My book has made $0.43 since it’s release at the start of 2018.
I have started a lot of long-term projects this week. I started the process of removing and replacing water-damaged carpets in the Princess’s bedroom and the family room. I planted a flower bed in the bare ground where we once had a swimming pool. I repaired the rake to start doing Spring yard-work again, then promptly broke it trying to rake up a winter’s worth of Texas live-oak leaves. And I went back to painting miniatures again. Last night my daughter and I spent time at the family room table, her sketching in her sketch book, and me painting HO-scale phone poles. It was a good time to paint and talk over the important issues, like nightmares, binge-watching shows on Netflix, comic book history, and what we plan to do with our lives when we grow up. I am also working on the final two chapters of The Baby Werewolf this week. That makes nine books at a stage that can be considered to be at least at a “completed-and-almost-ready-to-publish” stage.
Three books are published via an evil publishing house. Two more are self-published, and four are in manuscript form to be published as soon as editing and design is done through Amazon.
So, I still have an awful lot to do before I lie down and die. And Spring Break is supposed to help with catching up, the way it always did when I was a teacher. But this time it has merely added more things to do. Ah, well… I guess it’s what keeps me going.
Filed under autobiography, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Life is making music. We hum, we sing to ourselves, movie music plays in our head as the soundtrack to our daily life. At least, it does if we stop for a moment and dare to listen. We make music in many different ways. Some play guitar. Some are piano players. And some of us are only player pianos. Some of us make music by writing a themed paragraph like this one. Others make an engine sing in the automotive shop. Still others plant gardens and make flowers or tomatoes grow. I chose teaching kids to read and write. The music still swells in my ears four years after retiring.
The 1995 movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus, is about a musician who thinks he is going to write a magnificent classical orchestra opus while teaching music at a public high school to bring in money and allow him time to compose and be with his young wife as they start a new family.
But teaching is not, of course, what he thought it was. He has to learn the hard way that it is not an easy thing to open up the closed little clam shells that are the minds of students and put music in. You have to learn who they are as people first. You have to learn to care about what goes on in their lives, and how the world around them makes them feel… and react to what you have to teach. Mr. Holland has to learn to pull them into music appreciation using rock and roll and music they like to listen to, teaching them to understand the sparkles and beats and elements that make it up and can be found in all music throughout their lives. They can even begin to find those things in classical music, and appreciate why it has taken hold of our attention for centuries.
And teaching is not easy. You have to make sacrifices. Big dreams, such as a magnum opus called “An American Symphony”, have to be put on the shelf until later. You have children, and you find that parenting isn’t easy either. Mr. Holland’s son is deaf and can never actually hear the music that his father writes from the center of his soul. And the issue of the importance of what you have to teach becomes something you have to fight for. Budget cuts and lack of funding cripples teachers in every field, especially if you teach the arts. Principals don’t often appreciate the value of the life lessons you have to give. Being in high school band doesn’t get you a high paying job later.
But in the end, at the climax of the movie, the students all come back to honor Mr. Holland. They provide a public performance of his magnum opus, his life’s work. And the movie ends with a feeling that it was all worth it, because what he built was eternal, and will be there long after the last note of his music is completely forgotten. It is in the lives and loves and memories of his students, and they will pass it on.
But this post isn’t a movie review. This post is about my movie, my music. I was a teacher in the same way Mr. Holland was. I learned the same lessons about being a teacher as he did. I had the same struggles to learn to reach kids. And my Mr. Holland moment wasn’t anywhere near as big and as loud as Mr. Holland’s. His was performed on a stage in front of the whole school and alumni. His won Richard Dreyfus an Academy Award for Best Actor. But his was only fictional.
Mine was real. It happened in a portable building on the Naaman Forest High School campus. The students and the teacher in the classroom next door threw a surprise party for me. They made a lot of food to share, almost all of which I couldn’t eat because of diabetes. And they told me how much they would miss me, and that they would never forget me. And I had promised myself I would never cry about having to retire. But I broke my promise. In fact, I am crying now four years later. But they are not tears of sadness. My masterwork has now reached its last, bitter-sweet notes. The crescendos have all faded. But the music of our lives will still keep playing. And not even death can silence it completely.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, happiness, insight, kids, movie review, teaching
Only One Star?
There are certain books that simply have to exist in order for me to be me. I couldn’t be the person I am without The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) by Thomas Mann, and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. These are all books that have an allegorical element, a trans-formative effect, that shapes how you think and how you live after reading them. Some of these books have not been made into a movie. Some probably still can’t be. Others have not been made into an effective movie. But, then, Disney in 2018 makes a movie version of A Wrinkle in Time that makes me relive the primary experience of the book all over again.
I was disappointed to see the critics being harsh about the movie. I had high hopes before going to see it. Yet, you couldn’t miss the one star rating on the box office rating system of the ticket and show time site I was using. But my daughter and I went to see it yesterday anyway. It was far above my highest expectations.
You see, the novel itself is magical. The essential characters of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which have to be witch-like, super-real incarnations of inter-dimensional beings. It is the view of them with open-minded childlike eyes that makes the complex relationships of this story to reality apparent to anyone who thinks clearly like a child. It is the reason why this book is a young adult novel, written primarily for children, even though the concept of a tesseract is wholly mind-bending in a Stephen Hawking sort of way. It is the wonder with which the director of this movie lensed the dimension-tessering time witches that makes this movie the best version. Not like that failed attempt in 2003. That was almost there, but not quite by half.
Critics don’t like some of the special effects and the color schemes of some scenes. Many things about the final battle with evil are seen by them as inexplicably bizarre. They don’t like the over-use of extreme close-ups on the faces of characters. And they think the performances of some of the child actors are too wooden and unreal to carry off the story.
I wholeheartedly disagree.
This is a story that takes place in the heads of the people involved, including the viewer of the movie. The extreme close-ups pull you into the personal feelings and struggles of the main characters. Particularly Storm Reid as Meg. The story is about her struggle as an adolescent to be at peace with her own flaws and self-image while at the same time being responsible for finding and saving her father, as he has completely lost his way on his quest to “shake hands with the universe”. Meg undergoes a challenge to her self image as she is cruelly bullied by another girl in school. She has to come to terms with loving her super-genius little brother Charles Wallace. And she has to weather the changes that occur when she encounters a potential first love in Calvin. It is a coming of age story that really smart kids can relate to directly from their own personal experience.
This one-star movie with only a 40% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a far better movie than the critics would have you believe. It is doing quite well at the box office. Kids seem to love it. And in my wacky opinion, it is the best movie version of the book to date. I love this movie.
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Filed under art criticism, commentary, magic, movie review, science fiction
Tagged as A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle, movie review