Christmas Magic
Before now I have never talked about my childhood friend Jimmy Crafton. It took a long long time to build up enough courage. Writing this on Christmas Eve makes it easier.
It is not a terrible story. I can’t think of anybody that fits the idea of a “hero” any more than Jim. I remember him as a pale-faced little boy with a thousand Watt smile full of tiny white teeth. He was two years younger than me. He was in my sister’s class at Rowan Elementary. He was outgoing and funny. And he was a hemophiliac. He had the rare condition of having too little of the essential blood-clotting proteins in the blood that the vast majority of us get to take for granted. Every day for him was a risk of having an ordinary injury like a bruise or scrape cause him to bleed to death. He missed great gobs of school days with injuries and crippling pain and the need to go to the emergency room in Mason City for life-saving blood transfusions. We were told when I was eight that he probably wouldn’t last past his tenth birthday. The teachers all gave us strict rules for playing with him on the playground… what not to do, what to immediately report, and what not to allow him to do. I remember one time he decided to wrestle both Bobby and me at the same time. He had a deep and passionate love for the sport of wrestling, big in the high schools of Iowa. He aggressively took us both down and pinned us both with minimum effort. And you should stop laughing at how wimpy that makes me sound. Remember, I had to play the game by different rules than he did. Bob and I both had to live with the consequences if bad things were to happen.
The miracle of Jim Crafton was that he did not die in childhood due to his genetic medical difficulty. In fact, he grew up, went to college, and became a doctor all because of the gratitude he had towards the doctors and medical professionals who helped him conquer hemophilia in childhood. He got married. And he even had a son. Those were things he accomplished in life that no one believed were possible back in the 1960’s.
But now we get to the part that I can’t write without typing through tears. A hemophiliac relies on regular transfusions of blood to supply the clotting factors that he cannot live without. And there was no effective screening technique for HIV in blood supplies before 1992. Further problems arose from the blood bank practice of mixing blood donations together by blood type. That meant that even clean blood donations were likely to become tainted through mixing. Far too many of the hemophiliacs in America were given infected blood and became AIDS sufferers at a time when a diagnosis of HIV was basically a death sentence. And worse, AIDS sufferers were often isolated and treated like lepers for fear of contracting the disease from ordinary contact with them. You might remember the sad case of Ricky Ray in Florida. He and his two brothers were all hemophiliacs. They all were infected. They were expelled from school. They even had to live in hiding after loving members of their community burned their house down. We were horrible to people who were dying of AIDS.
But I can’t leave this essay on such a sad note. My friend Jimmy was a hero, a doctor, and a dad. He lived a life worth living and worth knowing about. His life was a gift to all of us lesser beings. And this is the time of year for remembering those we have loved and lost. Jim died of AIDS decades ago. But he still lives in my heart and my memory. And if you have read this little story, he lives in you now too. That is a sort of magic, isn’t it? I only wish I had more powerful magic to give.
Filed under artwork, compassion, heroes, Paffooney, pen and ink, strange and wonderful ideas about life
World Building
Part of being both an RPG gamer and a science fiction writer is the need to put together entire worlds and cultures that don’t exist anywhere in the universe outside of my own imagination. It is a big and complicated process. I used to create entire illustrated information pages to capture the world in simple form for future use.
If you can read the small print, you will find that much of the detail about Planet Dionysus and it’s associated planets is very complex. The planet was a home base for the Evil Dr. Nathir, a geneticist who experimented on people and animals to give them chloroplasts and other plant-like organs to remove the need to eat food and add the ability to regrow themselves from cuttings and regrow any missing parts. His evil plant people with a taste for violence and mindless destruction permeated the entire jungle society.
Many of the people are of Arabic Earth descent and have deep ties to the use of psionic mind skills. Shtaraqatl, seen above as a young adult and as a boy, is a good example of that.
Dionysus was also one of the planets involved in the invasion of a negative alternate dimension. The portal opened to invade the other dimension was a two-way doorway that yielded more invaders from the other side than the evil Nathirites sent to take over and exploit the Scion Dimension.
Another important pair of planets were the worlds of Mantua, in the Classical Worlds, and Jargoon, home of the Perfect Knights.
You can see that I not only established the worlds and their cultures, but I had to lay out the entire planetary solar system, including moons, gas giants, orbiting out stations, and anything else going around the system’s sun (or suns).
One of the results of the work I did planning out all these game worlds in the 1980’s is the ease with which I enabled myself to write science fiction stories later in life. I had notebooks full of entire planets, their people, their governments, and a cornucopia of worked-out details to use as settings. I hope to live long enough to make use of them all.
Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, imagination, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction, writing
Bedbug Crazy Planning
It occurs to me, (usually suddenly in the middle of the night making me leap out of bed with a light bulb over my head that tends to evaporate if I don’t write it down), that you may not be able to make much sense of the order of my posts, or the way that I leap from one pond frond paragraph of ideas to another with nary a bridge over troubled water between them. The phrase, “Crazier than a bedbug” may have just leaped into your head. If it didn’t, then I didn’t do a very good job of planting it there just now with this loony opening paragraph and my witlessly wired title for today’s post.
The problem probably begins with seeing the world as I see it. As in, “Nobody sees the world the way you do, Mickey!” For example, look closely as this picture of me cooking breakfast and pointlessly taking a picture of it. See the star I am cooking?
Really? You don’t? How about now?
Still don’t see it? Well, let me try once more with my artsy-craftsy weird Pythagorean math religion skills to make you see it so you know what the heck I am talking about.
Still don’t understand about me cooking stars in the morning for breakfast? Well of course you don’t. You don’t think like a bedbug. I read an article about needing protein for the first meal of the day to help diabetes and your thinking parts work like a well-oiled machine. Err… well, like a well-oiled sausage, then. And I see stars while I am cooking, because my mind works like that.
So, what does the expression “Crazy as a bedbug” mean, anyway? Well, if you have ever seen a bedbug crawling on your quilts at night… first of all, poor you! I hope it didn’t bite you more than once… but the bedbug seems to travel on all sixes in totally random directions, suddenly stopping, backing up, and then curly-cuing onward in its bizarre little paisley-patterned way. It is unpredictable.
My writing journey has been more or less like that. The first novel I completed was Superchicken, set in the year 1974, in my hometown, Spring and Summer. Then the first hometown novel I published, Catch a Falling Star, was set in 1990, Summer, in my hometown and on Mars. Then I finished the novel Snow Babies, set in 1984, December, in my hometown during a blizzard. I went back to the future… um, a past future… with Magical Miss Morgan, set in the 1989-90 school year in the little town where I went to junior high and high school. It will soon be published by Page Publishing. I published Stardusters and Space Lizards, set in 1991, entirely in outer space, but with characters from my hometown on board the space ship, on Amazon Kindle Publishing this last November, followed closely by Snow Babies, published in the same place with the same publisher. I am now working on The Baby Werewolf, set in Fall of 1974 in my home town again. So my writing journeys through time in total bedbug fashion.
What, then, am I planning to write this weekend and during the holiday? I can promise you, I won’t know until tomorrow… if then.
Totally Terribly Bankrupt
Disney recently unveiled the new President Pumpkinhead animatronic doll that they are putting into the Hall of Presidents at their theme parks. Scary thing, that. Scarier still, it would probably make a better President than the one currently in the White House.
Can you tell from this picture which one is the animated lump of unnatural doll parts and metal wires, and which one is the Disney animatronic President?
And in the Congress, the House and Senate each passed a tax reform bill that will reverse-Robin Hood money away from the poor and middle class to feed the never-ending greed of the top one per cent.
And a third thing that is now revealed this week, devastating for me personally, is my Chapter 13 Bankruptcy, signed and finalized on Monday. My bankruptcy, unlike Trump’s many Chapter 11’s, does not cancel any debt. I must pay 100% of the money won by Bank of America in their lawsuit against me and 100% of the rest of my unsecured debt with all of my other credit cards like Discover that had to be canceled out. The only break a personal bankruptcy affords a retired teacher like me is that I no longer have to pay any interest on any unsecured debt. And Bank of America does not get to take away my house and car and dog and light bulb out of my refrigerator. They are most certainly disappointed by that last thing.
So, now we get to see the suffering actually come to an end. Yes, no one must any longer worry about going to Disneyland and being bored by stuffy politician robots in the Hall of Presidents. Instead the Hall of Presidents will now be one of the scariest horror shows in theme park entertainment history. A robot Cheeto Man will be horrifically disemboweling and eviscerating the Constitution and portions of the English language on stage in front of children, grandmothers, and everybody. Rich people will no longer have to suffer the discomfort of knowing that other people have any money at all, or are entitled to any of the wonderful things that only ultra-rich people are supposed to enjoy, like Disneyland, for example.
And Bank of America and its merry band of blood-sucking pirates can rest easy in the knowledge that Mickey no longer has any money to fund undeserved privileges like the ability to think for himself.
Paul Ryan and Donald J. Trump can now sit smugly satisfied and glory in the fact that Mickey’s losses guarantees them a Mickey-less world.
Filed under angry rant, cartoons, horror writing, humor, Pirates, politics, satire, self pity
Aeroquest… Canto 7
Canto 7 – Good Doggie
Ged planned the mission to the Grange station just for Ham and himself. Trav was put in charge of the star port and given strict orders not to blow anything up or do anything stupid. The last part of those standard orders was intentionally left vague enough to cover almost anything Trav might do.
In the Leaping Shadowcat they quietly slid a quarter of the way around the planet to the geo-synchronis orbit of the space-food installation. It was vast. At five miles in length and a mile in width it should’ve been feeding at least a million people in space. It appeared that the hydroponically grown plants had grown almost completely out of control. Greenery obscured any view of the interior through the sun-source windows.
The docking bay was large, and Ham easily steered the Shadowcat into position. The automated systems attached to the Aero Brothers’ ship as smoothly as any starport in the Imperium.
“The power still works here. Do you suppose someone’s been maintaining it until a short time back?” speculated Ged.
“Dunno,” said Ham. “Somebody might be maintaining it and our sensors didn’t pick him or her up.”
“Maybe,” said Ged doubtfully.
Ged had spent ten years as a space-safari hunter for hire. He had been successful in tracking xenomorphs on four hundred worlds and survived many dangerous encounters. It was only natural that he led the way. Caution had always been his hallmark as a hired big-game hunter. He brought his customers back alive even if it meant not bagging the big xenomorph they were hunting.
Ged carefully set his medium-tech laser rifle on the stun-cone setting. He didn’t need to kill whatever he encountered, just control it. No telling how big a dog they were facing. He led the way into the Grange with hand signals to Ham.
Ham had the big gun. He carried an 80-pound MPPG, a man-portable plasma gun. It put a stream of thermonuclear star-stuff out that could burn through planets if necessary. It was the kind of weapon they’d kept safely out of Goofy’s hands for twenty years, since their teen years.
They were surprised to see the inside of the Grange fully operational. Someone had recently been tending it. Several of the hydroponic farms were operating efficiently and producing fruits and vegetables that the brothers hadn’t tasted in over two years. Ham couldn’t resist grabbing and biting into a succulent carbo-melon from Antares One, purple juice running down his arm to the elbow.
Of course, most of the farms were thoroughly overgrown and idle. A place like this needed a thousand people to operate completely, but someone, maybe two someones, had been very busy here.
Ged signaled to Ham. “Paw Print!” he said in sign. Ham signaled back. “Dog?”
Ged signaled. “Too big. Only two legs. Werewolf. Like me?”
Ham grinned. “Maybe you changed and got loose?”
“Not lately.”
Ged was an excellent tracker. He followed the sign down into the artificial valley and from under cover, sighted the paw-print maker. It had the head of an overly-fuzzy wolf or a husky dog, but the barrel-chested body was like a man’s. Its crooked dog’s legs ended in bare paws, but it wore pants and had a tool belt around his middle. He was shirtless and fuzzy-chested.
“Dang!” signed Ged. “Homo Lupines.”
“Bring down,” signaled Ham.
Ged rose up from behind the foliage and fired a cone of shock-laser beam at the Lupin. It dropped like a stone.
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
The Nature of Our Better Angels
I have friends and relatives that believe in angels. Religious people who believe in the power of prayer and the love of God. And I cannot say that I do not also believe. But I also happen to believe that angels live among us.
My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was, as far as I am concerned, an angel. Born in the late 1800’s, she was a practical prairie farmer’s wife. She knew how to make butter in a churn. She knew how to treat bee stings and spider bites. She knew how to cook good, wholesome food that stuck to your ribs and kept you going until the next meal rolled around. She knew how to cook on a wood-burning stove, and knew why you needed to keep corn cobs in a pile by the outhouse door. Or, in the case of rich folks, why you needed to read the Sears catalog in the little room behind the cut-out crescent moon.
She also knew how to head a family. She had seven kids and raised six of them up to adulthood. She sent a son off to World War II. She had nine grandchildren and more great grandchildren, of which I was one of the not-so-great ones, than I can even count on two hands and two feet, the toes of which I can’t always see. Great great grandchildren were even greater. Tell me you can’t believe she was a messenger from God, always knowing God’s will, and making the future happen with a steady hand, and eyes that brooked no nonsense from lie-telling boys.
Mother Mendiola was an angel too. I met her at my first school, Frank Newman Junior High in Cotulla, Texas. She was the seventh grade Life Science teacher. She had been a nun before becoming a teacher, and she was a single lady her whole life. But she was a natural mother figure to the children in her classes. She’s the one who taught me how to talk to fatherless boys, engage them in learning about things that excited them, and become a lifelong mentor to them, willing to help them with life’s problems even long after they had graduated from both junior high and high school. She was not only a mother to students, but she nurtured other teachers as well. She showed Alice and I how to talk to Hispanic kids even though we were both so white we almost glowed in the dark. She went to bat for kids who got in trouble with the principal, and even those who sometimes got into trouble with the law. She had a way of holding her hand out to kids and encouraging them to place their troubles in it. She even helped pregnant young girls with wise counsel and a loving, accepting heart, even when they were seriously in the wrong. When they talk about being an “advocate for kids” in educational conferences, they always make me picture her and her methods. I can still see her in my mind’s eye with clenched fists on her hips and saying, “I am tired of it, and it will get better NOW!” And it always got better. Because she was an angel. She had the power of the love of God behind her every action and motivation. It still makes me weep to remember she is gone now. She got her wings and flew on to other things a long time ago now.
Some people may call it a blasphemy for me to say that these people, no matter how good and critically important they were, could really be angels. But I have to say it. I have to believe it. I know this because I saw them do these things, with my own two eyes, and how could they not be messengers from God? I convinces me that I need to work at becoming an angel too.
Extremely Strange Christmas Gifts
This summer, in order to decompress a bit over the swimming pool removal crisis, I joined a nudist website in order to be able to write a blog for them. I believe it can be now revealed that it didn’t go entirely according to plan. Pretty much in the same way that, because I am not Santa Claus I will not be delivering Christmas gifts on December 24th.
The deal was, I needed to give them a sample of my writing to consider, and then be prepared to write a blog post about my first visit to a nudist park. It was technically a professional writing situation, but because of the cost of membership in the website and the cost of visiting a nudist camp, I was paying out money instead of taking it in.
So, I submitted a rewritten version of my blog post “Blushing in the Garden of Eden”, a piece about the comedy inherent in me being associated with nudist experiences written long before I ever imagined having the courage to actually go to one of these places and be a nudist at the same time.
I took the bull by the horns… okay, let’s not use that trite old expression because of its unfortunate metaphorical connotations… I prepared for the job by contacting a local nudist park, Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas, and I made arrangements. Then, while my family was off enjoying roller coasters at Six Flags that I was not physically fit enough to ride, I went to the nudist park for a day visit.
I wrote about all the fool missteps, embarrassments, and gobbledygook I went through to visit a nudist park on one of the hottest days of the summer wearing only a thick layer of sunscreen, hat, and shoes. I thoroughly embarrassed myself in an autobiographical essay or three about actually enjoying my brief time among the naked people. And then nudist connections began to blossom. Who knew that they might be so willing to recruit a spotty old naked man into their society? My blog post was re-blogged on a popular nudist website. Twitter nudists began following me by the baskets full. I became connected to nudist sites in Canada, Great Britain, and, curiously, Spain. I got tons of ads for nudists experiences in places world wide that I will never be able to afford to go visit.
But through it all, not a word from truenudists.com about my blog application.
Well, now, during this season of Santa Claus and gift-giving, I started receiving some extremely strange Christmas gifts. Tomorrow I get to go sign the court petition that allows me to be bankrupt under Chapter 13. No more credit cards for me. Including the one used to pay for my Truenudist membership. And then, out of nowhere, the blog coordinator of Truenudists contacts me about being delighted by my submission and being willing to publish my work on their website, Facebook sites, and Twitter account. I am now officially a nudist blogger. Now that the nudist wardrobe is about the only thing I can afford to wear. And my wife added one last gift last night. A plan to sell our house so we don’t end up losing it to the bank.
So, I wrote a letter to Santa Claus, thanking him for my wonderful gifts this year, and asking him to join me whenever possible at the nudist park so he can truly see how I have benefited from his presents.
Filed under autobiography, blog posting, feeling sorry for myself, humor, irony, nudes, Paffooney
Teachers in Space
This is another in my continuing series of Saturday night D&D posts, though it was written on Saturday morning and contains no Dungeons and Dragons information whatsoever.
The Space Bear was a travelling space ship/school.
You see, in the early 1980’s, I got in trouble with Baptists for playing Dungeons and Dragons with kids from school because… well, demons and dragons are evil, right? Apparently even the imaginary ones in games and illustrations. So I turned my attention to science fiction games. Traveller was my rule system, and all science fiction was my campaign. And then in 1986 Ronald Reagan and NASA decided to blow up the first teacher in space aboard the Challenger shuttle mission. So, my Traveller game became less about “explore and conquer” and more about “teachers in space”.
Ged Aero was the player character of one of my favorite kids. He was a psionic shape-changer who could transform into other animals, space creatures, and alien beings. He became so powerful that he naturally inherited the job of leader of the Psionics Institute, a criminal teachers’ union that taught psionic skills to psionically talented kids. It was a criminal organization because the semi-fascist government of the Third Imperium had made psionics illegal. He gathered students and taught them to use their powers for good. The students were all non-player characters to start with, but as new kids from school wanted to play the game too, and player characters were needed, the students of Ged’s psionics dojo became player characters.
Junior Aero, a former student and the adopted son of Ged’s deceased brother Hamfast, grew up and became a player character himself. He taught psionics, being a telepath who could talk to computers and robots that were self-aware. His wife, Sarah Smith Aero, also became a teacher. She and Junior had twins, a boy and a girl, both genetically Nebulons, and both destined to be students aboard the Space Bear.
Of course, you may have noticed a K’ung Fu sort of thing going on in the illustrations I am showing you. That was because one time as Ged was in dinosaur form and fighting with a ninja swordmaster, he won the fight by eating the ninja. His shape-changing power then absorbed all the muscle memories and martial arts training of the ninja he ate. So, his students would not only become psionic masters of mind manipulations, but ninja warriors as well.
So, whether they liked it or not, my Traveller players had to learn to teach their skills to others, lead students through complex adventures and problem=solving situations, and basically do themselves a lot of the same things they saw me doing in school all as part of a role-playing game. You see, that was one of the main dangers of playing role-playing games on Saturdays with that kooky English teacher in South Texas. The danger was, you might actually have to learn something. Although, most of them probably didn’t realize that that was precisely what they were doing. They thought we were just playing games, or junk like that.
Filed under characters, Dungeons and Dragons, education, high school, humor, imagination, kids, Paffooney, science fiction, teaching
