Life is a Gothic horror story now. We have to anticipate terror-filled things even more than we did the last time the Pumpkinhead King took up the scepter. The government may actually collapse this time when you consider the 2025 plan and what the evil minions have planned. The economy will collapse from tariff-fueled price inflation and the deportation of so many of the people who actually do the work in our society. The FBI is going to be overseen by a wild-eyed hate goblin with a mandate to hunt and destroy the Pumpkinhead’s enemies and critics. The secret factory will be run by a woman who delights in giving the poisoned tea to our friends and the goulash to our former enemies. The Department of Defense will be run by a drunk rapist who knows nothing about leading a squad, let alone an army.
We will be walking blindfolded into a future where another pandemic is lurking with the worst possible people in charge of protecting the nation’s health. The head of health is going to be an anti-vaxer with no medical education of any kind, one who not only doesn’t want to develop vaccines for the next pandemic but wants to invite POLIO back.
Elmo Muskmelon, a South African immigrant who appropriates other people’s inventions to make himself the richest and most important man in the world will take the role of viceroy regent who runs the country by fiat while the Pumpkinhead King farts around playing golf all day. The government will literally be looted by minions enriching only themselves.
Of course, climate change has the Doomsday Clock counting down to death by storms, death by wildfires, and the eventual elimination of breathable atmosphere at temperatures that will burn the birds and the bees right out of the sky.
The world will be filled with monsters, survivors who can afford underground bunkers and domed villages under the acidic sea, growing fat by eating everything they have stolen from those of us who did not survive, and probably eventually each other when resources run out. Or they will become mutants, gill men, wolfmen, and snake women. Hunting and hunting and then eating the luckiest of the rest of us who happen to last the longest as non-monsters.
Having read the Bible completely three times, I am well aware of the end of the world as predicted by the Book of Revelations. It is nowhere near as awful as the reality we will most likely be facing… If we don’t burn it all down ourselves before it can happen via nuclear war. Everything is gone or poisoned in a few flashes. A more horrible way to die? It’s quicker.
I fear there is not enough love left in the world to keep all this from happening. Sometimes it sucks to be a true pessimist.
Catch a Falling Star 
A Mr. Holland Moment
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 ten 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.
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