Here are the newest pages of Hidden Kingdom;
If you would like to see how it fits into the whole of chapter 2, then you can visit it at my vault with this link; Hidden Kingdom – Chapter Two
The Annual Appointment with Disappointment
Since the 1970 St. Louis Blues’ Stanley Cup Final where they lost to the Boston Bruins in 4 straight games, I have waited for the chance to return and have one more shot at rooting for my team to win their first hockey championship, their first Stanley Cup. We were in the finals and we had beaten the two best teams in hockey to get there. But hockey playoffs are more grueling than any other sports playoffs. We lost in 6 games. I am a dedicated fan. And I will be one for life. And I will root for them again next year. And they will very likely lose again this time of year next year. But that’s not the point. They will always be my team.
Filed under feeling sorry for myself, hockey, sports
I Love to Laugh
It began in childhood with the Red Skelton Show. Every Wednesday night it a was a refuge for me. And refuge was a critical idea for me. I was a child hiding a terrible secret from the entire world. At times I hated myself. Twice as a teen I came very close to choosing suicide over life. The person I most needed to hide from was myself. And humor helped. Red Skelton’s gentle humor helped me to not only escape from myself for a while, it taught me to laugh at my own foibles and not take things quite so seriously.
media.npr.org
In my college years I discovered humor in written form. Mark Twain swiftly earned my utter devotion as I read not only Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but Roughing It, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Mysterious Stranger, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain. You know, there are a large number of things in Mark Twain’s humorous books that make you cry, that make you angry, and make you think deep thoughts. I basically discovered that humor is a way that smart people choose to think of things which helps to keep you sane and basically un-suicided.
A beautiful portrait by artist Emily Stepp
It is obvious that some people become very skilled at humor because they have used it all their lives to fight the darkness . Robin Williams is only few years older than I am. In many ways his life has paralleled my own (obviously minus the wealth and fame in my case… but what would’ve happened if Robin had become a school teacher?) I have depended on Robin Williams’ movies to keep me going, giving me insights in how to talk to kids, how to be a parent, and how to empathize with others. Of course, I haven’t yet taken some of his movie advice. I never put on a mask and a dress to deceive my own children. But only time will tell.
I obsess about humor and how you create it. I gorge on things like the works of Dave Barry. Do you know who he is? Florida newspaper columnist who writes books about everyday life and the fools who live it? I have to do a post on Dave Barry, because he makes me laugh so hard that milk shoots out of my nose, sometimes when I am not even drinking milk… believe me, I don’t know how that works either.
A bust of Herman Munster
Doofy Fuddbugg here is an example of what a “Nolt” is.
I love to laugh. It makes the world right again. I have laughed an awful lot for almost an entire lifetime now. I treasure all the funny people I have known. And I need to continue to try to make people laugh up until the very end. Because the world is too often not a funny place. It can be full of badness and sadness and suffering. And as Mark Twain so aptly pointed out, “Against the assault of laughter… nothing can stand.”
A Thing That I Know…
You probably guessed it just from the title. I started this post without any idea at all what I was going to write about. And so I had to rummage around in the back rooms of my silly old brain looking for stuff to put out there that wasn’t too moldy, but definitely had been thoroughly cooked and stored away for a while.
So here is something I know… If you want to make someone pay attention to you, make a joke. You can do that by surprising people with something that they immediately recognize and realize that it is totally backwards to what they saw before. In other words, when I say or write things that make people wrinkle their noses at me, I am not merely being weird. I am being a humorist.
Here is something else I know… If you want to have an idea that is worth having, you need to look at things from a totally different angle. If I want to know myself better, I need to reflect on how Charles Schultz would draw me. I would be half Linus and half Charlie Brown because I am most profound when I have my blanket to comfort me, but things constantly go wrong for me and I see myself as a loser… but I have people who love me, and a dog that battles the Red Baron.
Another thing I know… If you want to make something, you have to follow the rules, and only occasionally break them. This post began with a simple enough rule. It had to have simple statements of things I have learned over the course of my life, and the pictures all had to come from a randomly selected picture file on my laptop. I save all kinds of weirdly chosen and goofy things in my art and memes files. So how dangerous can that rule be? Of course, I also want to put up a bit of my own artwork, and this file that I chose doesn’t seem to have any in it. So, I have to break the rule… but only this one last time.
Now, I know you will probably look at this and think to yourself, “What the hell is wrong with you, Mickey?” Or maybe you will say it out loud in your most disgusted voice. But I do know this… If you are old and you have lived long enough to have learned a thing or two… or possibly three, you can simply start writing and the ideas will be there. And it might turn out to be something you will be glad you wrote and shared. This is simply a thing that I know.
Walk the Walk with Diabetes
Today during the school-drop-off downpour, I was forced to pull into the Walmart parking lot and pass out for a few rainy minutes. Good times, huh? But life is like that with diabetes. I have been a diagnosed diabetic since April of 2000. I have learned to live with my sugars out of whack, my mind potentially turned into Swiss cheese with cream gravy at any moment, and a strangely comforting capacity to weather headaches, both the heartbeat in the temples like a timpani kind, and the red-hot needles of Nyarlathotep boring into my skull kind. I suffer, but I also survive. In fact, the terrible incurable disease most likely to kill me is, in some ways, a sort of a back-handed blessing. I certainly don’t take life for granted with it. I am more conscious of how food can affect me and make me feel. I have had to learn how to take care of myself when taking care of myself is tricky like an Indiana Jones’ adventure in the Doomed Temple of Mickey’s Body. I take going to the doctor seriously and have learned what questions to ask. I have been to the heart specialist and the endocrinologist and the dietitian more than most people, though not more than most people should see them. I have also learned how to make fun of dread diseases… a skill I never imagined I might develop later in life.
My first experience of diabetes wasn’t even my own illness. Back in 1984 I had a boy in my seventh grade class who seemed to be falling asleep constantly. He was a shy little Hispanic boy with curly hair who was usually whip-smart and very charming. But I couldn’t seem to keep his head off his desk. So I asked him what the matter was. He was too shy and worried that he had done something wrong to answer me. So I asked him to get some water to wake himself up. The reading teacher across the hall told me, “You know, Juanito is diabetic. His blood sugar might be low.”
So I asked him, “Is that your problem?”
He nodded and smiled.
“The office keeps some orange juice in the refrigerator for him,” the reading teacher said.
So, I saved his life for the first time in my career without even knowing what the problem was or how to solve it. He came back from the office perky and smiley as ever. And I realized for the first time that I needed to know what diabetes was and what to do about it.
Juanito became one of a number of fatherless boys that adopted me and spent Saturdays hanging out with me to play video games and role playing games. He was one out of a pack of kids that swarmed my home in the off hours and would do anything I asked in the classroom no matter how hard. He was a juvenile diabetic, the son of a woman with severe type-two diabetes (adult-onset). His older sister had become a nurse at least partly because of the family illness. Juvenile diabetics, though their lives can be severely at risk, have the capability of growing out of it. As a seventh grader he didn’t really know how to take care of himself. Teachers who unknowingly offered candy as a motivator could’ve put him in a coma because he was too polite and shy to say no. But I fed him a few times, befriended him a lot, encouraged his interest in sports, and he grew up to be a star defensive back on the high school football team. He gave me the portrait I share with you here for attending so many of his football games and rooting for him to overcome the odds. When he visited me at the school years later, he was basically diabetes-free.
Juanito’s story gives me hope. I know I will not overcome the dreaded Big D disease of South Texas. I will live with it until it kills me. It caused my psoriasis. It gives me episodes of depression and chronic headache. But at this point, I am still controlling it through diet and exercise, not taking insulin or other drugs. (In fact, it was one of those other drugs that was making me pass out at work constantly from low blood sugar. Diet works better than pharmaceuticals.) One day it will give me a fatal infarction or a stroke and be the end of me. But until that time I will continue to do the difficult dance with it and get by, because, after all, dancing is exercise, and exercise overcomes the effects of the disease. Just ask Juanito.
Filed under autobiography, battling depression, humor, illness, kids, psoriasis
The Right Words
I discovered a new artist today. I was reading posts in the Facebook writer’s group, 1000 Voices for Compassion. And there in a post by Corinne Rodrigues was a YouTube video by Andrew Peterson. And it was a miracle. I clicked on the video and he sang my soul. Here is the original blog post. And here is the video.
Yesterday I posted a self-reflected goopy bit of nonsense about how I write and draw. Today, I realized I haven’t explained why I write and draw.
You can capture it in words. You can capture it in pictures. Like Andrew Peterson did, you can capture it in music. It is deep and profound and eternal… and you can’t really explain it, but it is the singularity… the right word… the way to caress the very face of God.
This music from Andrew Peterson is musical poetry that expresses love in terms of romance and religion. Love of the significant other is equal to and intertwined with the love of God. There is a truth in that, and a fundamental reason why despite how religion has let me down, I will never be an atheist again. Through the right words I have come to know God. I speak to him daily. I spent twenty years as a Jehovah’s Witness, even to the point of knocking on doors and sharing the little pamphlets that are supposed to contain the capital “T” Truth. I can’t do that any more, though. The thing is, they believe the chosen of God, the only people who can reach paradise, are the people who all say and do and believe the very same thing, the very same words. Anyone else is left to destruction. No paradise. No life after death. And they clearly tell you what the words are, and you must repeat them like a magic spell. Peterson’s music is forbidden. JW’s don’t want you to listen to anyone’s words but their own. So, since this is Christian music, but not JW Christianity, it is the work of the devil, trying to lead you to destruction. What kind of selfishness is this? And yes, I have repeatedly been shown the words in the Bible that say that this is so. But I have stopped believing that all words in the Bible are the right words. When the Bible speaks of love… those are the right words. When the Bible speaks about what you must hate and who is condemned… those are not.
You may have noticed that I have obsessively searched out and shared this Andrew Peterson music. I do that when I find the right words… good words… I obsessively want to find more and more. I did that once with butterflies. When I was a boy, I chased them down with nets and collected them. But you have to put butterflies in killing jars and then mount them on pins and Styrofoam boards to collect them. I realized too late that this was not the right way to treat them. You have to let them flutter in the sunshine and float on the breeze. You have to let them live. And so must you do with the right words when you find them. You must use them and share them and let them live.
Yes, the reason I write is because my life has been lived and it is coming to an end. But it is a good life. A life filled with wisdom and love and the very best of those words I have collected in butterfly nets over time. And I must share those very right words… and let them live because they are beautiful and true… and it is simply who I have to be.
Critiques in Color
I recently posted about being synesthetic and discovering how I am different from normal people. Here is the post if you are interested.. Then I discovered that Kanye West is also synesthetic as he gushed some southern-fried crappie-doo about how wonderful he is as an artist because he sees the colors of his music. Well, now I don’t want that mental affliction any more. I don’t wish to be anything like him. Of course, it has to be incurable, doesn’t it.
Now I am wasting today’s post on another metacognative thinking-about-thinking style of paragraph pile when I could be rhapsodizing about the humor of Dave Barry or the wisdom of Robert Fulghum, the author of
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
I could be shamelessly promoting the work of artists whose works I love instead of examining the random filing cabinets in the back rooms of my stupid old head. But I can’t because I now need to explain myself to myself again. Self doubt and self examination are features of being an artist. We reach a point where we have to think about how we do what we do, because if you don’t know where the magic comes from, you might not be able to call on it the next time you need it.
I am a self-taught artist. I have had art classes in high school and college, but never professional art training. I know how to manipulate the rule of thirds, directional composition, movement, perspective, and lots of other artsy-craftsy techniques, but it is all a matter of trial and error and an instinct for repeating what works. I have had a good deal more professional training as a writer. But I do that mostly by instinct as well. Trained instinct. I have reached a point where my art is very complex and detailed. And I don’t mean to suggest there are no flaws. In fact, I am capable enough to see huge, glaring mistakes that really skew my original intent and make me feel hopelessly incompetent. But others who see it and don’t know the inner workings of the process can look past those mistakes and not even see them. Given enough time to look at my own work with new eyes, I am able to see at least some of what they see.
Now that I have totally wasted 500-plus words on goofy talking-to-myself, what have I really accomplished beyond boring you to death? What’s that you say? You are not dead yet? Well, that’s probably only because you looked at the pictures and didn’t read any of my sugar-noodle brain-scrapings in loosely paragraph-like form. And if you did read this awful post by a colorblind artist who doubts his own abilities, you probably didn’t learn anything from it. But that’s not the point. The point is, I care about doing this, and I need to do it right. And I managed to learn something… how to ramble and meander and make something that is either a hot mess… or something that vaguely resembles self-reflective art.
Boyhood
Fifty years ago when I was ten, the world was a very different place. Many people long for the time when they were young. They see it as a better, more innocent time. Not me. Childhood was both a blessing and a nightmare for me. I was creative and artistic and full of life. And my family encouraged that. But I was also a victim of a sexual assault and believed I had to keep a terrible secret even from my parents so that the world would not reject me as something horrible. We were on the way to the moon and the future looked bright. But President Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963, and Apollo 1 would end in a fiery tragedy in 1967. I look back with longing at many, many things, but I would never want to go back to that time and place without knowing everything I know now. I am grateful that I survived. But I remember the nightmares as vividly as I do the dreams.
As a teacher, I learned that childhood and young adulthood defines the adult. And the kid who is coddled and never faces the darkness is the one who becomes a total jerk or a criminal… or Donald Trump. I almost feel that the challenges we faced and the tragedies we overcame in our lives are the very things that made us strong and good and worthy.
When you are a boy growing up, hating girls on the outside and pining to get a look in the girls’ shower room on the inside, you can’t wait to grow up and get away from the horrors of being a child. Except, there are good things too. Tang, of course, wasn’t one of them. We drank it because the astronauts drank it, but it was so sweet and artificial it tasted bitter in that oxymoronic way that only fake stuff can achieve. Quisp is nasty-tasting stuff too… but we begged for it because, well, the cartoon commercials were cool. I only ever choked down about two boxes of the vile stuff. You went to school a little queasy on mornings when you ate Quisp in milk for breakfast. But one box had a toy inside, and the other had an alien mask on the back that you could cut out, but not actually wear.
But when it comes down to how you end a goofy-times-ten-and-then-squared essay like this one, well, how do you tie a proper knot at the end of the thread? Maybe like this; It is a very hard thing to be a boy and then grow up to be a man. But I did it. And looking back on it, the pie was not my favorite flavor… but, hey! it was pie!
Point by Point
I was enumerating yesterday all the bad things that make my life exactly the way I expect it to be as a total pessimist. Of course, I left out that I am fully expecting Donald Trump to be the next president of this country. Yes, I expect the worst to happen. Hillary Clinton will not beat Trump either because of her toxic unfavorability or because the email thing will bring down an indictment to nullify her eligibility to be president. And all my conservative friends who love Trump will continue to dance happy dances and sing about me being a hopeless “lib-tard” who doesn’t really know anything about anything as Trump continues to rob them and make their lives more miserable with the help of the government he will control from the inside.
Yes, one of the biggest downers about being too smart for your own good is, you see past the lies everyone tells themselves, and perceive the darkest of the truths that lurk behind them.
I got this meme from a high school friend who served in the Navy and became a firefighter… an honorable public servant no matter how you look at it.
In the meme to the right, I am characterized as a self-centered numb-noggin who thinks his opinion is more important than the realities of this person’s life. It makes me sad that my childhood friend believes this is true about my political beliefs. But I am not claiming to be oppressed. Well, maybe by Trump once he does away with the healthcare law that guarantees insurance companies will cover me despite six pre-existing conditions. This is a straw man argument that sets up liberals as unreasonable norks that want the law to dictate that everything should be the way liberals want them to be. That is not the way I see being a liberal.
I choose rather to look at what people are saying on all sides and make decisions based on my hopefully broad and enlightened mind. I would never advise someone to have an abortion. But I do care what happens to children once they are born. Are we limiting their suffering when they are not wanted by anyone? When they are born into poverty? When they drink lead-contaminated water and are subjected to brain damage and death because the conservative government decided saving money was worth the risk? I believe all people are deserving of respect and all people have value. I have gay friends and former students. Their existence in this world enriches it, and I am not ashamed to know them. I would never ask one of my conservative friends to marry another man… or marry anybody. I have a wife who is from a foreign country and her road to citizenship is still not traversed. Could we be making that road harder than it needs to be?
I am a liberal. But I would not call myself a tax-and-spend liberal. I would rather see the money we already pay in taxes go for better public schools, better roads and bridges and public works, less expensive, or even FREE college education for my struggling children, rather than tax breaks and corporate wellfare for GE, Pfizer, and Exxon. Is it too much to ask that our taxes be spent on us rather than enhancing corporate profit margins? And couldn’t millionaires and billionaires afford to pay the same percentage of taxes that I do? Maybe even more because they have more? Why does believing these things make me evil? Or stupid? Or any of the other things that my conservative friends tell me that I am because I am a liberal? I would rather reason things out than simply insult others, something the other side of this argument doesn’t make a habit of doing.
I have no problem saying, “Black lives matter.” They do matter. And they have not been treated fairly. Not Trayvon Martin. Not Michael Brown. Especially not Tamir Rice, the twelve year old shot to death for having a toy gun. These are children who are not to blame for their own deaths. So I am not burdened to add “…All lives matter” because it goes without saying. White and Asian lives have not been snuffed out in Walmart’s toy section for handling an air rifle. I guess I must be a reverse-racist for saying this like I have been told on Facebook.
I am a liberal. So shoot me. Er… rather, don’t shoot me. But be patient with my fact-heavy and logic-heavy arguments. If you are a Christian, then weigh my arguments against what you know in your heart Jesus actually would do. I know scripture. I have read the entire Bible more than once. I am confident my wanting government to do what helps the greatest number and harms no one will stand the test. And I am preparing to deal with a President Donald Trump who probably won’t see it that way.
Filed under angry rant, grumpiness, humor, Liberal ideas, pessimism, politics, Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 
Dave Barry
dave barry
I threatened to write a post about Dave Barry and the writing gods apparently thought that was a very very bad idea. They have tried to prevent me from carrying out this idle threat by attacking my computer with gremlins. Now my WordPress page is shrinking practically out of sight. I can barely see what I am typing. You don’t believe me? Here’s what it looks like at the moment;
They obviously tricked me into pressing the secret shrink button on my computer, and I have no idea where to find the un-shrink features. Not only that, but my Facebook page is automatically translating everything it can into French. They really don’t want me to tell you about Dave Barry. And why do you suppose that is?
Well, Dave Barry may actually be me from a parallel dimension. He started writing for The Miami Herald in the early 80’s, at about the same time I started teaching. He retired from that in 2004 after winning a Pulitzer Prize and started writing humorous novels…. the same thing I started doing when I left the job I loved and was good at. Okay, so I am stretching the analogy to the point that all the buttons are popping off its shirt… but the point is, we are alike in some ways and I admire his work and I steal things from it whenever I possibly can. Like this post. I deeply admire the way he can say witty and pithy things. Like some of these quotes;
So, you see, he is very good at doing what I want to be good at. He is a humor columnist and all-around imitation Mark Twain. And I have read and loved his novels. Especially the Peter Pan things he writes with a partner.
Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
So, I will leave this post here even though I could talk for hours about how Dave Barry makes me laugh. I have to stop. the words on the screen keep getting smaller and smaller, and my old eyes are about to fall out of my head.
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Filed under commentary, horror movie, humor, Uncategorized