April 26, 2015 · 2:30 pm

The Blues

Down again… oh, oh, oh, down deep and so blue again…
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They did it to me again this year.

Since 1967 when the St. Louis Blues were a first year expansion NHL hockey team, I have loved and lived for the Blues.  Their first three years in the league they were in the Stanley Cup finals.  I got to watch them play on my family’s old black-and-white Motorola against the Boston Bruins, their third try at winning the cup.  (My best friend preferred the Bruins and every other kid in town who could even stand hockey sided with them… Hence old Tiger Bates crooning at me “St. Louie is gonna be Blue tonight!”  after every single game.)  They didn’t realistically have a chance.  They were the representative from the expansion half of the league.  They dominated teams like the Minnesota North Stars, the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Philadelphia Flyers, and the California Golden Seals because they managed to land aging Hall-of-Famers like goalies Glenn Hall, Jaques Plante, and scorers like Dickie Moore and Doug Harvey in the expansion draft… there’s more to read about their history here;

http://blues.nhl.com/club/page.htm?id=39464

berenson5I also loved the next generation of heroes, like Red Berensen here, the old Red Baron of Hockey, and future Hall of Famers like Bernie Federko, Brett Hull, and did you know that the Great Wayne Gretzky played a season with the Blues before he retired?  Almost every year of their existence since that fateful first three years of Stanley Cup play they have been a legitimate contender to go back and actually win the cup.  Philadelphia did it in the 70’s, Pittsburgh in the 80’s and 90’s, the Stars did it after moving to Dallas.  But the Blues have never made it back to the Stanley Cup Finals.  Something always goes wrong.

photos from the St. Lpuis Blues home page and Arch City Sports

photos from the St. Louis Blues home page and Arch City Sports

264981_10151027767713661_1898205283_n 293820_10151154315328661_558373598_nWe never seem to be able to get past arch rivals.  The Chicago Blackhawks beat us and go on to win the cup.  The Los Angeles Kings beat us and go on to win the cup.  The last three years in a row we’ve been taken out in the very first round of the playoffs…  This year, despite winning the toughest division in hockey, they lose to the Minnesota Wild (the team that filled the hole the North Stars left when they moved to Dallas).  I am totally confusticated and fristumbobulated… and I mean in the worst possible way!  (Those are bad words in the language of the fairy-folk from Iowa… terrible curse words.)  It couldn’t be worse… well… except, of course for being a fan of Chicago Cubs baseball.  (Yeah, I guess it could be worse.)

Anyway… after such high hopes… I am once again singing the Blues.

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April 25, 2015 · 2:21 pm

Retirement Sinks In…

There comes a time in every career when the career is over and it has to end.  I spent 310 years teaching in Middle School and High School and loved every minute of it.  (Okay, divide the years by ten and subtract about twelve thousand minutes from the love… but I did love it.)  And I was good at it.  (At least, in my own confused little mind… I have photographic proof that I did help students get some quality sleep time in, but… hey, English is supposed to be boring.)

wonderful teaching

A year ago I was forced to make the decision to leave the job I loved.  Failing health and failing finances made it increasingly hard to do the job.  I was never a sit-behind-the-desk teacher.  I had to do the dance… up this row, down that one… lean over the spit-wad shooter before he could adequately aim and pull the stray cafeteria straw out of his mouth… suggest the verb needs to have an “s” on it if the subject of the sentence the student just wrote for me is singular…  stand in front of the boy who can’t listen to my wonderful teaching because the girl across the room is wearing a dress and block his view… and he doesn’t even like that girl, but she’s wearing a dress… you can see her legs… and he’s a teenager… you know, the dance of teaching.  When you walk with a cane and have a back brace on every single work day, the dance becomes harder and harder as the year wears on.  I got to spend my days with Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut and Maya Angelou and Robert Frost… and even more important I got to spend my days with Pablo and Sofie and Ruben and Rita and Keith…  I had so many more favorite students than I ever had those black-banes-of-a-teacher’s-existence kids that other teachers were always talking about in the faculty lounge.  (I rarely hung out in the faculty lounge because they tended to talk bad about kids I really loved and enjoyed teaching… and besides, I had crap to actually do before the next class came in.  Lounging was rarely an option.)

I confess that I have spent a good deal of this school year depressed and feeling sorry for myself.  No kids to talk to on a daily basis except my own, and even with them, only after school.  My wife is still teaching… so I rarely see her.  (Am I married?  I need to double-check.)  I fill the lonely hours with writing and story-telling and recollections of days past… and I am beginning to come to terms with my loss.  In retirement I can do more of the things that I always wanted to do… but never had time for.  I can draw and paint and write and sing (pray hard I don’t start posting videos of me singing!) and play with my toys… I have even decided to write a novel about people playing with toys.  Would I ever teach again if suddenly I was healthy and could do it again…?  YOU BETTER BELIEVE I WOULD!

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April 24, 2015 · 11:39 am

Grandpa Futty Drives Again

In Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley comics there is one old flivver-driving fool named Grandpa Futty.  He is the slowest driver on the road.  Rarely does he go over the breakneck speed of two miles per hour.  He is so overly cautious, that if there are two lanes going his way, he takes the middle of the road and effectively moseys along in his putter-banger taking up both lanes.  What is that you say, young whipper-snapper?  You don’t know what a putter-banger is?  Great galloping goat galoshes!  It’s a car, dang it!  You see them all over the metroplex.  They are so ancient that when you start it up with the hand crank, the engine coughs and the muffler falls off in back.  They were purchased as a used car two decades ago.  The only thing more miraculous than the fact that the car still runs is the fact that the old goat driving it is still alive (though the local police routinely have to stop him to check and see if his heart is actually still beating.  If it isn’t they have to fight with him about dropping him off at the nearest funeral home.)

Sadie2

So, if you haven’t guessed already, this post is about the generically named drivers I refer to as a Grampa Futty, and they are the exact opposite of the Texas Killer Grandmas I wrote about yesterday. Believe it or not, I think I have graduated into the Grandpa Futty class of driver.  I can still see more than three feet in front of my car, but I do have a dumpy-lumpy body that hobbles around with a cane, and I do smell like Ben Gay Ointment and Vick’s Vapo-rub.  (…And no, you can’t say Ben Queer Ointment and have it mean the same thing, young whipper-snapper!  That joke is nearly as old as I am!)  I am not entirely in that category of driver, though, because I still curse them with gusto and interjections like “dang it!” whenever I am behind one of that breed.  And besides, the last time the cop stopped me to check my heartbeat, it was going strong.

Grandpa Futtys are a real road hazard in the obstacle-filled world of Texas city driving… if it were a video game like Super Mario Brothers, they would not be Bowser, but rather that annoying Koopa Troopa that you just can’t bounce on hard enough to get past.  They are in the way, endearingly cute in an ugly-old-fart sort of manner, and potentially deadly as they put you in line for the easy kill by the nearest Texas Killer Granny.  So I am seriously studying now how to avoid Grandpa Futty on the road next time I see him, and I am definitely studying how not to become him.

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April 23, 2015 · 11:33 am

Crazy Old People Driving

You can probably tell that the photo Paffooney is totally staged.  I am not a good enough actor to manage the lookcrazy old driver2 of absolute blood-curdling horror that would be on my face if I were actually driving in the Dallas Metroplex.  My gray Gandalf-hair would be standing on end more, and my eyes would be more popped with horror… especially if I had really seen Suicide Sadie in her death-dealing super-WASP-rocket.  Honestly, I’m risking my life to reveal it, but one of the greatest perils of life in the suburbs in Texas is running afoul of the Texas Killer Grannies.  Yes, there is a secret, Illuminati-like organization of blue-haired old menaces driving big, expensive black battle-boats that try to kill as many other Texas drivers as they can… as well as pedestrians, cop cars, squirrels, poor-people’s children, and ceramic lawn gnomes as they can focus their myopic old granny glasses on.

To Texas Killer Grandmas, slaughtering the innocent on the roadways while your back seat is full of knitting baskets and tins of cat food is a Satanic ritual that gives them special and unnatural powers over life and death.

They all drive at least five-miles-an-hour faster than the speed at which they can actually control the vehicle.  For some of the most deadly grannies like Suicide Sadie and End-It-All Emma that is between 95 and 205 miles-per-hour, though the nearly-as-deadly Grandma McGillicuddy can be almost as guaranteed fatal at only about 35 miles an hour.  They cut in front of you without signalling, and traffic lights are interpreted far differently than normal in the presence of a Texas Killer Grandma.  Green means go.  Yellow means go faster.  And red means floor it and brace for impact.  Now, of course that is the granny interpretation of the light.  For me, green means proceed ultra-cautiously while scanning for hurtling BMW’s, Cadillacs, or Lincoln Town Cars with old ladies at the wheel and skulls painted in white on the driver’s door.  Yellow means pull over to the side of the road at a dead stop and make myself the smallest target possible.  And red means park on somebody’s lawn and wait for the intersection to become clear of all vehicles for several blocks all around.  Sidewalks are not safe either with a Texas Killer Grandma around.  You’re safer walking if you walk down the center of the road.  Of course, the more normal drivers will squish you like road-kill then, and the Texas Killer Grandma knows she was ultimately the cause of this suicidal death, so if they are close enough to see it in any sort of blurred clarity, they automatically count it as a kill.

You never see a Texas Killer Grandma charged with anything in the local media or even in court records.  They are not old ladies unconnected to persons of power.  Rich husbands, rich children, and sometimes even rich boyfriends see to it that they are never prosecuted.  They are immune to the wheels of justice.  Crazy Cat-Lady Clarice is immune to prosecution even though she doesn’t own even a nickel.  We think it is because she is so supremely skilled at vehicular homicide that even the police are afraid of her.  And how does she pay for gas in that 1965 Chevy Impala SS she drives with a blood-smeared hood and the driver’s side of the car painted completely white with skulls?

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April 22, 2015 · 12:44 pm

A Year Full of Sick Days

Dr SeabreezA year ago, I had to make the tough decision to end my teaching career of thirty-one years.  I had a run of about three months where the sick days were costing me $330 apiece and my monthly paycheck kept sinking lower and lower.  It was a choice between continuing to work hard, catch every virus that germy school kids carried into my classroom every day, and end up owing the school money at the end of the month.  Teacher paychecks are earned during the nine months of teaching time, but spread over the twelve actual months  (actually we work for ten and a half months because holiday breaks are always filled with paperwork, homework, and preparation, but you don’t actually get paid for that… eleven and a half months if you teach summer school for $20 an hour), and retiring on a fixed income that would turn out to be more each month than I was taking home each month while working.

After a year of headaches and breathing trouble… visits to the heart doctor… dealing with family bouts of social anxiety disorder and bipolar disorder… along with the resulting depression and physical pain… I am beginning to believe I made a good decision.  I never could’ve weathered another year of teaching.  I would’ve physically given out.  But I have had ample time to write, to talk with and spend time with my children, and heal.  I am still not well enough to get a part time job to supplement my income… but the chance to achieve good health again is closer now than it would’ve been if I hadn’t retired.   Goofing off and playing with my toys has been good for me.

During the school day, with my kids in school, I can sit and write stark naked.  (I know that sounds kinda perverted, but with psoriasis chewing my skin up in all the covered parts, that is far more comfortable than wearing clothes.  Sitting in a hot bath is even better.)  I have taken up Facebooking and WordPressing and playing Facebook games like Magecraft (I am now level 35 and gaining).  I can’t keep playing and wasting time for too much longer, but I have never been more creative than I have in the last year.  I wrote and finished four novels.

So, why am I telling you this instead of creating some humorous post about city driving or why bankers are better pirates than Blackbeard ever was?  (Hmm… I think I better write those topics down).  Because I can.  I have recently undergone several setbacks with family and health, and that takes some meditation and healthy thinking to recover from (especially when you don’t have enough money to get help from the doctor).  And besides, you all read my posts and offer words of comfort and pity… and I have a perverse need to write things that elicit comment and other proof that readers are actually reading what I write.  Most of my fiction-writing life has been addressed to the unseen ghosts of future readers… and I’m always a little bit afraid of ghosts.

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April 21, 2015 · 5:53 pm

How To Avoid Dropping Dead Like a Dunderhead

Pony party

 

If it is inevitable that I will surely drop dead some day, and if it is likely that it will come sooner rather than later, then I hope to go out with a bit of style and leave something behind that speaks not only to my own children, but to anybody searching for truth and beauty, people of the future that I will never know who are living beyond the confines of my little life.  What makes me think that I can do it?  Well, I’m a writer… and Mark Twain did it… and I don’t have to be vain or loopy or maniacal or delusional to make the same thing happen.

On this day one-hundred-and-five years ago, April 21, 1910, Mark Twain left the world of the living.  He caught a ride on Halley’s Comet (It deposited him on Earth in 1835, appearing in the sky when he was born, and took him away when it appeared in the sky again in 1910…  He didn’t have to be some kind of suicidal Heaven’s Gate nut to manage that.)  But it wasn’t the comet that showed me the truth… it was his books.   I learned to take a wry view of a complex world that I could do nothing to change and tweak it with intelligence and understanding from the story of racism and justice he left behind in Pudd’nhead Wilson.  I learned the value of ingenuity and opportunity and how to use them properly from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.  I also learned a profound love and understanding for small town people like me and the people of my little hometown in both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.   Samuel Clemens, Mr. Mark Twain, left himself behind in stories to speak to the ages.  He spoke to me… directly to my heart, and he had been dead for 46 years before I was even born.  If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.

 

media.npr.org

media.npr.org

Now, I am not a fool (wait a minute!  I know you have proof to the contrary if you read my blog posts, but I am not an UNINTENTIONAL fool), so I do not think that my words and wisdom are ever going to have any sort of effect on the entire world the way Mark Twain’s have.  I can accept reality.  This whole world is dying and may not long outlive me.  There are a large number of talented fools… er, I mean writers, out there who have put out a number of published good books, and have, like me, made diddly-zero-bupkiss in dollars on the deal.  I have no delusions.  My work is good enough to turn into a best-seller or maybe two, but I do not have the time or the backing to make it happen.  If anything other than obscurity embraces my books, I won’t live to see it.  Only eleven per cent of published authors make a livable wage from writing and I will never be one of them.  But I have ideas that resonate.  I can write in ways that touch the heart (as you may have seen if you have read my post “When Compassion Fails” that was a minor hit with the 1000 Voices Speak For Compassion group).

So, I am satisfied to confess my girly addiction to Barbie Dolls and My Little Pony… talk about cartoons and cartoonists on WordPress… make people giggle a bit… or even guffaw, and put together books that my family will read, and only be mildly embarrassed by, and maybe one day will reach and touch the heart of some boy or girl who really needs to read what I wrote at a time in their lives when it can actually help… the way so many other philosophers, wits, and word-wizards have helped me.  (How’s that for some prime purple-paisley prose?)

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April 20, 2015 · 2:29 am

Decompression

I got the word that my mother’s surgery went smoothly and she is fine.  Hopefully she will be out of the hospital soon.  I can breathe again.  There are numerous moments in life that make a person’s heart quicken and the “fight-or-flight” security program in the brain kicks in, making us breathe harder… making us sweat…   We wait endlessly for the threatening conditions to pass, and minutes feel like hours.

11062801_558004507676172_3499292867024087071_nAlan Watts was a genius who took Eastern philosophies and meditation and brought them to Western culture in a way that offers light and hope and freedom from fear.  I discovered him on YouTube and learned that even though he is dead, his thinking reaches out to me and gives me comfort in my inevitable face-off with Death.  Do you know Death?  He was that funny. yet disturbing character in some of Terry Pratchett’s funniest Discworld novels… the one that talks in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS because the weight of his words are so serious.  That particular face-off in the Hockey Game of Life is one that sooner or later I am bound to lose.  Everybody loses that one sometime… but only once.  After all, as hockey players go, Death is a superior center.

I think that if I can get one message across to other people before I lose that face-off and the hockey game ends, it needs to be this, “All people are the same.  No matter what color, what sex, what belief system… they all have equal worth.  I am a part of them, and they are a part of me.  As Alan Watts says, I am connected to everything.”

Alandiel

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April 19, 2015 · 10:51 pm

More Hard to Take

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I learned this evening that my octogenarian mother has had another heart problem and is in the hospital again.  My sister tells me that it seems to be fairly straightforward and she’s not in great danger.  But they are putting in a stint and doing a serious surgical procedure.  She has had a long and productive life.  I have to be prepared to lose her to time and the way of all things.  I would ask that when you offer prayers to whichever power you believe in, you ask that the universe continues to unfold in the manner that it should.   I am not a selfish man, and I don’t expect every bullet fired at me by life will miss… but I don’t have to be happy about it.

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April 19, 2015 · 1:59 pm

Truth That’s Hard to Take

HildaAfter cooking the noon meal, (I have discovered a way to burn hot dog pieces that makes them taste good when stirred into the pot of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese) I was putting away the dishes I had washed, sorting out the silverware (actually made of stainless steel, not silver you potential burglars reading this blog could steal) and it hit me…  We have too many forks.  There are four separate kinds of forks in the silverware drawer, big-big forks, littler big forks, big-small forks, and little small forks.  It is an OCD nightmare for a chronic sorter and cataloger like me.  And the most frustrating thing of all is that my days of retired leisure are either spent doing the maddeningly mundane, like fork-sorting, or lying in bed writing and obsessing and writing and thinking and obsessing on the internet and writing some more.  Actual fun, I have none… and sour sauce is the only sauce I get with which to savor the life that is left.

The more I research things on the internet (for writing science fiction and fantasy humor for young adults… and never just to waste time!) the more I discover things that are true that I really wish were not.  I don’t have the life-force and energy left to expend to fight these things I have found, but they need to be fought.  Let me give you some fer-instances;

The world is in the grip of profiteers who want to continue to pump oil and mine coal out of the ground and burn it all for energy in a way that is the most profitable, regardless of what it does to our world.  Global warming and ocean acidification threaten all life on earth, including human life.  If mankind does not unite on this issue, we are going to put out the candle flame that is life on Earth.   And members of Congress are bringing snowballs into the capitol building to prove that climate change is a hoax, and climate-change deniers debate science and have seats on committees about science and energy policy.

So, we are all going to die in a matter of decades if we can’t transform profit-minded people who will happily kill us all as long as they can maintain their super-profitable exploitation of the natural world.  I know that sounds like hyperbole.  “Happily kill us all?”  Surely there are no powerful people out there who would willingly do that.  They must be doing this all accidentally, surely?  But there are people in power who have already proven what lengths they will go to for their for-profit enterprises.  Consider the actual evidence for what happened on 9-11.

I know, people don’t want to hear that 9-11 was actually perpetrated by the American government.  You may have already dismissed me as a tinfoil hat nimrod for making such a claim.  But look at this evidence.  Regardless of the fact that conspiracy theorists are offering theories supported by a multitude of facts versus the unsupported inconsistencies in the official government explanation, there is proof that the official version is propaganda.  Government explainers and debunkers offer only surface solutions to problems with the government’s story of 9-11.  The videos I have linked here both reference an obvious attempt by the government to cover their tracks.  Sonnenfeld worked as a photographer for FEMA.  He reveals the myriad of details he witnessed and photographed in the destruction and aftermath of 9-11.  He was one of only a couple of photographers who were allowed to take such pictures.  Because he did not keep the government’s secrets, he has been accused of the murder of his first wife (though it was apparently previously ruled a suicide) and now faces life in prison so that the US Government can control his testimony about what happened.  I desperately wanted to disprove the conspiracy theorist when I first stumbled over this information in 2012.  I searched both sides.  I now know that some human beings are despicable and profited from mass murder.

So the obvious conclusion is… we are all gonna die!  Do I actually believe that?  Of course I don’t.  I believe in solutions to problems.  I believe that human beings are good by nature, not evil.  Evil is a learned behavior.  It is a behavior that is outnumbered and usually overcome by the general goodness of mankind.  Will the 9-11 perpetrators ever be punished?  Probably not.  Will we extinguish our own planet?  I hope not.  If I am wrong, and the evil in our world outweighs the good, then we deserve what’s coming to us, and the universe will find a new way to express the goodness inherent in being alive.

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April 18, 2015 · 9:40 pm

Unleashing The Muse – Multi-Author Event on June 16th

Daven Anderson explains what my favorite publisher will be up to in June.

Daven Anderson's avatarVampire Syndrome Blog

This June 16th, from 10am to 6pm, Tyward Books, in conjunction with PDMI Publishing, LLC, will host “Unleashing The Muse“, a spectacular multi-author book signing event. If you are an author resident in or visiting the Southern U.S., you’ll want to join us for one of the best opportunities to showcase your work to the widest possible audience!

“Unleashing The Muse” features TV/film producer and author Joel Eisenberg, co-author of “The Chronicles Of Ara,” a heralded new eight-volume fantasy novel series, now being developed for television by Eisenberg and his co-author Steve Hillard. Joel will be signing copies of “Creation,” Volume One of The Chronicles Of Ara series. “Creation” debuted on March 15th in a standing-room-only event in Pasadena, California, and it has already received countless five-star reviews on Amazon and millions of hits on social media channels. Don’t miss this rare chance to meet Mr. Eisenberg…

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