If you need to wind down after a long day at work… If you need to read something ridiculously full of alien invasions, skortch rays, and secret clubs of teen liars and goofs… Well, I humbly suggest that Minnie knows the answer. Look carefully at the silly tome that she is holding. It is a book of magic, as long as you are gullible enough to believe laughter is magical.
the picture above : Davalon and Farbick near Mars (by Leah Cim Reyeb)
I am constantly bubbling over with ridiculous ideas and dreams. After writing the book Catch a Falling Star, I was asked by an editor what happens next to some of the characters. The Morrell family, changed into children, travel into space with the Tellerons aboard Xiar’s Base Ship. Harmony Castille, the elderly church lady who falls in love with the Telleron Commander Biznap marries him and travels with the aliens too. The task; find a new home world and start a mixed civilization. Since the aliens have no inherent religion or morality, it falls to the humans on board to make Christian values the norm for the Telleron frog people. That is a challenge old church ladies can’t resist, but also can’t manage without help.
So what can I do with this story? Where can it go? I am trying to build my work in fiction around certain rules or boundaries that will give it the consistency and power that I need to achieve with my work. Well, the biggest rule is that all my stories have to fit like puzzle pieces into the entire picture, an imaginary history of the universe centered on the little town where I grew up. Space empires in the future, time travelers popping in and out freely, and imaginary breakthroughs in physics, astrophysics, and various sciences cannot be allowed to interfere with the unified history of the future of the galaxy. I know how silly this sounds, but silly rules inform the under-structure of all reality. How else can you explain things like the politics of Texas? Further, I adhere to other silly rules. It must be science fiction or fantasy. It must also be humor. And the most important characters are always children.
So what will this book I am planning be like? Well, first of all, there must be strong elements of science fiction. Of course, silly me, my heroes are on a starship looking for a new home-world. You can’t get too much more science-fictiony than that. But I have been overwhelmed with internet researches of late into the looniest of the internet conspiracy theories. Besides my obsessions with who killed JFK and what really happened on 9/11, I have also found cartoon characters like Alex Jones (the conspiracy world’s version of Elmer Fudd on PCP and prodded to ridiculous levels of vitriolic-aggressive anger management failures) speaking about lizard men from outer space who have taken to controlling our government by shape-changing and masquerading as Hilary Clinton. Whew! Humor is a breeze! All I have to do is set my lost space-colony down on the hostile, warlike world of the space lizards, the world of Galtorr Prime. The science fiction is then firmly grounded in the pseudo-science of paranoid madmen. And, joyfully, further research into the lizard people trying to take over earth will be justified by the creation of this book. Who knows? I may actually uncover their secrets in real life!
The humor, as I already indicated, is built in. Warlike lizards who want only to conquer and destroy! And don’t forget, this will be set on their war-torn home world. The satire is set. I will be writing political satire about Republicans and Democrats. Hot dang! And I can depict crazy folk who would gleefully destroy their own government and their own environment in order to spite their worst enemies, who are thankfully not us, but themselves. I can continue to describe the battle between good and evil in my book in the same religious terms I have always tried to use. It is not good against evil as much as it is Love against Heartlessness. All good comedy, from Mark Twain, to Charles Dickens, to Terry Pratchett, to Douglas Adams, is precisely about that. (Of course it will mean more of the run-on sentences, multi-adjectival descriptions, and infantile allusions and metaphors that I always use in my signature purple-paisley prose.)
And finally, I have the characters already fairly well set. Davalon, the boy Telleron explorer, his nestmate/sister Tanith, their friend and mentor Farbick, Davalon’s adopted child-parents Alden and Gracie Morell, and the crew of Xiar the Slightly Irregular’s whole wacky starship are already living and arguing in my head. Of course, the moldy underwear and dirty dishes in my head are not a particularly good thing. When will fictional characters ever learn to clean up after themselves? Only time will tell.
So there you have it, an entire book idea that came into being in the last week and a half. It will be interesting to chronicle the progression and creation of it. Will it actually get written? Will it take twenty-two years the way Catch a Falling Star did? Will it be worth doing more with than merely writing it and then burning it to save future generations from reading it and burdening themselves with the corrosive insanity it will most likely cause? Well, please, don’t bet any actual money on it. Imaginary or funny-money will be good enough.
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My writer friend, Stuart West (http://stuartrwest.blogspot.com) suggested it might be possible to travel by feeding bubble gum to goldfish. Here is what I thought it would look like. Don’t hold your breathe waiting to sign up for tickets, however. Stuart didn’t think it would work so good after all. I guess I draw scary pictures sometimes when the idea-wagon starts rolling downhill.
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How do you spell comedy? R-E-D-S-K-E-L-T-O-N! For real, that’s how I spelled it during a third grade spelling bee in 1965. Pretty dang dumb, wasn’t I? But it got a laugh from the prettiest girl in class. I truly couldn’t get enough of Red Skelton on Wednesday nights. It was on past my bedtime, but Dad always let me watch, because… well, I think it was his favorite show too. George Appleby always trying to get something past his wife who would always catch him and punish him soundly for something that truthfully wasn’t his fault. That con man tricked him into drinking that stuff that made him act like an insane lady’s man. San Fernando Red pulling a gag on the man with the silver six-gun and hoofing it out of town before the townsfolk caught on to him with the tar and feathers. He never truly got what he had coming, or what he wanted, either. Someone else got it instead. Freddy the Freeloader making even poverty and homelessness funny. He never passed up a cigar butt in the street and found a dime on every sidewalk.
picture from boomermagonline.com
I always thought that if it was going to be funny, it had to be done Red’s way. Let’s face it, there were two kinds of humor back then and only one my parents truly approved of. They were Eisenhower Republicans living in Iowa, the heart of the Midwest. Red’s gentle humor, with its hidden ribald parts, could profoundly make you laugh, and once in a while bring a tear into your eye. It was never mean-spirited or cruel. It never made a political or religious point. It always assumed that all people were good deep down, and even the bad guys could be reformed with the right joke or prank to make them see the error of their ways. That was comedy.
The other kind, the scary kind was Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. They would say bad words, even though you couldn’t say Carlin’s famous seven words on TV back then. They made jokes about dark and desperate things. Democratic political conventions in Chicago, the Viet Nam War, racial tension, the Black Panthers, these were all fair game for satire and black humor. Their jokes assumed that all people were basically bad and greedy and ignorant… full of malice towards all. Not even the comedian himself was assumed to be the exception to the rule.
And seriously un-funny things were happening. Kennedy was shot in 1963. Another Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were both killed in 1968. Patty Hearst was first kidnapped by and then somehow forced to be a part of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Chaos took the world we knew and turned it upside down. You had to learn to laugh at dark things, because laughing was somehow better than crying and hurting inside. The pictures of the My Lai Massacre in Life Magazine made me sick to my stomach for weeks. I did everything I could in class to make that pretty girl laugh, and when I couldn’t… I had to shut up for a while. I had to think.
I decided early on that I needed humor to live. I had to have the funny parts in my life in order to ward off the darkness. I whistled walking home from choir practice at the Methodist church on dark November nights. I told jokes to the rustling leaves and invisible hoot owls. I got by.
So, what is the lesson learned? If you read this far without gagging, then you know I mix a little funny with a little sad… and try to make a serious point in my writing. Maybe I’m a fool to do it, but I truly believe that Red had it right. People are basically good. You can reform a bad guy with a good joke. You can get by in the dark times.
If dark times are truly here again, then maybe that is why I have to tell my stories, make a few jokes, and make people think. I know I may be killing you with boredom by now, but that’s what I do. I’m a professional English teacher. I bore people to death. And if you read this far, and you’re still alive, maybe I can make you a little bit smarter too.
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Idiots say, “If you can’t do something useful, teach.” In Texas, the local wisdom is that teachers are over-paid and don’t work hard enough. They have three months off every year. They have more job security than small-business owners. And all they have to do is talk to kids. Why do we put up with such parasites? Of course you realize I am not talking from my own heart. I am speaking as a despicable straw man that I am intending to knock down, if only I don’t go anthropomorphizing to the point where I associate him with the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz and then find myself unable to knock down the poor misguided man with no brain.
So why would anyone in their right mind want to be a teacher? Oh, yeah… they wouldn’t. What does that say about me? You know, I never wanted to be a teacher when I was growing up. I wanted to be a cartoonist and make people laugh and like my adventure stories. I wanted to be a clown. I wanted to tell stories. I didn’t realize that a teacher, especially an English teacher, must be all of these things. God, with his infinite sense of humor, gave me arthritis in my hands and shoulders when I was only eighteen. And so, what was I gonna do? I had a BA in English. How do you feed yourself with that? I guess you get a Master of the Art of Teaching degree and teach. …Can’t do something useful… right?
When I was looking for a job in 1981, I had a choice between two States, Texas and Florida. Iowa was laying off its lazy teachers who had less than two years experience, reducing their teaching staffs, not hiring. Most other States were doing the same. Only Texas and Florida with some of the biggest education problems and worst educational inequalities needed teachers. And since my parents moved to Texas in 1980, the choice was really made for me. I came to the land of yee-hah cowboys and hey-gringo caballeros by Trailways bus. My first job was in Cotulla Texas, 85 per cent Hispanic and 80 per cent below the poverty line. I didn’t speak Spanish… or Mexican, or Texican, or Spanglish, or anything. I didn’t know the culture. I didn’t know the kids. I’m lucky they weren’t literally cannibals because they ate me alive my first two years. I learned all the bad words in Spanish the hard way, including the idioms. I was nick-named La Choosa (the barn owl), Batman, and Mr. Gilligan’s Island. I was plastered with spit-wads, defied, and demonized (and that was just the parents). I sent crazy little monsters to see the principal, and the principal would call me in and chew me out for having no classroom control. How do you control the behavior of hormone crazed early teens in a junior high school monkey house? The answer is… you don’t. No human being can actually control the actions of another human being. You can only control your own actions.
So I learned how to give them what they needed (as opposed to what they wanted). I started teaching things that weren’t in the textbooks. I taught a few of them how to read. I presented the many, many books I love and showed them how much I loved the books. Some of them loved the books too. I showed them how to reason and put ideas together. I showed them how to infer things. I showed them how to treat others with respect, and I even demonstrated how I respected them (sometimes by being polite and supportive as I told on them for selling pot in the boys’ restroom or busted them for calling the principal bad names in Spanish). I broke up fights. I faced down one kid who came to school with real ninja throwing stars. I kept kids near the interior concrete wall when the tornado visited… at two different schools. I did what Wall Street Bankers would never be able to do. I figured out how to do things that lawyers like Johnnie Cochran would never be able to figure out how to do. And I did it all for the BIG BUCKS ($11,000 for the first year, less than $50,000 last year).
Why did I do such an incredibly stupid thing with my life? Why did I waste my entire working life like that? I can’t write this without making myself cry. I did it because Ruben and Pablo both said I was their favorite teacher. I did it because Rita and Sofie and Shannon had a deep and painful crush on me. I did it because Jose told me that after he graduated he still remembered reading The Outsiders out loud when he didn’t really remember anything else he had learned in middle school. And I did it because David needed me to do it… and I still love all of them.
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When you are small, there is something intimidating about a man in strange clothes and a garish pattern of white and red and blue all over his face. What is he hiding? What does he want? Why does he squeeze off a blast from that ridiculous little horn with the big red squeeze bulb right in your little-boy face? His big floppy shoes suggest monstrous feet. Why does he have such a big mouth with red paint all around it? “The better to eat you with, my dear!”
But clowns have a purpose for those of us who are no longer frightened little boys. They parody our actions and exaggerate everything. They look like us, sound like us, and behave like us if only we are able to look at ourselves times twelve or thirteen. They are essential to our lives and our happiness. Why, you ask? Because, my friend, we should never take ourselves too seriously. If we look at life only through serious eyes, we will never get enough of weeping. When we blow up too many balloons with our face painted on them, balloons of self-importance, as serious adults are wont to do, then we need to find the maniac with the pin. He’s not always a professional with face paint and floppy shoes. Sometimes he is the mailman, the local grocer, or even your deadbeat brother-in-law. But the point is, no matter how scary he sometimes seems, we all depend on the clown. We all need the foolishness of the most foolish among us. It keeps us sane.
Why then did I have to take it upon myself to give the world clowns? After all, that is precisely what I am doing as a writer. I am physically miserable with my six incurable diseases. I have diabetes, arthritis, hyper tension, psoriasis, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder, and I have a prostate the size of a cantaloupe. I can’t walk without a cane. I can’t breathe while I’m walking. I can’t pee without pain. I can’t draw as much as I’d like. And soon I will have to retire from teaching… the single greatest thing I ever did with my foolish little life. Oh, and every night while I’m trying to sleep, I itch the top layer of skin off all my most sensitive anatomical parts thanks to the gift of psoriasis. I have every reason to just curl up in a ball and cry. But that’s not what a clown does. A clown picks himself up and dusts off that rusty tin can that he keeps his sense of humor in. A clown looks at the world around him and sees all the really absurd things that are there. He looks at the way high school students act. He sees politicians like Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate. He sees injustice, moronic balloons with Ted Cruz’s face on them getting bigger and bigger and presidential, people on Texas roadways turning road rage into performance art, and even the contradictory things his wife says to him in little cartoon speech balloons that never seem to agree with each other and fight back and forth until they fill up the entire Cartoon Panel of Real Life. The clown sharpens that sense of humor, that crooked little pin, until it is balloon-popping razor sharp. It suddenly becomes time to pop a few balloons.
There are clowns in my writing not just because I like to write humor, but because it is the only way I can truly fight back. I must crack a few jokes. I must take a few metaphors and push them and pull them until they are so out of shape they form a picture of Ted Cruz’s face. I must puncture things and blow things up. I must toss sarcasm-berry pies at Ted Cruz’s face. (Actually, I love Ted Cruz. What wannabe humorist wouldn’t? He’s such an easy target.) I must mock things and ape people. I must sock things and grape people… waitaminnit! Grape people? Is that what a one-eyed, one-horned, giant purple people eater eats? I must do all the funny foolish things that a foolish funny clown can do to make the tears turn to laughter and pain to be ignored. Ted Cruz to be ignored too, if possible.
I have a riff or two to do on the clown heroes who inspire me. Red Skelton, Milton Berle, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and even Charlie Chaplin. But maybe that has to wait for another day… another post. As teachers and other clowns must always be aware, the attention span of the audience wears out quickly. If you have read this far, you are getting sleepy… sleepy (Michael Beyer is the funniest writer you ever read and you will not remember that I am the one who told you so).
The clown in the picture is NOT Ted Cruz. Shame on you for thinking that.
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I admit to being a colored-pencil maniac. They are like oil colors. You lay down the dark hues first and overlay the lighter colors on top. I need to learn how to photograph them more effectively, but here are some of my best.
The Girl with the Red Bird (1993)
In the Land of Maxfield Parrish
The Boy with the Bugle (1994)
That Night in Saqquara I Was Taken By Surprise (1992)
The Wings of Imagination
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I have started work on the next novel which I will call The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. It takes two of the important supporting characters from my novel Catch a Falling Star, and weaves them into a story that can only be called a prequel-sequel to the previous book. It begins when the characters first meet and become friends. It incorporates some of the events from the alien invasion in Catch a Falling Star, and it concludes the incredible story of a friendship between a really nice mad scientist and the only son of a rural English teacher.
I have included here the first two cantos of this humoresque hodgepodge novel so you can get a sense of how truly awful the whole thing is going to be. (If you choose to skip this first-draft nonsense, I will completely understand. Not forgive you, mind you, but understand.)
Canto One – In the dark corners of the house in 1984
The stupid boy was easily followed home. When he patted the little Pomeranian dog on her fuzzy head, he entered through the back door, unlocking it with his key. He went in to make his afternoon peanut butter sandwich, stupidly leaving the door unlocked. The man in black couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.
The strip of bacon the man in black offered to the canine moron was soaked in a fast-acting, taste-free poison. The barker was silenced. The man in black quietly slipped into the house. Standing in the back entryway, he could peer in and see the stupid boy bending over the peanut butter with the knife in hand. The boy was handsome in a way. He had his father’s stupid blond hair and myopic eyes. The glasses on his little face were thick enough to magnify his blue-gray eyes. He had that same owlish look that the genius father always wore. But he had his mother’s lovely mouth and the same child-like oval face that always made his mother seem so appealing, so girlishly lovely.
As the man stepped into the kitchen, the boy looked up startled.
“Why are you dressed like that?” he asked. “You look like some kind of burglar.”
The man in black grinned. He whipped out the chloroformed cloth and pressed it over the mouth and nose of the boy. The stupid boy melted into his grasp. Swiftly bound and gagged, the boy was left tied up in a chair at the kitchen table. Now, the real work could begin.
The basement door was the first obstacle. It had a keypad lock. The man in black dusted the key pad with fingerprint dust. He could easily see the four keys that the genius always pressed. He remembered the pattern of code entry he had seen the genius using a hundred times from afar. Two in the upper corner, the one and the four, the key in the middle, the five, and the one at the bottom, the eight.
It worked! With a snap-hiss the electronically sealed door opened. Down he went into the lab.
The small safe was still open. Leave it to a genius to be sloppy about replacing paperwork and locking it up again. He never re-locked the safe upstairs with his wife’s jewels in it. Why would this safe be any different? The safe-cracking tools could be left in the old black pocket!
Inside the safe, just where he’d been told it would be, was the manila envelope marked Tesla Project. He took it out. It was worth a fortune apparently. Soon he would have the whole pile of money the ambassador had offered him. The man in black licked his lips. He stuck the envelope in his pocket.
Next would come the cover story. Yes, the experimental prototype sat on the table where the ambassador’s advisor had said it would be. How did the advisor know so much about the crazy genius? He had never been at any of the family reunions. The man in black smiled to himself. Easy enough to do. He used his lighter to start some of the papers on the table burning. He added some more flames to the nearby desk. Then he turned the prototype on.
Electricity began to shimmer and shine, crawling over the surface of the silver metal ball. Tiny electrical bursts that looked like lightning arced out over the table and connected with some of the water pipes overhead. The fire began to blossom faster than the man in black had anticipated. Time to get out, or be immolated too.
At the top of the stairs he was horrified to see that she was there too. She was bent over the boy, trying to untie him from the chair.
“Leo!” she said. “What have you done?” Her beautiful brown eyes were filled with horror.
It was a real shame. He hadn’t expected her to get there so quickly. He had intended for the boy to be the only one caught in the “accident”. Ah, well. He wasn’t actually Leo anyway. Leo was dead. He only looked like Leo and had taken Leo’s place in the family for a time. He hit her with a violent blow to the temple and she crumpled.
The flames were roaring up into the kitchen from the lab. The place would go up quickly. In his haste to leave the conflagration, he failed to notice how her hand, as she crumpled, had managed to clutch at his pocket on the way to the floor. He hadn’t noticed how the envelope had been dislodged by her fingers and also knocked to the floor. As he strode swiftly out of the house, he did not realize that his prize had remained behind to burn with his innocent victims. The perfect crime. He would never be suspected. But he would never be rewarded either. He was congratulating himself as he slipped away from the blazing inferno, his handiwork. And everything that mattered to the genius was on fire. A whole world was passing away.
Canto Two… Norwall, Iowa, population 278, 1988
Norwall, like many small towns in Iowa, had not changed more than a particle or two a year from about 1919 to around 1982. It had a main street. The houses were done mostly in the Victorian style, with its various porches and bay windows and corner tower-like structures. It was a sleepy-quiet little farm town where practically nothing ever happened. It was mostly set up for farm business. There was a grain elevator at the west end of Main Street, and a lumber yard at the southern end of Whitten Avenue. It was not unusual to see tractors parked in town along with the family cars and farmers’ pickup trucks.
Tim Kellogg had been born in the Belle City Hospital in 1978, and had lived in the town of Norwall all his life. He would’ve been bored to tears early on if it had not been for the Norwall Pirates. They were the local 4-H softball team, but they were also the greatest secret club and eternal fraternity of liars that was ever put together on a boring Saturday afternoon in Iowa. They had an interesting oral history. It was rumored and asserted by former club members that once they had chased a werewolf and defeated him even though he had killed an old church lady and a local minister. They also supposedly fought and defeated an undead Chinese wizard once, though details about that one were far more likely to change from tale-teller to tale-teller.
Not only was Tim a member of the club, but he was second in line to be grand and glorious leader. His older cousin Valerie Clarke was the current leader, but she was in high school now and so beautiful that she couldn’t help but always be busy with boys. Soon the club would be handed over to him, and no more girls would be members, possibly for eternity. This was an idea of no small attraction to Norwall boys who were less than enthusiastic about having a girl for a leader. You really couldn’t walk around the clubhouse naked or fart as much as you wanted to if your leader was a girl.
And Tim was very definitely looking forward to getting to know the mysterious new neighbor on Pesch Street. In the very house next door a man with thick glasses and eyes like an owl kept bringing in the most fascinating stuff. Computers, the big mainframe sorts of computers, fish tanks, hoses, machines both sleek and junky whose purposes were totally mysterious. And there were so many bicycle wheels! Bicycle wheels, gears, flywheels, chains, and driver cords. What did this man intend to do with all the wonderful junk? It was fuel for the wildest of speculations from the Norwall Pirates.
Tim rode up to the grocery store on Main Street and sat there on his bike in the middle of the sidewalk waiting. His best friend and fellow Pirate, Tommy Bircher, rode up also and grinned a silent greeting. Tommy was only a month younger than Tim, but was also different in that he had not lived his whole life in the little Iowa town. Although his grandparents, uncles, and various other relatives were rooted here, Tommy’s father and mother both traveled to distant places in pursuit of their business interests. Albert Bircher was an executive officer in a large Chicago-based business. Tommy and his family had moved back to Norwall only temporarily two years ago. Tommy had spent three years of his ten living in France.
“So, Tim, you got it all figured out yet?” Tommy grinned puckishly.
“Oh, you know… yes. The gossips in this town know everything about everybody, and all the gossips talk in the Post Office. We just hafta go there and listen.”
“That could take some time.”
“Yeah, but it will be worth it. We gotta find out somehow.”
“Okay, you’re the boss.”
Together, the two infamous Pirates stealthily walked over to the Norwall Post Office between what had once been the grocery store and what was now and always had been the fire station. They parked their bicycles in the fire station bike rack. They went in nonchalantly, trying to be nonchalant like they really belonged there, and hoping they really knew what nonchalant meant.
“Hello, boys,” said George “the Salesman” Murdoch, Post Master and gossip aficionado of the highest order.
“Uh, hello,” said Tim, trying to cover for both of them. He quickly looked at the wanted posters and missing children flyers on the medium-sized bulletin board near the East end of the counter.
Marjorie Dettbarn and Wilma Bates, two of Norwall’s middle-aged church ladies were there trading juicy stories and other tidbits with “the Salesman”.
“You know, George,” Wilma was saying, “the police really should be looking more carefully at the backgrounds of people like that.”
“Why do you say that, Mrs. Bates?” asked the Post Master with a sly grin.
“You know his wife is dead. They say it isn’t out of the question that he might’ve murdered her.”
“You’re so right, Wilma,” said Mrs. Dettbarn. “He’s such a suspicious-looking character. He never seems to hear you when you say hello.”
“Yes, “said Bates, “always has his nose in some book or other.”
“Do you ladies say hello to him a lot?” asked Murdoch the Post Master.
“Oh my, no,” said Mrs. Dettbarn. “I said it once. That’s all the chance a spooky young man like that really needs, don’t you know.”
“Yes, yes,” said Bates, “I never spoke to him at all. You can’t be too careful around a person like that!”
“Oh, you are right there,” said the Post Master. “He gets a check from the government twice a month, and numerous ones from different corporations. I think he may be quite wealthy in many ways. Who knows how a person like that earns so much money. Probably something suspicious, I say.”
Tommy and Tim were both wide eyed as Tim nudged Tommy towards the door.
As soon as they were outside, Tim nearly exploded. “A murderer! And lots of money coming in all the time!”
“Yeah, he could be a professional killer who works for the government!” gushed Tommy. “Oh, but who were they talking about?”
“You poophead! They were discussing my new neighbor, Orbit Wallace!”
“Orbit Wallace?”
“Well, something like that! The new guy that moved in next door.”
“Hey,” said Tommy, “maybe we should go stare at his house for a while!”
“Yeah! Great idea!” said Tim.
So the two Pirates were now on a mission to catch the hired killer red handed. Tim had visions of apprehending him literally red handed, with blood dripping from his fingertips. Red handed in the worst possible way.
*****
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Ancient Aliens Theorists assert that Zeus and Poseidon were actually powerful alien beings who came to Earth and presented themselves as gods. I now know this to be true, because I have run afoul of an old Greek god with a foul temper and a vengeful spirit. Umussnago Pastus is the ancient Greek god of the traffic light, and for reasons unknown, he has decided to do to me at least as much damage as Poseidon once did to Odysseus.
Now, the reason I have to worry about Umussnago’s foul humors is that I am a city dweller. I live in Carrollton, on the Western side of the Dallas part of the DFW metroplex. My teaching job, however, is on the East side of Dallas in Garland. That means my morning commute (which I must begin at 6 o’clock A.M. to avoid traffic) is liberally blessed with 45-plus stoplights. Depending on what circuitous, weaselly route I must follow, I can pass through the jurisdiction of as many as 52 stop lights.
A stop light, for you country bumpkins who have to face only one or two in your entire town, is a hideous time-consuming torture device. They were invented in the late eighteen hundreds by the British, particularly on engineer named J.P. Knight, who apparently knew in advance that they would one day inflict far more harm and mental duress on the rebellious colonies than they would on the honorable homeland. A four-way light, which almost all of them are in the Dallas area, can force you to sit for as much as four minutes. I have a morning commute that at its absolute best takes twenty minutes to travel by car while following a safe speed limit (actually with Texas drivers, anything less than twenty miles per hour over the limit will get you killed from behind… killed by car crash, too, not just by sixgun). Four minutes multiplied by fifty-two stoplights is… a major commuting problem.
Those of you who managed to stay awake during high school math class already see that by the statistical probability of hitting red out of three whole choices should not cause me to sit and percolate at a red light for the almost four hours of extra commute time that this makes possible. However, I have, in fact, counted forty red lights in one drive five different times. How many times have I had forty or more greens, you say? Never. This led me to suspect that old Umussnago didn’t like me. But a number of other factors encountered time after time, have led me to believe he positively loathes me.
If you are approaching a green light, especially a stale green light that you know is soon going to turn yellow and then the deadly red, you can increase your speed and try to skate through the intersection on yellow. Does this work for me? Ah, no. Umussnago will somehow make the yellow light into a super-short nano-second flash so that you end up driving through the intersection not on yellow, but on red. Why is this a problem? Red-light intersection dashes equal a three-hundred to four-hundred dollar ticket. And there is almost always a lurking cop to see it. If not the cop, there are those insidious intersection cameras that snap a quick video of you committing the capital offense of red-light violations. Try arguing with a Garland or Richardson or Farmers’ Branch traffic court that you didn’t actually violate a sacred red light! They have the video. I have paid enough tickets that I start slowing down to a stop while the light is still green.
Then, too, if you think you can’t make it through the intersection on green, or at least yellow, before you contemplate the stop, you have to remember the average Texan driver behind you is thoroughly convinced that he is going to get by being the last car to zoom through as the light is changing to red. He is, in fact, speeding up behind you as you make the horribly unwise decision to stop. You are going to die. Umussnago is pleased by this.
People who ride with me comment that I must have the most incredibly bad luck with stop lights of any human being on Earth. They see how I go from one light turning from green to red and trapping me for the maximum stop-light sit-time to the next where exactly the same thing happens, to the next, and the next, and… well, this just gets ridiculous after a while. Apparently no one but me sees him sitting up there laughing at me. Umussnago Pastus, Greek-dang god of traffic lights!
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Stuart West’s Young Adult novel, Tex, the Witch Boy, is a very engaging murder mystery that takes several unusual turns. Unlike most stories of the supernatural, the monsters are not the evil creatures of the night, but the evil creatures of the high school locker rooms and hallways. Tex and his friends are the outsiders, the loners that have to band together and help each other against brainless beefy bullies who use their athletic gifts to torment and even attempt to kill the story’s heroes. Tex has a very unusual set of skills to apply to the problem. It turns out that he is a witch. And with the help of his witch-mentor, a crazy blue-haired old lady named Mickey, Tex might just be able to solve a murder, save the girl, and help his friends through mysterious magic powers. It is an engaging whodunit that will have you doing what I did, turning back the pages and re-reading to find those clues that I so very cleverly missed altogether. You need to read this book. And if you have a teenager at home, you need to make them read and enjoy it too. Better yet, forbid them to read it. That will help them enjoy it all the more.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B3U5OWU/ref=cm_cr_mts_prod_img
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Catch a Falling Star 