I am not happy. We should have been done with the Pumpkinhead Criminal four years ago. An insurrection is an act of treason. Look at how Putin dealt with his mercenary force, which simply marched back from the war front toward Moscow. Those guys are dead now. The law used to be that traitors were executed. This one gets to be a dictator.
In 2017 the Pumpkinhead really screwed me over. At that time I had been retired from teaching for three years. I had struggled to eliminate all my credit card debt and pay down medical debts. Pumpkinhead pushed through his massive tax cut for billionaires. There were also measures to raise taxes on certain classes of people who paid less taxes than the average worker. This included pensioners in education. So, even though my pension was funded by the money I paid into the pension system for teachers month by month for 31 years, he laid upon us increased taxes that went up by more than 100 dollars a month and would incrementally increase for five years after that. And then the rotted old gourd increased the massive wealth he and his billionaire friends got by retroactively making changes to the tax code apply to the entire year… from a tax law instituted in December. I suddenly had a $2,000+ tax bill that I could not pay off at tax time because no warning was given about how much more needed to be withheld from paychecks before the last month of the year. I had to file for a monthly payoff plan that lasted more than a year. I went bankrupt in 2017. Not the kind of bankruptcy that Pumpkinhead walked away from so many times, but a Chapter 13 bankruptcy where you have to have all your worldly possessions evaluated for possible attachment and make arrangements for a large monthly payout every month for five years. I have gone through this same period of rage before. I survived it by managing not to die in the pandemic and living longer than my parents to use a portion of my inheritance to pay off the bankruptcy. I also managed to outlast the Pumpkinhead who was defeated by Grandpa Biden in 2020. But now he has another impossible election win to blast me with.
I am through some of the stages of grief already. This last election was a cruel blow. I am already done with denial and bargaining. But ANGER? I would never seek to kill anybody. But I have been sorting through a number of murder fantasies. Many of them involve smashing pumpkins with hammers.
I am not, however, suited to long periods of rage and boiling anger. The clown dictator will not win against me. He can’t stop me from being a nudist because that occurs mostly in my imagination anyway. And he can probably throw me in prison for my books and my nude drawings. And he will probably deport my immigrant wife, even though she spent more than twenty years earning her US Citizenship. He cannot, however, spoil the bittersweet beauty of the poetry of life for me. I have lived a long and productive life. I have many more people who love and respect me than he does. And I do not suffer from his Narcissistic doubts and phobias.
The Pumpkinhead will not win against me. I will vote against him every chance I can get. I will testify against him before God. And I will no longer honor his MAGA Minions with responses on my Facebook and Instagram posts. I will no longer post on X. And I will get back to writing things that matter… at least to me. Firetruck You, Pumpkinhead. And I didn’t leave out the “iretr” part, so I didn’t use profanity.
During my middle-school teaching years I also bought and read copies of The Prince and the Pauper, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi. I would later use a selection from Roughing It as part of a thematic unit on Mark Twain where I used Will Vinton’s glorious claymation movie, The Adventures of Mark Twain as a way to painlessly introduce my kids to the notion that Mark Twain was funny and complex and wise.
Catch a Falling Star 
I Love to Laugh
“Mickey, why can’t you be more serious the way smart people are?”
“Well, now, my dear, I think I take humor very seriously.”
“How can you say that? You never seem to be serious for more than a few seconds in a row.”
“I can say it in a high, squeaky, falsetto voice so I sound like Mickey Mouse.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“I can also burp it… well, maybe not so much since I was in junior high.”
“I distinctly remember getting in trouble in Mrs. Mennenga’s third grade class in school for pantomiming pulling my beating heart out of my chest and accidentally dropping it on the floor. She lectured me about being more studious. But I made Alicia sitting in the row beside me laugh. It was all worth it. And the teacher was right. I don’t remember anything from the lesson on adding fractions we were supposed to be doing. But I remember that laugh. It is one precious piece of the golden treasure I put in the treasure chest of memories I keep stored in my heart.”
“I always listened to the words Groucho Marx was saying, even though he said them awfully fast and sneaky-like. I listened to the words. Other characters didn’t seem to listen to him. He didn’t seem to listen to them. Yet, how could he respond like he did if he really wasn’t listening? In his answers were always golden bits of wisdom. Other people laughed at his jokes when the laugh track told them to. I laughed when I understood the wisdom.”
“Laughing is a way of showing understanding. Laughing is a way of making yourself feel good. Laughing is good for your brain and your heart and your soul. So, I want to laugh more. I need to laugh more. I love to laugh.”
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