On Cartoon Network’s Looney Tunes show, Daffy Duck has decided he wants to be a wizard. He even had business cards printed to be one.
Being a wizard is almost as easy as that. But becoming one is not what Daffy thinks it is.
wizard (n.) early 15th century., “philosopher, sage,” from Middle English wys “wise” (see wise (adj.)) + -ard. Compare Lithuanian zynyste “magic,” zynys “sorcerer,” zyne “witch,” all from zinoti “to know.” The ground sense is perhaps “to know the future.” The meaning “one with magical power, one proficient in the occult sciences” did not emerge distinctly until c. 1550, the distinction between philosophy and magic being blurred in the Middle Ages. As a slang word meaning “excellent” it is recorded from 1922. http://www.etymonline.com
The word comes from wisdom. Being one requires wisdom. Being one requires you to look to the future and use your hard-won experience to predict how the future will unfold, and what you can do about it to benefit yourself and others. You know, “magic”.
But to become a wise-one, a wizard, requires hard experience. It is possible that Daffy has acquired some over time. He’s certainly been subjected to all sorts of slapstick cartoon injuries and insults over time.
Remember this one? Daffy swallows dynamite, drinks gasoline, this bottle of nitroglycerin, and then throws a match down his throat. The results are spectacular, but Daffy has to admit that he can only do the act once.
So maybe he hasn’t become a wizard yet. To be a wizard, you have to learn from your hard experience. You have to gain knowledge in order to work spells and do magic.
For instance, my struggles to breathe from COPD have taught me to use magic potions like ginger tea and French onion soup to open my air passages wider and make breathing easier. When the siding on the back of the house deteriorated to the point that the city wouldn’t tolerate it any more, and I couldn’t afford to pay a contractor to fix it, I googled spells for siding repair on the internet, using articles and YouTube videos to magically fix the damage myself. I also consulted other wizards at Lowe’s and Home Depot, where they are happy to give you advice if you buy supplies from them.
Unlike Daffy, I think I do qualify as a wizard. I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor. I taught in a public school for 31 years. I taught middle school children. I lived through the years of the Kennedy assassination, landing men on the moon, the Civil Rights Movement, Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics, and 9-11. I lived through the Cubs winning a World Series. And all those events and hard experiences have given me more wisdom than, perhaps, any sane person would want. Of course, I’m not sure in all my years I have ever actually met a totally sane person.
You may notice that I had to get a new magic hat. My old black Walt Whitman hat flew out the window on Interstate 35 the other day. This one is a fedora made of woven straw, a grandpa hat. Who knows? I am not a grandpa yet technically, but maybe one day before I curl up my toes and go for a long dirt nap… and grandpas count as wizards too, don’t they?
Of course, authors create characters. Even autobiographers create characters. Carl Sandburg could no more make his words into Lincoln than a bird can make its tweets into a cat. Sandburg can, however, help us to understand Lincoln as Carl Sandburg understands the words that are Lincoln.
I, too, have not lived a particularly happy life. But I was always the “teacher with a sense of humor” in the classroom, and students loved me for it. Funny people are often not happy people. But they make themselves out of funny words because laughter heals pain, and jokes are effective medicine. And so I choose to write comedy novels. Novels that are funny even though they are about hard things like freezing to death, losing loved ones, being humiliated, being molested, and fear of death. Magical purple words can bring light to any darkness. I am the words I choose to write in my own story. The words not only reveal me, they make me who I am. And it is up to me to write those words. Other people might wish to do it for me. But they really can’t. The words are for me alone to write.
And so it is imperative that I write my words in the form of my novels, my essays, and this goofy blog post. I am writing myself to life, even if no one ever reads my writing.
Catch a Falling Star 
Old and Grumpy
Suppose being grumpy was a super power, and we could, as a grumpy old brotherhood of geezers, coots, and conservative uncles, could change things just by complaining about them.
No woman would ever leave a toilet seat down again. The Dunkin’ Donuts on Frankford Road would magically reopen and never run out of donuts again. And liver spots and wrinkles would suddenly be attractive to beautiful young women whether they were linked to fortunes or not.
But what if, in order to make better use of this unexplainable super power, we start telling old coots like the fool in the picture that they have to prove they will use this super power only for good, or we will raise their taxes? Or we would forbid them from ever eating bacon again? Either of those things would definitely motivate them.
Of course, the biggest problem with geezers, old coots, and conservative uncles that no one wants to sit next to at Thanksgiving is that they don’t generally get smarter and nicer with age. It is probably not wise to give them a super power that can alter reality. Yes, they are generally quite literally mean-spirited and unqualifiably dumb. And it isn’t really a matter of whether they could ever actually have a super power like that. The real problem is that they already have it. They proved it in 2016 when they elected a gigantic orange-faced Pillsbury Doughboy with mental flatulence to lead our government. And it wasn’t the dumb part that did it. It was the literally mean part. Trump is a walking, talking old coot-complaint given to us by mean old men to tell us, “We are unhappy geezers, coots, and conservative uncles who would rather blow up the government than lift a single tax dollar (especially from a rich dude) to try and fix it”.
What we truly need to do is harness a bit of that grumpy-old-man complaining power, a truly misunderstood and misused super power, to tackle problems like making public schools better, cleaning the environment, and electing smarter leaders (not the stupid ones who actually represent the majority of us). But of course, we will first have to turn off the spigots in the brewery of prejudice and ignorance that is Fox News, and brand all the greedy and stupid people with a red letter “R” for Trumpian Republican. That way, knowing who to vote for to make things better will become easier to the point that even us geezers, old coots, and conservative uncles can do it right.
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