These are volumes 3 & 4 of my daily journal that I have kept since the 1980s.
Writing every single day is something I have been doing since 1975, my senior year in high school. It is why I claim to be a writer, even though I have never made enough money at it to even begin to think of myself as a professional writer. I kept a journal/diary/series of notebooks that I filled with junk I wrote and doodles in the margins up until the mid-90s when I began to put all my noodling into computer files instead of notebooks. I have millions of words piled in piles of notebooks and filling my hard drive to the point of “insufficient memory” errors on my laptop. I am now 69 years old and have been writing every day for 51 years.
There are days in the past where I only wrote a word, or a sentence or two. But there were a lot of words besides the words in my journal. I started my first novel in college. I completed it the summer before my first teaching job in 1981. I put it the closet, never to be thought of again, except when I needed a good cringe and cry at how terrible a writer I once was. I have been starting, stopping, percolating, piecing together, and eventually completing novel projects ever since… each one goofier and more wit-wacky than the last. So I have a closet full of those too.
It would be wrong of me to suggest that my journals are only for words. As a cartoon-boy-wannabee I doodle everywhere in margins and corners and parts of pages. Sometimes the doodle is an afterthought. Sometimes it precedes the paragraph. Sometimes it is directly connected to the words and their meaning.
Sometimes the work of art is the main thing itself.
But always, the habit of writing down words and ideas every single day takes precedence over every other part of my day. That’s the main reason I am stupid enough to think of myself as a writer even though I don’t make a living by writing.
But I did put my words into my profession too. As a teacher of writing, I wrote with and to my students. I did that for 31 years as a classroom teacher, and two years as a substitute. I required them each to keep a daily journal (though they only got graded for the ones they wrote in class, and then only for reaching the amount of words assigned). We shared the writing aloud in class, making only positive comments. I wrote every assignment I gave them, including the journal entries. They got to see and hear what I could write, and it often inspired them or gave them a structure to hang their own ideas upon. And often they liked what I wrote and were surprised by it almost as much as I liked and was surprised by theirs. Being a writer was never a total waste of time and effort.
So am I telling you that if you want to be writer you have to write every day too? If I have to tell you that… you have totally missed the point.
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 
Healing From A Fatal Wound
This is a repost from 2016, the beginnings of terrible times under a pumpkinhead president.
The Trumpkins and Trolls won the battle and are now busy eating their prisoners… along with the puppies and kittens for dessert. And as far as I can see, the war is over. We had a chance with the Paris Climate Accords to repair the damage to the life of this planet, even though it was a very eleventh-hour plan to avert the end of life on Earth. The Trolls and Trumpkins are peeing on that fence too, shorting it out and preventing it from saving us from being eaten by the heat-wolves of corporate polluters.
I myself wasn’t expecting to live through another decade in any case, but now, I fear the lives of my children and grandchildren will be cut short as well. You can’t poop where you eat on a regular basis and expect not to get sick and die. I predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series because they stole key talent from the Cardinals and had a young, rising club to add them to. I got that one right. I predicted that Trump would win the presidency because I know a lot of the Trump-voter kind of former middle-class white people who are seriously in financial and existential pain, and I knew who they were going to blame it on. If I am right about this last thing too, then we are all doomed.
“Jeez, Mickey! You don’t call that humor, do you?”
Well, I guess I do, because humor comes from being able to laugh at the darkness and make fun of the dumpy-lumpy lumbering bears of bad fortune that are about to eat you. We are going to have a laugh or two before the end at the expense of Trumpkins and Trolls because they make world-shaking decisions based on faith in false facts. The irony and stupidity of it all is a very laughable absurdity that will build BS mountains taller than Everest. And those mountains will collapse upon them, burying them in poop. Never mind that we will also be buried. They brought it on themselves by the choices they made. Seeing them get their comeuppance has to be worth a laugh or two.
I have pretty much let Will Rogers speak to this current election result through the memes I have chosen to accompany this gloomy-doomy essay. I think it is significant that wisdom from a hundred years ago still applies so completely to the politics of today. With democracy and elections we get what we deserve… not what we want. We need to change to face the future, if we even get to have one. But the past clearly shows that we haven’t learned our lessons very well. I guess there’s nothing left to do but laugh about it… and try to love each other a little better before the bitter end.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, irony, Liberal ideas, politics, self pity
Tagged as Donald Trump, doom and gloom, election reaction, goofiness, humor, News, politics, Trump, Will Rogers