My poor little pony has a broken leg… er… wheel. I was told by insurance to get a rental car to drive while it is getting fixed… or maybe shot in the head, because that’s what they do with ponies that have broken legs. They don’t want me driving it with a wobble-wheel that may fall off at any moment. Of course, if the insurance is paying for it, they expect you to go as cheaply as possible. That’s how I ended up driving this little white roller skate that somebody inflated with a bicycle pump. Truly, I could’ve designed a sturdier and better-looking car using the old Ritz cracker boxes I build castles from, and some chocolate donuts on sticks for wheels. The thing does NOT have a Rolls-Royce engine. When it starts, the engine makes a winding-up noise like, “brrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRAHP!” that after three minutes finally gives a little kick and shifts into second gear. The squirrel that runs in the exercise wheel that makes the engine go is surely both spastic and epileptic. It has seizures going around corners. I do not imagine myself driving anywhere in it faster than 35 miles per hour. In Dallas suburban traffic it is going to get me honked at a lot. Not just your ordinary “Go-faster-stupid!” honks, but real, LOUD honks of impending doom piling up behind me.
Here you see it grinning its toothless fat grandpa-grin at me from the parking lot at Braums’ Ice Cream, the first place it successfully took me after getting it from Enterprise Rental Co. It was obviously quite happy with itself. My kids observed, while looking at it for the first time, that it has a smiley face on it that reminds you of a Japanese manga chibi character with little license-plate-gray Hitler mustache. Let me see if I can enhance the effect so you can more clearly see what they meant;
I truly believe that I am going to have fun making fun of this goofy little car.
Yesterday I was in a car accident that I wasn’t even a participant in. Wait, is that the right way to say it? I was in a car wreck when I wasn’t in my car. No, that doesn’t sound right either. Driving skills in Texas were definitely on display yesterday as I lay ill in my bed and a passing Texas motorist unintentionally held a mini demolition derby with my car on the street.
As you can see from the un-funny picture Paffooney above, it was mainly the left hind leg of the old pony that took the hit. The other car hit the rear driver’s side wheel with enough force to flatten the tire, wreck the rim, and bend the end of the axle so that, with an emergency spare in place, I could still pick up my kids from school, though it was with a definite wibble-wobble added to the experience. It was an inconvenient accident for me. But it was worse for the other guy. His car bounced off mine and skidded down the street about 200 feet. It came to rest against the curb with a front wheel so bent that the steering wheel could no longer move it. It sat at a weird angle to the rest of the car.
The young guy driving was rather shaken up. He had trouble calling for the police to come and make an accident report because his hands were still shaking, yet he felt guilty enough that he wouldn’t let me make the call. I tried to be as calm and helpful as possible. I found out he was also originally from Iowa. He also moved to Texas for work after college. He could easily have been me thirty years ago. He said that he had just dropped a friend off in the neighborhood, and the friend had left a drink cup from 7-Eleven on the dash. When the cup fell, he made the mistake of trying to catch it, and drove directly into my car.
The timing of the accident was miserable. I was already feeling ill before it happened, and it caused me to have to stand outside to give and send information to his insurance, my insurance, the police officer, and AAA Automotive Assistance to make my car drive-able enough to get my kids from school during the Friday afternoon rush. The repairs are going to be extensive because of a bent axle. But I survived it. And it gave me something to post for today. So let me end with a reprise of my cartoon homage to Texas city driving.
The current state of my cardboard castle is pictured above. I probably need to remind you that I am making this thing with my own hands. It is made from old Ritz Cracker boxes with a layer of cutout skin printed from the computer. It is put together with glue, tape, and a little bit of ingenuity… oh, and a lot of “insert tab A into slot B”. It is shaping up into a very Elizabethan style of castle. I originally started it to create props for use with the family Dungeons and Dragons game. But it grows into a project existing for its own sake, a piece of artwork that is made just like so many others I have done before, in many small steps, one piece at a time.
Here we are stepping back in time to what it looked like before, with fewer elements created. You can see that the essentials are already added in here… the tavern and the outhouse… can’t live without either of those.
It does, indeed, make a worthy addition and contribution to the ongoing D&D campaign currently journeying through the eastern cities of Aundair in the realm of Eberron. We are seeking the stolen dragon eggs, and have recently conquered the castle of the Duke of Evernight, freeing it from its terrible curse.
But I do truly believe that the key to this art project, in fact, the theme of this whole post, is that big, impressive things are built our of one small step following another over time. You build brick walls with a bricklayer placing one brick at a time.
Novels, too, are accomplished this way… one small step after another. As are both the marriage and the raising of children in the life of a family. Nothing worth building goes up in a flash… unless it’s built by the Flash… but he is only a character from a comic book and not real. So, I continue to build. One day soon, I shall have battlements capable of warding off goblins and orcs. And for today, I have added another brick to the walls of my blog.
Before I begin this very confusing and confusticating tale, I need to start by stating clearly that I do not believe in ghosts. I am firmly convinced that there is a rational scientific explanation for everything, and those things we may be tempted to see as a spirit living on after death of the body are really only misperceptions of other things… and wishful thinking.
In spite of all that, we have a ghost dog living in our house.
I know that contradicts everything I just said, but human beings are like that. Practically everything about this life is shot full of contradictions and impossibilities. So, let me lay out those contradictions as I encountered them.
This house we live in now was built in the 1970’s. It was lived in by a middle-class white family. A woman showed up here ten years ago wanting to look at the house because she grew up in it, and it had been sold when her parents died. So this house is not young enough to be free of potential spirits of those who lived before. But no tragic deaths, the kind that the lore says cause ghosts to walk, happened in this house. Except for the possibility of a family pet hit by a car in this neighborhood.
The first time I saw it was when I got out of the bathtub one evening in early January. As I opened the door to the bathroom, still not having my glasses on, I saw a dog sitting in the upstairs hallway, panting with its tongue hanging out. Now, we do have a dog, but our dog, Jade, is a small yellow-and-white dog. The dog I glimpsed out of the corner of my near-sighted, astigmatic eye with no corrective lens in front of it was a rather large chocolate brown dog. I jumped a bit and looked directly at it. It was no longer there with a speed that gave the lie to the notion that it was a real dog. It had to be a trick of the eye and the goofy old brain. Our mind is wired in a way that makes sense out of every visual stimulus-blob in the best way that it can. I must have misinterpreted some shadow or blob of color in a way that my brain instantly converted into a chocolate-brown Labrador-retriever sort of dog… with a goofy, open-mouthed dog-smile.
So, I didn’t really think anything more about it. I investigate ghost stories and conspiracy theories all the time as a part of the kind of surrealist writing I like to do. I always find those wedges of doubt that smugly allow me to dismiss the Don Knotts’ Mr. Chicken response.
Then, I saw it again. I have to get up in the night to go to the bathroom at least three times every night. About a week ago, I was making one of these necessary nocturnal treks when I happened to look down the staircase in passing. I saw the tail end of a big chocolate-colored dog trotting past on the way towards the garage. My heart leaped. And then I reminded myself we have a dog and she lives on a very different schedule than we do. I went to the bathroom, and then went down the stairs to investigate. The family room door was shut and blocked with a clothes-hamper. We have been trying to keep the dog out of the family room because she has a bad habit of trying to pee on the family room carpet in the middle of the night to mark her territory. There are certain discolored spots on the rug that we have worked very hard to keep dry. And I found our dog asleep on the foot of my son’s bed where she always sleeps. Whatever I saw wasn’t her. But again, I didn’t have my glasses on. I began mulling over the possibility of this post at that point.
Last night made this post a necessity. While returning from my nocturnal pee-break after midnight, I distinctly heard a dog whimpering, coming from the landing of the stairs. I stepped into the landing, and I still heard it. If it was not a dream sound or a misinterpretation of my own stomach growling, then I was hearing an invisible dog whimpering. It didn’t last for more than a minute. Again, the dog herself was nowhere near the place.
Should I be scared? Of course not. Ghosts don’t exist, do they? And even if this one does exist somehow, it was a beloved family pet, more likely to protect us than hurt us. So I was able to get back to sleep easily. But this post became absolutely necessary. If you read in the newspapers that a family in Carrollton, Texas was eaten by wolves in the middle of the night some night… tell somebody about my unfounded suspicions.
I have been suffering through bad day after bad day recently. I had a fender bender. My favorite football team got plowed into the turf in the playoffs. I have been suffering a great deal from weather-induced arthritis pain, low blood sugar, and viral infections. And I even reached the download limit on my WordPress account, meaning I will have to pay more money to post new pictures.
But this blog is percolating along at 30 views per day or more. I am being read and exposed to the light more than I ever have in my whole writing life. That doesn’t earn me a penny, in fact, it costs me money, but it has to be a very good thing. I deal with pain and hardship through creativity. I create things to make it better.
When I was a kid, there was a little old German lady that lived in our little town. She had a tattoo on her forearm. She had been in a concentration camp in Poland in the 1940’s. But , living as an Iowan, she was the most cheerful and loving old lady I knew. She gave me chocolate bars for holding the door open for her at the Methodist church. She gave homemade cookies to all the kids constantly. She did not have any children of her own for very sad reasons that no one ever talked about. She loved it when children visited her at her little tar-paper-covered house that we nicknamed “the Gingerbread House”. I vividly remember being there one cold winter night after choir practice when she gave us gingerbread cookies and hot chocolate. She told us on that snowy winter evening, “Gingerbread makes everything better.”
I have to believe that philosophy is essentially correct. My stories are like gingerbread. If I cook them just right, they will have that good ginger taste that soothes all hurts and longings. So, I started putting together a story in honor of her. She is already a character in several of my stories. But I needed one where Grandma Gretel was the main character. And it has to be about baking gingerbread and telling stories. In fact, I think I will bake a little magic into it. The gingerbread men she bakes will actually come to life. And I will put together a theme about overcoming the darkness with a smile and wink and a recipe for gingerbread.
I am a Dr. Who fan. It is without a doubt, one of the most important factors of my Who-life. I started watching in the early 70’s when Jon Pertwee was the Third Doctor. We used to get Whovian re-runs on PBS on Friday nights. I watched every episode I could manage… Cybermen, Daleks, Silurians… the Master. It was fantastic sci-fi and imagination fuel of the highest octane. The Fourth Doctor was my favorite after I started watching his episodes. I still think of the image of Tom Baker’s Doctor whenever I think of Dr. Who.
It was during the 1980’s that PBS went back to the beginning and aired the Dr. Who serials from the very start with William Hartnell as the Doctor. My favorite Doctor turned out to be the little clown Patrick Troughton who played the Second Doctor and really sealed the formula of a wild and wacky adventurer through time and space who could make me laugh and keep me on the edge of my seat and sometimes even make me cry.
The order I watched the Doctors was 3-4-1-2-3-4-5-6-7 until the series restarted in the new Millennium. Then I watched 9-10-11-8-and a couple of episodes of 12. I used a combination of BBC America when we still had cable TV, and then I bought DVD’s to to try to fill in the blanks of what I missed. When he went to the Marines, my oldest son bought me a Netflix account (shared with the whole family) and I have been using that to watch new episodes that I haven’t had a chance to see before… even some of the old Classic Dr. Who episodes that I had missed along the way. I fell in love all over again with Dr. Who. David Tennant and Matt Smith became my new favorite Doctors.
But then came February 1st, 2016. Contract disputes took all the BBC shows off Netflix. I panicked. I bought Hulu on January 30th. Dr. Who was there up until this morning. Apparently they no longer have Dr. Who either.
The world is darker place this morning. My travels through time and space with the Doctor and his companions has temporarily been stalled yet again.
I hear rumors that it will be renegotiated, the way the CBS/Time Warner dispute was that took Big Bang Theoryaway from me for a year. But I have no faith in the possible curbing of corporate greed and the effects it has on my imaginary life. I mourn for now, and pray to the Doctor, hoping for relief.
“Kaw-Liga”
KAW-LIGA, was a wooden Indian standing by the door
He fell in love with an Indian maid over in the antique store
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.
He always wore his Sunday feathers and held a tomahawk
The maiden wore her beads and braids and hoped someday he’d talk
KAW-LIGA – A, too stubborn to ever show a sign
Because his heart was made of knotty pine.
[Chorus:]
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he never got a kiss
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he don’t know what he missed
Is it any wonder that his face is red
KAW-LIGA, that poor ol’ wooden head.
KAW-LIGA, was a lonely Indian never went nowhere
His heart was set on the Indian maiden with the coal black hair
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.
Then one day a wealthy customer bought the Indian maid
And took her, oh, so far away, but ol’ KAW-LIGA stayed
KAW-LIGA – A, just stands there as lonely as can be
And wishes he was still an old pine tree.
The quirky movie I reviewed, Moonrise Kingdom, reconnected me with a song I loved as a child. It was on an old 45 record that belonged to my mother’s best friend from high school. When the Retleffs sold their farm and tore down their house and barn, they had a huge estate sale. My mother bought the old record player and all the collected records that Aunt Jenny still had. They were the same ones my mother and her friend Edna had listened to over and over. There were two records of singles about Indian love. Running Bear was about an Indian boy who fell in love with little White Dove. They lived on opposite sides of a river. Overcome with love, they both jump into the river, swim to the middle, lock lips, and both drown. Together forever. That song, it turns out, was written by the Big Bopper, and given to Johnny Preston to sing, and released the year after the Big Bopper died in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.
Kaw-liga, by Hank Williams, was a wooden Indian sitting in front of a cigar store. His love story is even worse. As you can see from the lyrics above, he never even gets the girl. Dang, Indian love must be heck!
But I have come to realize that these aren’t merely racist songs from a bygone era. They hold withing them a plea for something essential. They are a reminder that we need love to be alive.
When I was young and deeply depressed… though also insufferably creative and unable to control the powers of my danged big brain, I knew that I wanted love. There was one girl who went to school with me, lovely Alicia Stewart (I am not brave enough to use her real name), that filled my dreams. We were classmates, and alphabetical seating charts routinely put us near each other. She had a hypnotic sparkle in her eyes whenever she laughed at my jokes. She was so sweet to me… sweet to everyone… that she probably caused my diabetes. I longed to carry her books or hold her hand. I cherished every time she spoke to me, and collected the memories like stamps in a stamp album. But like the stupid cigar store Indian, I never spoke up for myself. I never told her how I felt. I was endlessly like Charlie Brown with the Little Red-Haired Girl. Sometimes you have to screw up your courage and leap into the river, even if it means your undoing. Because love is worth it. Love is necessary. And it comes to everybody in one way or another over time. I look at pictures of her grandchildren posted on Facebook now, and wonder what might have been, if only… if only I had jumped in that stupid river. I did find love. And I probably would’ve drowned had I done it back then. Life has a way of working things out eventually. But there has to be some reason that in the 50’s, when I was born, they just kept singing about Indian love.
Yesterday was a weird day. If you looked carefully at the mental map I made of Mickey’s head the other day, you realize that Uncle Slappy’s Big Box of Weirdness occupies a key position in the top center. I had a traffic accident in the parking lot of Long Middle School yesterday morning, banging bumpers with a lady named Vilma. The sun was in my eyes, and she started to go, then suddenly stopped for no reason I could see. No damage was done to anything but my pride. My wife put her parents, Tatang and Inang, on an airplane yesterday bound for the Philippine Islands, going home for a visit. Afterwards, my wife was feeling mortal, betting me that she was going to die before me even though I have the head start of six incurable diseases and surviving cancer once already. There are no symptoms for her impending heart attack, so I will probably win that bet. But the point is, it was a weird time yesterday to stumble weirdly over a weird and wacky movie on Netflix called Moonrise Kingdom. It is a Romeo and Juliet sort of story about two twelve-year-olds who fall in love at first sight, and though their families try to keep them apart, they end up together. Thankfully it is not a Shakespearian Tragedy where everybody dies at the end, though Sam is struck by lightning and the big storm nearly drowns all the boy scouts. It is more like a Shakespearian Comedy where everybody gets married at the end, though the twelve-year-olds don’t get married at the end… rather, they are married by the middle.
Wes Anderson is the genius director behind movies like;
None of which I have seen, but now have to watch ALL of them sooner or later. Kinda like the mad quest to see every Tim Burton movie ever made. I am one of the few idiots out there who think Dark Shadows was a truly wonderful movie, and along with Edward Scissor-hands, one of the finest things Johnny Depp has ever done.
In Moonrise Kingdom Anderson uses tracking shots at the beginning that shift quickly from one room to the next in a way that invokes an old-time slide show. The story is set in 1965 in Maine, and is filled with all kinds of iconic references to things we 60’s kids all vividly recall.
The movie also tells the love story of Sam and Suzy with a painter’s sense of iconic pictures that focus you on important plot points and themes.
And there are numerous quotable bits that make the movie what we teachers refer to as a text-rich environment, complete with phony kids’ books and maps and notes.
The all-star cast is pretty good, too.
This is now one of my new favorite movies. It is a happy-ending-type fairy tale with no fairies in it. It is full of ineffectual and incompetent adults who have rules of behavior like grown-ups and motivations like goofy kids… just like real life. The plot is driven by the notion that anything you do in life is a mistake, and mistakes have consequences, but you have to do them anyway because, well… that’s life.
Am I telling you that you should watch this movie too? Well, you should… but, no. I am simply gushing about this quirky movie because I like it, and yesterday was a very weird day.
As terrible as my first published novel turned out to be, I have not given up on the idea of Aeroquest. I am interested in whipping a part of it into the shape of a graphic novel. So I bought a sketchbook and noodled down some Baby Mutant Space Ninjas gunk into it in full color. But it is only a rough draft. It is not finished artwork. I can’t get over how pretty and colorful it is turning out to be. I thought I would show you how it is going so far.
There are obvious signs that the dialogue and text boxes need to turned into a more finished form. And serious editing decisions probably need to be made about moon shots.
Here is what it looks like to use computer editing to try to fix some of the problems.
I will continue to work on it, but I needed something to post today. And sometimes you need to consider the work-in-progress warts and all.
One really weird thing that teachers do is think about thinking. I mean, how can a person actually teach someone else how to think and how to learn if they don’t themselves understand the underlying processes? Now that I have retired from teaching and spend all my time feeling sorry for myself, I thought I would try thinking about thinking one more time at least. Hey, just because I am retired, it doesn’t mean I can’t still do some of the weird things I used to do as a teacher, right?
This time I made a map to aid me in my quest to follow the twists and turns of how Mickey thinks and how Mickey learns. Don’t worry, though. I didn’t actually cut Mickey’s head in half to be able to make this map. I used the magical tool of imagination. Some folks might call it story-telling… or bald-face lying.
Now, a brain surgeon would be concerned that my brain maps out in boxes. He would identify it as a seriously deformed brain. It is not supposed to be all rectangular spaces and stairs. It probably indicates a severe medical need for corrective surgery… or possibly complete amputation. But we are not going to concern ourselves with trying to save Mickey from himself right now. That is far too complex a topic to tackle in a 500-word daily post. We are just discussing the basics of operation.
You see the three little guys in the control room? They are an indication that not only did I steal an idea from the Disney/Pixar Movie Inside Out, but I apparently have too few guys doing the job up there compared to the movie version. (It probably makes sense though that a young girl like the one in the movie has a much more sensible configuration in her brain than someone who was a middle school teacher for 24 years. Seriously, that job can do a bit of damage.) The three little guys are not actually Moe, Curly, and Larry, though that wouldn’t be far from descriptive accuracy. They are Impulsive Ignatz, currently in the driver’s seat (or else I wouldn’t be writing this), Proper Percy the Planner, and Pompositous Felixian Checkerbob, the fact-checker and perfectionist (also labeled the inner nerd… I am told not everyone has one of these). They are the three little guys that run around in frantic circles in my head trying to deal with a constant flow of input and output, trying to make sense of everything, and routinely failing miserably.
I shouldn’t forget the other two little guys in my head, Sleepytime Tim in the Dream Center, and little Batty up in the attic. I have no earthly idea how either of them function, or what in the heck they are supposed to do. But there they are. The other three run up and down stairs all day, locating magic mushrooms and random knowledge in the many file cabinets, record collections, book stacks, and odd greasy containers that are stored all around in the many nooks and crannies of Mickey’s mind. They collect stuff through the eyes and ears, and it is also their responsibility to chuck things out through the stupidity broadcaster at various inopportune times. It is also a good idea for them to avoid the lizard brain of the limbic system in the basement. It is easily angered and might eat them.
So now you should be able to fully understand how Mickey thinks. (Or not… a qualifier I was forced to put in by Checkerbob.)
Catch a Falling Star 