Tag Archives: life

July 20, 2025 · 12:07 am

Becoming

The classic line from the visionary poet Theodore Roethke;

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**** This is a look back at an essay from 2017****

But the truth is, before you can BE you must first BECOME.

I know what you are probably thinking.  “What is this idiot rambling on about now?”

Well, sometimes you simply have to spout a lot of love and hoo-haw and just pretend it means something.  That is the core, I think, of what philosophy is all about.

But maybe a list of what I have already become will get the idea knitting itself together.  You know, a list of the things I can already just BE.

I have already become college educated.  I have a BA in English and an MAT in Education (Master of the Art of Teaching).  Those letters my college years bestowed upon me are only an “N” short of being an anagram for BATMAN.  So I have almost become BATMAN.

I have also finished becoming a teacher.  In fact, I have spent 31 years becoming a teacher.  I have gotten so teacherfied over the years that I am actually now becoming a retired teacher.  I haven’t learned the art of retired teacher yet.  It is still gonna take a bit of practice to start getting it right.  But I can get a kid to sit down and shut up with just a look.  I can read the mind of a glum-faced student and know we are about to have a bad day.  And I always know when to tell a really awful joke so that the students know their only hope of keeping their lunch down and retaining their sanity is to ask me to please get back to today’s lesson.  So I can BE that, at least in theory.  I am still BECOMING retired.

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Why-ever would I draw myself as a naked boy?  I have inexplicably weird urges sometimes.

I am a living, breathing human being.  I have been that now for sixty years and eight months.  I have practiced it enough that I can BE that without even thinking about it.  Well, not now, just most of the time I don’t have to think about it.

But I did make a huge mistake fairly recently in applying for a chance to be a blogger for an AANR-affiliated website.  Yes, that’s right, the American Association for Nude Recreation.  I signed on to write about being a nudist.

I am asked to write a review of the nearest naturist park, the Bluebonnet Naturist Park in Alvord, Texas.  I am hoping to find a day for a day-visit that won’t find a lot of people there.  Ummm.  How did I get roped into BECOMING a nudist?  Is it too late to back out now?  Or would that be UNBECOMING?

But most of all, I have labored long and hard at BECOMING a real writer.  I have two books already published.  Aeroquest and Catch a Falling Star.    You can find them both on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.  But don’t buy Aeroquest.  Those cheap burgle-binkies don’t deserve to make any more money off of me.  I have another book coming out soon from Page Publishing, Magical Miss Morgan.  It is a book I am really proud of, though these foofy publishers have done nothing to help it and a lot to mess it up for me.
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But, I must admit, I have just finished reading Mitch Albom’s masterpiece, The Magic Strings of Frankie Pesto.  It is a miraculous, engaging read that made me laugh and made me cry and made me fall in love with the story.  And it is so far beyond what I can do that I must write a review on it, maybe tomorrow, and gush praises all over it.  I can only dream of BEING a writer like that.  It proves to me that I have a lot more BECOMING to work on.  Sorry, Ted, I am just not there yet.

 

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July 14, 2025 · 12:24 am

The Quirky Backflips of a Writer’s Life

Tim is a character created in 1974. He began not as a character in a story, but a drawing of a boy wtith no pants or underpants on, but wearing a striped t-shirt, white with wavy blue horizontal stripes that were three fourths the size of the white stripes. It was an almost-portrait of a boy named Dewey ( or possibly something that began with the letter “T” because I make it a rule to never use real names in true stories about my actual past) that I had been watching from three tables away in the library during study hall. If you are thinking like a psychologist, you are probably thinking this sounds like a homosexual thing, but I promise I am not now nor have I ever been gay. I only have sexual fantasies about brown-eyed girls. It was the willowy and vulnerable shape of him, the quiet mystery of his quiet behavior and even quieter patterns of speech. I saw something of myself in him. A nerdy something about him that connected him to the thing that happened to me at the age of ten, and at that time was hidden from me by my traumatic amnesia. He represented the part of me that had been lost when the Big Bad Wolf in the forest caught me and ate my innocence completely.

I was never a friend or acquaintance of Dewey. He was a freshman when I was watching him as a senior in high school. We did not have PE class together, so I never saw him naked. The no-pants thing was not about him when I drew him. I never showed that picture to anyone. It was private, a thing completely about me in my own mind. I didn’t know anything about Dewey as a person, and his only personality in my estimation is what I imagined into him. So, he began fictional life as only a picture. In 1995 my oldest son was born. In a few years, the empty vessel that was Tim became more of my son than he was about me. My son inherited some… or most of my abilities as a liar, storyteller, imaginer, and devious thinker. Tim Kellogg, son of an English teacher, and grandson of a wise handyman who could do a little bit of everything, became full of fifty-percent son and fifty-percent father. He was both a portrait of my son and a self portrait.

The child I was… the Green Meanie

So, what’s the purpose of writing about where this character came from and who I modeled him after? As you get older and closer to death, you have to come to terms with a few hard truths. I will probably never be read widely as an author during my lifetime, and probably promptly forgotten as soon as I am gone. But, as a writer, I know in my very bones that it is in my DNA to need to tell a story. I have to make meaning in coherent sentences and paragraphs about the greater reveals of WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN AND MOSTLY… WHY? Life is not to be lived in a trance, unable to burble about anything but your own pleasure and pain. Life is tragedy… comedy… romance… and reverance. And the story has to be told… and rewritten and retold. We are not real people until we allow ourselves to believe our own lies.

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July 10, 2025 · 12:21 am

The Need for Magical Teddy Bears

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I woke this morning in excessive amounts of arthritis pain.  My left elbow has not been working well for a month.  My lower back is always painful after a restless night’s sleep.  Neither of my knees is willing to do the basic job required of knees in the early morning when you first wake up.  So I had to work joints back and forth to loosen them up despite the pain.  I had to stretch parts where muscles were knotted up in protest to stretching.  And it took me a half hour of painful work to get on my feet.

I have been psychologically in pain of late as well.  Being a school teacher who dedicated his life to getting young people to work together and grow up and mature, I have been deeply distressed by both the police shootings of innocent black men and the massacre of policemen here in Dallas.  My publishing goals have also hit a brick wall with recent rejections and cancelling of contracts.  I need to curl up in a corner and lick my wounds.

When I was a child I relied on stuffed animals to make me feel better when I was sick and in pain.  I had a toy tiger that was my constant companion.  I had a couple of teddy bears, one a panda, the other Smokey the Bear.  And there was a terrycloth pink elephant that I shared with my sisters.  Like many children, I talked to the stuffed animals.  Like a strange few other children, the stuffed animals would answer back.  I think that plays a large part in explaining why I am a writer of fiction stories.  I medicate my mind not with drugs, but by talking things out with imaginary people.

At this moment in time, when I am on the verge of being overwhelmed, it is a good thing that my hoarding disorder has caused me to collect stuffed toys.  I have more than one magical teddy bear to turn to.  Everything will be all right in the end.

 

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June 22, 2025 · 12:37 am

Sad Times Down in Toonerville

I have to come to terms with not having much longer on this Earth. And things go wrong more than they go right because I am old, have had arthritis for fifty years, and am losing my eyesight. I dropped my meal in the bowl I was using to make it this evening. I had to settle for a toasted cheese sandwich. I have to give up my library and a lot of my doll collection to move to Iowa, a move that was delayed at least two months by my heamrt problem. There is war with Iran to ponder, which may kill us before the climate-change weather does. WWIII? I am feeling doomed in any case.

On the good side, I got my novella done and published… finally. But Amazon has changed rules again on the paperback. I can’t publish in paperback until it reaches 72 pages. I still have to figure that out.

However, the essential fact is that I have achieved my life’s purpose. 25 books published. The authorities worry about male teachers hugging students. Republicans holler about “groomers.” I never offered a hug or asked for a hug in 31 years as a teacher. But they hugged me well over a hundred times. Both boys and girls. Because they wanted to, or needed to. That is proof you made a difference in the classroom.

I do still feel like crying anytime I remember the kids who hugged me that are now dead by their own hands, dead by alcohol or drugs, or institutionalized for poor life choices. There is more than one in each category. But they are the exceptions, not the rule.

My family is all still alive and healthy, no simple task that. My wife is still teaching. My three kids are now all functioning adults.

So, there are sad times now in Toonerville, the place Mickey lives in his own stupid head. But that’s okay. The universe is unfolding as it should.

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June 10, 2025 · 12:11 am

Forgetfulness

I may be suffering from the onset of… what’s that disease called? The one that makes you shake and be mentally confused about… what was I talking about? Oh, yes, I still can’t remember.

It disturbs me that I have difficulty recalling names that I used to rattle off the top of my head quite accurately when I was teaching and was a total master of all the useless trivia information in the universe.

Recently my daughter and number-one son were arguing with me about actors who played Superman. I successfully remembered TV Superman George Reeves who I watched as a pre-teen kid, and Christopher Reeve who I watched on the big screen as a college sophomore, and I even put the “s” at the end of the right one’s name. But I couldn’t remember the name of that new guy… No, not Brandon Routh from Superman Returns (apparently for only one movie), but that other new guy… from Man of Steel, and he was in the movie remake of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Number-One Son finally figured out who I meant by looking it up on his smartphone. Henry Cavill! Why couldn’t I remember that guy’s name? I recently watched him in the Witcher on Netflix. Henry gol-danged Cavill!!?

But then I ponder why there are some names and details I can’t seem to forget. Dawn Wells played Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island. But it wasn’t the actress’s name I could never forget. It was the sight of her belly button. When the series was on television on a night that didn’t conflict with watching Batman, I watched Mary Ann’s every movement and flounce and prance and twirl, and every banana cream or coconut cream pie she ever handed to Gilligan. At the ages of ten, eleven, and twelve I was mad to see a glimpse of her actual belly button. But not for the reason you think! I insisted to all my friends at school that I did NOT LIKE GIRLS! (Even though I actually did.) It was because I didn’t know if she had one. She wore revealing clothes and even bikini two-pieces on the show, and yet, it was always covered somehow. I remember every delicious detail of my too-close-to-the-TV inspection of Dawn Wells’ acting ability in black-and-white, and later, in syndication, in color. It was clear that somebody in the TV universe didn’t want me to see it. And maybe that is precisely why I can never forget it.

But, then again, I can’t remember this guy’s name. Yes, I know, Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. I even remember the two “d’s” in Addams. And I remember that he played the Kid when he was a little kid in Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Kid.

Yes, I honestly could not remember Jackie Coogan’s name until I looked up the Chaplin movie on Wikipedia.

It really bothers me that I cannot remember some things that I used to know really well. But given time I am able to remember that it is Parkinson’s Disease that my father has and may be causing my memory losses, and that the narrator-guy in the first picture I used in this post is Ludwig Von Drake, a character voiced by legendary cartoon voice actor Paul Frees. I am getting old. And forgetful. But how was I going to end this essay? I forget.

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June 4, 2025 · 12:25 am

The Secret Gallery in Grandma’s Closet

After years of being stored away, I discovered that my mother had hidden a hoard of my old artworks in the upstairs closet in Grandma Aldrich’s house (now my parents’ house).

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This oil painting was done on an old saw blade at the request of my Grandpa Aldrich.  He wanted a farm painting on it, like the one he’d seen in a restaurant during a fishing trip in Minnesota.  I chose as the subject Sally the pig.  Sally was a hairlip piglet that had to be bottle fed and raised in a box by the stove until later in life she became a favorite pet.  Believe it or not, pigs are smarter than the family dog.  She became a pig you could ride.  And Grandma had taken a precious old photo of my mother and Uncle Larry riding the pig.  I used that photo to make this painting.  It was also the painting I wanted to find on this trip to Iowa.  Searching for it led to finding all the others.

These two are among the earliest paintings I did.  They were both done on canvases that I stretched over the frame myself in high school art class.  The purple one is a scene from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The blue one doesn’t have a title, but you can see what it is.  It is an ancient shibboleth water monster lurking under a dock, fishing for young boys to eat.

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This drawing was done on the front porch in the house in Rowan.  It would be years before mom framed it.  It is another example of what I could do as a high school kid.  In fact, I composed it from art-class sketches I did my senior year in school.

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The Boy in the Barn was painted on the remains of an old chalkboard that my sisters, brother, and I had used in grade school.

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Grandma Aldrich asked for this picture to hang over the sofa in the farmhouse living room.  It stayed there for many years.

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Great Grandma Hinckley passed away in 1980.  I created this portrait from a combination of photos and memory.  It was too good.  It was never hung anywhere because it always made her daughter, my Grandma Aldrich, tear up.

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This pencil drawing won a blue ribbon at the Wright County Fair in the late 70’s.

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This picture is called First Years are Hard Years.  It was painted in 1982 after my first year of teaching at the junior high school in Cotulla, Texas.   I painted mostly the good kids.  The girl on the lower right would later go on to become a teacher for our school district.  I can’t claim to be the one who inspired her, but she did make straight A’s in my class.

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This is called Beauty.  It is done in oil crayon on canvas.  I did it for my mother to hang in the hallway in the house in Taylor, Texas.

So, it turns out, I unearthed art treasures by searching for the one painting.

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May 25, 2025 · 1:43 am

The Reaper’s Presence is Near

Yes, since my unfortunate heart event, I have been thinking about death too much. It is a reality we all face, and yet, it is not healthy to give in to it before it actually happens. Obsession is more like a disease to be avoided than a possible cure. But there is a lot of speculation on the nature or existence of an afterlife, both religious, philosophical, and scientific, that can be absorbed from the internet, books, and the wisdom of elders. In fact, there is a good deal of observation and learned conclusions I can draw from my own experience as a lifelong learner and seeker (a fancy way of saying an ancient know-it-all crazy coot.)

My inner self, having lived life naked in the snow.

So, here is what I believe… not what I know because I cannot prove it… But what I believe is based on how I put together everything that I have come to think is true.

All things come together as one thing. If there is a God, the entire universe is God. It is suggested by Quantum Physics that consciousness, in the form of fundamental information at the subatomic level, flows everywhere in the universe. The entire universe is the mind of God. Zeus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, and Odin are all the same God. The entire universe is alive and wise and we, each of us individually, are a tiny part of that whole.

A Shinto wise man summarizes it all this way,

You begin life as a drop of rain when you are first born. You drop down from the sky to the pavement below. As you grow and learn, you rise up in the sunlight like an evaporating raindrop. And when you grow old, you come down again, a raindrop heavy with experience. And when you die, you land back in the great wide ocean, a part of it all once again.

There is nothing to fear about death. I don’t need to be upset about its nearness. The universe is unfolding as it should. And I am not dead yet.

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May 21, 2025 · 4:01 pm

I am STILL HERE

I went to the emergency room on Friday.

Heart rate repeatedly 37 beats per minute. Heart failure is imminent at that low rate.

I was wheeled directly to the intensive care unit. A temporary pacemaker was immediately shoved through a vein in my hip directly to my heart.

Of course, they don’t settle for that. Once my heart stabilized, they switched the pacemaker off again, thinking it was a side-effect of my blood pressure medicine that caused the problem. It was. My heart beat normally for eight hours. Then my heart rate got bad again in the night. The pacemaker was switched back on, stabilizing me until morning. Sunday morning, they turned it back off again. I stayed stable for another few hours, and they told me they would take the temporary pacemaker out again and send me home on Monday. My body had recovered from the side effects.

But my heart had other ideas… at the same time of night as the previous bad night started.

They left the thing off for the rest of the night, and without telling me ahead of time, they scheduled me for a permanent pacemaker.

I actually spent a lot of that night thinking I was going to die. I saw the number 37 again, and I knew they weren’t being honest with me about what was going to happen.

But Monday morning brought a serious surgery. And they control the pain, but you have to be conscious for that implant surgery. That was a wonderful experience I hope never to have to go through again. But I probably will.

Life is simply poetry.

So, why do I live my life in prose?

Because I am intensely didactic,

Is the reason, as I suppose.

And that’s the ordinary level

At which I drink from Life’s firehose.

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May 14, 2025 · 12:44 am

Possibly Goodbye

I am going to die. And I am okay with that. My life has a good beginning, a challenging middle, and a satisfying end. I don’t have to lie about anything. I don’t fear going to hell. There is no hell. But there may well be something beyond. It is possible that I have lived before, and that I will possibly live again.

I know you may now be worried that I am talking from a position of depression and suicidal ideation. But I am not. If I am going to wake up dead in the morning, it will be from heart failure in my sleep. I have awakened in the wee hours of the past two days, shortly after 2 am. My chest was hurting on the left side, a thing it regularly does because of arthritis and muscle spasms in my rib cage due to my affinity for being a side-sleeper, sleeping on my left side. I also felt funny in the head, though I was not laughing. My arms both tingled. I had a pounding pain in my neck and in my left temple. I took my blood pressure monitor on Tuesday and found normal blood pressure, but a heartbeat of only 40 beats per minute. That, of course, is emergency-room territory. So, as advised during an early incident, I waited for the monitor to reset and took my blood pressure again. 40 a second time! My blood pressure was rising as I zoomed into panic mode. I took it twice more, one 70 beats per minute, but another 42 beats after that.

Before waking my wife, who had to get up for her school-teacher job by 6:30, I woke up my sensible 23-year-old daughter and repeated the monitor test. The first test was 42. My daughter pointed out that the monitor sleeve was so tight that my left arm turned purple. Readjusted it yielded 78. Still lower than normal for me, but much better than the tight-sleeve readings. By that time, my heart was thumping along real well and I felt much better overall. So, I went back to bed and lived a normal day after that. Exercising during the day helped a lot.

But at 2:30 am this morning, the whole thing was repeating itself. I was almost certain it was emergency-room time. I was reluctant to test my blood pressure. I exercised my arms and legs as vigorously as possible before carefully applying the monitor sleeve. 77 beats per minute. I was in the emergency room for reasons only in my imagination in early April, so that was a relief. I did not go back to sleep for fear of waking up dead. I ended up living another normal day today, though kinda groggy from lack of sleep.

The possibility remains that I may wake up in the morning to find that I have died in my sleep. Lady Death may be waiting to take me away. But I have this chance to say goodbye now before finding out if there is indeed an afterlife or not. For all who actually know me in person, I love you. Even those of you who will celebrate my passing. And for those of you who only know me by this blog and in my books, my writing will still be around for a bit. You can really get to know me better than most. No regrets. A good life in spite of the hard parts… or maybe because of overcoming the hard parts.

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May 13, 2025 · 12:13 am

Stuff That Works

What makes people visit your blog and maybe even click “like”?  I should tell you up front, I have no idea how best to navigate the crazy internet.  I want to.  I have a book to promote.  I have ideas and experiences to share.  I am a writer and I would like to make something more than excessive heartache out of being one.  But how you actually go about it is still a mystery.

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I know what I surf the internet for.  I like artwork, especially original artwork.  That is why I try to post as much of my own stuff as I can.  I am an amateur artist, self-taught with a little bit of college art classes, contact with real artists, and a lot of TV Bob Ross.  I surf to find other artists whose stuff catches my eye.  I post about artists like Loish, Maxfield Parrish, Paul Detlafsen, and Norman Rockwell.  I go to sites like DeviantArt (Example at this link) and follow artists like James Brown and Shannon Maer on Facebook.  I help promote their work by sharing as often as I can.  Do I worry about copyright violation with my artwork?  No.  I am long past the point of making a profitable career as an artist.  I like having people see my work and if someone decides to claim they are the artist instead of me, I have the real originals and even some pictures of work in progress.  The Big Eyes thing will not happen to me.

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So sharing pictures seems to matter.  I got lots of hits from the monster picture post because I used a lot of monster-movie images that people normally search for on the internet.  Pictures of pretty girls work too.  It doesn’t seem to matter if I drew them or if they are a picture of a relative, those pictures pull people in too.

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Pictures of photogenic nieces aid my blogging popularity in a rather noticeable way.

Yes, I do believe I have just intimated that Minnie Mouse is my niece, a daughter of my sister-in-law.  Lying is part of blogging.  You have to put spin on things and make people understand the things they want to understand more than you need them to see what is really true in the empirical sense.

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Being able to put the words “nude” or “naked” in titles or in the tags brings in more views too.  Those words get lots of hits on search engines and some of the people who visit my blog looking for that actually read what’s posted.  Just because an idea is a little bit naughty, it doesn’t mean only perverts and bad people respond to it.

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This is a picture of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. It is NOT a picture of me.

And it doesn’t hurt to be a little funny now and then.  Humor is something I look for in the posts of others.  I try to be funny in my posts too… though whether they are hah-hah funny or merely eeuw! funny is debatable.  Much of my humor is only intended to raise a smirk or half a smile.  I am most satisfied when I make you think, “heh, that’s right, isn’t it.”

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This is Millis, not me. He was an actual rabbit that was turned humanoid by a scientist’s experiment with alien technology.

So why is this post called Stuff That Works if, as I am claiming, I really don’t know anything about how blogging works?  I may have been a little less than truthful when I made claims.  Or maybe I was claiming with a little bit of “tongue in cheek”?  I hope I have demonstrated that I do know how.  The thing I have yet to wrestle with is WHY.  So now I have to get busy and work on that.

 

 

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