Tag Archives: life

January 1, 2024 · 1:46 am

Mr. Happy

I know that I am probably the last person you would think of to ask for advice on how to be happy. I am a crotchety old coot, a former middle-school English teacher, a grumpy old-enough-to-be-a-grandpa non-grandpa, an atheist, a nudist, and a conspiracy theorist. You would expect someone like me to be out in his yard in his underwear yelling at pigeons for pooping on his car more than they do his wife’s car. Be that as it may, I am also basically happy.

You know what happy looks like, surely. After Christmas day is over you see two kinds of kids. One kind is miserable and grumbling in his or her room about their Christmas gift that they didn’t get, in spite of the five expensive toys they did get. Yeah, that one’s never going to be happy. Then there’s the other kind, the one happily breaking or playing with the few cheap toys their parents could afford, using more of their own imagination than the imagination the toy companies pay someone to put into their TV or YouTube toy commercials. That one is going to be somebody you can rely on for years to come. That’s the kind of kid I like to think I was. Of course, I’m probably wrong about that too. Being a middle-school teacher gives you plenty of opportunity to learn the lesson that you are actually wrong about everything in life, and like Socrates, you know absolutely nothing for sure about anything.

Years upon years of being a public school teacher, the butt of comedians’ best school-memory jokes, the target of Republican spending cuts for saving enough money to give massive tax cuts to billionaires, and having to be every kind of professional for every kind of kid, no matter how ugly and unlovable they are, teaches you where true happiness comes from.

A. You have to learn to love the job you are trying to do. And…

B. You need to do the job you love with every resource you can squeeze out of your poor, battery-powered soul.

I did that. I did the job all the way from deluded and idealistic days of youth to cynical and caustic old age hanging onto your job by the fingernails until you have to choose between dying in front of the whole classroom of horrified kiddos you have learned to love, or going kicking and screaming into retirement to maybe live a bit longer than you would have if you had stayed at your work station in the idiot-to-income-earner factory for young minds.

Being satisfied with the career you chose and the success or failure you made of it is not the only factor in being happy. Teachers don’t earn much compared to corporate informational presenters who do the same job for a lot more money in front of a lot less hostile audiences far fewer times a day. So, it helps if you can manage to need less stuff in life. After all, stuff costs lots of money. Especially stuff you don’t really need.

That is why being a nudist and not having to worry about how much you spend on clothes helps a lot with your basic level of happiness and peace of mind. Also, lots of vitamin D soaked up through your nude all-togetherness produces happy-hormones in the brain.

Being an avowed pessimist is good for being happier in life as well. After all, the pessimist is always prepared for the worst to happen. And since the worst rarely is what actually happens, the pessimist is never shocked and dismayed and is frequently pleasantly surprised.

And so, here is Mr. Happy’s secret to a long and happy life;

  1. Tell yourself that the job you have to do is the job you love to do often enough that you actually begin to believe it.
  2. Do that job you love as hard and as well as it is possible for you to do.
  3. Love the people you work for and the people you work with, even if you have to pretend really hard until it becomes real to you too.
  4. Be satisfied with the stuff you need, and try to need as little as possible. The man whose paycheck is bigger than his bills is happier than the man whose paycheck only pays for a portion of the interest on his wife’s credit cards.
  5. Wear fewer clothes. You don’t need them in a quickly warming world. And you should love the skin you’re in.
  6. Expect the worst possible outcome from everything in life, and then there is nowhere to go but upwards.

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December 28, 2023 · 1:39 am

Writing About Nothing and Nobody Being Nowhere

Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Walt Disney, and Edgar Allen Poe (the four clowns depicted above) all probably had times in their writing life when they didn’t really have anything to write about. Charles Dickens couldn’t think of anything but his time in the boot-black factory and the misery he felt as a child raised in poverty. So, what did he do? He created Wilkins Micawber as a stand-in for his ne’er-do-well father who always believed, “Something will presently turn up.” And he wrote the semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield.

William Shakespeare didn’t actually write anything with his grade-school education and limited knowledge of the world. But when the Earl of Oxford who used his name as a nom de plume could think of nothing, he thought of ending it all, and the “To-be-or-not-to-be…” play, Hamlet, poured out of his quill pen onto paper.

And when Walt Disney rode the train in defeat, having lost his best comic character for cartoons, Oswald the Rabbit, to his old boss, he doodled a mouse and named him Mickey, even providing Mickey’s falsetto voice for decades on the silver screen. Oh, and claiming the rights to any further characters his studios produced… to this day.

Poe looked at the bust over his chamber door… and saw a raven. Instantly, NEVERMORE.

Now it’s Mickey’s turn to write about nothing, and try to live up to the nothing-masters’ artistic masterpieces of yore. For instance, the boy in the picture. I drew him from a nude model in a black-and-white photo. Nobody in class, not even the one who brought the picture, ever told me his name. And the class was forty-four years ago now. So, assuming the picture wasn’t old back then, the boy is now older than fifty-four, and possibly significantly older than that now. So it is a picture of a nude nobody in front of an abandoned house in the snow however-many years ago in a place that is probably nowhere now. And I won’t even mention the imaginary puzzle pieces floating through the air for nobody to put together. What’s that? I just mentioned them? What did I mention? They are really just nothing.

So, there is a time and a place for writing about everything. Even if that everything includes nothing… and that nothing is nowhere… and is about nobody.

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December 11, 2023 · 2:51 am

Creating Out of Time

Here is a goofy bit of physical philosophical reasoning and mad notions from a twisted mind. Time is a measure of the movement of physical mass directed by the random energies of the universe. If you could step out of time and take a look at what physical reality looks like seen from outside time, you would see one huge lump of you going and being everywhere you have ever gone and doing everything you have ever done… all at once as only one thing. It would look really weird because your eyes work only inside the flow of time. You can’t see everything that exists, ever has existed, and ever will exist all at one moment in time. But if there is eternity… doesn’t it exist outside of time?

And so, saying all things are one is basically true. But it doesn’t make any sense.

And so we see things in stages, making progress toward a goal. Even though it is all one big picture.

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December 7, 2023 · 3:17 am

The Boy Who Dreamed in Outer Space

I saw 2001, A Space Odyssey when it first came out in theaters. I saw Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon for the very first time in the Summer of 1969. I remember seeing a Gemini spacewalk on the black-and-white TV. I even remember standing in our backyard in Iowa, looking up at the blue sky, and seeing the bright pinpoint of light passing overhead that was John Glenn orbiting the Earth in his Mercury Capsule. When I was a child, I believed in space travel. I thought there was where I was one day going to go.

I believed I needed to be physically fit, smart, adaptable, and ready to accomplish anything necessary to leave my mark in life among the stars. I played sports full throttle, I got A’s in high school, and I won a full scholarship to college. It was the Space Program, not me who slowed everything down.

Of course, I went into education and became an English teacher instead. Rather than blasting off into space, I introduced classes to Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut. I read out loud and took them to Mars with me and into the interstellar far reaches of an imagined future that was further off than I was led to believe. I was teaching the day the shuttle Challenger blew up, killing the first teacher in space as horrified students watched on classroom TV sets all across the nation.

But the twelve-year-old boy that lives in my head still has not lost the dream. I may not live to see it, but perhaps the memory of me will make it there with somebody’s child that my stories, beliefs, and passion were paid forward to by someone in my class who actually listened to me. It could happen. I am not a hopeless fool.

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September 2, 2023 · 1:20 am

The Road Home

The Road Home

This sofa-sized oil Paffooney is called the Road Home because it was painted from a photograph looking west on US Highway 3 towards Rowan, Iowa, the little town I grew up in.  I painted it when I lived by myself in South Texas, believing that one day I would go back to Iowa to live out the rest of my life.  Here’s where today’s post gets mortifyingly morbid.  Yes, I know that last expression is repetitively repetitive, but that little bit of alliteration was necessary to lighten the load of this non-laughing part of my post.  I am not going to make it.  I am stuck in a North Dallas metroplex that I sincerely do not love.  My kids are not done growing up there.  I have family and roots there.  I have them in Iowa, too, but like a Sioux warrior, I belong to my wife’s tribe once I married into it.   I am old.  I have six incurable diseases and I am a cancer survivor since 1983.  Every day of life is a new miracle.  but the miracles are running out.  My COPD makes my chest hurt, and I have trouble breathing, especially at night.  The house is rotting away around us, courtesy of the housing bubble we bought it in back in 2005.  Doing what maintenance and repair that I can makes my arthritic body ache intolerably, more than Aleve can cure.  I will not go back to drugs like Vioxx or Celebrex and let them kill me to enrich the pharmaceutical industry.  My diabetes has made it almost impossible to eat without enduring a round of high blood sugar and nausea.  I do not look forward to either insulin or the possibility of losing an arm or leg.  So, if I get out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, it will probably be by curling up my toes and going bye-bye, followed by a cremation.  I would like to have my ashes scattered in Iowa, but the family will probably find flush toilets much cheaper. Ah well… dark part done.  Now for the part about going home.

The reason I feel uplifted, and crazily feel justified in calling this post “humor” is because I have already won my battle.  I was a teacher for 31 years.  I touched more than 2,500 lives, some of them profoundly.  I have almost raised three wonderful, talented children.  I have written and published three books, and if I can scratch out enough time, I have at least two more ready to be published.  I have shared what little wisdom I have acquired along with a lot of really goofy artwork I have done in this blog, and, although I used to be the best author no one had ever read, people are actually reading and liking my books.  In my stories, I have told about growing up in Iowa, about being a teacher, about being a friend, about being in love, about facing fear, and ultimately about being able to laugh about all of it.  In my fiction, I have already gone home, repeatedly.  When I get my cheapo flushing-funeral, that will not be me.  I will be in the cornfields under the blue Iowa sky with a threat of thunderstorms in the distance.  And while I may cry a little bit, because what is life worth without some of that? I will be mostly laughing and laughing and laughing.  Because life may end in death, but nothing about it is sad if you don’t let it be.  I like to delude myself into thinking the world is a little bit better now than when I got here, and I pretend that I have had something to do with that.  The game is won.  Everything else is just gravy!  (Sorry about that.  I do realize that gravy goes on mashed potatoes, not a game, but mangled metaphors are one of my specialties.)

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September 21, 2014 · 8:02 pm

The Road Home

The Road Home

This sofa-sized oil Paffooney is called the Road Home because it was painted from a photograph looking west on US Highway 3 towards Rowan, Iowa, the little town I grew up in.  I painted it when I lived by myself in South Texas, believing that one day I would go back to Iowa to live out the rest of my life.  Here’s where today’s post gets mortifyingly morbid.  Yes, I know that last expression is repetitively repetitive, but that little bit of alliteration was necessary to lighten the load of this non-laughing part of my post.  I am not going to make it.  I am stuck in a North Dallas metroplex that I sincerely do not love.  My kids are not done growing up there.  I have family and roots there.  I have them in Iowa, too, but like a Sioux warrior, I belong to my wife’s tribe once I married into it.   I am old.  I have six incurable diseases and I am a cancer survivor since 1983.  Every day of life is a new miracle.  but the miracles are running out.  My COPD makes my chest hurt, and I have trouble breathing, especially at night.  The house is rotting away around us, courtesy of the housing bubble we bought it in back in 2005.  Doing what maintenance and repair that I can makes my arthritic body ache intolerably, more than Aleve can cure.  I will not go back to drugs like Vioxx or Celebrex and let them kill me to enrich the pharmaceutical industry.  My diabetes has made it almost impossible to eat without enduring a round of high blood sugar and nausea.  I do not look forward to either insulin or the possibility of losing an arm or leg.  So, if I get out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, it will probably be by curling up my toes and going bye-bye, followed by a cremation.  I would like to have my ashes scattered in Iowa, but the family will probably find flush toilets much cheaper. Ah well… dark part done.  Now for the part about going home.

The reason I feel uplifted, and crazily feel justified in calling this post “humor” is because I have already won my battle.  I was a teacher for 31 years.  I touched more than 2,500 lives, some of them profoundly.  I have almost raised three wonderful, talented children.  I have written and published three books, and if I can scratch out enough time, I have at least two more ready to be published.  I have shared what little wisdom I have acquired along with a lot of really goofy artwork I have done in this blog, and, although I used to be the best author no one had ever read, people are actually reading and liking my books.  In my stories, I have told about growing up in Iowa, about being a teacher, about being a friend, about being in love, about facing fear, and ultimately about being able to laugh about all of it.  In my fiction, I have already gone home, repeatedly.  When I get my cheapo flushing-funeral, that will not be me.  I will be in the cornfields under the blue Iowa sky with a threat of thunderstorms in the distance.  And while I may cry a little bit, because what is life worth without some of that? I will be mostly laughing and laughing and laughing.  Because life may end in death, but nothing about it is sad if you don’t let it be.  I like to delude myself into thinking the world is a little bit better now than when I got here, and I pretend that I have had something to do with that.  The game is won.  Everything else is just gravy!  (Sorry about that.  I do realize that gravy goes on mashed potatoes, not a game, but mangled metaphors are one of my specialties.)

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At My Grandpa’s Knee

At My Grandpa's Knee

Although the child in the painting is definitely not me or one of mine (the dog is Queenie, and she was real), and although I grew up about as far from the sea as you can get, this painting reveals something critical about who I am. My Grandpa Aldrich was a singular man of wisdom and good humor. He could tell a funny story with the best of them. He was a farmer and inculcated in me a farmer’s work ethic, that get-up-before-dawn style of thing. He never got mad, even the time I broke the plumbing in his house by playing Tarzan in the basement, swinging on the bathroom pipes in the ceiling. Everything I know about how to love, and how to act, and who to be I got from him, or at least from him through my mother who was his child. My grandpa lasted into his eighties and was alive until I finally got married at 38. He lives in my heart still, guiding my actions… even the words I am writing now.

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April 20, 2014 · 7:28 pm