Tag Archives: mental health

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 1, 2025 · 12:53 am

The Reaper Knocks Softly

Over the last couple of weeks, I have had small reminders that I am not immortal. My neck is plagued by arthritis pain near enough to my spinal cord that it put me in the hospital once by messing up an EKG and making the ER doctor think I was having a heart attack. (Multiple EKGs were messed up; it took a week to sort out the real cause.) This week, my neck has been cracking as if it were a knuckle that I would never intentionally crack for long-term arthritis sufferers’ reasons. I keep thinking my head might separate from the rest of my body after an egregious, unwanted cracking. Or, more realistically, it might pop and leave me paralyzed. a

My chest has also been hurting in an area on the left side, right above my heart. This, too, has sent me to the doctor’s office thinking of a possible heart attack. It is arthritis attacking my ribcage. It causes rapid muscle spasms that feel like my heart fibrillating and beating far faster than a living heart should. So, I have vast experience with false myocardial infarctions.

But this week, on top of the same old false symptoms, I have been getting heart rate readings on my blood pressure monitor that are far below normal. Even more concerning, I have passed out several times, followed by snapping awake again, possibly my body reacting to dangerously low heart rates. I haven’t been to the doctor yet about that, a thing that may put me in the hospital again for something that is not really a heart problem again. But it could also presage a death by heart failure.

One day, coming up, I may wake up dead already from heart failure as I slept.

I am not worried about dying. I don’t believe in life after death. But I do believe the entire universe is alive, aware, and actively ready to reabsorb me and repurpose that which makes me up. The problems I worry about associated with death are the effects I leave behind me, economic, emotional, and generational. And I have left behind me lots of writing that will tell my loved ones all the things they don’t really want to know about me.

The time for proof of mortality is near. But even if it does not occur this week, I am not afraid of facing it. I feel fully connected to the universe and fulfilled in my little patch of existence. It is good to know there are some things I can choose and can control about how I face it. I will try to get back home to the farm in Iowa to choose the place where it happens, the place where both of my parents died, and all four of my grandparents have died, and four of my uncles and aunts have died. Heck, there are more finished lives in my family than continuing lives. Of course, that’s true for everyone who ever lived.

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April 25, 2025 · 12:18 am

Facing Forward

I honestly feel that death could take me at any moment. Arthritis constantly gives me symptoms and pains that could easily be the start of a heart attack . I felt like I was having a racing heart and tingling thing down my left arm when I woke up this morning. I could have called an ambulance and they would have put me in the hospital because my neck arthritis screws up every EKG reading I get.

And how am I to tell when the arthritis pains and neck problem with my spinal cord turns out to be a REAL heart attack? I would rather die than go bankrupt again.

So, I feel the need to tell stories to my family and share the many wisdoms life has taught me with them. It is something I need to take on soon and finish before I die.

First of all, I need to spread the word that the universe is alive and constantly thinking and self-aware. So, dying is okay. You simply return to the oversoul and merge back into everything as you were before you were born. The universe is alive because we are alive. The universe is aware because we are a part of its collective intelligence. It will go on even though we individually die… even collectively die as a planet. Death does not rule us at any point in the story.

And at 68 and a half, I know quite a bit about making my way in this world, and being happy, even though a lot of hard times and difficult events have passed over me in that time.

And if you are wondering what this essay is for… have you stopped to think what you should be sharing before the end comes? We all have a story. And it needs to be told and retold to make it real.

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April 18, 2025 · 12:26 am

Things I Know For Certain

I think a lot of thoroughly thoughtful thuggish thoughts that build and build and build up an idea, and then turn around and knock it all down.  Let me demonstrate by knocking down that title right off the bat.  Rene DesCartes in the early 1600’s said, “Cogito Ergo Sum”, and he thereby totally disrupted the world as we knew it.  Didn’t get that?  Let me translate.  He said, “Je pense, donc je suis.”  Still didn’t help?  Okay, here’s the English, “I think, therefore I am.”  In other words, the one thing that I know for sure is that I am thinking this particular thought at this particular time.  If I am thinking, and I know I am, I must be here and I must be real.  So there is one thing I know for certain.  But do I know anything else for certain?  Uh-oh.  How do I know anything?  I have to rely on my senses.  And my senses lie to me all the time.  I am partially color blind, so I don’t see the world the same way you do.  I don’t see things in black and white, like Great Grandma Hinckley did in her 90’s, but the colors look different to my eyes than they do to yours and I will never know what things look like to you.  Forget politicians and all other people who tell lies, my own eyes lie to me constantly.  So can I know anything for sure?  Of course not.  All I have are firm beliefs based on imperfect senses and best guesses at what is true.  So what I am actually talking about is a list of potential essay ideas that I am merely asserting as true based on my imperfect goofy thinking of thoughtful thuggish thoughts.

Idea #1 that I think is certainly possibly maybe true; My brain was taught and I was raised to adulthood by the movies I saw when I was young.  I want to talk about this at length in another post.  The video is by a guy who was a kid in the 80’s, and he has some really awesome movies to offer as a way to delineate his rise to adulthood.

My list includes the movies of my boyhood seen in the Belmond Theater and on our old black and white Motorola TV.  My list of movies that raised me includes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, and The Wizard of Oz.

Idea #2; Animals are people too.

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I mean, as a writer for young adults, I know for a fact that animals are relevant as characters.  They have a point of view, feelings, reactions, and complex lives that people rarely pay attention to.  I have to write about this some time in the future too.

Idea #3; The worst things that happen to us in our lives, are also the best things that happen.  Wow!  What a difficult essay topic.  But I not only think it, I can prove it… at least to myself.  But can I write about it?  Time will tell.

Idea #4; Silly thoughts and serious thoughts are two sides of the same coin.  And this will be particularly difficult to think about if thoughts are literally coins.  That would mean that my head is full of metal, and I know several people who would read that sentence and shout, “I knew it all along!”  Fortunately they are all too sensible to read this far in one of my blog posts.

So, at 600 words I still have lots more to say.  But people with metal in their heads often talk way too much, so my concluding sentence will be simply; “I promise to shut up for now.”

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March 20, 2025 · 12:56 am

Playing with the Butterflies of Good News

Well, our house will have to have some major repairs to retain insurance because we live in the southern part of Tornado Alley. Climate change has greatly increased our ability to have all our possessions wiped out overnight. And having to pay for the replacement of the entire house is bad for the insurance company’s ongoing ability to make huge profits off of our large monthly premiums. I am so sad for them. Especially since they are putting this pressure on to gain an excuse for canceling our insurance while retaining all previously paid premiums.

I didn’t die last night, however. And the high winds warning is set to expire in two more hours from writing this particular sentence. Big Bad Wolf hasn’t yet huffed and puffed hard enough to blow our house down. So, maybe I am good and things are generally good.

I have overcome my health problems too for the moment. The urinary tract infection I thought I had is not there anymore. I am not following the Jim Henson Road to Death… for now at least. The doctor did give me a final medication to stop the burning sensation that fooled me into thinking I was going to die. Humorously, it turns my pee blue.

I do have to pay taxes as soon as Spring Break is over. And the probability that the Trump Tax Cut, the gift that keeps on taking things away, will increase the amount of taxes the parasites known as retired teachers have to pay. I am almost at the point once again where I can’t afford to pay what more I will owe and will have to beg the government for monthly payments.

And when this week is over, my family, who left me behind on the Spring Break Trip to see Number Two Son at his Air Force base, will return so that I am no longer the only living thing left in the house (besides a handful of Norway rats and roof rats as well as at least two ghost dogs.) They didn’t leave me behind because they don’t like me very much, but because I had at least one doctor’s appointment to attend, partial dentures being made for me to chew tough foods with (like tapioca pudding,) and the fact that my arthritis prevents me from doing a car trip from Texas to Washington DC with any degree of comfort and an ability walk once we get there.

Everything is good news now. Times are at least better than they were.

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February 4, 2025 · 2:31 am

Doomscroll for no Gain

I had a terrible month in January. The dentist, in love with causing pain, yanked an infected and broken molar out of my head. The procedure lasted more than an hour beyond the usual time. That by itself put me out of business for January. But, two weeks into the month, my wife brought home a strain of regular flu from her teaching job and gave it to me. And as the flu was ending two weeks later, I passed at least two, and maybe four, kidney stones. Which immediately led to a severe urinary tract infection that had me taking the strongest antibiotic I have ever taken in my life. A fly tried to land on the top of my head. It immediately fell to the floor dead. The antibiotic was that strong. Now, tomorrow, it starts again. The dentist will yank out another broken molar on the other side of my stupid head.

So, I have been laid up and unable to do anything but draw, watch tv, and doomscroll.

The butterfly picture is loosely based on a photo of a spicebush swallowtail butterfly, turning brown into yellow for a very bumblebee vibe. the other two drawings were straight-up doodles drawn from a picture in my stupid brain. All three were enhanced by AI Mirror before publication. Arthritis in the fingers, you know.

But the doom-scrolling thing is an exercise in horror and crushing pains from liberal levels of empathy. Canadians are shocked and horrified that the Pumpkinhead President has declared economic warfare on them with 25% tariffs on everything imported from Canada. He also has the Danish President and the Mexican President preparing for war and trying desperate negotiations to turn away Pumpkin’s wrath.

I got to see a panicky little Hispanic girl crying and pleading because she came home from school to find that ICE had taken both her parents as undocumented immigrants. She was homeless and defenseless. And cruel white people who consider themselves superior to this little girl talked about how her parents got what they deserved for being criminals.

Make no mistake about it. Immigrants are NOT criminals. Being in this country without documents is a civil misdemeanor. The immigration system throws huge roadblocks in the way of immigrants who have the bad sense to choose to live in the wrong colored skin. My wife is an immigrant from the Philippines. After we were married, she lived in this country via green card for more than 25 years. That’s how hard it is unless you are from someplace white like Norway or England or Russia. At any point along the way she could have lost the green card for some technicality, and then she would’ve been in the same situation as the Hispanic girl’s parents. My kids have birthright citizenship like the Bozo in Chief has promised to de-citizenize.

He plans to do away with the Department of Education completely.

I find myself, as an atheist, praying to God after every doom-scrolling session that Pumpkinheads can have fatal strokes or heart attacks. And that a magic couch that can take revenge will eat the VP whole. And that the Speaker of the House sees a porn site on his son’s computer, which makes his flattop head explode. (That, of course, won’t kill him. Cockroaches can live without a head for weeks until they starve to death because they no longer have a mouth.)

I need to stop doom-scrolling.

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November 2, 2024 · 1:48 am

What Little Wisdom There is in This

Yes, she was made with AI Mirror and Picsart AI Photo Editor, but it was still built upon a drawing I did with my arthritic right hand, and yes, that’s why she is a little bit cross-eyed.

I am at the very end of a long life with a complete 31-year teaching career, childhood trauma, three kids when who are now adults, an interest in knowing about the answers to both mysteries and ordinary things, and an imagination so vivid I have to wonder how much of all of that is real. Like Socrates, I don’t really know anything. Everything I have in my head that is even remotely akin to wisdom is based on observation and experiment, wrapped up with Reason, and boiled in a broth of Skepticism. I am well aware that imagination can skew everything if you let it.

Of course, this is a simple pen-and-ink line drawing. I used Picsart to put it on blue “paper” because my printer was down, and I didn’t have any blue paper anyway.

Here’s something I believe to be true based on experience and evidence;

Lucid dreaming is a real thing that some people do. I have done it numerous times. It simply means becoming aware that you are actually dreaming in the course of the dream. You can then take total control of the dream. Most of the dreams I have had like this involve flying without an airplane. I have also had a dream of running naked through the old grade-school building where I went through grades K through 6. Everyone was laughing at me, but I took control and made all my classmates run naked with me, even the girls I never saw naked in real life.

I have also experienced a Close Encounter of the Third Kind although I strongly believe that, even though the aliens were exactly like the ones that Whitley Streiber described in his book, Communion, it was really only a very vivid dream. I have learned about such dreams over time that many of them are the result of childhood trauma, like the trauma of being sexually assaulted by a sadist, which happened to me at the age of ten. Many of these so-called alien abductions, then, are no more than vivid trauma dreams that under hypnosis get recalled as reality. I have also had trauma dreams about tornados caused by the Belmond Tornado of 1969, a night I spent fearing that my parents were dead. These dreams can seem so real that you can feel the wind on your dream face or a campfire warming your bare feet outdoors at night. I am pretty sure that my encounter with gray aliens from Zeta Reticuli was like that. The fear it gave me up and down my spine was the ghost of the fear my assailant gave me when I was ten.

This is an AI-generated image that looks like me because it was created from the data set available in my phone’s picture gallery.

Dreams can also Predict the Future. This I believe due to a large number of strange experiences. My tornado dreams often come right before a major tragedy like one of my car accidents, or my Great Grandma Hinckley’s death. One night in college I dreamt of my childhood friend Bobby falling out of the back of a blue pickup truck. Less than a week later I was told in the family phone call that Robert had actually been hospitalized when he fell out of a truck. And the pickup was allegedly blue. I also dreamed of being in the home of another of my high school friends where a number of his relatives were gathered to mourn the loss of his stepfather. It was a Friday night dream. The following Monday at school I learned all about his stepfather’s Friday night motorcycle accident. Eerily, some of the relatives I saw in that dream were people I only later learned were his relatives.

Of course, you cannot change the outcomes of things by a prediction-based dream. And none of this nonsense may actually be true due to the random nature of real life and the faultiness of my own stupid perceptions in my own stupid head. So, I can’t really know these things. I may have all the conclusions wrong. But the best wisdom I have to offer here is… well, it all MAY BE TRUE.

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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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May 6, 2018 · 2:50 pm

Deep Dark Depression

I have been very limited for over a week in the amount of time I have to spend on writing and blog posting.  The start of a new novel has been delayed.  My posts have been short… and hopefully also sweet.  I have relied some on re-blogging old posts.  Depression is a demanding illness.  It requires the sacrifice of time, the sacrifice of energy, and even the sacrifice of self.  It can go so far as to demand the sacrifice of a human life.  And it can require you to offer up those things even when you are not the one depressed yourself.  Though I must admit, my health and mood have suffered through hospital visits, business arrangements made without money to spend, only mortifying promises of doing whatever you can.  And then doing those things.  And at the same time I have earned zero dollars from Uber.

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Ghosts from the past, long dead emotions, and ancient regrets all arise from crypts you have been keeping them in to remind you that you are mortal after all and subject to the slings and arrows that flesh is heir to.  And you must become a ghost-buster.  How do you do it?  How do you defeat the phantoms of past deeds and devilments?

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Dr. Pinkenstein and Pinkenstein’s Monster Mickenstein

Of course, Science can help.  You need professional help from a real psychiatrist, especially if you can find a good one.  The doctor we found is one who saved our family from darkness once before.  This time a mood drug called Lexipro and vitamin D supplements helped.  Before it was too much cortisol, the stress chemical, and lack of serotonin that threw things out of balance.  Better life through proper medication is actually a thing.

And a sense of humor doesn’t hurt.  Dr. Pinkenstein was not our psychiatrist.  But if he makes us laugh about things… well, laughter really is good medicine.

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And I have sailed these waters and fought these devils before.  My little boat was easier to navigate this time because I had a map through the labyrinth that I drew for myself before.  Experience and the wisdom to learn from it is seriously a super power.

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Up, up, and away, me!  We have come out of the darkness again, and it is time to get our lives back on track.

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March 6, 2017 · 4:50 pm

The Man is Mad

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Mad can mean angry.

It can also mean crazy.

It is also a magazine.  He should be happy.  He made the cover.

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Mickey made fun of me… sad!  A very sick man!

Do we really understand why the man is mad?

Could it be that too many steaks from Mar-a-Lago have given him permanent heartburn?

Something in his diet is making him have Sith eyes all the time.

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There has to be a reason he tells so many lies,

And breaks wind on Twitter to give us all the gas,

To fuel explosions…

The man really is an… Biblical word for donkey.

It must be sad to be him.

Anger… dyspepsia… battling bubbling bile…

He’s really never happy, not even when he smiles.

He made a thirteen year old girl cry recently, sitting in the back of the car,

Watching ICE cart her father away to detention and eventual deportation.

If that doesn’t make him happy, I really don’t know what will.

He is planning to issue a new travel ban.

It will make life miserable for many Muslims…

Including those coming to this country with visas to get life-saving surgery.

Surely allowing something like that, life-saving surgery,  is not worth making the man mad.

He deserves to have his fun.

After all, he won the most amazing election in history…

Without the help of Russian Putin, pudding, and pie…

On a platform of making sure that poor people don’t get affordable healthcare…

The issue the Republican non-silent majority care the most about in life…

Just ask Ted Cruz.

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Such a lovely man… to be mad all the time.  I only wish he knew that peace of mind and a quiet stomach come from doing good, eating right, and sleeping soundly at night…even during the Twitter hour.  My life is a physical mess because I don’t have affordable healthcare even with Obamacare… something that will only get worse when the mad man gets his way.  But I am not mad.  I have done good with my life.  I eat right.  And I don’t sleep very well, but that is not my conscience bothering me… especially now that I have given up on tweeting with the twit-wits on Twitter.

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