I am falling apart. My health is poor and continuing to fail. My memory is suffering from an inability to remember the names of things. I find myself in the kitchen having gone in for a specific purpose, and not being able to remember what that purpose was. That is not to say I am not coping. I have quite a lot of adaptability and significant problem-solving skills. But that will eventually become a losing battle. Especially if I get the virus… any virus. So, what am I going to talk about with a dissolving brain and an hourglass of lifeforce swiftly running out? Fascination. I am fascinated by the details of the process. Like Mr. Spock, I find practically everything, “Fascinating!”
Birds and butterflies
My childhood fascinations turned into obsession first around natural things. When my mother would go to Vey Osier’s Beauty Salon, Vey had this fascinating parrot that was probably a hundred years old and knew how to swear really, really foully. I remember that being the only reason I was willing to go there and wait for Mom to get her hair fussed up (What my Grandpa Aldrich, her father, used to call it.)
I remember waiting for hours to hear that bird say the magic F-word or the horrible S-word. Or even the zillion other bad words I didn’t know anything about when I was seven. And, of course, I never did. The bird was mute the whole time during who-knows-how-many visits. But I did get to look endlessly at that green parrot’s amazing nutcracker bill that Vey always assured us would snap our fingers off like biting a salted pretzel if we got them anywhere close to the bill.
And when I was nine I was given as a present a plastic model kit of a Golden-Crowned Kinglet (the bird in that first picture). My relatives knew I was a burgeoning artist since my teachers constantly complained about all the skeletons, crocodiles, and monsters I drew in the margins of my school workbooks. So, I had a plastic bird to paint with all the necessary paints, but no idea what the bird looked like. We had to go all the way to Mason City to Grandma Beyer’s house because we called up there and checked, and, sure enough, there was a colored picture in the K volume of her Collier’s Encyclopedia. I painted it so accurately, the danged thing looked almost alive.
And if you have ever seen any of my butterfly posts, you know I became a butterfly hunter before ever entering junior high school, where Miss Rubelmacher, the rabid seventh-grade science teacher, made that obsession a hundred times worse. (She didn’t actually have rabies, just a reputation of requiring excessively hard-to-find life-science specimens like a nasturtium that bloomed in October in Iowa, or a Mourning Cloak butterfly.
I was able to find for her numerous Red-Spotted Purples like the one in the picture. I got them off the grill of Dad’s Ford, as well as in Grandpa Aldrich’s grove. And I eventually caught a pair of Mourning Cloaks as well on Grandpa Aldrich’s apple trees, though not until summer after seventh grade was over for me. I could tell you about my quest to catch a Tiger Swallowtail, too. But that’s an entirely different essay, written for an entirely different thematic reason.
Needless to say, my bird fascination led me to become an amateur bird-watcher with a great deal of useless naturalist information crammed into my juvenile bird-brain about birds. Especially Cardinals. And my fascination with butterflies opened my eyes to a previously invisible world of fascinating and ornately-decorated bugs. (Of course, I should’ve said “insects” instead of “bugs” since I absolutely did learn the difference.) And I still to this day know what a Hairstreak Butterfly looks like, what a Luna Moth is (Think Lunesta Commercials,) and how you have to look at the underside of the lower wings to correctly identify a Moonglow Fritillary Butterfly.
During my lifetime, my fascinations have become legion. I became obsessed with the comic books done by artist Wally Wood, especially Daredevil. I became obsessed with Disney movies, especially the animated ones like The Rescuers, The Jungle Book, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. I rode the bucking bronco of a fascination with the Roswell Crash (and the actual alien space ships I am almost certain the U.S. Army recovered there.) And so many other things that it would make this essay too long, and would probably bore you into a death-like coma. So, here’s what I have learned by being fascinated with my own fascinations;
You do not want to play me in a game of Trivial Pursuit for money, even now that my memory is like swiss cheese.
I have a real ability to problem-solve because I know so many useless details that can be combined in novel ways to come up with solutions to problems.
I can write interesting essays and engaging novels because I have such a plethora of concrete details and facts to supplement my sentences and paragraphs with.
It can be really, really boring to talk to me about any of my fascinations unless I happen to light the same color of fire in your imagination too. Or unless you arrived at that same fascination before I brought it up.
Sometimes you have to fly in big circles waiting for terrible things to pass. If you don’t wait… if you rush in unprepared… then you go down in flames.
The problem started with two molars whose expensive crowns both broke during the pandemic. I went to a Vietnamese pirate dentist who extracted both ruined and infected molars. tortured me heavily during the three-week procedure and extracted $4000 out of my pocket because I had no dental insurance. That was followed by a trip to the ER for a kidney-stone crisis, a matter of $65 out of pocket, thanks to the $185 a month I pay for Medicare. And two months later, another trip to the ER for a deadly low heart rate resulted in a week in the hospital, a surgical implantation of a pacemaker, and finally another trip to the ER after getting out of the hospital due to dehydration. The out-of-pocket cost of the hospital will be only $500, thanks to Medicare. Of course, President Pumpkinhead may kill Medicare, too, before I actually get the bill. It is expensive in this country to become poor. And if you are poor, you have no other option. At least, if I can manage three more bankruptcies by the time I’m 70, I will be qualified to run for president.
Life is definitely a lot like Moose Bowling. It is a simple game. In order to win, you only have to knock down all ten pins in one throw. The hard part is that you have to throw a moose to knock the pins down. Did you know that the average weight of an adult moose is 1800 pounds, or 820 kilograms? That’s a lot of moose meat to fling with my arthritic 68-year-old moose-throwing muscles. My flabber is totally gasted by that.
So, as I swiftly rise from prosperity to poverty, the ultimate fate of most old school teachers, it is probably a good thing that I have decided to become a nudist. At least I will save money on buying clothes.
I have often described the typical middle school with the name “The Monkey House” due to the resemblance in the behavior of sixth graders to little monkeys like squirrel monkeys, capuchins, and rhesus monkeys, and the behavior of seventh graders to chattering chimpanzees, and the behavior of eighth graders to poop-throwing gorillas. All of these simian varieties in nature do not wear any clothes. So, it follows that in nature, middle school students would naturally be at least metaphorically naked. They do swing with their tails out of their seats at any excuse, chatter about personal things without realizing others might be listening, and fling metaphorical poop at everyone… literal poop in certain regrettable situations. But every human species of middle-school monkeys in the Monkey House could benefit from being as naked in school as actual monkeys are in the jungle. In this post, I will try to cover how that works in an imaginary all-nude school for each of as many monkey species as I can.
The Nude Nerds in the Science Class Lab, Milton Steinbum and Nancy Jane Smithers.
I am starting with the nude nerds because, had I been put in an all-nude experimental middle school myself, I would have been a member of this middle-school monkey species. I would have been like Milton, always carrying nearly every book from my locker so I would have something to hold in front of me, hiding my little weiner as well as I could. Nerds know a lot more about everything than the other monkeys. And as a result, they are more aware of everything. Especially aware of how genitals react to the sight of nude bodies of either or both sexes. They are subject to death by embarrassment loSnarkng after the other monkeys have become desensitized.
The shrinking violets, mostly of the female persuasion, would benefit a lot from being nudists in a school full of naked people. Shrinking violets are kids who would turn invisible if they could. But as the nudist experience goes on, they would soon discover you blend in more by just being comfortably naked than you would by folding yourself into basketball shapes and trying to get smaller. The last shrinking violets to remove their hands from in front of their private places would be laughed at the hardest by the first shrinking violets to realize they are less seen as a part of the crowd than they are as part of the strange little people tying themselves in knots to become invisible.
Snarks are equally distributed between the male and female varieties. They have mostly grown into their snarkiness, not being snarks as the littlest monkeys, but blossoming with total snarkification as they grow into the chimpanzee and then gorilla stages. A snark becomes snarky in the presence of the bullies or the criminals. It begins as a survival method, saying something witty but mean to redirect the bully or criminal’s attention to nude nerds, shrinking violets, Boy Scouts, or the plain normals when the bully or criminal turns their attention to them. Sometimes they turn from snark into bully, but only if they are not clever enough to achieve the title of Class Clown. A Class Clown is a snark who is actually funny and even makes the teacher laugh. That’s why they sometimes become standup comedians later in life. A naked snark must sharpen comedic skills in an all-nude school. Naked you lose the opportunity to joke about bulges in boy’s pants, peed-your-pants jokes, poop jokes, and funny-clothing jokes. Plus, your personal privacy is no longer in need of defense. Everyone can see if you are circumcised or have hair down there.
You can’t tell a snark until he or she talks. Then they’re easy to recognize.
Plain normals should be the majority of the students in any school, but the truth is, none of them are actually even remotely normal. They all have their own weird quirks, talents, phobias, and terrible secrets. But this category serves to prevent having to break things down into as many categories as you have students. Cheerleaders are either a group or an affliction. Girls who suffer from cheerleaderpepitis are easily turned into snarks, puppy mothers, or even bullies and criminals. Too much energy, sex appeal, and ambition are dangerous things to put in the hands (and bodies) of people who are not that far advanced from becoming fully potty-trained. Being fully nude brings noses down out of the air a little bit. Jocks are still jocks at a nudist school since the thing that names them is a vital form of protection in sports. Brainless bums, ugos, angels, and future supermodels could be a part of any group I have named so far. So, the thing that helps them all in a nudist middle school is the fact that nudity as a school uniform makes them all equal in one very visible way.
Boy Scouts, once known as future Republicans, and still known to be the first to volunteer, hall monitoring, teachers’ helpers, and honor students, are the group least affected by a change to an all-nude dress code. Theirs is a behavioral distinction. They are the students who crave first place in everything. And, of course, girls make excellent Boy Scouts, being cleaner than actual boys. You can’t just call them Girl Scouts because that is a uniform, not a behavior. Boy Scouts are also more adaptable than the other students and will be the first ones to embrace nudity on the first day of school.
Female athletes are a part of the jocks subgroup even though they don’t… you know.
The last monkeys I will discuss here are potentially gorillas in all ways that matter. The bullies and criminals inhabit the same corners of every school, and rare is the criminal who hasn’t been a bully first. They are either much bigger and stronger than the other kids or much smarter. Their morals are mostly skewed by things outside the school. So the main benefit of having them in school naked is that they can’t hide knives, guns, drugs, or other evil contraband on their own person. Nothing stops a bully from verbally intimidating others or using fists. But bruises on victims are more visible and it is harder for a naked kid to look dangerous when they are limited to their birthday suits.
As I pointed out previously, there are other definable types of monkeys in the monkey house, but how being in an experimental all-nude middle school would benefit and affect them is basically covered now as far as I can figure out. I am a rather old and stupid orangutan myself, now that I am retired from teaching for a decade. And I am now senile enough to write about stuff like doing middle-school education naked. So, there’s that.
It’s a Pinocchio thing. Bad things happen, and then worse things happen, and it is all because you act detestably and have no remorse. In Collodi’s version of karma, you have to eventually die to make amends for your life of being rude, stupid, and bad. There is no redemption for the wicked… not even the slightly wicked… even if you’re made of wood.
The blue boy inside the whale in the first Paffooney of this post is a Nebulon, meaning he lives inside a gargantuan space whale. The Nebulons use living creatures for technology and space whales as starships contain entire functioning ecosystems on their insides, living mainly off the sunlight of the suns they visit and the various gases of the living things they shelter inside themselves. So, being inside a whale changes their relationship to the universe, but they don’t necessarily suffer the bad karma of a wooden-headed child like Pinocchio. Still, stuck inside a whale for life. No redemption. No return on penitence.
I am obsessing about space in these Paffooneys because my stupid head is generating another CIssy Moonskipper story.
My own personal time in the belly of a whale began when my wife destroyed her car by impaling the grill in the front of the car on the trailer hitch of a quick-stopping truck in front of her. Then we had a tornado twist its way overhead and damage every tree in the neighborhood and a few of the houses as well. My wife and daughter went then on a planned vacation to the Virgin Islands leaving me at home with the dog who is dying of doggy breast cancer. Then belated complications caused the electricity to go out for the better part of four straight days. During that time I had an accident in my own car as well. Bummer. Bad is followed by worse… and then terrible.
I am still alive at this point in time. And the dog is still alive… though definitely dying. But of course, there is more badness to come. The dog is dying… and I probably am too. And Donald Trump seems to be winning the presidency again. Global warming is going to try to kill us again this summer. And MAGA Republicans will probably kill us all in the fall whether they win the election or not. The world is ending. In the belly of a whale. And we must pray for the Disney version where Pinocchio becomes a real boy.
I guess I never realized I was quite so rude and stupid and bad.
The Toonerville Post Office and Bert Buchanan’s Toy Store.
Toonerville is not only a wonderful cartoon place created by Fontaine Fox in the 1930’s, but the name of the town that inhabited my HO Train Layout when I lived in South Texas and had the Trolley actually running nearly on time. The train layout has not been restored to working condition for over a decade now. The buildings which I mostly built from kits or bought as plaster or ceramic sculptures and repainted have been sitting on bookshelves in all that time. I still have delusions of rebuilding the train set in the garage, but it is becoming increasingly less and less likely as time goes on and my working parts continue to stiffen up and stop working. So, what will I do with Toonerville?
Wilma Wortle waits on the station platform for her train at the Toonerville Train station. I built this kit in the 1970’s, hence the accumulations of dust bunnies.
Loew’s Theater has been awaiting the start of The African Queen for more than twenty years.
Main Street Toonerville at 2:25 in the afternoon. Or is it three? The courthouse clock is often slow.
Grandma Wortle who controls all the money in the family likes to park her car near the eggplant house when she visit’s Al’s General Store.
But I may yet have found a way to put Toonerville back together through computer-assisted artsy craftsy endeavors.
A two-shot of Bill Freen’s house and Slappy Coogan’s place on the photo set to start production.
Bill Freen’s house lit up with newfangled electricical. (and I do believe that is the way Bill spells it all good and proper.)
Bill Freen’s house cut out in the paint program.
So I can make composite pictures of Toonerville with realistic photo-shopped backgrounds. Now, I know only goofy old artsy fartsy geeks like me get excited about doofy little things like this, but my flabber is completely gasted with the possibilities.
Bill Freen’s house at sunset… (but I don’t get why there’s snow on the roof when the grass is so green?)
Yes, that’s a downed tree in the park next to our house. It was a beautiful old live oak that gave ample shade to the picnic table by the bridge across the creek. Now it is wood for fireplaces and toothpicks.
We had a tornado. It never touched down. The funnel cloud never touched the ground. It was high enough in the air to spare practically all the houses in the North Dallas suburbs. It was not kind to trees, however. We lost the live oak’s top section that defends the house’s western front side. The severed tree section fell on the sidewalk to our front door rather than bashing the roof, so we were incredibly lucky. Everybody in our neighborhood lost at least tree branches if not whole trees. Everybody was lucky too on damage to their homes.
The freaky, scary almost tornado did manage to flood the floors in our house with downhill runoff from above us. It hit us with high winds a little after 4 o’clock in the morning on Monday, May 27th. The lights almost went out that day, but decided not to drown us in darkness too. I thought it was the end of the line until the wind died down and we could think about what happened next.
So, Tuesday my family got on a plane for a vacation to the US Virgin Islands. My wife, still teaching at age… oops, not making that mistake… had well-earned that vacation, and the damage was not so bad that it couldn’t wait until they got back. The dog and I stayed home. She has doggy breast cancer and is dying. I can’t travel on airplanes due to arthritis. So, we planned a quiet week at home.
I began work on this colored-pencil drawing to see how well I could still do completing it without AI help due to arthritis, glaucoma, and gradual oncoming color blindness. And while I was working on that, the lights went out on Thursday morning. Storm damage was having its delayed joke effect. Blackout to thirty houses in our neighborhood. And work crews had to add us to the end of a long list of electrical repairs, some of which were probably in hospitals or fire stations. So, it turned out to be a four-day vacation from having electricity. I spent one night in the dark house with the heat from no air conditioning, no working refrigerator or microwave to provide food, and no air purifier to protect my breathing parts from pollen and mold. I quickly learned to spend the nights in my car with the engine running and the air conditioning on. (Outdoors, of course, not committing carbon monoxide suicide in a garage.)
During the blackout, I didn’t merely sit in my car with the air conditioner on. On Thursday I went to see the Ryan Reynolds movie IF. It was great. I also drew a lot more on my colored-pencil project above. My AI Mirror app is on my phone, so I turned my finished art project into a polished piece you see the best version of above. Then, on Friday, I tried going to a movie again. Nope. Car accident on the access road to the Interstate. I side-swiped a working van. Minor damage to both vehicles. A policeman had to come and make an accident report. I called my insurance agent and learned I would owe 900 dollars to repair both vehicles. So, I returned to a dark house fully stressed and depressed and thoroughly something-else-essed to stew in my own misery in the dark.
I read half of a Nicholas Sparks novel called The Return and drew the new picture Paffooney you see above And then, miraculously the lights returned Saturday evening. So, I got a night’s sleep with the air purifier. Then Sunday… the lights went out again. No explanation from Oncor or Direct Energy. And I went from depressed to super-depressed.
My WordPress streak of consecutive days of posting ended at 274 because of this blackout. I had an expensive accident where I was at fault, probably due to stress because of this blackout. I lost sleep. I got to hear the local Vatos Locos of the Hispanic street gang that decided to protect our block during the dark night as they played Chicano Rap Music loudly at the mouth of the alley to warn away anyone who might try to loot dark houses in their proclaimed territory.
Thankfully, the lights were fully repaired and back on by Sunday evening… throughout the DFW Metroplex. And that’s my storm story for this week.
There are many ways to fly. Airplanes, bird wings, hot air balloons, bubble-gum-blowing goldfish… well, maybe I am really talking about flying by imagination. The more my six incurable diseases and old age limit my movement, my ability to get out of bed and do things, the more I rely on reading, writing, and the movie in my head to go places I want to be.
Sometimes the wings I use to fly come from other writers. I get the flight feathers I need not only from books, but also from YouTube videos, movies, and television shows.
This magic carpet ride in video form is by the thoughtful creative thinker Will Schoder. In it he carefully explains how Mister Rogers used the persuasion techniques of Logos, Ethos, and Pathos to talk to elephants and convinced a congressman intent on cutting the budget to actually give Public Television more money for educational programming. This is a video full of warmth and grace and lovingly crafted magic flight feathers that anybody can use to soar across new skies and blue skies and higher skies than before. I hope you will watch it more than once like I did, to see how beautifully the central explanation spreads its wings and gives us ideas that can keep us aloft in the realm of ideas.
It is important to stay in the air of fresh ideas and new thinking. The magic carpet ride that takes you there is the product of vivid imagination, cogent thinking, and the accurate connection of idea to better idea. So instead of falling from the sunlit sky into the darkness that so easily consumes us on the ground, keep imagining, keep dreaming, and keep flying. You won’t regret having learned to fly.
The folktale is that a dying swan, though it probably never sang a single note in its lifetime that wasn’t a car-horn-like honk will sing an absolutely beautiful song before succumbing to death. I am nowhere near as beautiful as a swan, but I probably sing better than they do. I have never heard a clear B flat or high C from a Swan. Their actual singing is more like a cow dying. But who knows? Maybe they do achieve a miraculous melodiousness as they step from one world into the next. And I have been feeling the need to compose my own swansong of late. No man lives forever. And I am much closer now to the end than I am to the beginning.
I may not be able to sing a beautiful swansong, but there are other acts I can commit whose commission leads to great beauty. And I am doing my best to make use of those actions and skills before I pass from this reality.
Why am I so fixated on this idea that I am dying? My dog has cancer, a hideous tumor that I do not have the money to undertake to cure. And if I did have the money, she’s an old dog and the surgery would probably kill her rather than cure her. My father died just a few short years after his beloved dog passed away. There’s a symmetry at play in this outcome. I think the messages from Fate are clear.
As my myriad of unfortunate health conditions leave me in more and more pain with each passing day, the weight of years is pressing on my soul. Better to look forward to the next great adventure than to suffer overlong in the last act of this mortal production of a play by the great poet in the sky. The final curtain will close and the concluding overture has its last beautiful notes. Perhaps a celestial swan will sing it.
But I am not depressed and maudlin. I have lived a good life. And not all the good things in it are now only available in memories. Not while I can still draw and tell a story. I am slowing down in every way, but there are still stories in me.
My three kids used to be cute, even with goblin grins.
I spent a lot of time yesterday looking at old photos. The journey seems a lot longer looking back than looking at the trail ahead. But there are good things beside every signpost on the road behind us. I am proud of where we’ve been.
The Three Faces of the Princess at the Kingdom Hall;
“We’re going to MacDonald’s afterwards, right?”
“What do you mean REAL FOOD?”
“Yes, that was me that farted.”
We are basically right with God. Oh, I know I haven’t been a very good Jehovah’s Witness the last three or four years. Being an atheist might have something to do with it. But I actually believe in God. It is just that my God is a bit bigger than theirs. My God is not some old man with a white beard on a golden chair in some invisible dimension. He is everything there is. And he doesn’t have to promise me eternal life and goodies for a lifetime of doing what I believe is good and right and benefits the lives of others. I don’t do it for theological dog treats. I do it because I know in my heart it is right. And I live for the here and now. Because that is the only part of existence that is relevant to me here and now. “I am a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, I have a right to be here.” (from Desiderata by Max Ehrmann)
We used to do a lot of camping and traveling. We have seen some amazing things in amazing places.
The Grand Canyon is improved by having my middle son posed in front of it.
At the Grand Canyon Railway Station;
In a land where dinosaurs once roamed;
You can find dinosaurs for tourists without spending big bucks to visit Jurassic World.
Don’t worry. The Princess is the scariest dino running with this pack. That goofasaurus rex is going to regret that nose-bump to the back of the head.
In the end, she ate every last one.
But my kiddos hatched a replacement, so they are not personally responsible for the re-extinction of the dinosaurs.
Appreciating nature;
Posing with dead nature.
Posing with living nature, including wild and feral cousins, is also fun.
Filipino nature and wild and feral Filipino cousins.
And we have allowed ourselves to have fun along the way.
But children grow up and begin to have their own lives. They get jobs. They learn to drive. And we have to fearfully accept the consequences of the monsters we have probably created.
As I continue trudging down the road of life, I am somewhat weary because I am old. My bones have a lot of walking-around mileage on them. My heart has a limited number of beats remaining. But my biggest regret is… you can only go back and walk the path again through memory and old pictures. Time and I march onward.
Catch a Falling Star 
Fascination
I am falling apart. My health is poor and continuing to fail. My memory is suffering from an inability to remember the names of things. I find myself in the kitchen having gone in for a specific purpose, and not being able to remember what that purpose was. That is not to say I am not coping. I have quite a lot of adaptability and significant problem-solving skills. But that will eventually become a losing battle. Especially if I get the virus… any virus. So, what am I going to talk about with a dissolving brain and an hourglass of lifeforce swiftly running out? Fascination. I am fascinated by the details of the process. Like Mr. Spock, I find practically everything, “Fascinating!”
Birds and butterflies
My childhood fascinations turned into obsession first around natural things. When my mother would go to Vey Osier’s Beauty Salon, Vey had this fascinating parrot that was probably a hundred years old and knew how to swear really, really foully. I remember that being the only reason I was willing to go there and wait for Mom to get her hair fussed up (What my Grandpa Aldrich, her father, used to call it.)
I remember waiting for hours to hear that bird say the magic F-word or the horrible S-word. Or even the zillion other bad words I didn’t know anything about when I was seven. And, of course, I never did. The bird was mute the whole time during who-knows-how-many visits. But I did get to look endlessly at that green parrot’s amazing nutcracker bill that Vey always assured us would snap our fingers off like biting a salted pretzel if we got them anywhere close to the bill.
And when I was nine I was given as a present a plastic model kit of a Golden-Crowned Kinglet (the bird in that first picture). My relatives knew I was a burgeoning artist since my teachers constantly complained about all the skeletons, crocodiles, and monsters I drew in the margins of my school workbooks. So, I had a plastic bird to paint with all the necessary paints, but no idea what the bird looked like. We had to go all the way to Mason City to Grandma Beyer’s house because we called up there and checked, and, sure enough, there was a colored picture in the K volume of her Collier’s Encyclopedia. I painted it so accurately, the danged thing looked almost alive.
And if you have ever seen any of my butterfly posts, you know I became a butterfly hunter before ever entering junior high school, where Miss Rubelmacher, the rabid seventh-grade science teacher, made that obsession a hundred times worse. (She didn’t actually have rabies, just a reputation of requiring excessively hard-to-find life-science specimens like a nasturtium that bloomed in October in Iowa, or a Mourning Cloak butterfly.
I was able to find for her numerous Red-Spotted Purples like the one in the picture. I got them off the grill of Dad’s Ford, as well as in Grandpa Aldrich’s grove. And I eventually caught a pair of Mourning Cloaks as well on Grandpa Aldrich’s apple trees, though not until summer after seventh grade was over for me. I could tell you about my quest to catch a Tiger Swallowtail, too. But that’s an entirely different essay, written for an entirely different thematic reason.
Needless to say, my bird fascination led me to become an amateur bird-watcher with a great deal of useless naturalist information crammed into my juvenile bird-brain about birds. Especially Cardinals. And my fascination with butterflies opened my eyes to a previously invisible world of fascinating and ornately-decorated bugs. (Of course, I should’ve said “insects” instead of “bugs” since I absolutely did learn the difference.) And I still to this day know what a Hairstreak Butterfly looks like, what a Luna Moth is (Think Lunesta Commercials,) and how you have to look at the underside of the lower wings to correctly identify a Moonglow Fritillary Butterfly.
During my lifetime, my fascinations have become legion. I became obsessed with the comic books done by artist Wally Wood, especially Daredevil. I became obsessed with Disney movies, especially the animated ones like The Rescuers, The Jungle Book, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. I rode the bucking bronco of a fascination with the Roswell Crash (and the actual alien space ships I am almost certain the U.S. Army recovered there.) And so many other things that it would make this essay too long, and would probably bore you into a death-like coma. So, here’s what I have learned by being fascinated with my own fascinations;
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