Tag Archives: philosophy

June 28, 2015 · 2:43 pm

Winning Easy

20150628_124803Now that Captain Action finally liberated my X-Box from the evil Dr. Evil who was holding it for ransom and not letting me play EA Sports Baseball ’04, I have been able to play Baseball ’04 again.  (It happened in this blog; Dr. Evil’s Removable Brain)  I have been playing this video game now with a passion, as you can plainly see.  You are probably aware that the St. Louis Cardinals are my very favorite team in any and all sports.  Notice, please that I have just pitched Matt Morris’ 30th victory against no defeats over stinky old steroid-fueled Roger Clemens.  It was also his 9th shut out of the season.  This is the first 30-game-winning season since Denny McLain in Detroit, in the 1968 season.  I only had to replay the entire 2004 season 4 times to get there.  Oh, and Albert Pujols has hit 114 home runs and Scott Rolen hit his 70th and 71st in this game.   You are certainly smart enough to figure out by now that I have left the difficulty level of this game permanently set at the Rookie level.  Hey, I’m old.  I like easy wins.

A close-up of the Flower Wagon's first bloom.

A close-up of the Flower Wagon’s first bloom.

This is true in so many areas of my life.  The flower wagon that I posted about on Friday is another evidence of my dedication to the philosophy of the easy win.  It was a victory over many things… depression, tragedy, Texas gully-washers that keep on coming, the tragedy of an old toy that no longer gets played with… things where my decrepit old self with six incurable diseases needs desperately to win.

Flowers in our yard in general are a victory of sorts.  This is Texas.  A couple of summers back we were in a severe drought with like 99 days in a row of high temperatures of 100-plus.  Flowers in June in Texas are a bit of a miracle.  Good flower pictures recently taken are another miracle.  My cell phone camera takes so much better pictures with all its automatic settings than my digital camera which cost twice as much, that it makes me wonder why I ever bothered with it.

A Yellow Rose of Texas in our yard.

A Yellow Rose of Texas in our yard.

Another yellow perennial that came up due to funky wet weather.

Another yellow perennial that came up due to funky wet weather.

Of course, this is pictures the easy way because I am not trying to adjust the color balance (in spite of partial color-blindness), or the brightness compensation, all by my own little self with my modest-to-insignificant photography skills.  (I am just skilled enough at photography to recognize a great work of art photographed by someone else, not skilled enough to take one myself.)

I am retired now.  I have had a long hard career as a public school teacher, and I am working hard at being a good writer (professional or not) in retirement.  I figure I deserve the odd easy win.  Using my writing skills to tackle toxic ideas like prejudice and politics recently I was able to score some real points with some of my very conservative friends.  I discovered by concentrating on the things they believe which I agree are very good things, I was able to make them consider a more liberal point of view, and not cling to Fox-News-sort-of faux-Fox-facts.  I can even get them to laugh at things like saying “Fox-News-sort-of faux-Fox-facts” because it sounds funny even if you are only reading it silently in your head.  It is an example of arguing towards an Easy Win, and I have become an addict.

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June 20, 2015 · 2:22 pm

Red State Hate

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It has taken me some time to put ideas together to tackle this terrible thing.  Jon Stewart did a segment at the beginning of his show that was not funny.  It was somber, thoughtful, and full of real outrage that cast lightning bolts at the heart of the dragon.  And I admire Stewart for what he is… someone who truly cares about things, and fights the good fight using the best weapon he has.  Humor.  Mark Twain said that against it, nothing could stand.  But some things are so terrible that not even a joke can put it right.  Why?  Because there are places in this human world where ideas are like a festering sore, spreading at an alarming rate, and daily becoming more and more poisonous.  Texas is like that.  It is a Red State.  That means it is a hotbed of conservative ideas and nurtures Republican values… like being distrustful and fearful of them…  And who are they?  They are not us.  They have a different religion.  They have a different skin color.  They are not opposed to raising taxes on the rich, even if they are rich themselves.  They are not capitalists… Or not freedom-loving…  They think it can be left up to women to decide what to do with their own bodies.  They don’t see abortion as murder.  They don’t think teaching evolution in schools is evil.  We must fear them… and, yes, even hate them.

kids

As a school teacher, I learned early on that if you only look for the bad in other people, then that is what you will be left with, a world in which there are only bad people.  I don’t know about you, but I can’t live in a world like that.  I learned to look at the world as being full of imperfect people who all have good in them, lots of good.  I grew up in Iowa where the people were so white in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s that when the winter snow fell heavy enough, we all had the super power of invisibility.   I remember only one black face from my childhood that wasn’t on television.  There was a little girl from Chicago who came to stay with a volunteer family so she could get out of the inner city for a while.  The adults warned us that she might be prone to stealing things, so don’t do anything to tempt her.  And we didn’t.  And she didn’t.  And damn it, I don’t know whether we did a good job of not tempting her, or that warning was just an empty prejudice.  She was just like us.  She laughed at things.  She loved kittens.  She played our games.  She was just like us… but she had a better tan.

I started teaching in South Texas.  I quickly learned how to deal with Hispanic kids who were mostly poor and mostly Spanish-speaking.  I learned that they didn’t laugh at the same things as I did.  When they called me Batman for a while, it wasn’t a compliment.  I learned to laugh at the things they found funny and learned to joke the way they joked.  I played their games.  I learned to love pit-bulls and other dogs the way they loved dogs.  I was just like them… but they couldn’t hide in the snow as easily as me.

I learned to teach black kids like they complain about on Fox News, the ones they throw to the ground and sit on at pool parties in McKinney, Texas, when I moved to the Dallas area and the town of Carrollton.  I quickly learned why some teachers are so stressed out by them.  They are louder than the white kids.  Their nerves can be more raw and their tempers hotter than the other kids.  Not all of them… just about 51 %.   But you have to look close enough to see that… they laugh at most of the same things as us.  Some of the brightest, widest smiles I have ever seen are on the faces of black kids when you laugh at their jokes.  They play the same games as I do.  They love puppies just like I do.  They sometimes even have more faith in God than I do.  Some of my favorite students of all time had very dark faces.  I still think of them often… and i will never stop loving them… all of them.  And when something happens like it happened in South Carolina…  Forgive me, I have to cry again for a bit.

And how do we solve the problem of places where love is so badly needed, but is not present in large doses?  How do we overcome this passion some people have to exclude illegal immigrants, and the need some people feel to move their children out of schools where there are too many of the wrong colored faces?  I do not know the answer.
But you do not create love by passing laws and building walls.  You have to spend time with them.  You have to laugh at the same jokes.  You have to play the same games.  You have to love puppies and kittens.  Don’t you?

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June 5, 2015 · 1:24 pm

A Matter of Religion

Iowans are simple people and have a simple faith.  We believe in the land and we believe in making things grow.  Whether we use Christian symbols and Republican moral imperatives, or liberal thought experiments laced with atheistic flavors of actual thinking, we all basically accept that we should believe in the land and make things grow.

valnchurch

The church in the Paffooney picture is a real church in my real little Iowa home town.  Once it was the Congregational Church in Rowan, the second location.  The first Congregational Church building that stood on Main Street burned down before I was ten.  But it didn’t remain pure Congregational.  Little Rowan was not really big enough to support two different churches.  So long about the time when I was wrestling with the fact that I had lust in my heart, and looking at the pretty Congregationalist farm girl two seats ahead of me and the Methodist Minister’s son on the school bus made my soul hurt, the Methodist Church and the Congregational Church were forced to become one church.  They used both church buildings on a weekly rotating basis, using the same minister for both.  It was the Methodist minister, my best friend’s father who got the job of spiritual leader for the entire community.  And there was hell to pay.  Congregationalists hated the idea that the minister was no longer speaking Congregationalist approved Biblical ideas.  And Methodists resented the fact that they had to have their immortal souls saved in the same church building as those unclean Congregationalists.  Heckfire, they didn’t even like taking cold showers as much as Methodists did.  They took them, all right, but didn’t really like them enough.  So religious wars were fought in our little town for decades.  But only in the manner of Iowegian Christians.   Silent wars employing laser-focused glares of righteous disapproval.  Attacks on the other side committed solely with clucking tongues and expressed only to members of the same congregation in places where the other side will never hear of it.  And of course, as children tackling the full range of punitive forces and concepts associated with puberty, we were completely unaware of what was going on behind closed doors.  Fury of Biblical proportions was disrupting the digestion of nearly one quarter of the Yoke Ministry of the United Churches of Rowan, Iowa, and causing innumerable bottles of Milk of Magnesia to be consumed in the middle of the night.  These two Midwestern flavors of Christianity were just too different to co-exist in the same building.  Of course, I couldn’t tell you what the differences actually were.  I still can’t.  But I learned the tremendously terrible and atheistic notion that all Christians are the same, and they all worship the same God, and they are all equally worthy of love.

The scariest thing of all is this.  I went on from the religious wars of Rowan, Iowa in the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s to living in a community in South Texas where the two sides were Hispanic Catholics versus Southern Baptists.  I got married to a Jehovah’s Witness, and tried very sincerely for a while to be a Jehovah’s Witness.  I taught kids who were Catholic, Baptist, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist.  And scariness comes with the realization that I still believe “they are all equally worthy of love.”  Atheists too, for that matter.  I am sorry that atheists are not crazy enough to actually talk to God.  There is comfort on so many levels with the ability to speak to an invisible mythological father.  And I speak to Him daily.  So what is my real religion?  I am not sure.  But Valerie Clarke in the church Paffooney agrees with me (because I totally created her and she has no choice); the church parking lot is a great place for skateboards.

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May 30, 2015 · 3:58 pm

Danse Macabre (the cartoon dance of death)

I would like to say going in that there are good reasons why young people can become obsessed with death and suffering and the color black and the dance towards the grave.  I danced that jig too when I was younger.  At age 22 my experience with sexual assault came back to me in dreams.  I thought they were only dream images, but as I continued to think about it and be tormented by it, I began to clearly recall the terrible things he did to me that I had been repressing for twelve years.  And I deal with traumatic experience with art for some crazy reason.  I took a week in 1981 to get all the horrid feelings out on paper.

Danse M3

You will notice the tombstone lists the date of death as being before my eleventh birthday in 1967.  That is when it happened.  It was not actually a sexual experience… it was torture.  He took my pants off and did things to my private parts to cause me intense pain.  And he even said to me that it was my own fault, that somehow I had told him that I wanted this horrible thing to happen.  For several years after I intentionally used the furnace in my home to make burn scars on my lower back and the back of my legs.  I believe now that I was hurting myself in order to extinguish sexual thoughts and feelings.  The worst thing he did to me was make me feel guilty about what happened.

Danse M2

When you go back to the art of the middle ages, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and other European artists both young and old, you see artists grappling with mortality, the fact that all people, including me, will die.   At times it can seem to the immature mind that death is the only possible escape from suffering.  This artwork comes from a time when I was contemplating exactly that.

Danse M1

If you are looking at this closely, you will see that I signed my name to it backwards.  I signed my art as Leah Cim Reyeb, or simply Leah Cim.  I put these four panels into my big black portfolio and never showed them to anybody until after my abuser passed away from a heart attack.  I don’t believe in Hell and I don’t believe in ghosts, so now, I finally feel safe about sharing this artwork with others.  The terrible secret is a secret no longer.  He can no longer reach out and hurt me any further.

Dansegawd 4

I apologize for not being funny… even remotely funny… in this post.  Funny is probably not the appropriate thing for this post.  You may be wondering why I even bother to post it.  Isn’t this a private matter, best kept to myself?  You tell me.  This is a terrible thing that happened to me.  I am now honest about it in a way I could never be before.  I can explain it without worrying about any retribution by or against him.  I can finally forgive him.  I can overcome what happened and be the stronger for it.  And if you have read this far without being so revolted by it that you stopped reading and stopped following my blog, maybe you need to do the dance with me.  Is there something you need to overcome?  It can be overcome.  So dance with me… and rejoice.

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May 26, 2015 · 11:32 am

Writing with Power

Troubled hearts can be soothed with words.  In 1Samuel 16:23 David plays the harp and his singing was a relief for Saul and the bad spirit departed from upon him.  In the same way, the written word can touch the soul of the reader and, like Saul, free the reader from the demons besetting him.  That is power.  That is responsibility.

solomon

Of course, I am the last person to claim that I can teach you to write with power… I can’t even claim that I can write with power myself.  But I know how to write well enough to make myself laugh, cry, and feel through my writing.  And occasionally someone else reads my writing and agrees.  Through years worth of being a writing teacher, I do have some thoughts about how it may be done.

First of all, I am not wrong to choose David’s harp playing, inspired by Jehovah as it was, as a metaphor for writing power.  It is in the very sounds of the words that a great deal of emotion and meaning is embedded.  One can evoke a very bitter and angry feeling by describing a cruel woman not as a “mean girl” but as one whose laughter is “like the crass cackling of devious old witch”.   Mean girl has too soft a labial sound, even with the hard g, to be as ugly and staccato as the repeated k sounds added to the tch and the fact that “devious” comes so close to “devil”… a related word.  A happy feeling can be created by describing a smile as “a sudden sunburst of white teeth and happiness”.  That almost makes me laugh…unless you add “shark’s” between “white” and “teeth”… and then I am convinced I am about to be eaten.  The s sounds in the description are like a sizzling burn that leads into the firework display at the end of the word “sunburst”.  To write with the music inherent in words, at some point you have to hear it out loud.  I always hear the words in my head when I write, spoken in a wide variety of voices.  But to truly get it right, I have to read aloud to hear with my ears… which I have already done three times to this paragraph alone.

In order to have power, writing must manipulate feelings.   I don’t mean by using the word “manipulate” that it is some sort of Machiavellian bad thing.  Simply put, a writer must control the feelings of the reader, not by sound alone, but by the depth of meaning of the words.  You must be able to weave a paragraph together not only with the simple meanings of the words themselves, but all the connotations and denotations in those words.  You must use metaphor and simile, comparison, allusion, and sensory details.  Ernest Hemingway had a working style almost completely devoid of metaphor and the writer’s own personal commentary… but that only worked because all his themes were about dispirited people suffering tragedy and loss and a pervasive sense of disconnectedness.  Hemingway is a powerful writer… but his books never make me laugh.  Purple prosey over-describers like Charles Dickens can make me laugh with a simple list of things.  “The boy’s desk had a nearly dry ink bottle, several pens that needed new nibs and were chewed about the grip, and a small stack of papers crammed full of ink drawings of skulls and skeletons.”   It is that last startling detail in the list that makes the mundane suddenly funny.

I suppose to do today’s topic true justice, I should write about it in book length.  There is so much more to say.  But I have bored you long enough for one post with writing nuts and bolts.  It is enough to say that I believe in the magic of words, and I think that if, like any good Dungeons and Dragons wizard, you study your books of magic long enough, you can soon be casting fireballs around the room made up of nothing but words.

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May 25, 2015 · 2:11 pm

Memorial Day Blues

What do you suppose it means that I am ill and confined to bed on Decoration Day?  You know, the holiday we now call Memorial Day?  I used to feel very patriotic.  I believed in singing the anthem and saying the pledge.  I joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses for a while because my wife is a true believer… and they tell me those things are un-Christian.  And now that I can no longer claim to be in that religion any more… because I really don’t believe…   Not that I don’t believe in God.   I have evidence in my own life (they say that if you talk to God you are normal, but if He answers, you are either a prophet or a lunatic… and I am definitely no prophet).  But I don’t believe in their God who calls the science of evolution a lie, and forbids blood transfusions that might save your life, and believes you will be denied eternal life if you don’t worship him in the correct manner… using the correct words.   They don’t believe you can be one of the saved and also be a member of the armed services… and my eldest son is now serving in the Marine Corps.

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Decoration Day was made a holiday in the 1860’s as a day to honor those Americans who had died in the service of their country.  Not honoring all soldiers, mind you, honoring the soldiers who died.  Over 600,000 of them died in the Civil War on both sides, and all of them were Americans.  Honoring the dead became a way of life back then, a very prominent part of the culture.  It was a holiday for putting flowers on graves.  I don’t think it was a holiday meant to make us happy like Christmas, or thankful like Thanksgiving.  I think it is supposed to help you remember… it is supposed to make you sad.

I lost a great uncle, my Grandma Beyer’s brother, in the Navy in WWII, although it was a training accident in a gun turret, not in battle… no purple heart.  My mother lost a cousin in the Viet Nam conflict.  Tommy Hinckley was a pilot who crashed and was lost.  So I have reason enough already to be thinking about war and death without even mentioning my son. What other conclusion can I reach?  War is a terrible, horrible thing.  This holiday is not about war.  But it is about soldiers.  I hate war.  But I love and respect soldiers.  And I hate all war… even wars like WWII that had to be fought to prevent great evil.  And I love all soldiers, even the ones we call our enemies, because they have made the choice to die to protect the things they believe in and the people they love.  And it is a noble sacrifice even when it is made for the wrong reasons and serves stupid ends.  And some of the soldiers, most of them, don’t die.  They live to tell the story.  And that is a story we need to hear.

But I am blue today.  Not because I am feeling ill, which is a constant part of my life…  but because soldiers die.  Today is the day we are supposed to think about that… honor that sacrifice… and remember.  And maybe we are supposed to be sad.

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May 16, 2015 · 1:58 pm

Teacher-Wise

So, does this title have more than one meaning?  Of course it does.  This post is about being a teacher and having wisdom.  And I know you will immediately think, “You dumb guy!  I know teachers who aren’t wise at all!  Some teachers are stupid!”

namaste_out_of_control_cover

You are especially saying that if you are a student.

You are not wrong, either.  Some teachers have no business being teachers.  It is especially difficult to find good science and math teachers.  After all, those who are good at math and science can make so much more money in the private sector, that they would have to be born to be a teacher… and realize it, to go into teaching.  There are very good science and math teachers out there, but many of them are wilting under the weight of a difficult job being made constantly harder by social pressures like truly dumb people who say things like, “You can’t solve our education problem by throwing money at it!”  I guarantee no one has ever thrown money at the problem.  If teachers were paid what they were worth so that we could retain good, competent teachers, you would see education make an amazing amount of progress in a very short time.  What Wall Street firm fails to pay their star players what they are worth?  Do bankers and lawyers get punished for doing a good job by asking them to produce more with fewer resources for less pay?  Those folks in finance and law always pay the price for the best because that always produces the best result.  If you want schools to routinely produce critical thinkers and problem-solvers, why would you complain that we are spending too much money per kid?  Of course, there are those with the money and the power (especially in Texas) who really don’t want more students coming out of schools with the ability to think and decide for themselves.   Smart people are harder to control and make a profit from. (Out of Control is a book they don’t want you to read.)

class Miss M2

So now I have totally proved the point that smart people who are looking out for their own interests should never go into teaching.  Still, among the unwashed, unloved, and incompetent that do make the mistake of going into teaching, there is still a great deal of learning and gaining of wisdom going on.  After all, if a fool like me can become a good teacher, anybody can do it.  You just have to learn a few bits of wisdom the hard way that have very little to do with what we call “common sense”.

As Dr. Tsabary points out in the book I plastered on the front of this post, discipline is not what you think.  We all remember that teacher we had that nobody listened to.  She was always yelling at us.  She made threats.  She punished us.  And even the good kids in class would shoot spitwads at the back of her head.  Why did we not respect and learn from this teacher?  Because she never learned these profound truths.

1.  Kids are people.  They want to be treated with respect and even love.  Their ideas matter as much, if not more than the teacher’s ideas.  Good teachers will;

a. Get to know every kid in their class as a human being, knowing what they believe in, what they care about, where they come from, and who they think they are.

b. Ask them questions.  They will never have an original idea if you do not make them think.  They have insights and creativity and strengths as well as weaknesses, bad behavior, and wrong ideas.  You have to emphasize the former and minimize the latter.

c.  Laughing and talking in the classroom is evidence of learning.  Quietly filling out worksheets is evidence of ignorance, and most likely the ignorance of the teacher.

2.  Tests don’t matter.  This is always true for these reasons;

a.  Tests are a comparison, and nothing is gained by comparing kids.  Comparing the scores of my bilingual kids in South Texas with upper class rich kids in Chicago and college-bound kids in Tokyo has no value.  Their lives are completely different and so are their needs.  If we don’t score as well on the tests as the kids in Tokyo, what difference will that make to what time the train arrives in the station in Paris?  (Especially if Pierre has chosen the bullet train that goes south at a rate of 200 miles per hour.  No trains in Texas go that fast without crashing and blowing up.)

b.  If I spend time in class teaching students how to read and making them practice reading critically, they will do just as well as the kids who drilled extensively from specially made State materials preparing for the test on the reading and vocabulary portions.  The only way that outcome changes is by cheating and giving them the actual test questions before the test.  (I should point out that teachers caught doing this last thing are shot in Texas and buried in a box full of rattlesnakes.  Dang old teachers, anyhow!)

I know I started this little post by convincing you that I am not wise, and very probably mentally unbalanced.  And now that I have made my arguments, you know for sure.  But over time, there is wisdom to be learned from being a teacher.  You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true.  (I don’t know how many times I used that phrase out loud in a classroom over 31 years, but I am guessing you couldn’t count them on fingers even if you used the hands of every kid I ever had as a student.)

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May 10, 2015 · 1:24 pm

Cloudscapes

Cloudscapes

Once upon a time, the English poet and, I would argue, cartoonist, William Blake once said, “You look at the sky and see clouds, while I see the assembled heavenly host!”  This is why my literature class in college about the Romantic Poets of his day made him out to be a certifiable nutcase who probably belonged in in a mental institution.  (And back then, in the 1800’s, the sanitarium was a place where inconveniently crazy people went to die.)

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Look at a couple of my cloudscapes.  Do you see angels?

Cloudscapes (a poem)

Blue and white and filled with light…

The cloudscape burns with angels…

And wholly bought with grace unsought…

I long to fly with angels…

Are they really there in the cloud-filled air?

I see them there, they’re angels!

So, there you have it.  I’m a loon.  I don’t even have the excuse of being a Romantic Poet and well-known for my poetry as a defense against the loony bin.  But as the matter stands, I am fully willing to accept the consequences.  Creativity has its price.  And, while you may not agree that I am somewhat creative, I am swimming in a vast ocean of perceived revelations that enriches me and fulfills me at the very same moment that it drains all the energy from my soul.  If that is not what it means to see angels… then I do not know anything of use to anyone but me.

The word “angel” (according to Wikipedia, the source of all true knowledge) comes to English via Late Latin and the word “angelus” which the Romans stole from the Greek  ἄγγελος ángelos,  The ángelos is the default Septuagint’s translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal’ākh denoting simply “messenger” without specifying its nature.  (Notice, I am giving full credit to Wikipedia because it is far more all-knowing than I.)

I have many atheistic and agnostic notions in my ultimate belief systems, but still, I claim to be a Christian and believe in God Jehovah… within limits.  I still communicate with God on a daily basis, and while I don’t publicly pray anymore (a notion promoted by the Biblical Jesus) I find answers to my questions and solutions to my problems from the observable universe around me.. the messengers of God.  So, now that I have fully rationalized being crazy as a loon, I am going to tell you where that craziness is taking me.  I started a new Paffooney for one of the books I am working on.  Here is the pencil sketch;

pencil sketch

This will be a picture of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, the farmer Kyle Clarke.  In my fiction, Kyle loses his farm to the bank (in the Family Farm Crisis of the 1980’s) and believing himself incapable of any longer supporting his family, kills himself.  But the thing is, the love of his daughter transcends death for Kyle.  She is able to reconnect with him time and again because the angels work for her as well as for Kyle.  I may be loony and ill in real life, facing the Angel of Death myself, but I am not done doing God’s work… not yet… not for a long time to come.

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May 4, 2015 · 11:52 am

A Silly Side-Note and Picture Paffooney

pink n blue22

I was trying to figure out a way to cheat today and post something that didn’t take a lot of time and effort, but appealed to an audience looking for humor, art, poop jokes, cute kids, or inspiration, or whatever the heck else people make the mistake of looking at my blog for.  I came up with this amalgam.  Amalgam is a good word.  It means different things all mashed up together to make something new.  You will note I took several old things I have already done and mushed them together into a single bizarre Paffooney picture of mostly pink and blue.  I promise that I will work harder tomorrow to do whatever it is that I actually do… and for today… well, it isn’t totally bad.  I usually do very similar stuff, but with way more words.

Here is a close-up of the prose-poem in case you don’t want to make the effort it takes to click on the picture and blow it up a bit;

pink n blue212

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April 22, 2015 · 12:44 pm

A Year Full of Sick Days

Dr SeabreezA year ago, I had to make the tough decision to end my teaching career of thirty-one years.  I had a run of about three months where the sick days were costing me $330 apiece and my monthly paycheck kept sinking lower and lower.  It was a choice between continuing to work hard, catch every virus that germy school kids carried into my classroom every day, and end up owing the school money at the end of the month.  Teacher paychecks are earned during the nine months of teaching time, but spread over the twelve actual months  (actually we work for ten and a half months because holiday breaks are always filled with paperwork, homework, and preparation, but you don’t actually get paid for that… eleven and a half months if you teach summer school for $20 an hour), and retiring on a fixed income that would turn out to be more each month than I was taking home each month while working.

After a year of headaches and breathing trouble… visits to the heart doctor… dealing with family bouts of social anxiety disorder and bipolar disorder… along with the resulting depression and physical pain… I am beginning to believe I made a good decision.  I never could’ve weathered another year of teaching.  I would’ve physically given out.  But I have had ample time to write, to talk with and spend time with my children, and heal.  I am still not well enough to get a part time job to supplement my income… but the chance to achieve good health again is closer now than it would’ve been if I hadn’t retired.   Goofing off and playing with my toys has been good for me.

During the school day, with my kids in school, I can sit and write stark naked.  (I know that sounds kinda perverted, but with psoriasis chewing my skin up in all the covered parts, that is far more comfortable than wearing clothes.  Sitting in a hot bath is even better.)  I have taken up Facebooking and WordPressing and playing Facebook games like Magecraft (I am now level 35 and gaining).  I can’t keep playing and wasting time for too much longer, but I have never been more creative than I have in the last year.  I wrote and finished four novels.

So, why am I telling you this instead of creating some humorous post about city driving or why bankers are better pirates than Blackbeard ever was?  (Hmm… I think I better write those topics down).  Because I can.  I have recently undergone several setbacks with family and health, and that takes some meditation and healthy thinking to recover from (especially when you don’t have enough money to get help from the doctor).  And besides, you all read my posts and offer words of comfort and pity… and I have a perverse need to write things that elicit comment and other proof that readers are actually reading what I write.  Most of my fiction-writing life has been addressed to the unseen ghosts of future readers… and I’m always a little bit afraid of ghosts.

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