Tag Archives: photo Paffooney

October 27, 2015 · 1:58 pm

So Grumpy

Grumpy (a poem about Grumpy life)

Dang it, you old grumpy man!

You annoy me as only a grumpy man can.

You grouse and growl and sometimes howl,

And pace the house like a cat on the prowl.

You worry me, weary me, and generally nasty be,

And of course you are… yes, you are… naturally me.

So why do you worry me, weary me, moan and make bother,

Now that you’re old, and you sound like your father?

Because you are cranky now, creaky with age,

And know you now, soon, the book’s turning its page.

And, though you complain, you do love your life,

And, loathe you will leave it, and your sweet-smiling wife.

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*Footnote*  I was in a foul mood when I wrote this poem, but my favorite team, the Cardinals, won a football game with a last second interception by Tony Jefferson in the end zone.

*Double Footnote*  Yes, my wife will be smiling when I am gone because I am so GRUMPY!

*Triple Footnote*  Yes, I was talking to the mirror in this poem.  I took the picture in the mirror and then reversed it on my laptop.

*Fourple Footnote*  Yes, I know.  Too dang many footnotes.  Dang it!!!

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October 15, 2015 · 1:52 pm

Revenge, a Dish Best Served… Well Cooked

You may remember, (if you are goofy enough to actually follow this blog) that Walmart hates my car.  So, I figure the time has come to declare war.  It will be the great War on Walmart by Mickey.  And I am pretty sure they won’t even feel it.  You see, I went to their manager with a complaint about them trying to make my car fart itself to death with too much oil after they originally screwed up the oil change.  I mean, everything was entirely their fault.  They forgot to replace the cap on the engine when they first changed the oil.  They also forgot to drain the old oil out completely when they cleaned up their mistake and put in replacement oil (which they did for free and that apparently counts for more than I think it did).  They did remember, however, to hold on to the receipt so I would have no proof in court that they had even done this particular oil change.  And they were not going to reimburse me for the $140 I spent at the Ford garage to make sure their mistakes had not caused permanent expensive damage to my car.  They informed me that on the receipt I had signed my name to the fact that I brought the car in low on oil and that they were not responsible for any damage to my car that may have caused.  And besides, I couldn’t prove that they had done any damage to my car because the Ford dealer’s diagnostic results only proved that the car was NOT damaged.  So, they basically screwed me out of $140 dollars plus the original $30 for an oil change that had to be completely redone.  So, step one, never ever ever… and I mean completely never ever… get any automotive supplies or work done at Walmart ever again… never again!

The hated Walmart on Frankford and Marsh... scene of much Mickey's misery.

The hated Walmart on Frankford and Marsh… scene of much of Mickey’s misery.

Step two, find other ways to deprive Walmart of every Mickey dollar I possibly can of the huge chunk of my salary they soak up every month.  It is hard to make the money last as long shopping anywhere else, and Walmart has driven almost all of their competitors out of the area.  You can, for the most part, only buy the same things for more money at other area stores.  You are stuck shopping at Walmart because for the average American that is all you can afford.  But I found a place that actually sells groceries cheaper.  I followed all my Hispanic neighbors to Aldi’s.  Yes, Aldi’s has taken over for the Kroger’s and the Albertson’s in the hearts and minds of the local people.  (Walmart wiped out Kroger’s on Old Denton Avenue, and forced Albertson’s to raise their prices to stay open).  Aldi’s, however, saves money in every way imaginable in their little mom-and-pop-type stores.

My grocery cart at Aldi's.

My grocery cart at Aldi’s.

My cart at Aldi’s in the Paffooney above ended up costing me $41.32.  Now, I know for people as dinosaur-ancient as me this is a horrible price to pay for what once cost under $10, but it compares really well with the estimated $65 the same cart-full would’ve costs at the Walton family’s evil everything emporium.  And you can’t really see it in this view, but I have a good sized tub of Neopolitan ice cream in here that I bought for less than $4.  And there is a 24-bottle raft of drinking water in the cart for only $1.29.  (And yes, I also remember when you got water for free and the tap at home didn’t have only hot-and-cold running Texas frog-water in it… with all those delicious fracking fluids added in for flavor, but water now can only be safely had from Nestle bottle trees).  So, I can rebel against Walmart by not buying everything from them, and I still get to eat and feed my family.  I even save a few dollars.  And the best thing is… cookies!

You probably didn't spot these in my cart, but these are delicious Italian apple-cinnamon cookies for less than $2!!!

You probably didn’t spot these in my cart, but these are delicious Italian apple-cinnamon cookies for less than $2!!!

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October 10, 2015 · 3:16 pm

Band Battles and Ballgames

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It was “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” night last night, because the Princess’ middle school band was expected to attend the football game and participate in the Newman Smith Trojans’ halftime show experience.  This of course took me away from where my heart was really located, as the St. Louis Cardinals took on the Chicago Cubs in their first ever playoff game.  Seriously, the Cubbies have never taken on the Cards in the whole history of baseball playoffs because they are in the same division and the wild card format had never brought them into playoff conflict before now.  Okay, before my brain bursts in cardinal red flames, the redbirds won and I only missed a fantastic playoff performance by pitcher John Lackey.  The band thing simply had to take precedence.

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So, we went to Standridge Stadium to watch the football team from the high school where number one son did his four years.  They were doomed from the outset.  The one and four Trojans were facing the Woodrow Wilson Wildcats who had reversed the Trojans’ record, winning four and losing only one.  The opening drive for a touchdown by the Wildcats let me know immediately that there would be no hope.  And then the Trojan kick returner fumbled the kickoff that followed.  It was going to be a long night in Trojan town.  And yet, it wasn’t.  The boys in green were able to intercept a pass and run their way back down the field to tie the game up.  It proved that the real way to win the game was for one side to be bright enough to never throw the dang ball.  What happened next was a horrible mishmash of long runs and end-arounds punctuated by pass interceptions and penalties.  At the half, the Trojans were behind 14 to 7.

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That brought us to the real event, the band performing at halftime.  Number one son had always adored the band program at Newman Smith.  Their marching band was award-winning and top-rated super-spiffy.  Dorin, my number one son, worked hard for four years to help them stay a number one rated band while he was in high school.  My daughter is seriously considering following in his footsteps.  But the band competition between Woodrow and Newman Smith was far more lopsided than the football game.  Only in our direction.

You can kinda see in the picture how pitifully small and powerless their band really was.  Of course, it didn’t help that they were facing away toward the visitor’s side, only showing us their little band butts during the entirety of their show.  And you see how their little red ants on either side of the marching band outnumber them?  Those little midget girls (apparently you made the girls’ dance team based on not being over four feet tall in high school) numbered about a hundred.  And all they did was turn around in circles and wave little sticks with blue and silver Christmas-tree tinsel on the ends.  The band performed their UIL competition routine entitled “Elvis on Mars”, or “Sram no Sivle” as their signs read from our point of view.  Their routine even included a boogie dance where the band put their horns and stuff down to wiggle their behinds at us.  How is that marching?  They weren’t even playing music at that point.

So, we came to the performance of the Mighty Trojan Band, and the performances of “Main Street America” and “Maestro” seemed to be marching band times twelve by comparison.  They actually marched in formation and impressed with a loud, bold, and highly musical sound.  Their lines were crisp and their corners sharp and my wife and I really appreciated that they haven’t lost their edge even a little bit since Dorin played the mellophone among them.

The marching band performance made the effort and expense worth it for the evening.  We thoroughly enjoyed it.  And then, like good band parents, we proceeded to go home after halftime.  Football game?  What about it?  That’s not why we went there.  Yet, the team had other ideas.  They ran the second half kickoff three quarters of the way to the goal line.  And they put on an unstoppable running game that took them down into the red zone.  And as we were exiting, they scored the tying touchdown.

“Do you want to stay and watch the game?” my wife asked with eyes that told me the answer had to be “no.”  And I did not feel particularly well from sitting in the cold wind on metal stadium benches.  So I let the aches and pains over-rule the game watching mania that nearly claimed me.  We went home.  I later learned that the Trojans lost in double overtime.  Dang!  But we won the battle of the bands hands down.

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September 30, 2015 · 2:34 pm

Why Does Walmart Hate My Car? Episode Two

I wrote a thousand words yesterday about terrible things Walmart did to my car.  I intend to follow that up with an even more harrowing tale of Walmart car-maintenance malevolence.  They really do seem to be out to destroy my car.  This attack was on an innocent little Ford Fiesta that I bought in 2011.  Prepare for a journey into the bizarre and horrible world of Walmart oil changes and attempted autocide with malice of forethought.

20150929_103033Episode Two;  Murder by Massive Car Farts

Now, I know that there is no posted policy anywhere in the Walmart automotive section where they do oil changes, tire mounting, and random acts of evil, but I really believe they all work under the same directive to stick it to Mickey anytime and every time they can.

I have been cheated by them before.  One time I took the car in, waited for two hours, and even though I was watching through the window as they did the oil change, I had no visible evidence that they actually took any old oil out or put any new oil in.  When I asked them for the empty oil bottles, they said they pump oil from an overhead reservoir (which I did not see anyone physically do).  So, I paid them and went home.  But before I made a trip to Iowa, I had the Ford dealer do a more expensive oil change.  They said the oil looked okay but it really didn’t look like it was only a week old.  So, I’m deducing Sherlockian-style that Walmart charged me twenty dollars just hold my car for two hours and look at the oil.

That brings me to last Wednesday.  I knew better.  I knew I should take the extra time and pay the extra money to take it to the Ford dealer, but Walmart is temptingly close and convenient.  So, I took the thing in.  The amount of oil in the engine was a little low, so they did the oil change (I actually saw oil go in this time) and made me sign a waiver that said that Walmart was not responsible for any damage that might’ve been caused by having too little oil in the engine.  On Friday, while picking up kids from school, the engine overheated in traffic.  While sitting at one foul-tempered stoplight with fifty or sixty… thousand other cars, and running the heater on a ninety degree day to keep my engine from flaming out, the check engine light came on.  “Oh, no!” I thought.  “Walmart was prescient about damage from too little oil.”

At home I checked the ridiculously hot engine and found the cap from the top of the engine (where a Walmart technician puts in new oil) was missing.  So I take it back on Saturday afternoon to show them the problem.  “Oh, yes, we’ll clean this mess up and put in new oil for free.  Don’t you worry about this.”  (He miraculously found the cap in the precise spot by the radiator where he had left it three days before.)

I waited it out, and, sure enough, the engine light was no longer warning of imminent car death.  So I failed to notice that he had kept my receipt from the previous visit.  We chugged happily out of the Walmart parking lot and down Marsh Lane to a spot where we were closer to home than to Walmart.  The car started making choking sounds and blinking multiple warning lights at me.  Number two son pointed to smoke coming up from the corners of the hood.  And a massive blue-white cloud of car fart exploded out of the tail pipe, obscuring the traffic behind me for miles.  My Sherlockian brain immediately deduced that something was wrong.  An oil change is NOT supposed to have an effect like that on your car.  So we limped the rest of the way home and called Triple A.

Fixing the problem was no bowl of Jello pudding.  I called Triple A and they recommended a tow so that no further damage would be done to the engine.  The tow truck came and I asked him to take it to 5-Star Ford whom I had previously called and explained my dilemma.  This he did.  And there are at least three 5-Star Fords in the North Dallas area.  He took it to the wrong one.  So, I arranged to have them keep my little Ford pony for the rest of the weekend and fix the potentially expensive problem on Monday.  I was depressed all weekend.  The evil Walmart goblin hordes had apparently destroyed my car.  I ate a lot of ice cream… probably more than was good for an aging diabetic.

Finally, the day came when I could find out the bad news and possibly get my car back.  I learned Monday that it was not a completely fatal blow.  The technician at Walmart had put new oil in without draining out enough of what was in there.  So there was far too much oil in the system when I tried to drive it home.  Too much oil and too high an oil pressure apparently gives a car massive amounts of intestinal gas.  That led to the nearly fatal car fart.  I ended up paying six times as much for the corrected oil change as Walmart had initially cheated me out of.  At least I didn’t have to sell one of my kids into slavery in order to get the money to fix it.  And I learned a valuable lesson from this whole experience.  Walmart hates me!

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September 29, 2015 · 2:23 pm

Why Does Walmart Hate My Car?

I have been having a lousy automotive time for the past few days thanks to Walmart.  And the kicker is, it is not the first dent in my soul put there by the Walmart corporate boot.  They are out to get me.  Specifically me.  Well, maybe paranoia and depression from chronic illness are not only good friends, but cousins.  But it does seem that Walmart is trying to destroy me.

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Episode One : Evil Decorative Parking-Lot Rocks

About five years ago I had a run-in with one of the corporation’s most seemingly innocuous assassins, namely a decorative parking-lot rock.

Look carefully at the expression on this rock's face. Do you see the vicious smirk? No? Then he has you precisely where he wants you.

Look carefully at the expression on this rock’s face. Do you see the vicious smirk? No? Then he has you precisely where he wants you.

A more insidious lurking evil I have never encountered.  Why is it even there?  Does it make the parking lot more beautiful?  Does it make you want to buy hand lotion, bananas, and school supplies from Walmart?  Does it make you want to buy car tires?  It may make you need to buy car tires.  But this particular decorative rock nearly destroyed my car.  You see, Walmart parking lot drivers are some of the best drivers in Texas.  You can tell by the kill stickers on their driver’s doors.  The one that was coming for me that late October afternoon was an Ace.  I swear, I’m sure I saw a little stick man, a stick woman, three stick kids, and five stick cats on her car.  It only takes five kills to officially become an Ace.  She even had one of those stickers in her back window of cartoon Calvin peeing on a Ford logo… and my cars are all Fords.  I was trying to turn out of the adjacent parking area in front of her.  She was at least thirty yards away and going at a snail’s pace when I turned in front of her.  Suddenly she floored the thing and was zooming straight for the driver’s door.  I swerved up onto the curb to avoid a grinding death of shattered glass and broken metal (or possibly plastic… it is an American car after all).  And guess who was waiting for my car at that precise spot.  The front passenger-side tire went up over the rock and the car came down hard on top of it, impaling itself, making a huge dent in the floor of the car right underneath number one son’s passenger seat.  We were stuck there.  The car still ran at that point, but there was no way to get the car off the rock.  The Ace driver sped off down Marsh Lane satisfied with the kill.

So I called Triple A to get a tow truck to come and lift the poor impaled car off the rock.  The rock would not let go.  A passing guy who had been previously t-boned on that corner stopped to help my son and I get the car off the rock.  No matter how we all pushed or pulled, forward or reverse, the car was not going anywhere.  So I called the tow truck, thinking surely it could lift the car off the rock and I could still drive away from this.  But then we were blessed with the help of a family of portly Mexicans (honestly, the license plate on their car was from Mexico, and they spoke only Castillian Spanish from the central part of that country, so I am not being racist here.)  The jolly little man told me in Spanish that I could only partly understand that he had tow cables in his car and could pull me off the rock.  I tried to tell him in Pidgeon Spanish (yes, my Spanish is apparently for the birds) that, “no, no… I want to wait for the tow truck I called.”  Apparently my no, gracias meant something like “yes, please, and make it snappy,” in his version of Spanish.  So, the guy who took pity on us because he had also been a victim at that spot, and the happy Mexican guy hooked the back axle of my car up to the back bumper of his little Mexican car and then he had me put the car in reverse and try to drive backwards while he tugged away with his little chugger of a car that contained his plump little wife and three plump and excessively happy little kids.  He assured me in Spanish that he would rescue my car.  So… we got the car off the rock.  But we left a chunk of the oil pan from the bottom of the engine on the tallest of the three knobs on the top of that evil, evil rock.  There was a long trail of oozing black car blood on the rock and on the parking lot.  I could envision Walmart handing me a bill for cleaning up the mess in their parking lot and on their evil rock.

The happy smile on the face of the Mexican guy disappeared.  He quickly retrieved his tow cable and they chugged happlily off down Marsh Lane too.  The man who first tried to help us helped us move the now fatally wounded car in neutral over to an unused parking space to wait for the tow truck.  Of course, by the time he got there, the garage where I wanted to take the car was closed, so we had to hitch a ride home, and we arranged for the car-corpse to be towed in the morning.  The evil decorative rock had won.  There was now a gaping hole in my car, and an even bigger hole in my heart.  One would think that fate and evil corporations would be satisfied with such an outcome.  But no, there is more to come in Episode Two, which I will have to tell you about tomorrow.

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September 28, 2015 · 2:27 pm

Toys

A new doll bought to combat depression. Part of a collection of Tinkerbell fairy dolls.

A new doll bought to combat depression. Part of a collection of Tinkerbell fairy dolls.

I have basically written an awful awful lot about my toys.  (The awful is repeated on purpose because I have been having a really awful time this week for reasons I will post about if I survive them).  And there is a reason a retired old man who seems to be rotting away into a second childhood is so obsessed with toys.  Playing is my primary goal for every day right now because darkness is closing in and, while play for children is practice for life in the future, play for an old man can be the reanimation of all the good things in life.

A Lego steam engine and a 1000-piece puzzle that my wife bought me to cheer me up.

A Lego steam engine and a 1000-piece puzzle that my wife bought me to cheer me up.

I have been a toy-maker and a toy-restorer as a part of my over-all quest to be an artist.  I even made some money with an online e-Bay store where I sold collectibles and restored toys.  I bought toys from Goodwill and re-sale stores, repaired them and cleaned them, and sold them for twice the sum I bought them for.  I also made a few porcelain dolls in a kiln I bought in the 1990’s when my mother and I became porcelain doll-makers.  I would show you some of my babies, but the real live children have managed to break all the dolls except for a couple my mother made.  (Well, toys are made to be played with, right?)  But I do still have many of the repaired and cleaned toys that I either didn’t sell or couldn’t bring myself to part with.

Toys in every corner of the house, dang it!

Toys in every corner of the house, dang it!

I have also been a model railroader since childhood, spending countless hours building tunnels and repainting rolling stock, and making buildings and scenery from kits and plaster.  I haven’t rebuilt my layout since moving north away from South Texas, but maybe I will get to that too in my retirement and second childhood.

I do still have some trolley street scenes on the tops of book cases.

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And toys serve as memory objects.  They can do magic with time and space.  I have saved many of my toys from childhood.  Toys were precious and mostly Christmas and birthday gifts.  I learned to save and salvage them because they treated me well, and… well, I owed them the same in return.  My own children were not like that.  They loved toys to pieces and even sometimes ate them, to a point where many of them were un-fixable junk.  But toys bring things back to life from the long-gone past.  Take for instance the toy in this next picture;

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No, I don’t mean the baby doll.  He grew up and joined the Marine Corps.  I mean the stuffed white tiger in the background. That was the first toy I ever bought for baby Dorin.  And it is still with us, though not as fluffy and pretty as it was in the picture.  My daughter, the Princess, inherited it and christened it “Baby Tiger”.  That is, of course, still its name to this very day.  I look at it and see all three of them… my super-destructo toy-flinging and clockwork-wrecking children.  And it is the toys that we have all played with that still link us all together even though they are almost grown.

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September 20, 2015 · 2:43 pm

Flag Football

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Yesterday was a long trek by car followed by what I thought was going to be a second straight flag football wipe-out all to get to see number two son play in a game.  I spent four years as a band parent lugging kid and equipment to and from band practices, bus-catches, concession stand work, fund-raising, and performances.  Number one son was a gung-ho marcher with dreams of joining a nationally ranked drum and bugle corps.  Wow!  The effort almost killed me.  But number two son reached high school with a different set of goals and skills, and due to educational forces beyond our control, and evilly opposed to us, he didn’t even stay landed in the big Texas 5A School he wanted to be in.  We settled for a charter school that provides a completely different format that Henry can handle.  Number two son is more like me than the first one was.  He’s brainy and thin and athletically capable, but not athletically experienced.  He is gifted in so many ways, but not in ways that are normally considered acceptable in cowboy country and the Greater Dallas Cowboy Area Football Imperative.

Henry is number 3, and like usual, back to the camera.

Henry is number 3, and like usual, back to the camera.

So this year we are taking on football.  I mean, not ferociously Texas high school tackle and kill football, but FLAG FOOTBALL.  The teams wear two yellow or white flags that have to be grabbed and pulled to stop the advance of the ball.  As a parent, I appreciate the sissy version of the meat-grinding, brain-fracking sport that Texas loves more than pornography.  I know it is not considered as manly to play flag football, but having been subject to a hospitalizing head trauma in my own high school football days, I would rather have him play the safer, cleaner version.  And, let’s face it, he weighs a hundred pounds less than some of the high school guys that would be chasing him to bulldog him in regular high school football.   And his school, a small charter school, is just starting it’s flag football program.  That allows Henry to be on the starting team, and play a sport that he wouldn’t stand a ghost of a chance of even making the team otherwise.

So, how did we get to yesterday?  Well, a week ago, the very first game for the Mighty Ospreys was a total disaster.  It started before two of the required seven players even arrived.  So, the first touchdown was scored by the other team when they intercepted the pass from the only girl in the game, playing quarterback for us even though she couldn’t throw the ball at better than a wounded-duck wobble.  We played a good portion of the first half, five players against seven.  And when the other two showed up, the other side was still the only side to score.  And they scored at will.  It ended mercilessly at ungodly-high-score to nothing.

So I was expecting another humiliation yesterday.  This reveals the true advantage of being a total pessimist.  I can only be pleasantly surprised.  The other guys were almost all shorter than our guys.  And our guys, after an extra week of practice, were handling the ball BETTER.  We found a quarterback who could throw the ball on target.  We scored two touchdowns and a two-point conversion to win 14 to 6.  And Henry was almost able to catch a touchdown pass.  It was deflected and he almost caught it anyway!

So, I came home sicker than Marmaduke after rancid pork, but happy.  Of course, the Princess mentioned that she wants to be in marching band when she gets to high school next year.  Oh, my aching sit-down parts!

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September 9, 2015 · 1:55 pm

Burning Issues

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As the sun rises over the baked and burning land of Too-Hot Carrollton, Texas, the clouds have decided to finally give us a break.  It rained today.  And that is significant in the land where Texas Republican government flatly states that climate change is a hoax, and fracking and drilling for oil and natural gas are the best thing in the world for all.  I can’t breathe because the drought out west, caused by this hoax, has led to the world being on fire in more literal ways than Texas Senator Ted Cruz ever thought to scare toddlers with.  Smoke from California makes the air difficult for someone like me to breathe.  I have lung problems from a long ago encounter with farm chemicals.  Texas officially recommends that instead of complaining, I should just try to conserve air, and only breathe every other day.  I am doing my best, but turning a little blue.

Matthew 5:44&45 says; “However, I say to you: continue to love your enemies and pray for those persecuting you; that you may prove yourselves sons of your Father who is in the heavens, since he makes his sun rise upon wicked people and the good and makes it rain upon righteous people and unrighteous.”

So, I take note of that, and appreciate that the unrighteous are sharing the cooling rain… whether I believe in the words of the Bible or not.  The Bible says many things that are very true, in spite of the fact that there are many people praying for the destruction of me and my kind (people who actually think for themselves) and basing those curses and ill wishes on what the Bible says.  Of, course, they call it “cherry-picking the Bible” when they pick out isolated verses and use them to justify not doing their clerky jobs or condemning immigrants and people of the wrong color.  I often think of it as being more of the “rancid lemon-picking of the Bible” myself.  There is a lot of cow poop in that wondrous old book if you look for it.  And I have personally read the entire Bible twice with numerous re-reads of many of the good parts.  Where, then, does a heathen like me look for salvation?  Buckminster Fuller, of course.

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Who the hell is Buckminster Fuller, you say?  Well, he is hero of mine from high school where I learned about him from a beloved Math teacher who told me about his efficient use of construction theory mathmetics in things like Bucky balls and geodesic domes .  Yes, it is in fact a nerd thing.  Bucky is a demigod to me, almost as much as Jesus of Nazareth.  Here is a website you can read about him at, and hopefully learn to love him as much as I do; https://bfi.org/!!!

The truth is, I believe science will do as much to ultimately save our souls as religion does.  But the point here is clear.  We must learn to love and value 100% of our fellow human beings.  Even the ones who hate us and insist that their right to make huge profits outweighs my right to breathe fresh air.

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As the sun sets, reddened by the smoke from western fires, this suffering cowboy wishes to acknowledge that a fellow blogger, Angie Trafford, wrote this blog It Had To Be Said and made me twist the lemon-juicers of my brain about how to make people appreciate others more.  So appreciate her and the people she passionately defends.  I know Bucky would.

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August 31, 2015 · 2:21 pm

The Blue Man

The Blue Faun who represents the lovely melancholy sensuality that informs my wordy little life.

The Blue Faun who represents the lovely melancholy sensuality that informs my wordy little life.

When I was in Iowa last, and had a chance to see the younger of my two sisters, Mary Ann, she told me flat out that she really liked my most recent blog posts and that I should give up all together on my gloomy pessimistic ones.  This, of course, was confusing to me because all my blog posts are relentlessly gloomy and never make anyone smile, so I did not know for certain what she was responding to.

As I have shared on more than one occasion, I suffer from six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor.  I don’t plan on living more than decade further at my most optimistic, and I told you recently that I am a confirmed pessimist.  At worst, I could be dropping dead from stroke or heart attack as soon as I post this silly sour old post.  I will be absolutely delighted to live long enough to finish another novel or two and maybe even see them published.   I keep close track of my remaining hours because each one is rare and precious to me, even the ones that are quite painful and hard.  So gloomy is as gloomy does.  I am constantly celebrating that I have lived this long already.  How depressing is that?  … the celebrating every day thing, I mean?

And of all the people who suspect I might be a fish sticks and custard sort of person, Mary Ann is not one of them.  She watches Doctor Who and knows that that is exactly what I am.  I am goofy and scatter-brained and a barely contained barrel of weird energy and misplaced enthusiasm. I do stuff like fill my bedroom Barbie shelf with bizarre and kitschy little 12-inch people.

The Barbie Shelf

The Barbie Shelf

I appreciate melancholy and being blue, because the hollows of the valleys of depression make you appreciate the giddy heights so much more.  And I do realize that I am stringing big words and goopy metaphors together to sound all literary and brooding… but that’s what real geniuses whom I am trying to emulate do to reach the highest heights.  They run down through the valley at the fastest possible pace to build up enough speed to shoot up the side of the mountain on the other side.  It is a Wiley Coyote trick for using cartoon physics in your own favor.  It is the reason I am still tending the flower wagon, trying to coax zinnias into blossoming during the depressingly renewed Texas drought.  It is the reason I keep adding to my collection of sunrises.  The dark blue pieces of the puzzle of life provide the contrast that help you define the puzzle picture of the brightest sunshine and light.

The blossoms in the flower wagon reached a new record number today, despite the heat.

The blossoms in the flower wagon reached a new record number today, despite the heat.

Sunrise on a school day when I don't have to go to school because I am retired.

Sunrise on a school day when I don’t have to go to school because I am retired.

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August 29, 2015 · 3:15 pm

The Happy Pessimist

“I’d rather be a pessimist because then I can only be pleasantly surprised.”

― Benjamin Franklin

289513Truthfully, I have always expected the worst out of life.  That expectation has never let me down.  In fact, it has made me a much happier person.  “How is that possible, you dim-witted dolt?” you ask.  Well, just as Franklin said it.  I am never taken unpleasantly by surprised.  In 1983 when I was diagnosed with malignant melanoma, skin cancer, I prepared myself to die at 27.  But I was pleasantly surprised.  I not only survived, but it was completely eradicated by surgery.  No chemo-therapy.  No recurrence.  No more cancer worries (beyond assuming each and every mole I had removed after that point in my life was melanoma revisited).  I can now celebrate 32 years of being cancer free.

pessimist

Watching politics as a humorous hobby benefits greatly from a pessimistic outlook.  I just assume that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz will win the Presidency in 2016, and I am preparing for that dismal dip into depressing gloom.  If Rodeo Clown Bush the Sequel gets elected, or Scott Walker gets the nod, the more likely scenarios, I will be pleasantly relieved and surprised, even though I will still be expecting the ultimate heat-death of the planet to come from those administrations.  If Marco Rubio gets the nod, better still.  He’s kinda young and stupid, but he’s demonstrated that he does care at least a little bit about the common man, and he doesn’t really want us all to die.  He’s even demonstrated the ability to learn from mistakes.  And if a Democrat wins, especially Bernie Sanders, that will be a repeat of the marvelous surprise we all got in 2008 from the election of Professor Obama, man of the people.  I will be preparing for the world to end after this next election, but there is actually a higher percentage chance of survival and limited suffering.  After all, people, even the mega-polluters in China and India. have recognized the need to try to repair the planet.

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I was honestly, as a pessimist, expecting to be dead before the new school year started in 2015.  So I was pleasantly surprised to be able to start a new collection of morning-dog-walk sunrise pictures.  I am prepared and at peace with the world because I always expect the worst to be happening.  Looking at everything from the dark side is ironically the way to find the light and hope in the new day dawning directly ahead.

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