This one isn’t about Bank of America or Aetna… specifically. It is just me adding to my cartoon vault and the story of the pirates in Fantastica.
This is the second panel of the story that can be found at The Pirate Vault
And panels three and four are all I have gotten done on this comic so far.
This nonsense will all be continued in upcoming days, and the whole thing is in my cartoon vault.
It is now official. I hate health insurance companies more than I hate the high cost of health care. I appreciate the emergency room that saved my son’s life a year ago in February. But I am still trying to pay for it. I am practically bankrupted by five ER visits in the last four years. Only one of those was mine. Health insurance does not approve ER costs for a whole list of health problems. And that was a better insurance than we have this school year.
In order to get my son out of the Health Facility that the ER sent him to, I had to arrange a doctor and a therapist before they would even discuss releasing him. I did that. My son reached a level of recovery that they could have authorized his release after one three-day weekend, but of course, the kept him for ten days… all of which I had to pay for out of pocket at hospital rates. The doctor I arranged for saw my son every three months after that to maintain his recovery and prescribe the best possible medicine. He was one of the best doctors in his field and he helped immensely. The therapist was even more helpful, being able to teach my son how to handle the symptoms and complications of his condition. He was also worth his weight in gold.
But then the State of Texas decided the health insurance that teachers got through their school districts on State funding’s dime was much too good. The wise and noble Emperor Perry of Texas decided to hand State employee health care over to Faetna ( a fake name that rhymes precisely with the corporation’s real name if you just drop the letter F). Wonderful doctor does not even deal with the pirates of Faetna. They swing into any and all health care situations on boarding ropes and slash at anything that moves with their cutlasses of problem-making. So I had to get a new doctor. The doctors in this particular field of medicine are not abundant to begin with. Aetna… er, I mean Faetna, decided that we could only use doctors that were associated with the same hospital where we visited the ER. Well, I asked them to give me names of the doctors who qualified. I got three names. I made an appointment. We were filling out the paperwork in the doctor’s office twenty minutes before seeing the doctor. The receptionist interrupted after I had half-way finished the mountainous paperwork to tell me the insurance had rejected payment. This doctor that THEY had recommended to me was not a part of the approved network. They took Faetna insurance, but Faetna refused to pay. The same day I called the other doctors on the list. No doctor recommended to me by the insurance company was part of the required plan. There were no doctors in the city who did qualify.
Okay. It can’t get worse. We still had the therapist who was working miracles for my son. He took Faetna insurance. There was no problem there, right? But wait. The pirate captains of Faetna took another look. They started rejecting his claims too. Soon there was a huge yellow envelope full of demands for clinical records to justify the need for the therapist. I went to the ER, to the wonderful doctor, to the hospital in Denton where they were still taking my money away from me, and to the therapist himself. We gathered documents. The lovely hospital charged me $50 for paperwork and made me drive all the way there to Denton twice to accomplish it. I got all the materials compiled, overnighted them to the insurance company’s disapproval department, and everything should’ve been fine. But. of course, it wasn’t. The claims for services were denied. I am expected to pay out of pocket. They found no clinical evidence that the services were essential and they insisted I pay the bills without help from them.
So, I am left marveling at the ingenuity of the insurance-pirate racket. Every month we pay for all five us, hefty premiums because we have health issues that need to be prepared for, and when the problems arise, and we ask them to pay their promised share… we have issues, and we get denied. I have been shanghaied by the pirates of Aetna… er, I mean Faetna.
Filed under angry rant, humor, pen and ink paffoonies
I am down and out again. The rain keeps coming down in Texas, when the wind isn’t trying to blow us away… And the pollen is higher than ever, with a really high mold count (to which I am very allergic). I am not the only member of my family suffering right now, and I just finished compiling fifty dollars worth of paperwork for my health insurance company because there are claims they don’t want to pay for. I am not an insurance-scammer. I really have been ill. I really have avoided expensive medication and referrals to specialists because I can’t pay for them. The pirates are actually the ones who have collected all the insurance premiums and then don’t intend to pay anything out. Sure, we are talking about pre-existing conditions, but the law says they can’t hold that against me any more. I could take them to court, but lawyers cost money too, and WHAT PART OF BROKE DON”T THEY UNDERSTAND?
This post is a place-holder. I have been religiously posting every day in 2015 and this post answers that particular quest today. But don’t worry yourself, Ol’ Black Timothy (the pirate pictured below in red, beside his best friend Scruffy Bill, who has two wooden legs, two wooden arms, and a wooden head)! I promise you, I will get to the humorous post where I skewer the evil buccaneers at (I won’t disclose the name, but it rhymes with Aetna in the way that orange rhymes with orange) and the evil swashbuckling freebooters of (rhymes with Bank of America…and possibly Providian). But for right now my head is hurting, I cannot breath, and I have a sick child to take care of at the same time. (How’s that for typing with one hand and fighting with a saber in the other?)
I am busily working on my novel, The Magical Miss Morgan. I would very much like to finish in November, but, at less than half way through, I don’t think it is likely. It is a novel about being a teacher. It is about both classroom magic, and dealing with the magical legacy of having a brother who is a wizard. So, this example Canto is telling about sitting at the teacher’s desk after class, talking to a “real” fairy. In the Paffooney, you see Miss Morgan with two students who are also Norwall Pirates, Blueberry Bates and Mike Murphy.
Canto Twenty-Three – After School at Miss Morgan’s Desk
Francis sat in the chair behind her desk and stared into the open planner spread out in front of her. She still had two days to get the following week’s plan accomplished. It was, however quite blank. For the last half hour she had done nothing but stare at it and think horrible thoughts about Six-Three.
“Please, dear teacher and storyteller,” said Donner plaintively, “respond that I may know you are unharmed and not mentally damaged.”
“Oh, hello, Bug. I’m okay, but I have had a very bad day.”
“What’s the matter?” the little insect-man had fluttered down to her desktop from somewhere above.
“Oh, sometimes students and their parents make me question if I’m in the right profession.”
“You are a lore-mistress. What higher calling could there be?”
“I just mean that I hate being in a job where you have to deal with willfully ignorant people.”
“I know what you mean. Dealing with Garriss and his brother Torchy is like that. No matter how many times you show them how to put out a campfire, they just seem too stupid to get it right.”
“No, Bug, my problem is not really like that. Cutie and her mother are not stupid. They are both quite bright. But they have a reason to not understand what I am trying to explain to them about my curriculum and my teaching methods. They want to set me up as a problem to be corrected, and so they refuse to see that my teaching methods are not the problem.”
“I have listened intently to the lore of Bilbo. I don’t know exactly what kind of fey creature a Hobbit truly is, but the world you describe… the world of Bilbo… is very accurate from the viewpoint of the fair folk. Tellosia is just like this Middle Earth you tell the young ones about.”
“Oh, heavens! I hope that doesn’t mean there are dragons flying around Belle City somewhere!”
“No, no. Dragon flies aplenty, but no dragons for at least six hundred years.”
Francis stared at Donner with a look that would’ve stunned any human student. Dragons? Really? Even six hundred years ago? Donner was completely oblivious to her disbelief. But maybe that was a good thing. If there were a dragon, maybe her disbelief could kill it and save the world.
“How did the mission we sent Garriss on turn out?” Donner asked innocently.
“Tim Kellogg took him to Norwall, just as we discussed. He gave your little fire child to a sweet little girl named Blueberry Bates. She is making drawings of him to pass around school and talk about fairies being real.” Francis frowned at the bug. “But tell me, Donner, can Garriss really teach the girl a spell to set someone’s underwear on fire?”
“Oh, yes. That is a simple glammer with pixie dust and the right tinder.”
“Oh, that is not good. I need to head things off again…”
It was almost too much. Her brother’s legacy of magic and the Pirates’ liars’ club made her life unnecessarily complicated. She and Jim needed to sort out how they were going to deal with Krissy, and on top of it all, Mrs. Detlafsen was intent on making a political issue out of Francis’ teaching style.
“If you are worried,” offered Donner sweetly, “I can teach you a spell to make a rain cloud hover over someone’s head. A nice big ten inch cloud… six gallons worth of rainwater… and you can make it rain on whichever person you need to soak. That should put out any fire that Garriss started.”
“Is Garriss hurt by water? Can it extinguish him? Hurt him in any way?”
“Magical water applied in the right way can snuff out a fire wisp, if you do it right. But Garriss is no beginner when it comes to magical fire… or even magical water.”
“That’s good. Tim’s little band of Pirate maniacs probably won’t kill him, then.”
“Believe me,” said Donner, grinning, “If my people haven’t been able to snuff out that fool in the last century, with all the reasons they have for trying, your young pie-rats don’t stand a chance of doing it.”
Filed under Uncategorized
As I lay here ill with another in an endless series of viral infections, I am reminded of the real reason I have been thinking so much lately about Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. (Of course the fact that I am re-reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles has something to do with it). It’s all about character. That’s what Victorian writers were all about. No one ever handled characters as masterfully as those two novelists. And, being ill and in pain, subject to problems with debt and credit cards and bankers, I began thinking about villains. Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist is one of the scariest villains in literature. Murdstone from David Copperfield and Daniel Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop are relentless predators. Uriah Heep from David Copperfield is smarmy as they come. In Tess young Master D’Urberville-Stokes has stolen the family name, and he steals Tess’s innocence in a manner that would make him a rapist in our day. He gets away with his horrible crime and later destroys the innocent woman, one of the best and most worthy characters in literature, because a corrupt and disintegrating culture allows him to do so. These characters are so carefully drawn and gloriously illustrated in the prose of these books, that I can see them in my artist’s mind’s eye. So I was inspired to draw a villain today. Since I am forced to think about bankers now, I drew a pirate. Yes, I know there’s no transition between Victorian novels and this picture, but I am not well, okay?
This particular pirate has a red face, red hair, red mustache, and wears red clothes, so naturally his name is Black Timothy. He is a credit card banker for Bank of America, the foulest kind of pirate to ever sail an international bank on the high seas. His friend is named Scruffy Bill. Now, when pirates get an arm or leg or other limb blown off by cannon fire or cut off in a saber fight, they replace that part with a wooden prosthesis. Bill has lost every limb he has, including his head. Now that his head is replaced with a wooden prosthesis, he can only repeat what Black Timothy says… but that works out well, because no one really understands Tim when he speaks, and Bill uses simpler words to say the same thing (primarily because he doesn’t remember all the bad words Black Timothy knows). So Bill takes the place of a parrot, and he serves as a translator for Tim allowing all of us to be truly disgusted by what he says.
Now, I am aware that my villain in no way matches any of the wonderful characters in Victorian novels, but I wanted to make a Paffooney with pen and ink and colored markers, and I have a lot of red markers. Forgive me for random acts of Paffoonery.
Filed under Uncategorized
Here are some of the writing projects I am working on and where they stand in relation to completion;
Snow Babies has been accepted by PDMI Publishing. I signed the contract this week. It will become a book both in print and in e-book form. It is the story of Valerie Clarke (in the Paffooney with the barn and the snow) and four boys who have run away from foster care who are all trying to survive a deadly blizzard in Norwall, Iowa. I like to say it is a comedy about freezing to death, but it is also much more than that. You can look for that book to be published within 12 months.
Superchicken is a novel I started writing in the 1980’s. It is about the secret origins of the infamous gang of Norwall Pirates, a secret society of young boys dedicated to 4-H softball, fighting evil, and seeing girls naked. Edward-Andrew Campbell, in the Paffooney, is the title character. Superchicken is his nickname. He struggles to make a place for himself in the close-knit Iowa farm town where he is the new kid, the weird kid, and the only kid so gone on the subject of superheroes that he doesn’t even notice when the Cobble sisters trick him into going to a nudist camp with them just so they can get revenge and a naked picture of him. It is not a comedy about freezing to death because, fortunately for Edward-Andrew, it happens in the summer of 1974. I have finished the manuscript and it has been revised twice. It is time to start submitting the dang thing.
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is a novel half-finished in rough draft form. It is a novel starring Orben Wallace, one of the heroes of Catch a Falling Star and Tim Kellogg, son of an English teacher and also the Grand and Glorious, Mostly Notorious Leader of the Norwall Pirates. It is a comedy about science and never really knowing what it true and what is actually possible until it has been proven by experiment. The primary theories involved include the impossibility of time travel, turning rabbits into people, defeating evil government secret agents who want to take away your Tesla ray and intelligent machines, and the answer to the very important questions; “Are all people good?” and “Will you be my friend?” I hope to have this thing finished shortly after Superchicken gets submitted to a publisher (or two… or seven).
I have also started a novel about being a teacher and fighting the good fight in the war against ignorance. It is called (as a working title) The Magical Miss Morgan. It, of course, stars the teacher in the Paffooney, Miss Francis Morgan, who is really me (in a very weird and almost perverted sort of way). I have two Cantos done on this one. It may be the next big inspiration after The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.
The final bit of nutbread I am going to give you a taste of here in this goofy future-looksee postie thingie is the sequel to Catch a Falling Star. I have written four Cantos in this one (Canto is the inexplicable name I use for chapters in my goofy books). It follows the aliens after their failed invasion of Earth as they reach and are forced to colonize an even more dangerous planet than Earth (if you can get your mind around such an impossible concept). It will be called Stardusters and Lizard Men. I have to confess that I do indeed write more than one story at the same time. It will probably continue to grow as I write The Bicycle-Wheel Genius and will probably be finished some time after I finish The Magical Miss Morgan.
Now, if you are one of those brave, weird people that actually make it this far in this silly post, I hope I have caught your interest in at least one of these ideas. If not, I may have scared you off and permanently scarred you. I apologize. But if you didn’t read this far, I don’t apologize, because I didn’t actually apologize until the very end. I’M SORRY! OKAY?
Filed under Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 