Tag Archives: rant

February 4, 2017 · 5:49 pm

The Boogendorfer

 

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This is not actually a picture of Boogendorf, this is Toonerville where the clocks are wrong and a giant Mickey Mouse lurks in the foothills beyond.

Today I mean to justify my existence before God and everybody.  Apparently in the modern world you have to be certain things in your basic foundation to justify getting travel visas, citizenship, and a basic right to continue to exist unmolested.  We apparently elected a new leader, the Mad King of Boogendorf, to make sure all Boogendorfers are suitably qualified to live in Boogendorf.  So this is a brief photo essay to justify my case for why Boogendorf should accept me as a citizen and not execute me outright.

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First of all, I am not one hundred per cent crazy.  You can tell from this photo, can’t you?

This kooky dorfleflop can’t be any more than 65% crazy because his pin head is not large enough to harbor more than 65 out of every 100 truly derfy and sanity-stealing notions.  (What is a dorfleflop, you say?  Well, dorf is a German word for town, and dorfleflops flop in a dorf and think they belong like everybody else who has flopped there before.)

But using the Mad King of Boogendorf as a measuring stick (an orange measuring stick with an extra-long tie), that is clearly not crazy enough by half.

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What’s the deal with the clocks always being wrong in Boogendorf?

I have always heard it said, “It takes a village to raise a child”.  And I think that saying I heard is probably true.  I was raised by the village of Rowan, Iowa in the 60’s and 70’s.  I learned to draw there.  And I can draw real cartoon human beings.

Doofy Fuddbugg here is an example of what a “Nolt” is.

Of course, one must be careful to note that if you could actually draw real cartoon human beings they would be alive after that, and that would make you like God, able to create life from nothing more than pencil, pen, and paper.  And in Boogendorf there is only room for one God.  That, of course, is the Mad King of Boogendorf.  So I guess that is a disqualifying quality too.

And that saying about a child raised by a village is a saying somehow connected to Hillary Clinton, and Hillary Clinton was defeated (I have also heard disgraced, demoralized, and denounced) in the last election by getting more votes than the Mad King of Boogendorf.  So I am judged lacking by my upbringing too.

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I am also undeniably guilty of playing with dolls.  I mean, I collect them, I comb their hair, dress them in different clothes, take them apart and repair them, and pose them for pictures.  That can’t be normal.  But is it abnormal enough to make me qualified to be a Boogendorfer from the village of Boogendorf?  Maybe if I plated them in gold or something, or had enough money to go to “golden shower” extremes?  I guess I don’t understand how to be Boogendorfy enough to live in Boogendorf.  The “Boo” in Boogendorf proves that you have to be pathologically afraid of things more, just like other Boogendorfers are.   I am sure the average Boogendorfer is afraid of people who play with dolls.  Especially if those weird people don’t own any guns and don’t like to kill stuff.  That just ain’t natural.  You even need to give guns to little girls to make them safe against those evil anti-Boogendorfers.

So, I guess I am doomed to live a life outside of the walls of Boogendorf (and they are really great walls, too).  I should be grateful that the citizens of Boogendorf have only rejected me and not used their sacred second-amendment rights to execute me.  For now, I am simply not a Boogendorfer.

 

 

 

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February 2, 2017 · 3:03 pm

Doo-Doodly-Noodly-Day

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This is a doodle even though it may look like finished art.  I began doodling with a pencil and she wasn’t a starship captain until I began inking it.

Yes, now and again I have to doodle.  You pick up the drawing tool and a blank piece of paper, and you let your mind go anywhere and everywhere that it wants to go.  Why did I choose to doodle a girl?  Sounds kinda creepy and bad, doesn’t it?  But I like science fiction and adventure and young people… I’m turning myself into a young adult author, after all.  And I like girls… even though I am 60 and my prostate is enlarged and rather dead.  I’m still a guy and I ain’t completely dead.  So maybe it isn’t really so creepy.  I am trying to keep my mind off of you-know-who… he-who-shall-not-be-named.  Yeah, this guy.

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This is truly a doodle.  I drew it in pen in about ten minutes time.  And it sucks (in the sense of a vacuum cleaner) because the overlong tie looks like a stream of blood and I think I drew the hands too big to look realistic. 

Random and open to the bizarre, allowing for accidents to appear on the page (both the Bob Ross happy kind and the not-so-happy kind), able to follow the wandering mind as fast as the hand can capture the flow of images and ideas in the silly old noodle.  That is not only what a doodle is, it is what this essay is.  A doodle essay.

I can do that without making a total poo-poo mess because I have practiced so much with pencil and pen and ink and paper that the lines flow naturally from my fingers.  And I can rely on my constant habit of writing stupid thoughts down to create a semi-coherent essay out of random jumbled thoughts.  Instinct born of practice guides my mind and hand.

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Here’s a random picture of the wall by my bed where I am writing this.  Perhaps it could be called a camera doodle?

Doodling helps me avoid the things needing to be avoided.  The world is ending.  Betsy DeVos is likely to be the Secretary of Education.  A trade war with Mexico will bring an end to much of the fruits and vegetables we can afford to eat.  I am big on avoiding.  You can tell that in my camera doodle.  Christmas lights Mickey hasn’t taken down yet?  Yeah, I’m thinking about leaving them up permanently.  You know, just until the world finishes ending.  My family, as Jehovah’s Witnesses, don’t celebrate Christmas anyway.  So what can it hurt if I keep my one dollar string of colored lights up for another few weeks.  Just until the Russian nukes start raining down on Dallas Fort Worth thanks to the red tie guy.

So there is nothing important at all in today’s blog.  Just doodles everywhere.  But why, then, does it make me feel so much better?  Well, I would say, “Because doodling makes it better.”

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January 16, 2017 · 4:59 pm

When You Can’t Laugh at the Clowns

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It is sad that Ringling Brothers, Barnum, & Bailey will be closing for good this coming May.  I have personally gone to the circus and enjoyed the spectacle under the big top (though actually in arenas) about fifteen times, first with my parents and then with my own kids.  I loved the elephants, the wire-walkers, the lion tamers, and I laughed at the clowns.  And now that will no longer be possible.  I have gradually lost more and more of the most important things in my life as I have gotten older.  I lost mobility with arthritis.  I have lost financial security through health problems.  I have lost the ability to do the job I devoted my life to and so deeply loved.  And now I can no longer laugh at the clowns.

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The problem is not that there are no clowns left, even though most of the greatest ones, Emmett Kelly, Bob Keeshan, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, and the man who played Bozo, have all passed on.  The problem is not that my kids are afraid of clowns, scared to death of people who aggressively get right up in your face while theirs is covered with grease paint (especially since my kids are now grown and can sock the clown in his painted mush if he gets too close).  The problem isn’t even that the clowns are not funny any more.

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The problem is that the Clown in Chief has killed the laughter.  He has become an agent of instability and chaos.  When he is mocked brilliantly by Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live, he has to mount a tweet storm on Twitter and uses his limited twit-wit to angrily denounce and threaten and belittle instead of laughing at the jokes as other politicians like the current President and Vice President have graciously done, even sometimes using self-deprecating humor to get in on the jokes themselves.  Even notoriously humorless political clowns like Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin have more grace in ignoring mockery and smiling at insults than this Great Orange Face that we put in charge of the country’s most serious business.

The ability to laugh at oneself is a very serious thing.  When the whole “golden showers” business made it into the national debate, this manic moron did not make it seem mere political hum-buggery by laughing it off.  No, he got deeply offended and defensive, the same way a person who is actually guilty of the accusation would react.  So, if it is not true, the Crybaby in Chief has only bolstered our belief that it is most probably true.  As ridiculous as the accusation sounds, you have to admit that Trump’s behavior in the past makes you at least entertain the possibility that it is a true thing that he has done.

And now, he has over-reacted again, this time to the very real concerns raised by Congressman John Lewis, an honest-to-God civil rights hero, with cruel and crusty criticism that lowers my respect for Trump as well as lowering all future expectations.  The man isn’t even sworn in yet, and he has already shown such bilious badness in his character that I truly dread living in this country under his rule.

I am a man who lives to laugh, and laughs to live.  That is how I overcome the things that bother me as well as the things that hurt me.  I use laughter as medicine, not as a weapon.  And I hate to see the viruses in our society that I have always been able to inoculate myself against with humor become totally drug-resistant in that way.

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January 11, 2017 · 3:56 pm

Bittersweet Irony

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“Mickey, you nerd!  Your jokes are not funny!

You’re not clever, you’re stupid, and not even punny!”

 

 

–wisdom from a Twitter troll who admires Dr. Seuss

I will admit, I was not joking when I said the world ended when Trump won the election.  I believe climate change is beyond our control when stupid, vicious, greedy people control 100% of our government.  They are busy already, before Obama even left office, with sealing our doom.  They recently passed the REINS Act, which is intended to not only curb but roll back government regulations.  The Republicans will no longer simply allow regulatory agencies like the EPA to control which toxic chemicals go into our food and drinking water when it might cost the taxpayers (especially RICH taxpayers) money.  They passed a rule that if corporations want to inject batrachotoxin into hamburger meat to increase profits short term, the FDA can’t regulate and prevent that without first having a congressional committee in each of the houses of congress voting their approval of the ban.  This with the aid of Tea Party sandbagging and temper tantrums to grease the gears toward refusal to turn.  Batrachotoxin as every congressman surely understands is the chemical in poison dart frogs that will will kill you if you kiss them.  We certainly need more of that in hamburgers to make the meat look tastier.  So, they will quickly and efficiently ignore the issue and fail to allow the regulation.  We are doomed, dear ones.

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Turtle-boy, pictured here, shows off his favorite flat iron of visual-sarcastic irony which he uses to throw at the heads of dumbnutz who don’t get what irony is.

Irony is when everything you held in your heart as an expectation and looked forward to as something you could depend on for the rest of your life comes abruptly to an end and the opposite is what actually occurs.

Republicans now hold all power in the US government.  Again!  Eight years of Lonesome George the Rodeo Clown, a Wall-Street meltdown and resulting Great Recession, two nearly-endless wars fought over false intelligence about WMDs, and eight years of obstructing everything the other side tried to do to fix their mess was not enough to satisfy Lucretia Borgia’s party of poison and greed.

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Senator Turtle-man McConnell doesn’t get irony.  He doesn’t understand now why Democrats don’t get on board with all the legislation and confirmation hearings that the GOP wants to push through right away.  Why would they want to obstruct legislation that helps people by reducing their social security benefits and ending not only the Affordable Care Act, but doing away with medicare as well?  It’s what the people voted for, isn’t it?

I have instructed Turtle-boy to throw the flat iron of visual-sarcastic irony at Turtle-man’s head.  But he must do it quickly and accurately, or the slow-talking Kentucky Senator will pull that big turtle head back inside his shell, as he has done so many times before.  And even if the flat iron hits squarely, it will not change anything.  We have lost and the future is lost to us and all our offspring.

I do still have some hope of survival of the human race and life on Earth.  Ironically that is because I am just as soft-brained and hopelessly stupid as the rest of my kind.  And I believe in savoring the time we have left.  I intend to cast off political worries into a sea of forgetfulness.  We shall have to see what sharks that attracts.  But hopefully, the sharks that actually eat us will die of food poisoning.

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February 19, 2016 · 4:57 pm

Sadder But Wiser

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My car was only a few months away from being paid off.  Then, while I was at home lying in bed feeling ill, someone driving past blasted into the rear wheel, damaging the axle beyond repair.  Yes, it murdered his car.  But because of the limits of coverage, my parked car is now dead also.  I am doing the paperwork today to have it interred.  And I notice, of course, that the paperwork says at the bottom, “State law makes falsifying information on this application a third-degree felony.”  Oh, good.  If I get any of the answers wrong, I go to prison.  And worse, they could deny my claim and pay me nothing for the car.  Why am I worried?  Because when I asked the insurance company for help with verifying the information, they gave me a license plate number that doesn’t match the way my imperfect memory remembers it.  If I put down the information they gave me, will they throw me in prison?  I made him repeat it twice and verified that it was right according to their records.  So, my memory could be faulty.  But that won’t matter when the judge decides the death penalty for my error.  Am I using hyperbole here for comic effect?  Yes.  But I live in Texas.  I am going to worry anyway.

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March 18, 2015 · 11:41 am

Dreary Days and Darklords

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Al Capp was a genius.  And he knows precisely how it goes.  And no one describes it better.  Storm clouds float directly over my little square head (I am a Midwestern German-American, and they all have cubes for heads… both literally and figuratively.)  Anywhere I wander, disaster surely follows.  The last few days have been an absolute and unrelenting disaster.  And I can’t tell you all the details because it would compromise other people’s privacy.  But I can say that no lightning stings worse than the lightning bolts thrown by aggressively profit-conscious health insurance companies.   I will not name the hated company here because they will surely raise my premiums, but I hate them with a hatred more hateful than red-hot iron-grate-hate.  I went to a doctor’s office yesterday,  a doctor I was seeing for the first time because the new insurance company handling retired Teachers in Texas didn’t like the old doctor.  The old doctor was too good and got paid too well for insurance to approve him.  So I asked them to recommend a new doctor, a specialist of the right brand to replace the old doctor.  They gave me a name and I made the appointment.  I was told this new doctor was in-network.  I got there and started filling out a small hill of paperwork that required all my personal numerology and the atomic number of several specific elements… and my shoe size.  (And this was not a foot doctor.)  As I was littering the doctor’s office with filled crossword puzzles of numbers, hard-to-spell drug names, and private information, I was called up to the receptionist’s desk and informed that the insurance company said that while the doctor was in-network, she was not in-plan.  The specific plan I bought (chosen from a list of one) only uses doctors associated with Baylor Hospital in Carrollton… and this new doctor was associated with Methodist Hospital in Plano.  I could only see this new doctor if I paid 100% of the fee.  Being an independently wealthy retired school teacher on a fixed income, I had to decline that honor.  This of course is not the only hyoomillagration (Popeye’s word for it, not mine… another explanation that requires another post and another day) that the last few days would bring.  Having half a year’s salary as a working school teacher and half a year’s salary as a doddering retired person fully capable only of puttering and nuttering, the income tax situation tipped heavily in the government’s favor..  I had to pay almost $2000 dollars on the taxes that I filed through Turbotax on Monday.  I was proud of getting the taxes done early, but saddened at the sudden deflation of my savings account to the condition of totally-flattened-balloon-hood.  Worse yet, Turbotax sends bills under the name INTUIT, which I didn’t recognize on my bank statement.  It took the Wells Fargo fraud expert all of ten seconds to figure out the mistake I made, which was two minutes and ten seconds after the previous banker I had talked to irreversibly closed my bank account and issued a new bank card and account number which will take two weeks to come in the mail.  Now I couldn’t pay that doctor even if I wanted to.  And there were other things biting my bum as well.  The electronic car key is out of battery juice and I must now unlock it by hand.  The dog is currently on another in a long line of poop-and-pee-in-the-house-sprees.  I have a benign growth on my back that the other doctor I actually got to see this week says needs to come off by next week.  It is hurting constantly and keeps me from sleeping.  I am Joe  Btfsplk this week for no reason that I know of and mad wizards are persecuting me relentlessly.

Black Wizard

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January 8, 2015 · 2:08 pm

Good and Evil

This was never planned to be a post by me on this blog, but sometimes you just have to respond to what what life and stupid people send your way.  I do not believe anyone should ever condemn a world religion.  Not even Islam.  Religion is a necessary evil in our society because it gives comfort to the suffering, hope to the desperate, and a way to combat the fear of death that plagues every mortal being on Earth.  But any time a fanatic uses religion as an excuse for violence, cruelty, or the kind of insanity committed against Charlie Hebdo magazine and its cartoonists, that is the very definition of evil.  No… not merely evil… I mean EVIL!

Those who do cruel, stupid, and selfish things in the name of God are blasphemers.  This is me, practically an atheist, saying this.  People who are the opposite of evil are in tune with the with the great silent orchestral arrangement that is our collective existence.  People who are in tune with the universe, one with the universe, truly at peace with the universe and themselves never use violence or terror or fear-mongering to change things.  If they ever do, they are no longer there in that eternal peace and shared wisdom that makes up the core of all that is good about mankind and makes us worthy.

Here is a good example of stupid and evil shared from www.facebook.com/pages/An-Uncloudy-Day.

10885091_1526831917574779_8054673923036807657_n We elected this smug, hidey-hole badger to congress and the conspiracy of stupid now in control of the government (GOP probably stands for “goofy old perverts”) put him in as the head of Senate Committee that looks after the environment.  Why does he believe what he believes?  Because of a great and unshakable faith in God and the infallibility of the Bible?  No.  That’s just the cover smoke that is meant to hide his real purpose from the GOP voting base who only hear the buzzwords and don’t realize that he is rationalizing the continuing rape and pillaging of the environment by oil and gas billionaires who want to continue putting profits as a priority above even the future of the planet we live on.  This is the kind of evil that threatens our very existence.  Does he realize that?  Probably.  Does he lose sleep over that?  No.  He looks well rested.   He believes that the consequences of his actions won’t be felt until his life is already over.  He only wants to make a profit and reap rewards while it still affects his own life… the rest of us be damned.  He is probably worse than the stupid-heads that killed the cartoonists because those deluded fools probably actually believe that when they are hunted down and killed, they will go to Muslim paradise and get their promised virgins.  Somebody evil and more intelligent than they are convinced them of that idiocy, even though that somebody probably does not believe it themselves.  Evil is self-interested to the exclusion of others.

What, then is the nature of the good?  No, not good… I mean GOOD!

Dansegawd 4Those who are good seek the good of others.  People like Jesus of Nazareth, Martin Luther King Jr., Francis of Assisi, Mohandis K. Gandhi,  and Joan D’Arc are good because they sacrificed their own benefits, comfort, and even their lives to benefit others.  Completely apart from faith and religion and politics, they chose to give away their precious lives and value to aid people, most of whom they didn’t even know and would never have a chance of meeting.  Love, self-sacrifice, and a peaceful means to any end are the very definition of what is actually GOOD.  If I harp too much on what is evil, and condemn it too strongly, then I can’t claim to be a part of that other side of the eternal struggle, the good.  I have to settle my anger and upset and be willing to forgive.

So what have I really accomplished in today’s un-funny rant and blistering attack on other peoples’ stupid beliefs and warped values?  Nothing important.  I have calmed myself down.  I have stopped myself from crying.  I have found my inner peace again.  And I have done one important thing… I have remembered to thank all of the good people who have ever existed because all of them benefit me and make my life better.  Thanks to all of them, and thanks to you who have put up with my stupid anger, and read… and understood.

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