Tag Archives: short story

September 14, 2026 · 12:04 am

Advertising on E-Bay Ignorantly

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You are probably not going to believe this, but there are certain things you simply cannot safely sell on E-Bay.  My first good novel, Catch a Falling Star, took years to write.  The research, interviews with survivors, fighting off remaining alien invaders left behind when the Telleron invasion failed, and clean-up of sites and inconvenient witnesses took at least from 1990 to 2012.  And then, as part of my marketing-by-blogging strategy for the book, I took a box of leftover skortch pistols and listed them for sale on E-Bay.  They turned out to be a very popular item.  It took the first skortch ray almost a year to sell for a measly five dollars.  It was bought by a woman with a very annoying husband.  She apparently bought the item as a joke, thinking it would not actually work as a molecular disintegration weapon.  But after she surprised her husband with it and then posted the surprising results on Facebook, I quickly sold out the rest of the 26 pistols in the box and made almost $800. I am told by concerned investigative reporters that crotchety old men, ugly wives, and particularly Dennis-the-Menace-like kids were disappearing all across the Midwest.  I also learned that one skortch ray pistol came into the hands of a Republican political operative before the election in 2016.  That fact may have accounted for the disappearances of large numbers of registered Democrats in both Michigan and Pennsylvania in the weeks before the election.

I wanted to inform you that I may have done something stupid on E-Bay.  Therefore I am re-posting the drawing I did of Studpopper the Telleron demonstrating the firing of an example skortch pistol created by Zillokahsitter Industries on Telleri Prime with Sylvani technology.  If you should see one of these in the hands of a spouse that thinks you are grumpy too much of the time, I would suggest an almost instantaneous program of self-improvement.  And if you see one in the hands of someone in a red MAGA baseball cap, immediately put on your own red hat and say something inordinately stupid so they will assume you are one of them, and hope they skortch themselves by accident before they get around to skortching you.

Sorry about that.  I should’ve thought this whole thing through more carefully beforehand.

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August 12, 2026 · 12:05 am

Aunt Minnie’s Love Seat

This is a story about an innocuous piece of furniture in Great Aunt Minnie Efram’s house.  It was a little brown loveseat with carved wooden monster feet.

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As the story begins, the little loveseat was sitting in the parlor in front of the small black and white television.  During the monthly Efram family card party, the love seat was the only place for the two of them to spend the evening.  But he was ten and he hated girls.  He had a reputation with the guys at school as a girl hater, and he couldn’t have it known that he was sitting on a loveseat with Uncle Henry’s stepdaughter, the one the guys all said they had seen eating her own boogers.

She was also ten, and in his class at school.  She liked to watch him more than any of the other boys.  But she didn’t know why.  She liked unicorns and the color pink, but she also kinda liked the way boys looked at her when she wore shorts.  And she liked seeing him in PE class at school, wearing shorts.  He was athletic and often won games in PE.

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After two years of monthly card parties happening during at least three different months every year at Aunt Minnie’s place, he had discovered that girls didn’t actually smell bad, and this one actually listened when he talked about playing football, and how it made him feel when he scored the seventy-five-yard touchdown.  In fact, the more he talked about football, and the closer they sat to each other, the better she seemed to smell.  He liked that smell.

She liked that he didn’t only pay attention to her at the card parties anymore.  He actually said, “Hi” in public.  And she liked his smile, even when he got braces.  He let her pick the shows they watched on the old black and white television while seated on the loveseat.  She actually worked up the nerve to tell him that she had told Jane at school to ask him if he liked her, and stupid Jane had completely forgotten to ask him, or maybe Jane was just too chicken to ask him and used the excuse that she forgot.

He said that if she liked him, he liked her.  But if she didn’t, he didn’t either.  “Like” her, he meant.  Which he did because she did.

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After two more years and six more card parties worth of scootching behinds closer together on the old loveseat, something different had happened.  And it was about time too.  Aunt Minnie had bought a puppy, and that not only was a bad thing for the seven cats that lived with old Minnie, but it was hard on the loveseat too.  One of the little couch’s monster feet was lost, and the numerous instances of terrified cat claws digging in were beginning to have an effect on the upholstery.  And that danged dog wizzled everywhere.  The loveseat had one purpose in life, and it didn’t want to give in to wear and tear before achieving that purpose.

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But the very next year brought disaster.  He apparently told the members of the freshman football team that something had happened on that old love seat that really hadn’t happened.  The football team was impressed because they all thought she was pretty hot stuff, and he was generally thought of as a lame-o dweeb.  She heard about it from Jane who heard about it from Nanette’s boyfriend who was on the team.  And she got mad.  How dare he say something like that when it wasn’t true?

In January of that year, Aunt Minnie passed away in her sleep.  The loveseat was sold at auction to a farmer who liked to do re-upholstery as a hobby.  It got re-done in red velvet and leather with wheels replacing the wooden monster feet and sold to a car dealer in Des Moines who placed it in the lobby show-room for customers to sit on.

But the story has a happy ending.  She would later make his locker room lie into the truth on Prom Night (fortunately with protection) and then went on to marry him when they both were sophomores in college.   Of course, it wasn’t always, “They lived happily ever after,” because they didn’t.  They got divorced once and got re-married shortly after… to each other.  They had three kids.  And the loveseat didn’t ever learn any of that.  Because it was a loveseat.  You didn’t really think loveseats could know anything, did you?

 

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August 8, 2026 · 12:19 am

Dark Mickey, the Blackest Secrets

This is a post about every evil thing that Mickey has done and kept secret (or things that Mickey has been accused of even if he didn’t really do them.) he

Starting with the Werewolf lie. Mickey (as the teacher known as Mr. Beyer, Mr. B, the Batman, and Mr. Gilligan’s Island) is not now, nor has ever been… a werewolf. The excessive growth of facial hair, especially around the full moon, is just an inherited family trait. NOT LYCANTHROPY! Mickey has never eaten a student, not even the bad ones who disappeared from our school. (They were removed by law enforcement and continued their education in prison.)

Emmalina, pictured above, was not really a werewolf either. She did not eat her boyfriend when he tried to dump her. She never threatened to bite Mickey if he didn’t give her A-plusses in English class. She never bit Mickey trying to turn him into a werewolf too. She’s a character in a fiction story. She doesn’t really exist. And the the real girl Mickey based the character on was not a werewolf either… at least, not that Mickey can prove.

Mickey is also a liar. He lies every time he sits down to his computer to work on his W.I.P.. He tells extensive lies that last between 15,000 and 75,000 words, but average around 35,000 words. He tells these lies about real people that he has known, though he lies about their names and calls them something way different than their real names. And the events he says happens to them in these extended lies didn’t really happen. So, basically, these are all fiction. In fact, their technical designation is either novella or novel.

Mickey does have some things to confess. He really is a horrid little goody-two-shoes who has always been too timid to actually ever commit a crime of any kind. He has been known to tell some lies that were not merely fiction. The big lie when he was a kid was, “I’m fine. Really, nothing is wrong.” If you have read much of this blog, you probably already know why that is a big lie.

Mickey does not have a very good marriage. He has been married for 31 years. That is really five good years, twenty-three tepid and kinda boring years, and three really bad years. Religious differences were the first problem that made it not great to be married. Mickey had great difficulty accepting that he was evil and detestable in God’s eyes. Mickey’s wife pointed out specific Bible verses to prove it. And somehow the verses in Proverbs that explained how a good wife acted were always invisible whenever Mickey looked them up during family Bible study.

Mickey is now an atheist who believes in God. Mickey understands that to mean he is a Christian Existentialist. His wife understands that to mean he is going to Hell when he dies… if only Jehovah’s Witnesses believed in Hell. But the reward ultimately is that she won’t have to share household space with him in Paradise, since he won’t be there.

But Mickey isn’t upset about any of that. The two of them have three wonderful kids who were all terribly bad in some way or other growing up, but now that they are responsible adults, they generally do good things… even if the good things they do somewhat resemble the way their evil dad taught them to be.

Mickey has one imaginary granddaughter. She’s imaginary because she didn’t make it all the way to the point where she would’ve become a real granddaughter… or grandson. But that’s also okay. It could’ve been worse. We could’ve lost two instead of one. And Susu is a lovely imaginary granddaughter.

And Mickey is also a nudist. He writes stories about naked people. And he visits places where naked people gather. This embarrasses the rest of the family. They choose not to remember when the children were younger and we had a pool and we did skinny-dipping at night with the underwater lights on in the pool. It was fun. And their embarrassment about it is still fun.

So, Mickey has lived a terrible, sordid life. It is a shame that he deeply regrets… with only a little laughter in the background.

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July 22, 2026 · 1:06 am

The Case for the Clown

The criminal was led into the courtroom in chains and forced to sit in a box made of metal bars so his influence would not reach out and harm anyone by drawing their sympathy in.

“Mr. Prosecutor,” said the learned judge, “what terrible crime has the perpetrator been charged with?”

“The alleged perpetrator!” objected the defense attorney, a mousy old man who looked like a cross between Santa Clause and Robert E.Lee because of his white beard, stern face, and a twinkle in his eye.

“Shut up please, Mr. Badweather. You will have your turn to speak.” The judge banged his gavel smartly to emphasize the shut-up-ness of his overruling.

“Your honor,” said the prosecutor, “Mister Pennysnatcher Goodlaughs stands accused of being a clown.”

“The people of the State of Texas, home of the free, land of the brave, and place where cowboys can hang their hat on the antlers of a moose they shot in Canada, will prove that Mr. Goodlaughs did willfully, and with malice of forethought, commit acts of supposed humor in order to make people laugh. And we will further prove that in a time of very serious things, he intentionally made light of very serious matters and the very serious men who try to turn those serious things to their exclusive… err, sorry, I mean… everyone’s benefit.”

“Your honor,” said the defense attorney, looking like a cross between Mark Twain and Colonel Sanders, “I would like to request a new venue for this trial. My client will not get a fair trial here.”

“Sir, your stupid request is rejected on the grounds that Mr. Goodlaughs cannot get a fair trial anywhere. We are all conservatives, and are therefore incapable of having a sense of humor. Continue, Mr. Prosecutor.”

“We will show numerous instances of Mr. Goodlaughs putting paint on his face to hide his true features or assume the identity of a character not his own. He has repeatedly used false noses, large shoes, and floppy hats to exaggerate his flaws and scare young children. He repeatedly wears polka-dotted clothing to simulate terrible taste and ridiculous lack of fashion-sense. He employs pratfalls and slapstick humor in his performances, things that, if any school-age child would imitate the behavior, might lead to serious injury or even death. And he has even dared to make fun of our glorious leaders, implying that they make mistakes and may even have hurt people. That they act without thinking about anything but their own pocketbooks. In other words, this clown has knowingly made jokes in order to get people to not take things seriously.”

“Your honor, I object to this jury. I object to the fact that it is made up of fifty percent rednecks and fifty percent kangaroos! My client demands a new, more impartial jury!” cried the defense attorney, looking like a cross between Captain Kangaroo and Ronald Reagan.

“Has anybody noticed?” asked the judge, “that this attorney looks like he could influence this jury unfairly? He looks like two people who could lead the two halves of this jury to the wrong conclusion. Bailiff! Take the defense attorney out back and execute him by firing squad.”

After the entire courtroom heard the gunshots go off, the judge then turned to the prisoner.

“It seems, Mr. Goodlaughs, that the defense’s opening statement is now entirely up to you. Do you have anything to say in your own defense?

“I do, your honor. Ladies and gentlemen, kangaroos and Reagan Republicans of the jury, I submit to you that I have never actually been a circus clown, or wore face paint. Not that I wouldn’t if the opportunity presented itself. I merely claim the right to laugh at anything I think is funny… or can be made funny. Whether I am being what you call a clown, a humorist, a cartoonist, a comedian, a fool, a village idiot, or a witty fellow, I believe I have the right to make light of anything. Life is always better when you can laugh. Especially if you can laugh at yourself.”

“I’ve heard enough,” said the judge. “What say you, jury?”

“Guilty!”

“Yes. And I preemptively waive the prisoner’s right to appeal. Sir, you are guilty, and you shall be executed immediately.”

Everyone in the courtroom breathed a long-awaited sigh of relief.

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June 12, 2026 · 12:30 am

Quackatoonity (Religion Where Ducks are Always Watching)

Yes, the universe was not formed in a big bang. It hatched from an egg. And God is the Ultimate Mallard.

Anatidaephobia (pronounced anna-tidy-phobia) is a pervasive and irrational fear that you are being watched by a duck. A person with this rare phobia fears that somehow, somewhere a duck is watching their every move.

This phobia about being watched by a duck may seem like a strange basis for forming a new religion. But I may have had an epiphany as a child when a goose at Deer Farm Zoo stuck his neck, head, and beak of retribution out through a hole in his chicken-wire cage and nearly nipped me in my five-year-old neck. That epiphany led to recurring nightmares about being chased by a duck with large white teeth that looked like he had bad human dentures in his bill.

This I tended to interpret as a sign that I was facing a big decision about what I would attempt to do with my young life, and would do it wrong.

Ducks in the farmyard, you see, are temperamental, often impulsive, and randomly violent. They will punish you for sins you did not know you were committing.

So, in this Quackatoon faith in judgmental ducks who are constantly watching our every move, thought, and deed, we should be taking Saint Donald Duck as our role-model and guide. When we see sin and wrongness in the world we are watching, we must dissolve in incoherent rage. Point your finger. Shout things that no one understands. Get the world’s attention. Confuse them completely. And get them to wonder what they did to make you so rage-filled and dangerously aggravated.

Then, hopefully, they will realize their sin and immediately mend their ways. Or at least, rearrange their feathers.

Or we can rely on the incompetent vengeful wrath of Saint Daffy Duck to see the unrighteousness in the rabbits of the world around us, posting Rabbit Season signs everywhere, and getting his duckbill blown off via the shotgun of a nearby Elmer who has been tricked into thinking ducks are rabbits.

Well, that might not be the most efficient prosecution of God’s will on Earth. But at least it will leave us laughing. And who can sin who is laughing that hard?

At this point in trying to establish this new religion, I should probably be talking about financial matters. Where you can send donations to the Church of Perpetual Quackers? Will there be t-shirts with religious slogans like, “You’re Driving Me Quackers!?” Do we still bring deviled eggs to church socials?

But I can’t talk about that right now… a duck is probably watching.

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March 19, 2026 · 12:00 am

Messing Up With Mickey

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The way I handle the computer tends to be the way I handle life as a whole.  Thirteen tabs open at the same time, eleven of them not responding, and me cussing the machine for not working properly.

Spring has come.  In fact, Spring Break has come.  My daughter the Princess and I were planning to plant flowers in the yard where the pool used to be.  We started work yesterday spreading compost on the flower bed and churning the soil.  But we should’ve done it sooner.  It was too much for tired muscles to finish yesterday.  Then the rains came last night.  It would’ve been perfect to plant the seeds yesterday, then have God water them naturally at night.  But plans don’t go anywhere near perfectly.  Thirteen tabs are open and twelve are not responding.

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In my novel, The Baby Werewolf, the murderer is now unmasked and he has started on his final killing spree.  But as I was supposed to write the next Canto the last two nights, I found myself overwhelmed and overtired.  I got no further writing done.  I vowed to do it tonight, but the time change has left me no less tired and overwhelmed.  Thirteen tabs not responding.

So here I sit, paralyzed by entropy and worriedly contemplating the eventual heat death of the universe.  What to do?  What to do?

Mickey’s inevitable answer… Mickey opens a new tab and keeps on writing.  Did you think he had an actual plan for the rest of his life?  Of course not.  He planned on retiring from teaching and writing for about three years, and then dropping dead from one of his six incurable diseases.  Guess what?  This June will be twelve complete years.  Who knows how many more?

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February 8, 2026 · 12:38 am

The Bottle Imp Implementation

I gave you a list of places where my ideas for fiction come from, and in the end, I failed to explain the thing about the bottle imp. Yes, I do get ideas from the bottle imp. He’s an angry blue boggart with limited spell powers. But he’s also more than 700 years old and has only been trapped in the bottle since 1805. So, he has about 500 years of magical life experience to draw from and answer my idea questions. Admittedly it would be more helpful if he were a smarter imp. His name is Bruce, and his IQ in human terms would only be about 75. But, then, I don’t have to worry about misfired magic. If I asked him to, “Make me a hamburger,” he wouldn’t immediately change me into a fried, ground-beef patty because he is not smart enough to do that high of a level of magic spell.

But he is just barely intelligent enough to tell me a truthful answer if I asked him a question like, “What would happen if I put an alligator’s egg in a robin’s nest as a joke, and the robin family decided it was their own weird-looking egg and then tried to hatch it?” The answer would be truthful according to his vast knowledge of swamp pranks. And it would also be funny because he’s too dumb to know better. In fact, he told me about a mother robin who worked so diligently at hatching an alligator egg that a baby alligator was hatched. She convinced it that it was actually a bird. And when it came time for the baby birds to learn to fly, the baby alligator couldn’t do it… until she talked it into flapping madly with all four legs. Then, a mother’s love and faith in her child got an alligator airborne.

Yeah, that hasn’t proved to be a very useful story idea. I put it into a story I was writing during my seven years in high school, and then lost the manuscript. (I was a teacher, not a hard-to-graduate student.) But it was proof that you can get your writing ideas from a bottle imp.

So, if you decide to use bottle imps as an idea source for fiction, the next step is to find and acquire the right sort of bottle imp. I got mine from Smellbone, the rat-faced necromancer. I bought it for an American quarter and three Canadian loonies more than a dozen years ago. I found it at his Arcana and Horse-Radish Burger Emporium in Montreal. But I am not sure how that information helps you. Smellbone died in a firey magical-transformation accident involving an angry Wall-Street financier and a dill pickle. The whole Emporium went to cinders in an hour.

If you are going to try to capture the bottle imp yourself, which I strongly do not recommend, you are going to need a magical spell-resistant butterfly net, a solid glass jar, bottle, or brass urn. A garlic-soaked cork to fit the bottle. A spell scroll ready to cast containing at least one fairy-shrink spell. And an extremely limited amount of time to actually think about what you are doing.

Now I have told you how I get writing ideas from a bottle imp. Aren’t you glad I did not include this idea in the post about where ideas come from? After all, I am a fiction writer. I get my jollies from telling lies in story form. And bottle imps, especially angry blue bottle imps named Bruce, or Charlie, or Bill, are more trouble than they are worth. They can curse you with magical spells of infinite silliness and undercut your serious nature for a lifetime.

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November 12, 2025 · 1:40 am

Reboot as Needed

So, my new life in Iowa is going slowly. Unable to drive a car. Unable to stay in writer mode for more than a few minutes at a time. I am basically just getting by. Paying bills on time. Staying alive one day at a time. Reposting old posts on WordPress most of the time instead of writing new ones.

We have gotten snow on the ground since Saturday. You can see it is going away. The snow is sublimating, going from snow crystals to water vapor in the afternoon sun. This picture of the actual yard and snowy cornfields beyond is what I used AI tools on to make the first Paffooney in this post.

None of the planned novel writing I meant to do has started. I have been drawing and playing with digital art tools, but even that has its arthritic limitations, and it takes AI manipulations to make the junk into gems.

I made this snowy butterfly gem while my sister was working on making holiday Christmas wreaths at Butch Aldrich’s Christmas Tree farm. I haven’t told her about seeing the ghost again, nor what the ghost told me, if ghosts are real and really do have telepathic abilities. The ghost could be lying.

I have been seeing things that aren’t really there a lot recently. Grandpa Aldrich’s black cat, Midnight, hopped up on the bed two weeks ago, though Midnight died at twenty-two years of age more than twenty years ago. If ghosts are real, he still prowls and protects the farm house in a spiritual sense.

Two nights ago I fell asleep in the easy chair while watching TV with my sister. I awoke with a start. An old woman with gray hair in a bun was shaking my right arm and asking, “Are you alright?” I realized with a sudden shock that it wasn’t my sister, Nancy. And as I realized it, she dissolved right before my eyes. That same night, I got up in the middle of the night, went out to the kitchen, and suddenly saw the same old woman standing over the ironing board that Nancy had left set up in the dining room. She was holding an old flat iron of the kind you heat up on the wood-burning stove before using, like Great Grandma Hinckley had shown me about sixty years ago. She was looking at me. Not moving. And fading away into nothing as I watched her with my mouth hanging open. That might’ve been a dream, but an extremely vivid one.

And last night I saw her again through the open bathroom door as she stood in the living room. She told me without opening or moving her mouth, “Don’t be afraid. I am watching over you. You are family. I love you though you were born after I passed on.”

I know it could’ve been another dream. It was more likely the onset of Parkinson’s Disease. Hallucinations are a symptom of that disease. It is how I rationalize seeing the ghosts of the ghot dog in Carrollton, and the ghost of my late dog, Jade before I moved to Iowa. But more intriguing is the notion that it is someone who lived and died in this house, my Great Grandma Emily Brannen, Grandpa Aldrich’s mother. That notion is more appealing than Parkinson’s or dementia.

Sometimes when you get to be moldy old and decomposing you have to stop and have a rethink about the meaning of certain things. You have to let the computer in your head reset, reboot, and download the various needed patches in the old software. It is the only way to move forward and get things done.

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October 22, 2025 · 12:16 am

Novel Writing in Novel Ways

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There are many ways to tell a story.  I have yet to try them all.  But I don’t intend to stop trying until I either get a lot nearer, or I am fertilizing the flowers.

So let’s start with the Snoopy way.

We start with a cliche, and goof it up to make it more interesting.

It was a dark and stormy night…  

And that was because the lights went out at George’s house while he was arguing with Mabel.  There was lightning involved.  Mabel got so mad about George watching football that she stabbed the toaster in a fit of uncontrolled anger.  Unfortunately, she stabbed it with a metal fork and it was plugged in.  Her hair never stood up so high and never glowed that particular color before.  Her eyes shown like car headlights.  And she was the main reason it went dark.

Okay, maybe not.  Let’s try again.

It was a dork and smarmy knight…

Sir Jiggs Giggly was a knight from King Percy’s Royal Court, but his manners were so bad that he drove all the women away from the court.  The other knights all decided that their choices were limited.  Either they had to reform Sir Jiggs, or they all had to become gay.  So, they went to the wizard. The wizard’s name was Wizzyfritz.  And Wizzyfritz had a boy working for him who also happened to be his legal ward.  So Wizzyfritz the wizard assigned his Wizzyfritz ward to be the watcher over the wastrel Jiggs. And so, well… that wizard ward was a dork.

Yeah, not this one either.

It was a stark and dormy night…

At Tilbury College in the women’s dormitory, there was a party.  There was lots of beer.  And the local fraternity decided that when they attended the party, they would show up as streakers and be stark naked.  Unfortunately, the Sigma Frakka Pi fraternity were all skinny geeks who wore glasses and had no body hair.  So a large number of women in that dorm died laughing.

Nope, that isn’t it either.

Hmmm…. maybe there’s a good reason this particular story-telling method is always shown in a cartoon as part of a joke.

 

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October 15, 2025 · 1:36 am

Every Picture Has a Story

This is an illustration that goes along with my first good published novel, Catch a Falling Star. I don’t talk about that novel in this blog very much anymore since, in order to actually promote that novel, I am under contract to have to spend hundreds of dollars more to use one of their many expensive promotional packages to get this “award winning” novel promoted in the way the publisher thinks it deserves. I wanted to use a picture like this for the cover of the book. They rejected that. Instead they gave me a silhouette picture of a girl flying a kite at night. That, of course, has nothing to do with the novel inside the book. These two, by contrast, are two of the most important characters from the book, both of them aliens. Farbick is the competent space pilot who gets himself shot and captured during the failed invasion of Earth. Davalon is the marooned tadpole, Telleron child, who gets himself adopted by a childless Earth couple. I definitely like my picture better than the one I got stuck with.

This picture is called, “Long Ago It Might Have Been.” It is a picture I drew in the late eighties, after my girlfriend/Reading-teacher colleague took a job in San Antonio and left me behind. Honestly, she wanted to marry me, and I never got around to telling her that the reason our love life was so difficult was because I had been sexually assaulted as a child, and though I was attracted to her, I hadn’t truly healed enough at that point to become a husband and father. I never told her about my terrible secret. She left. She got married and had more than one blond-haired little girl that probably looked just like her. The boy in this picture looks like a young me with blond hair. He wears a baseball jacket of the St. Louis Cardinals, my favorite team. He’s the child that might’ve been, if only I had grown to adulthood a little sooner.

This picture is even harder to explain without me looking like a real fool. After all, if you are a real fool, it’s rather hard to hide that fact. In that last picture, I depicted something that related to one of the two girlfriends that I had to juggle at the same time back in the eighties. You see, I had set my heart on winning over Mary Ann whom I had worked with in the same classroom as she was the teacher’s aide assigned to the Chapter I remedial program I was teaching. She’s the girlfriend I took on visits to the Austin area on weekends. She had a sister in Austin, the one who lived in the nudist apartment complex, where she stayed during those visits. My parents lived in Taylor, Texas at the time, a nearby suburb. We dated regularly. She knew my terrible secret. She was a divorcee and I knew her terrible secrets as well. Ginger, on the other hand, was looking for a mate, and she lived in the apartment next door. She’s the one who would’ve hopped into bed with me anytime I asked. And she made no bones about wanting me to be hers. Needless to say, I could’ve written a TV sitcom about the majority of my love-life back then. It could’ve starred Jack Ritter as me. And I ended up with neither of those two young ladies. The picture, of course. is in honor of the kids in the eighties calling my classroom Gilligan’s Island because they thought I looked like the Gilligan actor, Bob Denver.

This is, of course, a portrait of Millis the rabbit in his accelerated-evolution form as a rabbit-man from my novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. That book, obviously, is a science-fiction comedy with a lot of unexpected plot twists. But the story behind the picture is one of a boyhood spent as a town kid in a farm-town community. Unlike the other kids in the Iowa Hawkeyes 4-H club, I couldn’t raise a calf or a pen of hogs as my 4-H club project. So, instead, I got in as a keeper of rabbits. Of my two original rabbits, a buck and a doe, I had a black one and a white one. The white one was a New Zealand White, a purebred white rabbit with red eyes, because the entire breed was albino. I called the white rabbit, the buck, Ember-eyes because his eyes glowed like fire in the night under the flashlight beam. The doe was a black rabbit I called Fuzz. Out of the first litter of babies Fuzz had, eight of the ten were white And of the two black babies, one died in the nest, and the other passed away shortly after he got big enough to determine that he was a male rabbit. I won’t go into how you determine the sex of a juvenile rabbit. So, almost all of the rabbits I raised before I discovered what a Dutch-belted rabbit was, were white with red eyes.

So, it is my thesis for today that every picture I make has some kind of story behind it. It may be totally boring, but still technically a story. So, there.

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