Tag Archives: writing

January 22, 2026 · 1:18 am

Rest and Repair

Sometimes we all get a little tattered, a little weather-worn, especially during the winter.

I rescued the little Valentine Bear from the pile of items from my mother-in-law’s house, which was sold several springs ago. We still have all the rescued stuff on our patio, open to the weather, and the raccoons from the city park across the street.

I suspect he belonged to one of the two nieces who each lived for a time with Grandma. Sarooty Incaboody or Maroody Walladooty. One of them, though not both of them, and I haven’t given you their real names. Grandma had to move to San Antonio where there are more Filipino relatives to protect her from the weather. But less room for a lifetime of stuff that once belonged to her and my long-gone father-in-law. e lWell, she passed away too the winter before last

You can see his right ear is damaged and needs to be resewn with red thread. His fur is a little crusty from the rain this last week and the dirt blown by the cold winds from this week. He’s a mess, and I thought I better bring him in and fix him up before the park fairies do the whole Velveteen Rabbit thing to him. After all, we don’t need a baby polar bear wandering around the Dallas suburbs, do we? And someone once loved him enough to keep him. He deserves to be cared for in retirement as much as I do.

I myself am a bit tattered and weather-worn by this pandemic. Being trapped in the house all day every day deprives me of the physical activity that keeps my heart healthy and my diabetes under control. My mental health is a little ragged around the edges as well. In this house, we tend to get kinda snippy about money woes and unpaid bills. My wife and I now have separate finances. I was bankrupt, and she is counting on Armageddon to overcome her credit-card-debt monsters.

My answer to the crisis continues to revolve around books and writing and movies and documentaries. I retreat into stories and ideas, both in the form of fiction and well-researched nonfiction. I throw myself whole-souled into the promotion of my books by earning the necessary points from Pubby by reading and reviewing the books of others and spending the points on honest reviews from other writers reading my books. I have never reviewed so many books before. Especially new is the number of badly written books that I have to slog through and then review honestly in a way that doesn’t crush the spirit of the slow-learning writing masses. I think, so far, I have only driven one writer to quit the review exchange. And I have only received two cruel and unfair reviews of my work. Which is, of course, less than expected.

The least mind-bending activity I use to repair my psyche is fixing up and playing with dolls, as indicated by the photos I have used in this post.

In these pictures, you see five bargain-bin dolls and toys, two dolls purchased at Goodwill, and cleaned and dressed in a reclamation project. One repurposed aquarium decoration (the skull) and one Pinkie Pie that I bought with Christmas money at the full six-dollar price.

By doing these things, I have managed to avoid getting the flu and generally avoided depression and mental illness.

Leave a comment

Filed under collecting, doll collecting, feeling sorry for myself, humor, mental health

Tagged as , , , ,

January 18, 2026 · 2:02 am

Impending Darkness

I recently learned from the eye doctor that I may be at the doorstep of glaucoma, a disease that darkened my grandmother Beyer’s vision and connection to the light.

I am doing some serious editing now on my completed manuscript, Sing Sad Songs. There is serious foreshadowing going on in this novel. I think I mentioned once or twice before that I only rarely write a comic young adult novel without having some important character dying at the end. Death and dying and going blind are all on my mind.

News on the global warming front is increasingly bleak. Temperatures are rising faster than predicted. The date cited for the end of life on Earth is now 2030 (possibly within the scope of my lifetime if I get luckier than I have been on past health issues). The outlook is bleak and getting bleaker. Soon there has to be an absolutely miraculous technological or cultural revolution to help the optimists prove themselves right, a thing that they are totally not good at.

I wish I had a Steven Miller cartoon to place here, but he is much scarier and more evil than Stone, so maybe it is for the best that I only have the Stone head cartoon. It’s funnier than Racist Dracula.

The government seems increasingly incapable of helping with anything, even though some of us are paying increasingly large tax bills thanks to insane tariff programs, a form of sales tax, which, of course, we can’t afford. (I do realize some of you who are not on a fixed income actually got a small benefit from Republican tax cuts. Did that solve your financial problems?) It increasingly looks like the corrupt clown show currently in charge is blowing themselves up. We stand to get a whole new government soon that is marginally better at best. So, we are, as a society, marching forward into the darkness with neo-fascist, goose-stepping zeal.

I am not saying that I have no hope. My grandmother got help and never went completely blind. There are breakthroughs happening all the time in science and sociology. But the darkness in my personal future is growing ever closer. And I have less and less control over its advance.

Leave a comment

Filed under angry rant, autobiography, battling depression, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , ,

January 15, 2026 · 1:21 am

Reading Bag of Bones

This is not a book review. I did finish reading this book in a 3-hour-end-of-the-book reading orgy, spending an hour last night, and two more early in the morning before the rest of my family was awake.

This is certainly not a book review. But I did read a Stephen King book, 1998’s Bag of Bones, which I picked up from the dollar sale shelves at Half Price Books. And I did love the story.

………………………………………………………………………This is not a book review. Instead, I want to talk about what a novelist can learn and reflect on by meta-cogitating over what this book reveals about King’s work habits and style and author’s voice.

Mike Noonan, the protagonist, is a novelist who writes books that routinely land in the numbers 10 through 15 slots in the New York Times Bestseller List. Obviously, this first-person narrative is coming directly out of King’s own writing experience. But, remember, this is not a book review. I am discussing what I have learned about how King puts a story together. 

King sets a back-story for this novel that digs deep into the geographica and historica of the city in Maine where the story is set. The literal bag of bones revealed in the book’s climax is almost a hundred years old. And he takes a compellingly realistic tour back in time to the turn of the Twentieth Century more than once to reveal who the undead characters are and why they do what they do. One thing that makes a writer, a novelist, truly solid is his ability to set the scene, to grow the story out of the background in the most organic and realistic way possible. But this is not a book review. I am saying that King always does this with his books. And if you wish to write at that level, you must do that too. I know I am sincerely trying.

At the end of the story, he clearly tells the reader that he learned from Thomas Hardy that “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones”. So, he is definitely aware that a character is a construct that has to be crafted from raw materials. It takes a master craftsman to build one with the right words to make it live and breathe on the page. He does it masterfully in this book with several characters. The protagonist, the beautiful young love interest, the love interest’s charming three-year-old daughter who is nearly slain in a horrific manner at the end of the book… The living villain is a well-crafted bag of bones, as is the ghost, the actual bag of bones in the story. But this is not a book review. Most of his books, at least the ones I have read, have the same sort of masterful characters.

There is so much more to be learned about novel writing from this book. He literally shows you how ideas are captured, how they are developed into stories, how you overcome “writer’s block”, and Noonan’s book he is writing within this book is even used as an example of how to poetically advance the plot. But this is not a book review. You should read this book. It is a very good and scary piece of work. But you should read it because it shows us how to write and do it like a master.

Leave a comment

Filed under horror writing, insight, inspiration, NOVEL WRITING, writing teacher

Tagged as , , , , ,

January 11, 2026 · 3:14 am

Rereading Me

If the two girls up above are Sherry and Shelly Cobble, the twins from several of my novels, they are wearing too many clothes. These two fictional characters are true nudists and go naked whenever possible. (The twins they are based on in real life were probably lying to me about going to nude beaches to embarrass their English teacher (me).)

I have often thought that the reason my novels are so rarely read by anyone (except nudists, of course) is that I use ridiculous situations and purple paisley prose to tell improbable stories. It is entirely possible that I am a lousy writer.

So, I spent the recent holidays rereading what I believe is my best book, Snow Babies. It is a comedy about a small town coming together to survive a severe blizzard. In other words, it is a humorous story about bus passengers, runaway orphans, and farm town citizens being harassed by snow ghosts and some of them freezing to death. It has many intense moments. There are witches, a mysterious stranger, a group of kids in a liars’ club, a couple of orphans with severe medical problems, and a clown or two to become vivid characters that someone somewhere will identify with. (After all, most of them are based on real people I was related to or met sometime in my nonfictional past life.) There are hauntings and magic and near-death experiences. And rereading it gave me chills down my spine as well as moments of loud laughter and a few spots where I shed a few tears. Maybe it isn’t so terrible. I found it fascinating in spite of having read it ten times or more, on top of writing it and editing it.

I am now rereading this book, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. It is a story about friendship, losing friends, and renewing friendships. It is also about family, losing family, finding a new family, and learning to properly love the family you are stuck with. Besides having some serious themes, it is also a rollicking adventure about time-travelling, fighting a dogfight in World War I biplanes, killer alien robots, man-eating chinchillas, and rabbits who become human. And a girl with special problems to overcome gets to turn a boy into a girl for a while with an alien ray gun to exact the perfect revenge. You know, all very sensible, realistic stuff. And it makes me laugh in some parts, and cry in some parts, and even feel the tension in parts where good characters face terrible consequences. I am finding again that I enjoy my own writing when I go back to things I have already written and published.

Maybe I am not a bad writer. There is a good chance you will like them too if you try them.

.

This is the book to read to find out about the Cobble Sisters. Recipes for Gingerbread Children. It is the one I plan to reread next.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

January 10, 2026 · 2:31 am

How To Write A Mickian Essay

mickeynose

I know the last thing you would ever consider doing is to take up writing essays like these.  What kind of a moronic bingo-boingo clown wants to take everything he or she knows, put it in a high-speed blender and turn it all into idea milkshakes?

But I was a writing teacher for many years.  And now, being retired and having no students to yell at when my blood pressure gets high, the urge to teach it again is overwhelming.

So, here goes…

c360_2017-01-02-10-17-06-058

Once you have picked the silly, pointless, or semi-obnoxious idea you want to shape the essay around, you have to write a lead.  A lead is the attention-grabbing device or booby-trap for readers that will draw them into your essay.  In a Mickian essay, whose purpose is to entertain, or possibly bore you in a mildly amusing manner, or cause you enough brain damage to make you want to send me money (this last possibility never seems to work, but I thought I’d throw it in there just in case), the lead is usually a  “surpriser”, something so amazingly dumb or off-the-wall crazy that you just have to read, at least a little bit, to find out if this writer is really that insane or what.  The rest of the intro paragraph that is not part of the lead may be used to draw things together to suggest the essay is not simply a chaotic mass of silly words in random order.  It can point the reader down the jungle path that he or she can take to come out of the other end of the essay alive.

Once started on this insane quest to build an essay that will strangle the senses and mix up the mind of the reader, you have to carry out the plan in three or four body paragraphs.  This is where you have to use those bricks of brainiac bull-puckie that you have saved up to be the concrete details in the framework of the main rooms of the little idea-house you are constructing.  If you were to number or label these main rooms, this one you are reading now would, for example, be Room #2, or B, or “the second body paragraph”.  And as you read this paragraph, you should be thinking in the voice of your favorite English teacher of all time.  The three main rooms in this example idea house are beginning, middle, and end.  You could also call them introduction, body, and conclusion.  These are the rooms of your idea house that the reader will live in during his or her brief stay (assuming they don’t run out of the house screaming after seeing the clutter in the entryway).

Teacher

The last thing you have to do is the concluding paragraph.  (Of course, you have to realize that we are not actually there yet in this essay.  This is Room C in the smelly chickenhouse of this essay, the third body paragraph.)  The escape hatch on the essay that may potentially explode into fireworks of thoughts, daydreams, or plans for something better to do with your life than a read an essay written by an insane former middle school English teacher at any moment, is a necessary part of the whole process.  This is where you have to remind them of what the essay is basically about, and leave them with the thought that you want to haunt them in their nightmares later.  The last thing that you say in the essay is the thing they are the most likely to remember.  So you need to save the best for last.

So, here, finally, is the exit door to this masterfully mixed-up Mickian Essay.  It is a simple, and straightforward structure.  The introduction containing the lead is followed by three or four body paragraphs that develop the idea and end in a conclusion that summarizes or simply restates the overall main idea.  And now you know why all of my former students either know how to construct an essay, or have several years left in therapy sessions with a psychiatrist.

Leave a comment

Filed under commentary, education, humor, Paffooney, teaching, writing, writing teacher

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

January 9, 2026 · 2:42 am

Malevolent Marx Brothers’ Movies

8_1

“I wanna thank you for meeting with me in this super-secret high-level meeting in the White House (and broadcast on Truth Social), okay.  I brought you here… I am really good at bringing people and stuff together, by the way… I brought you here so we could make the Marx Brothers great again, okay?  We are going to make a new Marx Brothers movie.  It’s going to be great… bigly tremendous.”

“Wotta you sayin’, boss?  The Marx Brothers is dead.  How you gonna make a movie with dead guys?  You gonna dig ’em all up and do a Frankenstein number on ’em, or what?”

“No, no…  We will play the roles ourselves.  I’ll be Groucho, you know… the really smart one… the one with an amazing mind.  I really am very smart, you know.  Everyone says so.”

“And who am I gonna play?”

“Steve Miller, you get to be Chico.  You know, the fast-talking Wop guy.  You think of the greatest plans.  They are really great, you know.”

“Okay, boss, I got one already.”

“Really?  What is it?”

mv5bmtu4ote4mzgyn15bml5banbnxkftztgwnzy5mtm4mte-_v1_ux148_cr00148216_al_

“I think we gotta do an executive order.”

“Executive order?  What’s that?”

“It’s a order you give like Obama did, you know?  You take a pen and phone and say something in writing that everybody’s gotta do, and then, because it’s an executive order and you signed your name to it, you gotta execute somebody.”

“Ooh!  I like the sound of that.  We’ll call the movie Horsefeather Soup.  It’ll be tremendous.  The most tremendous thing people have ever seen.”

“Yeah, and the executive order will say we are banning Mexicans that come from places like Venezuela, Colombia, and Somalia.  That kind of Mexican has to be sent back to where they came from.  You know, just the ones where they might want to vote for Democrats.  And we can say we are doing extreme vetting so we are keeping America safe from terrorists.  And WOKE Mexicans.”

“Ooh!  Yeah!  Extreme vetting rhymes with bed-wetting.  Tremendous.   But what if people say I’m being racist again?”

“We say we intend to protect Americans from those really bad people you keep talking about, you know, the ones that eat the cats and dogs?  We’ll claim that nobody who’s innocent will get hurt.  And the good thing is, the immigration people will just know that anybody who is a Mexican is a bad person.  No matter where they’re from.  We’ll get everybody that way.”

“Good one, Steve, I mean… Chico.”

duck-soup-and-beyond-the-3-best-marx-brothers-movies-image-4
In the Homeland Security camps after the executive order.  (Possibly people waiting to be executed in Alligator Alcatraz.)

“Wait a minute, boss, who do I get to be in this movie?”

“Hogsweat, you get to be Harpo, okay?”

“My name is Hegseth, boss.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry, Heegsop.”

“HEGSETH!”

“Okay, Harpo doesn’t talk, so shut up, Hogsbreath!  Here, take this bicycle horn and, when you go on George Stefenopolis’s show and he doesn’t let you talk either, just honk it at him.  It will be really great.”

“And me, boss?”

“Oh, JD, I almost forgot about you.  What’s the name of that other brother?  Dumbo?  You get to be that one.”

“Hey boss, we gotta get goin’ on this executive order crap.  Somebody needs to get executed in the worst way.”

“Oh, yeah!  The worst way to execute is the best way.  I feel the need to tweet a truth about it.  This new Marx Brothers’ movie will be the best, just the best.  It will be so bestest that America will get tired of bestiness.”

go-west-marx-bros
Trump, Hogsbreath, and Steven Miller, ready for Woke Mexicans and protesters.

Leave a comment

Filed under angry rant, humor, politics, satire

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 6, 2026 · 2:08 am

What You Should Know About Filipino Families

1520816_752004171494685_584572888_n
Not everyone pictured in this post is actually a family member by marriage, but my wife has a big family and everyone who is even remotely related to a Filipino family… or even imagines that they are… is family.

I am about as much of a white-guy WASP-type as you can find in Middle America, having grown up in Iowa and teaching for my entire career in Texas.  But I know a thing or two… or three about other cultures.   I taught in South Texas for 23 years with students who were over 85% Spanish-speaking.  And then, in 1995, I married into the Pinoy culture of the Philippine Islands.

internet images 397
Me and my Filipino-American familia… circa 2003.

There are some things I have learned about this other culture that you should probably be aware of.

#1.  The United States is being invaded and colonized by the Philippines.  They are coming here in waves, getting jobs in education and medicine that not enough of home-grown America are willing to take up.  My wife came here with a placement company as a teacher.  Three of her group of Filipino teachers landed in our little Cotulla school district.  When she got here, she was met by her cousin and her cousin’s family.  There was a Filipina woman and her young son in the Valley that also took an interest in helping her get settled in Texas.  All of these people… and all of their friends and relatives are still a part of our lives.  My wife’s sister and her family lived in California where dozens of cousins also lived.  They and my wife’s parents have since moved to Texas, along with two other sisters and their families.  You get the idea.  They are taking over.

7499_1663348133953699_2177344199468661634_n

17861_1252288587394_1234893830_30687202_F453239_n

#2. As you can see, Filipinos love to take pictures.  Above is a picture from class where my niece goes to school back in Floridablanca in the Philippines.  People complain about pictures of food on Facebook.  My Filipino family puts the Food Network to shame.  Sometimes I can’t tell if they are eating another exotic Filipino dish with rice and meat or they’ve been putting firecrackers into fish and exploding them.  And the fish eyes are a delicacy.  Eeuw! My sisters in Iowa won’t even let me talk about the food at Filipino gatherings.  I have to be extremely careful of what I share on Facebook.

1013267_10201161984785458_2113452340_n

 #3.  To know about Filipino culture, you have to understand what Jollibee is all about.  Jollibee is the Filipino MacDonald’s.  Of course, it is cheaper… and better tasting.  There are a  few of them around the country here.  California has more than Texas.  They are like a giant Filipino magnet.  You go there to find the Filipino community in any American city.  But other people love the food too.  You have to sort the Filipinos from the Hispanics and white folks that are not too proud to eat cheap and delicious.

1383526_578968342150705_1648068876_n

Well, those are only about three things that you should probably know about Filipinos and Pinoy culture.  I haven’t even gotten into the thing about Matrilineal social orders or the evils of Karaoke addiction… but enough is enough for one day.  I have no idea how much trouble I am now in for revealing cultural secrets.  It could be a long cold night in the dog house.

Leave a comment

Filed under autobiography, family, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

January 5, 2026 · 2:48 am

Time For Wasting

wonderful teaching

When I was still alive and still teaching, maximizing and managing time was an incredibly important part of the day.    You had to activate learners with an attention step, a lesson focus that grabbed them.  Usually that had to follow a warm-up, something you got them to do as soon as you had smiled at them at the doorway, offered to shake their hand, and then pulled them into the classroom to do some work for you.  fifteen minutes at the start of the class to rev up mental engines and get the gears turning… shake out the rust and the cobwebs that accumulate the instant the final bell rang in the previous class. I timed that part of class down to the second with my pocket watch… or phone in later years.  Then, once the engines started, the focus is in place, you introduce the learning objective.  Never more than ten minutes… timed to the second… you give the explanation, the road map of the day ahead, the instruction.  Then for the next ten to fifteen minutes you let them discover stuff.  In groups, with a partner, teacher to class, student to class, or (rarely) individually, they must apply what you pointed out and figure something out.  It could be complicated, but probably it was simple.  All answers are welcome and accepted… because all answers will be evaluated and you learn more from wrong answers than you do from correct guesses.  Evaluation comes in the five to ten minutes at the end when you evaluate.  “What have I learned today?”  You try your hardest to pin something new to the mental note-board hanging on the brain walls of each and every student.  Depending on how much or how few minutes you are given before the final bell kills the lesson for the day, you have to put the big pink ribbon on it.  That tightly-wound lesson cycle goes on all day, repeated as many times as you have classes.  In that time you have to be teacher, policeman, friend, devil’s advocate, entertainer, counselor, psychotherapist, chief explainer, and sometimes God.  And you time it to the second by your pocket watch.

Teacher

I miss being the rabbit holding the BIG PENCIL.  Now that I am retired, I am no longer on the clock… no longer subject to careful time management.  My pocket watch is broken and lying in a box somewhere in my library.  I live now in non-consecutive time periods of sleep and illness and writing and playing with dolls.  I have entered a second childhood now.  Not really a simple one because of diabetes and arthritis and COPD and psoriasis and all the other wonderful things that old age makes possible.  But a childhood free of school politics and mandates from the school board and from the State.  A childhood where I can once again dream and imagine and create and play.  That’s what this post is if you haven’t already figured it out.  I am playing with words and ideas.  They are my toys.  Toys like this one;

turtleboy

This, of course, is Tim, the turtleboy of irony, holding his magic flatiron that he uses for ironing out irony.  He is flattening it out now with a cartoony Paffooney and wickedly waggled words.  Ironically, I have often taught students to write just like this, making connections between words and pictures and ideas through free association and fast-writing.  Have you learned anything from today’s retired-teacher post?  If you did, it is ironic, because you were never meant to from the start.

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, irony, Paffooney, teaching, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

January 2, 2026 · 2:18 am

Poor Ol’ Wooden Head

“Kaw-Liga”
KAW-LIGA, was a wooden Indian standing by the door
He fell in love with an Indian maid over in the antique store
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.

He always wore his Sunday feathers and held a tomahawk
The maiden wore her beads and braids and hoped someday he’d talk
KAW-LIGA – A, too stubborn to ever show a sign
Because his heart was made of knotty pine.

[Chorus:]
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he never got a kiss
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he don’t know what he missed
Is it any wonder that his face is red
KAW-LIGA, that poor ol’ wooden head.

KAW-LIGA, was a lonely Indian never went nowhere
His heart was set on the Indian maiden with the coal black hair
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.

Then one day a wealthy customer bought the Indian maid
And took her, oh, so far away, but ol’ KAW-LIGA stayed
KAW-LIGA – A, just stands there as lonely as can be
And wishes he was still an old pine tree.

“The Complete Hank Williams” (1998)

Magicman 3

The quirky movie I reviewed, Moonrise Kingdom, reconnected me with a song I loved as a child.  It was on an old 45 record that belonged to my mother’s best friend from high school.  When the Retleffs sold their farm and tore down their house and barn, they had a huge estate sale.  My mother bought the old record player and all the collected records that Aunt Jenny still had.  They were the same ones my mother and her friend Edna had listened to over and over.  There were two records of singles about Indian love.  Running Bear was about an Indian boy who fell in love with little White Dove.  They lived on opposite sides of a river.  Overcome with love, they both jump into the river, swim to the middle, lock lips, and both drown.  Together forever.  That song, it turns out, was written by the Big Bopper, and given to Johnny Preston to sing, and released the year after the Big Bopper died in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.

Kaw-liga, by Hank Williams, was a wooden Indian sitting in front of a cigar store.  His love story is even worse.  As you can see from the lyrics above, he never even gets the girl.  Dang, Indian love must be heck!

But I have come to realize that these aren’t merely racist songs from a bygone era.  They hold within them a plea for something essential.  They are a reminder that we need love to be alive.

When I was young and deeply depressed… though also insufferably creative and unable to control the powers of my danged big brain, I knew that I wanted love.  There was one girl who went to school with me, lovely Alicia Stewart (I am not brave enough to use her real name), that filled my dreams.  We were classmates, and alphabetical seating charts routinely put us near each other.  She had a hypnotic sparkle in her eyes whenever she laughed at my jokes.  She was so sweet to me… sweet to everyone… that she probably caused my diabetes.  I longed to carry her books or hold her hand.  I cherished every time she spoke to me, and collected the memories like stamps in a stamp album.  But like the stupid cigar store Indian, I never spoke up for myself.  I never told her how I felt.  I was endlessly like Charlie Brown with the Little Red-Haired Girl.  Sometimes you have to screw up your courage and leap into the river, even if it means your undoing.  Because love is worth it.  Love is necessary.  And it comes to everybody in one way or another over time.  I look at pictures of her grandchildren posted on Facebook now, and wonder what might have been, if only… if only I had jumped in that stupid river.  I did find love.  And I probably would’ve drowned had I done it back then.  Life has a way of working things out eventually.  But there has to be some reason that in the 50’s, when I was born, they just kept singing about Indian love.

Leave a comment

Filed under autobiography, finding love, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

December 30, 2025 · 2:01 am

Random Winter Thoughts

The little red bird that never flies away when the winter comes… is a symbol of who I am. I lasted for 31 years as a public school teacher no matter how hard it got to be, no matter how many brick walls I ran into, and no matter how little respect the world gives me for what I have done. I persisted in a difficult relationship for thirty years because it didn’t matter if she didn’t love me. I loved her and I made a commitment. And no matter how cold the relationship has become, it will continue. I don’t fly away when the snow begins to fall.

Life is hard. Terrible people do terrible things, and they seem to always get what they want and make the huge profits. Good and lovely people who sacrifice their comfort and wealth to help others always seem to be the ones who get kicked whenever they are down. Still, people are basically good. The depths of evil some of them sink to are the exception, not the rule. The heights of behavior and accomplishment are achieved by more people than the depths of the sinkers and the vile. Some people are amazing, inspiring, and the light the majority of us live by.

This world breaks many a soul under the hammer of God, but His forge is also where heroes are created from the truest of steel. There is hardship and pain and disappointment everywhere… constantly. But when you balance it all… life is good.

This is the philosophy I have come to live by. Work hard and take your lumps and wounds with grace and determination. And when it is done, celebrate. You may call me a fool or an idiot. I cannot prove I am not. But in the end, I know what happiness truly is.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,