A funny cartoon I made with paint

In est it is alright that you are an asshole.

When I decided to go ahead and start telling my story this was one of the first things I posted. I used the guy's full name and wrote a headline that would have probably caused him some consternation if he had seen it. He is a school teacher in Northern California and he has a collection of songs available for purchase at various internet sites and if you google his name there are quite a few hits. For a couple of weeks the first hit was a place to buy his CD. The second was my spaces live photo essay.

I had to remove the post because it was too likely that one of his students would find it next year. This is the brother-in-law who is involved in the Urantia U.F.O. cult and is a graduate of est. I took this picture at my mother's funeral. He has just asked me to take pictures of himself and my nephew and father, interrupting my picture taking, and as I passed him back the camera he made this slick move which I caught on disc. The full set of pictures I took that day tell a story and I am sorry I had to remove the original post. Seeing his name over those pictures made me feel very pleased with myself. He took my sister's last name when they got married.

His name is the same as mine. First name Michael. He is not as much fun as he looks.

Helping the aflicted

This is a little paint illustration I made the other night to send to my 21 year old daughter in an email. I told her about a review I wrote to a girl who was apparently molested by a cousin and is writing about how her abuser's side of the family is mishandling her grievance. She is blaming them for her problems with depression and "cutting." I read the story poem on a site where I have been writing and reviewing and sent her a review that I meant to give her a bit of therapy infused into the comments. I made this satiric cartoon to send along to my daughter of the girl cutting herself with the caption "helping the afflicted." 

The Berkeley Library could have ratted me out

The year I dropped out of the 5th grade and pursued a life of lawlessness on the streets of Berkeley with another kid until he got snared and I was alone was 1975. I wasn't sure where I was going with that sentance, 1975.

I actually was the one who was led astray by another kid that year. Alan became my friend at school and suggested that we just ditch one day and we just got into the habit. We began to feel like no one was even paying attention until one day Alan got busted when the school contacted his single father. I could have been busted too but my mother had lied about her residence to prevent me from being schooled in our rightful district and they could not find her. Alan pointed out the situation I was in and was jealous.

Alan did a lot of leading while we were together since he had some good suggestions like hanging around the labs at the University and watching the doctors experiment on animals.

After the exposure I took to spending much of my time at the public library in Berkeley where I found another friend. He was in some sort of expensive private school and was there to do his research. His assignment was devising a method to cheaply desalinate sea water. He explained all his theories and discussed their pros and cons with me while I read books about giants and ghosts.

My Opinion Of What The Message Is In Edwards' works

I think that Edwards has taken pop figures who have been under heavy criticism and parasitically threw himself onto the controversy with works that are extremely mysogynistic and morbid. The use of public figures has made the work interesting to the public who wonder what is the deep message.

By using symbols and acting naive or giving faint praise as in the case of his Hillary Clinton "bust" he can avoid the need to explain intelligently what his points are.

He also can point to his topicality as his message, the Paris Hilton that he released near the time of the conviction for D.U.I. and a message torn from the pages of a 1950's blood and guts driver's ed film. This is a pandering message that takes advantage of the divisiveness of the media cultures criticism of other media. It is tabloid tactics by an artist.

Stunt Artist Daniel Edwards Falls Flat

A few months ago I found myself studying the pop culture and began wondering what the "real message" of these charming bits that have dropped off the tables of Daniel Edwards are really supposed inspire in the public mind. I was appalled and like a child who wants to end all smoking and drug use I drew this.


His work is presumably about about issues of religion and social values of celebrity worship and media control of the arts. He found a path to circumvent the established art centers by holding outsider sales in typically familiar established venues much like a jumbo velvet painting sale. He and a "select" group of New York based artists have been getting very rich using this method. They are also apparently very fascistic about the way they handle criticism in their galleries and throw people out and ban them for criticizing too much.

Me in the puffed sleeve shirt that my mom bought for me at Value Village thrift store.

This is my 5th grade appearance while I was Kung Fu asskicking everyday I had to go to a lousey liberal hell hole of a school in Berkeley back in the 70's. I hated the school in toto back then and have only recently found one thing to like about the place. Ater an incident that I wrote about in my non-fiction novel I was treated well by a black principal when he put me together with another kid for a cooling off period away from the playground and he had us doing some play acting but our refusal to give up playing on a piece of the school's dangerous architecture caused us to loose our priviledge.

I had my hair the way I liked it at the time. I read comic books and wanted to have my hair like so many of the blonde heroes did.

I eventually became the target of a gang and along with a humiliating loss in a fight with a much smaller boy when I was wearing inapropriate clothes, a winter coat and overly tight pants that my mother put on me because we needed to do laundry, I found a way to play hooky for most of that year.

My Second Favorite Class In High School Was Banned

I entered High School in Dixon Illinois with the class of 1981. In my sophomore year I had the pleasure of taking the course entitled "conflicts" and was taught from a text book of the same name.
I imagine that whoever had a course of that name with a book of that title had had the same experience that we had that semester with our little sophist. The endearing nickname that many of the kids had for him was "fag" and unfortunately, it was just a bit apt.

The course however was a feast of important literature as was his other English course that I was able to take before I myself was effectively banned when I was permanently expelled against the wishes of many of the English department personnel.

It was in his class that I first encountered the famous play by someone "Inherit The Wind." Sadly becoming more and more the atheist's passion play. But it was important literature and our lesson was very well reasoned and moderate.

Our teacher took us into the lives of ghetto dwelling urbanites and migrant workers struggling to survive. It was mainly this material that brought the "authorities" down on the instructor and forced a change in his curriculum when complaints by students over depressing and upsetting subject matter were responded too.

I was looking at some other guy's blog and had my comment post dissed

Maybe I don't know something about the way comment posts are supposed to scroll? But the one I just made over at a journal that refers to being a "science librarian" was relegated to the bottom rung of his comments post scroll. My post is not in the order in which it arrived. Another post came in and bumped me down: seperated me from the main body of the post so mine will always be last. It just seems odd. Look at the posts and check the hours. my post was sixth and the seventh bumped me down.





Correction notification: The Editor of this blog has discovered upon a second look at the post he refers to that there was no "bumping down" or changing of the scroll order of his post. He regrets any confusion that this post may have caused. Thank you for reading 'I can rant too!'--Editor

Editor--blog has changed title from "I can rant too" to it's current title. I could change it again sometime and I won't have to do this again.

Full view of Chuck and his family

During my years in high school I may have drawn a cartoon like this of my friend Chuck and his family and given it a story through the ad libbed dialogue that I led at the lunch table that I shared with a group of friends.

Chuck's dad has the "Big bottle of xxx," his mom is dressed for company, his "little dog Shwartz" is eating a chicken bone and many of the family's possessions are on display.

The word on Chuck's shirt had a double meaning because his father 'had' worked for a company of that name and usually wore a cap with that logo. It also could be read as a shortened version of head-case.

I Resume Acting

My old boss who had to fire me from my dishwashing and stocker position at the now defunct "Good Earth" restaraunt of Berkeley and I re-met through one of my "anti-social" acts.

I decided to look into the theater of the Laney College where I had been trying to pick myself up from the wretched dregs of my shit life when I stopped to look at a stage performance of improv acting. I watched silently from the balcony and as I turned to leave an actor shouted to me.

"What did you think of the show?" I turned around and asked, "What? You really want to know?" He confirmed it. An I said " I didn't buy any of it! The acting was lousy from just about everyone. The stories were ridiculous and idiotic and..."

A grey haired bearded old dude in a black leather jacket pounced off the stage and started a piercing charge towards the skybox and I hit the doors.

He caught up with me on the student square and threatened me not to ever "step foot in his theater again."

That is how I was first introduced to Lew Levinson.

It a was a few days later when my old boss Bob Whalen came to me and began his plea to have me join the very class of lousy unconvincing actors with no point of view. He assured me that Lew could be handled and that all the actors wanted me.

to be continued...

Detail of Chuck's Dad

This is a Chuck's Dad cartoon like I used to draw to entertain my friends at school and work out our social dysfunction as I had been learning in my study of psychology and and my intuition and Lutheran concepts of right behavior and whatever else came into my rhetoric.

Chuck' father was an alcoholic who was fired from his job as a farm equipment salesman during the time that I knew Chuck. The cause for his firing was making false reports in his business statements. He had been listing customers as having been visited who eventually complained that they needed a salesman to service them. He had been some place getting drunk.

Chuck's dad was always drawn drunk with some element of violence around him since I did not like him and Chuck would always have some recent story about his father's recent abuse. He would sometimes get out his .45 and threaten his family with it. After his father was diagnosed with cancer he wrote a sad letter to his ex wife and while he sat in his beloved white cadillac he shot himself.

I have given myself a headache from too much alcohol and blogging in the dark

I got excited when I saw that someone other than myself had looked at my other blog and bought a box of beer last night . I drank 10 and 3/4's of them before I accidentally fell asleep at the computer.

I found out that the mother of my daughter has taken a hiatus from the Huffington post since I informed my daughter through emails and a phone message that I was writing about them. I can not give her post name since it would give too much away about her identity.

I have posted over there as morenot to try to get some communication serendipitously through to my daughter since the mother has persuaded my daughter to give up on having a relationship with me. I made myself a fan of the mother and posted under her posts with points to ponder for my daughter to be exposed to in conversations with her mother. I have no way of knowing if they ever read them but I did observe stylistic patterns in her writing that appeared to be influenced from reading my comments.