The people are white. Blond. Blue-eyed. And in front of an American flag.
It shouldn’t be. The girl loves her father. But in a couple of months, she will lose him to suicide.
He fumbled finances for the family farm and lost his third of the family farm to the bank. That was in 1984. He was no longer alive in 1985. He only belonged to her for the first eleven years of her life.
This girl is Kim Fields. She was a child star on the TV show The Facts of Life through most of the 1980s.
Let me ask you a philosophical question.
If you had the power of God and could give Valerie back her father….
But in order to do it, you would have to sacrifice the life of Kim Fields in 1984 to have the power, would you do it?
If you can even give one serious thought to answering “yes” for a second or two…. and you are not actually God…
Well, I will never understand you. I had to battle myself just to write the stupid question. I suppose that’s why I will never understand what racism is. My picture is not racist. Kim is not racist. But… it’s in there somewhere, no matter who you are. And it kills people.
While visiting in Iowa, I ran into an old high school friend at a local eatery. I remember how in high school and junior high, I played basketball on the same team with him, I listened to his exaggerations about a probably non-existent sex life, and helped him on one or two occasions to get answers on Math homework (even then the teacher in me wouldn’t let me just give him the answers, I always made him work out the answers step by step).
Now he is a judgmental and basically crabby old coot. He is a Trump supporter, hater of immigrants who take American jobs, and an unpleasant arguer of politics. And the sorest point about his intractable coot-i-ness is the fact that, as a classmate, he is the same age as me and I am, therefore, just as intractably coot-y as he is.
So, how exactly do you talk to a mean old coot?
Well, you have to begin by realizing that it is not like the dialogue in a novel or TV show. This is a real person I was talking to. So, I had to proceed by accepting that he thinks I am an idiot and anything I say and think is wrong. Not merely wrong, but “That’s un-American and will lead to a communist takeover of our beloved country!” sort of wrong. I can then laugh off numerous Neo-Nazi assertions by him, make snarky comments about his praises for the criminal president, and generally get along with him like old friends almost always do. I play my part just as furiously as he plays his, and we both enjoy the heck out of it.
We are both of us crazy old coots, likely to say just about anything to get the other one’s goat. Getting goats is apparently vital to the conversations of real people. But we have more in common than we have as differences. We don’t keep score in our world-shaking debates, nor do we count how many goats we get. And that is how you talk to real people.
If you know he or she is a stinky poet… hold your nose… and carefully read for anything worthy, and if you find nothing worth standing the smell of… then throw it in the trash before you let go of your nose so you never get a whiff of stinky poetry… that stuff can kill you.
If you know the poet is an average poet… hold your nose… just in case… and look to see if the ideas are crisp and fresh, bought in a farmer’s market rather than Walmart, and grown organically… not factory farmed. You should also check the quality of the protein versus the power of the carbohydrates… you don’t need too many calories in your poetry. Then let go of your nose… Why were you holding your nose anyway? Olfactory poetry is only for dogs and bad poets. Appreciate the nutrients in the verse, and ignore the effects of starvation that will set in if you never read any poetry above this level. The Rod McKuen and Joyce Kilmer level… well… if you only read this stuff, you deserve to poetically starve.
But then there is the Shakespeare-Sonnet level of poetry. No, get your hand away from your nose… this is not stinky-poet territory now. You are up in the stratosphere where if you get too close to the sun, you will get a Robert Browning, and if you swing too low over the Arctic, you may get a bit of Robert Frost. William Butler Yeats… Theodore Roethke… William Blake… John Keats… Emily Dickinson… they all will put wrinkles in your brain and silver streaks in your hair. You will find things you never thought about before… but wanted to know… needed to know… dared to know… but never before found anywhere else… because that’s what poetry is for… you read it… and understand a bit of the mind of God.
But finally, there is the unknown level of poetry. You go in with eyes wide open… not knowing if you will encounter the Goddess Aphrodite… or a monster… whether you will find love at first sight… or be hideously devoured by something wicked. This is where the horrible poetry of Mickey is most likely to abide (because unlike you, most people are wise enough not to read him,) and where the greatest poetry that Mickey has not yet read resides. Definitely enter here at your own risk.
So, that is the way Mickey recommends you read poetry. Aware that you may encounter rapturous particles of the heavenly ether, or die a death by dreadful doggerel verse.
I have told you before that I am blessed with the mental quirk known as synesthesia. I get sensory impressions of things that they can’t possibly have, but my brain imposes them anyway. For instance, today is a Thursday, so it is a yellow-ochre day. You can’t actually see the colors of a day or a month, but I do. I have very strong impressions with crossed-up sensory input. Mondays are teal blue, except in the month of September which is sky blue, so they become a darker blue or indigo-color day every week. And this weird mental mini-illness also applies to fiction.
For example, the character of Atticus Finch, the lawyer and father of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird comes across to me as a beige character. He represents a hero who struggles to do what is essentially right in a difficult situation. He faces raising Scout and her older brother Gem in a time and place where racism and vindictiveness are often dominant, and fairness and a sense of equity is often lost in the face of those problems. Hence, I believe that if he was some kind of pure, saintly character, he would be pure white as a character. But he has to make compromises. He has to shoot the rabid dog. He has to accept food and other goods in lieu of fees from people who can’t otherwise pay a lawyer for legal help. He has to defend a black man from wrongful rape charges as a public defender. But he is definitely a good man. He understands and accepts the shortcomings of a damaged soul like Boo Radley. He defends Tom Robinson, the black man, as an equal, even as a friend. He has to defeat the Ewells in court, but he understands and feels sympathy for abused Mayella Ewell.
Atticus Finch is beige in color because he is a character of firm principles who is not perfect, and slightly browned by the compromises of a regular hard life.
Captain Ahab, from the novel Moby-Dick, is a very different character, though he is played here by the same actor, Gregory Peck. Ahab is a dark navy-blue character. Navy blue is a color associated with the sea and the Navy (well, duh!), but also represents the depths of the ocean, the darkness that can fill the deepest corners of the obsessive mind. It is not quite a black villainous color, but definitely darker than what is needed. Ahab is a main character in his story, but definitely not a hero. He is an obsessive-compulsive nightmare, which is also a navy-blue thing. He is a storm-cloud threatening to sink his own ship, which he eventually does, and also a navy-blue thing.
Captain Keith Mallory, the anchoring main character in the plot of Alistair Maclean’s novel The Guns of Navarone, is a Kelly green character.
Now, that, of course, is not a mere Irish association, although Mallory is probably an Irish name. The color, for me, smacks of military discipline, resilience, irrepressible life and hope, and responsibility. Captain Mallory is not the leader of the commando raid on the impossibly secure anti-ship gun site on the island of Navarone, but leadership is thrust upon him when Major Franklin is injured climbing the cliff towards the guns. He is forced to adapt and make incredibly hard choices, leaving Franklin behind to be cured of gangrene by the enemy while in possession of false information that Mallory intentionally made him believe, knowing it would be tortured out of him. He also must decide to execute the resistance girl who had been helping the commandos until it was revealed she was a plant and actually helping the Germans. He is a Kelly green character of life and hope because he finds a way to succeed in the mission and brings most of the group out of it alive, having struck a major blow to the Germans.
This essay is not about Gregory Peck, though he is in all the pictures. I am merely using him to illustrate the idea that characters in fiction have different colors for me. He is a very good actor to be able to change color so easily. But the colors represent for me the kinds and qualities of the characters. I know it is not an entirely rational thing. But like the synesthesia effects on the days of the week, the colors perceived by my irrational Mickey-brain for fictional characters mean something to me, and I am attempting to explain in the best way that an irrational Mickey can.
The next morning Tod and Flute invited the girls to look at the map with them.
“We are here, just south of the Troll Bridge and about to enter into the beanfields of the Arcanum, west of the Slow-One Fortress called Duffy’s Farm.” Flute pointed to the spot in the center of the map. “We have to cross the bridge, and cut across an expanse patrolled by heroes from Demarceaux’s Hero Tree, but controlled mostly by the Unseely Court, surfacing from Castle Stoor over here. Gobbuluns like Wartoles and Cyclopes mostly, but a few other wicked creatures as well.”
Looking across the gravel road of the Slow Ones, they could see the old bridge of metal and wood and gravel.
“There are Trolls beneath?” asked Glittershine.
“Possibly, but more likely they are sleeping during the day and will not bother us in the sunshine far above their sleeping holes under the bridge,” said Tod.
“Perhaps we should go quickly now, as the sun is bright this morning,” suggested Poppy, not wanting to risk encountering Trolls. She had hated serving them green slime in the kitchens of Mortimer’s Mudwallow, and here there was no powerful necromancer to stop them from eating a butterfly child they happened to catch out in the open.
As the roosters crossed the road, suddenly the smell of rotten, moldy flesh told the group of Fairies that Trolls were on the bridge.
“Tod! Spur your rooster and make it run!” shouted Flute.
“I see the trolls. They are lying dead in the road, slowly turning into stones in the sunlight.” Tod pulled up to a stop beside one of the three Troll bodies. Poppy could actually hear the Troll-flesh crackling as the sunshine cooked it and made it into rock.
Flute pulled his rooster up too, and he and Glitter dismounted to look at the bodies.
“These bodies show signs of sword cuts,” said Glittershine.
“Yes. A Fairy sword. Possibly the Fyrehandle, the great sword of Lord Lancelot himself,” said Flute.
“Who is Lord Lancelot?” asked Poppy.
“He’s a great Fairy war hero, a Storybook Fairy since the time of the Slow One’s King Arthur,” said Tod.
“The son of the immortal Lady of the Lake,” added Glittershine.
But before they could do anything more, one more Troll was lumbering towards them, smoking from Troll sunburn and moaning in an angry way.
“This one is yours, Poppensparkle,” said Flute. “Use your polymorphing spells to turn the creature into stone. Put it out of its misery.”
Poppy could call the spell instantly to mind. But when she pointed her power finger at the Troll, her stomach began to churn, and she couldn’t make the spell kill the Troll. Not after she had seen the Necromancer kill Fairies and laugh about it afterwards. The White Stag had taken those memories away from her. But the situation now brought it back.
“I… I can’t do it!”
“You have to, Poppy! Before it reaches us!” shouted Tod.
She tried to control the swirling sickness in her guts as she wrestled with killing the poor thing. And then the spell came out of her pointer finger in a cloud of orange smoke and enveloped the Troll. And that was somehow not right… because the smoke was supposed to be smoky-colored, not orange.
“Oh, no…” She fell to her knees and emptied the contents of her stomach on the gravel road.
The cloud dissipated, leaving behind a… small sylph boy? He was naked and crying. His brown skin still was dripping with the leavings of the magical orange smoke.
Flute approached the weeping child. “Who are you? Did the Troll eat you, or something?”
The child looked at him with frightened eyes.
“Am no Trollz food! Am Schtinker! Am baby Trollz!”
“Whoa! Poppy? Did you turn the Troll into this sylph boy?” Flute gasped.
“I couldn’t turn him to stone. That would be killing…” Poppy had to stop there and throw up some more.
“It’s alright, Poppy. This Schtinker is still a Troll on the inside, but the new form is far less dangerous,” said Tod.
“Danger-us? Schtinker no know danger-us. Am no killah! Dat nite be doe killah!”
“What did he say?” asked Poppy.
“So, what do we do with him? If we just leave him here he will go back to the Unseely Court and be evil.” Tod shook his head sadly as he said it.
“We could kill him here and save him the trouble,” said Flute.
“No! He’s just a child!” said Poppy, horrified at the callousness.
“We can take him with us and teach him to be good,” offered Glittershine.
“That would be too much work,” said Flute.
“How do we decide? Take a vote?” asked Tod.
“We let Poppy decide. She created him, he’s her child, her responsibility,” said Flute, looking her in the eyes.
“Well, that’s it then. We take him. I will take care of him.”
Flute looked at her with eyes she thought showed great intelligence. And then he smiled.
Most of my novel stories have lived in my head since the 1970’s. I began recording the ideas in a notebook that I called the libretto. I drew illustrations to solidify the characters and some of the plot elements in my mind. But the basic natures of the characters and the style of my artwork grew from these original artistical notations.
I got better at art over time. And the characters benefited from my teaching experience in that I was able to depict numerous characters with nuances and details gained from students and other people I hadn’t met yet when I drew these pictures. Dorin Dobbs, for instance, is based in large part on my eldest son, who wouldn’t be born for another 18 years when I drew these pictures (He’s the yellow-haired boy in both of the first two pictures.)
Francois, the singing sad clown from my book Sing Sad Songs, is based on a student from the 80’s who was actually Spanish speaking and of Mexican-American descent.
I drew this picture of him in 1976.
I taught the boy in 1983.
I wrote and published the book in 2018.
The inter-dimensional traveler, the Man-Cat, is an idea from a story I have not written yet, and probably never will.
Disney-Michael Stewart and his gang of Milk-Lovers is another story I haven’t written yet, and though more likely, is still probably a novel I will never get to.
Invisible Captain Dettbarn and Francois ended up in separate stories from this picture. The other three boys in the picture were babies or not yet born when their stories happen.
So, today was a chance to look at and re-evaluate the past. All of these drawings were done in the 1970’s. All I did was scan them with a good scanner and crop them a little to make them better compositions. And they allow me to keep track of where my mind has already been, that I might successfully chart the future of where it is going.
Diabetes is currently trying to kill me with a severe headache. So, the most cogent piece of advice I have right now is this; Don’t let diabetes explode your head!
I can also say that doing something distracting, like writing something really stupid in a blog post, can take your mind off the pain and make it easier to survive an exploding head.
Pain in your head can make you surly and mean. See the photo of my headache above? Try not to be as ugly on the outside as you are on the inside if your head is exploding.
If your head is doomed to explode no matter what you do, quickly search your memory for every cute girl you were ever fond of and quickly remember each and every cutie’s face. Try to scroll past any blue fauns in your memory. No good comes from that if your head is about to explode. That’s a complicated metaphor and likely somewhat sexual in an inappropriate way.
And don’t worry about becoming a ghost after your head explodes. Ghosts are not real. And you won’t have any worries after your head explodes because an exploded head can’t do any thinking, and worrying… especially worrying too much… is a waste of time because it is a form of thinking an exploded brain can no longer do.
That’s all I have to say about wisdom today… After all, I have a really bad headache.
If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind. The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back. He just isn’t a normal thinker.
But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan. If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order. Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books. If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time. A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next. A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.
Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies. The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous. And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories. How dare he think like that? In undulating spirals instead of straight lines! He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.
But there is a method to his utter madness. He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve. And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality. Simple moves on to complex. Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.
And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman. He is a powerful wizard after all. The Sandman and creator of good dreams. So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says. And he will write another story.
It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written. And it will be glorious. It also rips Mickey’s heart out. And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys. It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will made that magic happen. So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.
I admit it. I am prosaic. I think in sentences. I speak in paragraphs. I write in 5-paragraph essays. I should stop with the repetition of forms and the parallel structures, because that could easily be seen as poetic and defeat my argument in this post. I write prose. Simple. Direct. Declarative. But those last three are sentence fragments. Does that fit the model of prose? How about asking a question in the middle of a paragraph full of statements? Is that all simple enough to be truly prosaic?
Prose is focused on the everyday tasks of writing. It seems like the world thinks that the mechanical delivery of information in words and sentences should be boring, should be functional, should be simple and easy to understand.
I don’t mean to be pulling your reader’s mind in two directions at once, however. I need to stop confusing you with my onslaught of sentences full of contradictory and complex ideas. I should be more clear, more direct, and more to the point.
So here is my thesis, finally clearly stated; The magic of writing prose, it turns out, makes you the opposite of prosaic.
Ah, irony again! It ends up being anything but simple. You can write in simple, adjective-and-adverb-free sentences as Hemingway did, and still manage to convey deeply complicated and thoughtful ideas. One might even suggest that you can create poetic ideas in mere prose, dripping with layers of emotion, conflict, theme, and deeper implied meaning. You can also write prose in the intensely descriptive and convoluted style of a Charles Dickens with many complex sentences and pages-long paragraphs of detail, using comic juxtapositions of things, artfully revealing character development, and idiosyncratic dialogue all for comedic effect. Prose is a powerful and infinitely variable tool for creating meaning in words. Even when it is in the form of Mickian purple paisley prose that employs extra-wiggly sentence structure, pretzel-twisted ideas, and hyperbolically big words.
Simply stated; I am a writer of prose. I am too dumb about what makes something poetry to really write anything but prose. But I do know how to make a word-pile like this one that might just accidentally make you think a little more deeply about your writing… that is, if you didn’t give up on reading this three paragraphs ago. I find it useful to examine in writing how I go about writing and what I can do with it. I try to push the boundaries in directions they haven’t been pushed before. And hopefully, I learn something from every new essay I write. What I learned here is that I am prosaic. And that is not always a bad thing.
Kops from Klown TownHe who must not be named… apparently not indicted either.Mandy’s sassy tongue.Creepy toys playing with their favorite kid.She claims to be a witch, but she really is just more observant than the rest of us.Football games at Dion City Jr. High are highly competitive and somewhat violent.
Ah, irony again! It ends up being anything but simple. You can write in simple, adjective-and-adverb-free sentences as Hemingway did, and still manage to convey deeply complicated and thoughtful ideas. One might even suggest that you can create poetic ideas in mere prose, dripping with layers of emotion, conflict, theme, and deeper implied meaning. You can also write prose in the intensely descriptive and convoluted style of a Charles Dickens with many complex sentences and pages-long paragraphs of detail, using comic juxtapositions of things, artfully revealing character development, and idiosyncratic dialogue all for comedic effect. Prose is a powerful and infinitely variable tool for creating meaning in words. Even when it is in the form of Mickian purple paisley prose that employs extra-wiggly sentence structure, pretzel-twisted ideas, and hyperbolically big words.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Way Mickey’s Mind Works
If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind. The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back. He just isn’t a normal thinker.
But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan. If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order. Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books. If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time. A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next. A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.
Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies. The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous. And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories. How dare he think like that? In undulating spirals instead of straight lines! He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.
But there is a method to his utter madness. He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve. And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality. Simple moves on to complex. Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.
And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman. He is a powerful wizard after all. The Sandman and creator of good dreams. So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says. And he will write another story.
It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written. And it will be glorious. It also rips Mickey’s heart out. And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys. It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will made that magic happen. So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.
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Tagged as Sing Sad Songs