Yesterday I finally found and bought a used car to replace the dead one in the shop. I am thinking this is the last car I will ever buy. Of course, that’s what I thought about the last car I bought, the one now awaiting the coroner’s report about its death by cracked transmission. The Fiesta is dead. Now, I hope the new 2015 Focus will be the car I end my driving career in.
Filed under announcement, autobiography
As Mickey’s go, the one who is writing this is a moderately interesting example of the breed. Still, there are things you probably ought to be made aware of. A sort of precautionary thing…
First of all, this particular Mickey is an Iowegian. That means he comes from Iowa, the State where the tall corn grows. It is a prime reason why his jokes are corny and his ears have been popped (oh, and he does actually have two, unlike the picture Paffooney where only one is showing). His fur is not actually purple. If anything now, it is mostly silver-gray. But the Paffooney is a magical portrait, and purple is the color of magic. He has a goofy, and sometimes fatal grin. You may not be able to prove that he has ever actually grinned someone to death, but it is likely he could always dig somebody up.
Another irrefutable fact about this Mickey, unlike many many Mickeys, is that he used to actually be a public school teacher. He taught the little buggers for thirty-one years, plus two years as a substitute teacher. He did twenty-four of those years in middle school… twenty-three of those in one school in South Texas. His mostly Hispanic students managed to teach him every bad word in Spanglish… err, Texican… err, Tex-Mex… or is it Taco Bell? Anyway, they taught him every bad word except for the word for cooties… you know, piojos. He learned that word from an old girl friend.
A despicable thing about him… (you know despicable, right? It’s that word that Sylvester the cat always uses) is that he actually likes kids. That’s just not normal for someone who teaches them. Teachers are supposed to hate kids, aren’t they? But he never did. It is true that he yelled at them sometimes, but he never did that because he hated them. He did that only for fun. And he actually apologized to kids sometimes when they got into behavioral trouble, because he said it was the teacher’s fault if kids are bad, and, besides, the kids are so surprised by that, that they forget all about the behavior and can be flammoozled into acting good.
The last and most wicked thing you need to know about Mickey is that he cartoons up a storm sometimes. He loves to draw everything that is wacky and weird. He has more goofball colored pencil tricks than a Charles Shultz and a Dr. Seuss rolled together in a sticky lump with a George Herriman stuck on top in place of a cherry. He steals ideas and techniques from other artists and steals jokes from comedians, undertakers, and random juvenile delinquents. He also puts together lists of wacky oddball details that don’t quite fit together and weaves it into purple paisley prose (somewhere in this whole messy blog thing he has also defined purple paisley prose and how to make it… in case you were curious.)
So there you have it. The Truth about Mickey. The sordid, simpering, solitary facts about Mickey. The straight poop. (wait a minnit! How did poop get there? Not again! I thought I had cured that!)
Filed under Uncategorized
Children are a resource that we, as a people, cannot live on without.
If we stop having children, nurturing children, raising children, providing children discipline and education, entertaining children, guiding children, and, most of all, loving children, in eighty or so years, human beings will be extinct in this universe.
How many universes are there with humanity being extinct in them? It is impossible to answer. But if there is more than one universe, there is more than one.
When I was a child myself, family farms were still the rule in Iowa. Couples would try for lots of kids to help with the farm work. Chores! I fed animals. I went with my grandfather to the feed store, the hardware store, and the hatchery. I drove a tractor. I walked bean fields and pulled weeds. I mucked out a hog house once (and believe me, once is enough for a lifetime.) I have slopped hogs. I shingled a house and a garage. I painted the family house (in town, not Grandpa’s farmhouse.) As a child, I helped my uncles who were farmers, and worked for other farmers in the area. I was just as important as fertilizer to the maintenance of the world I lived in. (I did not say I was important to USE AS fertilizer. They would’ve had to kill me to use me that way. But my work was a part of what made the land yield plenty.)
I was left, as a child, with the distinct impression that we were meant to live in the land as a part of the land. Nature was our friend. We didn’t cut down all the trees and pave over everything like the city folks did. The kid who never went skinny dipping was rare indeed.
There once were people who knew they lived with the land, and they were good stewards of the land. They knew if the land was not living well and healthy, then neither would they live well and healthy.
But I am not arguing that we should go back to the world of the 1960s. The work I did in the land back then is now mostly mechanized and done by machines, computers, automation, and factorization. But we can teach our precious children the values of old to use in new ways. If we don’t, well… I hope the AI Terminator Robots of the future will have a happy life without us.
Filed under artwork, farm boy, farming, humor, kids, Liberal ideas, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wisdom
Rosemary Hood was a bright, blond seventh grader who entered my seventh-grade Gifted English class in September of 1998. She introduced herself to me before the first bell of her first day.
“I am definitely on your class list because my Mom says I belong in gifted classes.”
“Your name is Rosemary, right?”
“Definitely. Rosemary Bell Hood, related to the Civil War general John Bell Hood.”
“Um, I don’t see your name on my list.”
“Well, I’m supposed to be there, so check with the attendance secretary. And I will be making A’s all year because I’m a werewolf and I could eat you during the full moon if you make me mad at you.”
I laughed, thinking that she had a bizarre sense of humor. I let her enter my class and issued her copies of the books we were reading. Later I called the office to ask about her enrollment.
“Well, Mr. Beyer,” said the secretary nervously, “the principal is out right now with an animal bite that got infected. But I can assure you that we must change her schedule and put her in your gifted class. The principal would really like you to give her A’s too.”
So, I had a good chuckle about that. I never gave students A’s. Grades had to be earned. And one of the first rules of being a good teacher is, “Ignore what the principal says you should do in every situation.”
But I did give her A’s because she was a very bright and creative student (also very blond, but that has nothing to do with being a good student). She had a good work ethic and a marvelous sense of humor.
She developed a crush on Jose Tannenbaum who sat in the seat across from her in the next row. He was a football player, as well as an A student. And by October she was telling him daily, “You need to take to me to the Harvest Festival Dance because I am a werewolf, and if you don’t, I will eat you at the next full moon.”
All the members of the class got a good chuckle out of it. And it was assumed that he would. of course, take her to the dance because she was the prettiest blond girl in class and he obviously kinda liked her. But the week of the dance we did find out, to our surprise, that he asked Natasha Garcia to the dance instead.
I didn’t think anything more about it until, the day after the next full moon, Jose didn’t show up for class. I called the attendance secretary and asked about it.
“Jose is missing, Mr. Beyer,” the attendance secretary said. “The Sherrif’s office has search parties out looking for him.” That concerned me because he had a writing project due that day, and I thought he might’ve skipped school because he somehow failed to finish it. When I saw Rosemary in class, though, I asked her if, by any chance, she knew why Jose wasn’t in class.
“Of course I do,” she said simply. “I ate him last night.”
“Oh. Bones and all?”
“Bone marrow is the best-tasting part.”
So, that turned out to be one rough school year. Silver bullets are extremely expensive for a teacher’s salary. And I did lose a part of my left ear before the year ended. But it also taught me valuable lessons about being a teacher. Truthfully, you can’t be a good teacher if you can’t accept and teach anyone who comes through your door, no matter what kind of unique qualities they bring with them into your classroom.
Filed under education, horror writing, humor, Paffooney
Some days simply nothing goes right. Some days things go so wrong that a couple of bad days turn into a bad week which then morphs into an unlucky, really bad month. So it is on a bad Friday.
A quick and messy explanation; my hoopy old automobile hit a pothole. The pothole broke the transmission. The repairs seemingly are going to cost more than the car is worth. The insurance wants to total the car. But my son in the Air Force bought my wife’s car a while ago. And he now needs his car to go to his post in Florida. So, my family has gone from being a two-car family to a no-car family in a matter of three weeks. This next week my wife has a job to drive to. My daughter has a class to go to twice in the next city to the East. I don’t have a usable toilet to use in our house, and I need to walk to the nearest public toilet in the grocery store. That’s a lot of Uber and walking we didn’t have to do a year ago.
I am endeavoring to get the destroyed car dealt with. The shop where it is now sitting wasn’t the first choice of the insurance company. So, they arranged a tow to another shop. But the tow truck and the shop where the car currently is had a big misunderstanding and that sudden cancelation became my problem. It took an hour and a half on the phone to straighten out the mess. The car won’t officially be deceased until the 19th. But the coroner will most probably declare it still dead.
And the attempt to get a new car derailed today too. I have been waiting to test drive a Ford Focus I found at Carmax since Tuesday. But, it turns out, the car couldn’t pass a pre-test-drive emissions test, and when they went back to check the paperwork from previous owners, they discovered a problem that requires investigation. So, I have to go through the car search for a used car all over again.
But, although the crisis of the family cars is reaching a double-deadly deadline, it is a bad day that isn’t all bad. The St. Louis Cardinals lead their division by seven and a half games with two weeks left in the regular season. I am pre-qualified for financing at Carmax in spite of having a Chapter 13 bankruptcy from 2017 to 2021 and having no credit rating at all. So, even from the depths of this bad day, I can see future sunshine over the next couple of hills.
Filed under angry rant
The internet is a golden treasure chest with an attached bag of holding for me. In other words, a lot of the writing I do depends heavily on a resource that didn’t really exist until I was almost 40 years old. I save stuff from my eclectic surfing forays in computer files that tend to become amazingly complex garbage dumps. So today, I decided to sort one of them to go through stuff I thought might make an interesting blog post.
So, let me show you some of the treasures I have found that could become upcoming blog posts. I will go through the sorted files from July of 2018.
This is a funny, fascinating, D&D-type adventure series from Netflix and the creators of Avatar, the Last Air Bender.
I have recently watched the entire first season, and love this show enough to write a gushing love-review.
This is a show on regular TV, the ABC network. It is about an immigrant family originally from China. I think I am married to the spiritual twin of the lead female character, an obsessively controlling Asian wife who has to have her fingers in every single pie in the neighborhood.
It is chocked full of little things that are both bizarre and funny about Asian cultures being assimilated in this country. And the kids are cute and extremely talented.
Gene Colan was one of my favorite comic book artists in the 70’s and 80’s. I will probably do a more in-depth biography post on him in the future because he really helped me learn to draw in pen and ink. I copied his work from Daredevil, Howard the Duck, and Tomb of Dracula. But all of the work I will show you is done not by me, but by Gene.
This is the stuff that didn’t need its own folder.
This is one I might not be able to use and still maintain a mild R-rating. But I am, in fact, a member of the online nudist community.
This one was already turned into a good blog post.
It goes without saying, nobody can have too many Wizard of Oz pictures.
Filed under blog posting, collage, photos
The truth of the matter is… I have nothing to write about. At least, not results of efforts, progress to report, or a list of things accomplished.
What I have managed to do in the last three weeks is 1.) Destroy my car’s transmission on a pothole so that I have to walk to the bathroom at the grocery store every morning to use the bathroom. After all, we have no working toilets at home that I can afford to have fixed. Sinks and showers, sure. But not toilets. Three non-working toilets that would cost over a thousand dollars and a dug-up floor in order to TRY to get one working via plumber expertise. 2.) I have also gotten enough walking done to get my diabetes under control. 126,060 steps recorded on my phone app plus many, many others taken without my phone in my pocket in the month of September so far have returned my A1C to pre-diabetic levels even though I have had diabetes for 22 years. 3.) I have started two new writing projects even though I have two others almost finished that were supposed to be done back in June but still remain incomplete by a few hundred words and thirty pages of proofreading. Truthfully, writing is stalled in a never-ending spin cycle. I am writing but not finishing. Just going round and round.
I am still a nudist who has to wear clothes all the time. Even at night. Things are bleeding that shouldn’t be and going to the doctor is out of the question because it is too far to walk.
But somehow we will make it through. The world is falling apart. But it is always falling apart. Life is held together by Band-Aids and rubber bands. The only thing that has changed is that I am even older now and much more easily tired out.
I hope at least you can enjoy the pictures. I know my ironic humor has gotten a bit rusty and ruined by old age.
Filed under Uncategorized
Yes, there is very definitely a possibility that there is more than one me.
If you look carefully at the colored pencil drawing above, you will see that it is titled “The Wizard of Edo” and signed by someone called Leah Cim Reyeb. A sinister sounding Asian name, you think? I told college friends that my research uncovered the fact that he was an Etruscan artist who started his art career more than two thousand years ago in a cave in France. But, of course, if you are clever enough to read the name backward, you get, “beyeR miC haeL”. So, that stupid Etruscan cave artist is actually me.
It turns out that it is a conceit about signing my name as an artist that I stole from an old episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show and have used for well over two decades through college and my teaching career.
And of course, the cartoonist me is Mickey. Mickey also writes this blog. Mickey is the humorist identity that I use to write all my published novels and blog posts since I published the novel Catch a Falling Star.
Michael Beyer is the truest form of my secret identity. That was my teacher name. It was often simplified by students to simply “Mr. B”. I was known by that secret identity for 31 years.
Even more sinister are my various fictional identities occurring in my art and my fiction. You see one of them in this Paffooney. The name Dr. Seabreez appears in Catch a Falling Star as the Engineer who makes a steam engine train fly into space in the 1890’s with alien technology. He appears again in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius as a time-traveler.
The young writer in the novel Superchicken, Branch Macmillan, is also me. As is the English teacher Lawrance “Rance” Kellogg used in multiple novels.
So, disturbing as it may be to realize, there is more than one name and identity that signifies me. But if you are a writer of fiction, a cartoonist, an artist, or a poet, you will probably understand this idea better. And you may even have more than one you too.
When choosing whose picture to publish of all the many made-up people that live in my head and my fiction, I often wonder, do I have an accurate sense of who is important and who is merely minor? I offer now some characters I don’t feel comfortable leaving out.
One of the Haire Sisters, rumored to be a witch, and proud to prove it to you, Mazie is a severe and highly focused individual with a knack for seeing and convincing you of the truth. So, maybe she really is a witch.
She appears in;
Snow Babies
When the Captain Came Calling
I can’t tell you about the witch without mentioning the wizard. Milt Morgan is the Merlin of the Norwall Pirates (an adventuring gang and 4-H softball team).
He is one of the founders of the gang and the one who got them into the most trouble in the 1970’s.
He appears in;
Superchicken
The Baby Werewolf
The Boy… Forever!
The Wizard in his Keep
Torrie is the hair-everywhere boy with hypertrichosis, the werewolf-hair disease. He was genetically doomed to life looking like a werewolf. He was discovered living in hiding in Norwall by the Pirates’ gang who decided they simply had to make him a member.
He is, of course, the main character of;
The Baby Werewolf
And also appears in;
Recipes for Gingerbread Children
Harker is a clown-character based on a real person living in the real town of Norwall. He buys the local hardware store and runs the business into bankruptcy. He is not only a ne’er-do-well, but he also is a truly loveable fool.
He plays a key role in;
Snow Babies
He is also in the upcoming novel;
Fools and Their Toys
Dilsey is Mike’s slightly older sister who seems to be in a lot of my stories. She is a tomboy and a Daddy’s girl. She is also beloved by her irascible Grampy, Cudgel Murphy. Mike Murphy both hates her and loves her, but mostly just depends on her.
She is in;
Magical Miss Morgan
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius
and a large number of upcoming stories
Grampy of the Murphy Clan, Cudgel is the meanest old man you’d ever want to meet. He is excellently suited to the job of teaching kids to swear. And he only drives his Austin Hereford, “The finest car made anywhere in the whole goddam world in 1954!”
He appears in;
Snow Babies
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius
Francois, the French orphan, is the main character in my novel,
Sing Sad Songs.
He paints his face in clown paint and sings beautifully enough to save his Uncle’s business. I am halfway finished with this new novel.
So, now I feel like I have exhausted myself in character introductions and will probably eschew a “Part 4”. But with Mickey, there are no guarantees.
Filed under characters, humor, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Adagio 22 – Outpost Demographics Analyzed by a Genius
I, Googol Marou, am the most qualified person in the universe to break down for you the basic facts about Tron Blastarr’s pirate-base home world. If you want a basic genius-level analysis, you naturally turn to the scientist who invented a telescope that could visually reconstruct events of the past gathered from planets viewed from my little telescope at sometimes thousands of light years of distance, thus looking thousands of light years into the past. And of course, I had twelve years of exile to work with in compiling the data from our little corner of the Orion Spur of the Sagittarius Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.
You see, Outpost was an airless planet on the frontier of the Galtorrian Imperium. It was unique in that it had been settled entirely by disgruntled privateers from the Coreward War with the Faceless Horde in the two short years between the end of the Horde War and the beginning of the fulfillment of the Prophecy of Shan, heralding the beginning of The White Spider’s new web of interstellar civilization.
I bet you can’t read that paragraph aloud at high lip speed. At least not without breaking a tooth. I dare you to try it.
The planetary system went from a world of zero population and zero Medium-Class Earthlike worlds to twenty billion intelligent beings and over 450,000,000 space fish of various species in only five standard planetary years (gauged from the orbits of both Earth and Galtorr Prime, two very similar Goldilocks-zone worlds of the Imperium.)
It began with the surviving members of the Pinwheel Corsairs, Tron’s highly successful space force of warships. They built the initial installations for crew habitats, a starport, and shipyards. They were soon joined by many other survivors of the Horde War, looking for someplace to be after being thoroughly beaten and betrayed by both the Faceless Horde and Admiral Tang’s Imperial Space Navy.
Outpost had its own source of hydrogen fuel in the two gas-giant planets in the system, each of which had multiple moons. Then they stole an Ancient artifact made so long ago that we couldn’t even determine if the Ancients were actual people, or maybe sentient mushrooms battling to fill the universe with mold spores… but sentient mold spores, that made life everywhere. (Okay, I admit it. That is all just a conspiracy theory.) But the Crown of Stars could do something really Ancient science-y. And then Trav Dalgoda stole it.
Tron and Maggie tracked the Goof down to a new planet recently liberated and reclaimed by the Aero Brothers. And the Goofy one had, in the meantime, discovered another Ancient thingy called the Hammer of God. This thing could build whatever you could think of (as long as you were telepathic enough to tell the Hammer what you were thinking of.) The Hammer could make whole cities instantly using nanobots and sentient energy beams. And so, Tron and his people used it to build cities all over Outpost.
And so, the pirates of Outpost needed people to come live in their new cities. They found Lupin space pirates willing to live on Outpost in return for help with their rotten spaceships. They also found massive flotillas of Nebulon space whales, living spaceships that breed on gas giants and contain cities full of little blue Nebulons. Although they were unwilling to live on Outpost itself. Instead, they wanted to live with their space whales and other space fish around the gas giants with their various moons and plenty of space for the breeding of even more space fish.
And then Arkin Cloudstalker not only brought his Lady Knights with their White Sword Corsairs to Outpost but also the weird alien Lazerstone who was made of intelligent rocks. And there was a wealth of psionic crystals in the sands of Outpost that Lazerstone could turn into numerous clone copies of himself, complete with a hive mind. Millions of Lazerstones came to life on Outpost and started wearing the special armored suits invented by Tron’s boy sidekick, Hassan the Space Elf of Djinnistan.
And so, that is the crucial insight into the reasons why Outpost was the key to the war between the New Star League and Admiral Tang’s Galtorr Imperium.
Filed under aliens, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, Pirates, science fiction
Catch a Falling Star 