Every writer, whether he or she writes fiction or non-fiction, is really writing about themselves. The product originates within the self. So, that self has to gaze into the mirror from time to time.
So, the question for today is, who, or possibly what, is Mickey?
I have been posting stuff every day for a few years now, and in that time, I have been much-visited on WordPress. Maybe not much-read, but then, you cannot actually tell if somebody read it or not. Most probably look only at the pictures. And, since I am also an artist of sorts, that can also be a good thing. Though, just like most artists, my nude studies are more popular than the pieces I value the most. But unless the looker makes a comment or leaves a “like”, you really have no idea if they read or understood any of the words I wrote. And you have no idea what they feel about the art. Maybe they just happened to click on one of my nudes while surfing for porn.
I rarely get below 50 views of something in my blog every day. The last three days were 86 views, 124 views yesterday, and 88 views already today. My blog has definitely picked up pace over the length of the coronavirus quarantine. But no definable reason seems obvious. Some of my posts are polished work, but Robin is right when he says today’s post is merely fishing with the process, which is true almost every day.
As a person I am quirky and filled with flaws, pearls of wisdom that result from clam-like dealing with flaws, strange metaphors that shine the pearls, and obsessions like the one I have with nudism that leaves me properly dressed for diving for pearls.
I have demonstrated throughout my life that I have an interest in and experience with nudism, though not the boldness to parade my naked self before the world outside of the writing that I do. I also spent most of my bachelorhood dating reading teachers and teachers’ aides, finally settling down and marrying another English teacher. I completed a thirty-one year career as an English teacher, which means I spent a lot of time teaching writing and reading to kids who were ages 12 to 18. Twenty-four of those years were spent in the middle school monkey house. And all of that led to being so mentally damaged that I wasn’t good for much beyond becoming a writer of YA novels or possibly subbing for other mentally-damaged teachers in middle schools around our house.
A real telling feature of what I have become is the fact that most of the characters I write about in my fiction are somehow a reflection of me. Milt Morgan, seen to the left, is illustrated here with a picture of me as a ten-year-old wearing a purple derby. Yes, I was that kind of geeky nerd.
And most of the plots are based around things that happened to me as a child, a youth, or a young teacher. Many of the events in the stories actually happened to me, though the telling and retelling of them are largely twisted around and reshaped. And I am aware of all the fairies, aliens, werewolves, and clowns that inhabit my stories. Though I would argue that they were real too in an imaginative and metaphorical way.
So, here now is a finished post of Mickey staring into the metaphorical mirror and trying in vain to define the real Michael, an impossible, but not unworthy task.
Here I am back to doing D&D and Traveller on Saturdays. All of the art in this post was once used in conjunction with RPGs played with former students, and my own kids. I was always the game master in the past, and I used drawings and illustrations to help the imaginary adventures come to life.
Zoran-Viktor was a Mirin Ice Wizard from the Talislanta D&D campaign. The player of this character was Victor, a gifted dancer and actor from the school’s theater department. The Lawgiver was a powerful Non-Player Character in both D&D and Talislanta. The character design came from a metal figure I painted myself. Zoric was a Talislantan Thaumaturge, the player character of a weird kid who told x-rated jokes better than any other high-school boy I ever met.
Harun the Charmer was only ever used as a player-character once. The boy whose character it was provided the face I modeled it after. He was an absolutely arresting boy that had such a winning personality that people fell in love with him almost instantly.
He spent way more time helping another teacher grade papers than he did playing Talislanta games with goofy old Mr. B.
And I promise, only one of the facts presented here about Harun is a lie, in attempt to protect this young gentleman’s identity. We unfortunately lost him back in the 1990’s.
Crane the Sorcerer was an NPC trapped inside his own crystal ball by his own evil familiar well before my kids met him in the D&D adventure.
Viktor, the Snow Wizard of Ice Keep, was the father of Zoran Viktor. Victor loved playing Talislanta.
You cannot cleave a ghost in twain with a cast-iron fireplace poker. Throwing snowballs at vampires will not keep your blood from being drained. And bugbears don’t really have an aversion to little girls in pink dresses (except for little Tessie Trueheart of the Green Dale; that little booger has a temper as large as her love for the color pink).
To go adventuring in Mickey the Dungeonmaster’s dungeons, you need the right equipment. Of course, whole books full of weapons and armor and adventuring doodads have been published. Some of the stuff we use in the family games comes from the game books, as exemplified by the items pictured above. The Blue Wood Armor of the Forest Guardian is a collection of items put together from the books published for D&D by Wizards of the Coast Publishing.
My daughter’s favorite weapon is a sentient throwing knife that always flies back to its current master after being thrown. It also never misses, adjusting its own flight to always strike the target for the greatest possible damage. It has a mind and intelligence of its own. It became sentient and alive in the middle of an epic combat with a magical giant golem who hit it with a spell that went disastrously wrong for the caster. This item was created on the spur of the moment in the midst of a published adventure, based on a disasterously low roll of the dice for the monster side of the combat.
Some items in the game are actually treasures from the published adventure scenarios I like to use. Instead of simply selling off items when they are discovered in the cold, dead hands of defeated evil druids whose dreams of conquest and tyrannical rule you have thwarted, you can take them for your own personal use. I have a tendency to embellish what is described in the pages of the adventure with both really good powers and effects, and really insidious concealed curses. The Legendary Black Blades are both demon-laced and deadly. And both, though fatal to your enemies, will eventually darken your own heart and possibly shorten your adventuring life the hard way.
Not all equipment is made of swords and armor. The Evil Heads of Dr. Zorgo are a collection of living zombie heads that can impart wisdom and information (allowing characters to add skills) and can also direct you to places of adventure and great treasure. Of course, they are evil. There is always that little factor to consider. But come on, how can you not be tempted by treasures talked about by the Ghost Elf’s head when you tried to ask her for the time of day in her native land?
So the point of this post is that I am really proud of my drawings of D&D equipment and wanted to show them off. This post is merely an excuse for doing that. I have one more to show you, though I must confess, while I drew this one, it was designed by number one son to be used for his character, though as soon as he got it made, he sold it for lots of gold to use on the next project.
Here are images from the Monster Movie collection I keep as an obsessive-compulsive hoarding disorder style of thing. I thought I would present them as a collage since I am lazy today and want to save words for my novel project.
The scary thing is that people like me obsess about such nonsense, and collect so many silly, fantastic pictures of stuff and nonsense.
The word for it is Paffooney. I know that is not a real word. It is a Mickian word. Kinda like the word “Mickian”. It is entirely made up gibberish, made up by Mickey, and used to mean an artwork made by the hand of Mickey. So I can’t really explain it. I have to show you what it basically is.
This is a Paffooney. It is inspired by the incredibly unbelievable time in Mickey’s life when they let Mickey be a teacher in Texas. It has no other relationship to reality. Chinese girls in Texas generally do not have manga eyes and blue hair, and while Hispanic girls have been known to eat pencils, they never bring their own notebook paper to class. They always borrow. So there is the basic formula. Colored-pencil nonsense drawn by Mickey and attached somehow to a story.
This Paffooney has a self-explanatory story embedded in it. It is obvious this is the story of an average family car trip in Texas. Notice how they demonstrate the Texas State highway motto of, “Drive friendly”.
And this Paffooney is a Mickian recurring nightmare about a duck with teeth. Silly Mickey, ducks don’t have teeth in real life!
And moose bowling is a Paffooney that needs no explanation… or does it? Well, never mind. I have forgotten what it is for anyway.
And this oil-painting Paffooney speaks volumes about a philosophy of life. See the pilot giving the viewer a thumbs up? And that isn’t a parachute on his back. They didn’t have parachutes in World War I. It is a message pouch with German war plans in it. I even painted it with a bratwurst sandwich inside for the pilot’s lunch. Don’t I do great detail work? But he will have to eat it quickly before he reaches the ground.
And this is me teaching an ESL class. When you teach English to non-English speakers in Texas, you get to hold the big pencil. And it helps to be a big white rabbit.
And this is a science fiction Paffooney, although the science is questionable. Don’t doubt that the flower-people of the planet Cornucopia are real, though. And Mai Ling, the psionic space ninja really can elongate her arm to get maximum thrust into her left-handed karate chops.
And we end for today with the Paffooney of a stupid boy. He’s not really me. Not really. And I don’t even know who gave him the black eye. So it can’t be me. So maybe he is not so stupid. You can’t say that about somebody you don’t know and is not even you.
So, now do you know what a Paffooney is? No? Me neither. But if you Google images with the words “Beyer Paffooney” you can see a lot more of them. Nobody else uses that word but little ol’ me.
One work of comic strip art stands alone as having earned the artist, Winsor McCay, a full-fledged exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Little Nemo in Slumberland is a one-of-a-kind achievement in fantasy art.
Winsor McCay lived from his birth in Michigan in 1869 to his finale in Brooklyn in 1934. In that time he created volumes full of his fine-art pages of full-page color newspaper cartoons, most in the four-color process.
The New Year’s page 1909
As a boy, he pursued art from very early on, before he was twenty creating paintings turned into advertising and circus posters. He spent his early manhood doing amazingly detailed half-page political cartoons built around the editorials of Arthur Brisbane, He then became a staff artist for the Cincinnati Times Star Newspaper, illustrating fires, accidents, meetings, and notable events. He worked in the newspaper business with American artists like Winslow Homer and Frederick Remington who also developed their art skills through newspaper illustration. He moved into newspaper comics with numerous series strips that included Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland. And he followed that massive amount of work up by becoming the “Father of the Animated Cartoon” with Gertie the Dinosaur, with whom he toured the US giving public performances as illustrated in the silent film below;
The truly amazing thing about his great volume of work was the intricate detail of every single panel and page. It represents a fantastic amount of work hours poured into the creation of art with an intense love of drawing. You can see in the many pages of Little Nemo how great he was as a draftsman, doing architectural renderings that rivaled any gifted architect. His fantasy artwork rendered the totally unbelievable and the creatively absurd in ways that made them completely believable.
I bought my copy of Nostalgia Press’s Little Nemo collection in the middle 70’s and have studied it more than the Bible in the intervening years. Winsor McCay taught me many art tricks and design flourishes that I still copy and steal to this very day.
No amount of negative criticism could ever change my faith in the talents of McCay. But since I have never seen a harsh word written against him, I have to think that problem will never come up.
My only regret is that the wonders of Winsor McCay, being over a hundred years old, will not be appreciated by a more modern generation to whom these glorious cartoon artworks are not generally available.
Self-reflection is the bane of stupid people. Essentially, they don’t want to risk encountering evidence that they actually are stupid. It would shatter their world to learn that they are idiots and most of what they believe is true is actually wrong. This fact goes a long way towards explaining why the Republican Party in its current form even exists, let alone the actions of the current mutant Cheetos monster that pilots their agenda and hates healthcare, the Special Olympics, and Puerto Rico.
So, if I am doing a self–reflection piece today, then that proves I am not a stupid person, right? What do you mean you agree with that? Yes, I can actually hear you mentally answering my questions as you read this. And if you believe that, then you have proven that even relatively smart people like you and I are capable of stupid thinking.
I believe in some stupid things, even though I think I am not stupid.
An example of this stupidity factor is my lingering belief that I am a nudist. I mean, I am rarely ever nude any more. I keep most of me covered up constantly because when my psoriasis plaques dry out they tend to flake and itch and force me to scratch to the point of infected bloody sores.
Obviously this is not totally a photograph from the 60’s. That does not make it a total lie either, though.
I have been pretty much accepted as a member of the nudist community on Twitter. I enjoy the artful pictures of nude people they share with me. And since I did a couple of blog posts for nudist websites, there are actually completely nude pictures of me available on the internet. I can be found on Truenudists.com for one, if your eyes can stand the horror. But I have only been to a nudist park, the Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. twice as an actual nudist. I can tell you, they were very hot days even though I was not wearing clothes. I am comfortable with nudity. I am comfortable around nude people. I fully accept it all as a non-sexual thing. But am I really a nudist? Or am I only playing at it? If you follow me on Twitter, then you know I don’t retweet pictures of naked people. I engage a lot with other writers there, and most of them are not also nudists, or even open-minded about naturism. I write about nudists in some of my books, but they are not about nudism, and most of them don’t even mention it. So, what good does it do me to think I am a nudist? Well, the very idea of it does a heckuva good job of embarrassing my wife and daughter. So, I do get some crazy-old-coot satisfaction out of it. Otherwise it simply proves that rational and otherwise intelligent people can be committed to irrational ideas.
I am also of the often mocked and ridiculed opinion that not only are alien beings from other worlds real, they are capable of space travel and have been visiting us for as long as there has been an us. I did not always believe this, however. Before I wrote my novelCatch a Falling Star I believed as Carl Sagan said on the original Cosmos that it is wrong to accept things without proof, and true results are testable. My novel was about aliens who watched a lot of Earther TV and learned to speak English from watching I Love Lucy reruns, I wanted to make the aliens different from humans, but at the same time, alike with humans in the most fundamental ways that translate easily into humor and relatability. Not all of my hero-characters were Earth humans.
Brekka the Telleron tadpole (also a nudist) with her friend Lester the man-eating plant (who only ate her once)
As I did research on the internet (a tool I didn’t have when I originally created the story in the 1970s), I found a ton of researchers and writers and con men and MUFON and the Disclosure Project and nuclear physicists and astronauts Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell who were all believers and mostly not stupid. Wow! What a huge and complicated hoax! Why would anybody believe , based on so little tangible evidence, and so much contradictory evidence, that the government’s position could possibly be right? I learned that I now believed, until significant further proof comes along, that I believe stupidly in alien visitors.
Today’s self-reflection post has now proven that I am a stupid old coot who thinks he is a nudist and an insightful conspiracy theorist. But the results of my look into the mirror have not made me upset about my stupidity. Maybe I am simply satisfied nudism is healthy and the universe is more complex than I am capable of understanding. Whatever the case, that’s enough with the mirror for today. You have to keep such dangerous weapons out of the hands of clowns.
The word for it is Paffooney. I know that is not a real word. It is a Mickian word. Kinda like the word “Mickian”. It is entirely made up gibberish, made up by Mickey, and used to mean an artwork made by the hand of Mickey. So I can’t really explain it. I have to show you what it basically is.
This is a Paffooney. It is inspired by the incredibly unbelievable time in Mickey’s life when they let Mickey be a teacher in Texas. It has no other relationship to reality. Chinese girls in Texas generally do not have manga eyes and blue hair, and while Hispanic girls have been known to eat pencils, they never bring their own notebook paper to class. They always borrow. So there is the basic formula. Colored-pencil nonsense drawn by Mickey and attached somehow to a story.
This Paffooney has a self-explanatory story embedded in it. It is obvious this is the story of an average family car trip in Texas. Notice how they demonstrate the Texas State highway motto of, “Drive friendly”.
And this Paffooney is a Mickian recurring nightmare about a duck with teeth. Silly Mickey, ducks don’t have teeth in real life!
And moose bowling is a Paffooney that needs no explanation… or does it? Well, never mind. I have forgotten what it is for anyway.
And this oil-painting Paffooney speaks volumes about a philosophy of life. See the pilot giving the viewer a thumbs up? And that isn’t a parachute on his back. They didn’t have parachutes in World War I. It is a message pouch with German war plans in it. I even painted it with a bratwurst sandwich inside for the pilot’s lunch. Don’t I do great detail work? But he will have to eat it quickly before he reaches the ground.
And this is me teaching an ESL class. When you teach English to non-English speakers in Texas, you get to hold the big pencil. And it helps to be a big white rabbit.
And this is a science fiction Paffooney, although the science is questionable. Don’t doubt that the flower-people of the planet Cornucopia are real, though. And Mai Ling, the psionic space ninja really can elongate her arm to get maximum thrust into her left-handed karate chops.
And we end for today with the Paffooney of a stupid boy. He’s not really me. Not really. And I don’t even know who gave him the black eye. So it can’t be me. So maybe he is not so stupid. You can’t say that about somebody you don’t know and is not even you.
So, now do you know what a Paffooney is? No? Me neither. But if you Google images with the words “Beyer Paffooney” you can see a lot more of them. Nobody else uses that word but little ol’ me.
Life is filled with impossible things. Doing my taxes is definitely one of them.
I once owned a copy of this Will Eisner comic and got a good barrel of laughs out of it back in the day when I was young and full of life and the grim reaper wasn’t standing just outside the kitchen door like he is now.
It had a bunch of useful suggestions on what to do in the face of the two most unavoidable things in life. I wish I could find it once again, but I fear it disappeared when my parents moved from Texas back to the farm in Iowa in the 1990’s. It was probably stolen by someone who wanted to learn the valuable secrets it contained. I accuse Donald Trump. Surely that would explain all those years he paid zero dollars in taxes. And I believe I spotted something with pale orange hair lurking behind the trash bin when my parents were loading the moving van. Of course, it may have been only a dried out tumble weed.
Now, I am not saying that I don’t want to pay my taxes. I have always felt that it was an important part of being a citizen to pay my fair share. And if you want the benefits of government services like schools, fire departments, police forces, court systems, garbage collection, and all those other things we really can’t do without… well, somebody has to pay for them.
But it often seems to me that the whole matter could become considerably more equitable if those people to whom life and the economy have been more generous could see their way clear to pay a little of that good fortune towards common goals. And I am not referring to the Koch brothers spending a billion dollars on elections, either. That’s a transaction where they come out ahead, making more money back than they put in. After all, they got the whole State of Kansas to pour their State funds directly into Koch Industries pocketbooks via tax breaks, effectively allowing them to rob all of Kansas’s public school children of their textbooks and lunch money. How is that equitable and fair?
And paying taxes this year means probably paying far more than my fair share. I recently completed a debt-reduction program to get out from under two decades worth of maxed-out credit cards at 25% to 29% interest rates. And as a further punishment for trying to get free of the burden, credit card banks get to report the forgiven debt as income for me to the IRS. And all of the banks decided this was the year for me to pay that off. Well, except for Bank of America who are petulantly suing me for more money than I owe them. I will probably end up mired back in credit card debt in order to survive the IRS. So how does that square with Mitt Romney paying less than 15%? Or Donald Trump paying nothing?
The only out for me, it seems, is to shake hands and make a deal with old Grimmy. He has patiently waited for me for sixty years, through times when my six incurable diseases definitely gave him hope. The only way to really escape the tax man is to take the really long dirt nap. But I shall scrape funds together and give it one more try. I just wish I could find that book.
(Note *** All the illustrations in this essay except for Mr. Flagg’s Uncle Sam were provided by the late great Will Eisner, the cartoonist so grand that the highest award for cartoonists is named after him. But I am not paying any royalties for these images since I owe my soul to the IRS.)
Catch a Falling Star 
Self-Reflection
Every writer, whether he or she writes fiction or non-fiction, is really writing about themselves. The product originates within the self. So, that self has to gaze into the mirror from time to time.
So, the question for today is, who, or possibly what, is Mickey?
I have been posting stuff every day for a few years now, and in that time, I have been much-visited on WordPress. Maybe not much-read, but then, you cannot actually tell if somebody read it or not. Most probably look only at the pictures. And, since I am also an artist of sorts, that can also be a good thing. Though, just like most artists, my nude studies are more popular than the pieces I value the most. But unless the looker makes a comment or leaves a “like”, you really have no idea if they read or understood any of the words I wrote. And you have no idea what they feel about the art. Maybe they just happened to click on one of my nudes while surfing for porn.
I rarely get below 50 views of something in my blog every day. The last three days were 86 views, 124 views yesterday, and 88 views already today. My blog has definitely picked up pace over the length of the coronavirus quarantine. But no definable reason seems obvious. Some of my posts are polished work, but Robin is right when he says today’s post is merely fishing with the process, which is true almost every day.
As a person I am quirky and filled with flaws, pearls of wisdom that result from clam-like dealing with flaws, strange metaphors that shine the pearls, and obsessions like the one I have with nudism that leaves me properly dressed for diving for pearls.
I have demonstrated throughout my life that I have an interest in and experience with nudism, though not the boldness to parade my naked self before the world outside of the writing that I do. I also spent most of my bachelorhood dating reading teachers and teachers’ aides, finally settling down and marrying another English teacher. I completed a thirty-one year career as an English teacher, which means I spent a lot of time teaching writing and reading to kids who were ages 12 to 18. Twenty-four of those years were spent in the middle school monkey house. And all of that led to being so mentally damaged that I wasn’t good for much beyond becoming a writer of YA novels or possibly subbing for other mentally-damaged teachers in middle schools around our house.
A real telling feature of what I have become is the fact that most of the characters I write about in my fiction are somehow a reflection of me. Milt Morgan, seen to the left, is illustrated here with a picture of me as a ten-year-old wearing a purple derby. Yes, I was that kind of geeky nerd.
And most of the plots are based around things that happened to me as a child, a youth, or a young teacher. Many of the events in the stories actually happened to me, though the telling and retelling of them are largely twisted around and reshaped. And I am aware of all the fairies, aliens, werewolves, and clowns that inhabit my stories. Though I would argue that they were real too in an imaginative and metaphorical way.
So, here now is a finished post of Mickey staring into the metaphorical mirror and trying in vain to define the real Michael, an impossible, but not unworthy task.
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