Category Archives: artwork

October 20, 2021 · 10:12 pm

It is Natural to be Nude

I have probably lost a lot of followers on both Twitter and WordPress by associating myself with the idea of being a nudist. A couple of my novels that have nudist characters in them or scenes where characters have no clothes on have received some hostile blow-back. I have gotten bad reviews on books that otherwise receive excellent reviews. Of course, this is because any suggestion of nudity or sensuality is perceived as pornography, especially when my best books involve young teen characters.

The general opinion seems to be that nudity is evil. “If God wanted us to be naked, He wouldn’t have had us born with a full suit of clothes on,” they say. Nudity equals sex. Because Queen Victoria said so.

The general opinion is not my opinion. But to avoid being censured or fired as a public school teacher, I had to hide the fact that I have been struggling all my life with a desire to live without clothes on. And now that I am retired, due to poor health, I keep running into roadblocks to actually practice being a nudist. I can really only freely be that in fiction stories.

Being a victim of a sexual assault when I was a ten-year-old boy helps me to understand female book reviewers who are hyper-sensitive to any suggestion that children and sex are being linked together. I spent years being traumatized in PE locker rooms when boys who were larger than me saw me in the showers. And trying to get out of taking the showers had consequences that included having to tell someone why I couldn’t stand the idea. And the only way I could do that would’ve been by lying. I dared not tell the truth. My father died in 2020 and my mother died last month. And neither of them knew what happened to me in a neighborhood back yard in 1966. I never found a way to tell them, and they didn’t ever read this blog. I console myself in th knowledge that, not knowing anything about it meant they enjoyed happier lives. It was not something that anyone could’ve done anything about after the fact. My attacker was dead before I ever talked about it openly.

But my journey towards being a nudist was in many ways critical to healing the mental scars of that old trauma. I used to shudder at the idea of taking my clothes off when I visited the clothing-optional apartment complex on Manor Road in Austin, Texas. My girlfriend’s sister lived there with her husband and child. I sat around a living room full of naked people with my clothes on, learning to accept them for the way they were. And they had no problem accepting me, even though I was using the clothing option. I learned that nudists are more open and honest about everything. And the place was no beauty contest. You were presented with many different variations of human anatomy. And I didn’t go blind or become a sex fiend.

The pictures in this post, nude males all, do not represent any sort of latent homosexuality in me. In fact, I am completely heterosexual with a wife and three kids. I have had gay friends and students of both persuasions. And I have no problems with them at all. These pictures are not about any kind of sexual experience. Instead they represent my own personal quest to have a healthy and positive body-image of myself in my own stupid head. I had to teach myself over time that I was not a naked prey animal, doomed to be preyed upon by those who are stronger and more predatory. These images are meant to show that I am normal, and not hideous inside my own head. They show me for the child that I wished I could’ve been. Naked, yet unafraid.

And all of this primal-scream therapy that I am finally admitting to has become a major theme in my work, writing comic adventures in young-adult novels.

Writing about these things in some of my books led to becoming a part of a community of writers who are also nudists and write fiction centered around nudist characters. I was invited to take part in a story-writing project by Ted Bun and Will Forest. This book of holiday stories will be coming out in November.

So, even if it loses me readers and gets my artwork gawked at by perverts on the internet, I will continue to take nudism to be a very good and healthy thing. I will continue to try to be a nudist for whatever time I can in the time I have left. Being nude is natural… just the way I was born into this world.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, novel writing, nudes, philosophy

October 17, 2021 · 4:38 pm

What God Wants from This Crazy World

Tobias and the Angel : Francisco De Goya

So, by what right do I make any assumptions about what God actually wants? I am, after all, arguably an atheist, definitely agnostic, and probably just as stupid as anyone else you could possibly name about the subject of God and His plan… except for Kenneth Copeland and Pat Robertson and every other religious-con-man-snake-oil merchant. Oh, and Tucker Carlson who knows pretty well what Satan wants, but not God… if there is one.

But I can see the hand of God in world events of late as clearly as anyone you can name. No exceptions there.

With the recent quadruple-spiked pandemic, the resulting recession, the insurrection by the criminal former president, and our headlong rush into climate-change apocalypse, any idiot can tell that God is itching to do some serious smiting. Yes, smiting, that unhappy word for getting smashed to death by Thor’s Hammer.

Tucker Carlson has been revealing what somebody with pretty big wings wants to happen nightly on his Fox ~~News~~ Spews broadcasts. He wants almost all of the money in the world to go to Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and all those closest billionaires who want to overtake Bezos or Musk. The God Tucker serves wants the rich to get richer, and everyone else to die or become totally subserviant to the rich.

And the government Tucker’s God has put in place are actively carrying out that God’s commands as Stephen Fry explains.

The zealots who swarm from Trump rally to Trump rally continue to insist that Trump is God’s choice to be their leader, and they must take election results, success, and even life away from Democrats, liberals, socialists, and anybody else who thinks Biden is actually president.-And if their agenda makes climate change accelerate, or causes nuclear war with China, then it will turn out the way they want. They will be in paradise with their God while the rest of us communist-heathens and liberals will burn in Hell for trying to help poor people and wanting to take tax cuts and guns away from the chosen people.

So, I don’t actually know what God wants in these crazy times. But there are people who insist that they do. And it is messy and painful. And I sincerely hope they are wrong.

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Filed under artwork, commentary, Paffooney, religion

October 17, 2021 · 2:11 pm

Go and Catch a Falling Star…

You may have looked at the name of my website here on WordPress and wondered, “Why in the heck has that fool Mickey called this thing he writes Catch a Falling Star?”

The answer is, he named it after the first good published novel he wrote at the insistence of the I-Universe Publishing’s marketing adviser. Very poor reason for doing anything, that.

But, the secondary reason is because of where that title came from. Look at the first stanza of this poem by John Donne.

So, now, you are justified in asking, “What nonsense is this? That doesn’t have any coherent meaning, does it?”

And you would be right. These are impossible things that I am being ordered to do by a very religious cleric in the Anglican Church who was originally a Catholic, but, in the time of Henry VIII Catholicism was made illegal, and he wrote this poem about not being able to find an honest woman in his drunken, wasted youth anyway. He is ordering me here to not only “catch a falling star” (and catching a meteorite with your bare hands has rather hot consequences), but also to have sex with a semi-poisonous plant, explain why we can’t go backwards in time, determine whether and why God might’ve given Satan goat feet, listen to probably-nonexistent humanoid creatures singing, find a way to avoid anybody ever looking at me with envy and then doing something to me because of it, and, most importantly, find a place where the wind blows in a way that fills your head with facts that actually makes you smarter.

Challenge accepted!

It is exactly what I wanted to write about. Impossible things actually being accomplished. Finding the meaning behind alien beings from outer space developing an intense love of I Love Lucy television broadcasts and Mickey Mouse Club music. Discovering why intensely shy people need to embrace social nudity. Defining who is actually a werewolf and who is not, uncovering who and what real monsters are. Singing songs so sad that it magically makes people fall in love with you. Talking to clowns in your dreams and getting real answers to the meaning of life, love, and laughter.

Catching falling stars is the stupid idea that this wacky, idiotic little blog is about. It is what I write about constantly. You have to kill me to get me to stop. So, there is your fair warning. Read on at your own peril.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, goofy thoughts, Paffooney, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism

Tagged as Catch a Falling Star, John Donne

October 16, 2021 · 2:34 pm

Ah! The Funny Face!

To celebrate the funny face, you really have to smile.

The goofy look, the bizarre expression, that lingers for a while.

Have a face that’s funny? It really is a gift.

To look for happy people, use the chuckle-sound to sift.

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Filed under artwork, cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, goofiness, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as Saturday Art Day

October 14, 2021 · 1:43 pm

Mickian Fantasy Art

There is a reason why anything in my artwork starting with a rabbit is assumed to be autobiographical. I raised rabbits as a 4-H project from about the age of 10 and we kept rabbits in pens until I was finishing my undergraduate degree. (Rabbit chores fell to my little brother when I was away from home.) In many ways, I was a rabbit-man. My personal avatar as a school teacher was Reluctant Rabbit.

The panda known as Mandy in my cartoon world is an avatar of my wife, an immigrant from the Pandalore Islands.

There is often an exaggerated sense of adventure in my cartoonally weird Paffoonies, the very name of which is a fantasy word.

I have been known to actually believe gingerbread can be magical enough for gingerbread men to come to life once baked. It is the reason I bite the legs off first, so they can’t run away.

I have been known to see elves, fairies, and numerous other things that aren’t really there. In fact, a whole secret hidden kingdom of them inhabited the schoolyard in Iowa where I attended grades K through 6. They were all mostly three inches tall. The biggest ones, like dragons reaching only about six inches tall at their largest.

Of course I am afraid of death, evil, and… (shudder) mummies.

I think of art and story-telling as a form of music. I am a troubadour whose songs (like this one) are often completely silent.

My fantasy art tends to be more “comic book” than “art gallery”.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, colored pencil, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism

October 11, 2021 · 4:55 pm

Upside Down and Inside Out

Ideally a writer must not become stuck in a rut, thinking about things in print from only one angle. If you fall into that trap you are doomed to be Tucker Carlson on FOX News, an evil, greedy, and anal-retentive soulless propagandist. Instead you need to have many eyes and notice things from up and down and all around.

As a writer of fiction I use the magic of observation, perception, and imagination together as three very different eyes. You use the observation eye, the one that sees naked Little Mickey in the center for what he really is, a naked, sometimes stinky, immature little brat who thinks he’s funny, to ground your thoughts in reality. You use the perception eye, the eye that discerns the things under the surface, like the presence of a happiness fairy and a sadness fairy in the picture, to determine what lies underneath everything, thoughts that may not be true, but are based on evidence and represent your best thinking. And you use the imagination eye to realize that you can take old pictures and paste them together in a new way to be creative and think a thought you totally never even thought about before.

And as a writer, you have to realize that everybody has a point of view that is uniquely their own. So, if you use the first-person narrative as much as I do, you have to learn to enter the character’s head and figure out how to be that person. I have become a small-town boy obsessed with monster movies. That one was easy. I became a somewhat dyspeptic and grumpy older man who owned a failing business. That was easier. Also I became a seventh-grade girl who lost her father and has to discover what post-trauma love is all about. Dang! That one was really hard. And I became a sentient sock puppet whose actual memories, perceptions, and personality reside in the head of his autistic puppeteer. Wow! Just wow!

So, what am I saying in this silly, unfocussed blog post? That you need to practice using your many eyes, and look at things from upside down and inside out, and finally see it’s not so unfocussed after all.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, fairies, humor, insight, Paffooney

October 11, 2021 · 2:25 pm

The Artist Who Masters the Darkness

Do you know who Bernie Wrightson is?

Bernie Wrightson in 1972, when I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, created for D.C. comics the character known as The Swamp Thing.

Of course,

being a stupid kid at the time, I totally ignored his genius with pen and ink, ink and brush, and fascinatingly dense forests of intricate detail.

I didn’t really get it until he joined The Studio with Jeffery C. Jones, Michael Kaluta, and Barry Windsor-Smith (whom I idolized for his work on Conan.)

And while in college, consuming everything available by The Studio that I could find and afford, I fell in love with his deeply dark and brooding illustration work for a new edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Frankenstein had 50 illustrations by Wrightson that firmly established the fact that by drawing with black ink you could show in startlingly real ways the qualities of white light. That appealed to me both literally as a way to make beautiful art and metaphorically, as that last thing was what I was doing with my own life, drawing the darkness to get to the beautiful light.

Most of his work

was drawing monsters; werewolves, zombies, the creatures of H.P. Lovecraft, and numerous things from nightmares.

But it has a definite beauty of its own. Darkness, evil, and corruption brings out the quality of what is light, righteous, and pure. There is truth in approaching reality from the dark side of the equation.

Of course, he would also do work on heroes like Batman, because the darkness breeds its own defenders of justice.

I am not so much a fan of monsters as I am a believer of taming the monsters who beset us as we try to make a worthy life for ourselves. But I can definitely see where Bernie Wrightson has been doing exactly that with his brilliant pen-and-ink artwork. Sadly, he will be doing no more of it since we lost him in 2017. But it is a legacy he left behind that will make his light continue to shine forth from dark places for a long time to come.

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Filed under artists I admire, artwork, heroes

Tagged as Bernie Wrightson

October 9, 2021 · 5:19 pm

The Art of Fall 2016

Brekka the female Telleron Tadpole is accidentally eaten by the flesh-eating flower from outer space known as Lester (both heads seen here are actually Lester,) But Brekka’s species of amphibianoid alien is poisonous to him/her/or it. so he vomits her out again, having juiced her just enough to grant her telepathy with the plant and all its buds. They become best of friends. This scene comes from the novel Stardusters and Space Lizards.

Filch is a Dungeons and Dragons character from the 1980’s. He is a Gypsy, pickpocket, thief, trap-master, and all around disgusting twelve-year-old boy. (A sixth-grader if he ever went to school.)

He was a D&D rogue used as a character by a 16-year-old band nerd who went on to attend undergraduate college at Notre Dame.

This was the title banner first used on my novel-writing Tuesday posts.

My illustration of psoriasis/arthritis/eczema suffering.

I told teacher stories in the fall of 2016, the second start of a school year after I retired. Randy was a pain in the posterior, extremely smart, and my biggest classroom clown. He saw the fins on the back of my Ford Torino and decided he would call me “Batman” my second year of teaching, 1982. In October he wore a Batman Halloween Mask (a cheap plastic one,) and before he could call me Batman, I addressed him in front of everyone, “I’m so glad you could attend my class today, Battyman, but you will need to go by your secret identity during class.” After that, Battyman was what the other 8th graders called him for the rest of the year.

Me as a teacher, holding the big pencil in front of ESL beasties.

Tackling Twitter for the first time. @mbeyer51

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Tagged as Saturday Art Day

October 8, 2021 · 2:38 pm

The Never-Naked Nudist

Today I have a low-grade fever. A slight cough. No sign of Covid yet, and I am fully vaccinated. But I have been to Walmart without a mask and get regular flu regularly. And it could also be a sinus infection again due to high pollen counts and neighborhood grass-cutting.

But the truly frustrating thing is that I had planned to go tomorrow to Bluebonnet Nudist Park, give them a copy of my nudist novel, and meet some of the members of that establishment that I didn’t meet in 2017.

The frustrating thing is that this marks the fifth time that I had planned to go back to Bluebonnet for a second visit. And now the plans are canceled yet again by illness.

As ever, I remain mostly a closet nudist. Me being a nudist now in the twilight years of my life is mostly a joke I tell, only loosely based on reality.

Part of the problem is the fact that I simply waited too long in my life to give in to the urge to be a nudist. I was one from childhood onward, but always too afraid of the unknown to try it openly. Especially after being assaulted at the ripe old age of ten.

My real opportunity came when I had a girlfriend in the 1980’s whose sister lived with her husband and children in a clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin. I met nudists there fully committed to the lifestyle and who encouraged me to join the movement, even after I broke up with that girlfriend. There were limited opportunities to become a nudist then. A park near Houston, a park near San Antonio, a nude beach on Lake Travis (Hippie Hollow,) and clubs in the Austin area that met in members’ homes. I only ever visited those places with clothes on. I never actually tried it. And now that I am old, I regret the opportunities missed.

Now I am old and ill and unable to express my love of nudism and naturism except through art and fiction. Of course, it has always been a very visual-only experience for me. No touching was ever involved. Whatever sexual feelings there were were always sublimated and deeply buried or strictly controlled.

And, as always, I didn’t absolutely need to share these normally private sort of details, but it seems my art and writing make me far more naked to the world than walking around a nudist park ever could.

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October 6, 2021 · 2:27 pm

Really Odd Things are in the “Wrong File”

On my computer I keep a lot of picture files for inspiration both as an artist and a writer. One of those files is labeled simply the “Wrong File”. Everything in that picture file is in there for the wrong reason. Or does a wrong file need to be filled with the wrong stuff for the right reason? I don’t know. There is a lot wrong with this world. The fact that I am going to post stuff from the “Wrong File” is merely proof of that.

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Liking Grumpy Cat posts on Facebook is an oxymoron of the lowest order. It is an example of what is wrong in the “Wrong File”.

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Certain puns are just so wrong in a fundamental way. That’s right. They are both fun and mental. So that’s wrong.

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As an educator I am aware that this thing we thought was true is now an untrue fact. That’s wrong also. My left brain tells me so. But my right brain tells me it feels right.

Yes, these things are wrong. Just wrong.

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Why did I put this in here? This is not wrong. This is right. So I must’ve put it in the wrong file. So that’s all right, then.

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Putting this in a file my wife could find on my laptop… Yes, that was wrong.

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Saddle shoes have been wrong for many years now. I still draw them on the feet of kids, especially girls, especially school-age girls, and that is especially especially wrong because it means I am just too old and out of fashion.’

Boy! Is that wrong!

These things are all older than me, but I remember two of them. Is that wrong?

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I’m not sure I believe this is wrong. So is that wrong? To believe that it is right, I mean? I’m probably wrong.

988289_10201821431282097_1326790710_n My wife constantly tells me I am wrong… about everything. And I probably am. So that is not right. And if you think that’s my wife in the picture, you would be wrong. She’s much larger than that in real life.