The three primary colors of paint are red, yellow, and blue. Together with the neutrals, white and black, these colors can be mixed to make any other shade, tone, or hue that exists on the color wheel and can be perceived by the human eye. When all three are present in a painting, it inherently has a feeling of completeness, wholeness, and balance.
Young Prinz Flute
How those primaries are mixed, allowed to dominate, or allowed to recede does a lot to determine the feeling the artwork projects into the viewer’s mind.
Great Grandma Hinckley as I most vividly remember her.
All of the artworks I am showing you today haven’t appeared in my blog for some time. But all of them are interpreted in primary colors. I won’t tell you how each picture is supposed to make you feel. I am just the artist. Only you can prevent forest fires, and only you can interpret a painting and tell someone else how it makes you feel.
The Wolf Girl and Dunderellathe Island GirlGilligan’s IslandAnnelise in Gingerbread TownChiron’s School for HeroesLong Ago It Might Have BeenThe Sea Witch
Today’s sermon is a further attempt by Mickey to say something coherent about religion. I am trying to be a humor writer, and religion is a difficult topic to commit acts of humor against. People do not take it well when you put the heat of thoughtful questions to the personal mythology that they adhere to. They are afraid it might all burn away and leave them with nothing. It is the main reason nobody plays George Carlin’s comedy albums in church. And my atheist friends and acquaintances always get upset when I slip and make a statement like, “Atheism is a religion too. After all, it is a difficult act of sincere faith to believe in nothing.”
But religion is important enough to being human that it merits some daily and, at the minimum, weekly attendance to the fundamental ideas of it. After all, what is the reason we always have had and still have some form of religion?
Religion serves an important function in the lives of human beings. It is the guiding principal that keeps us from wigging out, being self-destructive, or going on a killing spree. Religion sniffs out the borders of our behavior. It gives us a sense of where the lines are that you should not cross. Of course, by itself, religion is not enough to save us from ourselves. It only provides the warning. The girl who hears the admonition from the pastor to not have sex before getting married can still go ahead and have four children before reaching the age of eighteen. Religion does not (or rather, it should not) provide the punishment for crossing the line. It just gives us the warning about the consequences.
I like the metaphor that Joseph Campbell always used in his insightful books about mythology. He suggests that if our lives are the hardware, our shared myths are like the software that makes it operate properly.
Our religious software has to be used with caution, however. Because, just as George Carlin so often used to gleefully shout, “Religion can be stupid enough to really hurt you.” It is hard to deny the truth of that statement with things like the Westboro Baptist Church, the Spanish Inquisition, Salem Witch Trials, and the Methodist Church Ladies who saw your kid running around naked in the yard.
But there is a reason that some religious extremes are dangerous and counter to the basic purposes of religion. There is reason why more atheists are generated by the Catholics, Baptists, and other fundamentalist religions than by more tolerant sects like the Midwestern Methodists and the New-Age Crystal-wavers. Intolerance. If you are too insistent that your religious way is the only path, and all others burn in Hell, then you have taken religion too far into its own dark corners and scary, deep crevices.
There are many acceptable forms of religion that have many good things to offer. I have never been bullied by a true believer of the Buddhist faith. Christians, if they are tolerant, believe in a religion founded on love and forgiveness. Nudists are sun-worshipers who believe in positive body images, communion with nature, and freedom of self-expression. Quackatoons believe in the power of Donald-Duck cartoons to make you wise and capable of laughing at anything. Okay, I haven’t actually established that last religion in the real world. But it could happen, in the very near future. We are going to need it if Donald Trump (not Donald Duck) gets reelected in November.
But the simple point of all this is simply that… we need religion. There is a spiritual aspect to all human thinking, and especially when interacting with others. We need to keep it simple enough for even the most simple people among us to guide their lives and their children’s lives with it. And yet, we need to also be tolerant enough to suffer fools like me to think they are atheists who believe in God.
So, to put it in simple terms, “Here endeth the lesson.”
In the 80’s and early 90’s I played a lot of the science-fiction-role-playing game called Traveller. Those hours and hours of gaming produced the characters and stories I turned into my novel AeroQuest, now AeroQuest 1, 2, and very soon3. So, most of this artwork is either for the game and was used as a part of it, or the book, used as an illustration.
The Megadeath starship with her motley crewJunior AeroMai Ling on the planet GaijinShen Ming’s Palace on the planet Gaijin
Jadalaqstbr the teleporter and Alec Songh
Gyro the Nebulon and Shaman Billy Iowa
Tiki Astro is an artificial robot boy that looks fully human.
Tron Blastarr and Hassan the Peri ElfJunior Aero, Nebulon adopted son of Ham Aero
I have to tell you, although I have not gotten the Coronavirus yet, I firmly believe I only have about a ten percent chance of surviving this pandemic. I don’t expect to see any of 2021 with living eyes. And I don’t find that as bleak a prospect as living through it. Because the pandemic and economic crash it caused are not the end of the bad things coming. I am a pessimist.
That does not mean, however, that I would throw away all the goodness that is there to be had as it all comes to an end. I have no regrets. Life has been good. In spite of the pain and darkness I experienced along the way, I have seen wonderous things happen. I have come to believe there is goodness in everybody, even the really bad somebodies. And I can tell you with certainty based on experience, there are far more really good somebodies than there are really bad ones.
This oil painting is not by me. It was done by my daughter, the Princess.
If I do die in the next few weeks or months, I do have faith in the fact that my children have a better chance of surviving than I do. Not all of them have the passion for art and storytelling that I do. But my eldest son tells stories. And my daughter has a passion for drawing and painting… which you can see she does better than I do.
And even if there is a very limited future for life on planet Earth, amazing and enthralling parts of the story are still to be played out. They will still add more to the ultimate story of life on Earth in this solar system in this galaxy… in this universe. And that is the whole purpose for us being here to begin with.
I am vulnerable. I am in pain. But I have not given up. There is more to do. More to think about. More to feel. And I glory in it.
Again I go back to artwork done for Saturday role-playing games, a thing which I started doing in 1981. It filled my life for a time. And it also taught me to be a teacher. After all, the DM (Dungeon Master, or Game Master) has to be a story-teller and a master explainer… just like a school teacher.
A Dungeons and Dragons picture from 1981. A Shaitan Rider, a villain from 1982.The Giant Sorcerer’s Hand, a monster from the 2011 family game.A heroine-ally and her pet werewolf.The father of mys son’s player character was found at the end of an adventure. He is apparently me with fewer legs.An enemy necromancerTwo versions of the same weretigerThis unused non-player character would become a novel character in 2019.Some characters are borrowed directly from TVSome characters are kept around as potential instant player characters.
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.
Dickens’ novels have always inspired me.Gingerbread cookies inspire me too.My goal in this post is to only use pictures posted on this blog before, and yet, show you something you haven’t seen before,
This is my free book promotion for April, running through the weekend.
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 after all 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.
Life is like that. You work out a plan for how to economically get through a bankruptcy and chronic ill health and retirement income not being enough to get by, and then a life-threatening pandemic happens worldwide and shoots it all to hell like a redneck shooting watermelons in the backyard with his new AR-15.
We are now stuck at home with family, unable to go anywhere but the grocery store and pharmacy. And you have to have a mask to go anywhere because you are risking death by breathing every time you have to go to the store so you can continue to eat and live. But, of course, the supply chains are failing as people get ill on the job, and most of the food shelves are practically bare.
And a way of life is dying (or is already dead). But, for those of us lucky enough to survive until this is over, and that will be most of us, it will be a chance to remake the world. Maybe people post viro-apocalypse will take climate change more seriously. Maybe our lost future will be saved because billionaires will be too ill to keep pumping coal sludge and factory waste into our drinking water and breathable air. We should definitely be able to vote Mr. Toad of Toad Hall out of the White House, put him in jail for his crimes, and elect somebody that at least says they care about about people like me who will probably die from this virus.
But for now, stuff happens. (Or in many cases, important stuff doesn’t happen.) And we must make a new plan that deals with it.
Catch a Falling Star 
Stepping Out of My Skin
Who exactly am I?
I know who I wish to be.
And I have a pretty clear idea
Of who I have actually been.
Bur do I have a notion of who I am now?
Have I finally awakened after watching…
The bowling of little green men?
I live inside the heads of characters,
And walk around in their imaginary lives.
I pretend to be someone I don’t want to be.
And then I try to break out again.
But the problems I have
Are not quite my own,
Though once they were
In the long-ago way back when.
I look into mirrors that are shattered,
And see myself twisted and grim.
And I complain about just what I see there,
And the poetry just does not rhyme.
Who am I?
Where am I?
What am I?
How?
Mostly I think
I’m that thing from the circus.
You know the one.
That thing that rhymes with brown.
But mostly also I think,
I am something entirely else.
A writer.
Yes, that’s the one.
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