Category Archives: autobiography
More Old Art Re-Photographed
Filed under artwork, autobiography, Paffooney
The Creature I Have Become
I identify as a humorist, writer, cartoonist, and certified fool (Yes, I have a certificate from the Children’s Writer Institute that proves I once foolishly believed I could learn how to make money as a writer). But my current novel project is a horror novel, The Baby Werewolf, which I twice before tried to turn into a completed rough draft novel. This time I followed through to the bitter end. I published it on Amazon.
Torrie Brownfield, hypertrichosis sufferer and possible werewolf.
In order to reign in the goofiness enough to deal with the issues in this novel, I have been doing a lot of horror reading. I have also undertaken the reading of a very good author examination of the life of Edgar Allen Poe.
Poe’s life was highly instructive. You may not have realized this, but most of the giants of American Literature prior to and contemporary with Poe did not make most of their money as writers. Emerson was a clergyman. Nathaniel Hawthorne worked as a customs clerk. Poe, the first to try to make a living solely on work as a writer, editor, critic, and poet, was subjected to the horrors of poverty, illness, and want. His wife was chronically tubercular and ill. He never made the money he was obviously worth as a creator of popular horror fiction, poetry, critical essays about other authors, and as an editor for profitable magazines of the day. Other people made loads of money from his work. Poe, not so much.
It is instructive to a writer like me who can’t seem to land any sort of income from my own creations. There is no demand because there is no recognition of my work. I have come close, having my work praised by editors and fellow authors, and being a finalist in novel writing contests twice. The goal is good writing. I will probably never see a return on my investment in my lifetime. My children may not acquire anything by it unless one of them really devotes a lot of effort to it. Like Poe with his drinking problem, chronic depression, and ill wife, I face physical limitations and poor health, grinding financial issues, and family factors that make it near impossible to put marketing effort into my literary career.
And this novel is a hard journey for me. I was sexually assaulted by an older boy when I was ten. A lot of the fears outlined and elucidated in this particular story leap right out of that iron cage in my psyche where they have been contained for fifty years. Fear of nakedness. Fear of sex. Fear of being attacked. Fear of the secret motivations in others. Fear of the dark. And, most of all, fear of what fear can make me become. Fear of being a monster.
But I have not become any of the dark and terrible things that fear can make me into. Instead, I became a school teacher, and mentor to many. I became a family man, a father of three children. I became a nudist, hopefully not a dark and terrible thing in itself. I became Mickey.
This novel will become my Halloween free-book promotion later this month. Probably next weekend rather than Halloween.
Small Town Inspirations
I grew up in a small rural town in North Central Iowa. It was a place that was, according to census, home to 275 people. That apparently counted the squirrels. (And I should say, the squirrels were definitely squirrelly. They not only ate nuts, they became a nut.) It was a good place to grow up in the 60’s and 70’s. But in many ways, it was a boring place.
Yes, there were beautiful farmer’s daughters to lust after and pine for and be humiliated by. There was a gentle, supportive country culture where Roy Rogers was a hero and some of the best music came on Saturdays on Hee Haw where there was a lot of pickin’ and grinnin’ going on. There were high school football games on Friday nights, good movies at the movie theaters in Belmond and Clarion, and occasional hay rides for the 4-H Club and various school-related events like Homecoming.
I lived in a world where I was related to half the people in the county, and I knew at least half of the other half. People told stories about other people, some of them incredibly mean-spirited, some of them mildly mean, and some of them, though not many, that were actually good and actually true. I learned about telling good stories from my Grandpa Aldrich who could tell a fascinating tale of Dolly who owned the part of town called locally “Dollyville” and included the run-down vacant structure the kids all called the Ghost House. He also told about Dolly’s husband, Shorty the dwarf, who was such a mean drunk and went on epic temper tirades that often ended only when Dolly hospitalized him with a box on the ear. (Rumor had it that there were bricks in the box.)
And I realized that through story-telling, the world became whatever you said that it was. I could change the parts of life I didn’t love so much by lying… er, rather, by telling a good story about them. And if people heard and liked the stories enough, they began to believe and see life more the way I saw it myself. A good story could alter reality and make life better. I used this power constantly as a child.
There were invisible aliens invading Iowa constantly when I was a boy. Dragons lived in the woods at Bingham Park, and there were tiny little fairy people everywhere, in the back yard under the bushes, in the attic of the house, and building cities in the branches of neglected willow trees.
I reached out to the world around me as an artist, a cartoonist, and a story-teller and plucked details and colors and wild imaginings like apples to bake the apple pie that would much later in my life feed the novels and colored-pencil pictures that would make up my inner life. The novels I have written and the drawings I have made have all come from being a small town boy who dreamed big and lived more in stories than in the humdrum everyday world.
Wielding the Big Pencil
The guy holding the big pencil used to be me. I know you are thinking, “But, Mickey, you are not a rabbit!” Well, that’s true, but it is also true that the whole thing is a metaphor, and metaphorically I was always Reluctant Rabbit, pedagogue… teacher… the holder of the big pencil. It is a writing teacher thing. The best way to teach kids to write is to have them write. And the best way to show them what you mean when you tell them to write is to write yourself. You learn to read better by reading a lot. You learn to write better by writing a lot, reading what you wrote, and reading what other people wrote, especially if those other people were holding the big pencil in front of the class.
I was recently reminded by people who know me that once I held the big pencil in the front of the class. They both asked me, “Really? You were a teacher?”
I suppose it is hard to believe when once you’ve gotten to know me, at least a little bit. I don’t strike people as the sour-faced, anal-retentive English-teacher type. I smile and laugh too much for that. They can’t believe that someone like me could ever teach.
But over the years, I got rather good at holding the big pencil. I learned, first of all, that anyone can be a good teacher. You only have to be competent in the subject area you are trying to teach, and open to learning something new about teaching every single day for the rest of your life.
Here’s something you have to learn about teaching to be any good at it; Discipline is not about making kids behave. You can shout, stamp your feet, and hit them with a ruler and you will never get them to do what you want to them do. It has to be about limiting the choices they have for what they will do. Yes, one of those choices is to be removed from the classroom to go have fun sitting in the uncomfortable chair next to the assistant principal in charge of discipline’s desk, but the good teacher knows you should emphasize that they can either sit like a lump and imitate a rock, or they can participate in the activities presented. And in my classroom, activities led to jokes and laughing and trying new stuff… some of it hard, but most of it easy. Kids don’t end up having a hard time making the right choice.
Here’s something else you absolutely have to learn to be any good at it; You have to like kids. Not just the well-behaved teacher-pleasers, but also the class clown who’s too smart to sit still for stuff he already knows, the shrinking violet who is a wonderfully complex well of deep thoughts who is only a little bit too scared to actually speak in class and share her thoughts, and the dark snarky demon who is quietly plotting the next outburst that will make your life a living hell so he or she can spend time with their old and dear friend, the chair in the assistant principal’s office. If you don’t like them, you can’t teach them, and driving dynamite trucks in war zones is an easier job. It pays better too.
I often try to picture Donald Trump teaching English to seventh graders. What a slapstick comedy that would be. The man doesn’t know anything. He is always angry. And he hates everybody except his daughter Ivanka. My fourth period class wouldn’t merely eat him alive, they would skeletonize him faster than a school of piranhas could ever hope to match. And it might be entertaining to watch (assuming it was metaphorical, not literal).
And I sincerely wish I could hold the big pencil in front of class again. It was the act that defined who I was and what purpose I had in life. But it isn’t gone since I was forced by ill health to retire. I held the big pencil for over two thousand students in the course of thirty-one years. And I will always hold the big pencil in their memories of it. It is a sort of immortality for teachers.
So, What’s Wrong With Mickey Now?
I know you read the title and immediately thought, “Oh no! Not another self-reflection post where maudlin Mickey complains about what he thinks is wrong with himself and is usually eerily right on the money, although it is strange and bizarre and will probably never be corrected.”
But it is what successful authors do. I have seen Stephen King reflecting on his own career and writing process. I have seen Seinfield complain endlessly about every little thing that happens around or to him. And so, I plan to do it too. Though I probably will do it wrong and be terrible at it, so it will work the same way as my terrible poetry, making great poets better by comparison.
That which is pretty bad about me now includes the fact that my productivity has really fallen off. In the last decade, from 2012 to 2022, I have written and published 21 books. I have written this daily blog almost every day, and I have drawn, colored, or painted more pictures of various kinds than I could possibly ever keep track of.
But my storytelling has slowed in a molasses of forgetfulness, confusion, and lost thoughts. My drawing has slowed by arthritis pains in my fingers and hands. And if I can claim that less output is made up for by distilled and concentrated power, maybe I can pull out of the triple-bummer tailspin I’m in. But I am also pressed to prove that the concentrated stuff is actually better.
My following on WordPress is dropping as more and more I reveal the real me in these goofy little essays. I am being followed more and more by nudists. But the more nudists follow me, the more normal people who wrongly believe nudists aren’t normal people will unfollow me and swear off following any more Mickey-like nudists. And the irony is that less and less, because of health conditions, can I be actually naked. But more and more I am being emotionally, spiritually, and candidly naked. Naked in my beliefs. Naked in my soul. More and more leads to less and less which become more and more again. Maybe my followers on WordPress will do that too. I am linked to and followed by the AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation) and https://histonudismo.wordpress.com/. I seem to be making more sales of my nudist stories thanks to Twitter nudists who gleefully share everything they like about nudism.
And I have been really having a time about being the unluckiest human being that somehow managed to survive every dark turn in 66 years of life on earth.
The car that I was hoping would be the last one that I would ever need was destroyed by a Dallas pothole. Its replacement is giving me a hefty car payment I was hoping to never have to pay again. My wife’s bedroom ceiling collapsed on her bed. The plumbing in our house is seriously malfunctioning and beyond my pocketbook to repair. As is the bedroom ceiling. So, the luck part of my personal mojo is up to its lifelong bad old tricks.
But the baseball Cardinals have won their division this year. And Aaron Judge hit 62 homers in the American League this season. It ain’t all bad.
Filed under angry rant, autobiography, humor, Paffooney, self pity, self portrait
Re-Minders
Lately I have been having memory troubles. You know what I mean, when you walk through a doorway with a definite purpose in mind.and then, on reaching the other room, you have no earthly idea what that purpose was. It happens to me regularly. In fact, I can even start writing a sentences, and then I… What was I talking about? Oh, yes. I need to practice writing some more spectacularly bad poetry, before I forget how to do it.
Re-minders
Sometimes…
My mind slips out of my left ear…
And I can’t remember things.
So, I have to search under the table…
To find my mind…
And then I remember that that’s not how a mind works.
******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Forgetfulness
Tell me now, before I forget…
What was I supposed to remember?
Was it something religious, important, and good…
That comes towards the end of December?
Was I supposed to buy something for somebody then?
I wrote a note to myself in September…
Oh, gosh! How could I ever forget that?
Now the fire is nothing but embers.
******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Finding Fairies in my Hair
Why do I have elflocks all snarled up in my hair?
Surely some fairies have been twisting it up there.’
But if I can catch one and make him confess,
He claims I don’t comb it, and that’s why it’s a mess.
**********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Doofy Me
If I forget everything I ever knew,
Would it be possible that I am still smarter than you?
Old Socrates said he knew nothing at all.
And so he asked questions from Winter through Fall.
I hope I retain enough brain to remember
That everyone needs to wear clothes in December.
******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Yep, I still obviously remember how to write spectacularly bad poetry. It is my contribution to literature. Virtually all poets will be able to say, “At the very least, I am a better poet than Beyer.”
Filed under autobiography, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, poem, poetry
Consecutive Daily Post #587
This is the 587th consecutive day of Mickey posting at least one post on this danged old Catch a Falling Star thingy. That is not a record or even a milestone. I have reached this point at least twice before.
A year ago in September, I lost my mother to heart and kidney problems that conspired to defeat her doctors and bring an end to her consecutive run of 87 years of being alive. I kept writing and posting all during that time because it helped in many ways. In two consecutive years, I lost both of my parents, my Dad in 2020 and my Mom in 2021. I had a lot of memories to process as well as an inheritance and all the stages of grief. The time I spent writing resulted in two books, Laughing Blue and Mickey’s Rememberries, that contained all of it… I mean most of it… err, maybe just some important parts of it. And I had them both published before my mother died, though she never got to read either one.
I am beginning to be noticed as a writer. It is painfully slow, only a dollar or two at a time, but real. People are actually reading my books without being paid to do it. And a few of them even like the stories. I now have 21 books written. I have #22 written, but not yet published. I also have #23, a novella, only two chapters from finished. And I have started both #24 and #25 already. And the potential is there… but it is also a good thing that I don’t depend on writing for income.
I have managed in 65 years to create some evidence that I can do art in a couple of different forms with intelligence and humor (though I’m sure there are some readers who would strongly dispute that I have either quality in any amount at all.) It is enough. I may not be the superstar I once dreamed of being. But I have learned that I wouldn’t want to be that anyway. Being an ordinary unrecognized genius is good enough to justify a life.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, happiness, humor, Paffooney
700!
If you know anything about my sports obsessions, you know that I am a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals since the 1960s. Yes, the Cardinals of Bob Gibson, the pitcher, Lou Brock the base-stealer, Tim McCarver the Catcher, Mike Shannon, Orlando Cepeda, and Curt Flood.
And I cheered for them for decades, several World Series years, some won, some lost.
But in 2011 Albert Pujols led the team to a World Series win, the last time that happened.
Pujols left the Cardinals for a time, as a matter of more money for his amazing feats of baseball.
But now he is back. And he is ending his career with the Cardinals on a high note. Home runs number 699 and 700 were hit in consecutive at-bats against the Los Angeles Dodgers, the winningest team in baseball this season. I am in orbit. Only Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron, and Babe Ruth have hit more in a career.
Filed under autobiography, baseball, baseball fan, cardinals
My Favorite Cowboy
When he walked through my classroom door for the first time in August 1988, the start of his seventh grade year, Jorge Navarro was a tiny little third-grader-looking thing. But one of the first things he ever told me in English was that he was a cowboy.
He had two older brothers. Sammy was an eighth grader that year, and Jose was in tenth grade. So, I already knew his brothers. Big strapping lads. They didn’t speak English really well and couldn’t read. But they were smart in a pragmatic, workman-like way. They all three came from a ranch down in Encinal, Texas. Fifteen miles closer to the Mexican border than where I was teaching in Cotulla, Texas. But they were not Mexicans. Their grandparents and parents were born in the USA, and their great grandparents, and possibly further back than that had lived on the same ranch-land all the way back to when everything South of the Nueces River was Mexico. These were Tejanos. Proud Americans from Texas. Hard-working, dedicated to the ranch owners who paid them to do what they loved, getting the most agricultural benefits possible from the dry South-Texas brush country.
Jorge was, at the start, a little man with a big voice in a small package. He was smarter and could read better than either of his brothers. He could even read and translate Spanish, which, of course, was his native language. And he had strong opinions that you could not argue with him about. He was a cowboy. That was opinion number one. He not only rode horses, he fed them daily, curried them in the morning to loosen the dirt and stimulate the production of natural oils that kept their coats shiny, and he even told me about the times he bottle-fed newborn colts when their mothers were sick.
And he strongly believed that a boss, or a teacher in my case, should never ask someone to do something that he didn’t know how to do himself. That was opinion number two. And he held me to that standard daily.
You should never use bad language in front of a lady… or a teacher, was opinion number three. He had a temper though. So, unlike most of the other boys, on those days when he lost it, he apologized as soon as he was back in control of himself. It made the girls giggle when he apologized to them, but that was an embarrassed reaction. He impressed them. They told me so in private afterwards.
He had a cowboy hat in his locker every day. You never wore a hat inside. Strong opinion number four.
And when he was an eighth-grader, he almost doubled in height. But not in width. He was what they call in Spanish, “Flaco,” skinny as a rail. He was taller than me by the time in mid-year when he started competing like his brothers in rodeos. And he was good. Something about the way his skinny, light frame could bend and twist under stress allowed him to stay on a barebacked horse longer than his brothers, or even the older men. He was pretty good at roping steers too. But it was the bareback bronc riding that won him trophies.
This is not a story about someone overcoming hardships to succeed. It always seemed like Jorge was blessed with it from the beginning. But it was the fact that he did what was needed every single day without fail. You could depend on it. He had a code that he followed.
The drawing that started this story is one that I did for him. I gave him and every member of his class that asked for one a copy made on my little copier at home.
And he taught me far more than I could ever teach him. Jorge Navarro was a cowboy. And you couldn’t argue with him about that.
Catch a Falling Star 
Humble Pie
The difference between who you want to be and who you are is humbling.
The recipe for humble pie requires good, clear eyesight.
And you need a reliable mirror that only shows the flaws in the reflected image, not in the mirror itself.
And you need to look at every detail in the whole of you. Even the secret things that you tend to conceal from everybody, especially yourself.
And writing a novel, if you do it right, is a form of baking humble pie.
The good and the not-so-good is reflected in reviews, which are often written with mirrors that have flaws.
But what you see, if you are honest with yourself, can show you that, even though you are far from perfect, you are exactly what you are supposed to be.
Leave a comment
Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, irony, Paffooney, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life