This is a new and better photo of an old colored-pencil picture. Yes, there are copyrighted characters in this multi-portrait, but I am not making any money at all with this post, so I am not violating anybody’s copyright.
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.
This is an oil painting you haven’t seen in a long time on this blog, though this is also a new and better photo of it.
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.
This is basically a portrait of my daughter, the Princess, though it was drawn more than a decade before she was born. It is based on a dream. I don’t expect you to believe any of that. And that is because it is often hard to take the truth of things at face value. Truth is only an idea after all.
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.
This is a picture of daily life in a sealed environment on Mars, created in 1980 with a pencil and paper.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We get smaller as we age. Both physically and mentally and in terms of property…. smaller is what we get.
The car problem was solved by buying a new car (a new used car.) I bought a 2015 Ford Focus that I am quite happy with in spite of the fact that I will have to pay for it for 72 months and may well have to give up driving for medical reasons well before that.
But then the car problem got significantly complicated when the insurance company, instead of totaling the car that hit the pothole and giving me the current value of it less the deductible, decided to okay the repair of the transmission, in spite of the fact that the total cost couldn’t have been more than a few dollars less than the total value of the car. So, I will pay $800 to get back a beat-up car that I no longer want or need.
As a writer, I am also diminishing in my ability to produce output on my laptop keyboard. My mind is still churning out story ideas and daily progressions, but my fingers, arthritic and covered with numerous band-aids, can’t seem to control the typing anymore. Just typing this paragraph forced me to correct letters that seemingly for no reason appear in the wrong space, even in the wrong sentence, paragraph, and wrong page. How does that work? Muscle twitches? Not remembering where the proper letter goes? Or possibly the curser is simply wandering for no reason, highlighting and deleting things at random.
Just as the fairies I have been obsessively telling stories about lately have diminished from human-sized in the Middle Ages to three inches tall today, so too have I become much smaller as a storyteller than I was when I was teaching. I used to have 6 captive audiences 5 days a week. Now I have had 28 pages read on Kindle in the last week, and only made $2.25 in the last month as a writer. Definitely not challenging James Patterson for space on the Walmart bestseller display.
So, I am tiny now. Less well known than I was as a school teacher. Less wealthy than I was two weeks ago. And, if you measured me with a yardstick, probably shorter than I used to be too. Only three inches tall before you know it. And not even any magic to overcome my disadvantages with.
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.
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.
I always loved this song. When I was a boy, it was the song I would sing when I was alone in the darkness. It made me feel better, able to march toward home in spite of potential spooks and brain-eating zombies. The weight of the invisible future world could not drag me down if this tune was in my head, filling it with helium and good spirit; it allowed me to fly.
And when I listened to it playing on the radio… I always paused and listened to at least a couple of verses no matter what I was doing… I never once thought of Johnny Nash as a black man. I didn’t know he was black until I first saw a picture of him. But even then I didn’t think, “Oh, he’s a black man.” I thought, “Oh, he’s a man like me.” But, I, of course, am not black. I’m not really white either. I am a kind of pale pink to mauve mottled color with dark pink psoriasis spots in random places all over me. It is the man on the inside that is like Johnny Nash, full of uplifting things, and goofy grins, and… hopefully, hope.
But when I was young it wasn’t only singing “I Can See Clearly Now…” in my goofy farmboy voice that filled my head with air and allowed me to float away from the troubles of the world. I also learned to draw Manga style, in the tradition of Osamu Tezuka’s Astroboy , filtered through hours of practice copying Walt Kelly’s Pogocharacters and various Disney cartoons.
I copied the over-large eyes and big-headed cutsieness that informed the Japanese idea of the world after the atom bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I tried to capture innocence and wonder and adventure in drawings that took my mind off the terrible things of my childhood, being sexually assaulted, the assassinations of JFK and his brother RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr, the Viet Nam War, and Nixon with Watergate. You can reclaim innocence and peace of mind, if you get the lines just right, and the proportions are good, and the character has just the right expression on their sweet little faces.
Okay, maybe not always so sweet and innocent. This is not the Dorothy I would want to mess with. This girl is cocky, sure of herself, and more than a little impish. A destroyer of wicked witches, that one.
But that’s what Manga Art is all about. You whistle away the darkness one drawing at a time. And there’s plenty of darkness to whistle away anymore, isn’t there? What with Tronald Dump taking on the NFL over the American Flag and National Anthem, Tronald Dump taking on Jim Kong Oon in an insult war backed up by ICBMs, and Congress busily trying to take away all our access to health care. (I know I misspelled some names there, but I am tired of talking about that guy that Dorothy told me I should call the “orange-faced poop sack.” No, Dorothy, I can’t call him that. Using language like that robs my head of its helium.) So, what do I do now about the state of the world? Well, here is the Manga Art I drew last night.
Catgirl and White-haired Snow White with a ping pong ball in her mouth.
We have to have a reason to keep going from day to day. Sometimes people you would never expect to give up, real balls of intellectual energy and cultural importance give up and end their own lives. Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, and Robin Williams come to mind with no mental effort..
There has to be an undeniable goodness hidden somewhere in reality that makes life worth living. The real question, then, is how we find it. And in order to find it, we need to be able to recognize goodness when we see it.
A problem arises, though, when we realize that even the worst villains in history see themselves as the good guys, the heroes of their own stories in the annals of history. ,
There are many things in life that are seen generally as bad or evil that can, over time and with factual input come to be seen as a general good. I was more or less taught as a boy that if you masturbate, you are doomed to go to hell when you die. I was taught this after I had already been sexually assaulted and tortured. I tried really hard to completely resist the urge, going so far as to burn myself whenever I felt a desire to do the deed. But when the Methodist minister told our confirmation group the actual facts of life, he also taught us that masturbation is a natural function for both boys and girls. And that it was necessary to learn how your body actually works. And how to approach it with maturity and the realization that in later life you will probably need that practice to maintain a healthy love life based on mutual love, respect, and desire. And as an adult, I would actually reach an understanding that that particular practice was a useful thing for maintaining prostate health, avoiding depression, and helping both your immune system and your sense of satisfaction with life. It is a good thing that is hard to recognize.
I would also learn in my role as a teacher, especially when I taught middle school kids in their “Wonder Years,” that there really are no bad kids or evil kids. When they act out in class, being defiant, disobedient, unruly, inappropriate, and every other kind of stinky behavior that kids do, you can’t just throw them on a trash pile and get rid of them. That only leads to more of the same and a trash pile of monumental size. Rather, every instance of misbehavior has a root cause. And if you take the opportunity to talk to the juvenile offender, you can get down to those root causes where you can solve problems, extinguish bad behaviors, and instill good behaviors. You get to know the kid for who they really are. And I have to admit, by the sixth grade, some kids are so damaged by life there is literally nothing within your power to heal what’s wrong. You can still work with those kids, though, and benefit them in the long run. I had some amazing accomplishments with some kids that other teachers had on their trash piles. There is startling good in some of them, if only you are willing to search for it.
So, what is my reason, as the insufferable know-it-all who is giving you this unasked-for advice about life, for getting up and going on every single day?
Well, I am a pessimist by philosophical habit, and yet, I find more really good and worthwhile things to pursue in this life than bad things to avoid or arm myself against. In fact, I can focus on the good things and ignore the bad (at least until I have a bad week like last week where multiple terrible things happen all at once and screw up everything. I fear that may have been what happened to Robin Williams.)
I can see good coming from all the things the former orange-skinned leader of our government is doing or has done that are basically evil. (There is real evil in the world.) He is busily leading all the evil lemmings in the Republican Party off a cliff that will go a long way towards cleaning up corruption in Washington.
I am still fundamentally a pessimist, but I do recognize;
It is far better to live in the sunlight where you can see what is good and what is evil than to try to hide yourself in the darkness and hope the wolves that are hunting you simply never sniff you out.
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.
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Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, irony, Paffooney, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life