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.
Life is a slapstick comedy. And when it’s me on the stage, I always seem to be the slappee, not the slapper.
I have had an excitingly terrible week. On Tuesday my car broke down. It had been showing a check-engine light on the dash off and on for over a week. Probably caused by a construction pothole that I hit really hard in mid-August. It was running okay until last weekend when it started coughing and kicking and letting me know in no uncertain terms that it might be dying. We chugged into the Five-Star-Ford service center where it may have breathed its last. The service supervisor told me that they are booked solid until October, so it will be sitting in their overflow lot until then.
But while my wife is still in the Philippines attending her sister’s wedding celebration, we still had her car to use, right? But then we found out that our number two son, who bought that car from my wife, is finishing his Air-Force MOS training and will need that car in Florida to do his first assignment. So, we go from a two-car family to a no-car family by Thursday. Then on Friday, that car also breaks down. I call Triple-A for a tow truck, but they send a battery specialist instead. (Well, I did tell the computer voice that my car wouldn’t start before I talked to a real person, so, my fault.)
But when the battery specialist arrived, he talked me into letting him check the battery. Sure enough, the battery was among the evil dead. And he had a battery with him to give us for free as AAA members. Aha! We temporarily have a car again.
And it was a good thing we had a car on Saturday. My daughter woke up with so much pain in the kidney area of her back that we had to go to Primacare to see a weekend doctor. But she has brand new health insurance. And Primacare couldn’t take that. So, they sent us to the Baylor Hospital Emergency Room. We were headed to a very expensive place with possibly no insurance coverage.
Well, we lucked out again. The hospital did, apparently, take her insurance. They did bloodwork and an MRI to determine it was a urinary tract infection easily treated with generic antibiotics, and no kidney stones showed up on the MRI. So, now, on Sunday night, she is comfortably recuperating in her own bed.
And I will have to solve the car problem by buying myself a new car, something I can actually afford to do since I paid off my bankruptcy debts last year.
If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.
But the question remains, why does this ping-pong game of endless crisis management always seem to happen to me?
First of all, the older I get, and the more my arthritis and my diabetes slow me down and make me clumsy, the more I find Physics, and Gravity, in particular, are now my enemies. I have to walk with a cane everywhere to prevent falling down. And, of course, I fall down anyway. I run into things when I try to move around them. Acceleration, impacts, collisions, and other actions that Physics applies to my locomotive powers erratically are a constant source of ill luck, worry, and pain.
If Statistics evens things out like the Statistics professors say it should, I have enough good luck coming to me to win the lottery three times and then live to a hundred and ten years of age to balance the scales of good and bad luck.
How long have I been a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals? Since Bob Gibson and the World Series victories of the 60’s. When will it end? I have to know if there is baseball in Heaven before I can tell you. And I believe there is.
A true baseball fan never abandons the team he or she loves. They live and breathe and die with the team. In the 1960’s I got to experience my Cardinals win the World Series against the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. I got to experience the defeat in seven games by the Detroit Tigers and Mickey Lolich their star pitcher in 1968. And I followed them mostly by the sports page in the Mason City Globe Gazette. And sometimes second hand when I listened to the Twins’ games on radio with Great Grandpa Milo Raymond. I followed the individual players and their numbers. Curt Flood, the center fielder was a vacuum cleaner with legs in center field. Lou Brock could steal a base, though he was even more amazing at it in the 1970’s with veteran savvy and know-how on his side. Gibson was extraordinary as pitcher. And I followed the others too. Dal Maxvill at short stop, Tim McCarver at catcher. Mike Shannon at third. And a fading Roger Maris in right field, having never reached the heights again as the Yankee slugger who hit 61 home runs in 1961.
I watched and waited in the 1970’s, when I could follow them on television at least occasionally. I didn’t get more World Series victories that decade, but I listened to the ball game on radio when Bob Gibson pitched his no-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates. I was giddy about the base stealing record that Lou Brock set in the 70’s, later to be eclipsed by Ricky Henderson. I followed Ted Simmons, the catcher, and Joe Torre the third baseman.
The 1980’s brought more World Series with victory in 1981 over the Milwaukee Brewers, and losses against the Kansas City Royals and Minnesota Twins. I invented some new cuss words the night the Royals came from behind to win the sixth game of the series because an umpire blew the call at first base that would’ve given the Cardinals the series win. That bad call (the runner was clearly out at first) changed the series from a Cardinals’ win in six games to a Royals’ victory in seven games.
In the late 1990’s I cheered for Mark McGwire to break Roger Maris’ single season home run record. I watched on TV as he did it, holding my young son in my lap and cheering loudly enough to scare all the cockroaches out of the house in South Texas. It burned me later that the steroids scandals and Barry Bonds would later tarnish that moment. But I lived it never-the-less, and it was a highlight of my life as a Cardinals’ fan.
And now, this year, as everything is going wrong in my life and my body is breaking down more often than my car does, the Cardinals are surging again. They could win a hundred games this year. They could win World Series number twelve. We have history, this team and I. And I am a devoted fan. I can no more explain my love of the team to you than any baseball fan anywhere could ever explain to you why they love baseball. Or what the heck Fredbird is all about. But there it is. We don’t wait til next year. Not the Cardinals.
Jun 9, 2015; St. Petersburg, FL, USA; Los Angeles Angels first baseman Albert Pujols (5) reacts at home plate after he hit a solo home run during the fifth inning against the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports
Albert Pujols will always be a Cardinal in my mind. We won it all in 2011.
Sometimes it seems the stars are simply set against us. But the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars.
It was in a pothole in Scott Mill Road, actually. We hit it at thirty miles an hour near the roped-off road construction as we were going to the CVS to pick up my glaucoma eye drops. I immediately thought we had probably popped a tire, as we did on monster-canyon in a Dallas street a few years ago. But no warning lights were on. And later inspection showed no visible damage.
Still, the next week saw a check-engine light coming on and then going off again… And a few days later the engine began coughing and spitting like a fat man having a heart attack. I had to wait for Monday for the Five Star Ford service department to be open. But Monday I got ill during the weather change and the onset of intermittent rain. So, Tuesday, I barely got the car started, and we limped down to the service center, the car chugging and farting all the way.
So, we get there and immediately find out that the service department was already booked well into October. And the car was too dead to get it anywhere else.
Dang! What lovely bad luck!
And I am going to absolutely need a car at the very least a half-dozen times in the next week. The Princess has to get to the junior college campus in Richardson a couple of times. We need to get to the store and back enough not to starve. And my wife gets back from a wedding in the Philippines on September 12th. She will then need a car of her own too.
I can’t get by for two months without a vehicle of some kind. And getting a new car before the old one can even be looked at is tricky at best.
But I have navigated worse setbacks in my 65+ years on this planet. I don’t actually remember how it was on the planet before this one. I am fairly certain, though, that there is a way to get across this crevice in the rugged path of life.
In the deep woods of the Pacific Northwestern portion of the United States, a great tall pine tree is struck by lightning. Of course, the threat of fire in this day and age is very real. But luckily, this time as the tree falls in flames and ignites the brush around where it falls, the sky opens up and a deluge of rain extinguishes what the lightning has ignited.
Time passes as time always seems to do. The burned area heals. The slain giant is broken down by bugs and heat and bacteria and rot. And before you know it, flowers begin to bloom there. The tree’s carbon-based flesh has fertilized the ground. And where the tree once created shade, there is now a hole to let the sunshine in. Life gets wildly busy growing.
Because of what the tree suffered, the forest floor, especially the part of it where flowers bloom, got its chance in the sun.
The same sort of rule of nature happened in politics in 2016. Bozo the Crime Boss got elected because the wave of pus and anger he surfed into power on had been festering under the skin of the country since Reagan brought judgemental, self-righteous, and fear-mongering rich-types into the political power pinnacles in 1980. The boil finally burst. De-regulating environmental protections has been a Republican priority since Ronnie Ray-Gun put James Watt in the job of Secretary of the Interior just so the forests in National Parks could be opened up to logging and oil exploration. And we have seen in the past few years how badly those changes in policy have affected our lives. The environment is on fire. We don’t have enough trees to absorb all the carbon dioxide that is causing the warming. Most of this country’s fresh water is now contaminated with an industrial waste of one sort or another. But Don Cheetoh’s recent implosion is threatening not only to wither the poisonous fruits of Republican policies but fundamentally destroy the evil-making machinery that the Republicans have worked so hard at maintaining for decades. We human beans who actually value human life over money thought 2016 was a deadly disaster. But it may instead have been more of a lancing of the boil as the twice-impeached Prexydent of the Disunited States did all his high crimes and misdemeanors in the public eye and then was routinely given a pass by Republican leaders in Congress. It reached a point with the stolen presidential documents that his crimes can no longer be covered up. The poisons may well be draining out of the holes the spoiled mango of a man poked into the very skin of our government. Look at how much climate-correction legislation was recently passed by the new, non-Cheetoh President. And look at how polls are suggesting that Democrats might not have to endure the traditional punishments for doing something good for the people that Republicans were so looking forward to. Good things are seemingly growing where the manure of the previous Republican administration has been spread.
Maybe I should be more careful about drawing young ladies in the nude. This is not a sexualized depiction, but not everybody who sees it will judge it that way. Many Texans are convinced nakedness is always a sin.
My own life is also an example of how something terrible grew into something good. As a victim of childhood sexual assault, I spent many years grappling with trauma. But the incident made me a school teacher, determined to fight dark things like sexual assault, violence, and a will to do harm to others with the power of education, empathy, and love. As a retired teacher, I have fully embraced naturism, and am nakedly honest about many things. One of those things is that you really need to endure some badness in your life to truly understand and appreciate the good that directly comes out of having survived that evil.
I should be very clear about the fact that when I was a teacher, I was not also an active nudist at the same time. I never suggested that any child should be naked in public and never saw any of my students nude (a feat achieved by never being a coach of athletics in charge of monitoring behaviors in the shower room after events and practice.) My nudism is entirely practiced after I retired and mostly at home by myself. But it is also a good thing to grow out of the badness that occurred before. It is a chance for me to finally be at peace with who I am inside my own skin (hopefully free of boils.)
Looking out at the end of the drive at our family farm in Iowa.
As I am now a Medicare recipient, I have to face the badness on the horizon that comes with reaching an age considered a fully-lived life. There could be heart attacks, strokes, and possibly Parkinson’s in the near future. I could lose so much of my mental self-control that I end up being charged with drawing child pornography (though I don’t believe I have done any of that. Former President George HW Bush didn’t believe he sexually harassed any young nurses from his deathbed either.) But whatever badness comes, I do believe there will be some mitigating goodness that follows because of it.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Diminishing Man
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.
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