Category Archives: autobiography

June 26, 2022 · 5:53 pm

Cartoonity

“My name is Michael Beyer, and I am an amateur cartoonist.”

“Hi, Michael!” says the entire group of CA group-therapy participants.

(CA stands for Cartoonists Anonymous.)

Doofy Fuddbugg

“I have to admit, I am guilty of giving in to the urge to draw cartoons. I know how it can fill lives with slapstick pain and derisive laughter, and I give in to the urge anyway.”

“So, what did you draw that you have to be ashamed of now?” asked one mad-eyed cartoonist with a pencil lodged behind each of his large ears.

“I made a very unfortunate video to post on YouTube that was supposed to be How-to-draw Cartooning. But everything went wrong. You couldn’t see my drawings in the video. It was not adequately lit. I look like a doofus (which probably can’t be cured) in the video. And instead of thinking twice or editing it, I posted it anyway.”

“Wow!” said a rather ugly cartoonist lady, “that is really bad. You have a seriously bad case of cartoonity.”

“Cartoonity?” I responded stupidly.

“The condition of needing love for your cartoons so bad that you will risk anything to make people look at them and like them,” said the wise group therapist (who looked an awful lot like Chuck Jones, though I am fairly sure Chuck Jones is now dead).

“Yes, I suppose that’s about the size of the problem,” I said. “I have been posting pages from my graphic novel, Hidden Kingdom, and I really haven’t seen more than one comment about it. Do people actually read cartoons and comics nowadays? Or is it just me that gets ignored?”

“You have to focus on how much you love drawing and doing it just for that reason, and nothing beyond that,” said the wise therapist. “Cartooning should be done for its own sake, and nothing more than that. Craving attention and approval for it can get seriously infected and become a bad case of cartoonititis. How do you think I dealt with it when I was still alive?”

At that point, my eyes popped out of my head in disbelief and my lower jaw fell all the way to the floor. Could he really be…?

And so I must end today’s blog post since it is hard to keep typing when your eyeballs are rolling around on the floor.

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June 25, 2022 · 6:23 pm

Off-Beat Self-Portraits

This picture was intended to look like it could’ve been my son, so the face came from an old black-and-white photo of me when I was ten.
This is me as a nudist child in my current home’s backyard flanked by two nude Butterfly Children.
This is my purple-mouse avatar.
Eli Tragedy, my red-clad Sorcerer character from Dungeons and Dragons days is also really me.

Me as a happy new nudist
Milt Morgan is a wizard, and also a character who is half me and half the Other Mike from my childhood.
Milt Morgan as a child. Also half me.
Another purple Mickey.
The serious part of Mickey

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June 24, 2022 · 2:28 pm

Thanks for the Memories, Frances Gumm

Little Frances Gumm from Minnesota

She is older than both my mother and my father. In fact, if she were alive today, if she hadn’t died young when I was thirteen, she would be 98, and approaching the century mark. She was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota in 1922.

And even though that’s right next door to where I was born in Mason City, Iowa, we were never really neighbors. Our families never met in person, and didn’t know diddly-boo about each other.

But she had a profound impact on our lives. And, boy! Could she ever sing and dance!

The Singing Gumm Sisters.
A little bit older Frances Gumm

I don’t know why she ever felt that way, but Frances from childhood onward was always desperate to not be seen as fat.

She took pills to keep the weight off. She eventually had to take pills to sleep at night. Pills would make her suffer through most of her life. In fact, pills would eventually take her life.

But Frances Gumm would have an impact on my life. Frances would have an impact on my parents’ generation through the movie theater, back when you paid a dime to watch a movie projected on a white sheet tacked up on the Rowan firehouse wall. And she had an impact on my generation when we watched her on TV, mostly in black and white like we saw Meet Me in St. Louis. But also around Thanksgiving time. That movie they played every year.

Yes, Frances was a movie star.

But she didn’t go by the name she was born with in the movies.

And, boy! Could she ever sing!

And now that I am old and fragile, that song can make me cry. Like it did just now. And why?

Because Frances Gumm taught me something important when I was a little boy. Something that stuck with me for a lifetime.

While it’s true that there is no place like home, we are allowed to think about what is over the rainbow… and even to go there… and back again.

And I owe Frances for that memory. Especially because she had to struggle so hard to give me that. Frances, I will always love you for it.

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June 23, 2022 · 8:10 pm

Surprisingly Easy Fixes

I briefly thought this last Sunday that my writing life was over. I found my computer was dead after I had spent time doing household chores like washing the dishes. I couldn’t turn it on. And I found the battery wasn’t properly connected to the wall socket for recharging, a thing that had apparently been true for far too long. It was the third time that my faulty memory and my excruciatingly bad luck had conspired to completely drain the computer battery. That is, of course, about the worst thing you can do to damage a modern lithium battery, drain it completely. And I had done it THREE TIMES!!!

I briefly imagined my new Chromebook computer would become a stage for paper dolls the way my first laptop did.

So, naturally, I cussed myself as a stupid loser and decided to buy myself another laptop instead of paying the 300+ dollars it would cost to replace the electrical system of my Chromebook at Best Buy. My wife and daughter were in San Antonio visiting my sister-in-law and mother-in-law for the weekend. So, they were not around to talk me out of my evil plan. I bought a Windows 10 compatible HP Laptop at Walmart for about a hundred dollars more than I thought the repair of the other computer would cost me. And I was amazed as I got it home and started retrieving my essential apps and documents. It is much more compatible with my documents and writing habits than the Chromebook. I didn’t have to waste a lot of time learning new procedures and linking things up in a different way. I could even do Google Chrome on the new computer where the Chromebook doesn’t allow easy access to the Microsoft Edge I had gotten used to before the Chromebook. I was actually feeling quite pleased with myself.

This is either an old picture, or San Antonio’s weather is out of whack again.

On Monday, the same day I brilliantly replaced the Chromebook, my daughter came home from San Antonio. She heard the story of my tragedy and following triumph, and she immediately demanded to see the Chromebook. I had been keeping it on the charger since its death, and we still seemingly couldn’t turn it on.

“Wait a minute, how long did you wait after pressing the “on” button before you pressed it again?” she asked.

I hadn’t been timing it. But I had tried everything when it died.

“Try it again. But press it only once.”

I pressed the “on” button, not holding it down, just like she had advised me. A quick click followed by a long wait.

“See? The battery is truly dead.”

“Wait a moment more.”

As soon as she said that, the screen was suddenly prompting me for my password. I typed in, “bullwinklemooseismyheroandrolemodel989” (Not actually my password) and the computer was back from the dead!

“Amazing! I spent all that money just because I wasn’t turning it on correctly!”

“Well, you did have to fully reload the battery. And the Chromebook I had at school used to do almost the same thing sometimes when it didn’t feel like working properly. But now you have two laptops. One for watching Netflix and one for writing stuff.”

Genius! Pure genius. I now have two new computers, and my wife can’t even get mad at me for how it happened. Once in a great while, it pays to be forgetful and excruciatingly unlucky.

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June 23, 2022 · 1:52 pm

Stories with Gingerbread

Yes, this post is a shameless promotion. But this is a good book that not enough people are reading to truly appreciate that fact. When I was a boy in the 1960’s, there really was an old German lady who lived in a small tar-papered house, all ginger-brown in color, which we all called the Gingerbread House. She really did love to give out sweets and cookies and popcorn balls to the kids in our town. And she really did love to talk to people and tell them little stories.

Grandma Gretel Stein

Her name, in real life, was Marie Jacobson. She was, in fact, a survivor of the holocaust. She had a tattoo on her right forearm that I saw only one time. Our parents told us what the tattoo meant. But there were no details ever added to the story. Mrs. Jacobson doted on the local children. She regularly gave me chocolate bars just because I held the door for her after church. But she was apparently unwilling to ever talk about World War II and Germany. We were told never to press for answers. There was, however, a rumor that she lost her family in one of the camps. And I have always been the kind that fills in the details with fiction when the truth is out of reach.

Ignore the dates above. The Free-Book Promotion runs from June 24th to June 28.

I based the character of Grandma Gretel on Mrs. Jacobson. But the facts about her secret life are, of course, from my imagination, not from the truth about Mrs. Jacobson’s real life.

Marie Jacobson cooked gingerbread cookies. I know because I ate some. But she didn’t talk to fairies or use magic spells in cooking. I know because the fairies from the Hidden Kingdom in Rowan disavowed ever talking to any slow one but me. She wasn’t Jewish, since she went to our Methodist Church. She wasn’t a nudist, either. But neither were my twin cousins who the Cobble Sisters, the nude girls in the story, are fifty percent based on. A lot of details about the kids in my book come from the lives of my students in Texas. The blond nudist twins were in my class in the early eighties. And they were only part-time nudists who talked about it more than lived it.

Miss Sherry Cobble, a happy nudist.

But the story itself is not about nudists, or Nazis, or gingerbread children coming to life through magic. The story is about how telling stories can help us to allay our fears. Telling stories can help us cope with and make meaning out of the most terrible things that have happened to us in life. And it is also a way to connect with the hearts of other people and help them to see us for who we really are. And that was the whole reason for writing this book.

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June 22, 2022 · 2:30 pm

Re-bubbling the Old Enthusiasm

It is getting harder and harder to climb the new day’s hill to get to the summit where I can reasonably get a good look at the road ahead. At almost-64, I can see the road ahead is far shorter and much darker than the highway stretching out behind me. It is not so much a matter of how much time I have spent on the road as it is a matter of the wear and tear the mileage has caused.

This weekend I had another depressing free-book promotion where, in five days, I only moved five books, one purchase, and four free books. I have made $0.45 as an author for the month of June.

I was recently given another bit of good advice from a successful author. He said that I shouldn’t be in such a rush to publish. He suggested taking more time with my writing. Hold on to it longer. Polish it and love it more. And now that I have reached sixteen books published on my author’s page, I have basically beaten the grim reaper in the question of whether or not he was ever going to silence me and my author’s voice. I can afford to live with the next one longer.

But the last one, A Field Guide to Fauns, practically wrote itself. It went fast from inspiration to publication simply because the writer in me was on fire and full of love and life and laughter that had to boil over into hot print exactly as quickly as it did. The additional writing time afforded me by the pandemic and quarantine didn’t hurt either. Once in print, my nudist friends loved it.

This next one has the potential to boil and brew and pop out of me in the same accelerated way as that last one did. Of course, it has been percolating inside my brain basically since the Summer of 1974. So, this is no rushed job. The Wizard in his Keep is a story of a man who tries to take the children of the sister of his childhood best friend to a place of safety when their parents are killed in a car wreck. But the only safe place he has to offer is in the world of his imagination. A world he has bizarrely made real. And that best friend comes searching for the children. And so does a predator who seeks to do them all grievous harm.

In many ways, it is a story already written.

So, I am rekindling the flame that keeps the story-pot boiling. And more of it is already cooking. And I am recovering from the cool winds of disappointment, as well as the dark storm clouds of the nearing future.

This is now actually a two-year-old post. Both of the books mentioned here are published and available from Amazon. As far as holding on to the books longer, there is no problem with that on Amazon. Editing, improving, and re-publishing a book is actually easier than publishing it the first time. Nothing about this old post has been made untrue by the passage of time. I am still probably the best author of books like these whose published books almost never get read.

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June 19, 2022 · 1:13 pm

Art Unseen in a While

WordPress has put in a new feature for finding old photos from Posts Past.

This allows me to pull from past years much more easily than the scroll-down feature I have been using. Thus, art from 2017.

This is from the Star Wars Role-playing game that we stopped playing in 2008.
the Murphy family (well, three of them anyway)
The disintegrator pistol from Catch a Falling Star
“The Wise Thaumaturge Visits Cymril”
Eventual cover art for Magical Miss Morgan
I painted this miniature lead wizard, as well as made the castle from cardboard and paper.
I also painted the buildings in the background, acrylic on plaster.
“Their Most Feared Offensive Player Could Beat Them By Herself”
All of these works of art are done by me, whether they are drawn, painted, or photographed.

This has been a look back at pictures posted in 2017, starting in December, and going back in time to January. There is at least one picture from every month.

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June 14, 2022 · 1:35 pm

Take the Midnight Train to Anywhere

 

Journey back with me to the 1980’s, and hear once again the music of escape.

There was a time when I was young when I did not know where I would be when the next new dawn came.  Yes, I once took the midnight train (except it was a bus) and I arrived in a teaching career in deep South Texas.  I crossed borders into another culture, another way of life, another journey made of words and pictures that hasn’t reached the final station yet.

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At the outset, we all take a risk.  Born and raised in South Detroit (although it was really North Central Iowa) I passed through established procedures, rules, and regulations to do things that desperately needed doing for people who could only help themselves in very limited ways.

Some spoke mostly Spanish.  Some lived in broken homes.  One boy lived for a while under the bridge of the Nueces River, but attended school every day because he was hungry to learn, and because free school lunch was the majority of the food he got to eat.  He got on a midnight train, and I never saw him or heard from him again.  His sister, though, lived with a tia who treated her like a daughter, and grew up to be a school teacher.  I let her teach the lesson for me during one class period, as part of an educational experiment, and it put her on her own midnight train.

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It was a train going on the same track I followed.  Not because of me and what I did for her.  But because she came to realize it was the right journey to take for her.  It was the perfect anywhere for her.

But there is danger inherent in getting on a midnight train going anywhere.  You don’t know who is waiting for you down the line, or what your circumstances will be at the next station along the way.  There may be strangers waiting up and down the boulevard, their shadows searching in the night.  I befriended other teachers, mentored some, learned from many,  even married one.  I had a run in or two with people who sell drugs to kids.  I had all four of my car tires slashed one night.  I had a car window broken out.  I had a boy once tell me he would kill me with a knife.  I later had that boy tell me he had a good job and a girlfriend and he was grateful that I talked him out of it and never turned him in to the police.

night-train-werner-rolli

And we end up paying anything to roll the dice just one more time…  At one time or another we have all been there, aboard that midnight train to anywhere.  There is a moment in everyone’s life when… well, some will win, and some will lose.  Some were born to sing the blues.  I have been there.  I have done that.  And it occurs to me, that song plays on in my head still.  I am still on that journey.  And I won’t stop believing.  Because it goes on and on and on and on…

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June 13, 2022 · 1:42 pm

Dreams of the Mastiff

As a comic cartoonist sort of artist named Mickey, I was as a teenager obsessed with making artsy goofy books. One of those was unaccountably called Dreams of the Mastiff. These surrealistic picturations are examples from that silly Donald-Duck thing.

This page is supposed to explain the title. So I guess all of the following pages are somehow supposed to be from the nighttime brain of the dog in the nursery.

And what is this supposed to be about? My old-man memory has not a single clue.

It occurred to me long ago that both Fantasy and Science Fiction were surreal by nature. What is the story behind Black Peter? Ich weiss nicht! I do not know! Old-man memory again.

Inexplicable Sci-Fi from this little surrealist art-book-thing.

And more of the same…

Now back to cockroaches from doggy dreams…

…And mice, monkeys, and tea-drinking ladybird beetles…

…And what…? The whole world in a nutshell?

To a thing I used in two novels, Catch a Falling Star and The Baby Werewolf.

I offer no explanations or excuses for these nonsensical and unaccountable things. I am not sorry I once did them, if you want to know the truth… but I probably should be.

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June 12, 2022 · 10:43 pm

The Horrible Life of a Mickey

Yes, Mickey is thinking about the Autobiography of Mark Twain and the upcoming autobiography that James Patterson is threatening to publish. (Patterson, if you don’t recognize the name, is the very prolific author who dominates the shelves in Walmart, Target, and convenience-store book racks everywhere.) Is it an important thing for an aspiring literary pretender like Mickey to write an autobiography? Of course, not! So, that is precisely why he is thinking about it.

So, what would this threatened autobiography be about? Do you really not know what an autobiography is? Or am I just being abominably impatient and not waiting for you to provide the answer in the comments?

It would be about Mickey’s awful, terrible, horrible life. It would be about loving the St.Louis Cardinals, especially the 1960s dynasty that featured the death-ray stare of pitcher Bob Gibson, whom Mickey worshipped.

It would be about the troubled struggle to establish Mickey’s sexual identity because of the assault and traumatic amnesia he endured at age ten. And it would include his struggle to understand his attraction to certain girls. The awkward, pants-wetting episodes of extreme embarrassment included.

It would include the awkward, pants-shedding obsession with being naked in the forest that Mickey had at ages seven through nine. At least, the beginnings of that obsession. Including the read-aloud assignment Mickey heard the fourth graders read aloud when he was in third grade about Greek school being only for boys, and for at least half the day, only for naked boys. And then in fourth grade the next year, after having looked forward to reading that assignment for over a year, realizing the curriculum had been altered to save Miss M the embarrassment of reading that aloud again as she did the previous year.

It would include doing farm work, teaching Mickey the kind of pragmatic problem solving you have to know and apply to farm work if you are the grandson and nephew of actively-farming farmers.

And it would have to include lots of juvenile pipe dreams about cartooning, being an animator, or being a comic-book artist.

That kind of Mickey-Mouse enthusiasm for Woody-Woodpecker characters would be the “Terrible” part of the working title of this autobiography.

And there would also be a long part that is the teacher part. This would be the part that most makes this autobiography into slapstick comedy… and slap-student comedy that is swiftly followed by fire-teacher comedy… but that would be fiction, that makes it no longer strictly an autobiography.

And once the endlessly-droning teacher-time stories are done, it would move into the retirement years in which Mickey yields to the delusion that just because you have become a published author with 21 books published, one of them by a publisher that is an imprint of Penguin Books, you are not necessarily assumed to be a successful writer.

And of course, it would come to an end with Mickey retrieving his obsession with nudity that was really a life-long thing that would transform him into a nudist at an advanced age… marking, perhaps, the onset of his angry, misguided old-coot years. Ah, the horror… the horror…

Yes, in this time of elderly people making irreversible bad decisions, like Trump running for President, Mickey becoming a nudist, and Joe Biden trying to accurately remember stuff from the ’70s… the 1870s, writing a literary autobiography might be the most impossibly idiotic decision of all. But once Mickey’s old coot brain gets infected with such an idea, something truly horrible will ensue.

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