Category Archives: autobiography

July 26, 2020 · 7:46 pm

The Secret Identity of Super-Mickey

Cartoon villains take note; Super-Mickey’s secret identity is Filbert Hazelnut. I make that revelation without worry. After all, Mickey is not really me. So, if the Messmaster, Badnose the Clown, or Daniel Quilp are going to try to apply the Mickian version of Kryptonite, not laughing at the jokes, in order to slay Super-Mickey, Filbert is immune to that. I am too for that matter. If you are a school teacher who uses humor in the classroom, you soon learn that only the smartest kids actually understand the jokes, and half of them are just too cool to laugh when the teacher wants them to. (Although they will tell you years later that they still use concrete details in their writing because you said that if you routinely whack the reader in the head with verifiable concrete examples, they will be totally stunned enough to believe you know what you are writing about. That was, you must understand, a concrete detail I just whacked you with to help you remember what it is, not to make you laugh… even though it was a joke… but you are permitted to laugh if you want to.)

The basic point of this essay is Mickey is not really me. I never went by that name as a kid.

I was always called Michael, sometimes Mike (though they were usually talking about the Other Mike when anybody said Mike in school back then… circa 1963 to 1969). In high school I was given the nickname Superchicken after the Saturday Morning cartoon on the George of the Jungle Show. In college I was given the rhyming nickname Spike by my college freshman roommate because he ludicrously thought I was the opposite of a Spike, like calling a huge football player Tiny Tim, or a midget Big Bad John.

When I started teaching school, they called me Gilligan because I was thin and they wanted to pretend I was a hopeless stumbling fool (Which I was at times my first two years, just as all beginner teachers are.) My classroom became known as Gilligan’s Island on the day in third period when I made the comment, “Gilligan is lucky enough to be the only really eligible bachelor on the same island with Ginger the movie star and cute little Mary Ann. I would find out later that same day that three eighth grade girls in that very class had huge crushes on me and were fighting over which one was Mary Ann and which one was Ginger and, unsurprisingly, which one was the other girl.

And, of course, Rudolfo Hernandez tried to get everybody to call me Batman because I bought a used Ford Torino with fins on the back. But to promote the nickname, Rudy came to class wearing a Halloween Batman mask and afterwords had to learn to live with being called Battyman himself. (I wish i could take credit for calling him that first, but I am sure I did not. I distinctly remember it coming from a girl in his class that made fun of him for every stupid thing he did because she apparently adored him. I just reinforced it about a thousand times.)

Mickey is a name that I have only ever been called by me myself. It was a name I signed some of my cartoons with (using The Little Fool, Le Petit Fou, Leah Cim Reyeb, and Dr. Seebreez on the rest.) It also became the name I use to refer to myself on this blog when I talk about myself in the third person like a crazy person.

I have given myself other pseudo-pen-names in my writing. Googol Marou, as the only first-person narrator of the AeroQuest series, speaks with my voice as the primary storyteller in the tale. In Norwall, the fictionalized version of Rowan, Iowa in most of my other books, Branch McMillan, the writer-character, is actually me. (Like Charles Dickens switched his initials to write the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield, I created that one by switching the M and the B.

Of course, the many me-characters in my fiction books are also basically me. Superchicken is me. Milt Morgan is a combination of me and the Other Mike. Brent Clarke is the football-player me combined with two other football teammates. Certain parts of Todd Niland’s story are really about things that happened to me, and things I was afraid of at his age.

In some ways Tim Kellogg and Dorin Dobbs are me too, though both of those characters are actually based on my eldest son. It is possible, I suppose, that you could consider my actual son to be a me-character too, as people do live on through their own children.

But, while Mickey might be me more than I care to admit, Super-Mickey’s secret identity is definitely Filbert Hazelnut.

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July 24, 2020 · 6:21 pm

The Real Magic in that Old Home Town

Rowan, Iowa… Not the place I was born, but the place where I got to be a stupid kid, and have the lessons of the good and god-fearing life hammered into my head hard enough to make a dent and make it stay with me for more than half a century. I got to go to grade school there. I learned to read there, especially in Miss Mennenga’s third and fourth grade class. Especially in that old copy of Treasure Island with the N.C, Wyeth illustrations in it, the one Grandma Aldrich kept in the upstairs closet in their farm house. I got to see my first naked girl there. I learned a lot of things about sex from my friends there, and none of them were true. I played 4-H softball there, and made a game-saving catch in center field… in the same game where my cousin Bob hit the game-winning home run. But those were things kids did everywhere. It didn’t make me special. There was no real magic in it.

Being a farm-kid’s kid taught me the importance of doing your chores, every day and on time. If you didn’t do them, animals could get sick, animals could die, crops could be spoiled, the chickens could get angry and petulant and peck your hands when you tried to get the eggs. Cows could get grumpy and kick the milk bucket. Cats could vow revenge if you didn’t direct a spray or two at their little faces as they lined up to watch you milk the cows. And you never knew for sure what a vengeful cat might do to you later, as cats were evil. They might jump on the keyboard during your piano recital. They might knock the turkey stuffing bowl off the top of the dryer when Mom and Grandma and several aunts were cooking Thanksgiving Dinner. And I know old black Midnight did that on purpose because he got to snatch some off the floor before it could be reached by angry aunts with brooms and dustpans. And all of it was your fault if it all led back to not doing your chores, and not doing them exactly right.

But, even though we learned responsibility and work ethic from our chores, that was not the real home-town magic either. I wasn’t technically a real farm kid. Sure, I picked up the eggs in the chicken house at Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich’s farm more than once. And I did, in fact, help with milking machines and even milking cows by hand and squirting cats in the faces at Uncle Donny’s farm. I walked beans, going up and down the rows to pull and chop weeds out of the bean fields at Uncle Larry’s farm. I drove a tractor at Great Uncle Alvin’s farm. But I didn’t have to do any of those things every single day. My mother and my father both grew up on farms. But we lived in town. So, my work ethic was probably worth only a quarter of what the work ethic of any of my friends in school was truly worth. I was a bum kid by comparison. Gary G. and Kevin K, both real farm kids and older than me, explained this to me one day behind the gymnasium with specific examples and fists.

Being a farm kid helped to forge my character. But that was really all about working hard, and nothing really to do with magic.

I truly believe the real magic to be found in Rowan, Iowa, my home town, was the fact that it was boring. It was a sleepy little town, that never had any real event… well, except maybe for a couple of monster blizzards in the 60’s and 70’s, and the Bicentennial parade and tractor pull on Main Street in 1976, and a couple of costume contests in the 1960’s held in the Fire Station where I had really worked hard on the costumes, a scarecrow one year, and an ogre the next, where I almost won a prize. But nothing that changed history or made Rowan the center of everything.

And therein lies the magic. I had to look at everything closely to find the things and strategies that would take me to the great things and places where I wanted to end up. I learned to wish upon a star from Disney movies. I learned about beauty of body and soul from the girls that I grew up with, most of them related. And I invented fantastical stories with the vivid imagination I discovered lurking in my own stupid head. I embarrassed Alicia Stewart by telling everyone that I could prove she was a Martian princess, kidnapped and brought to Earth by space pirates that only I knew how to defeat. And I learned to say funny things and make people laugh… but in ways that didn’t get me sent to the principal’s office in school. Yes, it was the magic of my own imagination. And boring Iowa farm towns made more people with magic in them than just me. John Wayne was one. Johnny Carson was one also. And have you heard of Elijah Wood? Or the painter Grant Wood? Or the actress Cloris Leachman?

Yep. We were such stuff as dreams were made on in small towns in Iowa. And that is real magic.

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Filed under autobiography, commentary, dreaming, farm boy, farming, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, magic, Paffooney

July 16, 2020 · 9:29 pm

My Childhood in a Nutshell

Essay #1 :  Childhood in a Nutshell

Right off the bat, I’m sure you’re wondering what sort of nutshell is the right size for Mickey’s entire childhood to be put into?

Is it a coconut shell?  That would certainly be big enough to contain a lot of big words, complex sentences, and stuff that Mickey is likely to write repeatedly in this book.  His paragraphs are filled with purple paisley prose that use way too many adjectives and lists of things pointlessly put together in difficult and unlikely ways.  And he’s known for using lots of details when only a few would do quite well for making the pictures he is describing pop into the movie theater that is your imagination.

Or is it a walnut shell?  Mickey’s brain is all twisty and has deep grooves in the middle of it, lots and lots of wrinkles, and probably looks exactly like the walnut’s own nut meat.

Or maybe it is a Brazil nut, as those things are dark and had to crack like the themes that rattle around on the inside of nutcase Mickey’s peanut head.

But it is not a peanut.  It just isn’t.  Mickey’s childhood can’t be put in a peanut shell.  Because peanuts grow underground.  They are not actually a pea, nor are they a nut… by definition of each.  And Mickey did sometimes have to pee, but he was also not a nut.  So, not a peanut.  Definitely not.

Anyway, Mickey was born in Mason City Iowa.  It was mid-November, and a blizzard was raging.  And it was somewhere in the middle of the night.  It was 1956.  Dwight Eisenhower was President.  Richard Nixon was nefariously somehow the Vice President.

It was the age of television, but mainly in black and white.  My parents watched shows like “Garry Moore’s Variety Show” with Carol Burnett and Durward Kirby on it, “What’s My Line?” the blindfolded guessing-game show, and, of course, the Lawrence Welk Show with the champagne orchestra music and wild polka dancing to the accordion stylings of Myron Florin.

Mickey was not much more than a little, fat, and stupid thing until the 1950’s ended and Mickey turned at least four.

He lived in Mason City where his sister was born in 1958.  He was moved to Garner, Iowa, a place he barely remembered at all, and then to Rowan, Iowa.  It was a little farm-town where his mother’s family lived while she was growing up.  Lots of blood relatives lived in the area.  Which led to big family reunions with many Aldriches, Hinckleys, Beyers, Hoaks, and Utzes attending.   There was lots of German food, as well as Swedish meatballs, casseroles with who-really-knew-what in them, potato salad, deviled eggs, carrot salad, tuna salad, and other salads with meat and mayonnaise and lots of gooey green bits in them.  You were all right as a kid if you remembered not to ask what was in the food.  You could eat it until you had a basketball where your stomach used to be, and you would need a nap or lots and lots of running around Grandpa’s or Uncle Larry’s farm yards.

Mickey went to grade school in Rowan, where he could walk to school by himself, even in the snow, and walk home the long way home so he could get into trouble with Larry from next door, Alan the preacher’s kid, the other Mike and his brother Danny, Verner from the old house with the cinders in the basement, or sometimes with Bobby or Richard from the other side of town, a whopping five blocks away.

He had a huge crush on Alicia but could never tell her, even though he often sat next to her in class because of last names arranged alphabetically.  He kept up the story that he hated girls, the same story all the other boys told, and was surprised to eventually learn that they all had a crush on Alicia too.

He had to survive not only chickens from Grandpa Aldrich’s hen house, with occasional roosters who would chase you like they wanted to eat you, but also the constant fear of those Muscovy ducks with red wattles on their faces and bills.  Those feral ducks, when they had ducklings with them, were even more terrifying than the roosters who regularly got their heads cut off.  Muscovies would chase you down the farm lane, out onto the gravel road, and all the way to Uncle Don’s place if you didn’t find something along the way to distract them into thinking about their deadly vendetta and need to slay you.  Dried cattails at the railroad crossing worked.  A well-aimed stone raised a cloud of snowy white things rising into the cool autumn breeze like some alien creature that could actually scare wild ducks.  And wild ducks never got beheaded because, except for Grandpa’s original pair bought from a catalog, they didn’t have their wings clipped and could simply fly away.  They only stayed around because of the duck pond in the south pasture, and the fact that Grandpa always fed them kernel corn from the corn crib.

Roosters, once their heads were gone, actually deserved to be cooked in the oven after hours of cleaning, removing pinfeathers, and extruding weird smells in Grandma’s kitchen as they had their chicken guts removed.  We didn’t know it until Mickey grew up and went to college, but chickens are related to bird-hipped dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex, and they longed to live up to the deadly reputation of their distant ancestors.  Yes, they definitely deserved to die in the cook pot.  Chicken-pot-pie was a well-earned fate.  Mickey never liked eating chicken much, even though it was a form of revenge.   It wasn’t that he just wasn’t vengeful enough in spirit.  He was an Iowa farm boy, after all.  But he really didn’t admire the taste with the gusto his cousins all had for it.

Mickey was fifty-percent raised by television in the 60’s.  He learned a lot of moral lessons from “Gunsmoke,” but never actually got any practice shooting bad guys with a six-gun, though he did have a cap gun more than once that he wasn’t allowed to point at anybody… ever. 

And he learned about real life problems from “I Love Lucy” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.” But he was confused by never seeing a real-life chocolate factory like the one Lucy and Ethel worked in and then got to eat most of the chocolate on the fast conveyor belt.  And he was confused when the only “cement pond” he knew about, the public one in Belmond, didn’t allow “critters” to “swim wif the young-uns.”

And he learned about love from “Gilligan’s Island” where Mickey was definitely “Team Mary-Ann,” even though if Gilligan ever got the girl in any episode, Mickey never saw it.

And Mickey learned that Mr. Howell and Mr. Magoo were the same man.  Wow!

And Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller and Jungle Jim Johnny Weissmuller were both the same guy, but Jungle Jim wore actual clothes.  And Tarzan Ron Ely was on Friday Nights along with “Daktari” while both Johnny Weissmullers were on Saturday Afternoons along with, sometimes, Flash Gordon Buster Crabbe.  And if you took any of them for role models and began swinging on the pipes in the cellar ceiling at Grandpa Aldrich’s place, something would break and your Mom and Dad would get very mad, though Grandpa just fixed the pipes and told it as a funny story every Thanksgiving after that.

So, what kind of nutshell can actually contain all of that?  It would have to be a nut with a funny name.  Cashews would qualify because the name sounds a lot like a sneeze.  That’s an undeniable rule in life, “Sneezes, burps, and farts are all funny.”  But Mickey learned that, while nuts are, in fact, seeds, roasted salted cashews do not grow into trees when you plant them.

Macadamia nuts also have a name that would qualify.  But the macadamia nut is round and a pile of them can look too much like goat poop.  But when they are sliced and baked into cookies by old German ladies who really know how to cook, they are good enough to make your toes curl up and your smile to get so big you risk having the corners of your mouth meeting in the back of your head, causing the whole top part of your head to fall off.  So, that’s too dangerous of a nut for Mickey’s childhood.

No, I think it has to be the humble hazelnut.  Because, after all, not only does it have a witchy sort of name, it is also called a filbert.  Now there’s a funny name if ever I heard one.  Imagine if SuperMickey had to assume a secret identity as a newspaper reporter.  You couldn’t call him Clark because that name was already taken.  But Filbert!  Ah, comedy gold!  And therein lies the true nutshell, round and stumpy-small, a nut you can’t just crack with your fingers.  Along with the Brazil nuts, it was always the last available nut in the Christmas nut bowl at Grandma’s house, the perfect little place to store childhood memories for winter.  And there’s a lot of winter in Iowa.  I know.  I was born there.

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July 15, 2020 · 5:47 pm

Flintstone Cures for COVID 19 Blues

The pandemic has been wearing on us all. It keeps us home-bound. It prevented me from making the annual trip to Iowa to visit my octogenarian parents, even though my father is now in hospice care because Parkinson’s is winning the five-year battle he has been fighting against it. My mother got me to stay in Texas by telling me that my father no longer recognizes even her, and it would do him no good to see me through a glass window if he didn’t know me anyway. I may not even get to attend his funeral because of COVID.

My daughter too has been dealt a difficult hand of hearts to try to win a card-game of life with. She missed having a regular high school graduation. This is already her second time losing a grandfather. And she has been desperately worried about me with my six incurable pre-existing conditions catching my death of coronavirus flu just because I go to the grocery store to buy food.

But I am not suggesting that my family is the Flintstones, even though Fred, Wilma, and Pebbles have been a part of my life since the 1960’s. Instead I am showing you how we have been coping with it all. My daughter has taken to doing oil-paintings in her room, and today she registered online with the local Junior College. She has also developed an addiction to Fruity Pebbles cereal. They are putting these blank frames on the backs of her cereal boxes, and I have been addicted to cutting them out and drawing Flintstones characters on them. We have developed happy little artistical quirks to carry on the work of the Church of Bob Ross where we create whatever little worlds with our art that we feel like making today. And it is entirely up to us to make our world however we want it to be, just like Bob always says.

And, of course, we choose to make friends and neighbors a part of that world too.

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July 13, 2020 · 6:46 pm

Treading Water with Swimming Talent

I would like to dwell on yesterday’s topic for a change. Usually when I do a daily blog topic, I use my goldfish-brain swimming ability to totally forget what I wrote about yesterday. Relating one topic to the next is not something I normally do.

To be clear (see that nod to yesterday’s topic?) I had to link lessons and daily topics religiously as a teacher, going through review checklists after warm-ups and discussing prior learning daily before proceeding with new content. So, I’m not UN-intentionally failing to do that here. I am merely trying to recover from a lifetime of ingrained teacher habits.

My purple mouse avatar does actually have two ears.

Yesterday I wrote about not measuring myself by the standards most people use to think about whether or not a writer is successful. I concluded that if you are going to limit that assessment to financial realities or wide readership and critical acclaim, I am a failure. But here are some key points that deserve consideration.

I do have a fan base, even if it is not large. I have been given honorary membership in the group of pro-naturist writers on Twitter even though, as a nudist, I am hardly ever naked myself. I discovered them as I was researching nudism for my book Recipes for Gingerbread Children through the website https://www.clothesfreelife.com/. They discovered my book which only has two naturist characters in it, both of whom try to promote naturism to the other kids in their circle of friends, and liked it enough to review it and include me in their Twitter group. The story is really more about fairy tales and Nazi Germany in World War II than it is about nudists, but they liked it never-the-less.

I have also gathered a Twitter following among other unique groups. The international Twitter fan group that idolizes Tom Hiddleston as Loki regularly fill up my notifications inbox. One Russian member of this group bought and liked Sing Sad Songs, for reasons that were explained, but not in clear enough English for me to understand.

As I spent most of a decade as an ESL Teacher, I probably have been read by more Honduran refugees and Vietnamese immigrants than any of the other writers I know on Twitter and Facebook. And while that is mainly because they were in my High School ESL Class, that does not negate the fact that my writing has a truly international reach.

I am also proud of the fact that I was able to give a copy of the best novel I have written so far, Snow Babies, to the girl I grew up with and named the main character after. She read it, loved it, and recommended it to the school where she works, the school we both graduated from in 1975.

But I don’t want you to take either this post or yesterday’s as some sort of bragging. I humbly submit to you, my accomplishments as a teacher in public schools far outweigh anything I have done as a writer. Still, it is not nothing. And even if I die tomorrow (with my health problems and the current pandemic, a very real possibility) it is enough.

And, hopefully, that covers what I should’ve added yesterday.

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July 12, 2020 · 6:47 pm

Can We Be Clear?

Mai Ling uses psionic ninja powers to separate the flowers from the weeds, a thing that is not easy to do.

I suppose that if I were to be insightfully honest for a moment, I would have to admit that I am a failed novelist. If you take “success” as meaning “financial success”, the fact that I only make less than five dollars a month for my writing means I am a failure at it. If you specify that success means my books find readers, then evidence would suggest that my books are mostly ignored. A majority of those who have responded favorably to my work are actually members of the nudist community on Twitter. I admit that I have cultivated that a bit with nudist characters in about a fourth of my books. But that is a result of having experienced fascinating people and situations that I felt I had to write about because I happened to meet, totally by chance, interesting nudists in real life.

I have lost a lot of writing-community followers on Twitter because of my interactions with Twitter nudists. My work gets dismissed on occasion because your standard teacher-turned-writer on Twitter, usually female and usually fundamentalist Christian, doesn’t want to be contaminated by sinful nudist associations. Ah, such a life. But I don’t wish to destroy anyone’s faith in a God who will apparently burn them for an eternity in Hell if they are tempted to frolic with no clothes on. I would rather be blocked by them on Twitter than have them give up on whatever paradise they are pursuing.

But I am basically on the Brad Bird side of the argument about whether or not you can choose to be a hero even if others will see you as a monster. My fiction does not cause demonic possession and probably does not cause spontaneous bouts of joyful nudism either. Even my werewolf story, which was too much for one potential reviewer, does not have actual werewolves in it. Although it does describe some things that really happened to me as a child in a fictionalized, sort-of-truthful way.

So, by those criteria, I judge myself to be a failed writer.

But I am definitely not giving up on writing in despair. Those were never the reasons I wrote novels to begin with.

I write because I have something to say to the world and stories to tell. And I mean to have my say, even if the world is too stone-deaf and stupefied to listen.

I have things to say about living and learning.

I have things to say about finding love, and losing love, and finding it again.

I have things to say about how I think the world works, and why I’m pretty sure I’m completely wrong about all of that. And what I intend to do about it.

To that end, I have started writing a book full of essays like the stuff and garbage and lovely wisdom I write in this goofy little blog. And I shall call it Laughing Blue. Because, you know, nobody is going to read it anyway, and I can call it whatever the heck I want to call it.

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July 9, 2020 · 6:00 pm

Love Life and Live Happy

I hardly ever have a day now where I am not going through some kind of suffering. I have just been through rainy days that make my arthritis sore to crippling levels of hurting-ness. Okay, that’s not a real word, so let’s say hurtyness… not a real word either, but funnier sounding. I have been through a number of months of budget-squeezing economic pain, not making enough to afford medicine the doctor orders, or even enough for the doctor’s visit so he can tell me what expensive medicines (like insulin) that I may need to stay alive and yell at me for not taking the medicine I used to be on and couldn’t afford anymore. The news is unrelenting with pandemic infections out of control and death tolls rising while the criminal we elected in 2016 screams that it is all the fault of radical ANTIFA Democrats like me (ANTIFA meaning anybody against fascism) and we are entirely to blame for everything, and we better be opening schools soon or he will cut education funds again… and even more… and make us put up Betsy DeVos posters in our bedrooms so she can watch us sleep and make us have nightmares about schools because we had the audacity to be educators and pro-public-school advocates.

So, maybe, you think, I am bitter and hate my life. Ha! No! If I had it all to do over again, I would not change a thing!

One bad kid my first year nicknamed me “Mr. Gilligan” as if I were a skinny, dopey fool. For years afterward my classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island. I loved it!

Two times in my life I have had a job that I hated. Both were teaching jobs. Each of them only lasted for one year. The first time, my very first teaching job, I came back the second year to a new principal and mostly new kids. I worked really hard and turned it into a job I loved for the next 23 years. The second time was a job for a principal who was decidedly dictatorial and hated by most of the staff. She ended up firing me because I liked black and brown kids too much, and it resulted in me finding a much better job which I loved for seven more years. I have never regretted becoming a teacher. In fellow faculty and the vast majority of over two thousand students, I encountered some of the most interesting and best people I have ever known. Including my wife. Now, when pain and suffering are lonelier things to deal with than the hubbub and struggle of daily school life, I have all of that to look back upon and remember and grin insanely about with high levels of life-satisfaction. Doing things you love to do is a key to happiness.

This is called “A Portrait of Mark Twain with Drumsticks Involved”

Another reason I am in love with life in spite of it all is the chance I had to be an artist and express myself through drawing, painting, coloring, and telling stories. As you can see by this blog, I have done a lot of doodling since I discovered I could draw at somewhere around the ripe old age of four. And because I rarely throw artwork away, I have a lot of it to share. Some of it I am very proud of. The stuff I am ashamed of that I have not trashed, I am only mildly ashamed of.

I claim to be humorist. Some of my best stories can make you laugh. And some of my drawings can too.

But not every part of the world of humor is about laughing, chortling, giggling, snickering, or full-blown donkey-like hee-haws. Some humor only makes you smile.

Some humor is gentle and thoughtful, even ironic.

And some of the best humor calls up truths and feelings that can bring you to tears.

But all of us “normal” human beans love to laugh (or even groan about that bean-pun) and laughter is good for us. Expressing yourself through art, especially if it makes us laugh, is another reason I love being alive.

Being dead, of course, makes it awful hard to laugh. This is why I generally try to avoid being dead. But thoughts of death can too easily become a way of life. That is why I try to put fear and anger and Republican Senators from Texas far away from me. They will not take me out of my laughing place while I am still alive.

Stand resolute against evil and protect the ones you love.

And most important of all, you need to love life because of love itself. Now, I am not saying anything about sex here. Not that sex isn’t a good thing, and that it doesn’t pop into your old head every time you think about love, but that sex isn’t the most important part of love. It is possible to love everybody unconditionally. As much as Mark Twain and I both complain a lot about “That damned human race!” we both understand that the most wonderful thing about people is that, in spite of the fact that the word “people” is a little label on a very big thing… they are, in fact, an ever-expanding balloon of infinitely hilarious and detestable and cuddly things that threaten to pop at any moment and spew weird and wild personalities all over the damned universe. No matter how much you hate some people, or even if you hate people generally, loving people is the spicy Italian meat sauce on the spaghetti pile of your life. So, do some acts of pure gluttony upon it, and just be happy to be alive.

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July 6, 2020 · 5:29 pm

Why I’m Never Alone

There are voices in my stupid old head. But don’t worry. They are not dog voices telling me brunettes need to be shot with a .44. They are echoing voices. Voices of loved ones, voices of students, voices of random amusing people I have known and how they talk, the many voices of Robin Williams, and, of course, the singing voice of Roy Rogers.

I really don’t know how many times I traveled down dark and dangerous pathways with, “Happy trails to you…” echoing in my stupid head. It helped me through surgery. It helped me through hospitalization for a “That EKG could mean you are having a heart attack right now.” It wasn’t a heart attack. It helped me with the meeting with a judge for my Chapter 13 bankruptcy… which was caused by the coulda-been heart attack.

I hear the voices of departed relatives too. My sweet old Reagan-Republican Grandma Beyer comes back to me talking about magazine ads in “Look” magazine in the early seventies.

“Now, those children are positively up to no good. Look at the expressions on their evil little faces. Do you really believe they are merely going to eat that food? Or are they going to make someone wear it, scare it, or underwear it?

“And look at the neon-blue eyes those youngsters have! Do you suppose that orange juice is radioactive or something? It certainly doesn’t look like its doing them any good health-wise to be drinking that much. They look wired!”

Or when she saw TV Guide’s picture from the mini-series “V” in the 80’s.

“Land Sakes! That’s one pretty awful skin condition that poor man has. I certainly wouldn’t want to get infected with that!”

media.npr.org

And there’s always the voice of Mark Twain lurking in the back of my brain watching for a chance to remark on something and make me laugh.

“I don’t like to commit myself about Heaven and Hell… You see, I have friends in both places.”

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to any vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

“The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.”

“No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.”

“Okay, you can shut up now, Mark, before I laugh myself to death,” I replied.

And then there’s all those imaginary people that my own demented psyche gave birth to and now live in my fiction. They follow me around everywhere too, making comments, encouraging me, sometimes discouraging me, and always making me forget that I am actually talking to myself. I write down a lot of what they say. It becomes the basis for another book or two, or possibly twenty.

So, you see, I am rarely lonely. My mind is never quiet. And there’s always a conversation going on, no matter that I am completely alone and no one is saying anything at all out loud.

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Filed under autobiography, being alone, commentary, humor, imagination, Mark Twain, strange and wonderful ideas about life

July 3, 2020 · 4:11 pm

This is Me!

There is a bit of the circus freak in all of us… and a lot of it in me.

But I am who I am supposed to be.

I sit here writing this in the state of Texas, in the midst of the worst pandemic in this country in 100 years, possibly headed towards the worst pandemic ever.

My father in Iowa is in hospice care under strict quarantine. My mother can’t even visit him. She’s afraid to go see him through the window because he is dying from late-stage Parkinson’s Disease. He doesn’t remember who she is some of the time, and her presence makes him agitated. He doesn’t understand what’s going on anymore.

And I have been forbidden from trying to go see her because of the threat to my health and her health that COVID 19 represents. We are both diabetics. Both capable of being blown away by the next cold breeze, or uncovered sneeze

So, here I am. I am a prisoner of circumstances. I can no longer be a teacher, something I was born to do. I can’t go out and do anything because the disease has reshaped the world.

But I am here, I can write, I am free…

I am who I’m meant to be…

This is me.

I always wanted to start a day’s lesson by singing. I never had the perfect song. But when I did sing in the classroom, or play the harmonica, it always got a rise out of that batch of other people’s children.

And now I have the perfect song… from the musical The Greatest Showman. And I am no longer a teacher. I missed my shot.

Wouldn’t it be a kick to sing to them, and even get them to sing along?

You think it would be a silly waste of time? A foolish thing to do and a total mistake that risks getting me fired?

Ah, you don’t know kids very well, do you.

It would be glorious. They wouldn’t learn about me. They would learn about themselves. And it would be a lesson worth more gold than the world has to pay with.

But I am still me. I write and draw silly pictures. And I make books that nobody really reads… except for nudists, and other teachers, and random Twitter followers… all who seem to like my stories.

I actually now have 16 of these things.

Maybe I can’t ever be a teacher again. But I was one. It was glorious.

And, retired now, in my 60’s, it may all be coming to an end. I’m waiting at the moment for my COVID Test results.

And I still have a voice even now, through words like this… strung together on a page.

I make no apology,

This is who I’m meant to be.

This is me.

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Filed under autobiography, Paffooney

July 1, 2020 · 5:00 pm

Dreams of Forgetting

I don’t wish to forget anything… ever. But increasingly I can no longer call things to mind as swiftly as I could when I was younger. I constantly now find myself unable to recall names of old movie stars I loved as a boy, dates of Civil War battles that I studied at length in the ’90s, the names of former school teachers that I had when I was a boy, and those I worked with as a colleague in the 1980’s. I fear reaching the point my father is now at, not being able to remember my own children.

Last night I had a nightmare about being a substitute teacher. I remember in the dream finishing a first-period class that was not the teacher I was covering for, because the sub-coordinator does that during the teacher’s planning period, using you in classrooms where no sub showed up. And I left that classroom feeling good about the class, but suddenly not able to remember where the classroom was that I was supposed to be teaching in next. I remember going into the office, one unlike any school office I have ever been in. The secretary behind the front desk recognized me by name. Then she asked me why I forgot to sign in that morning. I couldn’t remember. She asked me who I was subbing for. I had forgotten. I didn’t know her name or recognize her face either, something that never happens in a school you work at even for a single day. Secretaries actually run schools telling both teachers and principals what to do and where to go. The secretary was beginning to get irritated with me. I told her I must be having a bad spell. And then I woke up in a sweat.

That dream will probably never come true. I will probably never walk into a classroom as the teacher again, even as a sub, thanks to this horrid pandemic.

But I am having anxiety about forgetting in a very telling way.

I must confess that every illustration for this post was chosen because I saw the picture in my media gallery for this site and realized I did not remember posting these or even making the one at the start of this essay which is two different drawings put together with photoshop.

But I do have one small ace up my sleeve for dealing with serious forgetfulness. I have seven years worth of posts to look back on. That should help me remember a thing or two about… wait, what was this post about?

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Filed under autobiography, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, Paffooney, teaching