Category Archives: autobiography

April 28, 2025 · 12:29 am

Follow Wherever It Leads You…

My path in life has never been straight, never arrived at the destinations I was originally shooting for.

Sometimes you wake up and find a new path spreading out before you.

My dreams were once to go to the Air Force Academy and learn to fly planes.

But bad arches in my feet, poor eyesight in my left eye, and nagging difficulties with allergies turned that dream on its head. I was physically ground-bound, and able to fly only in my dreams.

And then I went to Cow College, Iowa State University, to be an English Major. I was good at drawing. I had endless story-plots bursting out of my fevered comic-book lover’s brain. And I was determined to be a story-teller and comic book artist. But arthritis crept into my hands and slowed the drawing down, my confidence dried up. I realized I was a graduated English major with no chance at ever finding a job just reading books.

So, I went to the University of Iowa, the Hawkeyes, and got myself a remedial Master of the Art of Teaching degree and a teaching certificate. And this time the door actually opened… to a life of a pedagogue. I got to perform my act six times a day in front of a hostile audience for the next 31 out of 33 years, with two years off for bad principal behavior, and time spent being a sub for every kind of teacher that there was. I got to teach everything from autistic special education to P.E. teacher to Librarian to Orchestra teacher.

Some days I was the worst teacher that ever lived. But most days I was a pretty good teacher. And I never let a bad day pass without learning something from it. And I learned to use my drawing ability on chalk boards and bulletin boards and dry-erase boards and overhead projectors. And I learned to be a good story-teller, whether it was by reading aloud or re-telling stories that were mostly factual from history, and funny stories from my own experiences. I became a fascinating nearly-human bean that could keep the attention of even ADHD twelve-year-olds for as much as twenty minutes. A good trick, that.

And when the time came to give it up, I did not go gentle into that good night. I had a miserable last year in 2013-2014 because my health was so poor. I lost money from excessive absences since I had the flu three times that year and had a son spend a week in the hospital. I retired that May and thought my life was over.

And then the real nonsense started.

I published the original AeroQuest in 2007. Then in 2012 I added Catch a Falling Star, published with I-Universe/ Penguin Books.

Once I retired, I published Magical Miss Morgan with Page Publishing. Then, disgusted with traditional publishers whom I paid more money than I ever earned from, I began self-publishing with Amazon.

Snow Babies followed, with Stardusters and Space Lizards after that.

The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, Recipes for Gingerbread Chidren, The Baby Werewolf, Sing Sad Songs, and Fools and Their Toys followed that (in order).

Then I doubled down on writing more than one story at a time.

I began rewriting AeroQuest, publishing 1,2, and 3 as of this writing.

I wrote the prequel to Snow Babies, When the Captain Came Calling. I also wrote The Boy… Forever, the sequel to The Baby Werewolf.

I have published A Field Guide to Fauns, a novel where all the main characters are nudists. And I completed a book of essays from this blog, which I call Laughing Blue.

And then I began working even harder to get my books read and reviewed.

I have gotten more five-star reviews than any other level.

I have also published The Wizard in His Keep. I published The Necromancer’s Apprentice most recently.

My current work in progress is The Haunted Toy Store. It is currently at 14, 649 words.

How much more I can get done now until my life has ended remains to be seen. But I keep on trudging on the path into the future, not knowing where it will go next… and not really worrying about it.

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April 19, 2025 · 12:10 am

Pyrrhuloxia

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The desert cardinal.

It sings and behaves almost exactly like its scarlet cousins.  It never flies away from seasonal changes or difficult weather, and it also tolerates drier conditions than its bright red family members.

Why do you need to know that?  Because I am a birdbrain.  I connect things that are totally unlike each other.  I am a surrealist.  And for me, being a cardinal is all about never flying away when the winter comes, never giving up.

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There was a time in my life when I wasn’t entirely sure of who I would become.  Let me say clearly, “I am not now, nor have I ever been a homosexual.”  And if I had been one, like a couple of my friends turned out to be, I would not be ashamed to be one.  But there was a time, in my high school years, when I really wasn’t certain, and I was terrified of what the answer might be.

And it was in high school that I met Dennis.

Now, to be honest, I noticed him while I was still an eighth grader, and he was in my sister’s class and two years younger.  It was in the locker room after eighth grade P.E. class was ended and sixth grade P.E. was getting dressed for class.  I was returning to pick up a book I had left.  He was standing just inside the door in nothing but shorts.  The feeling of attraction was deeply disturbing to my adolescent, hormone-confused brain.  I didn’t want to have anything to do with that feeling.  But I felt compelled to find out who he was anyway.  He was the younger brother of my classmate Rick Harper (not his real name).  In fact, he was the book end of a set of twins.  But I came to realize that it was Dennis I saw, not Darren, because they were trying to establish their identities by one of them curling his hair, and the other leaving his straight.

Nothing would ever have come of it, but during my Freshman year of high school, I encountered him again.  During a basketball practice where the ninth grade team was scrimmaging with the eighth graders, the seventh graders were all practicing free throws at the side of the junior high gym.  While I was on the bench, he came up to me from behind and tapped me on the shoulder.  I turned around and he tossed me his basketball.   “Play me one on one?” He asked.  I almost did.  But I remembered that Coach Rod had warned us to be ready to go into the game when he called on us.  I had a turn coming up.  So, I told him that and promised I would play him some other time.  He grinned at me in a way that gave me butterflies in my stomach.  Why?  To this day I still don’t really know.

Dennis’s older brother and I were in Vocational Agriculture class together that year and both on the Parliamentary Procedure team preparing for a competition. We were at Rick’s house.  After a few rounds of practice that convinced our team we would definitely lose the competition, Dennis and his brother trapped me in a corner.

“Hey, Meyer, how’re ya doin’?” Dennis said.  Darren just stared at me, saying nothing.

“It’s Beyer, not Meyer,” I said.  Of course, he knew that.  The Meyers were a local poor family with a bad reputation, and it was intended as an insult.  And it also rhymed, making it the perfect insult.

“Still one of the worst basketball players ever?”

“I try.  I’m working on it really hard.”  That got him to laugh and ask me to give him a high five.

“Goin’ to the basketball game later?”

“Yeah, probably.”

I knew then that he wanted to be my friend.  I wasn’t sure why.  He was picking me out of the blue to make friends with.  We didn’t move in the same circles, go to the same school, or even live in the same town.  He was a Belmond boy, I was Rowan kid.  And he didn’t know I was only a few years past being sexually assaulted and not ready to face the demons my trauma had created within me.

Later, at the basketball game, he found me in the bleachers and sat down beside me.  In my defense, I am not a homophobe.  And neither he nor I turned out to be a homosexual.  He just wanted to be my friend and was taking difficult steps to make that connection.  He was the one taking the risks.  I greeted him sarcastically, and looking back on it, somewhat cruelly, because I was filled with too many uncertainties.  I never meant to drive him away.  But I will never forget the wounded look on his face as he scooted away down the bleacher seat.

He tried to talk to me several times after that.  He apparently never lost the urge to befriend me.  But as much as I wanted to accept his friendship, it never came to be.  I have regretted that ever since.

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Dennis passed away from cancer early this year.  It is what made me think about who we both once were and what I gave away.  I went on to actually befriend a number of boys through college and into my teaching career.  I never chose any of them.  The friendship was always their idea.  I went on teach and mentor a number of fine young men.  I like to think I did it because I felt a bit guilty of never really being Dennis’s friend.  I hope somewhere along the way I made up for my mistake.  I hope Dennis forgives me.  And I wish I could tell him, “I really do want to be your friend.”

The pyrrhuloxia is a member of the family of cardinals and grosbeaks.  And it does not migrate away from troublesome seasons and bad weather.  There is dignity in being a pyrrhuloxia.

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April 4, 2025 · 12:00 am

Pirate Novels

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My first novel-length piece of writing was attempted in college.  I finished it in four years.  It was a pirate tale about a young man, a pirate named Graff the Changeling.  You see him in this illustration I created in 1980 with his two young sons, Rene and Emery.  Because their mother was a fairy, the boys have pointed ears and horns.    It was an attempt at serious fantasy adventure fiction that was so awful, it became a comedy before it was through.  I called it The Graff Tales, and I still have it.  But I promise you, I will never, ever try to publish the horrible thing.  My sisters served as my beta readers for this story.  They both liked the oral stories I told, and they eagerly awaited something like they remembered from our shared childhood.  They both were a bit disappointed by my first prose attempt.  There was a knight called Sir Rosewall in the story.  He was a hapless knighted fool who lived in poverty and swore to reclaim his honor with great deeds, but as he goes to sea as a kidnapped sailor, all he manages to do is fall down a lot and bump his large head frequently.  In the first scene when he enters the story, long about chapter four, he exits a cottage and has to punt a piglet to get out without falling down.  This pig-punting thing was repeated more than once with this character.  My sisters joked that the “pig-in-the-doorway” motif would be my lasting contribution to literature.  Fortunately for me, it was not.  I am probably the only one who even remembers there was such a novel.

But my biggest failing with writing and storytelling was always that I could be too creative.  The story featured a flying pirate ship that was raised from the bottom of the ocean by fairy magic.  The crew were re-animated skeletons.  The gorilla who lived on the island where the ship’s survivors had been marooned would also join the crew.  His name was Hairy Arnold.  One villain was the pirate captain Horner, a man with a silver nose-piece because he had lost his real nose to a cannon shot.  Another was a red-bearded dandy named Captain Dangerous.  But the biggest villain of all was the Heretic, who turned out to be a demon in human guise.  It was all about escaping from pirates who wanted to kill you and hitting soldiers with fish in the fish market.  There were crocodile-headed men and little child-like fairies called Peris that lived in the city where Graff was trapped and transformed into a monster by the Heretic.

My plot was too convoluted and my characters too wildly diverse and unlikely.  The result was something far too bizarre to be serious fiction.  The only way it could actually be interpreted was as a piece of comedy.  There-in lay the solution to my identity problem as a writer.  I had to stop trying to be serious.  My imagination too often bent the rules of physics and reality.  So I had to stop trying for realism and believability.

 

In the end all the main characters die.  All except for young Rene who becomes a pirate hunter.  Of course, I follow Graff and Emery through to heaven because, well, it was a first person narrative and the narrator died.  So, I vowed to myself that I would never let this horrible piece of nonsense see the light of day.  I would never try to publish it, rewrite it, or even tell anyone about it.  And so to this very day I… oopsie.

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April 3, 2025 · 12:06 am

Gooseberry Pie

I would like to contend that a blog is a form of self-portrait.  Do you want to argue with me?  Have a piece of Gooseberry Pie….

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http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/531670/gooseberry-pie

You see, gooseberries aren’t made from geese.  They don’t look like gooses… er, goosei… um, geese.  They aren’t the favorite food of a goose, unless, maybe…  Mother Goose.  The name is a corrupted form of the Dutch word kruisbes , or possibly the German Krausbeere.   You know, because people who speak English don’t know how to talk right.  They don’t have anything to do with geese.  In the same way, a person’s name doesn’t really help you understand the person that wears it.  You have to dig deeper.  Do you know, I have never actually tasted gooseberry pie?  I have seen and even picked the gooseberries.  They are danged ugly, spikey-furred snot-green berries.  I am not tempted in any way to put one in my mouth.  And yet, I should not judge gooseberry pie before I taste a piece.  I know people who adore gooseberry pie.  Maybe you are one of them.

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CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29312

The point is, blogs are exactly the same thing.  An artist, a writer, a producer of something, or a day-dreamy noodling goober has put together a blog to display their wares, show off their creations, and share their words and wisdom.  You have to look at them, warts and all, and actually take a bite.  You have to try them out and test them.  Follow them over time.  Read, absorb, and appreciate… not merely zoom through and look at the pictures… and maybe click “like” at the bottom of the post.

Of course, I admit, I do the very thing I am advising you not to do.  The first few times I visit a blog, I scan through and only focus on a few things that catch my falling stars.  (oop!  Shame on me… I should say “catch my fancy”.  Forgive me for lapsing into Mickian brain farts for a moment there).  But if I am lured into coming back, I dip deeper and read more… tasting it thoroughly, as it were…  And much of what I taste there will end up in my own recipe somewhere down the line.  I begin to learn who that blogger is, and their writing style… sometimes even their thinking style (though I don’t read minds… only smell brain farts and odoriferous mental cooking smells) and I picture them as people in my minds eye.  Sometimes I wonder if they match in real life the person I am picturing.  Of course, the answer is no.  People don’t look like what you think they should look like.  They don’t even look like what they think they look like either… even in photos.  So let me end this goofy pie-based argument about why blogs are self portraits with a few self portraits I have created that aren’t really what I look like , even if it is a photo.

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Me in the mirror, 1980
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Scary pictures of the artist as a creepy old man…

 

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The novelist me…

 

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A wizard selfie taken at Mad Ludwig’s Castle in Bavaria.

 

 

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Who I am and who I was…

 

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Seriously grumpy me…

Gag!  Enough of the gooseberries already!  Or are they gross-berries?  I think that I really don’t look anything like me anymore.

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April 2, 2025 · 12:00 am

Synesthesia (Part One; French Blue Monday)

This link will help you understand Synesthesia

Francois spotlight

Yes, Mondays are blue.  Specifically French blue.  Every day of the week has its own color.  Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre,  Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue.  I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints.  I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head.  I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world.  I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name.  It is called synesthesia.

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It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”.  When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence.  I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns.  Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns.  It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color.  Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word.  But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue.  It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”.  And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.

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Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.

I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do.  I certainly was.  I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue.  My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing.  I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word.  I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there.  But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true.   The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded.  I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls.  My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters.  She is left handed and also gifted at drawing.  I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.

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Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.

Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about.  But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about.  And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases.  It is not a bad condition to have.  In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing.  I could use some good for a change.  Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway.  (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).

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March 30, 2025 · 12:02 am

It’s Not Easy Being Green

It’s not easy being green…. the color of so many ordinary things…

Especially as you grow older.

Because green is the color of growth and youth and life. But those things seem beyond the grasp of your outstretched fingers on your spotty and wrinkled old hand.

I am definitely no longer green like Littlebit, the Oceanian ship’s boy from the seas of Talislanta and the pirate ship, Black Dragon.

And, yes, an Iowa boy living as far away from an ocean as you can get in the United States, in all directions, you are bound to dream of pirate ships and the high seas, especially when you’re twelve and your favorite book is Treasure Island.

But now that you are old, green is more often your color because you don’t feel well… again… every day….

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But there is still bright green in dreams.

You can still go there and be a child again in memories and your imagination.

It’s just that now the green is written down in sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and cantos.

And talking to your kids about movies, art and artists, stories and writers of stories…

Did you know the favorite color of all three of my children is green?

I have known it since they were small and I could sing to them songs by Kermit the Frog, like “Rainbow Connections” and “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

And with paint, you make green by combining the blue of sadness with the yellow of sunshine and happiness.

And it’s not easy being green…

But it’s beautiful…

And it’s what I want to be.

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March 28, 2025 · 12:03 am

Go and Catch a Falling Star…

You may have looked at the name of my website here on WordPress and wondered, “Why in the heck has that fool Mickey called this thing he writes Catch a Falling Star?”

The answer is, he named it after the first good published novel he wrote at the insistence of the I-Universe Publishing’s marketing adviser. Very poor reason for doing anything, that.

But, the secondary reason is because of where that title came from. Look at the first stanza of this poem by John Donne.

So, now, you are justified in asking, “What nonsense is this? That doesn’t have any coherent meaning, does it?”

And you would be right. These are impossible things that I am being ordered to do by a very religious cleric in the Anglican Church who was originally a Catholic, but, in the time of Henry VIII Catholicism was made illegal, and he wrote this poem about not being able to find an honest woman in his drunken, wasted youth anyway. He is ordering me here to not only “catch a falling star” (and catching a meteorite with your bare hands has rather hot consequences), but also to have sex with a semi-poisonous plant, explain why we can’t go backwards in time, determine whether and why God might’ve given Satan goat feet, listen to probably-nonexistent humanoid creatures singing, find a way to avoid anybody ever looking at me with envy and then doing something to me because of it, and, most importantly, find a place where the wind blows in a way that fills your head with facts that actually makes you smarter.

Challenge accepted!

It is exactly what I wanted to write about. Impossible things actually being accomplished. Finding the meaning behind alien beings from outer space developing an intense love of I Love Lucy television broadcasts and Mickey Mouse Club music. Discovering why intensely shy people need to embrace social nudity. Defining who is actually a werewolf and who is not, uncovering who and what real monsters are. Singing songs so sad that it magically makes people fall in love with you. Talking to clowns in your dreams and getting real answers to the meaning of life, love, and laughter.

Catching falling stars is the stupid idea that this wacky, idiotic little blog is about. It is what I write about constantly. You have to kill me to get me to stop. So, there is your fair warning. Read on at your own peril.

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March 23, 2025 · 12:29 am

Speaking in Iowegian

“We’re from Ioway…Ioway!

State of all the land…

Joy on every hand…

We’re from Ioway…Ioway!

That’s where the tall corn grows!”

Yep, I was an Iowa boy.  I sang that stupid song with pride, though we never once called our home State “Ioway” outside of that song.  I have driven a tractor, made money for pulling buttonweeds out of soybean fields with my own two hands, watched the wind ripple the leaves in the cornfields like waves on bright green ocean water, and hid in the basement when we believed a tornado might come and destroy our house.  Life in Iowa is made up of these things and many more, don’t ya know.

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And of course, I learned to tell corny jokes along the way.  That’s a must for a quick-wit-hick from the sticks.  Pepsi and Coke and Mountain Dew are “pop”, and when you have to “run down to the store” you get in your car.  You don’t have to do it by foot.  And other Iowans know this.  You don’t even get the raised eyebrows and funny stares that those things evoke when said aloud in Carrollton, Texas.  You have to explain to Texans that “you guys” is how Iowegian speakers say “y’all”.  Language is plain and simple when you speak Iowegian.  You have to follow the rule of “Only speak when you’re spoken to”.  Iowans are suspicious when somebody talks first, especially if you haven’t known that somebody for their entire life.  That’s what an Iowan calls a “stranger” .  “Frank is from Iowa Falls, and he’s only lived here for twelve years, so he’s still a stranger around here.”   So large portions of Iowegian conversations are made up of grunts and nods.  Two Iowegians can talk for hours saying only like ten words the entire time.  “Yep.  You bet.”

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But that only applies when you are outside the confines of the local cafe or restaurant or beanery or eatery or other nesting places for the Iowegian gossiping hens and strutting roosters.   Inside these wordy-walled exchanges for farm lore and lies there is no end to to the talking.  And because the mouths are already in motion anyway, there is also no end to the eating.  You are not too likely to see skinny farmers.  But farms and farmers definitely affect the quality of conversations.  In Iowa you have to learn how to stuff good grub in your pie hole in spite of the fact that farmers have decided to compare in detail the aromas associated with putting cow poop in the manure spreader (back in the day, of course) and mucking out a layer of toxic chicken whitewash from the chicken coop.  Perfect topic to accompany that piece of lemon meringue pie (which is the perfect color to illustrate the chicken side of the argument).  And, of course, if you have a family of health-care and service professionals like mine (mother was a registered nurse for forty years), you get to add to that discussions of perforated gall bladders, kidney resections, and mean old biddies that have to be helped on and off the bedpans.  You must develop a strong tolerance and an even stronger stomach, or you are doomed to be skinny and underfed.

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And since Iowegian is a language that is very simple, direct, and mostly about poop, they practically all voted for Trump.  Like him they never use transitions more than starting sentences with “And” or “But”, so they understand him mostly, even though there is no chance in H-E-double-hockey-sticks that he understands them.   It’s what allowed them to elect a mouth-breathing troglodyte like Steve King to the House of Representatives, and I can say that because they have no idea what “troglodyte” means, and will probably think it is a complement because it has so many syllables.  Insults have four letters.  Politics in Iowa is simple and direct too.  Basically, if you are not a Republican you are wrong.  Of course, somehow the State managed to go for Obama over Romney, but that was probably because, to an Iowan, neither one was right, and Mormons are wrong-er than anybody.

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So there’s my brief and beautiful bouquet of Iowegian words and their explanatory weegification.  I know there is a lot more to say about how Iowegians talk.  But I can’t say it here because my short Iowegian attention span is already wandering.  So let me wrap it up with one final weegification (yes, that is a made-up word, not a one-time typo mistake).

 

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March 22, 2025 · 12:17 am

Antonín Dvořák – HUMORESQUES FOR PIANO

These eight short piano pieces represent work from Czech composer Antonin Dvorak’s “sketchbook”.  He composed these in his time as director of the Conservatory in New York from 1892 to 1895.  They represent a foreign-born composer’s take on being in America.  It is important to note that there is a very un-serious quality to the “sketches” in this portfolio.  His most famous piece from this set, the Seventh Humoresque in G Major would become the theme song of Slappy Squirrel in Steven Spielberg’s popular television cartoon show, Anamaniacs.  It also became well known as the tune behind the “train toilet song” where passengers began singing aloud the directions for toilet flushing in passenger cars beginning with the phrase “Passengers will please refrain from flushing while the train is in the station…”

So what more perfect background music could there be for a look at some of the junk in my computerized version of a sketchbook?  These images all come from my Work in Progress folder.  I hope you will listen to the music while looking at these incomplete horrors and humoresques.

That is definitely a load of humoresques.  But like other forms of it, you spread it on your garden and it will help the flowers grow.

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March 21, 2025 · 12:08 am

Midnight Monster Movies

I slept in this morning.  Spent another late night doing nothing but watching monster movies.  I recently got myself a DVD collection of Hammer Films monster movies from the sixties.  I found it in the $5 bargain bin at Walmart, a place I regularly shop for movies.

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When I was a boy, back in the 60’s, there always used to be a midnight monster movie feature called Gravesend Manor on Channel 5, WOI TV in Ames, Iowa.  It started at 11:00 pm and ran til 1:00 am.  I, of course, being a weird little monster-obsessed kid, would sneak downstairs in my PJ’s when everyone else was asleep and I would laugh at the antics of the goofy butler, possibly gay vampire duke, and the other guy who was supposedly made in the master’s laboratory.  And when the movie started, I was often scared witless by the black-and-white monster B-movie like Scream of Fear!, or Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, or Eyes of the Gorgon.  It was always the reason I could rarely get up in time for church and Sunday school the next morning without complaints and bleary-eyed stumbling through breakfast.  I never knew if my parents figured it out or not, but they probably did and were just too tired to care.

It was my source for critical monster-knowledge that would aid me greatly when I grew up to be a fireman/cowboy hero.  Because battling monsters was… you know, a hero prerequisite.  And I intended to be the greatest one there ever was.  Even better than Wyatt Earp or Sherlock Holmes or Jungle Jim.

Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, and the immortal Christopher Lee were my tutors in the ways of combating the darkness.  When I started watching a really creepy monster movie, I always had to stick it out to the end to see the monster defeated and the pretty girl saved.  And they didn’t always end in ways that allowed me to sleep soundly after Gravesend Manor had signed off the airways for the night.  Some movies were tragedies.  Sometimes the hero didn’t win.  Sometimes it was really more of a romance than a monster movie, and the monster was the one you were rooting for by the end.  I remember how the original Mighty Joe Young made me cry.  And sometimes you had to contemplate more than tragedy.  You had to face the facts of death… sometimes grisly, painful, and filled with fear.  You had to walk in the shoes of that luckless victim who never looked over his shoulder at the right moment, or walked down the wrong dark alley, or opened the wrong door.  The future was filled with terrifying possibilities.

Now, at the end of a long life, when I am supposed to be more mature and sensible, I find myself watching midnight monster movies again.  What’s wrong with me?  Am in my second childhood already?  Am I just a goofy old coot with limited decision-making capabilities?  Of course I am.  And I intend to enjoy every horrifying moment of it.

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