Category Archives: autobiography

December 12, 2016 · 3:55 pm

I Can’t Get Me No… Satisfaction

I am old.  And it is true that I am not as old as the Rolling Stones.  After all, they are living proof that prehistoric fossils can actually still sing.  But I am nearing the end.  My health is rapidly deteriorating.  And while medical technology has advanced worldwide, and is probably the only reason I have lived for 60 years, the cost of that technology to Americans is beyond what I can afford.  I am living now in a house that I saw in my dreams back in college.  In that dream from when I was twenty, I saw myself sitting in an easy chair that is now in this house.   The sky outside was pale orange.  And an angel came to me and said, “This is it.  This is the end.  You must come with me.”

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So I am expecting the angel any day now.

But there is so much in this life, in this world, left unfinished.  I have novels left to write, and novels I have written that still are not published.

Page Publishing has my Magical Miss Morgan book and I have to argue now with editors to keep them from totally mangling it.  They even want to change Miss to Ms. in the title!  Don’t they know that kids never say Ms. to a female teacher?    Will the angel have to wait while I labor through the process of correcting those danged ding-batty word-misers?

And the Arizona football Cardinals have not won a championship in the NFL since 1947, nine years before I was born.  I wanted to see them win once before I leave with that angel.  But the team that was practically unbeatable last year lost their seventh game this year to the Dolphins yesterday, and are probably defunct for this year.  It would take a miracle now for them to get funct again and make the playoffs.  Maybe I have to put the angel off for another football season.

And the world has ended in 2016.  The Great Orange Face has won the battle for leader of the free world.  He will institute policies that will make him richer, but will kill me, and eventually destroy life on Earth.  And remember, the Cubs won a World Series again, 108 years after the goat curse was set upon them.  The four horsemen of the Apocalypse are dusting off their saddles right now, and the pale guy is sharpening his scythe.  How can I leave behind such a world for my children?  The angel is getting impatient and tapping his foot quite a lot.

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                                                                                                               “You know, it is quite possible I will look like this the next time you see me, Mickey.”

So, I am really not satisfied quite yet with the way things are going.  The Rolling Stones have some sort of secret going for them.  They are never satisfied according to the song.  So maybe that is what is keeping them still singing after most of them have already died and simply refuse to lay down, get buried, and keep quiet.  Maybe I need to learn to sing.

 

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December 10, 2016 · 4:25 pm

Really Bad Jokes

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If you have the bad habit of reading this particular blog more than once, then you are probably aware that I used to be a public school teacher.  Even worse, I used to be a middle school English teacher.  Aagh!  Seventh graders!  It explains a lot about how life has warped my intelligence, personality, and world view.  It also explains somewhat where I found such a fountain-like source for some of the worst jokes you ever heard.

Now, as to the question of why I have chosen in my retirement early-onset senility to become a humor-blogger… well, that is simply not something I can answer in one post… or even a thousand.  But kids are the source of my goofball clown-brain joking around.

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Kid-humor, you see, is stunted and warped in weird ways by the time period you are talking about.  The eighties, nineties, two thousands, and the tens are all very different.  And those are the various sets of students that I attempted to learn moose bowling from by teaching them English.

Still, there are certain universal constants.

Potty humor really kills.  If you want to make a thirteen-year-old crack up with laughter, roll around on the floor, and maybe wet his or her pants, then you only need to work the “poop” word, or the “nickname for Richard” word, or the “Biblical word for donkey” word into the conversation.  Of course the actual words, even though we all know what they actually are, are magical words.  If you actually say them to kids in school as their teacher, those words can actually make you magically and permanently disappear from the front of the classroom.  All kids are big fans of George Carlin and his seven words, even though most of them have never heard of him.

And violent humor is popular with kids from all decades.  The most common punch line in the boys’ bathroom is, “… and then he kicked him in the Biblical word for donkey!” followed closely in second place by, “… and then she kicked him in the Biblical word for donkey!”  I am told (for I don’t actually go in such scary places myself) that in the girls’ bathroom the most popular punch line is, “…so I kicked him right in the soccer balls, and he deserved it!”   Why girls are apparently obsessed with soccer, I don’t know… or particularly care.sweet-thing

So my education in humor began with bad-word jokes, slapstick humor, put-downs, and rude noises coming from unfortunate places.  Humor in the classroom is actually a metaphorical mine field laced with tiger traps, dead-falls that end with an anvil hitting you on the head, or being challenged to a life-or-death game of moose bowling.  (Don’t know what moose bowling is?  Moose bowling is a very difficult game that, in order to knock down all the pins and win, you have to learn to roll a moose down the alley.)  Sounds like I spend too much time watching cartoons and playing video games, doesn’t it?  Well, there’s more.  And it gets worse from here.  But I will spare you that until the next time I am foolish enough to try making excuses for my really bad jokes.

 

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December 5, 2016 · 4:12 pm

The Use of Magic Words

Eli Tragedy

Okay, Mickey, you have said you have confidence in science to the point of not believing in God… at least not the Christian imaginary sky-friend with the white beard and bad temper.  But your use of magic words then makes you a hypocrite.

What?  Magic words, you say?

You heard me.  You use words that give you special powers.  And you believe in them like some kind of anti-science religious zealot.

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                                                                                                  Thank you, Bruce Rydberg, for giving me this useful meme.

Okay, you caught me.  There are certain words that do have super powers.  I know because I have used them.  (And Science is not the opposite of faith.   Just ask Heisenberg.)

I first suspected that magic words really existed back in college.  I read the book Dune by Frank Herbert.  (Followed by every other book he wrote.  I became a Dune-dream believer.)  Remember the part where Paul uses the Bene Gesserit fear chant to get through the psychological test given to him by the Bene Gesserit witch?  You don’t?  You haven’t read it?  I sometimes forget other people aren’t hopeless Trekkies and Sci-fi nerds too.  I do know, at least in my head, that most people have real lives outside of their own heads.  But I did develop a magic word to deal with times of stress and fear.

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Really, Mickey?  You chant this out loud when you’re nervous?

I say it in my head over and over to focus my spirit on what is truly important.  Never out loud.  I used this word to get through my wedding day in 1995 when a blizzard in Iowa prevented all of my non-Texas family at the time from attending.  I used it the day my first son was born when the delivery had to be accomplished by c-section due to heartbeat irregularities.  I used it the day an irate student came down the hallway towards me with metal ninja throwing stars, saying he was going to kill a specific student that was hiding in the History teacher’s classroom.  Yes, it helped me think and act appropriately during some rather intense times.  Sometimes a bit of nonsense injected into the middle of a tense situation makes all the difference in the world.

But that isn’t the only magic word that you made up, is it?

No, there’s the word “Paffooney” which you may have seen before in this blog.  It stands for a picture of my own design put together with words I have actually written myself.  Remember this?

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It still works.  I tested it myself this morning.  It gives you a look at my artwork posted on this blog without risking the danger of going back through all my old posts and accidentally reading something that makes your head melt.

But, really, are your magic words only words you made up yourself?

No.  I think the word “Truth” is a magic word.  It can be used or misused for both good and evil.

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This is very likely the magic word we need to defeat the orange-faced monkey we elected president.  There are lots of words that have immense power.  And all you have to do is believe in it a little bit… and use it intelligently.

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November 25, 2016 · 4:28 pm

The Beyer Brand

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This is a logo-doodle…wouldn’t that make an excellent name for an alien science fiction character?   Logodoodle, Prince of the Black Hole Kingdom.

I have been so obsessed with all the terrible details of the new orange monkey that has taken over our government that I completely forgot about an idea I had for a logo using my family name.  That is, until I began doodling while binging on Penny Dreadful on Netflix.  (Gawd, I have to talk about that show in a post too… horribly wonderful stuff!)  Yes the name-plate art you see above, not inspired by Trump’s gold letter fetish, no, not at all, is merely a doodle.  No rulers were used.  I eyeballed everything and let it flow.  I do admit to going over the pencil drawing in ink and editing at that point.

My family name, you see, is a very old and common German name.  Beyer means “a man from Bavaria” or auf Deutsch, “ein Mann aus Bayern”.  We were originally peasant farmers, but achieved nobility and a coat of arms in the middle ages.  I know this because in 1990 I was invited the to world-wide Beyer family reunion in Munich due to the genealogical research Uncle Skip did into the family name.  They sent me a book and I paid for the book, but did not attend.  (On a teacher’s salary?  Are you kidding me?)

But I was thinking about my brand.  It does have a meaning, and it does stand for something.  I underlined the illuminated letters of the name with a broken sword.  My ancestors were once warlike.  My great uncle died in the US Navy during World War II.   My dad was in the Navy during the Korean Conflict.  But having been a school teacher for so many years, I am dedicated to the belief that conflict is best resolved through wit and negotiation.  I would sooner be killed than have to shoot at another human being.  Of course, that part of the Beyer brand only applies to me.  Both my son the Marine, and my brother the retired Texas prison guard, are gun nuts.  And they are both very good shots.  I don’t recommend getting into serious arguments with them.

My family name also stands for farming and farmer’s values.  We were once stewards of the land.  Both my mother and my father grew up on farms.  I was raised in a small farm town less than five miles from the Aldrich family farms of my grandparents and uncles.  I have worked on farms.  I have shoveled cow poop… a unique thing to look upon as a badge of honor.  My octogenarian parents are living now in my grandparents’ farm house on land that has been in my family for more than 100 years.

My family name also stands for service.  I am not the only teacher in the clan.  My mother and two of my cousins are long-time registered nurses and all have seen the craziness of the ER.  (And I don’t mean by watching the television show with Clooney in it.)  I have a brother who was a prison guard and a sister who is a county health inspector.  We put the welfare of others before our own.  Our success in life has been measured by the success of the communities we serve.

While it is true that I could never make money off the Beyer brand the way gold-letter-using Mr. Trump has, I think it is safe to say, “My brand is priceless.”

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November 20, 2016 · 5:16 pm

Writing Every Day

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These are volumes 3&4 of my daily journal that I have kept since the 1980’s.

Writing every single day is something I have been doing since 1975, my senior year in high school.  It is why I claim to be a writer, even though I have never made enough money at it to even begin to think of myself as a professional writer.  I kept a journal/diary/series of notebooks that I filled with junk I wrote and doodles in the margins up until the middle 90’s when I began to put all my noodling into computer files instead of notebooks.  I have literally millions of words piled in piles of notebooks and filling my hard drive to the point of “insufficient memory” errors on my laptop.  I am now 60 years old and have been writing every day for 42 years.

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There are days in the past where I only wrote a word, or a sentence or two.  But there were a lot of words besides the words in my journal.  I started my first novel in college.  I completed it the summer before my first teaching job in 1981.  I put it the closet, never to be thought of again, except when I needed a good cringe and cry at how terrible a writer I once was.  I have been starting, stopping, percolating, piecing together, and eventually completing novel projects ever since… each one goofier and more wit-wacky than the last.  So I have a closet full of those too.

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It would be wrong of me to suggest that my journals are only for words.  As a cartoon-boy-wannabee I doodle everywhere in margins and corners and parts of pages.  Sometimes the doodle is an afterthought.  Sometimes it precedes the paragraph.  Sometimes it is directly connected to the words and their meaning.

Sometimes the work of art is the main thing itself.

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But always, the habit of writing down words and ideas every single day takes precedence over every other part of my day.  That’s the main reason I am stupid enough to think of myself as a writer even though I don’t make a living by writing.

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But I did put my words into my profession too.  As a teacher of writing, I wrote with and to my students.  I did that for 31 years as a classroom teacher, and two years as a substitute.  I required them each to keep a daily journal (though they only got graded for the ones they wrote in class, and then only for reaching the amount of words assigned).  We shared the writing aloud in class, making only positive comments.  I wrote every assignment I gave them, including the journal entries.  They got to see and hear what I could write, and it often inspired them or gave them a structure to hang their own ideas upon.  And often they liked what I wrote and were surprised by it almost as much as I liked and was surprised by theirs.   Being a writer was never a total waste of time and effort.

So am I telling you that if you want to be writer you have to write every day too?  If I have to tell you that… you have totally missed the point.

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November 19, 2016 · 3:43 pm

Scary Driving Stuff

Yesterday evening we didn’t pass a milestone… we kinda ran into it.

Number Two Son Henry is about to become a licensed driver in December.  Thursday night he finished his last drive time with driving school instructors.  We have to wait for the road test, but nothing really stands in his way.  He has been repeatedly practicing driving in Carrollton and Lewisville city traffic.  Over the summer and into the fall he has compiled hours worth of driving experience.   But, no matter how experienced, nearly everyone has at least one accident during their driving life.

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We had stopped at Wendy’s to get dinner after school, the three of us, the Princess, Henry, and I.  My diabetes was on the warpath yesterday, and I made the mistake of eating too much of a baked potato.  So, I asked him to drive even though it was Friday evening rush hour traffic.  He assured me he could handle it.

Well, we made the first turn onto the street on a yellow light and he accidentally caught the median curb with the driver’s side wheel.  Then, as we bounced into the traffic stopped at the next red light, we crunched into the backside of a lady’s car as it innocently waited for the light to turn green.

The air bags did not deploy.  There was no blood and death and fire.  My biggest worry was the fact that we were all shaken by the incident.  My hands were shaking anyway from blood sugar problems.  So, we put the emergency lights on.  I stupidly turned them off again.  Then the lady appeared at the driver’s side window with a look of utter horror on her face, her hands shaking worse than mine.  We exchanged insurance information.  She called the police to get an accident report, but they were busy and told us that if we could drive away from it, we should, and they would look into it later.  So, Henry realized the emergency lights were off and turned them back on.  We took pictures of the accident (see above).  Then we drove both cars into the Spring Creek Barbecue parking lot.  The damage turned out to be minimal, consisting of scratched paint on both cars.  There didn’t even appear to be dents.  Henry then drove us homeward, and we got him to work on time.  So it was basically a real-life jump scare that proved our hearts could still beat way faster than normal.  And Henry got the first-accident milestone done with, before he even got his license.  How fun!  But let’s not do it again soon.

 

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November 18, 2016 · 3:53 pm

Upon Further Reflection…

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My 60th Birthday Self Portrait

Time dictates lots of things.  I am not now even the ghost of what I was back then.  I look more like Santa Claus than my father or my grandfathers ever did.  You may notice that, even with glasses on, I have to squint in order to see who I really am.

It is normal to do a bit of self-examination after a milestone birthday.  But I never claimed to be normal.  In fact, I doubt after the results of the recent election that you could say I was anything like the common man at all.

I was raised a Christian in a Midwest Methodist Church from a small Iowa farm town.  But I have since become something of an agnostic or atheist… not because I don’t believe in God, but because I don’t believe anyone can tell me who God is or how he wants me to be other than me.  But I am also not at the center of the universe the way most religious people believe.  I believe that all people are born good and have to work at being bad by making self-centered choices and making excuses to themselves for behaving in ways that they know are wrong.  God doesn’t forgive my sins because he doesn’t have to.  I am tolerant of all people and most things about them.  To sum up this paragraph, I am nothing like the dedicated Christians I know and grew up among.  The actions of the new, in-coming government and dominant political party convince me that intolerance, self-interest, and rationalizations are the norm.

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Sometimes my nose gets really red and my hair bozos out for no particular reason.

I deal with the problems of life by making jokes and forging ahead with carefully considered plans in spite of the doubts others express about my abilities, my choices, and my sanity.  I prefer to do something rather than to sit idly by and do nothing.  Yet, I never do anything without agonizing over the plan before I take that step.  And like the recent election, things usually go wrong.  I have failed at far more things in my life than I have succeeded at.

I am told I think too much.  I hear constantly that I make things too complicated.  People say I should do practically everything in a different way… usually their way.  But I inherited a bit of stubbornness from my square-headed German ancestors.  In fact, I inherited Beyer-stubborn from my Grandma Beyer.  In all the time I knew her, I never saw her change her mind about anything… ever.  She was a Republican who thought all Republicans were like President Eisenhower, even Ronald Reagan…  but not Barry Goldwater.  Someone convinced her that Goldwater was a radical.  That was almost as bad as being a Democrat.  I, however, have strayed from the Beyer-stubborn tradition enough to change my mind once in a while, though only after carefully considering the facts on both sides of the question.  Nixon changed me from a Republican like Grandma into a Democrat.  Fortunately, Grandma Beyer loved me too much to disown me.

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In my retirement, I have gotten even more artistical than I was before.  This is a picture of me with my fictional child Valerie.

So how do I summarize this mirror-staring exercise now that I have passed the 500-word goal?  Probably by stating that I do have a vague idea of who I am.  But I promise to keep looking in the mirror anyway.  One never knows what he will see in the map of his soul that he wears on his face.

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October 23, 2016 · 4:31 pm

FrightFest in the West

One of the results of the loss of the patriarch of my wife’s family is that all the sisters in this country got together to mourn, and all bought season passes for their families to Six Flags Over Texas, the poor man’s Disney World.  I, being of sound mind and decrepit body, didn’t get a vote, as I wasn’t there when they bought tickets on this extended-family plan.  In fact, marching around a theme park on my arthritic legs and cane trying to breathe Texas air full of all the pollen and pollutants that have been killing me, didn’t seem like such a good thing.  Yesterday I finally got talked into going and activating my already-purchased season pass.

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My wife and daughter at the burger restaurant

“We will just go to use our food pass,” my wife said.  “We can have dinner there at the park and get some use out of all that money I paid.”

That seemed almost reasonable.

“And if we can’t help but get on a ride or two, you can sit on a bench and watch all the weird and stupid people go by.”

Well, that sold it.  So we went.  We did notice, however, that the line for food was long and getting longer.  Some of the people waiting seemed to have been waiting a very long time.

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We finally got to the front of the line and got to pick gourmet cheeseburgers and chili fries because I don’t already have enough heart-clogging cholesterol in my system and needed a lot of greasy saturated fat for a high price.  Ah, the joys of eating at a theme park.  Long lines, rude people, bad food, and everybody’s patient and happy for the most part because they paid big bucks to get there.

And then, after we had our meal, we soon discovered why the theme park was full of skeletons and being pumped full of noxious chemical artificial fog.

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Yes, the Snickers Bars were bigger and scarier than ever.

Now, FrightFest and other celebrations of Halloween probably aren’t the best thing for people who have been associated with Jehovah’s Witnesses for twenty years, but it definitely provided a ton of stuff to see as we fled through the Old West section of the park to avoid zombie jump scares and other holiday nonsense.

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Giant spiders were everywhere, just like skeletons.

The toxic artificial smog with spooky lighting made it difficult to get a picture of the giant spiders who seemed to be hanging from every tree and possibly explaining the multitude of skeletons.  I didn’t get any pictures of zombies who were actually very young-looking employees in red and gray greasepaint.  We were too busy avoiding getting a “gotcha!” which seemed to be the sole purpose of the zombies.

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But it was still a theme park.  We wound our way through the crowd and made our way out.  It was a terrible mistake.  But we had fun.

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October 22, 2016 · 3:46 pm

Making Portraits

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My biggest regret as a cartoonist and waster of art supplies is the fact that I am not the world’s best portrait artist.  I can only rarely make a work of art look like a real person.  Usually the subject has to to be a person I love or care deeply about.  This 1983 picture of Ruben looks very like him to me, though he probably wouldn’t recognize himself here as the 8th grader who told me in the fall of 1981 that I was his favorite teacher.  That admission on his part kept me from quitting and failing as a first year teacher overwhelmed by the challenges of a poor school district in deep South Texas.

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My Great Grandma Hinckley was really great.

My great grandmother on my mother’s side passed away as the 1970’s came to an end.  I tried to immortalize her with a work of art.  I drew the sketch above to make a painting of her.  All my relatives were amazed at the picture.  They loved it immensely.  I gave the painting to my Grandma Aldrich, her second eldest daughter.  And it got put away in a closet at the farmhouse.  It made my grandma too sad to look at every day.  So the actual painting is still in a closet in Iowa.

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There were, of course, numerous students that made my life a living heck, especially during my early years as a teacher.  But I was one of those unusual teachers (possibly insane teachers) who learned to love the bad kids.  Love/hate relationships tend to endure in your memory almost as long as the loving ones.  I was always able to pull the good out of certain kids… at least in portraits of them.

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When kids pose for pictures, they are not usually patient enough to sit for a portrait artist.  I learned early on to work from photographs, though it has the disadvantage of being only two-dimensional.  Sometimes you have to cartoonify the subject to get the real essence of the person you are capturing in artiness.

But I can’t get to the point of this essay without acknowledging the fact that any artist who tries to make a portrait, is not a camera.  The artist has to put down on paper or canvas what he sees in his own head.  That means the work of art is filtered through the artist’s goofy brain and is transformed by all his quirks and abnormalities.  Therefore any work of art, including a portrait that looks like its subject, is really a picture of the artist himself.  So, I guess I owe you some self portraits to compare.

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Yeah, that’s me at 10… so what?

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October 9, 2016 · 4:57 pm

Think Big, Think a Little…

When I feel like I am losing my battle with six incurable diseases, I often fight back against the depression by doing some big-picture thinking.  How does one little insignificant speck of carbon-based lifeform living on an apparently doomed planet fit into the vast over-all thing that is the universe?  Well, I can shift my point of view from the macro to the micro.  To the tiny little liver cell that just split off an older cell, the great big organism that is me is rather a big deal.  To the tiny germinating thought in my brain that will evolve into this essay, the collection of thoughts and experiences that is my mind and soul are a matter of life and death.  What does it all mean, anyway?  What value does it all have?

I have been a public school teacher who touched more than 2000 lives in my time.  I invented moose bowling.  I have written and published more than one novel.  I have somehow managed to reproduce and father three beautiful children in spite of my many flaws and geek-o-riffic tendencies.  I have achieved success in so many ways.  Even if it all ends in the next hour, it will be okay.  I will continue to resonate through this little world in one way or another for quite some time.  I have affected this world for both good and ill, but mostly for good, and that affects the solar system too because I have been a part of it… and the Orion Spur of the Saggitarius Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy too because I have been a part of it… and the local cluster of galaxies… and probably even the realms beyond that.

To paraphrase The Desiderata ; “I am a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, I have a right to be here.”

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Yes, some days when I don’t feel well, I live here… my house and my neighborhood.

So, Lord, this is not about regret or guilt or longing or pain.  This is about celebration.  It is good to exist.  Thank you for every day of life I have ever had.

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