In the Outhouse (a poem by a terrible poet)
So, here I sit for a while to ponder,
While I’m taking care of needs down yonder.
I read the paper’s news-less ruses.
And think that here, at least, the thing has uses.
Category Archives: humor
What Are You Reading, Mickey?
Well, I have a thing for collecting old books. This one is 100 years old. It is a modern edition, though, re-published in 2003.
Here’s my Goodreads review;
| This book is an ancient treasure in many ways, being now more than 100 years old. The illustrations by John O’Neill, too, have a very antique charm. The book is a little short on plot. Dorothy wanders off from the Kansas farm, meets the hobo Shaggy Man, and Button Bright, one of the stupidest little boys in literature. They meet old friends along the way; Jack Pumpkinhead, H.M. Wogglebug T.E., the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, the Hungry Tiger, Tik Tok the mechanical man, Billina the Talking Yellow Chicken, and the living Sawhorse. And they all end the story at Princess Ozma”s birthday party where Santa Claus is the favorite guest. This is a potboiler novel for Baum, obviously written only because the readers all begged for it, and it has a lot in it to be enjoyed by true fans of Oz, but not much in the way of suspense or excitement. It can easily be summed up in the words of Button Bright, “I don’t know,” which he says in answer to every question. |
I find the illustrations more compelling than the story itself, but I have to admit that the story itself is incredibly visual.
I love this book, even though I don’t respect it much as a storyteller myself. But it is the fourth Oz book I have read since childhood. And it isn’t because of the story. Frank L. Baum is a genius at creating loveable and memorable characters. And these illustrations are wonderful. The Shaggy Man with the head of a donkey? Absolutely fabulous! You can’t beat that. (Well, you can. But whether he’s a donkey or a man, it’s still a crime. )
Filed under book reports, book review, humor, Uncategorized
Blogging Advice
The only advice I am actually qualified to give here is… don’t take any blogging advice from me as worth more than diddly-squoot.
That being said, my blog views are going up amazingly this year. I am followed by readers all over the world, and some of them actually read my blog regularly, rather than just looking at the pictures and occasionally hitting the like button.
I have not yet, however, learned to throw the moose. I started this blog in order to promote my published writing. I now have twenty-five published books available on Amazon. I made $45.00 in royalties during 2025 so far. So, as a marketing ploy, it has been a relative failure.
But as a tool in my writing life, here are some things I definitely count as benefits;
Writing a blog post every day makes the ideas flow more easily and does away with any threat of writer’s block. I have also developed a backlog of good posts that I can repost to new viewers and readers.
Writing every day is practice and it makes me a better writer.
I have learned how to engage with an actual audience.
I am able to try out various writing ideas without worrying about success or failure.
So, all of these things add value and keep me at this blogging thing, which didn’t exist in my early life when I was planning to become a writer as I left teaching.
If you are tempted to make the huge mistake of following my advice and emulating me, I would warn you, I do not make a living as a writer, and I never will. I am a writer in the same way I am a diabetic. I can’t help it. I wouldn’t change it even if it were possible. I have a body of work that I intend to continue to build up until I am no more. The creation of it is a necessity of my existence. And I certainly don’t regret a single syllable, though what happens to it when I am gone is not important to me in any way that matters. I hope my children will keep it as a legacy, but I only do it because it shapes the story of my life.
And so, I continue to throw meese (or mooses… or moosi… or whatever the hell the funniest plural of “moose” is) and continue not knocking down any pins.
Filed under blog posting, humor, Paffooney, Uncategorized, writing, writing teacher
Hidden Kingdom (Chapter 1 Complete)
Filed under comic strips, fairies, Hidden Kingdom, humor, Paffooney
Elsie the Cow
I was a boy back when the milk man still came around in his blue-and-white panel truck delivering bottles of milk with Elsie the Cow on them. I don’t remember clearly because I was only 4 years old back when I first became aware of being a boy in this world instead of being something else living somewhere else.
There were many things I didn’t know or understand back then. But one thing I did know was that I loved Elsie the Cow. And why would a farm boy love a cartoon cow? There were many not-so-sensible reasons.
For one thing, Elsie the Cow reminded me of June Lockhart, Lassie’s mom, and the mom from Lost in Space.
It may be that June Lockhart’s eyes reminded me of Elsie’s, being large, soulful eyes with long black eyelashes. It may be that she starred in a TV commercial for Borden’s milk in which Elsie winked at me at the end of the commercial.
Or maybe it was because Elsie had calves and was a mom. And June Lockhart was Lassie’s mom and the mom of Will Robinson, so I associated both of them with my mom, and thus with each other.
Elsie gave you milk to drink and always took care of you that way. Milk was good for you, after all. My own mom was a registered nurse. So they were alike in that way, too.
And she was constantly defending you against the bulls in your life. She stood up to Elmer to protect her daughter more than once. Of course, her son was usually guilty of whatever he was accused of, but she still loved him and kept Elmer from making his “hamburger” threats a reality.
And you can see in numerous ad illustrations that Elsie’s family were basically nudists. Although she often wore an apron, she was bare otherwise. And though her daughter often wore skirts and her son wore shorts, Elmer was always naked. And that didn’t surprise me, because no cow I knew from the farm wore clothes either. From very early in my life I was always fascinated by nakedness, and I would’ve become a nudist as a youngster if it hadn’t been soundly discouraged by family and society in general.
So there are many reasons why I have always loved Elsie the Cow. And it all boils down to the love of drinking milk and that appealing cartoon character who constantly asks you to drink more.
I Love to Laugh
“Mickey, why can’t you be more serious, the way smart people are?”
“Well, now, my dear, I think I take humor very seriously.”
“How can you say that? You never seem to be serious for more than a few seconds in a row.”
“I can say it in a high, squeaky, falsetto voice so I sound like Mickey Mouse.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“I can also burp it… Well, maybe not so much since I was in junior high.”
“I distinctly remember getting in trouble in Mrs. Mennenga’s third grade class in school for pantomiming pulling my beating heart out of my chest and accidentally dropping it on the floor. She lectured me about being more studious. But I made Alicia sitting in the row beside me laugh. It was all worth it. And the teacher was right. I don’t remember anything from the lesson on adding fractions we were supposed to be doing. But I remember that laugh. It is one precious piece of the golden treasure I put in the treasure chest of memories I keep stored in my heart.”
“I always listened to the words Groucho Marx was saying, even though he said them awfully fast and sneaky-like. I listened to the words. Other characters didn’t seem to listen to him. He didn’t seem to listen to them. Yet, how could he respond like he did if he really wasn’t listening? In his answers were always golden bits of wisdom. Other people laughed at his jokes when the laugh track told them to. I laughed when I understood the wisdom.”
“Laughing is a way of showing understanding. Laughing is a way of making yourself feel good. Laughing is good for your brain and your heart and your soul. So, I want to laugh more. I need to laugh more. I love to laugh.”
Healing From A Fatal Wound
This is a repost from 2016, the beginnings of terrible times under a pumpkinhead president.
The Trumpkins and Trolls won the battle and are now busy eating their prisoners… along with the puppies and kittens for dessert. And as far as I can see, the war is over. We had a chance with the Paris Climate Accords to repair the damage to the life of this planet, even though it was a very eleventh-hour plan to avert the end of life on Earth. The Trolls and Trumpkins are peeing on that fence too, shorting it out and preventing it from saving us from being eaten by the heat-wolves of corporate polluters.
I myself wasn’t expecting to live through another decade in any case, but now, I fear the lives of my children and grandchildren will be cut short as well. You can’t poop where you eat on a regular basis and expect not to get sick and die. I predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series because they stole key talent from the Cardinals and had a young, rising club to add them to. I got that one right. I predicted that Trump would win the presidency because I know a lot of the Trump-voter kind of former middle-class white people who are seriously in financial and existential pain, and I knew who they were going to blame it on. If I am right about this last thing too, then we are all doomed. 
“Jeez, Mickey! You don’t call that humor, do you?”
Well, I guess I do, because humor comes from being able to laugh at the darkness and make fun of the dumpy-lumpy lumbering bears of bad fortune that are about to eat you. We are going to have a laugh or two before the end at the expense of Trumpkins and Trolls because they make world-shaking decisions based on faith in false facts. The irony and stupidity of it all is a very laughable absurdity that will build BS mountains taller than Everest. And those mountains will collapse upon them, burying them in poop. Never mind that we will also be buried. They brought it on themselves by the choices they made. Seeing them get their comeuppance has to be worth a laugh or two.
I have pretty much let Will Rogers speak to this current election result through the memes I have chosen to accompany this gloomy-doomy essay. I think it is significant that wisdom from a hundred years ago still applies so completely to the politics of today. With democracy and elections we get what we deserve… not what we want. We need to change to face the future, if we even get to have one. But the past clearly shows that we haven’t learned our lessons very well. I guess there’s nothing left to do but laugh about it… and try to love each other a little better before the bitter end.
Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, irony, Liberal ideas, politics, self pity
Writing Every Day
These are volumes 3 & 4 of my daily journal that I have kept since the 1980s.
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 mid-90s when I began to put all my noodling into computer files instead of notebooks. I have 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 69 years old and have been writing every day for 51 years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Beyer Brand
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.”
Filed under autobiography, doodle, family, humor, Paffooney
Catch a Falling Star 
Why Mickey Writes
If you are wondering, “How in the Heck can Mickey write nonsense like that essay he wrote yesterday?”, then please be aware that Mickey is pondering that same question.
Seriously, why would a writer publish personal thoughts and allude to personal tragedies? Especially when they are about things that once upon a time nearly killed him? (Please note that when Mickey starts a sentence with “Seriously” it is probably about to lead to a joke, the same way as when Trump says, “Believe me” we should assume he is telling a lie and knows it.)
The answer is simply, writers write stuff. They have to. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be writers.
It is really not something to do to earn fame and fortune. Fame and fortune happen to rare individuals like J. K. Rowling and Steven King… and even Stephanie Meyer, to prove that it is totally random and not based on actual writing talent… except for sometimes.
You write to get your head right about bad things that happen in life. You find that factor in Mark Twain whose infant son died, as well as most of the rest of his family, before him, forcing him to face survivor’s guilt and the notion that life is random and death does not come for you based on any kind of merit system. Charles Dickens wrote about the foibles of his father, on whom he based the David Copperfield character Wilkins Micawber, a man who was overly optimistic and constantly landing in debtor’s prison because of it. He also wrote in his stories about the women he truly loved (who were not, it seems, his wife) one of whom died in his arms while yet a teenager. Dickens’ amused take on the innate foolishness of mankind gave him a chance to powerfully depict great tragedies both large (as in a Tale of Two Cities) and small (as in Oliver Twist). I wrote yesterday’s post based on the connection between the nudity I write about in novels and my own traumatic assault when I was only ten.
You write because you have wisdom, an inner personal truth, that you are convinced needs to be crystallized in words and written down on paper. It isn’t necessarily real truth. Lots of idiots write things and post them in newspapers, blogs, and even books. And it is often true that their inner personal truth is complete hogwash. (But, hey, at least the hogs are cleaner that way.) Still, your wisdom is your own, and it is true for you even if some idiot like Mickey reads it and thinks it is only fit for cleaning hogs.
And you truly do have to write. If I did not write my stupid, worthless novels, all the hundreds of characters in my head would get mad and start kicking the pillars that hold up the structures in my head. I do have structures in my head. My mind is organized in boxes that contain specifically sorted ideas and stories and notions. It is not a festering stew pot where everything is mixed together and either bubbling or boiling with hot places or coagulating in the cold corners. (That is how I picture Donald Trump’s mind. It is certainly not an empty desert like many people think, because deserts don’t explode all over Twitter early in the morning like the stew pot metaphor obviously would.)
And so, I have done it again. I have set down my 500+ words for today and made a complete fool of myself. And why do I do it? Because Mickey is a writer, and so, Mickey writes stuff.
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Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, humor, insight, irony, Mark Twain, Mickey, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wisdom, writing humor
Tagged as goofy thoughts on writing