I told you recently that I believe that opinions are like onions. Consuming them is good for you. It cleans out the system. It turns little imperfections and poisons into gas and leads you to expel them. Yes, I mean opinions from my stupid old head come out of my mouth in the same way that digested onions form into gas and come out the other end. And keeping them inside (and safe from being argued or made fun of) can poison you and make you insane. So, I need to plant some onions… err, I mean opinions… and you should feel free to sample the stuff in this onion garden and fart back in my general direction if you feel the need.
It would be good if you don’t throw bricks.
Donald Trump is going to be our President until he dies. I am not saying I want that to happen. I didn’t want Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush to be President for life either. But bad things happen with the inevitability of thunderstorms and flu season. Fox News has been spreading poisonous onion gas for thirty years as a propaganda service to the corporate masters, and they will continue to provide us only with business-and-crime-friendly leaders who will wring every last penny’s worth of value out of our increasingly valueless souls.
Human civilization is doomed. We have failed to deal with human-induced climate change for too long, and now the air is turning into methane and carbon dioxide (that’s right, fart gas!), and only the people wealthy enough to create totally sealed environments will survive. We have the innate capacity to solve problems and overcome disaster, but we won’t because President Trump doesn’t want it to be that way. And he says that climate change is a hoax anyway. I think he has held onion gas inside long enough to pickle all his brain cells.
The Roswell incident was real, and there are aliens living on planet Earth. They will not save us from ourselves, however. President Trump won’t allow that. After all, they are immigrants.
Doctor Who is the best thing that the British ever gave us. It combines science fiction, fantasy, a goofy sense of humor, and serious charm into a show that can make us think about things in a new way and make us see things from a different point of view. Donald Trump won’t allow him to save us either, even though Great Britain is our very tremendous ally. Foreigners keep us from winning economically.
Eating onions is better for you than eating cheese. Onions get the gas out. Cheese makes you constipated. The French call cheese “fromage”, but that doesn’t make it any better. Cheese by any other name still can stink like Limburger.
“Once it reaches three months, the cheese produces its notorious smell because of the bacterium used to ferment Limburger cheese and many other smear-ripened cheeses. This is Brevibacterium linens, the same one found on human skin that is partially responsible for body odor, particularly foot odor.”
So I have now planted some real stinkers in the onion garden. In a just and reasonable world, the debate would now begin. Refute, if you will, dear reader, for that is the very reason that opinions exist, to start a debate. You cannot clear the air of fart gas without at least waving your hand at it.
I admit it. Even though I collect pictures of sunrises to glory in the fact that I still have another day of life in this world, I rarely snap a picture of the cloudless sunrise. It is very possible that this has something to do with what ultimately gives life value and makes it worthwhile to live one more day.
If there is no pattern, no color-changes, no contrast, no variation… then why bother? And this doesn’t only apply to living your life. It applies to taking pictures of the sky too. Solid blue or solid yellow are about as interesting as a minimalist painting. (Have you ever seen the big beige squares and red squares that fill entire walls of the Dallas Art Museum? Like a picture of a polar bear in a fierce blizzard or an extreme close-up of the side of a tomato.)
Yes, sunshine and happiness are all well and good… but you don’t get a satisfactory skyscape without some clouds in it. In fact, rain clouds provide the most fascinating patterns and colors. What would the picture be without a little drama splashed here and there to make a center of interest or a counterpoint to the happy ending? They say that variety is the spice of life. And when they say that they probably mean cayenne pepper rather than parsley or oregano. If that’s not what they mean, then why the hell did we bring food into the discussion?
So, I am thinking, there have to be clouds. (Notice, I said “clouds”, not “clowns”, because… according to the song, there “oughtto be clowns”, not “have to be clowns”.)
It is true that clouds can mean sadness… that the rain is coming, that your vision is obscured, that something has come between you and God’s eye. But without clouds, the sky would be plain and boring. Better to burn bright and explode in a short amount of time than to linger over a plain pale blue.
Once I was finally able to scan pictures again, I did some scanning of old pictures that only got the camera treatment before on my blog.
But why stop a drawing at just the pen and ink, when there is potential for so much more?
So, I took the Microsoft generic paint program and my generic photo editor to not only this pen and ink of the Jungle Princess, but a few other pictures as well.
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This is what she looks like after being attacked with color by my arthritic old hands. (There was a day when I could have handled intricate details more cleverly, but that was many, many days ago.
Anyway, I have added new dimensions to Leopard Girrrl with color.
Now I need to add more complications to the basic story of the picture.
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Here is an older pen and ink.
This is Dorin Dobbs, one of the dueling plotlines’ protagonists from the novel Catch a Falling Star.
But, of course, Dorin is a more complex character than this old black and white.
So, color needs to be added.
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I had this one actually already painted in…
But in order to use it in this project, I needed to enlarge it to make it fit into the other picture.
Making this unlikely pair work together in a story is one of the challenges of doing surrealist stories. They have to be grounded in realism, but also bring jarringly different things together. Like the Jungle Princess going on an adventure with Norwall’s Lying King.
But, putting these two together is still not enough. Let’s try some other things.
The Jungle Princess together with Tomboy Dilsey Murphy is an unusual pairing.
Or what about the blue faun from Laughing Blue?
Or even Annette Funicello?
Ridiculous, I know. But don’t they look like satin sofa paintings?
Yes, I am saying the world I live in is a low-budget commercial movie made without literary or artistic pretensions. You know, the kind where movie makers learn their craft, taking big risks with smaller consequences, and making the world of their picture reflect their heart rather than the producer’s lust for money.
Mostly what I am talking about are the movies I remember from late-night Saturday TV in black and white (regardless of whether or not the movie was made in Technicolor) and the less-risky as well as more-likely-good Saturday matinees on Channel 3. Movies made in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. They were perfect, of course, for the forbidden Midnight Movie on the show called Gravesend Manor. I had to sneak downstairs to watch it on Saturday nights with the volume turned way down low. (Not that Mom and Dad didn’t know. Well, maybe they didn’t know how many of those I watched completely naked… maybe.)
I watched this one when I was twelve, late night on an October Saturday. I had a bed-sheet with me to pull over my head at the scariest parts. Frankenstein was a crashed astronaut brought back to life by the magic of space radiation. He was uglier than sin, but still the hero of the movie, saving the Earth from invading guys in gorilla suits and scary masks (none of which looked like the movie poster.)
This one, starring James Whitmore, a really good B-Movie actor, was about giant ants coming up from the sewers and the underground to eat the city.
I would end up watching it again twenty years later when I was wearing clothes and not alone in the dark house lit only by a black-and-white TV screen.
I realized on the second viewing that it was actually a pretty good movie in spite of cheesy special effects. And I realized too that I had learned from James Whitmore’s hero character that, in times of crisis, you have to run towards the trouble rather than away from it, a thing that I used several times in my teaching career with fights and tornadoes and even rattlesnakes visiting the school campus looking to eat a seventh-grader or something (though it was a bad idea for the snake even if it had been successful.)
This one, of course, taught me that monsters liked to carry off pretty girls in bikinis. And not just on the poster, either. But it was the hero that got the girl, not the monster. This movie taught me that it sucks to be the monster. Though it also taught me that it was a good movie to take your pajamas off for and watch naked when you are thirteen.
But not all B-movies had to be watched late night on Saturdays. This movie was one of the first ones that I got to go to the movie theater to see by myself. (My sisters and little brother were still too young and got nightmares too easily to see such a movie.) It came out when I was in my teens and Mom and Dad began thinking of me as an adult once… or even possibly twice in a month.
And not all B-movies were monster movies, gangster movies, and westerns. Some, like a lot of Danny Kaye’s movies, were movies my Dad and my grandparents were more than happy to watch with me. I saw this one in both black-and-white and color. And I learned from this that it was okay to take advantage of happy accidents, like a case of mistaken identity, and using your wits, your creative singing ability, and your inexplicable good luck to win the day for everybody but the bad guys armed only with your good sense of humor.
And some of the best movies I have ever seen, judging by what I learned about movies as literature from Professor Loring Silet in his Modern Film Class at Iowa State University, are by their nature B-movies.
I am using movie posters in this blog post only from movies I have personally seen. (And I admit that not all of them are strictly “good” movies according to Professor Silet, but I like them all.)
Feel free to tell me in the comments if you have seen any of these movies yourself. I am open to all opinions, comments, and confessions.
This one is based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
I saw this one in college. You had to be 18 at the time to even buy a ticket.
I actually think that this is one of the best movies ever made. It will always make my own personal top-ten list.
I live in a B-movie world. The production values around me are not the top-dollar ones. But the stories are entertaining. The real-life heroes still run towards the problem. And it still sucks to be the monster. But it has always been worth the price of the ticket. And during my time on Earth here, even in 2020, I plan on staying till the end of the picture. I go nowhere until I see the Best Boy’s name in the end credits. And maybe not even then.
It is said by somebody who wasn’t basically me that any time an artist draws a picture of someone, or paints a picture of someone, or twizzles a twizzle-snoot of someone… they are basically making a picture of themselves.
So, this Paffooney that I paffooned of a purple mouse in a Don Martin-esque style, is supposed to be Mickey the cartoonist. And Mickey is supposedly, basically me.
And here I am as Muck Man, the superhero. It is me because the super power he has is his horrible, non-adorable, and unrelenting stench. The horrible smell of him renders villains and bad people unconscious or worse… sometimes straight to the hearse. And using his olfactory assaults on evil as a way to make something terrible into something with a -someness of awe, makes him indubitably, indelibly basically me.
“Long Ago It Might Have Been”
And here is a picture of a boy who might’ve been my son if only I had been given enough good sense to fall in love with that first blond young lady who first had thoughts about making babies with me. I didn’t. I’m stupid. And now she has only girls. That makes it a picture too of basically me.
And this little not-me was me all along, and as the boy who sees colors, it’s really not wrong. Synesthetic they call it in a name that’s not long, but is resoundingly deep like the words of a song.
And you might argue this one and say that it’s true… “This one is too pretty to be a picture of you.” But you would be wrong on this basis, you see…
The monster inside me is basically me
And here I am all magic and purple, and I just blew the rhyme again, so this isn’t another danged verse. I drew this picture of Milt Morgan from an old school picture of me.
I often say the character in the stories is based on the Other Mike, the other boy I grew up with who was named Mike in my little home town.
But he thought like me, he acted a lot like me. He even looked like me, at least a little bit. So, if I am portraying him, I am depicting basically me.
And this is the naked me, as a nudist back in childhood in Rowan, Iowa, which I never was… not like this… but still am. Because I am a writer. And writers always write about their naked selves, showing the whole world what saner and more prudish people keep secret. If they were truly smart and wanted to keep their secrets to themselves, artists would never draw or paint or write about or twizzle about themselves. In fact, they would make no art at all.
This is a repost of a classic bit… A post written by my dog using her tongue to lick-type. I offer this now nostalgically because she left us behind for dog heaven a year ago.
Okay, like, my name is Jade Beyer. I know I look like a dog, but my family lets me be a people sometimes. They let me eat enough people food from their table to turn into one of them. You know, like, all fat and unhealthy and some stuff. So, since Mickey is being lazy today, he said I could write his blog for him. It won’t be very long because it is taking forever to pick out the right keys with my nose. And my nose is bif… I mean big enough to hit the wrong key sometimes. So I have to edif caretully and ofren.
My family does a lot of funny stuff I can tell about. Like how they pee. They go in my extra drinking places. You know, the white things with the extra funky tasting water. Why are you not laughing about that? Don’t you get it? The house is full of carpets where they could pee and mark their territory with their scents. But they would rather just pee where I drink. I don’t get it. And why is Mickey yelling at me that I can’t write about that? I just did, didn’t I?
But besides that I can tell you about my Momma. Mickey is my Momma. Why do I say that even though Mickey is a man? Well, when I was a wee little puppy and my family found me in the street, Mickey was the first one to pick me up and hold me. He was the first one to feed me. He says I must have “imprinted” on him as baby animals sometimes do. And that’s why he’s my Momma. I love him best. Even when he is grumpy and mad at me. I chew up a lot of his stuff because it smells like him and I love him so very much.
I am writing this today because Mickey is busy shaving off his face fur. He found some old pictures of himself for yesterday’s post, and it made him wonder if he could look anything like that again. I tried to chew the old pictures so I could love them even better, but he just got mad at me and swatted me on the ears. He said I could show you the old pictures, and not eat them. So here they are before the temptation gets to me;
Wasn’t he a goofy-looking kid? I like him better with glasses. I tasted his glasses once, but not the ones in the picture, the ones he is wearing now. His face doesn’t look anything like the third grade pictures any more. I would very much like to lick that little-boy face with the same tongue I use to lick my own butt, but Mickey says he’s glad I can’t because that kid was dumb enough to let a dog lick his face. Apparently when people get older, you just can’t lick them as much. It just makes them grumpy.
Chances are… I could wear a foolish grin, like a Johnny Mathis Moon in the sky…
I could waltz… all alone in a dark room, never seizing on the chances to fly…
But there’s a time… meant to let the summer in…
And love songs… all make me wonder… Why?
Silly, I know. But silly and surreal is how I go, how I deal with the time. A song in my head leads to rhythm and metaphor and rhyme. And it takes me from old winter and the waning of the moon… to the silly month of June… And my dancing shoes were never quite so spry.
Chances are… if you really read this, you will know I am depressed.
My life is all unfairly messed.
And I barely can get dressed…
To go tripping cross the floor, dancing awkwardly toward the door, ’cause I’m in need of so much more.
But in a poem I find it… the very reason that I rhymed it… like the crooning song that’s stuck in my old head…
I will catch it, and I’ll bind it, like a fool who hopes you’ll find it, and the treasure will be revealed before we’re dead…
Chances are… that you hear that silly tune, as it reels across the page in silent spread. And the song will slowly stop, as I dance a final hop, and the answer is brightly shining in my head.
What does that even mean, that silly little two-line poem I wrote twenty years ago? Am I not old enough to know better than to create a snippet loaded with goofy contradictions? Apparently not. But I am old enough to deliver the past. I have been around long enough that I remember when President Kennedy was assassinated. I saw Neil Armstrong take that “small step for man” on the surface of the moon. I have learned a number of lessons from the past. And as a writer, I can deliver those lessons in the form of stories. I was born in a different century. I have been around for more than half of one… approaching two thirds. I have collected all kinds of wonderful things in my goofy old brain. And make no doubt about it, with six incurable diseases and being a cancer survivor since 1983, my Sun is about the set. So, I have a mission, to open the eyes of people who are too foolish to avoid listening to what I have to say, or to read what I have written.
I saw The Sound of Music starring Julie Andrews in the Cecil Theater in Mason City, Iowa in 1965 when I was not yet ten years old. I heard the song My Favorite Things for the very first time on the old black and white Motorola TV set in the clip I posted at the start of this post. Kukla, Fran, and Ollie was a puppet show I never missed on Saturdays if I could help it. In a world before video games and computers and even color TV, kids still had priorities. And my world was definitely a world of imagination.
Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Moose
Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, and then as Daniel Boone
Paul Winchell with Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff
So, what kind of knucklehead must I be to think younger folks would want to know about any of this stuff from the time of dinosaurs and black-and-white TV? I write books that are basically genre-breakers and about way too many different things to make sense to adults. As a result, I classify myself as a Young Adult novelist, a writer for children… but not the beginning reader kind, or the early chapter-book kind… the kind like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Light in the Forest, or Dicey’s Song. I write books about what it was like to be a kid in the past… the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s… last century. And I have some knowledge and expertise in this area because I was one of those teachers during that time period that got to know the kids in my classes. I made the horrifying mistake of actually talking to kids, asking them about their lives, and listening to their answers. I talked about all manner of things with all manner of kids… brilliant things and stupid things… with dumb kids, smart kids, smelly kids, charming kids, and the kids everybody else hated. You know… I did all the stupid mistakes that teachers who have no earthly idea how to do discipline would do, and got those kids to learn to behave at least halfway like human beings by being somebody they trusted and respected and… on rare occasions… believed. Right now I am working on Snow Babies. It is set in 1984. And I hope to be good enough of a Sunset Man to be able to deliver it to the future.
Today’s essay was inspired by Annette Funicello’s Facebook page. I was marveling at how a teen idol and Disney child star could have such a large following and leave such large footprints on social media when she is not only all grown out of her child-stardom, but is actually quite dead. I, however, who am technically still alive, work very very hard at this author-self-promotion-thingy, and I hardly make any headway at all in the ocean of the internet. So, I did what I always do when faced with the imponderables of this writing life. I drew a picture. I drew Annette naked. Well, that’s not entirely accurate either. I put clothes on her because, well, young-adult-genre authors don’t always have to think like a teenager.
You see, I am not mad at Annette. And my hormones no longer control the other things that once made me deeply regret the fact that Disney never let Annette appear in movies in a bikini, even in the movies that were not Disney movies. When you’re twelve, there are different priorities than when you are 68. Hormones don’t do all of my thinking any more… at least, that’s what I tell my wife.
And part of what I still love most about Annette is the music. The Mickey Mouse Club was always about talented kids. They could sing and dance and play the drums, and they were as easily professional quality as many of the adults… and cuter to boot. Talented children have been a significant portion of my life. As an English teacher in middle school, I taught kids that were Annette’s MMC age. I taught them how to write and how to read, and occasionally I had to find other talents to promote and help those kids become winners in the great game of life. And, it may be cruel to say it bluntly, but some kids are downright ugly. Not merely ugly in terms of what they looked like, but how they acted and how they thought and how they felt about things. Racism runs deeply through children who’ve been taught thoroughly by parents before the teacher even meets them. Sometimes you have to dig around really deeply in the black pits of their personalities to find something bright and shiny enough to put the spotlight on. But it is always worth it. ALL CHILDREN HAVE TREASURE BURIED INSIDE THEM. And it deeply hurts that too many adults in every community can’t be bothered to dig for it.
I grafted a background on my picture of Annette to stress the fact that she is not naked in my picture. She was a very public figure and a good portion of her personal treasure was that screen personality that showed through and sparkled in every role. My favorite Annette piece is the movie Babes in Toyland, which I saw for the first time at Grandma Beyer’s house in Mason City on her color TV. The songs from that movie still play in my dreams.
Catch a Falling Star 
Planting Some Onions
I told you recently that I believe that opinions are like onions. Consuming them is good for you. It cleans out the system. It turns little imperfections and poisons into gas and leads you to expel them. Yes, I mean opinions from my stupid old head come out of my mouth in the same way that digested onions form into gas and come out the other end. And keeping them inside (and safe from being argued or made fun of) can poison you and make you insane. So, I need to plant some onions… err, I mean opinions… and you should feel free to sample the stuff in this onion garden and fart back in my general direction if you feel the need.
It would be good if you don’t throw bricks.
Limburger – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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