Some days I feel loony… April first comes to mind
And I can be quite cartoony… It really helps to unwind
So I’ll make some Paffooney… and draw it while blind
And grow really prunie… old wrinkles unwind
And magic up some moony… to leave all worry behind.
April Fools! from an old fool.
Filed under foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, magic, Paffooney, poetry, Uncategorized
I am fascinated by the darker alleyways in the city of human thought. I love monster movies, those love-story tragedies where the monster is us with one or more of our basic flaws pumped up to the absolute maximum. We are all capable of becoming a monster. There are consequences to every hurtful thing we have ever thought or ever said to other people, especially the people we love.
The monster movies I love most are the old black and whites from Universal Studios. But I can also seriously enjoy the monsters of Hammer Films, and even the more recent remakes of Frankenstein, The Mummy, and their silly sequels. I am fascinated by the Creature from the Black Lagoon because it is the story of a total outsider who is so different he can’t really communicate with the others he meets. All he can do is grab the one that attracts him and strike out at those who cause him pain. It occurs to me that I am him when having an argument with my wife. Sometimes I am too intelligent and culturally different to talk to her and be understood. She gets mad at me and lashes out at me because when I am trying to make peace she thinks I am somehow making fun of her. How do you convince someone of anything if they always think your heartfelt apology is actually sarcasm? How do you share what’s in your heart if they are always looking for double meaning in everything you say?
But other people can change into monsters too. I am not the only one. People who are bitter about how their life seems to have turned out can strike out at others like the Mummy. Wrapped in restrictive wrappings of what they think should have been, and denied the eternal rest of satisfaction over the way the past treated them, they attack with intent to injure, even just with hurtful words, because their past sins have animated them with a need to change the past, though the time is long past when they should’ve let their bitterness simply die away.
And we might all of us fall into the trap of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, who never asked to be made. He finds life to be an unmanageable nightmare with others constantly assaulting him with the pitchforks and torches of their fear and rejection.
But the thing about monster movies… at least the good ones, is that you can watch it to the end and see the monster defeated. We realize in the end that the monster never really wins. He can defeat the monstrous qualities within himself and stop himself. Or the antidote to what ails him is discovered (as Luke did with Darth Vader). Or we can see him put to his justifiable end and remember that if we should see those qualities within ourselves, we should do something about it so that we do not suffer the same fate. Or, better yet, we can learn to laugh at the monstrosity that is every-day life. Humor is a panacea for most of life’s ills.
A bust of Herman Munster
Filed under autobiography, humor, monsters, satire, surrealism, Uncategorized
Signs, by their very nature, are powerful. They give you direction. They tell you what to do… and what not to do. They control you and control others.
Richard and Victor Martin were sitting at the table in front of the stage they had just finished constructing at the center of Martin’s Bar and Grille. It had turned into something of a gift from heaven to have the young cousin from France living with them. When he put the clown paint on his face and sang karaoke, people came from several counties away to hear it. They also brought their money and their thirst with them. The brothers had labored for two days to build the stage and make better use of the unexpected gift that came with taking in their uncle’s orphaned son.
“Have a beer, brother. You have earned it,” said Richard to his older brother.
“Generous of you. Especially since it is my bar and my beer to begin with.”
At that moment they both noticed the balding young man standing at the bar with his zebra hand puppet on his right arm.
“We’re not open for business yet,” Victor said. “The bar is still closed.”
“You are going to have give the dummy here a Kewpie Cola,” said the zebra puppet. “We can’t do anything but stand here and look at the sign until you give him one. He does have enough money to pay for it.”
“What? What are you talking about?” asked Victor. He looked at the young man, Murray Dawes, standing and looking up at the antique Kewpie Cola sign that Victor had hung as a decoration over the bar.
“It says, Drink a Kewpie Cola Today!” the puppet said. Victor did not see the young man’s mouth moving, but he had heard the boy had a gift for ventriloquism even though he was autistic and hardly ever spoke. “Murray always does everything signs tell him to. His mother told him signs tell us to do things for our own good.”
“So if he reads it on a sign he has to do it?” asked Richard.
“Yes,” said the zebra puppet. “You wouldn’t believe how long we have to stand and wait in front of that stop sign on the west end of Main Street. Every time we pass it he has to do what it says until he feels safe.”
Both men laughed.
“The fool’s mother constantly puts a sign on his bedroom door that says, Clean your room! So he has to do it every day before he can do anything else. One day he decided he didn’t want to clean his room that day, and he made a sign himself. It said, Don’t put any signs on this door! He put it on his bedroom door. But then he read what it said and had to take it down again.”
“That’s pretty funny,” said Richard.
“Yeah,” said Victor. “Do you think you could do that ventriloquist thing on stage? We’d pay you to do it for our customers.”
“You have to understand,” said the zebra puppet, “that Murray is very shy. He won’t be very talkative on stage. I would have to do all of the talking.”
“If you can do it and be that funny, I think it will work,” said Victor.
“You have a deal. But every time we get on the stage, you will have to put a sign on the wall for Murray to read.”
“What would the sign have to say? Break a leg or something?”
“Not unless you want him to fall down and hurt himself. It should only say, Believe in yourself… and be funny!”
Filed under humor, Paffooney, satire, strange and wonderful ideas about life
The flowers have begun to bloom in Texas. The leaves are budding on all the trees who aren’t live oaks. The live oaks are shedding their winter coats, and there-in lies my divided feelings about the end of winter. I am allergic to tree pollen, mold spores, and the grungy green gungus that goes with re-awakening life. This weekend I raked live oak leaves and cut the grass in the yard. So today, I am paying the price. I have an arthritic back-ache. I have an allergic-reaction headache. I hurt a lot and I can’t breathe. But I got to see the fresh blooms of another growing season. A little pain… and then renewal.
Filed under autobiography, feeling sorry for myself, humor, illness, photo paffoonies
Buckminster Fuller is an intellectual hero of mine. As he said in the video, if you bothered to watch it, “I was told I had to get a job and make money, but would you rather be making money, or making sense?” Bucky was always a little bit to the left of center, and basically in the farthest corner of the outfield. That’s why we depend so much on him in times like these when the ball is being hit to the warning track. (I know the world doesn’t really work on baseball metaphors any more, but my life has always been about metaphors from 1964 with the St. Louis Cardinals playing and beating the New York Yankees. Mantle was on their side, but Maris was playing for us.) You have to live in the world that fits into your own mental map of reality. And if you’ve been whacked on the side of the head one too many times… it changes the way you think. You begin to think differently.
If you don’t know who Bucky is, as you probably don’t because he revolutionized the world in the 60’s and died in the 1980’s, Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor. He is credited with the invention of the Geodesic Dome. But he was so much more than that. He wanted to build things that made better sense, in a practical sort of way, than the way we actually do them. He built geodesic homes because he felt a home should maximize space and use of materials and minimize costs and amounts of materials as well as environmental impacts. He is the one who popularized the notion of “Spaceship Earth”. He wrote and published more than thirty books, and gave us a variety of truly wise insights. He promoted the concept of synergy. He said, “Don’t fight forces, use them.” He also pointed out, “Ninety per cent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.” He was a man full of quotes useful for internet memes.
So, lets consider an example from the mixed up mind of Mickey;
Here are three dolls from the Planet of the Apes part of my doll collection. (Two different movies are represented here, the 1968 original, and the Tim Burton 2001 remake.)
The world we now live in is increasingly like the movie, The Planet of the Apes. In that film the world the astronauts set down upon is ruled by talking apes. The human beings in that film are relegated to the fields and forests where they are no more than speechless animals. Much like the Republican Party and the wealthy ruling elite of this day and age, the apes control everything and, led by Dr. Zaius (seen on the far right) reject science and evidence as a way to explain things. They rely on the rules set down by the Lawgiver in much the same way that modern day Republicans swear by the U.S. Constitution to determine the truth of all things.
Here we see the apes capturing and enslaving Marky Mark… er… Mark Wahlberg rather than Chuck Heston from the original movie.
In the original set of movies, Charleton Heston, playing the astronaut Taylor, discovers that through hatred and warring, the human beings of Earth have bombed themselves back into the stone age and enabled the evolved apes to take over. How does Mr. Heston deal with that problem? He discovers an old doomsday device and blows up the world. Chuck Heston has always approved Second Amendment solutions to modern problems, so it is no wonder that he lays waste to everything, the good and the bad. I think we can see that old orangutan-man, Donald Trump doing exactly the same things now as he runs for President, or Great Ape, or whatever…
In both the previous series, and the current remake, salvation from the rule of the monkey people comes in the form of a leader among the apes. Caesar, whether he be played by Roddy MacDowell or by Andy Serkis, is able to solve the problems of apes and men by reaching out to those of the other species, assigning them value, and ultimately doing what helps everyone to survive and live together. Diversity is power and provides a workable solution through cooperation. The forces of hatred and fear are the things that must be overcome and threaten the existence of everyone. Donald Trump needs to learn from the lesson of The Planet of the Apes, and be less like General Ursus. We need Bernie Sanders to embrace the role of Caesar and show us how we can get along with our Muslim brothers… after all, they are more like us than the apes are, and Caesar builds bridges between apes and men.
So, there you have it, my attempt to build a new model based on an old movie… or on the remake… whichever you prefer. And if that doesn’t work, well, there’s always…
I miss being a teacher. But even if I was suddenly healthy enough again to return to the classroom, I would have to think twice… or three times… or twelve times about it. I know excellent teachers who are being driven out of the education field by the demands of the job in the current educational whirlpool of death and depression. My own children are very bright and capable, but they face State of Texas mandated tests this next couple of weeks because that’s what we do in Texas, test kids and test kids and test them some more. If we don’t stress them out and make them fail on the first round of testing, there will be at least two more to get the job done. And believe me, the real reason for all the testing is to make kids fail. It sounds harsh, and like one of my loony conspiracy theories, but the Republican legislature of this State has discussed in earnest how test results prove our schools are failing, and how we must certainly need to fund more private schools and schools for profit, and stop teaching kids on the taxpayer’s dime (although they don’t really care about my dimes, only the dimes of millionaires and billionaires which we have more of in Texas than we have ever had before). Of course, these private schools they speak of will be for the children of well-to-do families, particularly white Anglo-Saxon protestant families. Public schools will be okay for everyone else, preferably built next to for-profit prisons where the public-school kids will move after graduation.
Arts and humanities-type class offerings are becoming increasingly rare. We don’t teach them to be creative any more. We have to focus on core subjects, Reading, Writing, History, Science, and Math. And not the high-level stuff in any of those areas, either. We test them on the minimum competency stuff. But we make it harder every year. Back in the 80’s it started when Governor Mark White let H. Ross Perot spearhead a school-reform drive that began with idiot-tests for teachers. The Mad Dwarf of Dallas was convinced that the biggest problem with Texas Education was incompetent teachers. But we didn’t test them on classroom management skills, or skill at motivating young learners. We took basic English tests where the teachers weeded out were mostly black and Hispanic. I helped one very gifted Science teacher pass the test which she nearly failed three times (the limit before contract non-renewal) since she was taking her teacher test in her second language, not her first. When they finally got it through their heads they were only weeding out the good teachers with test anxiety, they changed the tests to make them harder. They stopped giving life-time teaching certificates and made you prove that you were not an idiot every five years.
It was Governor George W. Bush (a Forest Gump clone with DNA mixed in from Bullwinkle the Moose and Elmer Fudd) who decided that teachers needed to be weeded by demanding that their students perform to a certain level on standardized State tests. If you watched the John Oliver video, you have a clear idea already of the value of that. We worked hard for a number of years to do better on the alphabet tests. The TAAS test became passable by most of the State, including the poorer districts, and so they replaced it with the TAKS test, a criterion-referenced test that they could provide all new and harder questions for every single year. I sat on a test review board for two years as the representative of the Cotulla District in South Texas. I got to see some of the horrendously difficult question before they were asked. There were very real cultural discriminations among those questions. Why should a Hispanic child in South Texas be required to know what “galoshes” are? And when teachers began teaching to the tests well enough to get a majority of students passing, Emperor Rick Perry, the permanent Governor of Texas after Bush, decreed we needed STAAR Tests that students had to pass in order to graduate to the next grade level. And, of course, we had to make them harder.
When I started teaching exclusively ESL kids in high school (English as a Second Language) that special population was mostly exempt from taking the alphabet tests. After all, it takes at least five years to gain proficiency in a second language even for the brightest among us, and all of those students had less than five years of practice speaking English or they weren’t qualified for the program. But scores on the TAKS and then STAAR tests were generally too high. So ESL and Special Education Students were required to take them too. And, although the passing standards were lower for ESL students than they were for regular students, the passing standards were ratcheted up every single year. And we eventually did worse than the expectation. Our ESL Department got a lot of the blame for Naaman Forest High School in Garland, Texas losing its perennial recognized school status. (We got the blame even though our scores were high enough to be rated exemplary on the sliding scale… it was actually the low socio-economic students in Math that lost us our yearly recognition… just so you know.) The paperwork nightmares I had to fill out for our ESL Department were one of the reasons my health got so bad I had to retire. Healthy teachers can’t take it any more either. We are looking at a crisis in Education in Texas. Teacher shortages in Math and Science are already apocalyptic. We are intentionally doing away with Art, Band, Chorus, and other artsy-craftsy things… things that are good for the brain and the self-esteem and the creative problem-solving abilities of students. Teaching has become a nightmare.
I hope you will take me seriously over my conspiracy-theories and lunatic teacher complaints. I have been told too often that you can’t solve education’s problems by throwing money at it (though I do not remember the time they speak of when money was actually flying through the air). I have been told too often that teaching isn’t a real job. You just sit around all day and talk to kids and you have the summers off. How hard can that be? And I have been told too many times that Johnny can’t read, and it is apparently my fault as a Reading teacher… it can’t be anything politicians have done, right? It certainly isn’t anything that politicians have done right!
God help me, in spite of all that, I really miss being a teacher.
So, I have been struck by a lightning bolt of inspiration. While working on the werewolf story I have been writing since 1998, I decided to make the sweet little old German lady from the Gingerbread House into the main character of her own novel. I can’t help it. Grandma Gretel is based on a real person I knew as a child. She was a concentration camp survivor from WWII who lived by herself in our little Iowa town. And I loved her. I can’t help but write a story about her in fictional form. So, here is the start of my goofy new project;
Recipes for Gingerbread Children (Rezepte für Lebkuchen-Kinder)
A novel by Michael Beyer
Gretel baked gingerbread the way Mozart composed symphonic masterpieces, or Leonardo DaVinci painted women with mysterious smiles. People loved her gingerbread cookies and were hooked with one single taste. And her recipes were a carefully guarded secret, as was the reason that she lived alone in the little town of Norwall, Iowa, on the eastern edge of Wright County. Gretel was basically a very happy person, a very loving person. But there were good reasons for her secrets to remain secrets, and though the people of her little Iowa town loved her and took care of her, they must never know the truth.
“Gretel, old girl, you make me work hard for my milk,” complained Lumpkin the Brownie as he deposited the special bag of flour on the kitchen table.
“Ya, you are such a kidder, you are,” Grandma Gretel snapped at the little brown-skinned man who had just climbed through her kitchen window and thrown the small bag of magical ingredients on the table. Lumpkin was a local fairy and benign spirit who got away with living in town because he was only three inches tall and could turn invisible at will.
“No kidding, Grandma. Brownies don’t like to do work. We’re just as lazy as human beans. We only do this stuff because we are compelled… or bribed. And your milk and your gingerbread is magical.”
“Ya ya, magical… this I know. But what you can be telling me is… did you have to do any bad things to get the fairy flour?”
“We are not the Unseely Court, Grandma Gretel. We don’t deal in evil or pain. We do it for love.”
“Love of cookies and milk I am thinking.”
The brownie grinned a great, wide, and particularly ugly grin. “Still counts as love, old woman.”
Filed under humor, work in progress, writing, writing humor
The basketball weekend was wild and wicked and mostly unsatisfying. ISU advanced to the Sweet Sixteen. But Iowa was taken out easily by Villanova. And the UNI Panthers fought the Texas A&M Aggies to a two-overtime loss. It was a better showing than last year. Better than Iowa has done in a long time. Still, it would’ve been better if there had been even one more victory. Sorry. Success makes me greedy. Maybe the Iowa State Cyclones can win again and make it better.
Over the weekend I discovered that giving up taking the blood pressure medicine I was on because of rising drug prices may have saved my life. The drug they put me on reduces blood pressure by suppressing adrenaline. It has side effects that robs the body of energy. It has also been proven to elevate certain chemicals in the body that collect in the lungs and hamper lung functions. This explains why I have COPD. It also explains why I have been feeling better after I stopped taking the medication. Maybe I have to start thanking my piratical health insurance company for refusing to pay for anything and forcing me to give up medication that may have been killing me.
I have been getting viewer traffic on this blog at higher rates than ever. I just went through a period of ten straight days of 50-plus views per day. I went as high as 150 on Sunday the 13th and hit over a hundred one other time as well. I am looking at it as a good thing because I don’t actually believe the NSA takes my conspiracy theory posts seriously and isn’t closely monitoring me as a potential tinfoil-hat problem. (You know the tinfoil hat is supposed to make it harder for the government to read your mind, right?) So, there is some degree of confidence that I am getting away with stuff because I am hiding behind the mask of writing humor.
Anyway, today’s post is merely a time-waster meant to keep my string of every-day posting alive and keep me in practice writing down words and ideas. There is never a guarantee that they will be funny ideas, or thoughtful ideas, or even coherent ideas. That is the nature of writing. You can’t always be Tolstoy. Even Tolstoy wasn’t Tolstoy sometimes. (Except that technically he was always Tolstoy. You know what I mean.) Now let’s see what the NSA makes of that.
Filed under healing, humor, Iowa, medical issues, tinfoil hats, writing
I am a graduate of both Iowa State University, where I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in English, and the University of Iowa where I got my remedial master’s degree so I could teach English. It sometimes makes rooting for college sports difficult due to divided loyalties. But not yesterday. Yesterday we rocked the NCAA basketball tournament. The Iowa Hawkeyes beat tenth-seeded Temple 72 to 70. The Iowa State Cyclones beat Iona 94 to 81. And my little sister’s team, the UNI Panthers, even stunned the tournament by beating Texas with a last second shot 75 to 72. All three Iowa teams in the tournament advanced to the second round. It was the first time ever. And Iowa State is looking especially good as an advancing number 4 seed. I rarely get such a chance to gloat over Elmer Mater’s success. (I do realize it is supposed to be Alma Mater, but we are Iowa country folk… Elmer sounds more likely.)
OKLAHOMA CITY, OK – MARCH 18: Paul Jesperson #4 of the Northern Iowa Panthers celebrates with his teammates after hitting a half court three pointer at the buzzer to defeat the Texas Longhorns with a score of 75 to 72 during the first round of the 2016 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament at Chesapeake Energy Arena on March 18, 2016 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
I learned to draw comics by copying the comics. So how many times has Mickey actually drawn Mickey? More than I can count. I hate throwing a drawing away, even if I did it when I was ten. But I cannot find all the drawings I have done of Mickey Mouse. I know some have been given away, some have gotten lost, and some may have even gone up in flames in the garbage barrel out back of the house in the 1960’s. I have posted pictures of Mickey before. Remember this one?
But I can basically do Mickey without looking at any references. I can do him well enough that people often say, “You didn’t really draw that, did you?” That’s why I included the simple pen and ink stage of today’s Mickey. You can see it is really me drawing it. But the absolute truth is, I draw Mickey because in so many ways I am Mickey. Yes, I’m a talking mouse that drives a car and owns a dog. And even though Disney sues right and left for any imagined copyright infringement, I can safely post this here because it is fan art… and I don’t get paid anything for this goofy blog anyway. It is homage, not theft of intellectual property.
So, here is the final product, drawn this morning, the day after St. Patrick’s day 2016.
Catch a Falling Star 