Category Archives: humor

March 8, 2016 · 4:41 pm

The Beasts of Armeggedon

Today may very well be the last day on Earth.  I laugh when I write that, but it could literally be true.  There is an asteroid approaching the earth and it is supposed to pass within 11,000 miles of Earth.  That is close enough for a minor math oops to fool us into not panicking about an extinction event.  The Dallas Fort-Worth area is being soaked in thunderstorms and potential high winds as I write this in a house that has foundation cracks made worse by a high number of fracking-induced earthquakes the last couple of years.  I woke up with chest pains this morning, and I have a family history of heart trouble.  (Although the last time I panicked and had the chest pains checked it was apparently arthritis in my rib cage… and the weather does make my arthritis worse.)  So, in very many ways, this really could be the last day.  And as I reminded everybody yesterday, I am a pessimist in all things.

So, I am girding up in armor as a pessimist always does, preparing for the worst.  If I am not going to be here tomorrow, then I need to prepare by counting my blessings today.  Number one, I have completed a successful 31-year career as a teacher.  I touched over 2,000 lives, made a difference in a lot of them, and screwed up only a handful of them.  I taught some kids to read, and I taught a lot of kids to write.  I was a good writing teacher.  I know how to build a theme and I can teach others to do the same.  I have lived a life of service, and though I have not been made money-rich by my efforts, I have wealth greater than Croesus (I know you don’t really know who that is, but I didn’t want that sentiment spoiled by using a name like Trump or the Walmart heirs.)

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Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.

Number two, I am a survivor who has seen an amazing amount of history roll past without ever being crushed under its wheels.  I was alive for John Kennedy’s Presidency and assassination.  I watched Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon.  I taught the day the Challenger exploded with the first teacher in space on board.  I also taught the day the twin towers fell on 9-11.  I have seen how the world was changed, and I, like most people, experienced the changes necessary to adapting to a new world.  As a pessimist, I am already planning for life under President Ted Cruz.  It will be the worst possible outcome for our nation of the election of 2016.  We really should not elect a Reptilian as our leader.  But I survived the Ronny Ray-Gun revolution, and eight long years under the Cowboy of Very Little Brain, so if I live to see it, I will adapt.  And so will you.  We have only rarely ever been truly free and prosperous, but in our minds, no one, no matter how tyrannical, can ever truly deprive us of our freedom.

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So, if these are the last words I ever write, then know that I am at peace with the world.  If the big space rock does us all in today, then at least we have to consolation that humankind has had its chance to live and love and laugh, and we didn’t do everything wrong.

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March 7, 2016 · 3:40 pm

Pessimism as a Super Power

 

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The Cardboard Castle at its current state of completion. I built this thing from Ritz Cracker boxes and a wooden bird house.

I have shared before the fact that those of us who are pessimists are never unpleasantly surprised.  We plan for failure, and cannot be destroyed by the worst that can happen.  Being indestructible is a very good thing.  In fact, it is a super power, just like the Incredible Hulk or something.

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Yesterday a year’s worth of work and waiting came to an end.  I reached the final round of the Chanticleer Book Reviews’ Rosetti Awards for YA novel writing.  I had a second chance to win a prize and a second chance to be noticed by literary agents, publishers, and the reading public.  But it ended the same way as the first chance did.  Magical Miss Morgan didn’t win.

So, I have to rely on my super powers once again to navigate my way through the dark valleys where a body lands once we fall off the mountain we are climbing.

I spent a good deal of time this weekend doing little things to make myself feel better.  I worked on my cardboard castle project.  I took my daughter, the Princess, on a daddy-daughter date.  We saw a very good movie, The Good Dinosaur from Pixar, and we had dinner at a Steak n’ Shake in Plano, Texas.  Last night my wife and I watched the finale of Downton Abbey on PBS.

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I am not devastated.  I didn’t win.  I didn’t get the boost I had hoped for in marketing and publication and seeing my stories in print.  But the book still exists.  There are still ways to get it published.  And I still believe it is a very good piece of writing.

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So being a pessimist and preparing for the worst held up as a super power.  I should get a black cape and black tights.  Gloomy Man to the rescue!  Villains and opposers will find me indestructible.  I will find a way to save the day!

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Filed under autobiography, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, humor, NOVEL WRITING, pessimism, Uncategorized

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March 6, 2016 · 10:30 am

Making Fun of What’s Funny

 

Senator Tedhkruzh

There is only so much time you can spend making fun of Tronald Dump and Cred Tuz…  Only so many “Ted Cruz is a lizard-man” jokes can be made before they are no longer funny.  But it is never going to be less important during an election season than it is now.

Lizard-man Cruz is a religious-fanatic-poser who will lead us further into the realms of oligarchy and fascism.  We see him constantly in the Republican Presidential debates using lizard tricks to get any advantage he can get.  Telling Ben Carson supporters that Ben the Sleepy Dwarf was leaving the race and his supporters should vote for Cruz, the next best choice.  Of course, Carson was still in the race.  And all we got from the Cruz campaign was a big old “oopsie”. Those of us dedicated to making fun of Senator Cruz, especially those of us in Texas who have to take the blame for him, are trying our hardest to expose what he is to everyone who listens to us, and it isn’t working very well.  Cruz, as sleazy and reviled as he is, still seems to get what he wants… at least preventing others from having what he doesn’t want us to have.

Here’s a lovely video of Ted Cruz from Bad Lip Reading on YouTube;

I have to admit that I had to watch this three times to figure out that they were matching words to his lips rather than just showing us stupid crap that Ted actually says.  I mean, he really does talk and act like this.  How was I supposed to know it was mere satire?

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And as bad as Ted Cruz would be as a choice for President, Donald Trump would be far worse.  The irrational humanoid orangutan is using the same sort of fear tactics that Herr Adolf used to rise in Germany in the 1930’s.  He uses Mexicans and Muslims as whipping people instead of Jews, but he is similar in almost every tactic.  In fact, I believe that Herr Hitler would have his own reality TV show if he lived in New York City in this day and age.  He would definitely relish firing people on television, especially using real fire.  This man is leading all the Republican candidates in the polls.  He is even capable of beating Hillary Clinton due to her Benghazi-and-email tarnished reputation.  We may soon be required to salute and shout “heil Donald!” in this country.

Any of the Republican candidates would be better than these two I have concentrated my ridicule upon, yet any of them would be a disaster.  Kasich and Rubio are the most moderate and least-likely-to-destroy-all-life-on-earth.  But Kasich wants to slaughter public education, and Rubio is actually an enemy to immigration reform, not an advocate.  They are no bed of roses either.  Bed of thorns maybe, but not sweet-smelling like roses.

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A fairly accurate portrait of what Marco Rubio sees when he looks in a mirror.

So now I have used my 500 words to elucidate and lament the evils of politics as they have played out in this election year so far.  I hope you will laugh with me at the ridiculousness of booger-eaters like Cruz and monkey-men like Trump.  But I also hope you will take this humor at least a little bit seriously.

 

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March 5, 2016 · 4:50 pm

Buying a New Pony

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My previous pony was also a Ford Fiesta.  But a passing motorist decided to modify it drastically by ramming it in the side as he drove past our house where we had it parked.  He broke the poor pony’s hind left hoof.  And the insurance company decided to give it a mercy killing.  Pony with a broken leg is a dead pony.  Especially if replacing the back axle costs more than the book value of the car.

So, the insurance company gave me $5000 to buy a new pony.  I found a 2014 Ford Fiesta through Enterprise Rent-a-Car.  Car payments for five years, but lower than I was still paying on the old pony.  It is nice to have wheels again.  My wife rode in the car for the first time this morning.  She was impressed.  But she thinks I paid too much.  I must agree with that because the rule is that she is a better and smarter shopper than I am.  If there is to be peace in the house, then I must admit that she is right, even if she is not.

So I have a new pony.  No more driving around in a chibi clown car (also from Enterprise).  It drives smoothly, quietly, and easily.

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March 4, 2016 · 9:05 pm

Wizarding Ain’t Easy

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

My quest to become a wizard began when I was but a kid reading comic books.  It got a boost when I became a middle school English teacher and realized the fundamental truth of the universe, human beings know practically nothing at all… about anything.  The only path to wisdom is the way of the fool.

So, I embraced it.  It made it so much easier to teach and manage a classroom full of teenybumpers to realize the only thing that works when they laugh at you and make fun of you, is to be able to laugh at yourself and make fun of them right back.

I learned along the way that things that hurt you and make you suffer cause wisdom to happen.  You walk under a ladder and the painter accidentally drops a paint bucket on your head, and you realize that walking under a ladder is a bad thing to do in the future… not simply because of superstition either.

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Drawing and painting wizards is something I began to do too.  I find it fascinating to try to draw a wrinkly old face and attempt to put some kind of intelligence in the eyes.  I can get vapid and stupid really really well.  I think I know what that looks like in the eyes of another far better than I know what wisdom looks like.  And how do you know it is wisdom, anyway, and not merely constipation?  Can you see understanding and intelligence in the eyes of another?  I think you can.  But looking into the eyes of young learners for so many years and searching for those things, I realized that the best you can do is guess.  You could easily be wrong.

That is what wisdom is.  Make your best guess, but remember that you are probably wrong.  It is possible to do great and powerful magic in the world if you are a wizard and you have wisdom.  But it will not be easy.  And you must work hard.  And when you have to decide whether to speak or stay silent, the wise man is always silent first, giving himself time to think before he speaks.

“Are you a wise man, Mickey?” you ask.

“…” Mickey says.

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March 3, 2016 · 4:41 pm

Not Everything Improves With Age

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I have to admit, I have changed a lot from my high school graduation portrait.  The extra facial fur hides some of the wrinkles and all the little pink itches and bleeds gifted to me by the miracle of diabetic psoriasis.  My hair has totally changed color without dye or bleach.  And you can’t see it, but the brain is full of a lot more wrinkles.

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This picture of my wife and I is from more than five years ago… what I looked like then reflected more who and what I was when I was still teaching and able to live life without so much arthritis pain and inability to breathe.  Not so many parts of me had fallen off or stopped working back then.  I sometimes think being younger than I am now is something to be wished for.  But I really don’t suppose that if I were to find a magic lamp that had a genii in it, I would want to be younger again if it cost me everything I have learned since I was that age.  I am an older man now… a sicker man… a less happy man.

But there is wisdom to be found in growing older.  And there is a certain magic in that which is really quite priceless.

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March 2, 2016 · 4:31 pm

Internet Lies About Mickey

Mickey

The truth is sometimes Mickey tells lies.  For instance, the title of this post is intended to lure you in with expectations of a juicy something that doesn’t actually exist.  There is no controversy on the internet over this particular Mickey.  He hasn’t done a very good job of keeping it secret that he tells a lot of lies.  In fact, most of the most embarrassing and terrible secret things that he had been keeping secret for going on sixty years are now published in this blog.  Talk about a life being an open book!

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Of course, being a lover of internet conspiracies and ufo’s and junk, there is always that other Mickey to talk about.  Yes, Disney has generated its share of conspiracy theories.

Everyone on the internet knows, for instance, that when Walt Disney died, he had his body frozen cryogenically  so that he could be re-animated once a cure for his lung cancer was found.  Of course, Snopes.com already did the investigation on it and brought out the fact that not only was Disney cremated with full documentation of the process, the first cryogenic freezing of a human being didn’t occur until a year after his death.  This lie about Mickey’s dad, then is easily debunked.  See, the internet lies about Mickey!

Of course, the notion that Disney was a racist and a Nazi and worked with the CIA are much harder to disprove.

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A character from the original version of Fantasia that doesn’t help Mickey’s image.

Most heads of super-wealthy corporations are by nature fascists.  The dictatorial style and oppressive oligarchic command structures of fascism organically grew out of business practices.  Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan were also Nazis.  And, of course, no one believes me when I start in on the Disney/alien connection.  After all, what’s with alien beings in Escape from Witch Mountain, Lilo and Stitch, and even Chicken Little?  I may have some more conspiracy-theory investigating to do.

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So, let me assure you that lies about Mickey are actually lies.  The thing about Mickey’s dream in the 1960’s of seeing Annette Funicello naked is a lie… er, probably.  The notion that Mickey trained himself to be a cartoonist by copying Disney characters like Carl Barks’ ducks are… err… um… lies… maybe.  Well, anyway, the point is… don’t spread lies on the internet about Mickey.  That’s my job.

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February 29, 2016 · 4:25 pm

Secrets in the Vault

The award that was given to me yesterday was not so much this blog as it was for my little vault.  I opened a can of worms a while back when I created a second blog on WordPress more or less by accident.  I wasn’t really interested so much in giving myself more writing tasks to do, rather, I decided I would use this other blog to store whole stories, poems, and cartoons.  I really haven’t figured out how to link this blog to that one, or that one to this… and since WordPress “improved” everything by changing all the controls, I really don’t know how to properly link something or put a URL into this prose, but here is the web address for that blog;

https://authormbeyer.wordpress.com/2015/06/

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It is a place where I have posted more complete works that, though mostly still unfinished, will take a little bit longer to look at and read.  I know that my daily 500 words on this goofy blog is too much for most internet readers, and these things take way more time to read than is good for you.  But some readers of this blog have recently discovered that the thing exists, and I have had a sudden burst of interest.  I gained five followers to the vault yesterday.  I think I have six total.  I don’t post there often enough to generate traffic, but I do keep stuff there that certain of my followers here are likely to enjoy if they are foolish enough to buy into this whole artwork and wordswork nonsense that I constantly do.  So, there it is… a little bit more of me than you were probably ready for.

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February 28, 2016 · 5:26 pm

The Cowboy Code

When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code.  The guy in the white hat always shoots straight.  He knows right from wrong.  He only shoots the bad guy.  He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can.  Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.

And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters.  People who make television shows never lie, do they?  In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.

Daniel Boone was a real guy too.  He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers.  And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode.  He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad.  Mingo was always on Daniel’s side.  And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared.  It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive.  Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.

So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code?  I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened.  Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology?  Didn’t they learn the code too?

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I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody.  But that was never the point of the cowboy code.  We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth.  We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad   We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands.  And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be.  But Daniel Boone was a real man.  Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.

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February 27, 2016 · 7:47 pm

SNAFU Car-Buying

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Today I bought a used car from the people who rented me the chibi clown car after my poor little pony was murdered while parked in front of my house.  (Murdered in a sense that the drive-by crasher broke its leg, and you shoot a pony with a broken leg, which my auto insurance cold-heartedly did for me.)  So last week the auto insurance sent me a check to cover the purchase of a used-car replacement.  The auto insurance put my wife’s name on the check even though it was not on the title of the car or on the bank account I am now using for my retirement money.  So, when I tried to draw out the money for the down payment, the lovely bankers told me there was a problem with the check.  Even though my wife endorsed it and they put it into my account, I could not withdraw it again because my wife’s name on there turned it into a third-party check.  Apparently her signature isn’t proof enough that she agrees I get to spend that money on a car.  The banker said they have to have her fingerprint and a copy of her driver’s license.  She, of course, is out knocking on doors as a Jehovah’s Witness and they couldn’t do anything anyway since today is Saturday and not technically a business day.  So I went to buy the car without the down payment, which it turns out is okay because the car I want to buy is in Independence, Missouri.  It will take seven to ten days for it to arrive.  Oh, and there is a transportation fee to get the car from there to here, and an insurance deductible, and fees of all sorts like title and license, so that my $10,000 used car is actually going to cost more like $15,000 by the time it is paid off, almost as much as the car that was destroyed which was nearly paid off after five years.  So, bankers, car dealers, rental car people, and insurance people are all happy with their respective profits in the ordeal, and I still have to drive the chibi clown car for another week (which I must pay for myself).  I really don’t have to write any new jokes to make this post humorous.  Existential irony has pretty much taken care of that.

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