Category Archives: insight

March 2, 2018 · 5:00 pm

Writing Myself To Life

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I have been working on my novel The Baby Werewolf, and I am now in the final phase, working on the climax and crisis point. And I surprised myself. The killer monologues to the main characters who have now become his intended next victims. I have played this out over and over in the twenty-two years I have been writing this book. Last night, for the first time ever, the hero character laughs in this scene instead of the cringing fear that had always been there before.

How is such a thing possible? What changed? I have been writing and rewriting this story since 1996. But it goes much deeper and darker than that. This story went on my have-to-write list in 1966 when an older, stronger boy who lived near my home trapped me in a place out-of-sight of others and stripped me, gaining some horrible kind of pleasure by inflicting pain on my private parts. Recovery from that has taken half a century. The recovery itself probably explains why I struggled so long to pull this story together in a finished form.

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There are things about my writing life that are undeniable. First of all, I have to write. There is really no other choice for me. My mind will never know rest or peace without being able to spin out the paragraphs and essays and stories that make it possible to know those things. Nothing is real if I can’t write it out. Secondly, I am a humorist. If I can never be funny at all, can never write a joke, then I will descend into madness. My sense of humor not only shields me and serves as my suit of armor, it heals me when I suffer psychic wounds. This book is a horror story, but like many of the best horror stories, it relies on humor to drive every scene and knit the plot together. And it was a breakthrough for me to have the hero character laugh instead of cringe in the critical scene. It allows me to live again. And love again. And the real monster that caused this book to be, is now forgiven. The world continues to turn. The picture is now complete. And soon, the novel will be too.

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Fools and Their Money

I spent yesterday with the court appointed trustee, under oath, successfully declaring bankruptcy without losing the house or any other protected assets. I have sworn to pay off the amount owed to banks without further interest. I will be aided by the court, protected from predators so that they don’t eat the corpse of my economic life.

Fools like me are soon parted from their money. After all, this country’s government and this country’s economy are run by con men. Cheats, criminals, grifters, thieves… they control the entire government now, and make the rules serve them and punish us.

And I suppose that’s the way it should be. If money is your only source of happiness, you are going to become one of them. A credit-manipulating predator and carrion-eater. I had to go through this bankruptcy proceeding because I lost Bank of America’s lawsuit against me. And if it weren’t for my bankruptcy case protecting me, they could come into my house and take whatever they wanted, including everything they wanted. They could garnish my wages up to 100% for however many months it took for my pension check to pay off my debt. Meanwhile my children would starve. I would have nothing to live on. It is within their rights to do it because they own the government and make the rules. Charles Dickens didn’t even have it so bad. At least in the debtor’s prison in Victorian London they fed you and kept you alive… mostly.

But I did learn some important lessons for the future. Let me share that hard-won wisdom with you now.

Never buy anything on credit. Save the money first, and then buy what you need once you have the total price. Only fools agree to never-ending cycles of interest upon interest, compounding and confounding your pocketbook for perpetuity. (Say that one three times fast!)
Only buy what you need. If you really need that shiny blue doohickimus to keep from going insane, then buy it… but save up the cash to pay for it in full. And if owning that doodadimus preposterosous isn’t going to provide you with the key to real happiness, then forget about it, and glory in your new-found self-control.
Banks are run by pirates. They are in the business of stealing your money. They charge fees for holding on to your money, while at the same time spending your money, and fees for counting your money, even when it’s not really there, and fees for looking at your money, though your money is only blips on a computer screen, and even fees for eventually… very gradually so you will not notice… stealing your money. You have to give them your money at some point, because you will die or be killed if you don’t. But taking your money by force, leaving you with no other choice but death, makes them pirates.
Save money wherever you can. Bury some in the back yard (but only metal money… gold bars being the least likely to turn into worthless soil filler). You are probably going to need it in the future. So don’t forget where you buried it. And making maps only helps groups of nerdy kids find it in the future after an unlikely series of fantastic adventures that all occur after you have become a one-eyed skeleton.
And don’t get sick, whatever you do. It costs too much to get health care. After you’ve paid an arm and a leg for health care services more than once, you are not going to be dancing any jigs. Maybe rolling around like a watermelon with a head, but that’s about it.

So, that’s the wisdom I gained from going bankrupt, for what it’s worth (and it isn’t worth much, or they would’ve confiscated it at the creditor’s meeting yesterday).

Getting Old is Heck

I am sometimes forgetful. You shouldn’t go for a walk on a country highway if you forgot to put on any clothes.

Cold weather makes my joints creaky and my bones ache. My head gets fuzzy, and it makes it hard to think when my blood sugar gets low. (By fuzzy, I mean on the inside like interference in your TV picture, not fuzzy on the outside. I am fuzzy on the outside because I had to give up haircuts due to psoriasis on my scalp.)

Yes, as we get older, we get crummier and crummier. I am literally crumbling now as psoriasis flakes my skin off all over.

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And as we get older… and poorer… and dumber… we have to learn how to do things to get happier. My health problems lead easily to depression. Not just a little generic sad, but deep down at the bottom of a deep, dark black pit of gloomy depression. So, I have to take matters into my own hands. Yes, I act a little goofy on purpose. I draw a funny picture. Laughter produces serotonin in the brain, the chemical that is missing when you fall into debilitating depression. Scraggles is the result of major dark back in the early 80’s. I also go to Walmart and buy chocolate. Eating chocolate produces serotonin in the brain too. I ate a whole 98-cent box of M&M’s this morning. (Of course, as a diabetic, they had to be peanut M&M’s because peanuts have niacin in them at levels that boost your body’s insulin towards working more efficiently. M&M’s make me happy.

Of course, I am not out of the woods yet. The mood of your family impacts your own mood. My children have been ill for most of January and all of February so far. And that puts them in varied states of depression and needing chocolate. It is a good thing that Valentine’s Day is near and Walmart is over-stocked. And it helps that it’s cheap.

I am old. Being old is not easy. Being ill is worse. It really is heck. But I don’t give up. I don’t surrender. I have fought back for too many years to give up now.

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Filed under angry rant, battling depression, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, humor, insight, Paffooney, self pity

February 11, 2018 · 4:09 pm

Do Not Crush the Butterfly…

Art on the bedroom wall, with Christmas lights being used as a night light.

Talking to a school administrator the other day about the challenges my children and I have been facing in the last year, I had one of those experiences where you get a look at your own life through someone else’s eyes. “Wow, you have really been on a difficult journey,” he said. I just nodded in response. Financial difficulties, health problems, dealing with depression… life has been tough. But you get through things like that by being centered. Meditation tricks. Things you can do to smooth out the wrinkles and keep moving forward.

I always return in the theater of my mind to a moment in childhood where I learned a critical lesson. My life has been one of learning how to build rather than destroy. It has been about creating, not criticizing.

Electric lights have come to Toonerville, helping to light the darkness.

When I was a boy, I was a serious butterfly hunter. It started when Uncle Don gave me a dead cecropia moth that he had found in the Rowan grain elevator. It was big and beautiful and perfectly preserved. Shortly thereafter, I located another cecropia in the garage behind the house, a building that had once been a wagon shed complete with horse stalls and a hay loft. I tried to catch it with my bare hands. And by the time I had hold of it, the powder on its wings was mostly gone. The wings were broken in a couple of places, and the poor bug was ruined in terms of starting a butterfly collection.

A cecropia moth

Undeterred by tragedy, I got books about butterfly collecting at the Rowan Public Library and began teaching myself how to bug hunt. I learned where to find them, and how to net them, and how to kill and mount them.

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I discovered that my grandfather’s horse pasture had thistle patches which were natural feeding grounds for red admiral butterflies (pictured top left) and painted lady butterflies (top right). But if you wanted to catch the rarer mourning cloak butterfly (bottom picture), you had to stake out apple trees, particularly at apple blossom time, though I caught one on the ripening apples too.

But my greatest challenge as a butterfly hunter was the tiger swallowtail butterfly. They are rare. They are tricky. And one summer I dueled with one, trying with all my might to catch him. He was in my own back yard the first time I saw him. I ran to get the butterfly net, and by the time I got back, he was flitting high in the trees out of reach. I must’ve watched him for half an hour before I finally lost sight of him. About five other times I had encounters with him in the yard or in the neighborhood. I learned the hard way that some butterflies are acrobatic flyers and can actually maneuver to avoid being caught. He frustrated me.

The tiger swallowtail was the butterfly that completed my collection, and it was finished when one of my cousins caught one and gave it to me because she knew I collected them.

But then, one day, while I was sitting on a blanket under a maple tree in the back yard with my notebooks open, writing something that I no longer even recall what I wrote, the backyard tiger swallowtail visited me again. In fact, he landed on the back of my hand. I dropped the pencil I was writing with, and slowly, carefully, I turned my hand over underneath him so that he was sitting on my palm.

I could’ve easily closed my hand upon him and captured him. But I learned the lesson long before from the cecropia that catching a butterfly by hand would destroy its delicate beauty. I would knock all the yellow and black powder off his exquisite wings. I could not catch him. But I could close my hand and crush him. I would be victorious after a summer-long losing battle.

But that moment brought an end to my butterfly hunting. I let him flutter away with the August breeze. I did not crush the butterfly. It was then that I realized what beauty there was in the world, and how fragile that beauty could be. I could not keep it alive forever. But it lasted a little big longer because I chose to let it.

So, here is the lesson that keeps me whole. Even though I had the power, I did not crush the butterfly.

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Filed under commentary, compassion, feeling sorry for myself, healing, humor, insight, inspiration, wisdom

Tagged as bug hunting, butterflies, wisdom

January 26, 2018 · 4:20 pm

The Philosophy of Bad Poetry

I do write poetry. But I must admit, I am not a serious poet. I am a humorist at heart, so I tend to write only goofy non-serious poems like this one;

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So here is a poem that rhymes but has too much “but-but-but” in it. A poem about pants should not have too many “buts” in it. One butt per pair, please. So this is an example of spectacularly bad poetry. Why do we need bad poetry? Because it’s funny. And it serves as a contrast to the best that poetry has to offer.

As a teacher I remember requiring students to memorize and recite Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”. Now this sort of assignment is a rich source of humorous stories for another day. Kids struggle to memorize things. Kids hate to get up in front of the class and speak with everybody looking at them. You get a sort of ant-under-a- magnifying-glass-in-the-sun sort of effect. But in order to truly get the assignment right and get the A+, you have to make that poem your own. You have to live it, understand it, and when you reach that fork in the road in your own personal yellow wood, you have to understand what Frost was saying in that moment. That is the life experience poetry has a responsibility to give you.

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Hopefully I gave that experience to at least a few of my students.

Bad poetry makes you more willing to twirl your fingers of understanding in the fine strands of good poetry’s hair. (Please excuse that horrible metaphor. I do write bad poetry, after all.)

But all poetry is the same thing. Poetry is “the shortest, clearest, best way to see and touch the honest bones of the universe through the use of words.” And I know that definition is really bad. But it wasn’t written on this planet. (Danged old Space Goons!) Still, knowing that poetry comes from such a fundamental place in your heart, you realize that even bad poetry has value. So, I will continue writing seriously bad poetry in the funniest way possible. And all of you real poets who happen to read this, take heart, I am making your poetry look better by comparison.

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Filed under humor, insight, irony, philosophy, poem, poetry, Uncategorized

Tagged as Robert Frost as good poetry

January 24, 2018 · 3:31 pm

A Poem Written on a Picture

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-a poem written by Mickey and pasted on a picture.

Homely People

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I prefer to write about, think about, and draw pictures of homely people. But don’t mistake me. I am not talking about ugly people. Our President, the giant blood sausage with a bird’s nest on top that we have put in charge of making us all feel sick to our stomachs every day, demonstrates what ugly means. Ugly is not just weird and interesting to look at, it is also repellent behavior that makes physical flaws take a back seat… no, a rumble seat in the trailer behind by comparison.

I am talking about the ordinary people back home. The ones that may be sitting by your own fireplace on a cold day trying to warm their hands after throwing snowballs outside. And, of course, that snowball that hit Maggie Doozman in the side of the face and knocked her glasses off, made you laugh for an instant, until you realized she was crying, and Kirk Longhatter didn’t even apologize for throwing so hard, so you went over and picked her glasses up for her and handed them to her, and she smiled at you through the tears. That is the kind of homely I mean.

Pesch Street

There is a lot that is beautiful in homely people. Sure, maybe not a classically beautiful Elizabeth Taylor face or a Gregory Peck lantern jaw. Maybe not even a shapely behind or a graceful step when walking across the street. But ordinary beauty. Kindness. Humility. Determination in the face of long odds. Good-natured jokery. A touch of childish silliness. A moon face that actually shines when a smile lights it up. That is beauty that can be found in homely people.

You’ve probably figured out by now that this post is just an excuse to show off some goofy old off-kilter portraits I did. But that doesn’t change the fact. I do love homely people.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, cartoons, characters, commentary, compassion, humor, insight, Iowa, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

December 29, 2017 · 4:25 pm

Writing Every Day

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Teachers of serious writing will often tell you… or more correctly, give you the Word of God, “You want to be a good writer? You have to write every single day.” And having been a teacher of writing at the high school and middle school level, I am committed to passing that on to you also as the inviolable Word of God. You see, I have long been, well, not a serious writer exactly, more of a dedicated writer with warped notions of reality and a tendency towards goofiness. You can see by the view of my WordPress insights page that I have steadily, in five years’ time, been noticed and looked at by increasing amounts of thoroughly duped WordPress viewers.

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10,373 visitors have viewed something on my blog 17,383 times in 2017. And I know that most are looking at the pictures and moving on. That’s how I get away with writing some of the stupid stuff I post on my blog. But there’s a secret to that too. I drew or painted a lot of the pictures I use on this blog myself. You would think that sooner or later some expert psychologist would trace violence in the streets back to my pictures as the ultimate cause, but that hasn’t happened yet. I am sure that is mostly because not even the psychologists can muck their way through my paragraphs of purple paisley prose. You see, I most often use my writing on this blog to commit atrocities of humor and wit. I only rarely dabble in things intended to be uplifting, spiritual, politically challenging, or sentimental. I complain on my blog a lot. It is also a place for expressing my inherent grumpiness and old-man dyspeptic irritations with life. But viewers tend to take my humor seriously and only laugh at the stuff I am most embarrassed about.

I was supposed to be doing this blog as way to promote my book, Catch a Falling Star, for I-Universe Publishing. They set it up for me. But, as they don’t pay me anything for the work I put into it, and it doesn’t really impact sales anyway, I use it now as writing practice. I have as a personal goal to write 500 words a day. The blog counts. So it means that some days, the 500 words I write in my blog are the only words I get written that day. Though, now that I am retired, 500 words of blog writing plus 500 words of novel writing can get me well past writing 1000 words in a day. It doesn’t take long at that rate to build up an awful lot of words. I shudder to think what would happen if the word dam were to suddenly give way, releasing a word-flood of monumental proportions. Half of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex would drown in Mickian words if that were to happen.

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So, do I think that you should write every day? Do I think it makes you a better writer? Do I actually follow my own advice? Yes! To all three. And as I have passed the 500 word mark yet again, I can stop now.

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Filed under blog posting, insight, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor, writing teacher

Tagged as writing advice

December 18, 2017 · 2:37 am

The Nature of Our Better Angels

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I have friends and relatives that believe in angels. Religious people who believe in the power of prayer and the love of God. And I cannot say that I do not also believe. But I also happen to believe that angels live among us.

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My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was, as far as I am concerned, an angel. Born in the late 1800’s, she was a practical prairie farmer’s wife. She knew how to make butter in a churn. She knew how to treat bee stings and spider bites. She knew how to cook good, wholesome food that stuck to your ribs and kept you going until the next meal rolled around. She knew how to cook on a wood-burning stove, and knew why you needed to keep corn cobs in a pile by the outhouse door. Or, in the case of rich folks, why you needed to read the Sears catalog in the little room behind the cut-out crescent moon.

She also knew how to head a family. She had seven kids and raised six of them up to adulthood. She sent a son off to World War II. She had nine grandchildren and more great grandchildren, of which I was one of the not-so-great ones, than I can even count on two hands and two feet, the toes of which I can’t always see. Great great grandchildren were even greater. Tell me you can’t believe she was a messenger from God, always knowing God’s will, and making the future happen with a steady hand, and eyes that brooked no nonsense from lie-telling boys.

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Mother Mendiola was an angel too. I met her at my first school, Frank Newman Junior High in Cotulla, Texas. She was the seventh grade Life Science teacher. She had been a nun before becoming a teacher, and she was a single lady her whole life. But she was a natural mother figure to the children in her classes. She’s the one who taught me how to talk to fatherless boys, engage them in learning about things that excited them, and become a lifelong mentor to them, willing to help them with life’s problems even long after they had graduated from both junior high and high school. She was not only a mother to students, but she nurtured other teachers as well. She showed Alice and I how to talk to Hispanic kids even though we were both so white we almost glowed in the dark. She went to bat for kids who got in trouble with the principal, and even those who sometimes got into trouble with the law. She had a way of holding her hand out to kids and encouraging them to place their troubles in it. She even helped pregnant young girls with wise counsel and a loving, accepting heart, even when they were seriously in the wrong. When they talk about being an “advocate for kids” in educational conferences, they always make me picture her and her methods. I can still see her in my mind’s eye with clenched fists on her hips and saying, “I am tired of it, and it will get better NOW!” And it always got better. Because she was an angel. She had the power of the love of God behind her every action and motivation. It still makes me weep to remember she is gone now. She got her wings and flew on to other things a long time ago now.

Some people may call it a blasphemy for me to say that these people, no matter how good and critically important they were, could really be angels. But I have to say it. I have to believe it. I know this because I saw them do these things, with my own two eyes, and how could they not be messengers from God? I convinces me that I need to work at becoming an angel too.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, compassion, humor, insight, inspiration, Paffooney, religion, strange and wonderful ideas about life

December 15, 2017 · 4:02 pm

Finding My Voice

As Big MacIntosh welcomes more little ponies into my insanely large doll collection, I have been reading my published novel Snow Babies. The novel is written in third person viewpoint with a single focus character for each scene. But because the story is about a whole community surviving a blizzard with multiple story lines criss-crossing and converging only to diverge and dance away from each other again, the focus character varies from scene to scene.

Big MacIntosh finds himself to be the leader of a new group of My Little Ponies.

In Canto Two, Valerie Clarke, the central main character of the story, is the focus character. Any and all thoughts suggested by the narrative occur only in Valerie’s pretty little head. Canto Three is focused through the mind of Trailways bus driver Ed Grosland. Canto Four focuses on Sheriff’s Deputy Cliff Baily. And so, on it goes through a multitude of different heads, some heroic, some wise, some idiotic, and some mildly insane. Because it is a comedy about orphans freezing to death, some of the focus characters are even thinking at the reader through frozen brains.

The ponies decide to visit Minnie Mouse’s recycled Barbie Dreamhouse where Olaf the Snowman is the acting butler.

That kind of fractured character focus threatens to turn me schizophrenic. I enjoy thinking like varied characters and changing it up, but the more I write, the more the characters become like me, and the more I become them. How exactly do you manage a humorous narrative voice when you are constantly becoming someone else and morphing the way you talk to fit different people? Especially when some of your characters are stupid people with limited vocabularies and limited understanding?

The ponies are invited to live upstairs with the evil rabbit, Pokemon, and Minions.

I did an entire novel, Superchicken, in third person viewpoint with one focus character, Edward-Andrew Campbell, the Superchicken himself. That is considerably less schizophrenic than the other book. But it is still telling a story in my voice with my penchant for big words, metaphors, and exaggerations.

The novel I am working on in rough draft manuscript form right now, The Baby Werewolf, is done entirely in first person point of view. That is even more of an exercise of losing yourself inside the head of a character who is not you. One of the first person narrators is a girl, and one is a werewolf. So, I have really had to stretch my writing ability to make myself into someone else multiple times.

I assure you, I am working hard to find a proper voice with which to share my personal wit and wisdom with the world. But if the men in white coats come to lock me away in a loony bin somewhere, it won’t be because I am playing a lot with My Little Ponies.

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Filed under commentary, goofiness, humor, insight, NOVEL WRITING, photo paffoonies, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor

Tagged as My Little Pony, Snow Babies

Category Archives: insight

Writing Myself To Life

Fools and Their Money

Getting Old is Heck

Do Not Crush the Butterfly…

The Philosophy of Bad Poetry

A Poem Written on a Picture

Homely People

Writing Every Day

The Nature of Our Better Angels

Finding My Voice

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