Category Archives: inspiration

March 28, 2026 · 1:00 am

I Shall Not Fear…

I am a high-risk individual since I have diabetes, hypertension, a family history of heart problems, and a compromised immune system. This pestilence is probably going to be the end of me. I have not come down with it yet, and I am probably not exposed at this point. But the only person who could’ve done the grocery shopping for me is exposed and quarantined. And hoarding has caused grocery store shelves to be empty. Not all shelves. But specific basic needs. Cleaning supplies are disappearing as soon as they are placed on the shelves. Toilet paper is not available, or possibly invisible. Meat products are practically non-existent. I was able to buy some food, but not as much as we usually buy in a week. And not cheaply enough to sustain us within a limited budget. I am going to have to make these trips too frequently. Sooner or later, the disease catches up to me.

When I was still in college, I had a dream that impressed me as a prophecy. Other dreams I had like this one, and they felt like this one, have come to pass, in ways that are not predictable, granted, but true nevertheless. This dream found me ill sitting in an armchair in my Grandma Beyer’s house, a corner house on the city block with windows that looked out over a yard shaded by multiple trees. The air outside was glowing grayish yellow. A winged angel came through the front door and said, “Michael, it is over now. Come with me.”

The house I am now sitting in is a corner house on the city block with windows that look out over a yard shaded by multiple trees. The air outside is glowing yellow on an overcast day

Actually, I have now moved into my grandmother’s house, but the other grandmother. It is six years later than when I wrote the preceding paragraph.

I am not afraid to die. I accept that life is finite, and I have had a good one. But this disaster is not going to wreak its worst on me. The innocent, the young, and those with the creativity and the will to live that it takes to solve major problems for the whole world need to be protected and need to survive. It is not going well. We have to come back from this. I have to believe that if this is the end of me, it is not the end of everything.

So, I shall fear no evil… Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me…

Since the pandemic, when I originally wrote this post, I managed to get the vaccination and booster before I got Covid twice and survived. But I also had a heart crisis that resulted in a pacemaker being implanted in my chest.

But I recognize that now is not the time for fear. Not the time for acting out of fear. We must help each other. We must act in the best interests of not just ourselves. We must keep doing what we know is right, what we know God made us to do. And if we are coming to the end of our personal path, take heart. The world is capable of going on without us. The universe is unfolding as it should.

This book is available on Amazon.

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March 26, 2026 · 12:01 am

Inspiration…

So, what if it is true that the future begins with the story-teller? Smart phones are obviously descendants of the communicators and tricorders and computers that Gene Roddenberry introduced to us in the original Star Trek series. George Orwell gave us timely predictions and warnings of the rise of fascism and authoritarianism in his novel, 1984.

If we truly wish to be a force for good, we have to take the evil bull by the horns and turn its momentum away from the future we seek to protect. Like Solzhenitsyn we may be gored in that bull-fight and end up spending time in the gulag. But those of us who choose to be writers, especially story-tellers, must take on that responsibility. What if ours is the story that changes the mind of a nation, like when the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn took on slavery and the unjust treatment of others who think that, because they are white, or have money, or are somehow smarter than everyone else, they have the right to abuse, take advantage, or even kill other people? What if ours is the story that turns the rich into selfish engines of greed as Atlas Shrugged obviously did?

It is a tremendous responsibility. It is a power we must not wield unwisely, even if our talent level is only that of the disastrously lazy Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

What sort of a story-teller will I be?

What sort will you be?

Where will I lead my readers (If indeed there ever are any)?

And where will you lead yours?

If any questions are important now during these days of self-reflection, isolation, and Coronavirus, it will surely be these. So, tell me what you think.

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March 5, 2026 · 12:47 am

Milt Caniff

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My 1967 Captain Action Steve Canyon action figure.

I have always been a deeply devoted fan of the Sunday funnies.  And one of the reasons I read the comics religiously was the work of Milt Caniff.  His comic strips, Terry and the Pirates, Male Call, and Steve Canyon set a standard for the age of action comics and adventure strips.

I read his comics in the 1960’s and 1970’s and always it was Steve Canyon.  But this, of course, was not his first strip.  I would discover in my college years the wonders of Terry and the Pirates.  When Caniff started the strip before World War II, he set it in China, but actually knew nothing about China.  So he did research.  He learned about people who became oriental hereditary pirate families and organizations.  He learned to draw authentic Chinese settings.  His comedy relief characters, Connie and the Big Stoop, were rather racist parodies of Chinamen and were among the reasons that the original strip had to mature into his later work in Steve Canyon.  But perhaps the most enduring character from the strip was the mysterious pirate leader known as the Dragon Lady.

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Steve Canyon is a fascinating study in the comic arts.  When he left the Terry and the Pirates strip in 1946, it went on without him.  It was owned by the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News distribution syndicate, not Caniff himself.  Steve Canyon would change that.  He created it and owned it himself, making Caniff one of only two or three comics artists who actually owned their own creations.  Canyon started out as a civilian pilot, but enlisted in the Air Force for the Korean War and would remain in the Air Force for the remainder of the strip.  Some of the characters in the strip were based on real people.  His long-time friend Charlie Russhon, a former photographer and Lieutenant in the Air Force who went on to be a technical adviser for James Bond films was the model for the character Charlie Vanilla, the man with the ice cream cone.  Madame Lynx was based on the femme fatale spy character played by Illona Massey in the 1949 Marx Brothers’ movie Love Happy.  Caniff designed Pipper the Piper after John Kennedy and Miss Mizzou after Marilyn Monroe.

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I am not the only cartoonist who was taken with the work of Milt Caniff.  The effects of his ground-breaking work can be seen to influence the works of comic artists like Jack Kirby, Bob Kane, John Romita Sr., and Doug Wildey.  If you are anything like the comic book nut I am, than you are impressed by that list, even more so if I listed everyone he influenced.  Milt Caniff was a cartoonists’ cartoonist.  He was one of the founders of the National Cartoonists’ Society and served two terms as its president in 1948 and 1949.  He is also a member of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.

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March 4, 2026 · 1:10 am

Skyscape

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It is difficult to look at the sky and not feel that the power of Heaven is real.  As I approach the halfway point of my sixty-ninth year, and the darkness of the future draws ever nearer, I am forced to think about what I really believe.  Being smarter than the average bear has its drawbacks.  I understand why most of the writers I most admire were atheists, and all of the philosophers I have read and found agreement with are decidedly atheist.   Science, rationality, and reason all suggest that there is nothing beyond the physical realm.  Should that matter?  Faith, according to Mark Twain, is fervently believing in your heart what your mind tells you ain’t so.  In fact, Hebrews 11:1 says, “Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld.”  Even the Bible is saying you have to believe it even though you shouldn’t believe it.

So, will I go to Heaven when I die?  For me, the question is meaningless.  I look up at the miracle of a blue sky on a partly cloudy day and see the life-giving sun.  I am alive… here and now… and nothing else is really relevant.  I am a part of the great, vast universe of reality.  My existence is real and cannot be unmade… even by God, if He were inclined to do such a thing.  I am a small, insignificant part of reality, and I can be gone in the next instant like a puff of smoke in the wind.  But I am here and I am alive and I took the Paffooney picture that I used to illustrate this post.  And I face whatever comes with a smile on my face.  I am alive… and life is good.

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March 2, 2026 · 1:06 am

Thinking Differently

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.  

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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.

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So, lets consider an example from the mixed up mind of Mickey;

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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.

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Here we see the apes capturing and enslaving Marky Mark… er… Mark Wahlberg rather than Chuck Heston from the original movie.
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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…

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January 15, 2026 · 1:21 am

Reading Bag of Bones

This is not a book review. I did finish reading this book in a 3-hour-end-of-the-book reading orgy, spending an hour last night, and two more early in the morning before the rest of my family was awake.

This is certainly not a book review. But I did read a Stephen King book, 1998’s Bag of Bones, which I picked up from the dollar sale shelves at Half Price Books. And I did love the story.

………………………………………………………………………This is not a book review. Instead, I want to talk about what a novelist can learn and reflect on by meta-cogitating over what this book reveals about King’s work habits and style and author’s voice.

Mike Noonan, the protagonist, is a novelist who writes books that routinely land in the numbers 10 through 15 slots in the New York Times Bestseller List. Obviously, this first-person narrative is coming directly out of King’s own writing experience. But, remember, this is not a book review. I am discussing what I have learned about how King puts a story together. 

King sets a back-story for this novel that digs deep into the geographica and historica of the city in Maine where the story is set. The literal bag of bones revealed in the book’s climax is almost a hundred years old. And he takes a compellingly realistic tour back in time to the turn of the Twentieth Century more than once to reveal who the undead characters are and why they do what they do. One thing that makes a writer, a novelist, truly solid is his ability to set the scene, to grow the story out of the background in the most organic and realistic way possible. But this is not a book review. I am saying that King always does this with his books. And if you wish to write at that level, you must do that too. I know I am sincerely trying.

At the end of the story, he clearly tells the reader that he learned from Thomas Hardy that “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones”. So, he is definitely aware that a character is a construct that has to be crafted from raw materials. It takes a master craftsman to build one with the right words to make it live and breathe on the page. He does it masterfully in this book with several characters. The protagonist, the beautiful young love interest, the love interest’s charming three-year-old daughter who is nearly slain in a horrific manner at the end of the book… The living villain is a well-crafted bag of bones, as is the ghost, the actual bag of bones in the story. But this is not a book review. Most of his books, at least the ones I have read, have the same sort of masterful characters.

There is so much more to be learned about novel writing from this book. He literally shows you how ideas are captured, how they are developed into stories, how you overcome “writer’s block”, and Noonan’s book he is writing within this book is even used as an example of how to poetically advance the plot. But this is not a book review. You should read this book. It is a very good and scary piece of work. But you should read it because it shows us how to write and do it like a master.

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January 13, 2026 · 1:06 am

Wake Up Sunday Morning!

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As weekly rituals go, one of the most important ones came every Sunday morning when I was a kid.  My parents were 50’s people.  By that I mean they were teenagers and young adults during the post war boom of the 1950’s when everything seemed hopeful and bright and alive with wonderful possibilities.  As a kid in the 1960’s the Sunday morning routine was this;

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  • Wake up grouchy from staying up too late to sneak a look at the late-night monster movie on Saturday.
  • Read the funny papers.
  • Learn life lessons from Family Circus, Dagwood Bumstead, Pogo, Lil’ Abner, and Steve Canyon.
  • Eat scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.
  • Complain about having to go to church and Sunday school.
  • Go to Sunday School and church at the Methodist Church in Rowan, Iowa.
  • Complain about having to go to church every Sunday on the way home from church.
  • Pray over Sunday dinner and be really, actually thankful for all the positive good things in life.

Obviously the most important thing in that routine was complaining, because I listed it twice.  But when it got down to it, we were thankful for all the good things about life.  We were positive people.  We sometimes listened to Norman Vincent Peale on the radio.  We knew we ought to be positive and thankful and love goodness and be kind.

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Somewhere along the way, though, the world forgot the life lessons of Family Circus.

Somehow we managed to screw things up.

Environmental scientists like Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, warned us that the world could soon be ending.  And we ignored them.

Richard Nixon taught us not to trust politicians any more.

We stopped believing in things like the wholesome goodness of scrambled eggs.

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We let corruption in our government and inequality in the economic sphere become the norm.  The greedy people who were cynical and had no empathy for the rest of us took over.  That is how we ended up with someone like Donald Trump.  Racism, fear, and complaining now rule the emotional landscape in America and most of the world.

So, what is the answer?  What do we do?

Well, The Family Circus is still out there.  We can learn from it, laugh a little, and apply some of those life lessons.  Especially this one;

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December 18, 2025 · 12:44 am

The Lovely Lennon Sisters

Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich lived on the family farm outside of town, a little more than two miles from the tiny farm town of Rowan, Iowa.  I walked it more than once.  It was faster to walk the railroad tracks between the two places.  About a mile and three quarters as the crow flies… three hours as the boy investigates the critters in the weeds, throws rocks at dragonflies, and listens to the birdsong along the way.  But the point is, my maternal grandparents lived close enough to have a profound influence on my young life.  Much of what they loved became what I love.  And every Saturday night, they loved to watch the Lawrence Welk Show.  And that show had highlights that we longed to see again and again… on a show that never really went into reruns.  We lived to see Jo Ann Castle play the old rinky-tink piano, Bobby and Cissy doing a dance routine, and most of all… the lovely Lennon Sisters.

I always wanted to be the things they wished me to be in the song “May You Always”.  I wanted to “walk in sunshine” and “live with laughter”.  They presented a world of possibilities all clean and good and wholesome.  As a young boy who hated girls, I had a secret crush on Janet Lennon who was the youngest, though a decade older than me, and on Peggy Lennon, the one with the exotic Asian eyes.  They sang to me and spoke directly to my heart.

You have to believe in something when you are young.  The world can present you with so many dark and hurtful experiences that you simply have to have something to hang onto and keep you from being blighted and crippled by the pain.  For me, it often came in the form of a lovely and simple lyric sung by the lovely Lennon Sisters.  When you are faced with hard choices… especially in those dark moments when you think about ending it all because it is all just too much to bear, the things stored in those special pockets of your heart are the only things that can save you.  For me, one of those things will always be the music of the Lennon Sisters… especially when watched on the old black-and-white TV in the farmhouse where my grandparents lived and helped raise me every Saturday night in the 1960s.

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December 14, 2025 · 12:47 am

Lighting Candles in the Darkness

I recently got word that my octogenarian father is in the hospital again for the third time in the last three months.  I am fairly sure the end of my father’s long and epic life is near.  And though I have basically come to terms with not only the coming end of his life but my own life as well, human beings, real ones, were never meant to live forever.

But I do not welcome the coming sadness, never-the-less.  There will always be something in the mysteries of death and darkness that is to be feared… and avoided for as long as possible.

There are many ways to light a candle, and some require no fire.

One of the most important avoidance measures is to light a few candles.  A candle holds back the darkness for a while.  And of course, I mean that in only the most metaphorical of multiple senses.

There are many ways to light a candle.  I have lit three in this essay.  I lit them with my ink pen and my drawing skill (modest though it may be).  And drawing alone is not the sum total of the ways a candle may be lit.

Each of the novels I have written is also a candle.  They may be useless piles of pages that nobody ever reads, but they are the summation of my already long life and work as a writer.  I may not be well known, and probably am not as talented as the better-known writers, but I really do have something to tell.  And being published where someone may eventually… even accidentally read some of it, there is no telling exactly how far into the darkness my light will reach.

And the even-more-amazing fact about the reach my candlelight into the darkness has is this, my candles were only lit because my father first lit the candle that is me.  As I have passed the candle-lighting responsibility on to those who read my writing, and to my children who have many more candles of their own to light.

I love you, Dad.  Raymond L. Beyer.  My next novel is dedicated to you.  Let’s continue to hold off the darkness for as long as we can… together.

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November 26, 2025 · 12:36 am

Contradictions

You know what a contradiction is, don’t you? It is whatever comes out of your wife’s mouth whenever you make a statement asserting that whatever you said is factually true. She will promptly and always explain to you how wrong you are… loudly… and in great detail. No matter if you happen to be provably right or not.

What’s that, you say? I’m wrong about that too? Of course, I am, dear. I only deserve the catfood cookies.

The fact is, if you raise your hand and give the teacher the correct answer often enough, you get a certain reputation amongst your classmates. Instead of continuing to call you, “dumbhead,” or “stupidhead,” or the simplified form of “caca-poo-poo-head” like they endearingly call everybody else, they begin calling you pejoratives like “Einstein,” or “Brainiac,” or “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” And they begin pointing out in detail everything that is wrong about you. How you dress… how you talk… especially how you laugh. You have become the enemy. You must be contradicted.

“You are wrong, Mickey!”

“So, I get to be Dumbhead again?”

“No. you are still “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” But you are wrong. We all think so, so that must be right.”

The truth is, Life itself is a contradiction. Considering the violence and hostility of the physical universe towards life, it is a miracle that anything at all is alive in the universe. The chaos of everything guarantees that if you are born into the miracle of life, then at some point, caused by a nearly infinite variety of possible aids to chaos, you will die. Order is whittled away into chaos. Civilizations fall eventually. Things die all the time.

But if all order must, by physical laws of the universe, be broken down into chaos, then, how is it that we have any order at all in the first place? Where does order come from? I’d give you a possible answer. But I would just be contradicted by the majority

Except for fundamentalist Christians who would say, “Let me think for a moment about why you are still wrong… and then I’ll tell you what I think the Bible says about why you are actually still wrong.”

One thing about being “only book-smart, but without common sense” that makes being contradicted all the time worth it, is that the more challenged the answers you come up with are, the more deeply you dig into them, and the more of a real-world understanding of why I am wrong about everything begins to make a bit more sense. Or not. Because I’m probably wrong in your estimation anyway.

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