Category Archives: Paffooney

January 19, 2016 · 3:39 pm

Exercise For Life

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This is an art exercise, making a drawing imitating the manga style of Rumiko Takahashi, the greatest female comics artist of all time.

Yes, I need to exercise.  I have six incurable diseases and I am a cancer survivor since 1983.  But exercise may soon kill me deader than the proverbial door nail.  Does that make sense?  Can you be any more dead than a thing that was never alive?  I think you can.  It comes when death is achieved through extreme pain and suffering.

If you hadn’t figured it out already, my family joined a gym on a trial-membership basis.  But, of course, we can’t afford a personal trainer, so the only way was to get me in and exercising without consulting the professionals about my health challenges.  Diabetes and arthritis and COPD?  They would instantly be worrying about sudden death on the gym floor and the lovely attendant lawsuits that would probably go with that.  And my wife probably will try to sue them when the exercise machines kill me.  She is a smart woman when it comes to making money out of the cracks in the system.

The gym has personal trainers and professionals to deal with problems like mine, and they were around and visible while I was there exercising for the first time.  Signs on all the machines admonish the user to take a break if they become light-headed or feel faint.  They are at least aware that I might be killing myself.  But while I did the twenty-five-minute trudge on the treadmill all tomato-faced and gasping for breath, no one bothered to even check on me to make sure I wasn’t idiot enough to torture myself to death on the cruel march-to-oblivion machines that are all lined up there in neat little rows facing television sets blaring Fox News Channel.  You might know that the last voice I will ever hear is Bill O’Reilly declaring what an idiot-communist-threat-to-democracy Bernie Sanders is.  What a way to die!

But my wife is determined to exercise me enough to make me healthy and more like Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson than it is possible for me to be.  Or kill me.  I think she might be looking forward to that too.  She told me when we went in that we only had to stay as long as I wanted to.  But that was a lie.  The gym has a pool.  She and the Princess made a bee-line there and I didn’t see them again until closing time.  To be fair, they had a free class to attend with pool exercises led by a trainer.  But still, as I suffered and dried myself out on the walkways of death, they were splashing happily.  In a pool!  In winter!  …But it was indoors.

So, I didn’t die.  And I have done this sort of thing before enough to know how far I can push myself on arthritic knees with impaired lungs.  I didn’t really come out of there with any more aches and pains than I went in with.  And, though I really hate to admit it, the day after leaves me feeling somewhat… better.

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January 14, 2016 · 4:34 pm

Werewolf Inspirations

Having lived through a horror story recently, I now must work more on mine.  I have a werewolf story that I have been writing since the 1970’s.  I have been calling it The Baby Werewolf for forty-two years.  And that may have to change.  It is a story of a boy with hypertrichosis (werewolf excessive hair disease, a genetic disorder) and the family that is ashamed of him and tries to hide him forever in the attic.  Of course, if you know anything about me, you probably realize I am going to clown it up one side and down the other, because writing serious stuff is not my style… at least not without a “hefty helping of our hospitality”.  I am doing serious research now, which translated from ManicMickian means, “I am watching old werewolf movies on YouTube.”

 

I know you don’t believe I can pull off a YA novel that is a comedy about murder, wolves, and lycanthropes, with naked girls thrown in for good measure.  But watch me.  I am nothing if not willing to do practically anything to be creative.

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The Baby Werewolf

A Gothic Novel by Michael Beyer

 

 

 

Opus One – Of Wolves and Men

Canto One : “Homo Homini Lupus”

 

      Dad doesn’t like it when I watch horror movies.  He says they will give me nightmares.  They will keep me from getting a good night’s sleep.  And a farm kid needs his sleep because he has to get up early in the morning to check on the pigs, give them feed, and milk the cows.  We only have five cows.  Just enough to give the Niland family the milk it needs.  We can process it ourselves because we once had a lot of milk cows.  Not so much anymore.  Things are changing in the 1970’s.  But there I was that night watching The Wolfman on Grave’s End Manor the horror movie show that comes on CBS every week on Saturday… midnight.

I don’t always do exactly what Dad says.  Fathers don’t really know everything.  Well, not… everything, everything.  So, I have this story now to tell you, and it’s a… well, horror story.  It’s about werewolves.  Little ones.  And naked girls.  And me being almost fourteen already, I have to get this story told while I can still remember every little detail.  I just won’t show it to Dad.  And if they make it into a movie, I will tell him not to go.

I was all by myself that night.  The farmhouse was dark.  Mom and Dad had taken my little brother Nathaniel to Grandma’s house and they were in Rochester, Minnesota for some medical thing.  I was supposed to look after the farm and the pigs and the cows.  Our big thirty-six-inch TV was capable of doing full color, but the horror movie on Saturday nights was almost always a black and white movie anyway.  I was almost naked while watching it.  I only had on my Fruit of the Looms and an old silver crucifix on a chain around my neck.  It was something Great Aunt Hannah Foxworth had given Mom when she died.  Hey, it was a werewolf movie after all.

Lon Chaney Jr. was the star of the movie, and he looked more like old Elmer Dawes from Norwall, Iowa than your usual movie star.  But he was great in monster movies.

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January 13, 2016 · 4:55 pm

Parking Lot Nightmares

Sadie

Sometimes life is more like a car accident than a well-planned story.  You have to scrabble for themes and meaning as you undo your seatbelt to get out of the burning car before it explodes.  It was like that last night in the high school parking lot.

Princess

You see, the Princess had a U.I.L. academic competition last night.  In Texas we compete in nerd olympics so we can pretend that our kids actually learn things in school.  The Princess was a part of the science team, taking a test in competition with the nerds from the other district middle schools.  Well, she lost.  Personally, team-wise, and school-wise, the Long Middle School Falcons were shut out of the top three places.  Yes, that sucks, but she did get to compete, an honor already.  As much as this society pooh-poohs participation ribbons and feeling good about less-than-winning, sometimes they do represent real effort and real value.  It is the kind of gut-twist you put up with every year, with every competition.  Not everybody can win, and non-winners don’t deserve punishment.

But the excitement last night was not about that.  What was it about?  I don’t still completely know.

I went at 9:00 p.m. to pick her up from the Newman Smith High School competition site after her team was thoroughly beaten.  I hate high school parking lots.  You have to put up with other parents and their Texas driving skills.  We call it “driving friendly” in Texas.  It means pushing to the front of the line, cutting people off, bluffing your way through with the threat of violent collision.  In truth, if most of those parents in the parking lot had to take the driving test today, they not only wouldn’t have a license, they would be in jail to prevent vehicular manslaughter.  So, when I saw the multiple police cars at the high school, I merely assumed that some of the parents of UIL contestants had been “driving friendly” a little too hard.

Well, I pulled up behind the buses and got an ominous text.

“We are in lock-down.  Something happened.  Are you in the parking lot?”

“Yes.”

“My teacher says to stay in your car and keep the doors locked.  Wait until I tell you that we have been cleared.  The police are here.”

Well, that was tense.  Twenty minutes of sitting in the car not knowing what was going on… not knowing how to find out.  Finally I get another text.

“You have to pick me up back at Long.  They are taking us out to the bus at the back of the school.”

So, I drove the ten blocks to Long Middle School and waited in the parking lot there.  Far fewer parents in cars to run into, so it had its plusses.

Finally the bus arrived.  My daughter had to sign the teacher’s roll call of students before she would be released for me to take her home.  It was already 10:30.

“We’re sorry for this,” one of the teachers told me.

“The principal will probably call you tomorrow and explain what happened,” said another teacher.  Personally, I didn’t really care what happened.  She was safe, and that was what mattered.

“I don’t know what happened, Dad,” the Princess said, “but the police were looking for a man with an AK47.  At least, I think that’s what they told me.”

Ah, Texas.  The right to bear arms truly makes us rest at ease.  Except, I do not want to have the arms of a bear.

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January 10, 2016 · 5:51 pm

Book Magic, the Empathy Spell

Fools

I have long known that reading good books is the primary path to being a wizard.  There are many, many things you can learn from the magic contained in fiction books, but now there is also research that proves books can improve your empathetic skills.  Here is the article I found to suggest it is so;

http://blog.theliteracysite.com/fiction-readers/?utm_source=lit-twcfan&utm_medium=social-fb&utm_term=20160108&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=fiction-readers&origin=lit_twcfan_social_fb_link_fiction-readers_20160108

If you don’t feel energetic enough to actually go there and read that, let me summarize a bit.  When you read a good fiction story, you get to live for a while in another person’s skin… see the world through someone else’s eyes… and if it is intelligent, realistic, and complex enough, it rewires a bit of the part of your brain that tries to understand and make sense of perspectives that are new to you, not merely habits that you follow down muddy, well-worn paths on auto-pilot.  You get to practice understanding other people.  And the more you practice this with well-written, insightful material, the more empathetic you will become.  The article notes significantly that children reading J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series develop skill at compassion.  I can personally testify that as a middle school teacher, I saw that very thing happening as students in my nerd classes not only became more sensitive towards the gifted weirdos in their class because of Harry, but also became more understanding of the special education students, and other often-bullied minorities.  Harry Potter books are literally magic books.

Here are some other notable books and their magical powers;

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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is taught in numerous middle schools and high schools across the country because teachers have instinctively realized how much it does to solve problems of racial and cultural tension in the school environment.  It tackles the unfairness of racism, the effects of extreme poverty, the possible side effects of too much religion, and it illustrates everything through the voice of a very intelligent young girl.  Learning hard lessons becomes practically painless.

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The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is narrated by the angel of death.  It is set in Nazi Germany in the war years.  The central character is the daughter of a man arrested and executed as a communist.  She is forced to live with German foster parents who turn out to be very loving individuals, though they are enduring difficulties of their own.  They not only love and nurture her, they take in a young Jewish man who is fleeing the Gestapo and the work camps.  In the face of the constant threat of death, the main character learns to read both books and people, to care about others, and face the deaths of those she loves without fear.  This book makes beauty out of human ugliness and war, and love out of fear and death.  Very powerful magic, in my humble opinion.

So what am I saying in this Paffoonied post of books and magic?  Only this.  There is magic power to be gained from reading fiction books, especially well-written fiction books.  Try it for yourself.  You may accidentally turn yourself into a frog… or a little girl from Maycomb, Georgia in the 1930’s… but it will turn out to be very good magic.  Go ahead, try it.  I dare you.

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January 8, 2016 · 7:40 pm

Squint Beastwood and his Action Heroes of the 70’s Face the Here and Now

Yesterday I happened upon Squint Beastwood sitting in a park in the North Dallas area.  He had an empty lawn chair next to him, and he appeared to be deeply into a conversation with it.

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Squint (speaking as his character the Man with No Name);  You see, chair, I have a gun.  It’s a really, really big gun.  And I know how to use it.  I can shoot the eyes out of a peckerwood at 100 yards.  (I was confused about whether he actually meant to say “woodpecker”, but his gun was so big I was afraid to ask.)

chair (speaking as itself);  …

Squint (still as the Man with No Name);  I just don’t get this whole second amendment thing.  I mean, do I really have to have somebody’s permission to have a gun?  I don’t think so.  Lots of dudes have come up to me and said, “give me your gun, Josey Whales.”  And I don’t have to even shoot them to keep my gun.  I just squint my eyes real hard at them and chomp down on the toothpick in my mouth and say, “Are you sure you want to be asking me that?  I can draw my gun and shoot so fast that you can’t blink before you’d be deader than a cold stone that died from stone cancer.”  And they would just get this confused look on their faces and drop their own guns.  Of course, then I would shoot them stone cold deader than a cold stone that died from stone cancer.  You know what I mean?”

chair (still speaking as itself); …

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Squint (suddenly speaking as the rogue cop anti-hero Hurty Barry);  Now they are pestering me about the rights of the perpetrator.  They say things to me like, “Barry, you can’t just go around shooting somebody just because they were jaywalking or playing with  a toy gun while making the mistake of being black.”  But I don’t get that.  There are no crimes committed around me because I just look at the perpetrator and say, “I know you are thinking about committing a crime, criminal.  But you gotta ask yourself, can he really shoot me before I can dial 911 on a  cell phone?  You’ve been texting a lot, and have lots of practice, and probably think you can snap a picture of me and text Hurty Barry just violated my civil rights before I can shoot you in the head and make you stone cold deader than a cold stone that died of stone cancer.  So, do ya feel lucky, punk?”

And then I shoot them in the head.  The world is suddenly a safer place.  Why would anybody assume that somebody who is thinking of committing a crime has a right to a fair trial to determine if they actually committed a crime or not?  You just don’t know people the way I know people.  They are all criminals, rapists, murderers… and some, I assume are good people, but I think we should just shoot them stone cold deader than a cold stone that died of stone cancer and let God sort them out on judgement day.

chair (still speaking as itself)…

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Buck Cheston, former leader of the NPA (National Pistol Association) and star of movies like Planet of the Grapes wanders up and speaks as himself instead of one of his numerous movie characters;  Squint, old man, I see you have been talking to chairs again.  And you are afraid that Obama and his jack-booted government thugs are going to take away your guns.

Squint (still speaking as Hurty Barry); No, Buck.  Nobody takes away my guns.  I am just upset that society seems to think we should talk about our problems and find peaceful solutions, instead of solving problems with violence.

Buck (still speaking as leader of the NPA… even though he is actually dead now);  I agree with you that we can never solve this country’s problems as long as liberals and government types want to take away our guns.  Whether it is a matter of going to war with Iran, or keeping peace on the streets of Baltimore, the solution is not to take guns out of the hands of good guys with a gun.  We have to be able to shoot bad guys with a gun, and shoot to kill.  They will never get my guns until they pry them from my cold dead hands.

Squint (suddenly shifting back to being the Man With No Name); But, Buck, aren’t you dead of old age already?

Buck (speaking now as a dead man who is deader than a cold stone that died of stone cancer); Yes, I am afraid that is so.

Squint (still speaking as the Man with No Name); Well, don’t worry, Buck.  I’m still alive and I still have my gun, and if I can’t kill the bad guy, then he must be immortal.

Buck (still speaking as a dead man); You know, Squint, you haven’t been talking to anyone who is actually alive for this entire conversation.

Squint (finally speaking as himself); I will definitely have to kill somebody for that.  Somebody needs to die.

The chair began shivering uncontrollably.

 

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January 4, 2016 · 4:16 pm

Gingerbread Town

My recent experiments with holiday gingerbread and happiness have yielded some patently artistical results.  Yes, I know that isn’t a real word.  But I use it anyway because I take bits and pieces and use them to make something new.  You may remember the gingerbread house I made with my kids.  It turned into a disaster you could eat.  But  I got some pictures out of it.  Pictures like this;

I took one and loaded it into an art program and did this to it;

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I also took a picture of some old Christmas chocolate tins;

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I used them together with a stolen background to make this scene;

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Of course, I was not satisfied there.  I had some old cartoon characters lying around.  So, I wanted to use them too.

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And I ended up with an artistical art mess like this;

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If that isn’t artistical, then I don’t know what is.

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January 2, 2016 · 5:59 pm

An Autobiography of Mickey

 

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Last night I watched again Part I of Ken Burns’ Mark Twain.   I think it reminds me of who I am as a writer.  No, I am not being all big-head arrogant and full of myself.  I devoured certain writers as a youth, consumed them whole.  Charles Dickens was my first passion, followed by J.R.R. Tolkien, and then Mark Twain.  Of all of them, Samuel Clemens is the most like me.  He was from the Midwest, born and raised in Missouri along the Mississippi River.  I am from the Midwest, born and raised in Iowa along the Iowa River.  He endured hardship and tragedy as a youth, losing his little brother in a riverboat accident, and he dealt with it by humor.  I endured a sexual assault from an older boy, and dealt with it by… well, you get the picture.  We are alike, him and I.  We both draw upon the place we grew up, the people we have known, and the events of our youth to create stories.

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It is a pretty big responsibility to follow in his footsteps, and I will probably never live to see the success and the wealth that came to him.  But I have a responsibility to the people I knew and the time that gave rise to me to tell their story.  I need to build a network of stories that resonate the truth of existence that I have been witness to.  A big responsibility… and I probably will not live up to it.  But I have to try.

Being a writer is somewhat like being cursed.  The words burn inside, needing to get out, needing to be heard.   I have stories that need to be told, and they will be told, even if only to file away in the closet again.  Like Mark Twain, I am good at feeling sorry for myself.  And the Mickey part of me, the writer part of me, is just like Mark Twain, a writer persona, and not the real man himself.  I am simply the container for something that has to exist and has to tell stories.  It is not a bad thing to be.  But the more I get to know it, the more I would not wish the destiny on others.

Forgive how sad and bunglingly boorish this post is.  But sometimes there are thoughts I simply have to think.  And as a writer, I am bound to write down the silly things that I think.

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January 1, 2016 · 9:05 pm

I Has Done a Good Thing

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In 2015 I decided I would post a blog post every single day of the year.  And so I have done it.  WordPress didn’t count every single post on the day it was intended for.  My computer clock doesn’t work right, and their day ends something like four to six hours before mine does.  (Greenwich Time?)  So some of my posts were counted on the wrong day from my point of view.  But that is just a technicality.  I accomplished this writing goal while finishing a contest novel that has made it into the final round, and I did final edits on my novel Snow Babies so PDMI Publishing LLC can make an actual book of it.

WordPress says my blog was viewed 9,500 times in 2015.   I am up to 759 followers, some of whom seem to like every post I put up.  I have gotten no real troll comments so far (probably due to the fact that the only people who look in on my humble blog are the kind that like to read the sort of stuff I write).   No readers have as yet made it their personal mission in life to try to save the world from my brain-boggling goofiness and potential for killing people by making them laugh themselves to death.  Either those readers haven’t found me yet, or my posts are not as grin-inducing as I tell myself when I am lying to myself on a semi-daily basis.

I will have posted 776 posts with the posting of this one in all the time I have been writing on WordPress.  It is a lot of wordy talkiness in printy printyness.  And I have not stopped the flow yet.  I need a break from posting, but just as I posted every day for two months before 2015, I will probably need some time to break the bad habits I have developed over the last year.  I still need to blog, because it is the only writing I do that gives me any kind of feedback beyond editors saying, “You can’t write that in a young-adult novel!” or, “People don’t actually talk like that in real life.  You can’t just go around inventing new language.”  (But Shakespeare did it… or, rather, whoever really wrote Shakespeare’s plays did it… so I have the right to try, consequences to the sanity of Western Civilization be damned.)  So I will continue to cut and paste purple paisley prose into this brain-bogglingly bumptious blog, and I will continue to illustrate it with perfectly pickled Paffooney pictures.

 

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December 31, 2015 · 4:46 pm

Wisdom of the Mickey

 

 

MickeyOne must end the year on a note that is either upbeat or regretful.  A heartfelt, “Meh,” just won’t cut it.

So here are a few particles of wisdom from the dustbowl of Mickey’s imagination.

The world is getting brighter… also hotter.  If we continue to chill on the topic of global warming, soon we will be fricasseed.

Ima mickey

You should definitely pay attention to your teachers.  They are mostly old and cranky and undervalued, and it makes them sad when they realize that no one really listens to them.

I learned this from the poet Dylan Thomas, “Rage! Rage! Against the dying of the light!”  He cursed death, and then he promptly went out and drank so much liquor, he died at a very young age.  Thank God I have lived to be old.

You are also pretty much stuck with the face that you are born with, so you better get used to it, and it has many varied uses… especially in the comic sense.

And I would also like to re-iterate the wisdom of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery;

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It is a bit of a disappointment to an artist to realize that what is essential is actually invisible to the eye… but I know it is true.  Truth resides in words.

The only wisdom I truly possess is the knowledge that I am a fool.

Since I was a mere stupid boy, and before I grew up to be a mildly stupid man, I always yearned to have wisdom.  And wisdom comes through experience and pain.  Now, years later, I realize what true wisdom is… I’d have been better off without all that pain.

Millis

People are a lot like rabbits, except that they are not.

They can never eat too many carrots… unless they do.  And then their skin can turn orange.

There is no beast as noble as a rabbit… except for practically every other beast.

Turtles are not as noble as rabbits.  When you challenge them to a race, they cheat.

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People really ought to be naked more.  It’s true.  If you can strip yourself down to only what is fundamentally nothing but you yourself… you begin to know who you really are.  And it is not shame to let other people see.  Oh, wait a minute!  You thought I was talking about being literally naked?  Oh, no!  Metaphorically naked only!

One should be so opaque and obtuse that other people can see acutely right through you.  It is the only thing that makes nonsense into sense.

And we need to sing and dance a little more than we do.  A good song is healthy for the soul, no matter how badly you sing it.  And even if you are old and arthritic like me, dancing a good jiggity-jig keeps the bones loose and the heart thumping.

Everyone needs to dance with their children.  And talk to them.  You can learn more from them than they can from you.  They have more recently come here from the hand of God.  And they know things that you have forgotten… and will need to remember before you return to Him.

 

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I hope my anti-wisdom has not seriously screwed everybody up.

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December 30, 2015 · 5:11 pm

Google “PAFFOONEY”

One of the most important things about my blog has been that I can share my artwork.  I have always been capable of a reasonably high level of drawing ability.  I can also paint and create artistically original photographs.  I have that artist’s eye that sees creatively.  If you follow directions in this first Paffooney, you will see a wider variety of the kind of Paffoonies I post than I will post here.  This will be, however, a picture post.  I intend to share a bunch of my artwork here, both old and new.  Take a gander.  (And while you hold on to that male goose, look at some of my pictures, too.)

Animal Town

tree time_ginger

Aztec

You have to admit that I am clearly not an artist like Van Gogh or Picasso… certainly nothing like Andrew Wyeth or Winslow Homer.  I am more of an illustrator, or … worse, a cartoonist.

Blue in the back yard

So, this is at least partially about sharing artwork.  I am not a professional artist.  I have made no money from drawing, even though my artwork has been published before.  I have been given this talent by God not to be famous and wealthy, but to be a better teacher and a better storyteller.

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