This is an oil portrait of me and David. I can probably no longer create a picture like this. My arthritic hands are not steady enough anymore to blend shadow colors, especially in clothing.
My personal connections to the 1800’s died in 1980 with the loss of Great Grandma Hinckley.Much of my connection to the bucolic days of family farms is gone too. I am a part owner now of the family farm, but it is being farmed by a renter. and I only get to visit once a year, which hasn’t happened during one of the two years of pandemic.
I will never return to the classroom as a teacher again. Not even as a sub. I am no longer physically capable of doing the job. Most people don’t realize how tough a job it truly is.
When I pass on, my connection to the future will also be gone… At least to all the parts of me that are not confined to words in a book.
My super powers are fading, even the incredibly bad smell that makes criminals pass out during combat.
I am slowly going color-blind.
Fortunately, my kids can carry the family name onwards.
Yes, Mary Ann, Gilligan, and Ginger… but also Ysandra, Me, and Abigail
I suppose if you look at my blog regularly and don’t just look in on it once and swear off coming here for the rest of the life of our galaxy, you have probably realized that I live and die for cartoons and metaphors.
Seriously, the cartoon above is Mary Ann and Ginger with Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island, a TV show I watched far more often in afternoon syndication as a Belmond Junior High student at the start of the 70’s than I did when it was originally on in the 60’s and I wasn’t watching with high levels of hormonal lust in my brain.
This Rabbit with the Big Pencil is teacher-me, Reluctant Rabbit.
In the Fall of 1981 I began teaching Language Arts to eighth graders in Frank Newman Junior High of Cotulla, Texas. On the very first day of my teaching career, in the third period of the day, one of my somewhat stupid but probably also slightly evil male students announced to class, “Hey, you look like Gilligan!”
The show on TV, of course, was still running in the afternoons in syndication. And because the student thought I looked like the actor Bob Denver, and because he probably thought they could all manipulate me as a fool like the TV Gilligan was a fool manipulated by others on the island, my classroom would become known as Gilligan’s Island.
Ironically, in a few more years, about 1985, I ended up with basically two girlfriends. Mary Ann, the one I was actually chasing, was the teacher’s aide in my classroom who helped by translating all the bad words in Spanish used daily on the “Island.” And Ginger, the one that was chasing me, was the rookie Reading Teacher for whom I was the unofficial mentor since she was the white girl from Wisconsin who could only get the boys to settle down because she was good looking in their little brains filled with hormonal lust. Technically I dated both of them, because I asked Mary Ann out repeatedly, and she said yes to me for lack of anything better to do. I took Ginger places because she was my next-door neighbor at the apartment house, and she did not own a car of her own. And Mary Ann let me go on dates that Ginger asked me out on as long as we never talked about it using the noun “date” as something other than the sugary fruit that comes from a date palm.
Naturism became a synonym for innocence in my mind.
Mary Ann didn’t like the noun “girlfriend” either, whether I meant Ginger or herself. She had been unhappily married before, and liked me better as a friend with no permanent attachments.
Mary Ann was also responsible for introducing me to nudists and naturists. Her sister who was deaf lived in Austin at a “clothing optional” apartment complex with her husband and child. It was a culture shock for me when we went to Austin for the weekend to see the musical “Cats.” I didn’t have to stay there since my parents lived in nearby Taylor, Texas. But after leaving her there on Friday night, I had to enter the place to pick her up again on Saturday. Oh my! Naked people! And not just hairy guys and fat women, but young ladies and kids in the pool too. I talked to some of them. They were all open and friendly, though they were sort of 70’s hippie-types. Mary Ann and I made a number of weekend trips to Austin, and I got to know the place well, though always exercising the “clothing” option. I began corresponding with one couple because of a mutual interest in stamp collecting. They put me in touch with a couple that sold naturist publications and traded stamps who also ran a naturist resort in Florida. They definitely got me into philately, but they also predicted that one day I would embrace naturism too. I have to confess, the roots of the obsession were already there before I got to know any of them.
I actually only saw one of the two “girlfriends” naked in the five year period I spent time with them both, and I didn’t marry either young woman. But I played the part of Reluctant Rabbit holding the Big Pencil (a metaphor that obviously stands for teaching ability) on the Island for 23 years. Those cartoonish ideas all came together to make me who I am. And I laugh about it… long and hard… with no regrets. I really kinda like who I am.
The “Mickey” in me is the cartoonist and story-teller I became on retiring in 2014.
I have long identified with Popeye. Let me review that notion by re-posting a bit of an old post in which I explain while talking like Popeye;
I am Popeye, I sez, because I just am… Yeah, that’s right, I yam what I yam.
First of all, I looks like Popeye. I has that cleft in me chin, very little hair left on me ol’ head, and I gots the same squinky eye (what squinky eye?). I has had that same squinky eye since I wuz a teenager and got kicked in the eye doin’ sandlot football (bettern’ sandlot high divin’, fer sure!). I also has them same bulgy arms, the ones that bulge in the forearm and is incredibobble thin on the upper arms.
Second of all, I has Popeye Spinach-strength. I look weak and scrawny, but I is a lot tuffer than I looks. I go into classrooms full of wild, crazed middle schoolers, and grabs their attention, tells ’em what’s what, and makes ’em woik. (Woik is a voib, and that means I is woikin’ when I makes ’em do it.) I kin stands ridicule and kids what will remarks on the hair in me ears and me squinky eye. I tells ’em that the scar on me face was did by a bloke with a knife (which it were, cause I had skin cancer and the doctor used a knife to get it off). I has taken all kinds of nasty punches from life (diabetes, blood-pressure problems, prostatitis, arthritis) and I still keeps comin’ back fer more. In fact, I can winds up me arm and give that ol’ Devil a good Twisker Sock right in the kisser.
Third of all, I has a typical Popeye Sweet Patootie. My Island Girl Wife is like Olive Oyl in very many ways. She is always tellin’ me what to do. She compares me to ol’ Bluto. She panics and flails her arms when there’s a crisis. And she expects me to always save the day and never says “thank you” after.
So, I mean it when I sez “I am Popeye”. I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!
See? I kin talk like Popeye because in many ways I AM him… He of the mangled-mouth vocabubobulary created by Elzie Crisler Segar on January 17th, 1929 for his comic strip Thimble Theater for King Features Syndicate. He doesn’t talk right because his brain is so full of goodness and spinach that he has no room left for spelling and pronunskiation. Ak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak…. Popeye is just a simple sailor, and has been for 94 years. He expresses himself horribly, but only in the very best of ways. So when I mangle a word on purpose… or by happy accident… it is just me honoring that old one-eyed sailor. It is not me just being a stupid addle-pated blarney goon who don’t knows how to talk right.
As a senior in high school, there were a few things that Valerie had to endure that were not such a terrible thing for the other girls. You see, the Belle City School District PTA put on a father/daughter dinner for all the senior girls every year, a tradition that went back eleven years. In it, the girls and their fathers would be given the royal treatment in the school cafeteria with a full meal courtesy of the PTA who did the majority of the cooking, aided by the senior mothers who did the serving and the every-thing-elsing. There would be some boring and semi-torturous entertainment from the music department, and then the dinner would culminate with the father/daughter dance.
But Valerie had no father.
Instead, she was stuck with Uncle Dash. Yes, the eldest of Grandpa Larry’s three kids, with Aunt Jen the middle child, and Daddy Kyle the youngest. That Uncle Dash. The farmer in the dell. Father to Brent and Stacy Clarke. But he had missed Stacy’s father/daughter dinner, and Stacy had ended up running away from home, possibly away from the whole State of Iowa. So, who would Mom ask to fill in for Daddy Kyle? Was there ever any doubt? The same monster who drove beloved cousin Stacy away forever because he couldn’t stand the Toad.
So, there she sat in the school cafeteria wearing the baby-blue evening dress that Mom and Aunt Jen had crafted for her with their semi-legendary sewing skills. Uncle Dash, dressed in his best Sunday suit and tie sat next to her.
“Val, can you pass me that pepper shaker?” Uncle Dash asked, pointing at the pepper beside Charlotte Robbins’s plate. It was ironically appropriate that the PTA wanted her to sit next to her worst enemy and the little fat man who was Charlotte’s father.
“Char? Can I have the pepper please?”
“Oh, Val, surely you know that, on a night like tonight, everything belongs to you.”
Charlotte plunked the shaker down in front of Valerie so hard that a cloud of pepper poofed up almost in Valerie’s face. If this were a cartoon show, Val would then be seized by a sneezing fit as the villainess laughed eerily. But this wasn’t a cartoon show, and thankfully Val was apparently immune to cartoonish sneezing fits brought on by malevolent clouds of pepper.
“Here you go, Uncle Dash,” Val said, gingerly sitting the pepper down in front of her uncle.
“Thank you, sweetheart. Did I tell you how beautiful you look tonight?”
“Only once at our house, three times in the pickup, and seven times since we’ve been here… not counting this one.”
“Oh, well… you know… you are beautiful. Kyle would be proud.”
She briefly turned her glare on him. But the tears in his eyes stifled that instantly. After all, Uncle Dash had loved his little brother in that stand-offish way Iowa farmers have of doing things and feeling things that farmers are not allowed to feel and do for some stupid reason.
And she knew that Uncle Dash blamed himself for Daddy when he… Damn! She didn’t want Charlotte Robbins seeing any tears. Especially not Valerie’s own tears. Then the little witch would pity her, and the last thing she wanted from old Baldy Greenskin was actual pity. Not from the enemy!
“Uncle Dash, I’m not feeling so well. I have a headache.”
“Oh, honey, the dance is about to start. I promised your mother and your Aunt Betty that I would dance at least one dance with you. Can’t you hang on just a little longer?”
She glanced at Charlotte who was making sheep’s eyes at David McLaughin who was sitting across the table from her with his older sister Carolyn, since his father was that workaholic that owned half of McLaughin Brothers Chevrolet.
“I can try. But it’s only going to get worse.”
He looked at her anxiously. It obviously meant more to him than it did to her that he had that one dance. He could probably never understand what it meant to her to be there without…
She tried to concentrate on the meal. She nibbled a little bit more of the chicken breast in yellow gravy. But food tasted no better than she felt on the inside. She ended up asking Alice Pedersen’s mom to take her plate away with most of the food still on it.
And then the dance music began. The first one… the one she had promised to Uncle Dash… was Bryan Adams’ song “All I Want is You.” Oh, gawd. Why did the DJ have to pick that one? It wasn’t a dance tune that Uncle Dash could really dance to. And the words cut into her like a knife. After all… who was the only one she wanted on this particular night?
She dutifully let Uncle Dash drag her out onto the dance floor, the clear rectangle of space left in the middle of all the rectangular tables in the school cafeteria. He immediately tried to get her to dance a wooden-legged waltz, the only dance he knew. She let herself be pulled around in a slow circle. It was like dancing with Pinocchio… if the puppet’s joints had an excessive amount of Elmer’s Glue jamming them up.
Charlotte, that witch, stood there on the dance floor staring and laughing. At least, she did until her own manic-midget father began doing a cross between the Chicken Dance and something the Monkees probably did on stage back in the 60’s.
“Uncle Dash! I have to go home. My head hurts.”
“Darling, we have almost finished the song. And I gave my word…”
“You don’t understand. I can’t do this anymore!”
“But Princess…”
That was it. The name her father had always called her when he was still…
Valerie fell to her knees in the middle of the dance floor.
She began to shout just as the song was ending so that everyone’s attention would be riveted on what Val was saying.
“You are not my father! My Daddy’s dead. I can’t take it anymore! Take me home now!”
“Please, Valerie… don’t… not here.”
“Home, now!”
Everyone was dead silent and staring. Even smug Charlotte now looked stunned and horrified.
“I know you blame me for not being there when… but I…” Uncle Dash was more distressed than he had even been that night when…
“No! I don’t blame you! I blame me! I didn’t see it coming! I didn’t do anything to stop him! And when I found him, the gun was laying right there next to his hand. It’s my fault.”
She raised her face to the ceiling.
Tears fell everywhere. They were all silent, watching.
Her face was the moon.
And it was a blue moon.
But hopefully there would never be another blue moon.
“My name is Michael Beyer, and I am an amateur cartoonist.”
“Hi, Michael!” says the entire group of CA group-therapy participants.
(CA stands for Cartoonists Anonymous.)
Doofy Fuddbugg
“I have to admit, I am guilty of giving in to the urge to draw cartoons. I know how it can fill lives with slapstick pain and derisive laughter, and I give in to the urge anyway.”
“So, what did you draw that you have to be ashamed of now?” asked one mad-eyed cartoonist with a pencil lodged behind each of his large ears.
“I made a very unfortunate video to post on YouTube that was supposed to be How-to-draw Cartooning. But everything went wrong. You couldn’t see my drawings in the video. It was not adequately lit. I look like a doofus (which probably can’t be cured) in the video. And instead of thinking twice or editing it, I posted it anyway.”
“Wow!” said a rather ugly cartoonist lady, “that is really bad. You have a seriously bad case of cartoonity.”
“Cartoonity?” I responded stupidly.
“The condition of needing love for your cartoons so bad that you will risk anything to make people look at them and like them,” said the wise group therapist (who looked an awful lot like Chuck Jones, though I am fairly sure Chuck Jones is now dead).
“Yes, I suppose that’s about the size of the problem,” I said. “I have been posting pages from my graphic novel, Hidden Kingdom, and I really haven’t seen more than one comment about it. Do people actually read cartoons and comics nowadays? Or is it just me that gets ignored?”
“You have to focus on how much you love drawing and doing it just for that reason, and nothing beyond that,” said the wise therapist. “Cartooning should be done for its own sake, and nothing more than that. Craving attention and approval for it can get seriously infected and become a bad case of cartoonititis. How do you think I dealt with it when I was still alive?”
At that point, my eyes popped out of my head in disbelief and my lower jaw fell all the way to the floor. Could he really be…?
And so I must end today’s blog post since it is hard to keep typing when your eyeballs are rolling around on the floor.
This is not going to be your usual yearbook picture day, is it?.Unusual choice for what to wear on picture dayBetter dressed, but… You mean to tell me this is a teacher?Cute smile, Blueberry.Which second grade class are you in, Ronny? Who’s your teacher?Were these yearbook photos actually taken in the school cafeteria?So, you must be the Science Teacher, eh, Mr. Purrdy?Tim, it would be nice if you could smile before the photographer takes the picture.So, Wally, you must be in Mrs. Nelson’s Art Class this period, right?
Now, that’s a picture done right, Ruben. Good job!
What subject do you teach, Mr. Enstein? Frank, take the cancer stick out of your mouth.
Is that a teacher pose, Mr. Beyer?
Why do so many teachers want to be pictured smoking in the yearbook, Mr. Dogg?Don’t we already have your yearbook picture, Michael?Rita, that’s an interesting t-shirt, but it feels like it is staring at me.Um, are you smiling yet, Murky?I honestly don’t want to take pictures for this yearbook again next year.
I am aware that nobody who looks at my blog ever clicks on my videos. This one, however, would be very useful if you are really going to read and engage with this essay. This self-reflection came into being as a response to watching this video. The video talks about how most people can’t stand to actually sit alone in a room with only themselves. And it has an impact. I have claimed in the past to being a devotee of the Theodore Roethke maxim, “Being, not doing, is my first love.” But how does one go about becoming truly self-aware? How does one enumerate the concept of “being”? I believe I can do it, but it requires a bit of self-examination. How do I do it?
Let me count the ways…
I put myself down on paper, through drawing or writing in English and look at the way it portrays me.
I find myself in both the written characters I create and the cartoon characters I draw. In Hidden Kingdom, my graphic novel, the Mouse and young Prinz Flute are both me. I can see myself both as the reluctant romantic hero and the snarky child-thing with a dangerous little bit of wisdom.
I learn to know more about my secret heart and what I truly think about the world I live in and react to by writing about what I think and the things that happen to me, both for good and ill. This blog is all about learning about myself, just as your blog is a mirror of who you really are. Consequently, I have no secrets left.
I not only reveal myself in this blog, but I also attempt to sing about myself in much the same way that Walt Whitman did in his poetry.
I live most of my life in my own imagination. It is a silly Willy Wonka world of images, songs, music, and dreams. It can all blow away in a moment when the sun comes out. It can also keep me in a light-obscuring cloud wrapped and safe, well away from the things I fear and the things that worry me. I came to realize I was repressing the memory of being sexually assaulted when I was ten through a dream when I was nineteen, re-living the event in a dream from which I awoke with a blinding flash of realization. I came to grips with the horror that mangled my childhood and young adulthood first by facing the fact that the nightmare had been real, and then by finding ways to overcome it. I became a teacher of young people in large part as a way to protect them and prevent such a thing from ever happening again to someone else.
I use my fictional stories about the girl Valerie Clarke to examine my relationships with my own daughter and a couple of old girlfriends from my youth.
I often worry that I don’t see real people as being real people. I tend to think of them from the first meeting onward as potential book characters, walking collections of details and quirks, conflicts and motivations. But I recognize too that that way of seeing with the author’s eye is not incorrect. People really are those things. There are rules and generalizations that everyone falls under at some point. It is not so much that I see real people as book characters as it is that I realize that book characters are as real as any other purportedly “real” people.
I am myself both the subject of my cartooning and fictionarooning, and the cartoon character of myself as well.
Mickey is not a real person. He is a cartoonist persona, a mask, a fake identity, and the lie I tell myself about who I actually am.
In this essay, I have attempted to explain to you who I think I am spending time with when I am alone in a room with myself. He is not such a terrible person to spend time with, this Mickey. Or else he really is truly awful, and I am lying about me and who I think I am when I am alone with me and have no other options. But probably not. I have been getting to know me for about 562 years, only exaggerating by 500, and I am not finished yet.
It is, of course, one of the most powerful, masterful, and best-known pieces of music ever written.
Mozart completed the “little serenade” in Vienna in 1787, but it wasn’t published until 1827, long after Mozart’s untimely death.
The Serenade is incorrectly translated into English as “A Little Night Music”. But this is and always has been the way I prefer to think of it. A creation of Mozart written shortly before he hopped aboard the ferryman’s boat and rode off into the eternal night. It is the artifact that proves the art of the master who even has the word “art” as a part of his name. A little music to play on after the master is gone to prove his universal connection to the great silent symphony that is everything in the universe singing silently together.
It is basically what I myself am laboring now to do. I have been dancing along the edge of the abyss of poverty, suffering, and death since I left my teaching job in 2014. I will soon be taking my own trip into night aboard the ferryman’s dreaded boat. And I feel the need to put my own art out there in novel and cartoon form before that happens.
I am not saying that I am a master on the level of a Mozart. My name is not Mickart. But I do have a “key’ in the name Mickey. And it will hopefully unlock something worthwhile for my family and all those I loved and leave behind me. And hopefully, it will provide a little night music to help soothe the next in line behind me at the ferryman’s dock.
Can Bugs Bunny sue me over this picture? Does it represent a copyright violation?
First of all, the Bugs-Bunny look-alike above is clearly labeled “Rugs Rabbity.” You can make satirical references to copyrighted characters if it is clearly satirical. The Rabbity’s speech balloon is clearly not saying, “What’s up, Doc?” Instead he’s using a beer-commercial reference addressed to a wooden structure intended for tying up your boat at the shore. Sure, it’s clearly meaningless without the context of the Warner Brothers’ favorite attack rabbit. (He is well-known for getting black ducks blasted by Elmers during Wabbit Season.) But it is referential using clearly altered forms of the copyrighted character. And clearly, no cartoon rabbit has ever won a lawsuit in human court.
Yes, I know Superman won his lawsuit against Captain Marvel (err… make that Shazzam because of Marvel’s Captain Marvel.) But that was actually DC Comics ruthlessly taking down the competition, and the result was that DC ended up owning the character they proved was a rip-off copy.
But what’s the actual topic of this post anyway?
In other words, “What’s up, Doc?”
Um, as a kid I used to think updock was a weed like burdock. And I assumed that Rugs Rabbity said that all the time because he liked to smoke it. Or brew it so he could drink it and dip his carrots in it.
See, I got you to grimace at that joke without being sued yet again.
But, really, this post is about yesterday. 22/02/2022!
Yes, yesterday was a screwy -number day. You can write the number out forwards or backwards, depending on how you initially write it down, and have it be exactly the same. In other words, not numbers, a palindrome. In other numbers, 2/22/22. The last time a number like that happened was in the 17th Century. (I haven’t double-checked that fact myself, but Stephen Colbert said it was so.)
And Minnie Mouse can’t sue me either, since we paid for our Disneyland tickets and she posed for the photo with my daughter as part of what we paid for. Scraggles the Cat surely won’t sue me because I created him with my own colored pencils, and cartoon cats can’t sue in human courts either.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
It is, of course, one of the most powerful, masterful, and best-known pieces of music ever written.
Mozart completed the “little serenade” in Vienna in 1787, but it wasn’t published until 1827, long after Mozart’s untimely death.
The Serenade is incorrectly translated into English as “A Little Night Music”. But this is and always has been the way I prefer to think of it. A creation of Mozart written shortly before he hopped aboard the ferryman’s boat and rode off into the eternal night. It is the artifact that proves the art of the master who even has the word “art” as a part of his name. A little music to play on after the master is gone to prove his universal connection to the great silent symphony that is everything in the universe singing silently together.
It is basically what I myself am laboring now to do. I have been dancing along the edge of the abyss of poverty, suffering, and death since I left my teaching job in 2014. I will soon be taking my own trip into night aboard the ferryman’s dreaded boat. And I feel the need to put my own art out there in novel and cartoon form before that happens.
I am not saying that I am a master on the level of a Mozart. My name is not Mickart. But I do have a “key’ in the name Mickey. And it will hopefully unlock something worthwhile for my family and all those I loved and leave behind me. And hopefully, it will provide a little night music to help soothe the next in line behind me at the ferryman’s dock.
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Filed under artwork, cartoons, classical music, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, Hidden Kingdom, magic, metaphor, music, Paffooney
Tagged as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Mozart