Category Archives: strange and wonderful ideas about life

December 9, 2016 · 12:42 am

Where I’d Like to Be (a book by Frances O’Roark Dowell)

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This book made me cry. And that is not unusual, even though I am a 60-year-old man. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens made me cry. At the end, not during the funny parts. But this was a book about a lonely eleven-year-old girl trying to make friends. Why should that make me cry?
But it is also a bittersweet tale of memorable child characters who have nowhere left to turn but each other, and their imaginations. The poetic sting of it can make a grown man cry. You should read it. You will understand then.

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December 8, 2016 · 4:09 pm

Bubble People

I was recently gifted with the eye-opening event of having my own personal soap bubble of beliefs, dreams, and hopes popped by an angry, dyspeptic orangutan.  Yes, he got elected to the most powerful position of leadership on the planet Earth.  And, as I was hurt in the fall from my rudely popped bubble, I began to think about the nature of the bubbles we live in and plot my evil revenge.

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You see, people all live in bubbles of perception.  There are limits to what you can see, hear, learn, accept, believe, and understand.  Those limits are the walls of the soap bubble we create for ourselves in the empty warehouse of our own mind.  I know I have just revealed that what I am talking about is completely metaphorical, but all you people out there who live in literal-minded, practically impenetrable bubbles need to be reminded that metaphorical truth is still truth.

In politics, there now seem to be two main classes of bubble that exist separately and prevent many people from seeing and understanding the perceptions of many other people.  There are conservative bubble people.  There are also liberal bubble people.

Conservative is supposed to mean that they like what they currently have and want to preserve it.  I include here not just possessions, but values, goals, religions, hopes, and dreams.  Liberal traditionally means that they are dissatisfied with what they currently have and want change.  Looking at this construct carefully reveals that anyone who is liberal should be seeking change, but once they have it, should then become satisfied and change into a conservative.  Similarly, if they are conservative, but things change into a new set of things that they don’t like, they should become liberals.  But in our political system, these labels have become set in stone.  And I should warn you, putting stone letters on a soap bubble will invariably pop it.  Conservative bubble people have added concrete mix to the walls of their bubbles to harden it, so that it won’t pop.  Liberals have done the same.  Though, I believe Republican conservative bubble people have somehow found a concrete mix that, when it hardens, makes it impenetrable by facts, science, and logic.  Not to be outdone, though, liberals have added bizarre chemicals to their mix that makes their bubbles impenetrable by feelings, emotion, and religion.  The collective effect of all this bubble-fixing is that all bubble people’s bubbles have become dark and no longer transparent.  You cannot see through them.

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It is no wonder that when liberals look at conservative bubbles they think, “These people are just selfish, money-hungry, and evil, and will do anything for a profit.  They don’t care what’s best for everybody.”

Conversely, conservatives look at liberal bubbles and think, “They are unfeeling control freaks who want to take away our freedom to do what we believe in.  They want to tell us what we can do.  They are trying to take away our rights.”

So, humorist and crack-brained nitwit that I am, I have come up with an evil plan to undo this opaque-bubble nightmare.  I intend to look inside lots of bubbles and find ways to make them more transparent again.  I also intend to invite everyone I know, and everyone who reads this, to do the same.  That should help.

But I should warn you, I am not the only one looking to manipulate bubble people.  There are a bunch of rich and cynical folks out there too who are busy playing billiard games with a majority of the fossilized opaque bubbles .  Once bubbles start popping, more people will be hurt.

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December 5, 2016 · 4:12 pm

The Use of Magic Words

Eli Tragedy

Okay, Mickey, you have said you have confidence in science to the point of not believing in God… at least not the Christian imaginary sky-friend with the white beard and bad temper.  But your use of magic words then makes you a hypocrite.

What?  Magic words, you say?

You heard me.  You use words that give you special powers.  And you believe in them like some kind of anti-science religious zealot.

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                                                                                                  Thank you, Bruce Rydberg, for giving me this useful meme.

Okay, you caught me.  There are certain words that do have super powers.  I know because I have used them.  (And Science is not the opposite of faith.   Just ask Heisenberg.)

I first suspected that magic words really existed back in college.  I read the book Dune by Frank Herbert.  (Followed by every other book he wrote.  I became a Dune-dream believer.)  Remember the part where Paul uses the Bene Gesserit fear chant to get through the psychological test given to him by the Bene Gesserit witch?  You don’t?  You haven’t read it?  I sometimes forget other people aren’t hopeless Trekkies and Sci-fi nerds too.  I do know, at least in my head, that most people have real lives outside of their own heads.  But I did develop a magic word to deal with times of stress and fear.

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Really, Mickey?  You chant this out loud when you’re nervous?

I say it in my head over and over to focus my spirit on what is truly important.  Never out loud.  I used this word to get through my wedding day in 1995 when a blizzard in Iowa prevented all of my non-Texas family at the time from attending.  I used it the day my first son was born when the delivery had to be accomplished by c-section due to heartbeat irregularities.  I used it the day an irate student came down the hallway towards me with metal ninja throwing stars, saying he was going to kill a specific student that was hiding in the History teacher’s classroom.  Yes, it helped me think and act appropriately during some rather intense times.  Sometimes a bit of nonsense injected into the middle of a tense situation makes all the difference in the world.

But that isn’t the only magic word that you made up, is it?

No, there’s the word “Paffooney” which you may have seen before in this blog.  It stands for a picture of my own design put together with words I have actually written myself.  Remember this?

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It still works.  I tested it myself this morning.  It gives you a look at my artwork posted on this blog without risking the danger of going back through all my old posts and accidentally reading something that makes your head melt.

But, really, are your magic words only words you made up yourself?

No.  I think the word “Truth” is a magic word.  It can be used or misused for both good and evil.

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This is very likely the magic word we need to defeat the orange-faced monkey we elected president.  There are lots of words that have immense power.  And all you have to do is believe in it a little bit… and use it intelligently.

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November 28, 2016 · 4:23 pm

Just Call Me Joe

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Yes, the rain clouds are hanging over my old gray head.   I am plunged deeply back into credit card debt by increases in property taxes, a lawsuit by Bank of America, the city  forcing me to get the cracked pool repaired though I can’t afford to do anything more than fix it myself and rain keeps refilling it, a recent car accident, my wife forgetting to pay the phone bill for two months, and the @#%&! family dog chewing up another of my son’s expensive retainers.  Good fortune occurs once in a blue moon, but bad fortune comes in daily waves.

So today is about complaining.  Life sucks… in the sense of a vacuum cleaner (the addendum I always had to add as a school teacher whenever the word “sucks” was used in class).  Life especially sucks (remember… vacuum cleaner) now that we have a dyspeptic orangutan running our country.

The answer, of course, is that we simply have to live with it.  Life will go on.  At least, until it doesn’t.  We are all going to die some day.  Humanity and life on earth will be extinct some day.  We live within the borders of birth and death.  The beginning and the end.

 But life is actually like a book.  It begins and ends.  But the important part is the pages in between.  And we can fill them with good things and lots of love and even more laughter.  Hmm, maybe I should stop complaining now.

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November 27, 2016 · 4:06 pm

Saturdays With Gingerbread

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This is the pen and ink start of an illustration of the novel I am working on, Recipes for Gingerbread Children.

I admit that my obsession with the benefits of gingerbread is mostly in my head.  Specifically, in my sinuses.  I find products with ginger in them, diet ginger ale, ginger teas, and especially gingerbread cookies, help reduce the tightness in my COPD-laced lungs, clear my sinuses, and make breathing mercifully easier.  Gingerbread cookies are also seasonally wonderful in that they are slightly Christmassy and help bring my family together.

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So, yesterday, a Saturday, my daughter the Princess and I executed a perfectly evil plan to commit evil acts of gingerbread and whip up some wicked little gingerbread men in a frenzy of deliciously evil bakery.

Okay, maybe not evil exactly…  but I have diabetes and the Princess desperately wants to lose some weight, neither condition being one that benefits by having the temptation of wicked little gingerbread men around.

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And, as with any evil plan, many things proceeded to go awry.  We did not have any actual flour available to make the gingerbread dough less butter-and-egg sticky.  All we had was some corn starch… which had bugs in it.  After struggling to craft sticky little bodies a few times, we decided to go ahead and use the tainted corn starch.  After all, a few little larvae that get overlooked and not picked out will only add a bit of extra protein, right?

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And we had the added bonus that you can make just as much mess with corn starch and margarine as you can with flour and butter!

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But we did get the corn-starchy little buggers baked.  (And they were probably literally buggers due to the potential for having bugs in them.  Oh well, it should fortify the old immune systems.)

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The only decoration we had was chocolate frosting, since someone ate all the sprinkles and sugar dots we bought last year for the gingerbread house.  (Don’t look at me.  I have diabetes.)  So we frosted them, prompting the Princess to begin calling them “little burnt souls blackened in hell”.

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So then the cookie cannibals could allow the eating to begin.

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Mmmm!  Good cookie!

Okay, I know it looks like the Princess did all the work, and all I did was eat them.  But somebody had to do the hard work of taking all the pictures, right?

 

 

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November 20, 2016 · 5:16 pm

Writing Every Day

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These are volumes 3&4 of my daily journal that I have kept since the 1980’s.

Writing every single day is something I have been doing since 1975, my senior year in high school.  It is why I claim to be a writer, even though I have never made enough money at it to even begin to think of myself as a professional writer.  I kept a journal/diary/series of notebooks that I filled with junk I wrote and doodles in the margins up until the middle 90’s when I began to put all my noodling into computer files instead of notebooks.  I have literally millions of words piled in piles of notebooks and filling my hard drive to the point of “insufficient memory” errors on my laptop.  I am now 60 years old and have been writing every day for 42 years.

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There are days in the past where I only wrote a word, or a sentence or two.  But there were a lot of words besides the words in my journal.  I started my first novel in college.  I completed it the summer before my first teaching job in 1981.  I put it the closet, never to be thought of again, except when I needed a good cringe and cry at how terrible a writer I once was.  I have been starting, stopping, percolating, piecing together, and eventually completing novel projects ever since… each one goofier and more wit-wacky than the last.  So I have a closet full of those too.

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It would be wrong of me to suggest that my journals are only for words.  As a cartoon-boy-wannabee I doodle everywhere in margins and corners and parts of pages.  Sometimes the doodle is an afterthought.  Sometimes it precedes the paragraph.  Sometimes it is directly connected to the words and their meaning.

Sometimes the work of art is the main thing itself.

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But always, the habit of writing down words and ideas every single day takes precedence over every other part of my day.  That’s the main reason I am stupid enough to think of myself as a writer even though I don’t make a living by writing.

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But I did put my words into my profession too.  As a teacher of writing, I wrote with and to my students.  I did that for 31 years as a classroom teacher, and two years as a substitute.  I required them each to keep a daily journal (though they only got graded for the ones they wrote in class, and then only for reaching the amount of words assigned).  We shared the writing aloud in class, making only positive comments.  I wrote every assignment I gave them, including the journal entries.  They got to see and hear what I could write, and it often inspired them or gave them a structure to hang their own ideas upon.  And often they liked what I wrote and were surprised by it almost as much as I liked and was surprised by theirs.   Being a writer was never a total waste of time and effort.

So am I telling you that if you want to be writer you have to write every day too?  If I have to tell you that… you have totally missed the point.

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November 18, 2016 · 3:53 pm

Upon Further Reflection…

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My 60th Birthday Self Portrait

Time dictates lots of things.  I am not now even the ghost of what I was back then.  I look more like Santa Claus than my father or my grandfathers ever did.  You may notice that, even with glasses on, I have to squint in order to see who I really am.

It is normal to do a bit of self-examination after a milestone birthday.  But I never claimed to be normal.  In fact, I doubt after the results of the recent election that you could say I was anything like the common man at all.

I was raised a Christian in a Midwest Methodist Church from a small Iowa farm town.  But I have since become something of an agnostic or atheist… not because I don’t believe in God, but because I don’t believe anyone can tell me who God is or how he wants me to be other than me.  But I am also not at the center of the universe the way most religious people believe.  I believe that all people are born good and have to work at being bad by making self-centered choices and making excuses to themselves for behaving in ways that they know are wrong.  God doesn’t forgive my sins because he doesn’t have to.  I am tolerant of all people and most things about them.  To sum up this paragraph, I am nothing like the dedicated Christians I know and grew up among.  The actions of the new, in-coming government and dominant political party convince me that intolerance, self-interest, and rationalizations are the norm.

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Sometimes my nose gets really red and my hair bozos out for no particular reason.

I deal with the problems of life by making jokes and forging ahead with carefully considered plans in spite of the doubts others express about my abilities, my choices, and my sanity.  I prefer to do something rather than to sit idly by and do nothing.  Yet, I never do anything without agonizing over the plan before I take that step.  And like the recent election, things usually go wrong.  I have failed at far more things in my life than I have succeeded at.

I am told I think too much.  I hear constantly that I make things too complicated.  People say I should do practically everything in a different way… usually their way.  But I inherited a bit of stubbornness from my square-headed German ancestors.  In fact, I inherited Beyer-stubborn from my Grandma Beyer.  In all the time I knew her, I never saw her change her mind about anything… ever.  She was a Republican who thought all Republicans were like President Eisenhower, even Ronald Reagan…  but not Barry Goldwater.  Someone convinced her that Goldwater was a radical.  That was almost as bad as being a Democrat.  I, however, have strayed from the Beyer-stubborn tradition enough to change my mind once in a while, though only after carefully considering the facts on both sides of the question.  Nixon changed me from a Republican like Grandma into a Democrat.  Fortunately, Grandma Beyer loved me too much to disown me.

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In my retirement, I have gotten even more artistical than I was before.  This is a picture of me with my fictional child Valerie.

So how do I summarize this mirror-staring exercise now that I have passed the 500-word goal?  Probably by stating that I do have a vague idea of who I am.  But I promise to keep looking in the mirror anyway.  One never knows what he will see in the map of his soul that he wears on his face.

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November 5, 2016 · 3:31 pm

What Mickey is Really Up to Now

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I have not been well.   Six incurable diseases combined with colder, wetter weather will do that.

But Mickey has been busy.  Yes, my goofy writer alter ego has been pecking away at a novel that pushes the boundaries of “strange” into a purple dimension where having a president that looks like a racist sour-lemon-flavored cookie dipped repeatedly in Orange Fanta with fingers covering the eye holes almost makes sense.

The novel is called Rezepte für Lebkuchen-Kinder which translates to Recipes for Gingerbread Children.  The more I let Mickey work on it, the stranger it gets.  It currently is about an old German lady who lives in a little Iowa town where she likes to bake gingerbread for children.  But it is also a fairy tale where the fairies of Tellosia are still fighting their never-ending war against darkness.  And in this story with a magical fairy war in it, there are gingerbread men who magically come to life.  There are also teenage nudists, evil Nazis from the past, fairy tales that can solve life’s problems, and a lurking possibility of werewolves.  (This is a companion novel to The Baby Werewolf and happens simultaneously to that story.)  It has hit the 20,000 word mark.  And you know how novel writing works.  Too many words all put together into the same thing will magically merge and metastasize into book form.  I know this is true, because I’ve seen Mickey do it before.

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Grandma Gretel Stein talking with fairy General Tuffaney Swift.

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November 4, 2016 · 3:38 pm

Trolls, Wish-niks, and Garden Gnomes

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(From left to right)  My green-haired Wish-nik from 1966, my teacher troll from 1990, Poppy, and the wizard troll from 1992 (with the garden gnome in the background)

Okay, here is some bad news for a guy who suffers from hoarding disorder, especially when it comes to things like dolls and toys that he can play with while he’s supposed to be trying to be a writer in his burned-out sick-bed retirement.  They are making a movie about Trolls at Dreamworks… and there are dolls already on sale.

The city is after me to repair the house and yard on the outside, especially the cracked swimming pool that now only seems to hold bug-water for brewing the next generation of West Nile and Zika squeetoes to bite me and immediately die from the toxic chemicals already in my sick old blood.  I need to do more than just put mosquito poison in the water.  They say I must have the filter operating and it must be clear enough to see the drain in the bottom of the deep end.  Pool repair guy says the crack repair is in the neighborhood of $14,000, which is $16,000 more than I have to spend right now.  I’m already not buying medicine any more for my six incurable diseases.  I’m also not going to the doctor any more because he will just yell at me for not taking medication anymore… even though I actually feel better not having taken the blood pressure medicine for over a year now.  So the plan is to clean and repair the pool myself.  This apparently will satisfy the trolls at the city inspector’s office, at least until I die from the cold and rain we seem to be getting now.

But those aren’t the trolls I meant to write about today.  I am writing about the little troll doll named Poppy that I bought for $5 yesterday at Walmart.  She’s the pink one in the middle of my photo-paffooney.  The one that’s not a nudist like the rest of my remaining troll collection.  (My daughter, the Princess, played with my troll collection of over 20 troll dolls when she was smaller and decided they all needed hair cuts and make-overs that completely altered them and eventually murdered them when she learned to cut and melt plastic.)

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A troll corpse from the garage, murdered by make-up and partially eaten by rats.

So, the movie will feature a number of different trolls, the corresponding toys for which are already on sale in places where I will not be able to help myself from collecting the entire goofy little crew.  And I do not have any place for them to live.  I had to remove a section of Booggloopenstein Castle just to display the old trolls for a photo-paffooney.  They will take over the house.  And I know I should be out working on the pool instead of plotting where to put more trolls.  But I just can’t help it.  There is something irresistible about collecting ugly and goofy toys.

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October 30, 2016 · 4:01 pm

Tom Sawyer Abroad (Book Review)

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Yep, I read about being an “erronort” traveling in a balloon while sitting in a parking lot in my car.

Believe it or not, I read this entire 100+year-old book in my car while waiting for my daughter and my son in school parking lots.  What a perfectly ironic way to read a soaring imaginary adventure written by Mark Twain and mostly forgotten about by the American reading public.

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My copy of this old book is a 1965 edition published for school libraries of a book written in 1894.  It tells the story of how Tom and Huck and Jim steal a ride on a balloon at a town fair from a somewhat mentally unhinged professor of aeronautical science.  The balloon, which has space-age travel capabilities due to the professor’s insane genius, takes them on an accidental voyage to Africa.

Of course, the insane professor intends to kill them all, because that’s what insane geniuses do after they prove how genius-y they really are.  But as he tries to throw Tom into the Atlantic, he only manages to plunge himself through the sky and down to an unseen fate.  The result being a great adventure for the three friends in the sands of the Sahara.  They face man-eating lions, mummy-making sandstorms, and a chance to land on the head of the Sphinx.

The entire purpose of this book is to demonstrate Twain’s ability to be a satirical stretcher of the truth, telling jokes and lies through the unreliable narrator’s voice of Huck Finn.

Here is a quoted passage from the book to fill up this review with words and maybe explain just a bit what Twain is really doing with this book;

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Notice how I doubled my word count there without typing any of the words myself?  Isn’t the modern age wonderful?

But there you have it.  This book is about escaping every-day newspaper worries.  In a time of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, global warming, and renewed threats of thermonuclear boo-boos with Russia, this proved to be the perfect book to float away with on an imaginary balloon to Africa.  And the book ends in a flash when Aunt Polly back in Hannibal wants Tom back in time for breakfast.  I really needed to read this book when I picked it up to read it.

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