Category Archives: strange and wonderful ideas about life

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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Filed under commentary, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, humor, self pity, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as bad luck, complaints, humor, Joe BTFSPLK

November 27, 2016 · 4:06 pm

Saturdays With Gingerbread

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.

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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Filed under bugs, fairies, family, humor, illustrations, imagination, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as baking cookies, cookies!, family, gingerbread, happiness, happiness to the point of stupidity, health, humor, Recipes for Gingerbread Children

November 20, 2016 · 5:16 pm

Writing Every Day

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

Tagged as humor, journaling, teaching, teaching writing, writing every day

November 18, 2016 · 3:53 pm

Upon Further Reflection…

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.

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.

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.

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.

Grandma Gretel Stein talking with fairy General Tuffaney Swift.

Trolls, Wish-niks, and Garden Gnomes

(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.)

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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Filed under collecting, doll collecting, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, humor, nudes, Paffooney, photo paffoonies, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as city trolls, doll collecting, humor, leaky pool, trolls

October 30, 2016 · 4:01 pm

Tom Sawyer Abroad (Book Review)

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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Filed under book reports, book review, foolishness, good books, humor, imagination, Mark Twain, old books, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as book review, humor, Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

October 28, 2016 · 2:57 pm

Tricks With Lazy Goals in Mind

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As a writer, my goal is to create wisdom and new ideas and stuff that makes a reader feel happy, or sad, or angry, or even slightly insane. But thinking is hard when your head hurts and your body aches and your sixtieth birthday is just around the corner. (Yes, this Mickey is nearly 60, but can you believe that that Mickey is going to be 88 on the day after I turn 60?) Sometimes you just want to say, “Never mind that I wanted to post every single day for the past two years. Just curl up in a ball and go to sleep.” But there are ways to get something done even if your mind is full of the Sandman’s leavings and old, rotted dreams.

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You can always get by with posting somebody else’s wisdom… somebody else’s thinking. You don’t have to work too hard to paste things together. After all, why else did you have to look at so many cut-and-paste essays over the years in middle school and high school?

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And you can rely on the work you have already done collecting computer files full of colorful crap and stuff you like enough to steal to complete your cut-and-paste scrapbook post. You don’t have to feel like you erred and are about to have your head cut off by an angry Groo.

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And you know you can get a lot of cheap likes on Facebook with some of the stuff you have available to put in this post. You have been working at the “Be funny!” thing for a long time, and have gotten almost good enough at it to be funny on the fly. And when you’ve gotten more than halfway to the goal, you can rest a bit. Take a nap. Regenerate the crazy things in your head so you can do this all again another day.

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And if you can have a laugh before you are finished, even if no one else in the world gets the joke… well, at least you will feel a little bit better yourself.

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Filed under battling depression, blog posting, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, healing, humor, illness, self pity, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism

Tagged as humor, illness, scrapbook post

October 27, 2016 · 3:12 pm

Reading Twain for a Lifetime

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I wish to leave no doubt unturned like a stone that might have treasure hidden under it. I love the works of Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

I have read and studied his writing for a lifetime, starting with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer which I read for myself in the seventh grade, after seeing the musical movie Tom Sawyer starring Johnny Whittaker as Tom. I caught a severe passion, more serious than a head-cold, for the wit and wisdom with which Twain crafted a story. It took me a while to acquire and read more… but I most definitely did. I took an American Literature course in college that featured Twain, and I read and analyzed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I also bought a copy of Pudd’nhead Wilson which I would later devour in the same thoroughly literate and pretentious manner as I had Huck Finn. Copies of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Mysterious Stranger were purchased at the same time, though I didn’t read them cover to cover until later during my years as a middle school English teacher. I should point out, however, that I read and re-read both of those, Connecticut Yankee winning out by being read three times. As a teacher, I taught Tom Sawyer as an in-class novel assignment in the time when other teachers thought I was more-or-less crazy for trying to teach a 100-year-old book to mostly Hispanic non-readers. While the lunatic-inspired experiment was not a total success, it was not a total failure either. Some kids actually liked having me read parts of it aloud to them, and some borrowed copies of the book to reread it for themselves after we finished as a class.

marktwaindvd2006 During my middle-school teaching years I also bought and read copies of The Prince and the Pauper, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi. I would later use a selection from Roughing It as part of a thematic unit on Mark Twain where I used Will Vinton’s glorious clay-mation movie, The Adventures of Mark Twain as a way to painlessly introduce my kids to the notion that Mark Twain was funny and complex and wise.

I have also read and used some of Twain’s most famous short fictions. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” are both masterpieces of Twain’s keen insight into the human psyche and the goofy and comic corruptions he finds there.

And now, retired old me is reading Tom Sawyer Abroad. And, though it is not one of his finest works, I still love it and am enthralled. I will review it and share it with you when I am finished. But I will never be through with Mark Twain. Not only is there more of him to read, but he has truly been a life-long friend .

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Filed under book reports, book review, goofy thoughts, happiness, heroes, old books, sharing, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as humor, Mark Twain, novel reading, reading, teaching

October 26, 2016 · 3:41 pm

The Silent Sonata

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Being a writer is a life of music that happens only in your head. You hear voices constantly. They pulse rhythmically with insights and ideas that have to be written down and remembered. Otherwise the music turns clashing-cymbals dark and depressing. Monday I wrote a deeply personal thank you to the Methodist minister who saved my life when I was a boy. I posted a YouTube music video by the acapella group Pentatonix with that essay in a vain attempt to give you an idea of the music in my head when I composed that very difficult piece to give myself a measure of peace.

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I realize that I am not writing poetry here. Poetry can so easily slip into melody and music because of rhythm and meter and rhyme. And yet, words to me are always about singing, about performing, about doing tricks with metaphor and meaning, rhythm, convoluted sentence structure, and other sneaky things that snake-oil salesman do to get you to think what you are hearing is precisely what you needed to hear. The Sonata of Silence… did you notice the alliteration of the silvery letter “S” in that title? The beat of the syllables? Da-daah-da a da-da? The way a mere suggestion of music can bring symphonic sounds to your ear of imagination as you read? The way a simple metaphor, writing is music, can be wrapped into an essay like a single refrain in a symphonic piece?

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A sonata is a musical exercise in three or four movements that is basically instrumental in nature. You may have noticed that the movements are loosely defined here by the accompanying pictures, of which there are three. And it is silent only in the way that the instruments I am using themselves make no noise in the physical world. The only sounds as I type these words are the hum of an old air conditioner and the whirr of my electric fan. Yet my mind is filled with crescendos of violins and cellos, bold brass, and soft woodwinds. The voice saying these words aloud only in my head is me. Not the me you hear when I talk or the me I can hear on recordings of my own voice, but rather the me that I always hear from the inside. And the voice is not so much “saying” as “singing”.

Writing makes music. The writer can hear it. The reader can too. And whether I croon it to make you cry, or trill it to make you laugh, I am playing the instrument. And so, the final notes of the sonata are these. Be happy. Be well. And listen for the music.

Category Archives: strange and wonderful ideas about life

Just Call Me Joe

Saturdays With Gingerbread

Writing Every Day

Upon Further Reflection…

What Mickey is Really Up to Now

Trolls, Wish-niks, and Garden Gnomes

Tom Sawyer Abroad (Book Review)

Tricks With Lazy Goals in Mind

The Silent Sonata

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