Category Archives: Uncategorized

February 27, 2025 · 2:05 am

Meaningless Corrections and Correct Implications

A lot of critical art viewers will randomly tell me that using AI Art programs is plagiarism because these programs have been trained on people’s posted artwork without permission or acknowledgment. I agree that that is not fair. I also think that is not how I use AI programs. The above picture used Picsart AI Photo Editor and AI Mirror in its creation. The Harlequin Girl is drawn from a model I saw on Instagram, a human dancer in a costume that is similar to my drawing. I used AI Mirror to make my imperfect drawing look better than I can do with arthritic fingers. I used the uncorrected version here with the problem hands so you could see the kind of things you have to go back and draw over with digital art tools. I used Picsart to turn her into what is called a “sticker” that I could place upon a background. I used a colored mandala that I got from Tapcolor Digital Coloring Book as a background. Before I put the sticker on top, I added the butterfly and altered the round design elements into flowers.

This is how I use AI Mirror to improve my artwork. The picture above is nothing but a pencil drawing inked and guidelines erased. If you look at it carefully you can see how I skewed the eyes when I inked the pencil drawing. One on the left is the roundness I wanted. The right one has a lower eyelid that cuts too narrowly to make the eyes look mismatched. So, I ran the photo of the finished pen and ink drawing through AI Mirror allowing it to make changes up to 50 %. Below you can see the best result. It took eight tries to get the eye match I wanted.

You can see that the program made changes to more than just the eyes. It took much of the 50% to adjust the background, adding art tools that I had in previous photos of the drawing board used in similar pictures I used AI Mirror on. It also changed the hairstyle, and since it didn’t like the ladybug theme of the dress, changed it for white roses which I have used in similar pictures repeatedly. I did go back and add whiteness to the roses to make it look a little cooler.

This one above is intended to be a surrealist interpretation of a piece of music. Of course, the AI Mirror program and the Picsart program are both overly sensitive to copyright and trademark. That’s why it intentionally screws up the sheet music and the words on the t-shirt of the drawing I did for the girl sticker. It doesn’t reproduce things that could potentially be trademarked. And the flower stems the girl held in my drawing got turned into a short black stick and a sword? There were multiple things I needed to correct as I continued to change it to make it fit my vision for the piece.

This isn’t a final version either, but it is closer. It still needs to have the sheet music tamed to look more like ordinary sheet music. The main character’s bikini bottom shows up in a way that proves that making it two-color black and brown needed to be more contrasting to the shadow color on her legs. And the nudity of her companion was my idea, but I will have to make the further correction of not sending this post to Facebook. Facebook is ready to sanction me for showing bare breasts in their news feeds.

I am now done complaining about the nagging little things that annoy me about the AI art process. But I do the drawings that I present as my work. I am not plagiarizing anything. And I thoroughly enjoy this whole process.

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February 25, 2025 · 2:27 am

Dumb Times Get Really Dumb

The past two months have been a rollercoaster in the dark in a rail car that is barely set properly on the tracks. Every curve I didn’t see coming was a potential derailment and crash. A potential fatal crash.

President Pumpkinhead has been crashing and destroying government services left and right. My Medicare (which I am still paying increasingly high premiums for) is at risk of being totally cut, as is the Medicaid and Social Security that people more poverty stricken than me may lose. The military leadership has been overturned for less competent and lower-ranking officers who are more Pumpkinhead-friendly. The Department of Justice is now set up to unleash a revenge campaign, firing politically neutral officers, judges, and lawyers for less competent and more wishy-washy ones. Will they come for me? Probably not for a while. Big list. But eventually.

And my health woes have taken a darker turn. A broken crown that turned into a dangerously infected broken molar had to be extracted, along with a second broken molar. I ended up with a large dental bill that the dentist’s office tried to help me finance resulting in a credit denial that will stick me with a large bill I cannot pay. That started at the beginning of January and is finishing in the credit denial today. I also had a second serious infection of my urinary tract that required the heaviest possible antibiotics I could take without dying. That was overlapping some sort of flu-like virus and the passing of two, or possibly four, kidney stones. I am floored with lifeforce fully spent… but not quite dead.

Could any of this have been avoided? Any of this dumb stuff? I voted for the nice black lady who took over from the really old but really good President. So did my daughter. We didn’t want the Pumpkinhead to win. And I really would’ve liked Medicare to help me pay for necessary dental work, but you apparently have to fill out a long form by a certain date back in October as explained in a letter I never got in September. I have no idea where the other dumb stuff came from or how it could’ve been prevented.

So, I am now done complaining about all this dumb stuff. I will probably survive it. Maybe not. But probably. It would depend on where the rail car actually went off the rails resulting in a fatal crash I didn’t yet learn about.

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February 23, 2025 · 12:52 am

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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February 21, 2025 · 12:32 am

Writer’s Block on a Thursday

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The 1957 Pink and White Mercury of Imagination

I don’t have writer’s block.  I can write as long as I can think and move my fingers on the keyboard to crystallize that thinking into words.  The Pink and White Mercury of Imagination is always moving, either driving forward in the present and towards the future, or in reverse, rewriting the past.  It is never parked.

But somewhere along the way today, the route got sidetracked onto a looping detour.

Hence, this car-themed drive through the idea-capturing process.

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A picture of me reading painted long ago and not with me in the picture..

I started reading a new novel.  It is a 500-plus-pager by Kate Morton called Distant Hours.  It is a Gothic novel, but in a very different way from the one I am writing in The Baby Werewolf.   That book starts as a first person narrative, and then flashes back to the past as a series of third person narratives focused on single characters per section.  My novel is a first person narrative throughout, though told by three different narrators.  It would make an interesting writing analysis post, but I haven’t read enough of that novel nor completed mine to a point where I can compare and contrast them.  And those of you who get bored easily have already tuned out and just looked at the pictures by this point.

I also thought about writing a post about Uber-driving conversations and how that impacts the quality of my driver-service.  But the best stuff there can’t be revealed without breaking confidences.  Doctors, lawyers, bartenders, and Uber drivers are tasked with providing a touch of confidentiality.

I wanted to complain more about Trump and evil Republicans.  But that gets far too tiring.  And if the collection of my posts on WordPress is like a flower garden, the political rants I do are definitely the garden-choking weeds.

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A much better thing for my garden is to chase the flitting butterflies of near-perfect ideas with a butterfly net made of idea lists like this particular post.

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So, it is true that I never actually have writer’s block.  I do get writer’s detours, writer’s delays, and writer’s just-not-satisfieds- with-those-ideas sorts of things.  But not today.  I made the problems the topic and the topic wrote itself.

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February 19, 2025 · 1:52 am

The Spirit Knows

Yep, Denny knows the truth of it. My new dentist is a small, demented Vietnamese female sadist. She has kept me on the dentist’s chair for over two hours at a time twice now. She never got a full scream out of me, but that’s because it is hard to scream with a mouth full of fingers and sharp tools.

And it only mirrors what the Pumpkinhead Sadist in the White House is doing to the mouth of our government. Killing foreign aid so African children can starve to death while the food the farmers made for feeding them rots on the wharf unsent and unpaid for. The Consumer Protection Bureau is killed next so that bankers can swindle credit card users and loan institutions can commit usery on a level that collapses economies. Cancer research is suspended and possibly ended because we apparently have to preserve drug companies/ profits on cancer drugs that drain savings accounts and personal wealth can continue to eat us. Meals on Wheels for Seniors is too expensive to continue, as is Snap payments for poor people. Let’s starve out the people who can’t defend themselves.,

Mickey is tired of cruelty, pain, and hardship being relentless. He is not in favor of the death penalty for sadist dentist-pirates. But he is still thinking about treasonistic Pumpkinhead government wreckers.

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February 19, 2025 · 1:04 am

500 Words

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When I started this whole blogging-every-day thing, I decided the rule had to be 500 words written in a day.  And I meant to hold myself to writing 500 words somewhere in the writing day, whether it was my blog post or the novel I was working on, or a combination of both.  I followed that rule religiously through more than 1,500 blog posts and five first draft novels.  I found it easier and easier to surpass 500 words on a daily basis.  There are all sorts of bits of time available and I collect ideas faster than a rich kid generates empty candy wrappers.  The more I call on the well of words for more words, the more words are available.  Now, it seems, writing only 500 words is the trick.

I suppose I have become an Old Man of Words.  I know both the rules and the exceptions.

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Knowing that I can write more than 500 words easily, then the question becomes, why don’t I?  Well, the cardinal rule is “Say it short.  Say it simple. And say it sweet.”  That rule can generate a lot of wonderful writing, full of juicy ideas that splash with flavor when you bite into them.  Ernest Hemingway knew that rule.  Every poet knows it.  Readers generally prefer the easily accessible idea expressed with elegance.

Now, I also have to admit a guilty pleasure in perpetrating purple paisley prose.  That is the style of writing in which I generally write convoluted sentences with complex ideas that fold back in on themselves and over-use alliteration to criminal degrees.  Charles Dickens liked to do that with descriptive details.  Paragraphs about the boarding schools of London, the streets filled with child chimney sweeps and flower girls, and dingy mind-dulling workhouses could take up two or three pages per paragraph.  And two pages further on, he layers more details on the same setting.  Piles and piles of words and wordplay fill the pages of William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust.  And if you haven’t read at least something from each of those gentlemen, you will never know what you are missing.  But you can prune your paragraphs like a greenhouse master florist with limited space will do to his orchids, and you can actually end up fitting great beauty and powerful content into something even more limited than a 500-word essay.  In fact, if you take your ideas and distill them, and keep distilling them, over and over, you will eventually have pared the words down into poetry.

So, there you have it.  The reason my essays are about 500 words.  This one is four hundred and forty-one words.

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February 13, 2025 · 2:57 am

PAFFOONEY-Type Excuses

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I am not well again after a couple of weeks of rain and cold working on my arthritis.  So I am going to merely post a few past Paffoonies to make up today’s post.  If you would like to see what Paffoonies are all about, then go to Google picture search “Beyer Paffooney”.  It will basically give you a Mickian art gallery, peppered with other pictures that I used in posts that aren’t actually Paffoonies (but the algorithm doesn’t know that).

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February 12, 2025 · 1:10 am

Talking to Girls

Communicating with a wife is complicated.  In fact, I couldn’t do the whole writer-think thing about that topic without writing a book.  But I can successfully ruminate for about 500 words on the that awkward first encounter, the first time I ever was embarrassed in front of a non-sister girl.

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In grade school I met my first crush in kindergarten.  Alicia Stewart was a honey-sweet little brown-haired girl with a bow in her hair.  I was a boy.  I was not allowed to like girls.  Hating them was the only thing that made sense to my friends and I.  But, secretly, I didn’t hate Alicia.  In fact, if I was ever to be doomed to be married when I grew up, I would’ve only accepted that horrible fate if it was with her.  And in my small town school I saw her practically every school day.  In fact, in Miss Malkin’s music class on Tuesdays and Thursdays I sat right next to her in Miss Malkin’s seating chart for six years.

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In Miss Malkin’s music class we always did musical stuff like listening to classical records, singing songs for the yearly musical review concert (we did the songs from the musical The Music Man one year… you don’t get more musicky than that), and we did square dancing.  Yeah, you heard that right.  Square dancing.  You had to have a girl for a partner.  And one year, Miss Malkin decided it would be cute to have the boys ask the girls to be their partners.  Now, as boys… in top secret boy-conversations, we had generally agreed that if such a problem would ever occur, Alicia Stewart was the only acceptable choice.  We all hated girls.  But we all were secretly in love with Alicia.  She was girl-hating-boy approved.  When I was twelve, there was another girl that was making me uncomfortable too.  Marla Carter was nine when I was twelve.  She had big brown eyes and dimples.  Her face was somehow heart-shaped, and only Alicia could make my palms sweat any worse than she did.  But in top secret boy-conversations it was ruled that she was a booger-eating little girl and totally toxic.  Well, I didn’t totally agree, but I was still subject to all girl-hating directives.

“Okay,” Miss Malkin said, “the boys will now pick their partners… one at a time in alphabetical order.”

My last name began with the letter “B”, but my best friend Mark had a last name starting with “A”.

“I pick Alicia,” Mark said.

My heart sank.  I had my pick of any girl besides Alicia.  Marla was standing about four feet away from me, her hands folded together behind her back, looking at me with those puppy-dog eyes.  My throat was too dry to speak.

“Um, ah… I can’t pick anyone…” I croaked.  “You pick it, I will dance with it.”

“Now, don’t be like that, Michael.  Get on with it!” Miss Malkin commanded.  Everyone loved the music teacher, and so everyone obeyed her.  I had to submit.

I looked at Marla, dug my toe into the floorboards, and said, “I choose my cousin Diane.”

Talking to girls has always been a matter of embarrassment.  The words are always awkward and shaped not by my brain, but by my bowels.  This fact has always been a hindrance to my dealings with the female species, but it has been an unending source of potential for writing  humor.

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February 11, 2025 · 1:08 am

The Cowboy Code

When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code.  The guy in the white hat always shoots straight.  He knows right from wrong.  He only shoots the bad guy.  He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can.  Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.

And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters.  People who make television shows never lie, do they?  In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.

Daniel Boone was a real guy too.  He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers.  And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode.  He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad.  Mingo was always on Daniel’s side.  And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared.  It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive.  Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.

So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code?  I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened.  Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology?  Didn’t they learn the code too?

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I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody.  But that was never the point of the cowboy code.  We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth.  We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad   We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands.  And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be.  But Daniel Boone was a real man.  Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.

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February 11, 2025 · 1:05 am

The New Discipline (a strict little poem)

The New Discipline

I sit in the corner, a dunce cap on my head.

Behind me the class rises.  I miss recess in their stead.

And what was my criminality, that earned me this despise?

I told them that I loved them, and that was just not wise.

They tell me all are equal and each one’s on his own.

And if I can’t pull myself up, they must all leave me alone.

Thinking anyone will help me is an assumption with great risk.

The new order is the quiet that is whipped in with a whisk.

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