Here’s the magical mystical wizard bear, casting his spell with curly bear hair.
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Tinfoil Hats
image from morettafra.altervista.org
I have, over time, become something of a nut over conspiracy theories. My family jokes about me to friends and relatives… and people we don’t know that overhear me in restaurants. Okay, I admit it. I believe in some pretty loony things that I repeatedly search out on the internet. I suppose it can all be traced back to college speech class where I gave a serious informative speech about why vampires are real, and the evidence (pre-internet loony-bin sites) from library books about nosferatus and the vampire of Croglin Grange. The speech teacher told me he would’ve failed me for the class, except I was too entertaining. Saved by a fool’s inherent comedy value.
The internet has proved to be a real boost to my addiction with its plethora of fake UFO pictures and New World Order/ Illuminati conspiracies. I am caught up in so many things it worries me. Of course, I will lie and say I am researching for my fiction. I write humor, and thus require large amounts of otherwise useless trivia to fuel my extended puns, over-blown metaphors, and purple paisley prose. I also like to write about clown characters; evil-hearted old men with lies too unbelievable to cause disbelief, fools who believe the fantastically foolish things that all fools believe, slapstick jokers whose pranks land them in the middle of demonic possessions and alien invasions, and gullible goofs who end up sounding just like me. Any excuse in a storm of protests, right?
Here’s what I believe in the terms I can best defend it;
- John Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy that probably included E. Howard Hunt, George H.W. Bush, and J. Edgar Hoover. There was obviously at least one extra shooter. There was a cover-up that at the very least included covering up gross incompetence. At the very worst, he was executed by rogue elements of our own government that may still hold power. Of course, most of the “experts” that give you the facts for your puzzling-efforts make their living off conspiracy theories and the books they can sell. Especially the books they can sell to gullible goofs who accept what they read as worth consideration. Some of the information comes by way of various investigators and prosecutors that became mentally unbalanced to the point of pursuing things to the degree that it destroyed their careers.
- Aliens did crash in the Roswell, New Mexico area, and the U.S. Government did recover wreckage which was then back-engineered. I have seen and heard enough evidence to know that the truth has been suppressed since 1947, and there are cracks in the government’s armor, and holes in the government’s collecting sacks. The truth is probably far more mundane and harmless than all of this sounds, because, seriously, if aliens wanted to take the Earth away from us, what could stop them? They have technology that can cross interstellar space. All we have is bad science fiction by gullible goofs like me.
- The 9/11 Truthers worry me. I know there’s a lot of bad science there. A lot of shysters and hucksters play on peoples’ fears and anti-government sentiments. But the truth is… I do not believe those planes brought down the twin towers. And they certainly didn’t bring down the World Trade Center 7 building that wasn’t even hit by a plane. I don’t want to believe it, but those buildings did fall exactly like a controlled demolition. Concrete and steel designed to withstand a hit from a 747, and yet they were pulverized, and the debris burned for a month? The implications are horrible. Somebody should be in jail by now.
- The Illuminati are not real… at least not any more. The New World Order, the Bilderburgers, the Tri-lateral Commission, the Knights Templar, and the Free Masons are only dangerous in the minds of paranoid people who listen to B.S, salesmen like Alex Jones and Jim Fetzer.
- There are no lizard men from outer space masquerading as world leaders. Thank you David Icke for that amusing tidbit.
- Nikola Tesla did not send the USS Eldridge through a black hole in 1943 while trying to make it invisible.
So now you see why my family makes fun of me. I recently saw a UFO over Carrollton in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It was box shaped, and floated silently. A military-looking jet approached, and it suddenly disappeared. It was the first UFO I ever saw. My oldest son saw it too. And I am only too well aware that UFO means UNIDENTIFIED flying object. My government knows what it is. They just aren’t telling the rest of us.
Alien girls dancing to Mickey Mouse Club music in my book, Catch a Falling Star.
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Of Rabbits and Men
I have been working on my novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius and just now reached the part I originally planned back in 1977. It, of course, has to deal with ten-year-old Tommy Bircher and his pet rabbit Millis. Now, I must confess that Tommy is a real person. He is based half on me (I was the rabbit raiser as a boy), and half on my best friend who was the Methodist Minister’s son. The personality of the character is primarily my best friend Mark, and the inevitable parting of the two friends Tim and Tommy is based on us when his dad, the reverend, had to go to a new church in another part of Iowa. Of course, in the book, we do to the rabbit Millis what it would’ve been impossible to do to my own alpha bunny Ember-eyes. For those of you imagining how terrible two boys can be to a rabbit, let me give you an excerpt from the novel to explain how the boys in the story are far more terrible… but unintentionally so;
Canto Twenty-Seven – Behind the Computer Named Dewey
Millis was not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill dumb bunny. He was, in fact, a highly educated rabbit. He had eaten several of Tommy’s books. He had chewed on the computer cords of Tommy’s video game machine and the shock it had given him had actually made him smarter. He was more than a little conceited about how much smarter he was than other dumb bunnies.
“You are a nicer boy than I am,” Millis heard the boy who was some sort of servant of Tommy say. “You have a good heart and burble burble burble, blah, blah.”
The thing that had Millis’ attention was apparently a carrot. Carrot! Now, idiot people seemed to think that all rabbits loved carrots above all other food. No way, monkey boy! Nothing beats a good chunk of lettuce, a clump of yard grass, cabbage, leaves, and other green foods. Green foods make a buck rabbit feel sexy. But you never turned down a good carrot either.
“Is it gonna hurt?” asked Tommy. Tommy was a good boy. He brought Millis green food, clover hay, salt licks, and water every day. He almost never forgot. And when Millis opened his cage to get out and go for an explore, Tommy gladly came to find him where ever he was when he got lost and carried him back to his house.
“It’s not going to hurt at all,” said the big owl-eyed man with the yellow fur on his head and his chin. “Burble burble, blah, tickle.”
Millis looked at the carrot with his right eye, and then turned his head and used the left eye. Looked the same both ways. It had a funny leafy part that was not the right color. And it kept going in a long vine to the back of the big red and white clink-and-bonk box. That wasn’t quite natural. He sniffed. It only slightly smelled right. Still, he was hungry, and it did seem to be a carrot, and… well, he just had to take a bite.
ZZZAKAKAKAKZZZAM!
“Ooh, that’s hard on the teeth!” Millis said aloud.
“What?” said Tommy. “Did you hear that?”
“I did,” said Tommy’s servant. “We’re not the only people here.”
“Idiot boy,” said Millis. “You are the only people here. I’m a rabbit.”
“Ghosts?” asked Tommy.
“I believe it is your rabbit,” said the owl-eyed man. “He’s over behind Dewey.”
“It can’t be Millis. Millis doesn’t talk.”
“Rabbits would never reveal how much smarter they are than people,” said Millis.
“It is Millis!” declared the servant boy as he came around the big gray clonk-and-clank box. Actually… it was called a computer. How did Millis know that? He couldn’t say. Well, actually he could say, but didn’t know and didn’t want to say. The servant boy picked him up. And on top of that, he didn’t really know how to hold a rabbit.
“You are hurting me, you stupid boy.”
The stupid servant boy dropped Millis as if he were on fire, his rabbity fur blazing and crackling and burning his fingers. Wait-a-second! He was on fire! His skin was burning and bubbling. “Ahh! I’m burning!”
“Oh no, Millis. What did you do?” cried Tommy.
“Are you brain-dead, fool? I took a bite of the evolutionary accelerator tool created by the Xandar Empire. It is accelerating me.”
“Gee, that’s kinda cool,” said Tommy, staring at him with wide eyes. The owl-eyed man was staring too. Glasses. Those were glasses making his eyes look so big!
“Your arms and legs are growing,” said the servant boy. “You’re getting bigger.”
“Yes,” said Millis in amazement. “I am accelerating to become more like you. I am still a rodent, but I’m becoming sentient and man-like! Why would anybody be so sadistic that they would do that to a rabbit?”
“I’ll have to ask him,” said the man with glasses. “How did you know it was from Xandar?”
“E equals MC squared. Polytetrafluoroethylene is the proper name for Teflon. Richard Plantagenet became Richard the Third upon the death of his brother Edward IV and the mysterious disappearance, possibly murder, of twelve-year-old Edward V, Edward IV’s son.”
“Millis, you’re a genius!” cried Tommy.
“I am suddenly very tired,” said Millis the rabbit-man. “I must sleep now. Good night, Tommy. I will bring you cabbage and clover hay from now on.”
Rabbit eyes closed and the world veered away into darkness.
*****
So, there you have it. The accelerated evolution of the rabbit-man Millis. I will even provide a picture. Oh, and he’s not flashing a peace sign, that’s the universal signal for “rabbit ears”.
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Minnie Likes Catch a Falling Star!
If you need to wind down after a long day at work… If you need to read something ridiculously full of alien invasions, skortch rays, and secret clubs of teen liars and goofs… Well, I humbly suggest that Minnie knows the answer. Look carefully at the silly tome that she is holding. It is a book of magic, as long as you are gullible enough to believe laughter is magical.
October 7, 2013 · 2:27 am
Star Dancing with Lizard People
the picture above : Davalon and Farbick near Mars (by Leah Cim Reyeb)
I am constantly bubbling over with ridiculous ideas and dreams. After writing the book Catch a Falling Star, I was asked by an editor what happens next to some of the characters. The Morrell family, changed into children, travel into space with the Tellerons aboard Xiar’s Base Ship. Harmony Castille, the elderly church lady who falls in love with the Telleron Commander Biznap marries him and travels with the aliens too. The task; find a new home world and start a mixed civilization. Since the aliens have no inherent religion or morality, it falls to the humans on board to make Christian values the norm for the Telleron frog people. That is a challenge old church ladies can’t resist, but also can’t manage without help.
So what can I do with this story? Where can it go? I am trying to build my work in fiction around certain rules or boundaries that will give it the consistency and power that I need to achieve with my work. Well, the biggest rule is that all my stories have to fit like puzzle pieces into the entire picture, an imaginary history of the universe centered on the little town where I grew up. Space empires in the future, time travelers popping in and out freely, and imaginary breakthroughs in physics, astrophysics, and various sciences cannot be allowed to interfere with the unified history of the future of the galaxy. I know how silly this sounds, but silly rules inform the under-structure of all reality. How else can you explain things like the politics of Texas? Further, I adhere to other silly rules. It must be science fiction or fantasy. It must also be humor. And the most important characters are always children.
So what will this book I am planning be like? Well, first of all, there must be strong elements of science fiction. Of course, silly me, my heroes are on a starship looking for a new home-world. You can’t get too much more science-fictiony than that. But I have been overwhelmed with internet researches of late into the looniest of the internet conspiracy theories. Besides my obsessions with who killed JFK and what really happened on 9/11, I have also found cartoon characters like Alex Jones (the conspiracy world’s version of Elmer Fudd on PCP and prodded to ridiculous levels of vitriolic-aggressive anger management failures) speaking about lizard men from outer space who have taken to controlling our government by shape-changing and masquerading as Hilary Clinton. Whew! Humor is a breeze! All I have to do is set my lost space-colony down on the hostile, warlike world of the space lizards, the world of Galtorr Prime. The science fiction is then firmly grounded in the pseudo-science of paranoid madmen. And, joyfully, further research into the lizard people trying to take over earth will be justified by the creation of this book. Who knows? I may actually uncover their secrets in real life!
The humor, as I already indicated, is built in. Warlike lizards who want only to conquer and destroy! And don’t forget, this will be set on their war-torn home world. The satire is set. I will be writing political satire about Republicans and Democrats. Hot dang! And I can depict crazy folk who would gleefully destroy their own government and their own environment in order to spite their worst enemies, who are thankfully not us, but themselves. I can continue to describe the battle between good and evil in my book in the same religious terms I have always tried to use. It is not good against evil as much as it is Love against Heartlessness. All good comedy, from Mark Twain, to Charles Dickens, to Terry Pratchett, to Douglas Adams, is precisely about that. (Of course it will mean more of the run-on sentences, multi-adjectival descriptions, and infantile allusions and metaphors that I always use in my signature purple-paisley prose.)
And finally, I have the characters already fairly well set. Davalon, the boy Telleron explorer, his nestmate/sister Tanith, their friend and mentor Farbick, Davalon’s adopted child-parents Alden and Gracie Morell, and the crew of Xiar the Slightly Irregular’s whole wacky starship are already living and arguing in my head. Of course, the moldy underwear and dirty dishes in my head are not a particularly good thing. When will fictional characters ever learn to clean up after themselves? Only time will tell.
So there you have it, an entire book idea that came into being in the last week and a half. It will be interesting to chronicle the progression and creation of it. Will it actually get written? Will it take twenty-two years the way Catch a Falling Star did? Will it be worth doing more with than merely writing it and then burning it to save future generations from reading it and burdening themselves with the corrosive insanity it will most likely cause? Well, please, don’t bet any actual money on it. Imaginary or funny-money will be good enough.
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Inventive Travel Technology
My writer friend, Stuart West (http://stuartrwest.blogspot.com) suggested it might be possible to travel by feeding bubble gum to goldfish. Here is what I thought it would look like. Don’t hold your breathe waiting to sign up for tickets, however. Stuart didn’t think it would work so good after all. I guess I draw scary pictures sometimes when the idea-wagon starts rolling downhill.
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Now, That’s Entertainment!
How do you spell comedy? R-E-D-S-K-E-L-T-O-N! For real, that’s how I spelled it during a third grade spelling bee in 1965. Pretty dang dumb, wasn’t I? But it got a laugh from the prettiest girl in class. I truly couldn’t get enough of Red Skelton on Wednesday nights. It was on past my bedtime, but Dad always let me watch, because… well, I think it was his favorite show too. George Appleby always trying to get something past his wife who would always catch him and punish him soundly for something that truthfully wasn’t his fault. That con man tricked him into drinking that stuff that made him act like an insane lady’s man. San Fernando Red pulling a gag on the man with the silver six-gun and hoofing it out of town before the townsfolk caught on to him with the tar and feathers. He never truly got what he had coming, or what he wanted, either. Someone else got it instead. Freddy the Freeloader making even poverty and homelessness funny. He never passed up a cigar butt in the street and found a dime on every sidewalk.
picture from boomermagonline.com
I always thought that if it was going to be funny, it had to be done Red’s way. Let’s face it, there were two kinds of humor back then and only one my parents truly approved of. They were Eisenhower Republicans living in Iowa, the heart of the Midwest. Red’s gentle humor, with its hidden ribald parts, could profoundly make you laugh, and once in a while bring a tear into your eye. It was never mean-spirited or cruel. It never made a political or religious point. It always assumed that all people were good deep down, and even the bad guys could be reformed with the right joke or prank to make them see the error of their ways. That was comedy.
The other kind, the scary kind was Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. They would say bad words, even though you couldn’t say Carlin’s famous seven words on TV back then. They made jokes about dark and desperate things. Democratic political conventions in Chicago, the Viet Nam War, racial tension, the Black Panthers, these were all fair game for satire and black humor. Their jokes assumed that all people were basically bad and greedy and ignorant… full of malice towards all. Not even the comedian himself was assumed to be the exception to the rule.
And seriously un-funny things were happening. Kennedy was shot in 1963. Another Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were both killed in 1968. Patty Hearst was first kidnapped by and then somehow forced to be a part of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Chaos took the world we knew and turned it upside down. You had to learn to laugh at dark things, because laughing was somehow better than crying and hurting inside. The pictures of the My Lai Massacre in Life Magazine made me sick to my stomach for weeks. I did everything I could in class to make that pretty girl laugh, and when I couldn’t… I had to shut up for a while. I had to think.
I decided early on that I needed humor to live. I had to have the funny parts in my life in order to ward off the darkness. I whistled walking home from choir practice at the Methodist church on dark November nights. I told jokes to the rustling leaves and invisible hoot owls. I got by.
So, what is the lesson learned? If you read this far without gagging, then you know I mix a little funny with a little sad… and try to make a serious point in my writing. Maybe I’m a fool to do it, but I truly believe that Red had it right. People are basically good. You can reform a bad guy with a good joke. You can get by in the dark times.
If dark times are truly here again, then maybe that is why I have to tell my stories, make a few jokes, and make people think. I know I may be killing you with boredom by now, but that’s what I do. I’m a professional English teacher. I bore people to death. And if you read this far, and you’re still alive, maybe I can make you a little bit smarter too.
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Why am I a teacher?
Idiots say, “If you can’t do something useful, teach.” In Texas, the local wisdom is that teachers are over-paid and don’t work hard enough. They have three months off every year. They have more job security than small-business owners. And all they have to do is talk to kids. Why do we put up with such parasites? Of course you realize I am not talking from my own heart. I am speaking as a despicable straw man that I am intending to knock down, if only I don’t go anthropomorphizing to the point where I associate him with the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz and then find myself unable to knock down the poor misguided man with no brain.
So why would anyone in their right mind want to be a teacher? Oh, yeah… they wouldn’t. What does that say about me? You know, I never wanted to be a teacher when I was growing up. I wanted to be a cartoonist and make people laugh and like my adventure stories. I wanted to be a clown. I wanted to tell stories. I didn’t realize that a teacher, especially an English teacher, must be all of these things. God, with his infinite sense of humor, gave me arthritis in my hands and shoulders when I was only eighteen. And so, what was I gonna do? I had a BA in English. How do you feed yourself with that? I guess you get a Master of the Art of Teaching degree and teach. …Can’t do something useful… right?
When I was looking for a job in 1981, I had a choice between two States, Texas and Florida. Iowa was laying off its lazy teachers who had less than two years experience, reducing their teaching staffs, not hiring. Most other States were doing the same. Only Texas and Florida with some of the biggest education problems and worst educational inequalities needed teachers. And since my parents moved to Texas in 1980, the choice was really made for me. I came to the land of yee-hah cowboys and hey-gringo caballeros by Trailways bus. My first job was in Cotulla Texas, 85 per cent Hispanic and 80 per cent below the poverty line. I didn’t speak Spanish… or Mexican, or Texican, or Spanglish, or anything. I didn’t know the culture. I didn’t know the kids. I’m lucky they weren’t literally cannibals because they ate me alive my first two years. I learned all the bad words in Spanish the hard way, including the idioms. I was nick-named La Choosa (the barn owl), Batman, and Mr. Gilligan’s Island. I was plastered with spit-wads, defied, and demonized (and that was just the parents). I sent crazy little monsters to see the principal, and the principal would call me in and chew me out for having no classroom control. How do you control the behavior of hormone crazed early teens in a junior high school monkey house? The answer is… you don’t. No human being can actually control the actions of another human being. You can only control your own actions.
So I learned how to give them what they needed (as opposed to what they wanted). I started teaching things that weren’t in the textbooks. I taught a few of them how to read. I presented the many, many books I love and showed them how much I loved the books. Some of them loved the books too. I showed them how to reason and put ideas together. I showed them how to infer things. I showed them how to treat others with respect, and I even demonstrated how I respected them (sometimes by being polite and supportive as I told on them for selling pot in the boys’ restroom or busted them for calling the principal bad names in Spanish). I broke up fights. I faced down one kid who came to school with real ninja throwing stars. I kept kids near the interior concrete wall when the tornado visited… at two different schools. I did what Wall Street Bankers would never be able to do. I figured out how to do things that lawyers like Johnnie Cochran would never be able to figure out how to do. And I did it all for the BIG BUCKS ($11,000 for the first year, less than $50,000 last year).
Why did I do such an incredibly stupid thing with my life? Why did I waste my entire working life like that? I can’t write this without making myself cry. I did it because Ruben and Pablo both said I was their favorite teacher. I did it because Rita and Sofie and Shannon had a deep and painful crush on me. I did it because Jose told me that after he graduated he still remembered reading The Outsiders out loud when he didn’t really remember anything else he had learned in middle school. And I did it because David needed me to do it… and I still love all of them.
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Clowns
When you are small, there is something intimidating about a man in strange clothes and a garish pattern of white and red and blue all over his face. What is he hiding? What does he want? Why does he squeeze off a blast from that ridiculous little horn with the big red squeeze bulb right in your little-boy face? His big floppy shoes suggest monstrous feet. Why does he have such a big mouth with red paint all around it? “The better to eat you with, my dear!”
But clowns have a purpose for those of us who are no longer frightened little boys. They parody our actions and exaggerate everything. They look like us, sound like us, and behave like us if only we are able to look at ourselves times twelve or thirteen. They are essential to our lives and our happiness. Why, you ask? Because, my friend, we should never take ourselves too seriously. If we look at life only through serious eyes, we will never get enough of weeping. When we blow up too many balloons with our face painted on them, balloons of self-importance, as serious adults are wont to do, then we need to find the maniac with the pin. He’s not always a professional with face paint and floppy shoes. Sometimes he is the mailman, the local grocer, or even your deadbeat brother-in-law. But the point is, no matter how scary he sometimes seems, we all depend on the clown. We all need the foolishness of the most foolish among us. It keeps us sane.
Why then did I have to take it upon myself to give the world clowns? After all, that is precisely what I am doing as a writer. I am physically miserable with my six incurable diseases. I have diabetes, arthritis, hyper tension, psoriasis, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder, and I have a prostate the size of a cantaloupe. I can’t walk without a cane. I can’t breathe while I’m walking. I can’t pee without pain. I can’t draw as much as I’d like. And soon I will have to retire from teaching… the single greatest thing I ever did with my foolish little life. Oh, and every night while I’m trying to sleep, I itch the top layer of skin off all my most sensitive anatomical parts thanks to the gift of psoriasis. I have every reason to just curl up in a ball and cry. But that’s not what a clown does. A clown picks himself up and dusts off that rusty tin can that he keeps his sense of humor in. A clown looks at the world around him and sees all the really absurd things that are there. He looks at the way high school students act. He sees politicians like Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate. He sees injustice, moronic balloons with Ted Cruz’s face on them getting bigger and bigger and presidential, people on Texas roadways turning road rage into performance art, and even the contradictory things his wife says to him in little cartoon speech balloons that never seem to agree with each other and fight back and forth until they fill up the entire Cartoon Panel of Real Life. The clown sharpens that sense of humor, that crooked little pin, until it is balloon-popping razor sharp. It suddenly becomes time to pop a few balloons.
There are clowns in my writing not just because I like to write humor, but because it is the only way I can truly fight back. I must crack a few jokes. I must take a few metaphors and push them and pull them until they are so out of shape they form a picture of Ted Cruz’s face. I must puncture things and blow things up. I must toss sarcasm-berry pies at Ted Cruz’s face. (Actually, I love Ted Cruz. What wannabe humorist wouldn’t? He’s such an easy target.) I must mock things and ape people. I must sock things and grape people… waitaminnit! Grape people? Is that what a one-eyed, one-horned, giant purple people eater eats? I must do all the funny foolish things that a foolish funny clown can do to make the tears turn to laughter and pain to be ignored. Ted Cruz to be ignored too, if possible.
I have a riff or two to do on the clown heroes who inspire me. Red Skelton, Milton Berle, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and even Charlie Chaplin. But maybe that has to wait for another day… another post. As teachers and other clowns must always be aware, the attention span of the audience wears out quickly. If you have read this far, you are getting sleepy… sleepy (Michael Beyer is the funniest writer you ever read and you will not remember that I am the one who told you so).
The clown in the picture is NOT Ted Cruz. Shame on you for thinking that.
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Colored Pencil Gallery
I admit to being a colored-pencil maniac. They are like oil colors. You lay down the dark hues first and overlay the lighter colors on top. I need to learn how to photograph them more effectively, but here are some of my best.
The Girl with the Red Bird (1993)
In the Land of Maxfield Parrish
The Boy with the Bugle (1994)
That Night in Saqquara I Was Taken By Surprise (1992)
The Wings of Imagination
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Catch a Falling Star 