As a species, Homo Sapiens has a distinct tendency to keep making things more and more complicated. Using my digital art tools on this picture, I kept going long past the point that it makes sense. Trying to do this with an electronic stylus on the small touchscreen of my Android cellphone, I managed to get all the guitar strings turned into wet noodles. The bird wings got all fussed up between layers, and I made mistakes because arthritis in my hands screws up my drawings and overlapping details skew each other at a level I can only clearly see when I put the result on a computer and blow it up big. My eyes are old and funky too.
I changed the background and concentrated on the strings, but it was late at night. The birdwings were still misinterpreted by the AI tool. I left too many extra lines in the pencil original on the art paper. Notice what it did to her fingers.
This is the pencil copy I scanned to start with.
The version I actually settled for.
Simple, right? I didn’t let the AI screw things up as much. Though, there are still some edits I need to make with the stylus and eraser.
This is a Paffooney I have had in my portfolio for many years. Is it a miracle that it looks so much like my daughter the Princess? Yes! Most definitely. I drew this before I got married, more than twenty years ago. Yet, it looks so much like the Princess that my flabber is completely gasted.
A portrait of Jenna Ortega that doesn’t look like her. Oh, well. I tried.A portrait of somebody whose name I don’t even know.Somebody else I don’t know who doesn’t really look like this.
Yes, I am a wizard. That is a complicated thing to say. It is complicated because a wizard has to be a wise man, and wisdom has to begin with the idea that you know practically nothing about anything… but you can find out. So one version of me has to be my wizard D&D character, the wizard Eli Tragedy. This is because I know practically nothing about anything… but I am willing to not be stupid and look stuff up before I tell you anything and pretend it is a wise thing to say.
I have been thinking about who I am because I want to re-do my About the Author page. And that leads to the difficulty of explaining who Mickey actually is. You see, I am actually lots of different people in my head. Mickey is the cartoonist, the humorist, the clown. He is not the every-day me. He is the goofy and foofy and lovey-to-drawie part of me. And yes, I know some of those are not real words. Mickey is like that. He speaks Mickian Goof Speak. I have no control over that part of him. I am not certain where this Mickey-part of my soul originated, but it may be the result of too much TV when I was a kid.
And of course there is the Teacher-Me, Reluctant Rabbit, the person who stood in front of groups of twelve-thirteen-and-fourteen-year-olds for three decades and tap-danced, told stories, stood on my head, and begged them to internalize at least a lesson or two of what I tried to teach them.
And the wizard part of me was just barely wise enough to realize that a teacher can open doors, but you can’t shove a kid through. They have to take the critical learning step themselves. They have to want to learn something. But even though they actually do the learning themselves, they will come back to me in later years saying, “Oh, thank you, you taught me so much!” when really all I did was be a guide on the side and stayed out of their way.
And, of course, there is the Cowboy Me. I live in Texas. I was a Belmond Bronco in high school, but I became a Cotulla Cowboy for 24 years of my teaching career. I ended up as a Naaman Forest Ranger. I have worn the hat a lot in my life, being as much of a straight shooter as the Shakiest Gun In The West can be, always trying to shoot the six-guns out of the bad guy’s hands rather than shoot people.
So how do I explain a thing like that? Probably the way I just did it (ironically). I should use Paffoonies I have created over time and waffle about stupid stuff that might make people laugh when they realize how self-contradictory it is. And I should say it like I mean it… because I probably do.
This is a post about every evil thing that Mickey has done and kept secret (or things that Mickey has been accused of even if he didn’t really do them.) he
Starting with the Werewolf lie. Mickey (as the teacher known as Mr. Beyer, Mr. B, the Batman, and Mr. Gilligan’s Island) is not now, nor has ever been… a werewolf. The excessive growth of facial hair, especially around the full moon, is just an inherited family trait. NOT LYCANTHROPY! Mickey has never eaten a student, not even the bad ones who disappeared from our school. (They were removed by law enforcement and continued their education in prison.)
Emmalina, pictured above, was not really a werewolf either. She did not eat her boyfriend when he tried to dump her. She never threatened to bite Mickey if he didn’t give her A-plusses in English class. She never bit Mickey trying to turn him into a werewolf too. She’s a character in a fiction story. She doesn’t really exist. And the the real girl Mickey based the character on was not a werewolf either… at least, not that Mickey can prove.
Mickey is also a liar. He lies every time he sits down to his computer to work on his W.I.P.. He tells extensive lies that last between 15,000 and 75,000 words, but average around 35,000 words. He tells these lies about real people that he has known, though he lies about their names and calls them something way different than their real names. And the events he says happens to them in these extended lies didn’t really happen. So, basically, these are all fiction. In fact, their technical designation is either novella or novel.
Mickey does have some things to confess. He really is a horrid little goody-two-shoes that has always been too timid to actually ever commit a crime of any kind. He has been known to tell some lies that were not merely fiction. The big lie when he was a kid was, “I’m fine. Really, nothing is wrong.” If you have read much of this blog, you probably already know why that is a big lie.
Mickey does not have a very good marriage. He has been married for 28 years. That is really five good years, twenty tepid and kinda boring years, and three really bad years. Religious differences were the first problem that made it not great to be married. Mickey had great difficulty accepting that he was evil and detestable in God’s eyes. Mickey’s wife pointed out specific Bible verses to prove it. And somehow the verses in Proverbs that explained how a good wife acted were always invisible whenever Mickey looked them up during family Bible study.
Mickey is now an atheist who believes in God. Mickey understands that to mean he is a Christian Existentialist. His wife understands that to mean he is going to Hell when he dies… if only Jehovah’s Witnesses believed in Hell. But the reward ultimately is that she won’t have to share household space with him in Paradise, since he won’t be there.
But Mickey isn’t upset about any of that. The two of them have three wonderful kids who were all terribly bad in some way or other growing up, but now that they are responsible adults, they generally do good things… even if the good things they do somewhat resemble the way their evil dad taught them to be.
Mickey has one imaginary granddaughter. She’s imaginary because she didn’t make it all the way to the point where she would’ve become a real granddaughter… or grandson. But that’s also okay. It could’ve been worse. We could’ve lost two instead of one. And Susu is a lovely imaginary granddaughter.
And Mickey is also a nudist. He writes stories about naked people. And he visits places where naked people gather. This embarrasses the rest of the family. They choose not to remember when the children were younger and we had a pool and we did skinny-dipping at night with the underwater lights on in the pool. It was fun. And their embarrassment about it is still fun.
So, Mickey has lived a terrible, sordid life. It is a shame that he deeply regrets… with only a little laughter in the background.
Let’s put Mickey on trial for a minute. The question is something that ought to be considered. After all, the lead Paffooney is a picture inspired by William Blakes’s poem Tyger (hence the major misspelling in the picture) which is showing the tiger from the poem, and which is often considered a portrayal of the Devil, right before the tiger eats the child sitting in front of him. He knew somebody might see it that way. And he colored-penciled the thing that way anyway.
After all, we trusted him to teach our children for over 30 years. And if someone like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had seen how he taught them to read and write, the possibly-racist, definitely-narcissistic little fat man would be screaming, “Evil! There is evil in our classrooms!” After all, Mickey used books in the classroom where he was reading out loud that the Civil War really happened, and it was about slavery, and the Confederacy actually lost. And he read that to classes in Texas! In a book called The Glory Field, by Walter Dean Myers. A black author! Certainly a case of evil CRT (meaning Critical Race Theory, not Crazy Ron’s Theory.)
And that danged Mickey also used a book in the classroom that showed an innocent black man being put on trial for the rape of a white woman, which Atticus Finch proved he didn’t do, and then he almost got lynched and lost the case anyway, causing the black man to die for a crime he didn’t commit, thus making all Mickey’s white students feel unnecessary shame needlessly because of Mickey’s political woke agenda, which he apparently had before “woke” was even a thing. That was in a book called To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, which hasn’t been banned yet for some unknown reason and is written by a white woman.
How many awful things does Mickey have to do before we proclaim him hopelessly evil?
And you know this guy has embraced nudism after he retired from teaching. NUDISM! That means he likes to be naked. And not just when he’s alone (though mostly it is that.) He has gone to private nudist parks to be with other naked people.
And he’s constantly drawing and posting pictures of naked people. Sure he writes books about how being a nudist is calming and centering and helped him overcome childhood trauma. And he never practiced it while he was actively teaching so parents wouldn’t have to worry. And he doesn’t post naked photos of himself in front of us like many Twitter nudists enjoy doing. But he always thinks and writes about naked people. Well, maybe not always… but too much.
And liberal teachers who think like that are dangerous. It automatically makes him a groomer (and I’m not sure if I have it right, but a groomer isn’t just someone who uses curry combs on horses… is it?)
The point of it all is… if we look at Mickey’s record carefully enough, we are sure to find something that we can execute him for. And that should make the little fat man in white boots from Florida appropriately happy as he ascends to be the next Republican dictator of the United States. Evil will have been thwarted.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, when he was ill and nearing the end, said he could only write a single page in a day. But it was an excellent page.
I am now entering that end-of-it-all Fitzgerald territory. Some of the best writing I have done, but very little of it.
I have been writing on the essay project, Naked Thinking.
And so, I am delving deep into the darkness inside. And there sits that never-ending festering battle between light and darkness. A writer knows how to accurately depict the hellish reality of things he has always kept locked away inside. H. P. Lovecraft found a lot of racist hatred and existential terror inside. Dickens found regret in love misplaced and the cruelty of men to lesser men. Mark Twain found grief at outliving most of his children and his beloved wife. There is a lot of yeast applied to leaven the bread of life in the interior of every writer. And most of it ranges from unpleasant to deeply disturbing.
And so I am nearing the end. I do not know how close. But I am writing like the dervish whirls, fast and furious and knowing I will do it until the dance is over.
Being an artist is a matter of genetics, luck, and loads of practice. I began drawing when I was only four or five years old. I drew skulls and skeletons, crocodiles and deer on everything. My kindergarten and first grade teachers were constantly gritting their teeth over the marked-up margins of every workbook and worksheet. I drew and colored on everything. I eventually got rather good, drawing in pencil, crayon, ink, and as you see here, colored pencil. I loved to draw the people and things around me. I also drew the things of my imagination. I drew my best girl, Alicia, and I drew the half-cobra half-man that lived in the secret cavern under our house. I drew a picture of the house across the underpass from Grandma Mary’s house. I drew cardinals, and I drew Snoopy cartoons. I drew my sports heroes in football and hockey, Donny Anderson and Gordie Howe. I drew monsters with fangs and fuzzy animals with huge soulful eyes. I still draw and it’s mostly the same things that I drew when I was a child. I will post more of the drawings here in the near future to dazzle you with my talents and ridiculous sense of the absurd.
Catch a Falling Star 