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Before you go into panic mode, let me clearly state: No college or high school was actually foolish enough to invite Mickey to give the commencement address to its graduates. So, don’t worry about a generation of our youth actually taking to heart the advice Mickey is about to give and ruining our world for the next twenty years. This is just the insane drivel that Mickey would say if some superintendent, principal, or college dean were actually stupid enough to ask.

The most impressive commencement speech I remember from my life in education was given in 1974 by my favorite high school English teacher, Mr. Sorum. He was a gifted speaker and told a mean joke whenever a joke was needed to make the point.

He talked for forty-five minutes about “Taking the next bite of the hot dog.”

Of course, he was talking about a metaphor where the hot dog was a life of being a good citizen and living in service to the greater good. High school graduation, in this speech, was the first bite of the hot dog. Some of us were listening to what Mr. Sorum was actually saying. My second bite of the hot dog was to get an English degree from Iowa State University. My third bite was a teaching degree from the University of Iowa. The fourth was choosing a life of service by being a public school English teacher. So, I followed his advice.

Most of my class, though, took that speech to mean life was all about eating hot dogs. Was I wrong? Do I need to rethink my life?

If I am going to give advice to today’s graduates, the advice I would have to give is, “For God’s sakes, don’t choose to be a public school teacher! Do you have any idea how hard that job is for how little reward (practically none of it in money?)”

So, what advice do I have for actually doing something with your life that helps with the common good?

The most important one; “After you go to the bathroom, flush! Gol dangit! And afterwards, wash your danged hands!“

You wouldn’t believe what kind of bacteriological nightmares are being placed in your hand daily if you have a job where you are supposed to regularly shake hands.

Another key recommendation;; “Stop being so gosh-darned ugly!”

Of course, you know that this is not a matter of whether you have a pretty face or you scare rats in dark rooms. This is a matter of behavior. A matter of how many people you hate and treat with scorn and injustice, as well as who you routinely hate, and why you hate them. Hating anyone for any reason is not good for their health and is even worse for yours.

And a final thought about how to improve the world; “Figure out what and who you love in this world. Everyone needs to have something and someone to love and work at sharing your life energy with.” People need other people and they need a purpose, even if they have to forge that purpose out cardboard, imagination, and thin air.

If, by chance, you can already handle all of these things that idiot Mickey is lecturing you about, especially if these things come naturally to you, then totally ignore that first dumb thing Mickey said. Think seriously about becoming a teacher. What you have we desperately need more of. And with your expertise passed on to others, we might just be able to make more of it.

Sing Sad Songs is among the five best stories I have ever written. I usually place it as number 3 actually. It was going along full steam getting only five-star reviews on Amazon. And then somebody’s mother, or possibly anonymous old maid, decided to troll it as an evil book.

The problem, it seems, was that twelve year old kids are not allowed to talk about sex in a humor novel, even if the conversations are with older peers in private and that person gave sound be-cautious-and-don’t-risk-it advice. To be clear, there were no actual sex scenes depicted anywhere in the book. Other reviewers loved the book. One even thought it should be recommended to school libraries as being good for middle-school kids. But not anonymous reader. She suggested that the other reviewers were either idiots or weren’t smart enough to know what they were reading.

Remember, this is a humor blog. I find things funny about the terrible irony of how this book was treated. My complaint to Amazon was not profanity-laced or anything. I simply did not believe reviewers should impugn the remarks of other reviewers. I was even told by the Amazon adjudicator of justice that I was not given the right to comment on this review because every reviewer is entitled to their opinion, Oh, well… we all know the relationship between stupid people and an appreciation of ironic twists of fate.

Anyway, the punishments did not end there.

The story is about a boy who grew up in France and was in the car with his twin sister and both parents when it went off the cliff. The only family members who could take him in as the only survivor in the crash were his cousins Victor, Richard, Kelly, and Richard’s young son Billy Martin who all lived together in one house in Norwall, Iowa. They are a dysfunctional family who own and operate a small town bar and grill, two brothers and a sister. Nobody wants another family member (except for young Billy) in a family that none of the members really want to be in.

And while the new arrangement has its difficulties, Francois begins to sing sad songs from the bar’s new karaoke machine. And his singing is a hit with all who hear it. The bar and grill begins to prosper from the show he puts on. Soon everybody is falling in love with the sad boy from France.

The story is intended to make you cry at the end. But it should make you laugh too. I can’t tell you more than that without spoiling the book.

What the book is not is child pornography. I even went in and removed the words that made the anonymous reader rain fire on my book.

But Amazon lowered the rating from two stars to one. Then they went to my other books, found a review on Magical Miss Morgan that used the word “Questionable” (referring to the main character’s decisions as a teacher, which is part of the plot) and lowered that book’s rating from a four to a three. Apparently Amazon exacts maximum revenge on anyone who lodges a complaint about a review.

On my last free-book promotion for this book, I only gave away one copy. I don’t know whether that is because of this one bad review, or if it was the glitch that Amazon suffered over the weekend that removed several books from my author’s page even though, when I checked, all of the books were still for sale the whole time. Sing Sad Songs was one of those glitched books. According to other self-published authors, this happened to many others as well.

So, now there is nothing for it but to endure it. Such is life. Sing Sad Songs has had some sad luck.

The end is in sight for AeroQuest 4. I have two chapters left in Ged Aero’s story arc, and one cross-over chapter, plus the finale chapter with the time-travelers once again being quirky and odd for reasons to be explained later.

I have, however, lost momentum with that novel and continue to work more on Cissy Moonskipper instead.

That book has a story that parallels Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Like that story Cissy is aware of others, dangerous people like the ones who killed her brother, and she is spending time trying to prepare to defend herself should those other bad folks come to her little island in space, the Moonskipper family’s free trader space ship.

Her time as the lone survivor on the deserted starship is about to come to an end too as she is about to acquire her own version of Crusoe’s “man Friday.” It should be noted, however, that her Friday will not be a “man” in more ways than one.

Another factor in the fragmented writing life of Mickey is that, as of today, all members of this household are vaccinated (except for the dog who gets her shots Monday.) Both Henry, my number two son, and the Princess, my daughter, got their one-shot J&J vaccines at the local school district’s Health and Human Services office. It seems the entire Beyer family will survive the Covid Pandemic.

The rainy weather in Texas, not the usual thing for this time of year, has left me with a head full of allergic reactions to pollen and a body full of arthritis pains from the unseasonably cold weather. Hence the short re-hash of old ideas in a shortened post for today. Hey, I got writing done. And when I feel bad, short posts are excusable.

I have sunken to a new low. Why else would I be reposting this Christmas card with Vincent Price’s Christmas Tree?

I literally have an exploding headache. My sinuses are causing my eyes to see stars and my ears to pour out foul-smelling brown smoke. (Well, maybe only half of that is true. But it is Vincent’s Christmas tree. I know because I photo-shopped him out myself. Now there is only Vivi, naked ten-year-old me, Anneliese the gingerbread-cookie-girl, and Annette Funicello. I created this weird little card when I had a similar splitting headache as I do today.)

You may have noticed that I tend to get weirder when I am in pain than most people do. Instead of moaning “Oh, woe to mio!” the way other people do when they are in pain, my mind gets more free-flowing and obtusely creative when I can’t think straight. Sure, I still seem to make complete sentences and string them together logically, but that’s just a matter of writerly habits that I will still follow when I am dead and busy being a ghost writer.

But, for now, I really can’t write anymore. I only did this post to be able to say that I did still write something today. I cannot, however, say that I wrote well today. But I did write.

My work in progress, He Rose on a Golden Wing, is now at 8,500+ words. I am still on track to have written and posted something every single day of both March and April in 2021.

Yes, I planned for this. It is the day after my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. I was sick the second day after the first injection. So, I knew today would be like that, only possibly worse. I was right. It’s worse.

I have a headache and body aches. My arm hurts where the injections was administered. My fever never got higher than 37.3 Celsius. I would tell you what that is in Fahrenheit, but I am ill. I can’t do math. It is definitely not life-threatening. 37.7 is where you start thinking about alerting the doctor.

Yesterday my computer lost all powers of speech. It could not make a single peep. And I don’t mean those disgusting little marshmallow birds and bunnies. A computer by itself could never do that. What were you thinking when you thought I meant that? Oh, right. I am sick today. That was my feverish paranoia talking.

Anyway, that threatened my sick-day TV-watching. I only have You-Tube, Disney+, Netflix, and Hulu available to me. And all of that comes only by streaming on computer.

But even though I thought I had burned out a sound-card or something in my laptop, I was able to save the day by turning the computer off and back on again.. Simple solutions to life-altering problems.

And for those of you who were wondering why I drew myself as a crying girl in the Paffooney, that’s not me. Why did you think that? I’m a bearded, gray-haired old man. A real old coot. You should’ve known better. Oh, right again. Feverish old coots often hear voices in their doddering old heads.

The picture is actually Valerie Clarke, the protagonist in my work-in-progress, The Boy Who Rose on a Golden Wing, previously titled Valerie in Darkness. But I am thinking it needs to change again to He Rose on a Golden Wing. I know that probably doesn’t make sense to you. But I won’t put words in your mouth anymore. You are reading to the end of an over-long rant from a sick old coot. You should get a medal for that. Unfortunately I have no more Courageous Reader medals with a Word-Comprehender Cluster and five stars on it to give out. I have to get busy and make some more. Now, where did I put the scissors, cardboard, and glue?

Ever have one of those days where you feel the need to write, but you don’t know what to write about?

Today my second vaccine appointment was postponed until next week. The weather is blustery and rainy. So, I am left with unexpected writing time and no ideas on the yet-to-write-about list.

Well, this book is listed as a free Kindle book from today until Tuesday, the 20th, the day my vaccination was rescheduled for. This is the third time Recipes for Gingerbread Children has been in a free-book promotion. I am hoping it does better than the last couple of promotions. It really is a good book, but it gets passed over because of its connections to nudism, or because people see the title and think it’s a cookbook. I promise, if you try it, you will find it’s much more complex and fascinating then that. The story began as a retelling of Hansel and Gretel. but this time the witch in the Gingerbread House is Grandma Gretel, a Holocaust survivor trying to deal with what she lost by telling stories and baking magical cookies. And it has a werewolf in it for good measure, a little one who is not a predator, but himself a victim.

The book I am working on now… my work in progress, is a story I am calling The Boy Who Rose on a Golden Wing. This is a novel idea about handling depression, and it was originally titled Valerie in Darkness. Valerie Clarke is still the protagonist, but the story is not solely about her depression.

I used this picture to illustrate it, but this will not be the cover of the book. It will have a cardinal in it, but the girl in this picture is not Valerie.

I recently got the book The Baby Werewolf reviewed on Pubby, but the reader did not actually buy the book, which is what I paid for, and he or she probably did not actually read it. 75,000 words in just a couple of hours? I think not. So, the five-star review will be pretty useless to me in the long run.

So, now I have basically written about nothing in this post. And I have written to my goal, but achieved only that and nothing more. Still, if you are interested at all in how a writer’s mind works on a disappointingly bad day, you now have some evidence for the formation of negative opinions. And you may have some idea of what to avoid in future blogs. (And I messed with the colored-text feature out of sheer goofiness and do apologize if you actually read this far only to be disappointed by the content of this paragraph.)