I have been complaining for a while now about not being able to concentrate on writing the way I was before and during the pandemic.
My father died of Parkinson’s Disease. And I have been exhibiting many of the same symptoms that he had. So, is that what it is? Am I going to become a shuffling old bearded coot, angry about everything, seeing things that aren’t really there, and slowly losing my hold on reality?
But it probably isn’t that. I probably have those symptoms because I worry about it too much. Honestly, I had Covid, the Omicron Variant, twice in 2022. Nobody knows what the long term effects of it are.
Probably Cootism.
I face being a really old and possibly crazy old coot, someone who yells at people and some dogs to get off my lawn… even though it is actually my wife’s lawn. She owns the house. And then I will probably be one of those coots who forgets to wear pants before walking the dog. And when the police bring me home, my wife will claim she doesn’t know who I am. And without my pants, I will not have my wallet and my driver’s license.
And I will probably get angrier and angrier until I am not just snorting in anger at the dog, but the postlady, the neighbors, and the policemen who bring me home with no pants on. Not much danger I will begin watching FOX News or vote for Don Cheetoh Trumpaloney (rhymes with “Full of baloney.”) And that’s because I don’t have cable. I will have to be radicalized over YouTube and Instagram. I am already practicing my coot-dancing in case I am discovered on Facebook. I can dance better than that old coot who dropped his cane and went viral with his boogying.
Most of my novel stories have lived in my head since the 1970’s. I began recording the ideas in a notebook that I called the libretto. I drew illustrations to solidify the characters and some of the plot elements in my mind. But the basic natures of the characters and the style of my artwork grew from these original artistical notations.
I got better at art over time. And the characters benefited from my teaching experience in that I was able to depict numerous characters with nuances and details gained from students and other people I hadn’t met yet when I drew these pictures. Dorin Dobbs, for instance, is based in large part on my eldest son, who wouldn’t be born for another 18 years when I drew these pictures (He’s the yellow-haired boy in both of the first two pictures.)
Francois, the singing sad clown from my book Sing Sad Songs, is based on a student from the 80’s who was actually Spanish speaking and of Mexican-American descent.
I drew this picture of him in 1976.
I taught the boy in 1983.
I wrote and published the book in 2018.
The inter-dimensional traveler, the Man-Cat, is an idea from a story I have not written yet, and probably never will.
Disney-Michael Stewart and his gang of Milk-Lovers is another story I haven’t written yet, and though more likely, is still probably a novel I will never get to.
Invisible Captain Dettbarn and Francois ended up in separate stories from this picture. The other three boys in the picture were babies or not yet born when their stories happen.
So, today was a chance to look at and re-evaluate the past. All of these drawings were done in the 1970’s. All I did was scan them with a good scanner and crop them a little to make them better compositions. And they allow me to keep track of where my mind has already been, that I might successfully chart the future of where it is going.
I am a bit of a cartoonist for a reason. I started drawing cartoons at the age of five. I read everything in the Sunday funny pages, not just for the jokes. I poured over the drawings and copied some. I drew Dagwood Bumstead and Blondie. I drew Lil’ Abner and Charlie Brown and Pogo. Cartoonists were heroes to me.
But my parents wanted to protect me from the evils of comic books. Superheroes were off limits most of the time. Things that are associated with evil were out of the question. So Daredevil was beyond reach. And Mad Magazine was full of socialist ideas and led kids down the dark path of satire. So the truth is, I didn’t discover Wally Wood until I was in college. His corrupting influence didn’t take hold of me until I was older and full of hormones. Ah, youth and the propensity for sin! Wally taught me that cartoons could be real.
Wally Wood was one of the original artists working for EC comics who formed Mad Magazine with it’s spoofs and irreverent humor. Wood worked together with the Great Will Eisner on the Spirit. He went on to work for Marvel on the comic book Daredevil where he innovated the red suit and double-D logo, as well as doing the primary story-telling that brought that comic book from the bottom of the Marvel stack to almost the very top. His work on Daredevil resonates even until today where there is now a big controversy that the popular show on Netflix does not list Wood among the creators of Daredevil in their credits. I must remember to complain about that later.
But the thing that drew me to Wood more than anything was the realistic style that he brought to the unreal realm of cartoons. The man could draw! He did marvelous detail work and was a leader in the development of dynamic composition in an artistic industry that tolerated and even often encouraged really poor-quality drawing. He took the comic book from the age of the glorified stick figure to an age of cinematic scope and know-how. Here it is revealed in his classic break-down of innovative comic-book panels;
But it is also important to realize that the more power you put into art, the more it can blow up and hurt people. Wood had a dark side that went a bit darker as he went along. He had an issue with the kind of false front comics had to throw up in front after the anti-comics crusade of psychologist Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of Innocents. He is probably the artist behind the cartoon poster The Disneyland Memorial Orgy. He started his own cartoon studio that produced increasingly erotic and pornographic comics like Sally Forth, Cannon, and Gangbang. He became increasingly ill, lost the sight in one eye, suffered severe headaches, and eventually committed suicide in 1981. With great power comes great responsibility, and we are not all superheroes in the end. But I will always admire and emulate the work of this great artist… and selfishly wish he could’ve lived to create more of the wonderful art he gave us.
There is a major drawback to being so smart that you can perceive the edges of infinity. It makes you bedbug crazy. I love the science fiction that populated the paperback shelves in the 50’s and 60’s when I was a boy. I love the work of Philip K. Dick. But it leads you to contemplate what is real… what is imaginary… and what is the nature of what will be.
the robot Philip K. Dick who appeared at Comic Con and answered questions
There are numerous ways to investigate life. But it is in the nature of imaginary people to try to find ways to make themselves real. When the replicants in Bladerunner try to make themselves into real people, they must try to create memories that didn’t exist. They try to mirror human life to the extent that they can actually fool the bladerunner into letting them live. Of course, it doesn’t work. They are not real. (Bladerunner is the movie name of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).
It is like that for me as well. Being an imaginary person is difficult. You have to constantly invent yourself and re-invent yourself. By the time you finally get to know yourself, you have to change again so that the anti-android factions don’t destroy you. Although, I think I may not actually be an android.
Does that sound a bit crazy? Well Philip K. Dick’s life story may in fact have led him down the path to really crazy. In 1971 he broke up with his wife, Nancy Hackett. She moved out of his life, and an amphetamine-abuse bender moved in. In 1972, ironically the year I began reading Dick’s work, he fell in love at the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention. That was immediately followed by erratic behavior, a break-up, and an attempted suicide overdosing on the sedative potassium bromide. This, of course, led directly to his 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly.
The story is about a police detective who is corrupted by a dangerous addictive drug that takes him down the rabbit hole of paranoia, and being assaulted by the perception of multiple realities simultaneously. His novel Ubik from 1969 is a story of psychics trying to battle groups of other psychics even after they are killed by a bomb. The crazy seems to have been building for a while.
In 1974 he had a transcendental experience when a lady delivering medicine to his door wore a fish-shaped pendant which he said shot a pink beam into his head. He came to believe the beam imparted wisdom and clairvoyance, and also believed it to be intelligent. He would later admit to believing he had been reincarnated as the prophet Elijah.
Imagination has its dangers. It is a powerful thing able to transform reality. Science fiction writers often use their imagination to shape what the future will actually make come into being. But it can also turn your mind inside out. A great science fiction writer like Philip K. Dick can contemplate the nature of reality and turn his own reality inside out. It is a lesson for me, a lesson for all of us. Wait, is that a pink beam of light I see? No, I just imagined it.
I am now in the final phase of publishing The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. I am merely waiting for Amazon to object to whatever ridiculously minute formatting error I may still have going. And I once again had to publish without benefit of a beta reader or an editor of any kind. You learn things about yourself that you really don’t want to know.
What I have learned;
I can’t depend on my wife to be a beta reader and comment on my work. She tried once and told me, “Your writing is like dog poop. It is full of weird stuff, smells bad, and is impossible to get off your shoe once you step in it.” To be honest, I ironed out that metaphor just a bit. She was actually quibbling about my proofreading style and basically ignored all the content of the story. That’s the way English teachers are about prose.
I can too easily fall into the habit of introducing characters on a fashion model runway. The first time the character enters the narrative I tend to give a head to toe rundown of how they look, what they are wearing, and how they have done their hair. I know better than that, but I still do it.
I… use… ellipsis… marks… toooo… much…!
My creative spellings tend to drive the spellchecker insane. In this novel I had trouble over the spellings of blogwopping, interbwap, and dillywhacking. To be fair two of those words are from the language of the Tellerons, a space-faring race of frog people who happen to ineptly invade the earth. (Oh, and the other is a euphemism used by young boys for something very private. Don’t tell anybody about that one.)
Time travel plots can be laboriously difficult to follow through mobius-strip-like contortions of time, space, and history.
Sometimes my jokes are not funny. Seriously… that can be a problem.
And my characters often act on weird impulses and do things for no rhyme or reason… or rhythm either for that matter… see what I mean about ellipsis marks? Of course, one can always explain that that is exactly how people really are. I myself never do that. There is always a rhyme to be snatched from the ether in the very nick of time… randomly.
And at the end of the novel, when I am tying up the loose ends of the plot in a Gordian Knot, I have strings left over. Maybe enough to knit a shirt with. So I end up picking them up and starting another novel with them.
It is basically heck to be a divergent thinker. You try to make a list of things, and by the time you get to number 9, you have forgotten what the list was about, and you even forgot to number things, so you have to go back to the first one and count. Now what was I talking about?
Oh, yeah. I edited the book all by myself. And now it’s done. Time to start a new novel and make all the same mistakes over again.
What I am telling you now is a secret I have carried with me for at least 8 years. I have gone deeper into helping kids than most teachers do. I became experienced in helping kids with suicidal depression. Four different kids didn’t kill themselves because I found a way to help them. Two of them I sat in the emergency room with. Two kids, three emergency room visits, three hospital stays complete with regular visits by me. Another kid, a long night on the phone because he called me instead of the suicide hotline. That could have ended in the hospital too, but he made me promises and then kept them because he didn’t have a father and his mother neglected him, but I was willing to talk all night one Friday night. And another one was headed for suicide because her mother had committed suicide, and this I knew from the school counselor, but she had no hope and no connection to the world, and this I found out when she screamed it at me in the classroom, and then explained it to me in private conversation later in the classroom when no one else was there to hear. And I told her the stories of the ones I had helped. And she said, “If I had known them, I would’ve been their friend.” And sometimes the ability to cry in front of someone who understands is all it takes to save a life.
But this post is not an ego boost. I am not bragging. I am not batting a thousand. This is a crying post.
Up until this point I have not told you any names. Those kids have a right to keep their secrets, or tell their stories themselves when appropriate. But I will tell you Ruben’s name. He deserves to be remembered.
Ruben was a small eighth grader. He was rail thin and not very imposing. But Vernon was a gold-glove boxer, not a huge kid, but he had champion-sized muscles. And he bullied Ruben relentlessly. Ruben was in the same grade as his younger sister, a result of failing a lower grade. Vernon made numerous comments to make him feel stupid. And because Ruben was not athletic, Vernon pushed him around and told him he was gay.
“I will tell the principal what he has been doing to you in my class if you will back me up and tell the principal too,” I told Ruben after class.
“No. Don’t tell the principal nothing. You can’t fight my battles for me.” He made me promise not to tell the principal. I didn’t know at the time what a mistake that was.
The next year his sister told me that he had gone back to the barrio in San Antonio. He joined a gang. They were called the Town Freaks. They would later become the Latin Kings, an extension of the LA gang known as the Bloods. It made me sad. But it was not the end of the story.
Later that year I heard a news report from San Antonio. Eight members of the Town Freaks had stolen a pickup truck and taken it for a joyride. The police had chased them, the chase ending in the pickup crashing and rolling over in the ditch. All six of the kids in the back of the truck were killed. You know already how this story ends, don’t you. The name of the last kid killed they read out on the news was Ruben Vela.
I have cried for Ruben at least once every year since 1982. He was the first child I lost. And he was the one that made me committed to never let that happen again. Somehow I had to learn how to save a kid.
Of course, there was another loss as time went by. Suicidal depression can take them even after you think they’ve beaten it. I can’t tell you J.J.’s story now or I will not sleep tonight. But I was more of a surrogate father to that boy than most of the others I ever mentored or helped. And he ended himself by getting drunk, racing the train to the crossing, and then losing the race. He left behind a young wife and two little daughters… and a teacher who feels like a loser because one loss overshadows all the other wins.
I am not a hero. I would give anything not to have this particular story to tell about being a teacher stupid enough to give a damn. But when faced with the dark night of the soul, no matter whose soul it is, the only thing you can do is stand up and face the dragon. And you are likely to get burned. But what other choice is there? There’s only so much crying you can live with, and beyond that, your head dries up and turns to dust.
There are many ways to fly. Airplanes, bird wings, hot air balloons, bubble-gum-blowing goldfish… well, maybe I am really talking about flying by imagination. The more my six incurable diseases and old age limit my movement, my ability to get out of bed and do things, the more I rely on reading, writing, and the movie in my head to go places I want to be.
Sometimes the wings I use to fly come from other writers. I get the flight feathers I need not only from books, but also from YouTube videos, movies, and television shows.
This magic carpet ride in video form is by the thoughtful creative thinker Will Schoder. In it he carefully explains how Mister Rogers used the persuasion techniques of Logos, Ethos, and Pathos to talk to elephants and convinced a congressman intent on cutting the budget to actually give Public Television more money for educational programming. This is a video full of warmth and grace and lovingly crafted magic flight feathers that anybody can use to soar across new skies and blue skies and higher skies than before. I hope you will watch it more than once like I did, to see how beautifully the central explanation spreads its wings and gives us ideas that can keep us aloft in the realm of ideas.
It is important to stay in the air of fresh ideas and new thinking. The magic carpet ride that takes you there is the product of vivid imagination, cogent thinking, and the accurate connection of idea to better idea. So instead of falling from the sunlit sky into the darkness that so easily consumes us on the ground, keep imagining, keep dreaming, and keep flying. You won’t regret having learned to fly.
So, as I was playing with this post, I began to realize that Alan Watts is really the one wizard whose ultimate philosophy spell is cast with these words;
The whole purpose of being alive is…
Simply to be ALIVE. -Alan Watts, wiseguy wizard
I have been shouting into the stormwinds of late because… well, because I don’t have very much longer to live. Don’t get me wrong. I am not suddenly diagnosed with cancer and doomed to die next Thursday at 3 o’clock. But I am old. I have had arthritis for 48 years, diagnosed when I was 18. I have had diabetes for 23 years, diagnosed in Spring of 2000. I have four other relatively serious incurable diseases and conditions not even counting the fact that I survived cancer in 1983, malignant melanoma. Every morning I wake up alive now is a significant effort to get up and going, as well as being a miraculous escape from the clutches of the inevitable.
Well, far be it for me to question Master Alan Watts. But even though I am suffering daily, I am living in the here and now, making plans to look forward to, letting go any anger and blame I have against anyone for injustices against me in the past (Don’t worry. I don’t mean I have forgiven Don Cheetoh Trumpalonely.) And I am enjoying life in spite of the pain and difficulty. It is a Nietzschean appreciation for how the dark parts and the hard parts make the sunshine sweeter.
I live my life, I play with my toys, I enjoy my crayons and colored pencils (the crayons are particularly chewy, but the red ones don’t taste like cherries,) and I remember childhood by reliving it a second time.
“I am not dead yet,” said the 66-year-old little boy with the red crayon in his mouth.
If you’ve read any of the crap that Mickey wrote about before in this goofy blog, you probably already suspect that Mickey’s mind does not work like a normal mind. The road map above is just one indicator of the weirdness of the wiring that propels Mickey on the yellow brick road to Oz and back. He just isn’t a normal thinker.
But having a few bats in the old belfry doesn’t prevent the man from having a plan. If you read all of Mickey’s hometown novels, you will discover he hasn’t written them in time order. Main characters in my 2016 novel weren’t even born yet in my 2017 books. If you look at them in chronological order rather than the order written, you will see characters growing and changing over time. A shy kid in one novel grows into a werewolf hunter in the next. A girl who loses her father to suicide in a novel not yet completed, learns how to love again in another novel.
Multiple Mickian stories are totally infected with fairies. The magic little buggers are harder to get rid of than mosquitoes and are far and away more dangerous. And there are disturbing levels of science-fiction-ness radiating through all of the stories. How dare he think like that? In undulating spirals instead of straight lines! He doesn’t even use complete sentences all the time. And they used to let that odd bird teach English to middle school kids.
But there is a method to his utter madness. He started with the simpler stories of growing up and learning about the terrors of kissing girls when you are only twelve. And then he moved on into the darker realms of dealing with death and loss of love, the tragedy of finding true love and losing it again almost as soon as you recognize its reality. Simple moves on to complex. Order is restored with imagination, only to be broken down again and then restored yet again,.
And, of course, we always listen to Mr. Gaiman. He is a powerful wizard after all. The Sandman and creator of good dreams. So Mickey will completely ignore the fact that nobody reads his books no matter what he does or says. And he will write another story.
It is called Sing Sad Songs, and it is the most complex and difficult story that Mickey has ever written. And it will be glorious. It also rips Mickey’s heart out. And I will put that ripped-out heart back in place and make Mickey keep writing it, no matter how many times I have to wash, rinse, and repeat. The continued work is called Fools and Their Toys. It solves the murder mystery begun in Sing Sad Songs. This re-post of an updated statement of goals is the very spell that will make that magic happen. So, weird little head-map in hand, here we go on the writer’s journey once again and further along the trail.
It should be noted that Mickey does not battle the St. Louis Blues. That is his favorite hockey team. And while they have never won the Stanley Cup, they do win a lot and are almost always in the playoffs. So they help fight depression. Battling them would not only be counter-productive, but might also result in losing all those big square white middle teeth in that goofy smile.
But battling depression is a constant necessity. Not only am I subject to diabetic depression and Donald Trump overload, but my entire family is prone to deep and deadly bad blue funks. It helps to be aware that there are a lot of ways to fight that old swamp of sadness. It doesn’t have to keep claiming the Atreyu’s horse of your soul. (Yes, I know that Neverending Story metaphors seriously date me to the 80’s and signify that I am indeed old… another reason I have to constantly fight depression.)
I have some surefire methods for battling depression that apparently the science actually backs up. It turns out that most of things that Mickey does actually stimulate the brain to produce more dopamine.
“Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. Dopamine also helps regulate movement and emotional response, and it enables us not only to see rewards, but to take action to move toward them.”– Psychology Today
So, I guess I am secretly a dopamine addict. It is a brain chemical you cannot focus or function effectively without.
Being creative in some way fosters the production of dopamine in the old think-organ. So writing this blog helps. Doodling excessively helps. Writing novels, painting pictures, drawing cartoons, and writing really remarkably bad poetry also help, and I do all of those things every week.
Chicken Dancing helps. Really. Flapping your arms and wiggling your butt in such a stupidly silly way is aerobic exercise, and the very act of exercising increases not only dopamine but also serotonin and endorphin get a boost. These are your “natural high” brain drugs. Have you ever noticed chicken dancers are never really sad while dancing? The ones crying excessively are either crying from happiness or extremely embarrassed teenagers forced to chicken dance by their goofy old dad.
For more information about chicken dancing and its possible uses for evil, check out this link The Dancing Poultry Conspiracy Theory. Because laughing about stuff is also a cure for depression. It tends to even bypass dopamine and take a left turn through serotonin straight into the pleasure centers of the brain.
Winning streaks also help immensely. Of course, I can’t always count on the St. Louis Blues to give me winning streaks. X-Box EA Sports MVP Baseball 2004set on the rookie difficulty level for the last decade helps with that. I have won over 300 consecutive games including two World Series sweeps that way. And Albert Pujols has hit over 1,000 home runs in his Mickian baseball career.
Check lists also help because they are the same thing as winning streaks. The sense of accomplishment you get from checking off boxes on your To-Do List also boosts dopamine in the same way. So what if I am listing routine things like walking the dog, picking up socks, and taking out the trash? A check mark is still a check mark and a check mark by any other name still smells like marker.
And, of course, there is listening to music. I am seriously addicted to classical music because every emotion from beautiful and awe-inspiring to butt-ugly brutal can be found somewhere in the works of the great composers. And don’t forget, Paul Simon, Don Henly, and Paul McCartney are in that category too.
8. And please, don’t forget food. Depressed eating can easily make you fat, but there are certain magical chemicals in certain foods that give you certain dopamine-building effects that can turn blue skies to bright sunshine. The primary chemical is called Tyrosine, and it can be found in a variety of foods like;
– Almonds
– Avocados
– Bananas
– Beef
– Chicken
– Chocolate
– Coffee
– Eggs
– Green Tea
– Milk
– Watermelon
– Yogurt
9. And finally, thinking skills are critical. While thinking too much and obsessing can get you into the tiger trap pits of depression, meditation, decompressive mantras and positive thinking can all dig you out and keep you out.
You are probably wondering what kind of nitwit authority I can actually bring to this topic, but I have spent a lot of money on therapy, not all of it for me, and I not only listen to psychiatrists and psychologists, but I remember what they explained to me. And I have tried enough things to know what works.
So while you are busy chicken dancing to Beethoven while eating a banana, rest assured, Mickey is probably doing something just as embarrassingly ridiculous at the very same time.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Joys of Editing Yourself
I am now in the final phase of publishing The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. I am merely waiting for Amazon to object to whatever ridiculously minute formatting error I may still have going. And I once again had to publish without benefit of a beta reader or an editor of any kind. You learn things about yourself that you really don’t want to know.
What I have learned;
Oh, yeah. I edited the book all by myself. And now it’s done. Time to start a new novel and make all the same mistakes over again.
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Tagged as novel writing, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius