Art on the bedroom wall, with Christmas lights being used as a night light.
Talking to a school administrator the other day about the challenges my children and I have been facing in the last year, I had one of those experiences where you get a look at your own life through someone else’s eyes. “Wow, you have really been on a difficult journey,” he said. I just nodded in response. Financial difficulties, health problems, dealing with depression… life has been tough. But you get through things like that by being centered. Meditation tricks. Things you can do to smooth out the wrinkles and keep moving forward.
I always return in the theater of my mind to a moment in childhood where I learned a critical lesson. My life has been one of learning how to build rather than destroy. It has been about creating, not criticizing.
Electric lights have come to Toonerville, helping to light the darkness.
When I was a boy, I was a serious butterfly hunter. It started when Uncle Don gave me a dead cecropia moth that he had found in the Rowan grain elevator. It was big and beautiful and perfectly preserved. Shortly thereafter, I located another cecropia in the garage behind the house, a building that had once been a wagon shed complete with horse stalls and a hay loft. I tried to catch it with my bare hands. And by the time I had hold of it, the powder on its wings was mostly gone. The wings were broken in a couple of places, and the poor bug was ruined in terms of starting a butterfly collection.
A cecropia moth
Undeterred by tragedy, I got books about butterfly collecting at the Rowan Public Library and began teaching myself how to bug hunt. I learned where to find them, and how to net them, and how to kill and mount them.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
I discovered that my grandfather’s horse pasture had thistle patches which were natural feeding grounds for red admiral butterflies (pictured top left) and painted lady butterflies (top right). But if you wanted to catch the rarer mourning cloak butterfly (bottom picture), you had to stake out apple trees, particularly at apple blossom time, though I caught one on the ripening apples too.
But my greatest challenge as a butterfly hunter was the tiger swallowtail butterfly. They are rare. They are tricky. And one summer I dueled with one, trying with all my might to catch him. He was in my own back yard the first time I saw him. I ran to get the butterfly net, and by the time I got back, he was flitting high in the trees out of reach. I must’ve watched him for half an hour before I finally lost sight of him. About five other times I had encounters with him in the yard or in the neighborhood. I learned the hard way that some butterflies are acrobatic flyers and can actually maneuver to avoid being caught. He frustrated me.
The tiger swallowtail was the butterfly that completed my collection, and it was finished when one of my cousins caught one and gave it to me because she knew I collected them.
But then, one day, while I was sitting on a blanket under a maple tree in the back yard with my notebooks open, writing something that I no longer even recall what I wrote, the backyard tiger swallowtail visited me again. In fact, he landed on the back of my hand. I dropped the pencil I was writing with, and slowly, carefully, I turned my hand over underneath him so that he was sitting on my palm.
I could’ve easily closed my hand upon him and captured him. But I learned the lesson long before from the cecropia that catching a butterfly by hand would destroy its delicate beauty. I would knock all the yellow and black powder off his exquisite wings. I could not catch him. But I could close my hand and crush him. I would be victorious after a summer-long losing battle.
But that moment brought an end to my butterfly hunting. I let him flutter away with the August breeze. I did not crush the butterfly. It was then that I realized what beauty there was in the world, and how fragile that beauty could be. I could not keep it alive forever. But it lasted a little big longer because I chose to let it.
So, here is the lesson that keeps me whole. Even though I had the power, I did not crush the butterfly.
Of course, I am recommending my own books. These are some of my best.
I also drew all of the pictures you will see in this post.
Authors and their books who made me who I am…
Terry Pratchett… any Discworld Novel and Good Omens (written with Niel Gaiman)
JRR Tolkien… The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Ernest Hemingway… The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls
Harper Lee… To Kill a Mockingbird
Mark Twain… The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Charles Dickens… David Copperfield, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities
Thomas Mann… The Magic Mountain
Thomas Hardy… The Return of the Native
William Faulkner… Light in August
Rudyard Kipling… The First Jungle Book
Robert Lewis Stevenson… Treasure Island
Authors you will love if you try them
Mitch Albom… The Magic Strings of Frankie Pesto, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Paulo Coelho,,, The Alchemist
Willa Cather… My Antonia
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry… The Little Prince
Any books by these Science Fiction Authors;
Theodore Sturgeon
Ray Bradbury
Arthur C. Clarke
Frank Herbert
Douglas Adams
Michael Crichton
Any books by these Fantasy Authors
C. S. Lewis
David Eddings
Michael Stackpole
R. A. Salvatore
I have avoided including anything that I haven’t personally read yet. And I haven’t included anything by William Shakespeare, although you should read any play of his you have ever heard of.
Yes, this post is a self-examination. Not the kind you see Donald Trump enacting every weekend, where he says any crappy thing that occurs to his craptastical very good brain to cover what he doesn’t want us to believe about the truth on Twitter, basically for the purpose of continuing to say he is great and we are poop. I do not like myself the way Trump likes himself. I am an old bag of gas that is in pain most of the time, in poor health, and the subject of endless persecution from Bank of America and other money-grubbing machines that are convinced any money I might accidentally have really belongs to them. But this is not a complain-about-crap fest either.
This is a self-examination that attempts to honestly examine where I am in my quest for wisdom and my affliction with being a writer.
If I am being honest about the type of writer I really am, I guess I am most like the Weird Recluse in the bottom corner. I can’t claim to be as good as Kafka or Dickinson, but I am definitely better than some of the crap that gets published and marketed as young adult literature. The business of publishing is more interested in how many books they can sell, rather than literary merit or good writing. Some of the crap that is out there and being made into bad movies (which I have not seen because I don’t go to movies that don’t pass the fiction-source smell test) is actually a form of brain poison that will mold young people into sexual predators and professional poop makers. And people will take poison happily if it has been deviously marketed well. So far, in the money test, I have made only $16.43 dollars as an author (plus whatever I have made from I-Universe that doesn’t cut a check until it reaches at least $25 dollars). Nobody is buying my books because nobody has read them. I have sold a few copies to friends and relatives. Some of those books are just sitting on a shelf somewhere unread. I have a couple of 5-star reviews on Amazon, and that is it. I will die in the near future not having known any measurable success from my books at all.
I have entered novels in writing contests and done well enough to make it into the final round of judging twice. I have not, however, made a big enough splash that anyone really noticed. I have paid reviewers to review my books online. One of those charged me money, and then reviewed a book with the same title by a different author, a book which was nothing like my book, and then, when forced to correct their error, only read the blurb on the back of the book to write the oopsie-I-goofed-last-time review. They were not worth the money I paid them, money that Bank of America could’ve sued me for instead.
The only thing I have done successfully as a writer is, I think, this goofy blog. By writing every day, I have managed to give myself considerable practice at connecting with readers. I have practiced writing humor and written some laughable stuff. I have plumbed my soul for new writing ideas, and found a creative artesian well bubbling up with new ideas daily. I can regularly manufacture inspiration. I am never truly without an idea to write about. Even when I write a post about not having an idea to write about, I am lying. Of course, I am a fiction writer, so telling lies is what I do best. I am also a humorist, so that means I can also tell the truth when I have to, because the best humor is the kind where you surprise the reader with a thing that is weirdly true. Like just now.
So, somewhere ages and ages hence, I hope there will be a trove of old books in a cellar somewhere that will include one of mine. And some future kid will pick it up, read it, and laugh. The golden quality of that laughter is the only treasure I have really been searching for. It is the reason I write. It is the reason I continue to be Mickey.
Since I wrote this blog post originally, I have added a few books published on Amazon. You can find information about this random noveliciousness here at this page in my blog. Click on this linkie thingie here.
One good thing about being a humorist is, if somebody calls you out for an error you made in your writing, you can always say, “Well, it’s a joke, isn’t it?” Errors are for serious gobbos and anal-retentive editors. I live with happy accidents. It is a way of life dictated in the Bob Ross Bible.
Yeah, I know it’s supposed to be “oops” not “OPPS”, but after all, this isn’t even a list I made up myself. I stole the whole thing from another writer on Twitter.
You have no idea what a cornucopia of ravings from knit-wit twit-tweets Twitter really is.
Oh, you waste time time on Twitter too too?
Then you know already.
Twitter makes you want to shout at your computer, and has so many Trump-tweets and conservative blather-bombs on it, that it can seriously impair your editing skills.
So I look elsewhere and elsewhen to sharpen my critical English-teacher eye.
Yes, the illustrator of that meme doesn’t get the blame for the content. I wrote that violation of the sacredness of classic literature myself. I think we should thank God for the fact that neither Charles Darwin nor Dr. Seuss decided to act on evil impulses. The world is a better place for their decision on how to use their genius, and how to edit themselves.
So, this is me writing today’s post about editing as a writer, and failing miserably to edit my own self. I got the pictures from Twitter and edited them myself. Or failed to edit them properly, as the case is more likely to prove. But however I may have twisted stuff and changed stuff and made up new words, editing is essential. It makes the whole world better. Now let’s consider editing the White House for a bit, shall we?
Yes, Mickey still has more of this stuff to say. So, hang onto your shorts, and don’t let the old bird talk you out of them. But he’s gonna try… just like naturists once lobbied him.
And this stuff will probably not be as surprising as it was once or twice before, because you have heard him say it… err, saw him write it… in a previous post. Or two or three of them.
If you are one of those sane people who are not crazy enough to repeatedly read this blog, then you may indeed be surprised by stupid Mickey saying, “It’s good for you to be naked.” So, I should quickly review why Mickey ever needed to think about becoming a nudist at all.
You see, when Mickey was a child of ten, he was sexually assaulted by an older boy. Not a pleasurable thing, mind you, but a bizarre twisting of the private parts under threats of hurting the victim even more if he cried out or called for help. You know, the kind of thing that causes so much trauma that poor Mickey couldn’t allow himself to remember until he was twenty-two when he suddenly relived the entire incident in a PTSD-like flashback.
After the flashback, stupid Mickey decided that on this topic he needed to make himself into a smarter Mickey. He took a sociology class in college on human sexuality. He learned about the sexual abuse of children and the effects it commonly had on its victims. And of the many things he learned, he learned that it is important in the matter of healing to tell somebody. But he had a good, loving family, and he was reluctant to bring a life-spoiling thing like that to their attention. And the Methodist minister who had saved his life as a young teenager had moved away to a distant new congregation. So, who did he tell? His second regular girlfriend, the one who had been previously married and divorced. She had been through some tough things herself and therefore was able to understand.
The relationship between Mickey and Ysandra developed from working together as a teacher and teacher’s aide in a small South Texas school district. Their working relationship grew into a dating sort of thing by 1983, and one of the things that they most liked to do together was visiting Austin for the weekends. It was a long drive, but Mickey’s parents and Ysandra’s sister, and her family lived in the area. Mickey would stay in his parents’ house. And Ysandra would stay with her sister, her sister’s husband, and their baby daughter. They would go to see the sights in Austin, Zilker Park, the stage shows, the movie theaters, the good restaurants, and even the circus when it came to town. But there was one unexpected complication. Ysandra’s sister lived in a clothing-optional apartment house. And real nudists lived there.
Picking up Ysandra meant embarrassment. Mickey had to go up to the door with one of those sliding window things that gangsters use on bootlegger-casino doors, alert the gatekeeper to his presence, and then wait while the naked, hairy guy went and got Ysandra. And she invariably asked Mickey to come in and wait while she finished getting ready. There were lots of things inside there to look at and turn red over. Two young girls, probably sixth graders, were swimming nude in the pool one time, showing off bare butts when they dived. Another time, two beautiful young women with t-shirts and no pants on glared at him the whole time Mickey stood by the pool because, unbeknownst to Mickey, he was staring at them with an open mouth and purple face.
A third time, a boy with blond hair and no clothes on was playing pool at the courtyard pool table.
“Hey, skinny guy!” the boy said to Mickey, “take your clothes off and come play pool with me.”
“Can’t. Waiting for the girlfriend. Going to a movie,” Mickey said nervously.
Ysandra was fine with making fun of Mickey for being constantly embarrassed. She and her friends there enjoyed asking Mickey to go nude while spending time there, which he never did. The ladies got a good laugh when his face turned strange colors. But one of her brother-in-law’s friends took pity on Mickey and told him about the benefits of being naked in nature, nude in the sunshine, and meditating in your birthday suit. He also gave Mickey a book on naturism and an address for where he could get more such books.
And books were Mickey’s fatal weakness. He read and learned a lot about nudism. In his apartment, when he was alone and not expecting visitors, he got comfortable being naked most of the time. Of course, being seen naked by anyone else would start up the PTSD again. It was bad enough to interfere with getting closer and more intimate with Ysandra and eventually forced them apart. And being a school teacher precluded being known to be a nudist for Mickey. Still, the experience would lead to Mickey’s heart being captured by nudism as an ultimate goal.
Whether there will be a part 5 or not depends on a lot of things. For now it is merely a lingering threat.
Yes, I am a coot. I became a coot in 2014 when I retired. I have the hair in the ears to prove it. I sometimes forget to wear pants. The dog is learning to hide from me on days when my arthritis makes me cranky.
So I am a practicer of the ancient art of being a cranky old coot. I have opinions. I share them with others foolishly. And I am summarily told to, “Shut up, you danged old coot!” And, of course, I don’t shut up because that would be a violation of number five in the by-laws of cootism. Obnoxiousness is our only reason for still being alive.
Lately, my group of coots on Facebook (who call themselves a “pack” like wolves, but, in truth, a group of coots is called an “idiocy”) are talking about politics… very loudly salted with firmly held opinions, beliefs, and bad words in several languages. I mean, it’s texting each other on memes we disagree about, but we do it LOUDLY, like that, in all caps. We also do it in such an infuriating manner because, if no one ever bothers to tell us to “Shut the hell up!” we will begin to suspect we have actually died and gone to purgatory where we are still being obnoxious, but nobody knows we are doing it. That is rubbing coot fur in the wrong direction.
The radical right (otherwise known as coot paradise) have been cooting up a storm about school shootings and gun control of late. They have more or less turned their ire on me because, knowing I was a school teacher, they have seized on the Coot in Chief’s notion of arming teachers to protect schools. Obviously a majority of old coots agree that requiring a few “volunteer” teachers to conceal carry and learn how to handle a school shooter crisis situation with a gun instead of the way teachers are actually trained and practiced on handling such a situation, is the only economical way to defend schools from crazed lunatics with assault weapons. Of course, it is definitely more economical than hiring full time police officers to handle security because “volunteer” teachers does not mean that they are necessarily willing to do it, but rather that they are doing it without pay. And of course they shout at me things like, “Why don’t you just admit that you are too scared and unpatriotic to carry a gun as a teacher, and cowardly allow some female teacher with a big pistol to step in and do the job for you?” That is a very coot thing to say, and is hard to adequately counter, because if you try to argue using logic other than coot-logic, like the notion that since a majority of teachers in this country are female, you are asking women who are fierce enough to do the job (and I have known more than a few who would take it on no matter how hopeless their prospects) to take a handgun that the principal bought at Walmart with money from the Coke machine in the hall and face down a suicidal maniac with an assault rifle, you will not even be heard over the cacophony of coot braying and chest-thumping, let alone be understood.
And, for some reason, coots love Trump. Maybe because they feel he is truly one of them. He is older than dirt. He has an epicly bad comb-over to hide his bald spot. He says bad words very loudly in front of women, children, and everybody. He says, “Believe me,” a lot, especially when telling lies. And he’s not afraid to fart in public and blame it on the dog. I admit to insulting Trump in front of them only because I like to see coot faces fold up in extra wrinkles, and coot heads turn various shades of angry red and apoplectic purple.
So, yes. I am a coot. Not proud to be one… that I can remember, but a coot never-the-less.
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).
On the car ride home, Maria worked up the nerve to ask her stepfather a few things.
“Why did you lie to those people, Stan?”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You were pretending to be that woman’s friend. You never met her before. How is that not a lie?”
“I only said I knew Brittany from her charity work. When I researched her, I found that information about the charities. So, that was exactly how I knew about her. I can’t help it if he interpreted my words differently than that.”
“So, you really want the man and his little girl to think of us as friends and call us?”
“We need to listen to anything they have to say. If we are going to learn anything about why this woman was struck down in this way, it will come from what they want to talk about when they want to talk about the incident.”
“But why bother at all? It doesn’t really have anything to do with the case we really want to solve. We need to find out about Rogelio and Yesenia.”
“Strange things have been happening in and around that toy store for a long, long time. I have a suspicion we will need to find out how more than one of those things happened in order to figure out what your boyfriend is caught up in.”
“So, what do you really think happened to Mrs. Nguyen?”
“I don’t know anything for sure yet. You have to be open to anything as a possible clue. Once you find some things out, you follow those leads and try to eliminate them as paths to the answer. You eliminate all the false paths, and the one you are left with is the one that will lead you to the answer.”
“It makes you sound like Sherlock Holmes.”
“It should sound like logic. In fact, it is the methodical application of logic that Sherlock might’ve called “ratiocination.”
“What ratio-whatsit do you already have about Rogelio?”
“Well, you said he seemed to be hearing voices in his head before he disappeared.”
“Yeah. He seemed to be talking to a papier-mâché skull. You know. One of those Day-of-the-Dead Mexican holiday things.”
“Did you hear it say anything?”
“No. It was just a toy on a shelf.”
“But was it really? Do you know for sure he wasn’t talking to someone, somehow?”
“Like how?”
“A miniature radio?”
“ESP?”
“Ghosts?”
“Be serious!”
“I am. At the start, you don’t throw out any possibility. It is the weirdest ones that make it hardest to find the real answer. You can’t discount anything without evidence.”
“Okay. I see your point. I hope it’s ghosts, actually. That would be more fun than a miniature radio to contact Yesenia in the alley.”
“Yes. We might want to see if we can eliminate the radio thing first.”
“You going to that toy store to check on it?”
“We are going. I need your eyes and ears and brain there too.”
So, it was settled. The investigation had a new lead to track down.
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?
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.
It bothers me that my sense of sight and my ability to type are both deteriorating now when I still have so many more stories to tell. I want to write more about my time as a school teacher, recalling the students I learned to both love and hate… often at the same time. And I want to put more of my surrealistic ideas into fantasy-comedy stories,,, with illustrations I drew myself. But I am having a hard time typing this… and drawing is nearly impossible. My hands hurt with the cold weather. This paragraph took twenty minutes with as many corrections… or more.
So bare with me… I mean bear with me… like two bears… but it is easier to explain and make jokes than go back to make corrections.
Catch a Falling Star 
Do Not Crush the Butterfly…
Art on the bedroom wall, with Christmas lights being used as a night light.
Talking to a school administrator the other day about the challenges my children and I have been facing in the last year, I had one of those experiences where you get a look at your own life through someone else’s eyes. “Wow, you have really been on a difficult journey,” he said. I just nodded in response. Financial difficulties, health problems, dealing with depression… life has been tough. But you get through things like that by being centered. Meditation tricks. Things you can do to smooth out the wrinkles and keep moving forward.
I always return in the theater of my mind to a moment in childhood where I learned a critical lesson. My life has been one of learning how to build rather than destroy. It has been about creating, not criticizing.
Electric lights have come to Toonerville, helping to light the darkness.
When I was a boy, I was a serious butterfly hunter. It started when Uncle Don gave me a dead cecropia moth that he had found in the Rowan grain elevator. It was big and beautiful and perfectly preserved. Shortly thereafter, I located another cecropia in the garage behind the house, a building that had once been a wagon shed complete with horse stalls and a hay loft. I tried to catch it with my bare hands. And by the time I had hold of it, the powder on its wings was mostly gone. The wings were broken in a couple of places, and the poor bug was ruined in terms of starting a butterfly collection.
A cecropia moth
Undeterred by tragedy, I got books about butterfly collecting at the Rowan Public Library and began teaching myself how to bug hunt. I learned where to find them, and how to net them, and how to kill and mount them.
I discovered that my grandfather’s horse pasture had thistle patches which were natural feeding grounds for red admiral butterflies (pictured top left) and painted lady butterflies (top right). But if you wanted to catch the rarer mourning cloak butterfly (bottom picture), you had to stake out apple trees, particularly at apple blossom time, though I caught one on the ripening apples too.
The tiger swallowtail was the butterfly that completed my collection, and it was finished when one of my cousins caught one and gave it to me because she knew I collected them.
But then, one day, while I was sitting on a blanket under a maple tree in the back yard with my notebooks open, writing something that I no longer even recall what I wrote, the backyard tiger swallowtail visited me again. In fact, he landed on the back of my hand. I dropped the pencil I was writing with, and slowly, carefully, I turned my hand over underneath him so that he was sitting on my palm.
I could’ve easily closed my hand upon him and captured him. But I learned the lesson long before from the cecropia that catching a butterfly by hand would destroy its delicate beauty. I would knock all the yellow and black powder off his exquisite wings. I could not catch him. But I could close my hand and crush him. I would be victorious after a summer-long losing battle.
But that moment brought an end to my butterfly hunting. I let him flutter away with the August breeze. I did not crush the butterfly. It was then that I realized what beauty there was in the world, and how fragile that beauty could be. I could not keep it alive forever. But it lasted a little big longer because I chose to let it.
So, here is the lesson that keeps me whole. Even though I had the power, I did not crush the butterfly.
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Tagged as bug hunting, butterflies, wisdom