February 6, 2023 · 2:33 am

Wisdom from the Outsider

There is so much left to be said before my time runs out.  Wisdom, whether hard won or acquired entirely through wit, bears a certain responsibility in the possession of it.  We are duty-bound as wizards, the masters of wisdom, to pass it on.mrFuture

Now, you certainly have every right to protest that I am not wise and I have no wisdom.  You are certainly right to point out that I am a doddering old fool that sits around the house all day in the midst of his poor-health-enforced retirement doing little beyond writing silly stories and drawing pictures of mostly naked cartoon girls.  I get that.  But the beginning of wisdom is the realization of how big everything is and how little I really know about anything.

Take for instance the question of where we came from and what our purpose is?  (And the question of why I put a question mark on that when it really wasn’t a question.)

I originally believed in the God of the Christians and in the promises of Jesus… everlasting life and an eternity of sitting on a cloud with a harp and…  Okay, it didn’t take me long to see the logical holes in that line of reasoning.  So much of that is fear of death and the need to believe that I am the center of all things, the most important person in existence.  The truth is I am only a tiny part of a nearly-infinitely-large universe.  And the universe is conscious… self aware.  How do I know this?  Because I am conscious and self-aware.  I am an infinitely tiny piece of the whole… but there are untold trillions of others just like me.   Mai LingAnd when I die… when this body ceases to function, as it already has a great deal of trouble doing, the parts that make up the individual creature and thought patterns I identify as me will be scattered to the far corners of everywhere to be gathered up once again and be something new.  All of mankind passes away.  Human beings and the planet Earth will one day be no more.  But that is not what matters.  There is so much more beyond the boundaries of what my limited eyesight can behold, and what my limited mind can comprehend.   I am made of star-stuff (just ask Neal DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan), and I am a part of the universe as a whole.  I am in no hurry to die.  Life is worth fighting through the pain for… but I do not fear death.  Like birth, it is only a stop along the way in a journey that, as far as I can tell, never ends.

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February 5, 2023 · 4:40 am

Banned Breakfast-Table Talking

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At Mother’s breakfast table we were always encouraged to talk about stuff.  That was a given.  It was how families operated in the 60’s and 70’s.  Mom and Dad not only listened to the mindless drivel coming out of the childish mouths of me, my two sisters, and my stinky little brother, but they also tended to hold forth about things they wished to teach us. We learned Methodist-Church-flavored Christianity and Eisenhower-Republican values.  Ike had been president when I was born and got most of the credit for the post-war boom in the economy.  We were middle-class people with solid middle-class values.

And then I had the bad sense to grow up and start thinking for myself.  Nixon had let me down big-time when I was in high school.  I had defended him against my McGovern-leaning loony liberal friends.  My best friend was a preacher’s kid, a Methodist preacher’s kid.  His father actually believed in progressive nonsense about sex-education for children and helping to feed the poor.  And then Nixon turned out to be a liar, a coverer-upper, a cheat, and a bad-word-user.  I suspect, though my Dad never admitted it, that he may have voted for Carter over Ford.  It was my first time voting, and it actually felt good to use my vote to strike back at the party that betrayed my trust.

Religion, too.  In the late seventies a man named Carl Sagan put on a TV show called Cosmos.  The man bedazzled my father and I with Science.  He taught us that every molecule of us was composed of atoms that could only have been forged in the cosmic furnaces in the centers of stars.  He showed us how spectroscopy of the stars could show us what they were made of.  He showed us the meaning of Einstein’s special Theory of Relativity.  He pulled the universe together for us in a way that could not be undone.  And he did it without calling upon the name and blessings of God.  But he pointed out that we are connected to everything in the universe and everything is connected to us.  To me, that seemed to define God.  My religion was changing from Christianity to Saganism.  Of course, Mom heard that as “paganism”.  Breakfast table talking changed into early morning arguments.  We didn’t exactly throw chairs at each other, but some pretty heated and pretty large ideas went flying through the air.   Religion and politics became the banned topics at the breakfast table.

tedcruz  So that brings me to the Paffooney points for today.  This blog has turned into a place where a disobedient son, a horrible sort of “free-thinker” type of radical hippie pinko goofball, can talk about the loony-liberal progressive ideas that have taken over his good-little Eisenhower-Republican little-boy mind.    I spent the last post talking existentially about my religious beliefs.  My conservative, old-fashioned friends and family call me an atheist now, but I truly believe in God.  It’s just, I recognize the factors behind Christian myths.  I bow to the wisdom of Scientists like Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking… as well as hippie psychologists like Alan Watts… and literary heroes like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S, Lewis.

Will_Rogers_1922I am proud to be an Iowegian (a Mickian word for being from Iowa), yet my birth-State produces gawd-awful Tea Party politicians like Steve King and Joni Ernst.  The stuff that comes out of their mouths doesn’t even make good fertilizer.  But they are comedy gold.  Will Rogers would have pointed out that the jokes will write themselves.  All the humorist would have to do is consult the front page of the newspaper.  I also live in Texas where the debate over secession from the United States still goes on with new Governor Greg Abbott, a man who is a Rick Perry clone, except that he hasn’t bothered to put on glasses as much to make him smarter.  And Texans are looking forward to the next Republican president in 2016.  Both Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are running.  That doubles Texas’ chances, right?  With Global Warming not being accepted as a real thing, the need for giving all our money to the Koch brothers and the Walton family being recognized by both parties in Congress, and looming war with foreign nations that have the bad sense to be “Muslim in nature”, the future looks kinda bleak.   But it is a great time to be a humorist, and I am guessing I won’t be doing very much talking at the breakfast table for a while.

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February 4, 2023 · 10:43 pm

Faun Art

I have completed work on a novel called A Field Guide to Fauns. In it, I will make use of one of the most central metaphors in all of my art and writing. The mythological figure of the faun is usually portrayed as a young boy or youth, nude, and potentially having goat horns, goat legs, a deer’s tail, and/or pointed ears. It represents sensuality, connections to nature, and a willingness to partake in enjoyments without hiding anything.

Fauns were defined in art long before I came along. The Marble Faun was a book by Nathaniel Hawthorne that I read in college. I looked endlessly in libraries after that for pictures of Praxiteles’s masterpiece from all angles. I would eventually be inspired to make the picture above by a picture made in print by Maxfield Parrish printed in Collier’s Magazine. I have been fascinated for years by fauns. And I began drawing them repeatedly.

As a teenager, I had a faun as an imaginary friend. His name was Radasha. He made it his business to lecture me about sex and nudity, morals, religion, and what was wrong with me. At the time I was repressing the memory of being the victim of a sexual assault, a very painful and traumatic experience that I did not allow myself to remember and admit was real until I was twenty-two. Radasha turned out to be a coping method who helped me heal, and helped me realize that just because it was a homosexual assault, that did not make me a homosexual.

Fauns would come to dominate my artwork through the eighties. I drew Radasha multiple times. I would use the image to express things I feared and fought with and won victories over .

I would come to learn that there were fauns in real life to be found. The portrait above is of Fernando, a favorite student from my first two years as a teacher. He is portrayed as a faun. The cardinal on his shoulder is a symbol of courage and endurance, a bright red bird that never flies away when the winter comes.

Devon Martinez is the main character of my novel in progress. He is an artist like I am. He is fifteen at the time of the novel, and faced with living the rest of his childhood in a nudist community. He doesn’t consider himself a faun to begin with. But that changes during the course of the novel.

Here is the first illustration done for the novel. It is supposed to be a picture drawn by Devon himself.

So, as always with Saturday artwork, there is more to come.

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February 4, 2023 · 2:56 am

Something Unexpected

I finished up a final proofread and formatting project on the novel I am re-publishing on Amazon, Magical Miss Morgan.

And, you know what? The story made me cry again. An unbroken record. It is about the fifteenth time I read through it. And every single time, the little three-inch-tall fairy is killed again, and I can’t keep my eyes dry.

He’s not even based on a real person as so many of my characters are. It’s not like it is someone I know and love. It’s a fairy. Not even remotely real. And I’m the one who decided he had to die in the story because because good comedy stories always end with at least one main character dying… Don’t they? It’s a rule derived from Robert Altman movies.

Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates

But I can’t help feeling things about the characters in my stories. I don’t love them all. I hate some of them. But, they’re the ones you are supposed to hate. They are villians, bad guys, characters based on real people who hurt me in real life.

Silkie and Donner are fairies.

It’s not just my stories that make me feel. I have read Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities twice, and both times Sydney Carton made me cry. I read Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop only once. And Little Nell made me cry so hard I could never reread that book. And there’s Simon in The Lord of the Flies, and, of course, the old Yeller dog in Old Yeller by Fred Gipson… I’m a sucker for heroic deaths and tragic losses. They touch and twist my little blue heart.

Miss Francis Morgan, school teacher

But I cried for the fifteenth time, and I survived it. I will probably cry again if I read it again. That is what life is like. That is what fiction is for. To make me think and feel and… love.

Magical Miss Morgan is now back in print.

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February 3, 2023 · 2:16 am

Mickey Writes

Chalkboard Girl is poking fun at me again. Dang her pigtails!

My name is Michael Beyer. That’s the name I put on the covers of all my books. So, technically, Mickey is not me. Mickey is my cartoonist’s name. It is the top layer of the onions that is my writing.

But what does it actually mean that “Mickey Writes?”

Well, since Mickey is really the cartoonist in me, it means that everything he writes is most likely not very serious, possibly exaggerated, and definitely more fictionalized (read that as telling lies) than universal truth, and maybe ten percent evil.

But Mickey writes primarily because he has to write in order to feel alive. It is something he has been doing since he was a child. It all began with the inner narrator in his stupid head. That progressed to putting stories and daily journal entries down in spiral notebooks and looseleaf notebooks, and those crazy empty books that you can get cheaply at B Dalton’s, or Half-Price Books, or Books-a-Million, or any other bookstore that still has stores open anywhere or still is in business (heck! why didn’t the fool just say Amazon Books online?) And now, woe to you, he does the same thing in this daily blog. And, believe it or not, it’s like all that private head-juice and moldiness is published online so that you can actually read weird things like this essay.

Two portrayals, one a fictional character who represents a real person from Mickey’s past, and one fictional character that represents the D & D character that the fictional character plays when the Norwall Pirates play D & D.

The problem is that one of the layers of the onion is spoiling, keeping Mickeey from taking the ideas simmering in his stupid head and adding it to the deeper layers of the savory onion of ideas to make a more exotic onion soup. (In the stupid-headed metaphor, soup apparently means NOVEL.)

The layer that controls the writing and editing is spoiling because Mickey’s eyes are deteriorating with glaucoma and old age. He can’t see the computer screen he’s writing on well enough to effectively create paragraphs, or edit the mistakes that his stupid head and arthritic fingers inevitably make. At least, Mickey can’t do it effectively fast.

Right now, Mickey is still pecking out progress on his novel The Haunted Toy Store. But at a highly reduced rate. So, the ghost stories are crawling along. But not much else is happening.

Other projects are not faring as well.

My depression novel, He Rose on a Golden Wing was the first novel that I stalled and put on hold. It is a complex story full of magic and suffering and critical depression-coping that seems to me like a great story. But Mickey had to table it for later because it has become so difficult to edit it and control the typing of it, since I had to change the format three times and so much of the edit doesn’t get done correctly by my failing vision.

The same problems that plague He Rose… have also stalled The Education of Poppensparkle, even though I am only two chapters from the end of the story. Again, format changes for three different computers and two different word processors, and, since I am trying to illustrate every chapter, the inability to draw also affects this book.

And AeroQuest 5 is finished, but I am unable to finish a difficult revision and editing of it for publication.

So, there are too many things that Mickey is NOT writing that he should be. The time for “Slow and Steady wins the race” has come. I am putting eye drops in Mickey’s old eyes. I am slowing down my daily writing and trying not only to pace myself better, but to get old Mickey back on a more reasonable daily schedule. Time will tell if I can ever publish anything anymore except for this onion pile of a blog.

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February 2, 2023 · 3:31 am

February Freezing

The fact that Texas weather now turns to freezing in February on a yearly basis is a matter of some concern and existential dread. The last three times we went through this we lucked out at our house, with an electric company that may be a little expensive, but not one of the ones that lose power and lets people freeze to death. It is certainly possible that this time we will roll snake eyes on the matter, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Things are no better where my sister is now living in the house we inherited from our mother. The power grid is a bit more secure in Iowa than it is in Texas. But snow and cold are visiting there too.

My car has been grounded by ice both yesterday and today, so I walked to the grocery store and back each day. I may have to do it again tomorrow. The forecast has already caused school cancellations for tomorrow. But I have not seen any snow babies yet, and that means I will probably not freeze to death this February.

Just a suggestion.

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February 2, 2023 · 2:48 am

Rabbit People

castle carrot

On days when I am still recovering from life-altering blows, I often try to find new realms, alternate realities to live in.  (Retreating into a fantasy world is one of the reasons she gave for leaving.)  And since, as a youth in Iowa, I raised rabbits for a 4-H project, I know rabbits better than I do human people.  Rabbits are people too.  So, I have been walking among the rabbit people.  Seriously, bunnies are better people than most human people.  They are not trying to profit off you.  They are not trying to get everything they can off you.  They are merely there to wiggle their whiskers, sniff for food, poop, gnaw on stuff, and make more bunnies.

Mr. R Rabbit

I often see myself as a rabbit person.  In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.

As a teacher, I am always pulling out carrots of irony and gnawing on the ends of them in front of students.  If they complain that eating food in class is supposed to be against the rules, I ask them, “Do you want a carrot of irony?”

“Oh, no, thank you sir.”

“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight.  You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”

“Oh, no sir,” they say.  “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”

And so, I taught on like that… like a rabbit, fast and frumious (a Jabberwocky sort of word), and never really bit anybody.  Teaching is like that.  You offer the good healthy stuff to nourish their little animal minds, and they always choose the junk food instead.

Millis

And so life goes on like that.  Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.

I have  recently run a free-book promotion on The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.One of the main characters in the book is Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit Millis.   During the course of the story about invading aliens, Secret Agent Robots from the CIA, and making friends when you need friends, Millis is turned into a rabbit-man by a lab accident.  He teaches Tommy that you don’t have to be human to be a good, caring, self-sacrificing person.  He also teaches him to eat his carrots and greens like a good boy should.

So, I will spend more time with the rabbit people and heal a little bit.  That is what you do with the tragedy that life brings you.  You spin it into whole cloth, making humor and poetry out of everything bad that happens… wrapping yourself up in a comforting blanket of lies (you can also call those fiction stories), and eating a little chicken soup on a cold day to heal your soul.  (Oh, I forget, rabbits often gag on chicken soup.  Let’s make that bean soup with carrot chunks.)

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February 1, 2023 · 4:49 am

Jungle Boy

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When I was 12, my favorite novel was Rudyard Kipling’s First Jungle Book.  I loved it.  From page one to the last sentence of the story about the White Seal.  I owned a paperback copy that I still have 51 years later.  I bought it from the school book order form, Scholastic, I think.  I used my allowance money, earned at a nickel a week.  Along with the chapter books I had read previously, The Swiss Family Robinson, the White Stag, and Treasure Island, it guided my view of life.  Every grove and forest in Iowa became the jungle in the summer of 1968.  The windswept fields of corn and soy beans easily transformed into tropical seas.  I imagined pirates, natives, and buried treasures everywhere.  When I found a piece of a brass candlestick with the necessary curved part, which became the cursed Ahnk from The Jungle Book.  Midnight, Grandma Aldrich’s blue-eyed black cat, became my Bagheera.  I traveled with an invisible Baloo.  You know, it was only a year or so before that when I saw the Disney movie.  So, of course, dancing and singing was a part of being a jungle boy.

In the book, unlike the movie, Mowgli was naked in the jungle.  He didn’t wear clothes until the first time he submitted himself to the man village.  He took them off again when he escaped.  I had to try that too.  I went to the BinghamPark woods down by the Iowa River.  I found a tree where I could put my clothes, and I took everything off.  I figured roaming the woods like Mowgli would be great.  Boy, I was a stupid child.  Problem number one struck with my first naked step in the forest.  Dang!  There must not be any twigs or nettles in Mowgli’s jungle.  I tried hopping from place to place, but in minutes I was wearing at least my socks and shoes.  Hanging branches and brambles were a problem, too.  They clutched at me, striping me with welts and scrapes.  Certain parts you just don’t want pricked by a bramble bush.  It was like God suddenly planted those pointed things everywhere.  Okay, shoes and socks and shorts.  Well, then I began to get cold.  Iowa is never very warm even in the height of summer.  I had already defeated the whole naked in the forest thing when I put my shorts back on, so, what the heck!  It just didn’t work like I thought.

I still believed that the ways of the jungle were an essential part of my young life.  I read and reread what the Jungle Book says about the “Law of the Jungle”.  I tried to make sense of it as a credo to live by.  Of course, at twelve we are always among the wisest and all-knowing of God’s creatures.  We can make sense of the world in our own weird little way, and no one will ever be able to sway us from the philosophy we live by, no matter how silly it is.  I still think about my “Jungle Book Period” as an important part of my young life.  There are things about young Mowgli and Jim Hawkins and the Robinsons that formed a significant part of my character.  I would one day make use of those determined and resourceful qualities to stay alive in the classroom jungles of South Texas.  I tried to make others see it.  I shared Kipling and Stevenson with kids and hoped that I could make them learn, as I did, how to be that little boy facing and succeeding against the dangerous jungle around him.

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February 1, 2023 · 4:46 am

Why Does Mickey Want to be a Nudist? Part 3

My real encounters with nudists didn’t wait until I was a teacher to occur. I went to the University of Iowa for a Master’s Degree in order to satisfy all the requirements for a teaching certificate.

While there, it was not only at the hippie-dippie daycare center where I changed diapers, and the very liberal parents were happy about their children’s backyard skinny-dipping in the blow-up pool while being chased around naked by adults with a hose to spray them with, but also in the efficiency apartment where I shared a kitchen and bathroom with an honest-to-god nudist.

Ned never explained to me about being a nudist, but whenever he watched my television in my half of the efficiency apartment, he came right on in without a stitch of clothing on. I was a little shocked. But I got used to the fact that any time he was in the apartment, he was naked. He explained to me about spending the summers at a nudist resort in Mexico with his family. He lived naked every single moment that he didn’t spend in public where nakedness was illegal.

He was the one who explained to me how the polite thing for a nudist to do was to carry around a towel to sit on when he visited my bedroom and used my chair to watch TV while I sat on the bed. He didn’t do much of that because he wasn’t wild about wasting time watching TV. But when we played chess, or just talked about life, the universe, and everything, he was always in his birthday suit.

I got used to the idea that there were actually people who were mentally healthy and otherwise normal who also inhabited our world feeling that I was the abnormal one being averse to being naked in the company of others.

Ned’s girlfriend, when she came over, was never naked. She did tell me she thought he was a little nutty on the subject of naturism, but she also mentioned that he was really good-looking that way because he lifted weights and had body-builder muscles. And she agreed to pose naked for me at his insistence because I had told him about having an anatomy drawing class at Iowa State. She didn’t seem to be shy about nakedness either, although that is based on only the one incident. She seemed much more at peace with Ned’s naked habits than I was. And I got the distinct impression that she loved him enough to convert to his way of life when they got married.

This is my pen-and-ink copy. She has the original in pencil. I also have a pencil copy.

So, I did learn a lot about nudism, naturism, and nudists by living with one for two semesters of grad school. Now, I know I promised to tell the very embarrassing story of the clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin that I mentioned in Part Two. But I will get to that. Maybe in the Part-4 post if I don’t let my mind wander again like I did in this post.

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January 31, 2023 · 2:32 am

The Haunted Toy Store… Canto 7

Canto 7 – Room 1313, Parkland

Stan brought the flowers he bought in the gift shop with him as he entered the room.  The husband, David Nguyen, sat in the cushioned chair by the bed with his head in his hands.  He was obviously distraught in spite of the time that passed since the mystery illness struck down his wife.  The daughter, Hannah according to the notes, sat in a folding chair watching cartoons on the hospital-room TV. 

Stan turned to Maria and whispered, “You make friends with the little girl.  Give her your cellphone number and tell her she can call you if she wants to talk about anything.”

Maria nodded silently and walked over to the little girl.

“Um, Mr. Nguyen?  I know now is not a good time, but I brought Brittany some flowers.  I wanted to know if there was anything I could do to help your family out in this time of trouble?”

The man looked up.  He was obviously an Asian-American, probably Vietnamese.  He had been crying.  His eyes were red.

“Who?  Who are you?  Brittany knows you?”

“I know her through her work at the charity, the one helping troubled teens.  She’s a very determined activist trying to make kids’ lives better.”  It wasn’t totally a lie.  The information he dug up about her charitable activities was indeed impressive.

“Yeah, well, I wish she had spent more time with her own daughter and less time fundraising for future criminals and terrorists.  Now poor Hannah will never know her mother as well as she deserves.”

“Oh?  Did the doctor give you bad news?”

“He can’t tell me anything at all.  He has no idea what caused this coma.  She’s not brain-dead, but nobody can say when or even if she will ever wake up.  For all they know, she will be like this until she dies.”  The man was obviously filled with bitterness and anger.

“She got this way at that old antique toy store on Mockingbird Lane, didn’t she?”

“Yeah…”

“Do you know anything about what happened while she was in there?”

“Not really.  She took Hannah in there just to look at the toys.  Why?”

“There’s a lot of very old things in there.  Some of those really old toys come from a time before anybody knew that mercury or asbestos was bad for you… even deadly.”

“You think she might’ve gotten some of that stuff from the toys in there?”

“It’s possible.  Did you talk to the store owner… or whoever was there running the place?  Maybe he could’ve shed some light on what she did that may have caused her condition.”

“I didn’t really talk to him.  He did talk to the ambulance guy and the police while I was there.  But I went here to Parkland in the ambulance with Brittany.”

Maria gave Hannah a hug and then came over to stand next to her stepdad.  Stan winked at her with the eye farthest from the man in the chair.

“My daughter and I are hoping for the best.  You and your family will be in our prayers.  I will leave you my phone number.  Anything you want to talk about or anything we can do to help, just give us a call.”  Stan handed the man a piece of paper with his cellphone number scrawled on it.

“Thank you.  What was your name again?”

“My name is Stanley… but you can call me Stan.  Stan Menschen.  My daughter here is Maria.  Your daughter is more than welcome to talk to her about anything.  I asked her to give Hannah her cell number.”

“Thank you.  I don’t know what else to say…” He dropped his head back into his hands.

Stan walked out with Maria feeling like they did not learn much, but the groundwork was laid.

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