If you practice drawing regularly, you will find that sometimes when you pick up your colored pencils, you can end up with a picture just like this. And you don’t have to tell me it is good. I know. And if you don’t see what I mean, I’m not going to read your comment anyway.
Filed under colored pencil, drawing
I am trying to cut down on political notions and noodling in this blog. It is like sugar to a humor writer. The easy laughs are sweet, but if you are diabetic, they will eventually build up and kill you.
But between Twitter-tweeting twit-wits and Facebook false-fact fools, I keep getting drawn back in. The gang of kids I grew up with in Iowa are seriously infected with Tea Party propaganda now that they are old coots like me, and continue to vote for Teabagger trolls (And I mean literal trolls. Steve King, Congressman from Iowa, has green skin and lives under a bridge… and maybe eats foolish children when they try to cross) for public office. And of course, I live now in Texas where gun-toting cowboys look at you intently to find any possible reason to shoot you and then thank Jesus if you are fool enough to give them one (like admitting to be mostly a Democrat in your political persuasion). They want to argue anything and everything I post on Facebook. Apparently even my bird pictures and cat videos politically offend them.
Oooh! This one really offends Teabaggers… especially the ones who make $25/hr or less.
Can you pick out the Trump voters in this line? All of them maybe?
And I am not suggesting that people who voted Republican in the last election aren’t as smart as my side. I waited until now in this essay to say that, because the childhood friends and family members in that group who read my blog will have all stopped reading by this point. I really don’t need to give them any more ammunition for Facebook and dinner table arguments.
But my side of the table are not wholly guilt free.
I regularly tweet or post things like these, innocently believing these heroes of the heart and mind have universal appeal because they champion truth and science and facts. But I become alarmed when I learn how much Bill Nye offends them. They tell me, “That guy is not a scientist! He has no right to argue for climate change issues or the non-existence of God. He’s just a TV guy.” And, I suppose they have a point. I mean, his extensive education and background in engineering, or his years in television promoting science to kids in research-based creative ways, doesn’t necessarily make him an expert on all science. And Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist. He doesn’t have a degree in EVERYTHING. And when I point out that their so-called experts on climate-change denial from Fox News cannot even claim to be TV weathermen, they are further put out by my brain-bashing bullying way of using my superior knowledge of science to put them down. Okay, I get it. I am not being careful enough of your feelings. (Oh, I forgot, you stopped reading this a while back.)
But the point of this is, we have to stop listening to and electing stupid people, while at the same time being a bit nicer to each other. We have to approach the discussion with the notion that you yourself may not be totally right about everything, and you may actually learn something by talking about it. (Which is, of course, no problem for me since I really don’t know anything for certain and need to learn practically everything as if I were still four years old.)
Okay, Bill, I get it. I am probably wrong about that too.
Yep, Mickey has the blues… again.
He’s just finished proofreading The Necromancer’s Apprentice again. 12 errors corrected and the book successfully republished. Comma errors, typos, and poor-word-choice corrections can make a guy sad.
And Mickey feels awful all the time. Every joint hurts with arthritis. He hasn’t been remembering to eat on time, so his diabetes is filling his head with angry bees. He’s lonely because every friend he used to have was a teacher too, and now that he’s retired they are all far away and long ago, teaching in other schools, retired too, or dead.
And he’s depressed.
And then he remembers. He’s a storyteller. His head is full of imaginary people to talk to. And most of them are funny. And they can walk around naked if he wants them to be nudists. And in a sense, he is like God in that way. He is in control of everything when he’s writing a story.
But, ironically, he can write very little because of all of things that make him sad.
He’s a sad man.
Filed under Uncategorized
The word for it is Paffooney. I know that is not a real word. It is a Mickian word. Kinda like the word “Mickian”. It is entirely made up gibberish, made up by Mickey, and used to mean an artwork made by the hand of Mickey. So I can’t really explain it. I have to show you what it basically is.
This is a Paffooney. It is inspired by the incredibly unbelievable time in Mickey’s life when they let Mickey be a teacher in Texas. It has no other relationship to reality. Chinese girls in Texas generally do not have manga eyes and blue hair, and while Hispanic girls have been known to eat pencils, they never bring their own notebook paper to class. They always borrow. So there is the basic formula. Colored-pencil nonsense drawn by Mickey and attached somehow to a story.
This Paffooney has a self-explanatory story embedded in it. It is obvious this is the story of an average family car trip in Texas. Notice how they demonstrate the Texas State highway motto of, “Drive friendly”.
And this Paffooney is a Mickian recurring nightmare about a duck with teeth. Silly Mickey, ducks don’t have teeth in real life!
And moose bowling is a Paffooney that needs no explanation… or does it? Well, never mind. I have forgotten what it is for anyway.
And this oil-painting Paffooney speaks volumes about a philosophy of life. See the pilot giving the viewer a thumbs up? And that isn’t a parachute on his back. They didn’t have parachutes in World War I. It is a message pouch with German war plans in it. I even painted it with a bratwurst sandwich inside for the pilot’s lunch. Don’t I do great detail work? But he will have to eat it quickly before he reaches the ground.
And this is me teaching an ESL class. When you teach English to non-English speakers in Texas, you get to hold the big pencil. And it helps to be a big white rabbit.
And this is a science fiction Paffooney, although the science is questionable. Don’t doubt that the flower-people of the planet Cornucopia are real, though. And Mai Ling, the psionic space ninja really can elongate her arm to get maximum thrust into her left-handed karate chops.
And we end for today with the Paffooney of a stupid boy. He’s not really me. Not really. And I don’t even know who gave him the black eye. So it can’t be me. So maybe he is not so stupid. You can’t say that about somebody you don’t know and is not even you.
So, now do you know what a Paffooney is? No? Me neither. But if you Google images with the words “Beyer Paffooney” you can see a lot more of them. Nobody else uses that word but little ol’ me.
“We’re from Ioway…Ioway!
State of all the land…
Joy on every hand…
We’re from Ioway…Ioway!
That’s where the tall corn grows!”
Yep, I was an Iowa boy. I sang that stupid song with pride, though we never once called our home State “Ioway” outside of that song. I have driven a tractor, made money for pulling buttonweeds out of soybean fields with my own two hands, watched the wind ripple the leaves in the cornfields like waves on bright green ocean water, and hid in the basement when we believed a tornado might come and destroy our house. Life in Iowa is made up of these things and many more, don’t ya know.
And of course, I learned to tell corny jokes along the way. That’s a must for a quick-wit-hick from the sticks. Pepsi and Coke and Mountain Dew are “pop”, and when you have to “run down to the store” you get in your car. You don’t have to do it by foot. And other Iowans know this. You don’t even get the raised eyebrows and funny stares that those things evoke when said aloud in Carrollton, Texas. You have to explain to Texans that “you guys” is how Iowegian speakers say “y’all”. Language is plain and simple when you speak Iowegian. You have to follow the rule of “Only speak when you’re spoken to”. Iowans are suspicious when somebody talks first, especially if you haven’t known that somebody for their entire life. That’s what an Iowan calls a “stranger” . “Frank is from Iowa Falls, and he’s only lived here for twelve years, so he’s still a stranger around here.” So large portions of Iowegian conversations are made up of grunts and nods. Two Iowegians can talk for hours saying only like ten words the entire time. “Yep. You bet.”
But that only applies when you are outside the confines of the local cafe or restaurant or beanery or eatery or other nesting places for the Iowegian gossiping hens and strutting roosters. Inside these wordy-walled exchanges for farm lore and lies there is no end to to the talking. And because the mouths are already in motion anyway, there is also no end to the eating. You are not too likely to see skinny farmers. But farms and farmers definitely affect the quality of conversations. In Iowa you have to learn how to stuff good grub in your pie hole in spite of the fact that farmers have decided to compare in detail the aromas associated with putting cow poop in the manure spreader (back in the day, of course) and mucking out a layer of toxic chicken whitewash from the chicken coop. Perfect topic to accompany that piece of lemon meringue pie (which is the perfect color to illustrate the chicken side of the argument). And, of course, if you have a family of health-care and service professionals like mine (mother was a registered nurse for forty years), you get to add to that discussions of perforated gall bladders, kidney resections, and mean old biddies that have to be helped on and off the bedpans. You must develop a strong tolerance and an even stronger stomach, or you are doomed to be skinny and underfed.
And since Iowegian is a language that is very simple, direct, and mostly about poop, they practically all voted for Trump. Like him they never use transitions more than starting sentences with “And” or “But”, so they understand him mostly, even though there is no chance in H-E-double-hockey-sticks that he understands them. It’s what allowed them to elect a mouth-breathing troglodyte like Steve King to the House of Representatives, and I can say that because they have no idea what “troglodyte” means, and will probably think it is a complement because it has so many syllables. Insults have four letters. Politics in Iowa is simple and direct too. Basically, if you are not a Republican you are wrong. Of course, somehow the State managed to go for Obama over Romney, but that was probably because, to an Iowan, neither one was right, and Mormons are wrong-er than anybody.
So there’s my brief and beautiful bouquet of Iowegian words and their explanatory weegification. I know there is a lot more to say about how Iowegians talk. But I can’t say it here because my short Iowegian attention span is already wandering. So let me wrap it up with one final weegification (yes, that is a made-up word, not a one-time typo mistake).
Canto 13 – The Doll’s Bargain
The owl-guy had demanded that Maria work for another half hour dusting toys that apparently hadn’t been moved even an inch in five decades. And when she was done, the toys seemed to have accumulated the exact same amount of dust as they had possessed before she started cleaning.
Stan had spent time talking and prodding the weird old man all the time Maria had been working, and then when it was over, the private dick wouldn’t even tell her what they had been gossiping about.
She went straight to her room, her laptop and her cell phone, as soon as she was home.
Mom was no help. She had gone to bed the moment that she had drug herself home from work.
And then… the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Ma-Maria? C-can I talk to you… please?”
“Who is this?”
A little girl was crying into the phone on the other end.
“Hannah? Is that you?”
“Yeah… you said I could… call you?”
“Of course, I did. But what’s the matter?”
“I have to tell you something. Something terrible.”
“What is it?”
“It’s something terrible… that I did.”
“What did you do?”
“If I tell you… You will never forgive me.”
“Yes, I will. I promise.”
“You can’t. Daddy won’t forgive me if I tell him.”
“Please, Hannah. You can tell me. And maybe I can help you tell your daddy in a way that will make him forgive you…”
“Really? You would do that? For me?”
“I promise. I like you, Hannah. You are a nice little girl.”
“No, I’m not. I made a deal with a Lonely One.”
“A Lonely One?”
“She was a ghost… err… something… inside a really cool doll. And she… she was…” Hannah dissolved in tears, unable to finish the sentence.
“You can talk to me, Hannah. You can tell me anything. I wish you were here right now. I could hold you… hug you. Make you feel better.”
“The doll was made of hard white stuff. And she was beautiful… She looked just like me… but her hair was all white.”
“And the doll did something?”
“She asked me for something.”
“What did she want?”
“She asked if she could play with my mom. She said if I just let her play with Mom for a while, she could make Mommy love me better… She said… But she lied to me.”
“What was the lie?”
“She was supposed to give Mommy back to me. But when… when she was done playing her tricks, Mommy was sleeping on the floor and couldn’t wake up. I let a monster play with my mom.”
“She tricked you, Hannah. You didn’t do anything bad. She did. It was not your fault.”
“But, can your daddy get my mom back from the ghosts? I mean… the Lonely Ones. She said they were not ghosts, but Lonely Ones.”
“Stan is a very good detective. He’s solved cases nobody ever thought he could. If anybody can get your mom back, he’s the one who can do it.”
“You promise me?”
“I can’t promise for sure. But if he can’t do it, then nobody can.”
“Thank you, Maria. I love you,” Hannah said in a tiny, strained voice.
“I love you too, Hannah. Hang in there. I’m gonna tell Stan. Then we’ll figure out these Lonely Ones you are talking about.”
Maria spent the next half hour listening to the little girl cry over the phone. She tried to comfort her whenever she was given the chance, but it was mostly just being there to listen that mattered. Maria was crying too by the time she went to the living room to tell Stan.
Filed under ghost stories, horror writing, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
There’s only one person who controls your happiness. Yes, you yourself. The only one with the actual power to make you happy or keep you from being happy is you. Not me. I control only me and my happiness. Not yours. Stop thinking that. True happiness requires you to cook your own happiness recipe. So, there! Wisdom. My two cents. Although it isn’t even worth half that.
I have been thinking of the end of my personal story a lot lately. And although I know it is kind of maudlin to be telling you about it in what is supposed to be a humor blog, I do not fear death any more than I welcome it. The end of the story happens to every storyteller. More than once hopefully. But if you’ve spent your lifetime tending to your little pot filled with blooming blossoms of happiness, you’ve lived a life worth living.
My story has been a good story. I like it just the way it is. I don’t have to change anything so far.
But everything is slowing down. I can’t write or draw as much as I did only a year ago. So, the last chapter is probably here already. We shall see how it ends.
But don’t worry or be sad for me. Tend your own little pot of happiness blossoms. Make them bloom. I will be fine. And so will you.
Filed under Uncategorized
Yep… Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles… Neil Armstrong placing one small step for man onto the surface of the moon… Laugh-In making “Sock-it-to-me” jokes… JFK… LBJ… Nixon going away…Viet Nam… Good gawd! I reminded myself that the 60’s happened yesterday… Yes, the 60’s happened yesterday… And I remember what happened. I was there. Four-year-old me to fourteen-year-old me… And it looked like this;
I remember Monkees from the 60’s… Lots and lots of monkeys.
And black-and-white TV… and Red Skelton on Wednesday nights… and civil rights marches… and larches… and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis… and Sherry Lewis with Lambchop… and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie… and Lawrence Welk on Saturday night… and Halloween parties with costume contests at the fire station on Main Street… And the 1957 pink-and-white Mercury of Imagination.
I know that isn’t even 200 words… but this could go on forever if I let it. I was a boy in the 60’s… and that is something not even God can take away from me.
Filed under autobiography, humor, nostalgia
I recently wrote a story that will be included in an upcoming story collection written by and for the reading pleasure of nudists. It is a story where the main character is naked for most of the story. It is a fantasy adventure collection.
And I have been asked to write a brief biography to accompany my story.
So, here goes…
Michael Beyer – a.k.a. Mickey – I was born during a November blizzard in Iowa during the Eisenhower Administration. I grew up in a small farming community.
My goal in life as a kid was to grow up to be a cowboy, an astronaut, or a comic book artist. Or maybe a clown. But I promised myself I would never be a teacher.
Well, God has a sense of humor. I would begin teaching in 1981 and would keep doing it for 31 years. I was introduced to nudism in the mid 1980s when my girlfriend’s sister lived in a clothing-optional apartment complex which we visited on weekends. But I was a teacher. There was a morals clause in my contract. So, I avoided actually becoming a nudist while I was teaching in Texas. But I got to be a cowboy. It was the school mascot at the school where I taught the longest.
But when I retired, I didn’t exactly get to draw comic books or be a clown. But I got to write funny stories. And draw lots of illustrations. And I joined the AANR SW (American Association for Nude Recreation, Southwest.) Some of my best novels have nudists in them, like Recipes for Gingerbread Children. You can find me on Amazon, and on my blog https://catchafallingstarbook.net/
Well, there it is. The most Mickeyness I can manage.
Filed under announcement
I slept in this morning. Spent another late night doing nothing but watching monster movies. I recently got myself a DVD collection of Hammer Films monster movies from the sixties. I found it in the $5 bargain bin at Walmart, a place I regularly shop for movies.
When I was a boy, back in the 60’s, there always used to be a midnight monster movie feature called Gravesend Manor on Channel 5, WOI TV in Ames, Iowa. It started at 11:00 pm and ran til 1:00 am. I, of course, being a weird little monster-obsessed kid, would sneak downstairs in my PJ’s when everyone else was asleep and I would laugh at the antics of the goofy butler, possibly gay vampire duke, and the other guy who was supposedly made in the master’s laboratory. And when the movie started, I was often scared witless by the black-and-white monster B-movie like Scream of Fear!, or Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, or Eyes of the Gorgon. It was always the reason I could rarely get up in time for church and Sunday school the next morning without complaints and bleary-eyed stumbling through breakfast. I never knew if my parents figured it out or not, but they probably did and were just too tired to care.
It was my source for critical monster-knowledge that would aid me greatly when I grew up to be a fireman/cowboy hero. Because battling monsters was… you know, a hero prerequisite. And I intended to be the greatest one there ever was. Even better than Wyatt Earp or Sherlock Holmes or Jungle Jim.
Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, and the immortal Christopher Lee were my tutors in the ways of combating the darkness. When I started watching a really creepy monster movie, I always had to stick it out to the end to see the monster defeated and the pretty girl saved. And they didn’t always end in ways that allowed me to sleep soundly after Gravesend Manor had signed off the airways for the night. Some movies were tragedies. Sometimes the hero didn’t win. Sometimes it was really more of a romance than a monster movie, and the monster was the one you were rooting for by the end. I remember how the original Mighty Joe Young made me cry. And sometimes you had to contemplate more than tragedy. You had to face the facts of death… sometimes grisly, painful, and filled with fear. You had to walk in the shoes of that luckless victim who never looked over his shoulder at the right moment, or walked down the wrong dark alley, or opened the wrong door. The future was filled with terrifying possibilities.
Now, at the end of a long life, when I am supposed to be more mature and sensible, I find myself watching midnight monster movies again. What’s wrong with me? Am in my second childhood already? Am I just a goofy old coot with limited decision-making capabilities? Of course I am. And I intend to enjoy every horrifying moment of it.
Filed under autobiography, foolishness, horror movie, humor, monsters, nostalgia
Catch a Falling Star 