It’s true… 24 years of my life was spent in the Jungles of Junior High fighting for my life against predatory seventh graders, monkey people, lizard people, and general craziness. If my pictures are loony, and my stories are insane, it is because I have endured where no sane man should ever venture. The pink raptor, by the way… one of my best students.
Canto 3 – The Gumshoe
Maria came into the kitchen, finally home from the police station where she had spent the night and half of the next day. Her mother, Bonita, dragged herself into the kitchen after Maria, obviously, a wreck from the ordeal her daughter had put her through again.
“So, what did the criminal do this time?” asked Stanley. He had been sitting at the table reading the news from his phone.
“You coulda helped, you know,” said Bonita, firing off an angry glare in his direction.
“I told you I was on a case last night. My job pays for the bail money that got her out of the slammer.”
“Well, at least there is no money to pay. The store owner isn’t pressing charges. And he’s gonna let her make up for the mess she made by helping him clean the store.”
“And the murdered boy?”
“There is no murdered boy. They found bloody clothes in the alley again, just like in Yesenia’s case. But no body. And the store owner said Maria was in the store with him when the boy was taken.”
“Well, I guess we both knew she didn’t kill him,” said Stanley. “She’s in love with him or something.”
“Shut up, stupid,” Maria said to him with acid in the delivery.
“Don’t talk to your stepfather that way. He loves us both and takes care of us both.” Bonita’s eyes were filled with fatigue and pain. “I need sleep, Stan. You have to deal with her for a while, please.”
Stanley looked at his beautiful wife, his overweight, slightly defeated-by-life beautiful wife. “You get a good sleep in. Maria and I will talk this out.”
Bonita smiled at him and dragged herself towards the bedroom.
Maria looked grim. She pulled a chair out from the table, turned it backward, sat on it with her arms folded across the back of the chair, and laid her head on her arms.
She looked at Stanley with tears in her eyes. She didn’t pick her head up when she said, “You have to help me find Rogelio, Stan. I love him. If you can find him for me, I’ll have sex with you.”
“I told you before, it is not appropriate to try to bribe your stepfather with sex. I am not interested in underaged kids.”
“You know I don’t have any money. I can’t afford your detective skills.”
“This isn’t the same as when Yesenia disappeared. You didn’t really know the girl. It wasn’t something I was willing to interfere with when the police were investigating the disappearance of a girl from your school who wasn’t even your friend.”
“So, you’ll find Rogelio, and in return, I’ll sleep with you?”
“No, kid. I will investigate for free. Have you bargained sex for something with anybody else I should know about?”
“My answer is the same as last time.”
“But you know I didn’t believe you when you said it last time.”
“Why do you care?”
“I’m your stepfather. Protecting you is part of the job. And if you and I are going to find Rogelio, you are going to have to be more honest with me than you have been in the past.”
“Um, well… I may have used that instead of money for a couple of things. But I’m not telling you who.”
“Honesty at last. Well, I’m a detective. I already know who, and I already threatened both of them.”
She smiled an evil smile.
“What are you smiling about?”
“You do care… at least, more than you let on.”
“Well, we are being more honest… I suppose.”
Filed under horror writing, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Basil Wolverton (1909 to 1978) became famous as a cartoonist by winning a contest. He submitted the picture of Lena to Al Capp’s newspaper strip to answer the question of what Lena, who had been appearing for weeks in Li’l Abner underneath a black square with an editor’s warning printed on it that she was just too ugly to be revealed, actually looked like. Capp ran the contest to depict Lena and selected Wolverton’s drawing from among 500,000 entries. I think Capp got it right when he chose this to be the world’s ugliest woman.
Wolverton had done comics before this one amazingly ugly picture. He did Spacehawk for Target Comics up to 1942, and he did a comic series called Powerhouse Pepper for Timely Comics (which is the company that became Marvel after the 1940’s.) But Lena not only brought him fame, it really started him down the path of his intensely detailed “spaghetti and meatballs” style of rather ugly comic art.
He used millions of little dots and lines to create art that would really soak up the printer’s ink supply and gave his artwork a uniquely “pointillistic” look.
Here’s Wolverton’s portrait of Bing Crosby.
And here’s monster movie monarch, Boris Karloff.
But what really made Wolverton’s unique artwork popular and lucrative was his uniquely twisted and downright ugly portraits.
ugh! wotta beauty!
Ain’t this one… um… unique?
He would go on to be featured in Mad Magazine, Cracked, Panic Magazine, and Topp’s trading card series of Ugly Posters. He managed to do work that reached amazing levels of monstrously ugly humorous mastery of pen and ink drawings.
For years Basil made me laugh. But there’s no denying it… Basil masterfully drew really, really ugly artwork.
Filed under artists I admire, artwork, cartoon review
“I will publish a book,” he said quietly in a soft voice that nobody could hear.
Since I am not quite ready to die, I resolve to stay alive for another year.
I will try to be naked more.
I will save wear and tear on clothing.
I will be more immersed in the environment.
With climate change, I probably won’t freeze to death. But I do live in Texas where suffering in a way that is contrary to expectations is what the government requires of everybody but the richest folks.
I will draw more naked people because I am a nudist and aspire to make an art book about drawing nudes.
I will talk to dogs more. They have lots of things to say. And they have a unique point of view. And not many old coots like me can actually interpret what dogs say in Barkese. There is an evil schnauzer on our block that keeps barking at other dogs about how he buys stocks in dog food companies and plans to use his profits to make cats illegal in Texas. I feel compelled to expose the plot.
I will continue to be obsessed with writing creative and imaginative stories for children, but never avoiding being frank and honest about adult topics because, even if the child reading the book I have written is under the age of twenty-one, they need to know things adults know in this world because if they don’t, what they don’t know can hurt them. And it is confusing enough when I am being frank and they thought I was being Mickey. That confuses children older than 21 especially.
And so, I will set out on the adventure that is 2023. And I will try to keep all my resolutions… and probably not be able to keep any of them… but I will try really hard… especially the talking to dogs thing.
Filed under Uncategorized
I recently was advised by a fellow blogger to offer a few writing tips on my blog as a way to painlessly market my writing. Okay, I’m a writing teacher, so I can do that. But in my own writing I have hit a snag. Yes, there are things much, much bigger than my humble skill as a writer.
My current novel project, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius has grown into a science-fiction monster. It is not only about a scientist who has secret government connections, but about time travel and people changing into rabbits… or rabbits into people… or boys into girls… dogs and cats living together… No, that is Ghostbusters.
But it has reached a point where the most important theme is incredibly clear and difficult to deal with. The theme I find myself weaving into this story is; “All men are basically good.” Gongah! Wotta theme to try to write! Do I believe it? Of course I do. Can I put the story together in such a way that I illustrate it to the reader’s satisfaction? Of course I can’t. So what do I do? This story has some of the best villains and evil people in it that I have ever written. I can’t kill them off to solve the story’s plot problems (Well, I can, but I don’t want to). I have to show how evil can be redeemed.
My cast of characters include the scientist himself, calmly dealing with time travelers, invading aliens, government assassins, and a group of young boys known as the Norwall Pirates. There is a time traveler who appeared in a book within a book in my novel Catch a Falling Star. There is also an alien space navigator who has been shot by a local Iowa Deputy Marshall and stranded on Earth. Another character is an artificial man, an automaton who has been crafted as a government assassin made from alien technology. Okay, I know you don’t believe I can make serious science fiction out of such crazy-quilt characters, especially with a primary theme like the one I’ve claimed. So, I have to confess that it is not serious in any way, shape, or form. It is a silly fantasy comedy.
So, how do I generate a theme as big and bold and important as the goodness of all men? Well, here’s a secret recipe;
Of course, if you thought I was giving you real writing advice, then SURPRISE! It turns out I have been making it all up as I go along. That’s how you do it. You write and write, knit it all together tenuously, and then edit the heck out of it, hoping to make sense of the whole thing.
Filed under Uncategorized
I know that I am probably the last person you would think of to ask for advice on how to be happy. I am a crotchety old coot, a former middle-school English teacher, a grumpy old-enough-to-be-a-grandpa non-grandpa, an atheist, a nudist, and a conspiracy theorist. You would expect someone like me to be out in his yard in his underwear yelling at pigeons for pooping on his car more than they do his wife’s car. Be that as it may, I am also basically happy.
You know what happy looks like, surely. After Christmas day is over you see two kinds of kids. One kind is miserable and grumbling in his or her room about their Christmas gift that they didn’t get, in spite of the five expensive toys they did get. Yeah, that one’s never going to be happy. Then there’s the other kind, the one happily breaking or playing with the few cheap toys their parents could afford, using more of their own imagination than the imagination the toy companies pay someone to put into their TV or YouTube toy commercials. That one is going to be somebody you can rely on for years to come. That’s the kind of kid I like to think I was. Of course, I’m probably wrong about that too. Being a middle-school teacher gives you plenty of opportunity to learn the lesson that you are actually wrong about everything in life, and like Socrates, you know absolutely nothing for sure about anything.
Years upon years of being a public school teacher, the butt of comedians’ best school-memory jokes, the target of Republican spending cuts for saving enough money to give massive tax cuts to billionaires, and having to be every kind of professional for every kind of kid, no matter how ugly and unlovable they are, teaches you where true happiness comes from.
A. You have to learn to love the job you are trying to do. And…
B. You need to do the job you love with every resource you can squeeze out of your poor, battery-powered soul.
I did that. I did the job all the way from deluded and idealistic days of youth to cynical and caustic old age hanging onto your job by the fingernails until you have to choose between dying in front of the whole classroom of horrified kiddos you have learned to love, or going kicking and screaming into retirement to maybe live a bit longer than you would have if you had stayed at your work station in the idiot-to-income-earner factory for young minds.
Being satisfied with the career you chose and the success or failure you made of it is not the only factor in being happy. Teachers don’t earn much compared to corporate informational presenters who do the same job for a lot more money in front of a lot less hostile audiences far fewer times a day. So, it helps if you can manage to need less stuff in life. After all, stuff costs lots of money. Especially stuff you don’t really need.
That is why being a nudist and not having to worry about how much you spend on clothes helps a lot with your basic level of happiness and peace of mind. Also, lots of vitamin D soaked up through your nude all-togetherness produces happy-hormones in the brain.
Being an avowed pessimist is good for being happier in life as well. After all, the pessimist is always prepared for the worst to happen. And since the worst rarely is what actually happens, the pessimist is never shocked and dismayed and is frequently pleasantly surprised.
And so, here is Mr. Happy’s secret to a long and happy life;
Filed under artwork, autobiography, happiness, humor, insight, inspiration, Paffooney, philosophy
This has been a year of two steps forward and three steps back.
My quality of life is headed down the backside of the mountain. My eyes are afflicted with glaucoma and color blindness, things that permanently take away from my ability to see. I stand to lose the ability to draw and paint, to drive a car, to cook my own food, and numerous other things I have taken for granted for a lifetime.
My body is eroding in many other ways too. I have now had osteoarthritis for 48 years since I was diagnosed with it at the age of 18. I can still walk (with a cane) because I have exercised my joints repeatedly and daily in order to keep my joints flexible and workable, in spite of the pain that has cut into my quality of sleep more this year than any previous year. I have had diabetes since 2020 and still am not on insulin because of carefully monitoring my diet and the exercise that keeps my arthritis at bay.
The only book I managed to publish was The Necromancer’s Apprentice back in February of 2022. It has typos in the final text that I have not yet been able to correct. Most of those occurred during the final proofreading and editing because not only are my arthritic fingers routinely landing wrong, my laptop likes to glitch due to accidentally repurposed keys that teleport letters to pages not on my screen for some obscure reason involving the ctrl and Windows keys being accidentally brushed by arthritic fingers that apparently have more static electricity on them than I would believe is possible. I have had to slowly learn how to undo these things with a brain that is increasingly slowed and forgetful.
My storytelling has slowed to a crawl. I don’t get as many words written in a week. Of course, I have too many projects going at the same time. I have three novels in progress. He Rose on a Golden Wing is a long one that will probably end up being the longest one I have ever written. The Education of Poppensparkle was about three chapters from being a finished novella when I stopped working on it temporarily back in August. I have the AeroQuest novel number 4 in the final proofreading stage but haven’t finished the proofreading because of difficulties of seeing the text and format settings properly. And I started a new obsession project, The Haunted Toy Store.
My blog is headed downhill now too for the first time since it was begun in 2013. The high point last year was 31,106 views and 17,676 visitors. This year, with two days left, I have only 24,346 views and 12,499 visitors. This probably happened because I posted too many nudes in the blog and wrote a novel about nudists and alienated all my fundamentalist Christian readers who see such things as inappropriate rather than innocent or artistic. And the increased interactions with online nudists has probably put me in the disapproving spotlight of the algorithm
Nudists, however, turn out to be good and loyal readers. I have sold more books and made more money from books than any previous year. And not just my nudist stories. My most popopular books are non-nudist stories. Snow Babies, about surviving a blizzard is at the top of the list. My teacher story, Magical Miss Morgan, and my computer-science-fiction book The Wizard in his Keep, are also vying for most read and most positively reviewed.
.And so, I suppose, that it has been a good year after all, though my condition and prospects for the future are possibly at a point of percipitous decline until the end of the road.
Filed under Uncategorized
Bob Crachit and Tiny Tim were a key part of Charles Dickens’ masterwork that really helped create Christmas as we know it in this 21st Century time of troubles. I drew this with colored pencils back in the early 80s. It is still one of the artworks I am most proud to have created. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Filed under Uncategorized
Lately I have been having memory troubles. You know what I mean, when you walk through a doorway with a definite purpose in mind.and then, on reaching the other room, you have no earthly idea what that purpose was. It happens to me regularly. In fact, I can even start writing a sentences, and then I… What was I talking about? Oh, yes. I need to practice writing some more spectacularly bad poetry, before I forget how to do it.
Re-minders
Sometimes…
My mind slips out of my left ear…
And I can’t remember things.
So, I have to search under the table…
To find my mind…
And then I remember that that’s not how a mind works.
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Forgetfulness
Tell me now, before I forget…
What was I supposed to remember?
Was it something religious, important, and good…
That comes towards the end of December?
Was I supposed to buy something for somebody then?
I wrote a note to myself in September…
Oh, gosh! How could I ever forget that?
Now the fire is nothing but embers.
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Finding Fairies in my Hair
Why do I have elflocks all snarled up in my hair?
Surely some fairies have been twisting it up there.’
But if I can catch one and make him confess,
He claims I don’t comb it, and that’s why it’s a mess.
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Doofy Me
If I forget everything I ever knew,
Would it be possible that I am still smarter than you?
Old Socrates said he knew nothing at all.
And so he asked questions from Winter through Fall.
I hope I retain enough brain to remember
That everyone needs to wear clothes in December.
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Yep, I still obviously remember how to write spectacularly bad poetry. It is my contribution to literature. Virtually all poets will be able to say, “At the very least, I am a better poet than Beyer.”
Filed under autobiography, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, poem, poetry
Catch a Falling Star 
Infinite Monkeys
The theorem goes, “If you sit an infinite number of monkeys behind an infinite number of typewriters and let them tap away at random for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually come up with all the works of Shakespeare, and in addition to that, all the works of literature that have ever been written and ever will be written.”
Now, that is a daunting theorem. All the great works of literature by Mickey will be recreated by monkeys? And even worse, they will probably produce much better versions of all of it. Plus versions of it written in German, Mandarin Chinese, Urdu, and Californian (a really difficult language to translate.) All languages ever created on all the planets of the universe, as a matter of fact. The proof is there. It hinges on the mathematically precise definition of “Infinite.”
But you have to remember, infinite is the biggest number there is.
So many variations will be there in the truthfully infinite amount of stuff that infinite monkeys will produce that one version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet will have a final act where, instead of everyone dying or accidentally killing themselves, Hamlet will talk them all into putting on yellow chicken costumes and dancing with hula hoops as a means of acquiring absolution for their sins.
And a version of it will also exist where all the letter “B’s” will be replaced by “P’s” and all the vowels will be doubled so that Hamlet’s famous soliloquy will begin, “Too pee oor noot too pee, thaat iis thee quueestiioon…”
Accurately imagining the conditions required to have infinite monkeys tapping out infinite works of literary art means that any ridiculous thing that Mickey thinks of will have to actually be typed out by one or more (or infinite) monkeys in all of that infinite monkey writing. Somewhere Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros will have nothing but characters who are rhinoceroses at the beginning of the play who turn into human beings by the end of the play. (That is the exact opposite of the real French absurdist’s play, for those of you who did not have to read such stuff in college literature courses.)
In fact, in order to think up all the ridiculous variations of every work of literature would take Mickey an infinite amount of time. Mickey probably doesn’t really want to live that long.
‘
And then there is also the question of the physics of infinity. Is the universe itself, I mean, the one we all live in presently, actually infinite? Astrophysicists don’t think so according to current observable data on the astronomical model of this universe. And then you have the problem of infinite monkeys made of infinite matter. The universe would be filled to overflowing with infinite monkey-matter. And that leaves no matter or space to be used for infinite typewriters. The whole universe would be monkey-matter. And that would also mean no room for bananas, or, in fact, any monkey food of any kind. What is going to motivate the infinite monkeys to work for an infinite amount of time on their monkey literature which they won’t have typewriters to write on anyway?
And then there is another horrible thought that occurs to me. In this picture to the left, do you see the evil monkey? Believe me, if you have an infinite amount of monkeys, one or two (or possibly an infinite number of them) will definitely be evil geniuses.
And evil monkeys do evil monkey-business.
At least one or two (or possibly… you know…) evil monkey geniuses will disassemble infinite typewriters to make infinite doomsday devices. Typewriters will be re-engineered into computers and will become filled with monkey-viruses that will rewrite the operating software of the universe. And then, everything becomes an infinite monkey-villain paradise where the evil geniuses among the monkeys will live the perfect life for monkey criminals full of monkey crimes and monkey debauchery and the kind of infinite chaos that infinite monkey-villains enjoy.
This thinking about infinite monkeys leads to one very definite infinite-monkey conclusion; WE DO NOT WANT TO MESS WITH GIVING INFINITE TYPEWRITERS TO INFINITE MONKEYS!!!
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Filed under commentary, goofiness, goofy thoughts, humor, philosophy, strange and wonderful ideas about life