I have no reason for putting this post together. But I wonder;..
Random Art for No Good Reason
How It Should Be… According to Mickey
My bicycle was red. It was red and looked just like the ones that Captain Kangaroo had in his commercials that we watched on a black-and-white TV every day before we walked or rode our bicycle to school, across town a whole long seven blocks away. After school I could ride it out a whole mile and a half to Jack’s farm with Bobby and Richard and Mark the preacher’s kid to go skinny dipping in the cold creek in Jack’s South pasture. Jack was younger than any of us except Bobby. And it was a golden age.
Spiderman comic books and Avengers comic books cost twelve cents to own, but they were forbidden. And as much as we sneaked them and passed them around until they fell apart, usually in Bobby’s hands, we never knew that Dr. Wertham had gone to Congress to make our parents believe that comic books would make us gay and violent. He was a psychiatrist who wrote a book, so even if you didn’t believe him, you had to worry about such things.
I believed in Santa Claus until 1967. And after I found out, I only despaired a tiny little bit, because I began to understand you have to grow up. And adults can lie to you, even if they don’t do it to be mean. And the world is a hard place. And the golden age ended in November of 1963 when JFK was assassinated.
In June of 1968 I rode my bicycle out to the Bingham Park woods, Once there, I took off all my clothes and put them in the bicycle basket, and then I rode up and down the walking paths through the trees with nothing between me and God but my skin. I had a serious think about how life should be. All the while I was terrified that someone might see me. I was naked and vulnerable. A mere two years before that I had been sexually assaulted and was terrified of older boys, especially when I was naked and vulnerable. But I was a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and Bob Gibson. They were repeated World Series winners. And they beat the Yankees in the series in 1964. And more important than that, cardinals were the little red songbirds who never flew away when the winter came. You don’t give up in the face of hardship. You face the trouble. No matter how deep the snow may pile up.
And in 1969, the first man to walk on the moon showed that a Star Trek world was in reach of mankind. Star Trek was on every afternoon after school. I watched a lot of those episodes at Verner’s house on his family’s black-and-white TV. The Klingons were always bested or beaten because the crew of the Enterprise outsmarted them. You can solve the problems of the universe with science. I know this because of all the times Mr. Spock proved it to me not just by telling me so, but by showing me how you do it. And what you can achieve is greatly enhanced if you work together like Spock and Kirk and Bones… and sometimes Scotty always did.
So, what is the way it should be? What did Mickey decide while naked in the forest like a Dakota Sioux shaman on a spirit-quest?
JFK’s 104th birthday was on May 29th. Dr. Wertham has been dead for 40 years. Bob Gibson was 85 when he passed away in October of last year. Captain Kirk turned 90 in March of this year.
The Golden age is long gone. There is no single set of rules that can clearly establish how it should be now. But I like those ideas of how it should be that I established for myself while naked on a Schwinn Spitfire in a forest long ago.
Filed under autobiography, cardinals, comic book heroes, commentary, humor, inspiration, oldies, Paffooney, philosophy
66 Life is Awesome… but Painful 99
Life is a dance that you keep dancing while you live.
The steps are difficult and hold your attention ransom.
So, often, you do not see the beauty of its pattern and flow,
Until you are so old and slow that you can barely take the next timely step.
Life is an exercise of making meaning and value of all that you are given.
The factory in which you make that life is only rarely comfortable.
Loud and grouchy managers provide the materials unfairly and with austerity,
And they constantly interfere with your work and make your hammers dull.
Yet, at the end of the job, you will marvel at what you have made.
Life is an operatic performance, full of color, flashy swirls of movement, and arias hard to sing.
And you will strut and fret your hour upon the stage, terrified you’ll miss the high note,
And fear of your inevitable solo will freeze the butterflies in your guts into sharp and painful fears.
And some fat lady in a Viking helmet and chainmail flits about trying to sing the notes that bring the opera to its end.
And when you belt out the song at center stage that is meant to bring the house down, and the audience applauds,
You will fall back exhausted, confident that it was your best possible performance, and worth your life to perform it.
Life is awesome… but painful.
What Dreams May Come?
Lately I have been having problems with passing out during low blood-sugar moments in the middle morning, early afternoon, and shortly after supper, usually when I have already had a snack and my sugars haven’t balanced yet. When I pass out, perchance… I dream. Vivid dreams. So, for art day, I will post images I have made based on dreams I have had.
This one has shadows on everything. I exhausted three pens drawing shadows. Yet, there are no shadows on the child-figures. In the dream, they were glowing white ghosts.
Snowboy is one of the main villains in The Bicycle-wheel Genius. But the boy-robot made entirely of snow, ice, and circuitry first appeared in a 1978 dream that happened while I had a fever from the flu.
This dream is a mental-disturber caused again by fever. Here the two gigantic toys play with the little girl. I was not actually in this dream. I was an observer floating above. I think the bear was inspired by a Care-Bear.
This picture has all the elements of the actual dream, the candle, the line of glowing pixies, the sleeping princess, and Prince Charming. But nothing here looks like it did in the dream. The prince and the princess were both young teens that I did not know in real life. The fairies were larger and a lot more obviously nude.
I actually passed out while writing this post. It happened right here, before I could post this dream of living colors. All the colors were in motion in the dream, something I couldn’t really represent here.
I knew when I dreamed this dream that the Bambi-kin in this dream were members of my family, but at the time I dreamt it I had not met my wife yet, let alone had three kids of my own. Yet I knew that it was not my family at the time of the dream because one of my sisters was not there.
This is from a dream I had in college at Iowa City. I made an entire cartoon out of it called Babysitters Hate My House, It is about a babysitter having a horrible time with my two sons as she loses control when they show her the man in the basement that, “Daddy built out of a kit.”
And, finally, this dream featured not only the spirit stag and the medicine man, but the bolt of lightning in the background. The Dakotah people say having a dream with lightning in it makes you a “lightning dreamer”, a magic man, or a shaman. So, I guess that qualifies me to be one.
the world we live in
I fear the future. I fear the things that will be required of us will be so far beyond our capabilities to cope with it that we will be overwhelmed. Is there going to be any life on Earth by 2050?
If everything ends more completely than the Book of Revelations suggests it will, then we will have to be satisfied that life on Earth was a beautiful thing while it lasted. And the universe as a whole is better off than it would have been if we never existed.
And I am only a simple school teacher that used to yell at seventh graders. So, I could be wrong, and life will find a way.
Filed under Uncategorized
Divining Rods, Ouija Boards, and Making Up My Own Danged Mind
How do you foretell the future? Simply put, you don’t. But if you approach each new day, each new week, or each new set of circumstances without a plan and a rough idea of the near future, you are even more of a hopeless fool than Mickey is.
While it is true that a crystal-ball connection to the future would be really handy for figuring out what to do next with our little lives, it is also provably true that crystal balls, Ouija boards, and divining rods don’t actually work. Statistically even the best users of these fortune-telling devices are no better at foretelling the future than are well-informed guessers.
Ghosts are not provably real. You cannot actually talk to them. Not even in a graveyard at midnight with a dead cat to throw at the devil.
Oh, and that reminds me, the devil is not provably real either.
But I admit to talking to the dead.
My Grandma Beyer was one of the wisest people I knew in my childhood. She advised my Dad who was her son. She was a guide for the Beyer side of the family. And I talk to her a lot when I have a tough decision to make.
In 2017 I irrationally made a commitment to write for a nudist website. The article assigned was to go to a nudist park or resort and write about my first-time experience there. Of course, getting my wife to go along with her RV camper was out of the question. She was a Jehovah’s Witness in good standing then, and was sure that nakedness in a group was a terrible sin. But I had known nudists back in the 1980s when a previous girlfriend’s sister was living in a clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin, Texas. We visited there a number of weekends. I never actually stayed there or got nude while visiting. I saw naked people there, male, female, and children. And after my eyes popped out on the first visit, I picked them up, put them back in, and learned a lot about nudists while at the same time turning down all invitations… which I could do because my parents were living nearby, and I could stay with them and keep all my clothes on. But the nudist website assignment weighed heavily on me. Grandma Beyer had been the one that threatened to spank me before I was supposed to take a bath at her house because I wanted to run around the house naked rather than get in the tub with my sister. I was five at the time, not in high school… honest. So, she was the one I consulted when it came time to decide if I would actually go to a nudist park and be naked in front of other people just because I had made a commitment to a writing assignment.
Of course, she had been among the no-longer-living for fifteen years when I asked her about it.
The thing is, however, that I knew my grandmother well enough to know what she would say as I basically discussed it with her memory rather than her ghost. I even saw what facial expressions she used as she explained that it was more important to keep my word than it was to be a little bit embarrassed. And besides, it was not like I was going to an orgy or anything. Nudists are merely ordinary people who are dedicated to the belief that getting your vitamin D directly from the sun without any clothes between you and nature was good for you.
So, I made the visit, got naked, and wrote the article, as well as articles on this blog that were used on other nudist websites as well. It is how I came to be a member of the nudist writing community on Twitter. And that has helped me promote my books whether there were nudists in them or not.
Even with consulting a Ouija Board you are not really talking to ghosts. You get an answer from somebody with their fingers on the piece of plastic that picks the letters and is accessing their unconscious mind, or even their conscious mind if they are a bit of a dershenbugle (a word which doesn’t mean anything at all, just like the answer they picked.)
I often use a coin-flip to make decisions, adding an element of total chance to the decision I am making. (I admit, that’s how the decision to accept the writing assignment from the nudist blog was made.) If either answer to the question being asked is acceptable, but one causes a bit of anxiety, I flip a coin. Not just one coin. I throw three. Yes is three heads. No is three tails. Ten straight no decisions is indication not to decide at that time. In truth, this only works for me because it forces me to take an arbitrary amount of time to think about the decision. And often, I toss three heads when I have already decided to say no. And then I go with no.
So, divining the future is silly superstition, and I don’t do superstition. But that is not to say I don’t try to divine the obstacles ahead and prepare for them. And what looks like Mickey being an idiot about consulting coins or other signs, is really only Mickey being only slightly an idiot as he makes up his own danged mind.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
The Rebellion Begins Again
Yes, I have decided to join evil Grandpa Joe Biden in his plan to destroy America by providing the critical communist ideals of fully funding public schools, providing a real path to citizenship for legal immigrants that doesn’t take more than twenty years to achieve, not depending on the color of their skin, allowing everyone who has the right to vote to actually cast their ballot regardless of personal wealth, the color of their skin, religion, or party affiliation, and believing that tax money should be used to benefit all members of a society rather than just the wealthy elite and ruling class.
So, I voted against the plans of Republicans to restore our freedoms by reinstating massive tax cuts to the wealthiest citizens and the corporations that provide their wealth. I voted against making our world smarter by privatizing education so that wealthy people can put their progeny into the best schools and consign the rest of us to corporate-sponsored factory-skills-training programs or prison schools. I voted against balancing government budgets by cutting Medicare, Social Security, and safety-net programs like SNAP. In other words, I voted against the coming Empire that Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell envision. I’m not sure which one is the Sith Lord and which is the apprentice, but we will know when they win power through evil means.
Here’s to the fading hope that we will elect a few Jedi heroes to the Senate and House of Representatives before the darkness falls.
Filed under politics
Fascination
I am falling apart. My health is poor and continuing to fail. My memory is suffering from an inability to remember the names of things. I find myself in the kitchen having gone in for a specific purpose, and not being able to remember what that purpose was. That is not to say I am not coping. I have quite a lot of adaptability and significant problem-solving skills. But that will eventually become a losing battle. Especially if I get the virus… any virus. So, what am I going to talk about with a dissolving brain and an hourglass of lifeforce swiftly running out? Fascination. I am fascinated by the details of the process. Like Mr. Spock, I find practically everything, “Fascinating!”
Birds and butterflies
My childhood fascinations turned into obsession first around natural things. When my mother would go to Vey Osier’s Beauty Salon, Vey had this fascinating parrot that was probably a hundred years old and knew how to swear really, really foully. I remember that being the only reason I was willing to go there and wait for Mom to get her hair fussed up (What my Grandpa Aldrich, her father, used to call it.)
I remember waiting for hours to hear that bird say the magic F-word or the horrible S-word. Or even the zillion other bad words I didn’t know anything about when I was seven. And, of course, I never did. The bird was mute the whole time during who-knows-how-many visits. But I did get to look endlessly at that green parrot’s amazing nutcracker bill that Vey always assured us would snap our fingers off like biting a salted pretzel if we got them anywhere close to the bill.
And when I was nine I was given as a present a plastic model kit of a Golden-Crowned Kinglet (the bird in that first picture). My relatives knew I was a burgeoning artist since my teachers constantly complained about all the skeletons, crocodiles, and monsters I drew in the margins of my school workbooks. So, I had a plastic bird to paint with all the necessary paints, but no idea what the bird looked like. We had to go all the way to Mason City to Grandma Beyer’s house because we called up there and checked, and, sure enough, there was a colored picture in the K volume of her Collier’s Encyclopedia. I painted it so accurately, the danged thing looked almost alive.
And if you have ever seen any of my butterfly posts, you know I became a butterfly hunter before ever entering junior high school, where Miss Rubelmacher, the rabid seventh-grade science teacher, made that obsession a hundred times worse. (She didn’t actually have rabies, just a reputation of requiring excessively hard-to-find life-science specimens like a nasturtium that bloomed in October in Iowa, or a Mourning Cloak butterfly.
I was able to find for her numerous Red-Spotted Purples like the one in the picture. I got them off the grill of Dad’s Ford, as well as in Grandpa Aldrich’s grove. And I eventually caught a pair of Mourning Cloaks as well on Grandpa Aldrich’s apple trees, though not until summer after seventh grade was over for me. I could tell you about my quest to catch a Tiger Swallowtail, too. But that’s an entirely different essay, written for an entirely different thematic reason.
Needless to say, my bird fascination led me to become an amateur bird-watcher with a great deal of useless naturalist information crammed into my juvenile bird-brain about birds. Especially Cardinals. And my fascination with butterflies opened my eyes to a previously invisible world of fascinating and ornately-decorated bugs. (Of course, I should’ve said “insects” instead of “bugs” since I absolutely did learn the difference.) And I still to this day know what a Hairstreak Butterfly looks like, what a Luna Moth is (Think Lunesta Commercials,) and how you have to look at the underside of the lower wings to correctly identify a Moonglow Fritillary Butterfly.
During my lifetime, my fascinations have become legion. I became obsessed with the comic books done by artist Wally Wood, especially Daredevil. I became obsessed with Disney movies, especially the animated ones like The Rescuers, The Jungle Book, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. I rode the bucking bronco of a fascination with the Roswell Crash (and the actual alien space ships I am almost certain the U.S. Army recovered there.) And so many other things that it would make this essay too long, and would probably bore you into a death-like coma. So, here’s what I have learned by being fascinated with my own fascinations;
- You do not want to play me in a game of Trivial Pursuit for money, even now that my memory is like swiss cheese.
- I have a real ability to problem-solve because I know so many useless details that can be combined in novel ways to come up with solutions to problems.
- I can write interesting essays and engaging novels because I have such a plethora of concrete details and facts to supplement my sentences and paragraphs with.
- It can be really, really boring to talk to me about any of my fascinations unless I happen to light the same color of fire in your imagination too. Or unless you arrived at that same fascination before I brought it up.
Filed under birds, bugs, commentary, humor, imagination, insight
AeroQuest 5… Canto 152
Canto 152 – Ged on Mingo
The Ancient Red Dragon starship popped out of jump space to find the planet Mingo bustling with activity. The spaceways around the heavily industrialized planet were crammed with merchant ships of every kind, from gargantuan, cigar-shaped mass haulers to the smallest of independent beetle-shaped personal transports. It wasn’t that no one noticed the dragon-shaped vessel as it arrived from the complex gravitic web of outer space; it was more a matter of everyone being too busy to care.
Three system defense boats came out to look over Ged’s Ancient spacecraft, but as they scanned it and found it was not alive, they quickly lost interest. It had no weapons that registered on any kind of detector. The human signatures on the routine life-scan would tell the transport police that nothing about this unusual craft suggested it was hostile in any way.
“Ged-sensei, we have arrived at the place your girlfriend is hidden,” said Billy Iowa, coming out of his clairvoyant trance. “I see her in the palace below, the one called David King’s Hall in the Ruined Palaces District.”
“It is a shame we don’t have any computer database available on this ship,” remarked Ged. “I suppose even if it did, it couldn’t tell us anything about Emperor Mong or his planet Mingo.”
“We have to get down to that palace and save her,” asserted Junior, looking determined.
“Don’t get ahead of us, Smurf,” growled Alec. “What are the Ruined Palaces?”
“It’s a place where the buildings have all been attacked at one time or another,” said Billy, looking with his inner eye. “Their damage has been preserved as a part of the decor of the buildings. David King’s Hall is one of the three biggest ones.”
“Whoa,” said Alec, half-laughing, “why would they rebuild something and make it look like it’s still ruined?”
“An evil sense of humor,” said Phoenix. “It’s like something Bres might do.”
“You put Bres down too much!” said Alec, suddenly hot.
“No, he can’t be put far enough down, Alec,” answered Phoenix coolly. All could see the air begin to sizzle around the Phoenix.
“Yeah, whatever.” Alec backed off from the subject.
“We do have to go down there,” said Ged at last. “We need to be prepared to use our Psion powers. We know what rot warriors are, but we have no experience of what they can do.”
Taffy King, who had only been looking at the back of Rocket Rogers’ neck before, spoke up. “I grew up around them.” Her blue snake’s eyes glowed with angry fire. “They are like robots who don’t work right. They lurch around and stumble into things, but when they are ordered to fight, they do it one hundred to one. They overwhelm the opponent with bone-headed force.”
“What are they really?” asked Sarah innocently.
“Re-animated skeletons,” offered Rocket. “I’ve seen them before on Bradalanth Colony. They are bones and circuits and some patches of leathery skin. Mechanoids with no brains.”
“Monsters!” moaned Hassan Parker.
“Remember, young ones,” said Ged, “they are easily defeated because they cannot think for themselves. As long as we work together and let no one get overwhelmed by numbers, we should be able to overcome them. I worry more about what other problems may arise as we try to get past Emperor Mong’s living minions.”
“Geez, you sound like an old holo-cartoon show!” remarked Phoenix.
“You disagree with something?” Ged was suddenly a bit annoyed.
“Oh, no. You are right. It just sounds so cartoonish!”
“So, what will we do, Sensei?” asked Junior carefully, afraid of rousing more ire from Ged.
“Sarah? Can you help us see the distant places Billy can sense?”
“Yes, Sensei.” Sarah was capable of transferring images from one mind to another.
“Jackie, if you see the place, can you teleport us there one by one?”
The pretty, brown-skinned girl smiled at Ged for the first time in a while. “You know I can!”
“Well, then, that’s our way in.”
Filed under aliens, heroes, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction
Catch a Falling Star 
Seeing Through an Artist’s Eyes
It is not an easy thing to explain. Artists don’t see things using only their eyes. The brain intrudes in the process. For instance, you are welcome to interpret the picture above any way you like. But the way I see it will be nothing like what you thought this picture is about. You probably see two very different girls here. There is actually only one. I know because, as the artist who drew both parts of this picture, I actually know where the ideas came from. There is only one girl in the picture. Dilsey Murphy, in front and wearing her Carl Eller Minnesota Vikings’ jersey, is based about 33% on the older of my two sisters. On the outside she is pragmatic, no-nonsense, and focused on living a family life that is as normal as possible. But the inner Dilsey is the African leopard-princess. She dreams of going on Tarzan adventures in the movie-jungles of the mind with a handsome male hero. She is fierce, loyal, and completely independent, not even needing the hero she adventures with. In fact, she often saves him.
This picture is about the idyllic parts of my childhood. The mother figure is doing a ritual dance. She is in tune with the music of daily life. She is closely attuned also to her responsibilities of stewardship in her society. Both children are nude. I cropped this picture so that it is not rude and showing Smiling Boy’s penis. But both children are bathed in nature and sunshine, not just because I am pro-nudism personally, but because clothing covers up innocence and joy.
This one is easier to interpret. I was an ESL teacher. I had students who spoke Spanish as their first language and students who learned to speak Mandarin Chinese as their first language. It makes for a classroom that becomes a cultural mixing bowl. You have to learn how to deal with people who are very different than you,, but are benefitting from learning English together.
Every picture the artist draws or paints has its own weirdness embedded inside it. The way the artist sees it is probably never the same as how the viewer thinks about it. And that is as it should be. But as a viewer of art, it is hoped that you will at least try to think about what the artist means to say..
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Filed under artwork, colored pencil, coloring, commentary, Paffooney
Tagged as Saturday Art Day