Catch a Falling Star

March 3, 2022 · 1:35 pm

Talk Like Popeye

I have long identified with Popeye. Let me review that notion by re-posting a bit of an old post in which I explain while talking like Popeye;

I am Popeye, I sez, because I just am… Yeah, that’s right, I yam what I yam.

First of all, I looks like Popeye. I has that cleft in me chin, very little hair left on me ol’ head, and I gots the same squinky eye (what squinky eye?). I has had that same squinky eye since I wuz a teenager and got kicked in the eye doin’ sandlot football (bettern’ sandlot high divin’, fer sure!). I also has them same bulgy arms, the ones that bulge in the forearm and is incredibobble thin on the upper arms.

Second of all, I has Popeye Spinach-strength. I look weak and scrawny, but I is a lot tuffer than I looks. I go into classrooms full of wild, crazed middle schoolers, and grabs their attention, tells ’em what’s what, and makes ’em woik. (Woik is a voib, and that means I is woikin’ when I makes ’em do it.) I kin stands ridicule and kids what will remarks on the hair in me ears and me squinky eye. I tells ’em that the scar on me face was did by a bloke with a knife (which it were, cause I had skin cancer and the doctor used a knife to get it off). I has taken all kinds of nasty punches from life (diabetes, blood-pressure problems, prostatitis, arthritis) and I still keeps comin’ back fer more. In fact, I can winds up me arm and give that ol’ Devil a good Twisker Sock right in the kisser.

Third of all, I has a typical Popeye Sweet Patootie. My Island Girl Wife is like Olive Oyl in very many ways. She is always tellin’ me what to do. She compares me to ol’ Bluto. She panics and flails her arms when there’s a crisis. And she expects me to always save the day and never says “thank you” after.

So, I mean it when I sez “I am Popeye”. I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!

See? I kin talk like Popeye because in many ways I AM him… He of the mangled-mouth vocabubobulary created by Elzie Crisler Segar on January 17th, 1929 for his comic strip Thimble Theater for King Features Syndicate. He doesn’t talk right because his brain is so full of goodness and spinach that he has no room left for spelling and pronunskiation. Ak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak…. Popeye is just a simple sailor, and has been for 94 years. He expresses himself horribly, but only in the very best of ways. So when I mangle a word on purpose… or by happy accident… it is just me honoring that old one-eyed sailor. It is not me just being a stupid addle-pated blarney goon who don’t knows how to talk right.

Comic strip from comicskingdom.com

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Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as adventure, cartoons, goofiness, humor, language tricks, lies, paffooney, talk like popeye

March 2, 2022 · 4:38 pm

Reasons Why the World is Crazy

Reason #1 : People Believe Stupid Stuff

Do you believe that there are shape-shifting lizard people who control the world’s governments by ruling in disguise? Do you believe a secret CIA operative called simply “Q” is fighting against the “deep state” by telling MAGA world about Democrats and intellectuals eating Republican babies to give themselves super powers? Do you believe giving tax breaks to billionaires and corporations will trickle down to the rest of us and make us all rich? If you do believe those Stupid Things, you probably want to stop reading this. The possibility exists that you will be called stupid at some point and be blamed for things those of us who vote for Democrats and wonder where all the baby-eating is taking place think is really bad stuff.

The truth is… people are all human beings (depending on how A.I . research has actually gone, and whether or not the lizard people are aliens, or just imaginary.) And there will always be selfish people who will willingly harm others for their own gain, and there will be selfless people who give to others to the point that the world turns on them and assassinates or crucifies them. But most people are on a continuum between those two polar opposites. There will also always be people who use the scientific method to try to prove things before they believe in them. And there will also always be people who will believe anything said by a Republican leader, FOX News talking head, idiot in a red hat, Q Shaman, or legally insane person as long as they have the right color skin, the right religion, or they hate the same groups of people the true believer hates.

Doing good in this world would be so much easier if people were only more loving and capable of looking for the evidence before they decide what to believe. Believing stupid stuff causes wars, mishandling of pandemics, insurrections, and Republican Presidents (at least in the last twenty-two years.)

Reason #2 : You Can’t Actually Prove Anything

The thing Descartes says is important. I know I am here and I exist because I can think and perceive stuff. Of course, the mind can be deceived and vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell have no absolute truthfulness guarantee. I could be a disembodied mind floating in darkness for eternity and everything I have experienced in life could be a lie I tell myself daily. And some mathematics-obsessed philosopher/scientists are even suggesting that evidence shows that reality is a computer simulation. So maybe I can’t even know what I know. I can’t prove anything even to myself.

Reason #3 : War is a Thing

Ukraine proves that War is a part of human life that we will never be without. I have been alive now for sixty-five years. In that time, while I was aware of the news, there was never a time I can remember when there wasn’t a war somewhere in the world. History class from the seventh grade onward always included learning about wars and dates of wars and who won and who lost and how “The War to End All Wars” was followed by an even bigger war twenty years later. People believe in stupid stuff, and some of them are always willing to kill you for not believing too.

Putin believes Ukraine belongs to him. The Ukrainians disagree. He has killed a bunch of them already.

So, the World is Crazy! What do we do about it?

There is nothing you can do to change it. It will always be thus. But there are things you can do. Survive it. Write a blog post about it. Give money to someone who will actually use the money to do something good. At least someone you hope will use it for good. Vote against the people you think are bad guys. Vote for the ones you think are good guys. But check first to see if you are correct about their goodness or badness. Think about things twice, or three times, before you decide. Seek wisdom. Make fun of the crazy stuff, and laugh a little. Life is a white-water, raging river. Try to avoid the rocks. And enjoy the ride while you are still on it.

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Filed under angry rant, pessimism, philosophy

March 2, 2022 · 2:47 pm

Cardboard Castles

After a long, lonely week by myself, unable to go with my family to Florida for Spring Break due to poor health, my isolation ended suddenly as they returned early. I woke up to find them already here yesterday morning. They were tired from travelling, having arrived in the middle of the night, and so they needed to sleep in… and I was suffering horrible cabin fever. It mattered little, though, that I longed to get out. I was still ill and unable to breathe outside of my sealed bedroom. My arthritic back ached and I needed to lie in bed on the heating pad for the better part of a Saturday. So, what could I do but use my creative talents to take me on a journey into imagination. I built a castle.

I used an old computer program I previously found at Half-Price Books, the big superstore thing on Northwest Highway in Dallas. I printed out castle parts on white paper with colored ink. I gathered pieces of reusable cardboard I had been saving for the purpose. I began to cut and paste and tape.

I nearly forgot the most important step. I put on a Dr. Who DVD I snagged at Walmart. It was An Adventure is Space and Time starring David Bradley (who was playing William Hartnell who was the first Dr. Who, so it was a movie about an actor playing a part in a BBC fantasy series in the 1960’s played by another actor who looked like the original actor… I mean, it was a story about telling a story and it was the true story of the telling… Oh, I give up! You figure it out.) (That was the second longest parenthetic expression I have ever written, by the way.) It also had a full four episode adventure from the very first Dr. Who story, An Unearthly Child, starring the real William Hartnell. So I watched and cut and taped and pasted and built castle all day.

It begins to get exciting as the pieces fit together and it actually starts to look like a castle. Of course, once it was finished, I had to play with the dang thing. I am old, and this is my second childhood after all.

Now, if only I can figure out how to keep female vampires dressed in red from invading my castle.

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Filed under humor, making cardboard castles, photo paffoonies

Tagged as cut and paste, goofiness, humor, making cardboard castles, paper sculpture, photo Paffooney, playing with toys

March 1, 2022 · 3:22 pm

Those Were the Days

Pictures from picturehistory.com, www.edb.utexas.edu, texasescapes.com, and lbjmuseum.com

My personal history as a school teacher begins in the 1981-82 school year in a little town in South Texas called Cotulla. Without realizing it, I was following in the footsteps of former U.S. President LBJ. Really! It’s true! To prove it, here is a picture from the LBJ Museum showing the big-eared, jug-headed goofball with his class of Mexican American Cotullans.

His class looked a lot like my first class, only a lot smaller. I was hired by the new junior high principal to be the 8th-Grade English teacher for Frank Newman Junior High. The school had basically imploded the year before. Gus the janitor told me that the previous principal had been robbed several times, with kids breaking into the main office in the middle of the building during the middle of the night. They even broke open the safe. Some of the same kids I was supposed to teach had been arrested for assault the previous year, and some of the kids were caught making babies in the school cafeteria. I went into the same classroom that the previous year’s seventh grade class had used to drive poor Miss Finklebine out of teaching for life. They had set off firecrackers under her chair. They threw erasers and chalk at each other. They almost got away with murder… In fact, they may have gotten away with it. Miss F was never heard from again, and I found a very long list of self-destructive rantings (in the form of discipline reports that had apparently never been turned in) in her desk that threatened the lives of several students whom I knew for certain had survived because they were in my eighth grade classes that year. I don’t think they tracked her down and got her… but what they did to that poor woman’s mind may have pushed her over the edge. I had a tough year that year. The two boys who threatened to beat me to death with a fence post they picked up when I was marching kids in a line to the cafeteria, El Mouse and El Talan, both went to prison within five years of being in my class. Both of them are now deceased. El Mouse by suicide after the Texas Syndicate wrecked him in prison, and Talan was shot and killed by a rival drug dealer while his wife and family looked on. I hope you are not laughing at the moment. I do often exaggerate for humorous effect… but that is not what I am doing here.

Cotulla was once a wild west town, probably worse than anything Hollywood ever put up on the silver screen. Former Mayor and descendant of the town’s founder, Bill Cotulla, once told me that they had six-gun shoot-outs on Front Street in the 1880’s. I met Mr. Van Cleve the former Texas Ranger whose picture is in the Waco Texas Rangers’ Hall of Fame because of the border machine-gun shoot-out in the 1940’s. In fact, I taught English to his grandson. The school, just like the town, was a tamable thing. I spent the next 23 years of my life there teaching mostly Spanish-speaking kids about the wonders of English, literature, and writing. I saw the school go from a rough-and-tumble wild beginning into a program that routinely out-performed other small schools our size in everything but Math.

I know that you may find this part difficult to swallow… in the same way a goat has never managed to swallow an entire school bus… but my fiction books about school kids in Iowa are really mostly about characters I knew and taught in Cotulla, Texas and only slightly merged with the white-bread Iowegians I grew up with in Rowan, Iowa. Texas and Iowa have more in common than you might think… Me, for one thing.

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Filed under autobiography, Cotulla, teaching, Wild West

Tagged as autobiography, Cotulla, LBJ, teacher challenges, teaching, Texas, wild west

March 1, 2022 · 4:16 am

He Rose on a Golden Wing… Canto 5

**Debussy – Clair de Lune**

As a senior in high school, there were a few things that Valerie had to endure that were not such a terrible thing for the other girls. You see, the Belle City School District PTA put on a father/daughter dinner for all the senior girls every year, a tradition that went back eleven years. In it, the girls and their fathers would be given the royal treatment in the school cafeteria with a full meal courtesy of the PTA who did the majority of the cooking, aided by the senior mothers who did the serving and the every-thing-elsing. There would be some boring and semi-torturous entertainment from the music department, and then the dinner would culminate with the father/daughter dance.

But Valerie had no father.

Instead, she was stuck with Uncle Dash. Yes, the eldest of Grandpa Larry’s three kids, with Aunt Jen the middle child, and Daddy Kyle the youngest. *That* Uncle Dash. The farmer in the dell. Father to Brent and Stacy Clarke. But he had missed Stacy’s father/daughter dinner, and Stacy had ended up running away from home, possibly away from the whole State of Iowa. So, who would Mom ask to fill in for Daddy Kyle? Was there ever any doubt? The same monster who drove beloved cousin Stacy away forever because he couldn’t stand the Toad.

So, there she sat in the school cafeteria wearing the baby-blue evening dress that Mom and Aunt Jen had crafted for her with their semi-legendary sewing skills. Uncle Dash, dressed in his best Sunday suit and tie sat next to her.

“Val, can you pass me that pepper shaker?” Uncle Dash asked, pointing at the pepper beside Charlotte Robbins’s plate. It was ironically appropriate that the PTA wanted her to sit next to her worst enemy and the little fat man who was Charlotte’s father.

“Char? Can I have the pepper please?”

“Oh, Val, surely you know that, on a night like tonight, *everything belongs to you*.”

Charlotte plunked the shaker down in front of Valerie so hard that a cloud of pepper poofed up almost in Valerie’s face. If this were a cartoon show, Val would then be seized by a sneezing fit as the villainess laughed eerily. But this wasn’t a cartoon show, and thankfully Val was apparently immune to cartoonish sneezing fits brought on by malevolent clouds of pepper.

“Here you go, Uncle Dash,” Val said, gingerly sitting the pepper down in front of her uncle.

“Thank you, sweetheart. Did I tell you how beautiful you look tonight?”

“Only once at our house, three times in the pickup, and seven times since we’ve been here… not counting this one.”

“Oh, well… you know… you are beautiful. Kyle would be proud.”

She briefly turned her glare on him. But the tears in his eyes stifled that instantly. After all, Uncle Dash had loved his little brother in that stand-offish way Iowa farmers have of doing things and feeling things that farmers are not allowed to feel and do for some stupid reason.

And she knew that Uncle Dash blamed himself for Daddy when he… Damn! She didn’t want Charlotte Robbins seeing any tears. Especially not Valerie’s own tears. Then the little witch would pity her, and the last thing she wanted from old Baldy Greenskin was actual pity. Not from the enemy!

“Uncle Dash, I’m not feeling so well. I have a headache.”

“Oh, honey, the dance is about to start. I promised your mother and your Aunt Betty that I would dance at least one dance with you. Can’t you hang on just a little longer?”

She glanced at Charlotte who was making sheep’s eyes at David McLaughin who was sitting across the table from her with his older sister Carolyn, since his father was that workaholic that owned half of McLaughin Brothers Chevrolet.

“I can try. But it’s only going to get worse.”

He looked at her anxiously. It obviously meant more to him than it did to her that he had that one dance. He could probably never understand what it meant to her to be there without…

She tried to concentrate on the meal. She nibbled a little bit more of the chicken breast in yellow gravy. But food tasted no better than she felt on the inside. She ended up asking Alice Pedersen’s mom to take her plate away with most of the food still on it.

And then the dance music began. The first one… the one she had promised to Uncle Dash… was Bryan Adams’ song “*All I Want is You*.” Oh, gawd. Why did the DJ have to pick that one? It wasn’t a dance tune that Uncle Dash could really dance to. And the words cut into her like a knife. After all… who was the only one she wanted on this particular night?

She dutifully let Uncle Dash drag her out onto the dance floor, the clear rectangle of space left in the middle of all the rectangular tables in the school cafeteria. He immediately tried to get her to dance a wooden-legged waltz, the only dance he knew. She let herself be pulled around in a slow circle. It was like dancing with Pinocchio… if the puppet’s joints had an excessive amount of Elmer’s Glue jamming them up.

Charlotte, that witch, stood there on the dance floor staring and laughing. At least, she did until her own manic-midget father began doing a cross between the Chicken Dance and something the Monkees probably did on stage back in the 60’s.

“Uncle Dash! I have to go home. My head hurts.”

“Darling, we have almost finished the song. And I gave my word…”

“You don’t understand. I can’t do this anymore!”

“But Princess…”

That was it. The name her father had always called her when he was still…

Valerie fell to her knees in the middle of the dance floor.

She began to shout just as the song was ending so that everyone’s attention would be riveted on what Val was saying.

***“You are not my father! My Daddy’s dead. I can’t take it anymore! Take me home now!”***

“Please, Valerie… don’t… not here.”

***“Home, now!”***

Everyone was dead silent and staring. Even smug Charlotte now looked stunned and horrified.

“I know you blame me for not being there when… but I…” Uncle Dash was more distressed than he had even been that night when…

“No! I don’t blame you! I blame me! I didn’t see it coming! I didn’t do anything to stop him! And when I found him, the gun was laying right there next to his hand. It’s my fault.”

She raised her face to the ceiling.

Tears fell everywhere. They were all silent, watching.

Her face was the moon.

And it was a blue moon.

But hopefully there would never be another blue moon.

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Filed under Depression, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as He Rose on a Golden Wing

February 28, 2022 · 6:12 pm

Retooling the Cover

The cover I have been using for my current work in progress has some flaws in it. As you can probably see better than I can (because I am becoming increasingly colorblind,) the golden glow I tried to put on Valerie’s face with colored pencil is too heavy-handed, not subtle enough. So, I tried to smooth it out and blend it with the Windows Paint program. I also needed to do something about the blue frame and the rather wide title banner. The Amazon KDP Cover Creator has a tendency to cut off words and details if you are not careful enough about the distance between words and images that you need to appear on the cover and the potential edge of the cover. And I decided to use white over blue because the book is about battling suicidal depression. White is a more hopeful and positive color than blue which is usually associated with sadness and negative emotions. And I want this book to be an answer for depression, not a cause of it.

The cover probably still needs work. But I think it is getting better. You are certainly welcome to disagree, and the comments are open for you to say so. Input is a good thing, even if it is insulting. After all, no matter what else happens, some readers are going to hate this book. I hope more will love it.

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February 28, 2022 · 2:56 pm

Cartoonity

“My name is Michael Beyer, and I am an amateur cartoonist.”

“Hi, Michael!” says the entire group of CA group-therapy participants.

(CA stands for Cartoonists Anonymous.)

“I have to admit, I am guilty of giving in to the urge to draw cartoons. I know how it can fill lives with slapstick pain and derisive laughter, and I give in to the urge anyway.”

“So, what did you draw that you have to be ashamed of now?” asked one mad-eyed cartoonist with a pencil lodged behind each of his large ears.

“I made a very unfortunate video to post on YouTube that was supposed to be How-to-draw Cartooning. But everything went wrong. You couldn’t see my drawings in the video. It was not adequately lit. I look like a doofus (which probably can’t be cured) in the video. And instead of thinking twice or editing it, I posted it anyway.”

“Wow!” said a rather ugly cartoonist lady, “that is really bad. You have a seriously bad case of cartoonity.”

“Cartoonity?” I responded stupidly.

“The condition of needing love for your cartoons so bad that you will risk anything to make people look at them and like them,” said the wise group therapist (who looked an awful lot like Chuck Jones, though I am fairly sure Chuck Jones is now dead).

“Yes, I suppose that’s about the size of the problem,” I said. “I have been posting pages from my graphic novel, Hidden Kingdom, and I really haven’t seen more than one comment about it. Do people actually read cartoons and comics nowadays? Or is it just me that gets ignored?”

“You have to focus on how much you love drawing and doing it just for that reason, and nothing beyond that,” said the wise therapist. “Cartooning should be done for its own sake, and nothing more than that. Craving attention and approval for it can get seriously infected and become a bad case of cartoonititis. How do you think I dealt with it when I was still alive?”

At that point, my eyes popped out of my head in disbelief and my lower jaw fell all the way to the floor. Could he really be…?

And so I must end today’s blog post since it is hard to keep typing when your eyeballs are rolling around on the floor.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney

February 27, 2022 · 8:56 pm

Up and Down, Round and Round

The world goes from bad to worse,

And is it time to rent a hearse?

Or shall we ride the merry-go-round,

And let it take us up and down?

And shall we fear the screaming ducks?

Who watch us use their firetrucks?

To put out fires that they have set,

In swimming pools that should be wet?

Or should we run on small bare feet?

And hide ourselves in fields of wheat?

To quake and shake in our underwear,

At every passing Russian bear?,

We are not on an island

And we are not alone in the sand.

Coconut cream pie is tasty,

But nothing but that is hasty,

And living on hasty ain’t grand,

And deprivation is not what we planned.

I know this poem’s pretty awful,

But invading other lands isn’t lawful,

And riding on the merry-go-round ride,

Leaves the riders with no place to hide.

And you have to pay your pennies for the chance,

To go up and down in a trance.

I do, in fact, realize that this is bad poetry written by a pretty poor poet. But, as you can plainly see, I am not very pretty… and not poor now that my bankruptcy is paid off. (Having nothing, but not being in debt makes me richer than Trump.) But life in 2022 is no more poetic written in putrid prose either.

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Filed under feeling sorry for myself, humor, poetry

February 27, 2022 · 2:57 pm

The Toy Tiger

This is Baby Tiger. My daughter named her shortly after learning to talk.

I have a certain mania about hoarding old toys. My toys. My children’s toys. Other toys like abandoned toys from Goodwill and ReSale stores and liquidation toys from the bargain bins in Walmart and Toys-R-Us.

You see, the dependence on the importance in my life of people who are not real began with my own perceptions when the lights first went on in my little attic. Yes, my parents and my grandparents were real people. And I sometimes admitted, when forced, that my little sister was too. But so was Tagger, my own stuffed toy tiger.

This is not Tagger. This is a rare Stieff collectible. Tagger was loved to pieces.

I definitely treated him as my best friend and greatest confidant. I told him my troubles, and he protected me from monsters in bed at night. He often was included when I played with my sisters and their dolls. He was wise and brave and caring, and he talked with a voice that sounded very much like mine. In fact, I often think he was such a part of me that, when I no longer needed him in bed with me to help me sleep, I internalized him and he became a part of me. He did not meet his physical end until my parents had to leave Iowa and move to Texas while I was in grad school. What my sister did with his physical form, I really never wanted her to tell me. The house had to be cleaned out, and stuffed toys from the attic did not fair well.

Baby Tiger came into our lives in October of 1995.

I had almost given up ever being married and having a family when, at the age of 37, I finally fell in love, and then had a family, first of two, and then of three by the end of 1995. On the day my oldest son was born, as the doctor had told me to go home and get some sleep, I went to Walmart and bought a toy tiger. He was not orange like my Tagger, but white. He was about the same size as Tagger, and significantly larger than my infant son. Truthfully, neither number one son or number two son actually played with him. They slept with him and used him as a pillow, but they never even gave him a name. It was my daughter, my youngest child, who took him over and made him into a her. She named her Baby Tiger, loved her, talked to her, carried her around everywhere, and miraculously never loved her to pieces to the point that we don’t still have her 24 years later. The photos of her prove the miracle.

I am not Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame. But I do understand the importance of toy tigers. They help to make you who you are. And while they are technically not real people, technically you could argue, “Yes, they are too real!” and argue it very loudly. Of course, people will think you are a crazy fool if you do. But I doubt that changes anybody’s mind about Mickey.

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February 26, 2022 · 6:23 pm