I continue to believe bankers, health insurance companies, and corporate leaders are all pirates. The gentleman of the sea dressed all in red in this picture is Black Timothy, bombastic and barely comprehensible leader of the pirates of Fantastica.
The truth is I am a bit of a cartoonist. Don’t worry. It is not a completely horrible and detestable thing to be. Not like being a pirate… or a banker… or worse, a pirate banker. It leads me to do cartoons like you will find in my vault, here…
It is a basically incurable disease, and yet… I can live with it. It will not kill me like some of my other incurable diseases eventually will.
So today’s post, keeping alive an unbroken string of daily posts that now goes back 16 months, is a picture post. I hope you like it, but if you don’t, another one will come along soon enough.
This is an oil portrait of me and David. I can probably no longer create a picture like this. My arthritic hands are not steady enough anymore to blend shadow colors, especially in clothing.
My personal connections to the 1800’s died in 1980 with the loss of Great Grandma Hinckley.Much of my connection to the bucolic days of family farms is gone too. I am a part owner now of the family farm, but it is being farmed by a renter. and I only get to visit once a year, which hasn’t happened during one of the two years of pandemic.
I will never return to the classroom as a teacher again. Not even as a sub. I am no longer physically capable of doing the job. Most people don’t realize how tough a job it truly is.
When I pass on, my connection to the future will also be gone… At least to all the parts of me that are not confined to words in a book.
My super powers are fading, even the incredibly bad smell that makes criminals pass out during combat.
I am slowly going color-blind.
Fortunately, my kids can carry the family name onwards.
I am fascinated by the darker alleyways in the city of human thought. I love monster movies, those love-story tragedies where the monster is us with one or more of our basic flaws pumped up to the absolute maximum. We are all capable of becoming a monster. There are consequences to every hurtful thing we have ever thought or ever said to other people, especially the people we love.
The monster movies I love most are the old black and whites from Universal Studios. But I can also seriously enjoy the monsters of Hammer Films, and even the more recent remakes of Frankenstein, The Mummy, and their silly sequels. I am fascinated by the Creature from the Black Lagoon because it is the story of a total outsider who is so different he can’t really communicate with the others he meets. All he can do is grab the one that attracts him and strike out at those who cause him pain. It occurs to me that I am him when having an argument with my wife. Sometimes I am too intelligent and culturally different to talk to her and be understood. She gets mad at me and lashes out at me because when I am trying to make peace she thinks I am somehow making fun of her. How do you convince someone of anything if they always think your heartfelt apology is actually sarcasm? How do you share what’s in your heart if they are always looking for double meaning in everything you say?
But other people can change into monsters too. I am not the only one. People who are bitter about how their life seems to have turned out can strike out at others like the Mummy. Wrapped in restrictive wrappings of what they think should have been, and denied the eternal rest of satisfaction over the way the past treated them, they attack with intent to injure, even just with hurtful words, because their past sins have animated them with a need to change the past, though the time is long past when they should’ve let their bitterness simply die away.
And we might all of us fall into the trap of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, who never asked to be made. He finds life to be an unmanageable nightmare with others constantly assaulting him with the pitchforks and torches of their fear and rejection.
But the thing about monster movies… at least the good ones, is that you can watch it to the end and see the monster defeated. We realize in the end that the monster never really wins. He can defeat the monstrous qualities within himself and stop himself. Or the antidote to what ails him is discovered (as Luke did with Darth Vader). Or we can see him put to his justifiable end and remember that if we should see those qualities within ourselves, we should do something about it so that we do not suffer the same fate. Or, better yet, we can learn to laugh at the monstrosity that is every-day life. Humor is a panacea for most of life’s ills.
Yes, Mary Ann, Gilligan, and Ginger… but also Ysandra, Me, and Abigail
I suppose if you look at my blog regularly and don’t just look in on it once and swear off coming here for the rest of the life of our galaxy, you have probably realized that I live and die for cartoons and metaphors.
Seriously, the cartoon above is Mary Ann and Ginger with Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island, a TV show I watched far more often in afternoon syndication as a Belmond Junior High student at the start of the 70’s than I did when it was originally on in the 60’s and I wasn’t watching with high levels of hormonal lust in my brain.
This Rabbit with the Big Pencil is teacher-me, Reluctant Rabbit.
In the Fall of 1981 I began teaching Language Arts to eighth graders in Frank Newman Junior High of Cotulla, Texas. On the very first day of my teaching career, in the third period of the day, one of my somewhat stupid but probably also slightly evil male students announced to class, “Hey, you look like Gilligan!”
The show on TV, of course, was still running in the afternoons in syndication. And because the student thought I looked like the actor Bob Denver, and because he probably thought they could all manipulate me as a fool like the TV Gilligan was a fool manipulated by others on the island, my classroom would become known as Gilligan’s Island.
Ironically, in a few more years, about 1985, I ended up with basically two girlfriends. Mary Ann, the one I was actually chasing, was the teacher’s aide in my classroom who helped by translating all the bad words in Spanish used daily on the “Island.” And Ginger, the one that was chasing me, was the rookie Reading Teacher for whom I was the unofficial mentor since she was the white girl from Wisconsin who could only get the boys to settle down because she was good looking in their little brains filled with hormonal lust. Technically I dated both of them, because I asked Mary Ann out repeatedly, and she said yes to me for lack of anything better to do. I took Ginger places because she was my next-door neighbor at the apartment house, and she did not own a car of her own. And Mary Ann let me go on dates that Ginger asked me out on as long as we never talked about it using the noun “date” as something other than the sugary fruit that comes from a date palm.
Naturism became a synonym for innocence in my mind.
Mary Ann didn’t like the noun “girlfriend” either, whether I meant Ginger or herself. She had been unhappily married before, and liked me better as a friend with no permanent attachments.
Mary Ann was also responsible for introducing me to nudists and naturists. Her sister who was deaf lived in Austin at a “clothing optional” apartment complex with her husband and child. It was a culture shock for me when we went to Austin for the weekend to see the musical “Cats.” I didn’t have to stay there since my parents lived in nearby Taylor, Texas. But after leaving her there on Friday night, I had to enter the place to pick her up again on Saturday. Oh my! Naked people! And not just hairy guys and fat women, but young ladies and kids in the pool too. I talked to some of them. They were all open and friendly, though they were sort of 70’s hippie-types. Mary Ann and I made a number of weekend trips to Austin, and I got to know the place well, though always exercising the “clothing” option. I began corresponding with one couple because of a mutual interest in stamp collecting. They put me in touch with a couple that sold naturist publications and traded stamps who also ran a naturist resort in Florida. They definitely got me into philately, but they also predicted that one day I would embrace naturism too. I have to confess, the roots of the obsession were already there before I got to know any of them.
I actually only saw one of the two “girlfriends” naked in the five year period I spent time with them both, and I didn’t marry either young woman. But I played the part of Reluctant Rabbit holding the Big Pencil (a metaphor that obviously stands for teaching ability) on the Island for 23 years. Those cartoonish ideas all came together to make me who I am. And I laugh about it… long and hard… with no regrets. I really kinda like who I am.
The “Mickey” in me is the cartoonist and story-teller I became on retiring in 2014.
I am writing this post today to celebrate two things. My doctor’s visit today not only came back with positive post-op results (no cancer cells in the cyst), but it was free. And while I waited at Walmart for my prescription to be filled at the pharmacy, I found the two Equestria Girls that finish my collection. I spent the co-pay (that I didn’t have to pay) on Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy (I made that rhyme without a try!) Yay me!
But I have also come to the sobering realization that my collecting mania may actually be a form of mental illness. After all, my daughter is now 20 and not really interested in My Little Pony any longer. That excuse no longer flies. My wife has lost interest in collecting also (although she still collects clothes and shoes with a gusto that shames Imelda Marcos.)
So why do I do this collecting thing so relentlessly? Is it a serious mental disorder? As always I turned to the internet to diagnose myself with life-threatening conditions based on one, or possibly two symptoms. I may be doomed. What I found was an explanation of Hoarding Disorder.
Yes, I inherited it from Grandma Beyer. She hoarded all sorts of stuff in her little house in Mason City, Iowa. In her basement, when they cleaned out the house, she still had wrapping paper from Christmases in the 1930’s. It was in stacks. neatly folded and ready to be re-used. According to the Psychology Today website article about extreme collecting, one of the first signs of the disorder is the inability to part with personal possessions no matter their actual value. Never in all the years we spent Christmases together did I ever notice Grandma re-using wrapping paper. She actually kept that stuff for the memories they invoked and the sentimental value they held for her. My mother ended up throwing out all that wrapping paper when the house was sold.
Another indicator is the extreme cluttering of the home, to the point of rendering living spaces unlivable. One glance at the upstairs hallway sends shivers down my weak little hoarder’s spine.
There are any number of things that might concern a psychiatrist in this hallway. Of course, the blocked door in the back is where the old non-working air-conditioner is stashed, so there is no room in there for stuffing more stuff. This picture reveals that I have a vast collection of collections… not merely one. I collect stuffed toys, HO model railroad stuff and trains, Pez dispensers, stamps, coins, comic books (in the boxes in the back corner under the stuffed toys), and books… gobs, and gobs, and gobs of books! (“Gobs” is Iowegian for “lots”, not “sailors”.) In fact, the door on the left is actually the door to the library.
A quick scan of Toonerville along the tops of the bookshelves reveals the full extent of my madness. Here you see HO-sized buildings, most of which I painted myself or built from kits. You also see the Pez dispensers that suck money out of my pockets at $1.50 a shot. My trains have been around for many years. I shared that obsession with my father (Grandma Beyer’s eldest son) when I was a boy and most of these trains were either gifts from him, or purchased with allowance. (I haven’t bought anything new in seven years.)
So, the evidence makes it clear. One day soon I will be locked up somewhere in a padded room. I hope, at least, that my children still like me well enough to sneak in Pez dispensers when they come to visit.
This is my most recent illustration for He Rose on a Golden Wing.
His name is Clovis. He is either a faun, or a ghost of boy who killed himself. But he is not real. He is only seen and heard by the main characters because they ate some marijuana-laced brownies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But the thing about monster movies… at least the good ones, is that you can watch it to the end and see the monster defeated. We realize in the end that the monster never really wins. He can defeat the monstrous qualities within himself and stop himself. Or the antidote to what ails him is discovered (as Luke did with Darth Vader). Or we can see him put to his justifiable end and remember that if we should see those qualities within ourselves, we should do something about it so that we do not suffer the same fate. Or, better yet, we can learn to laugh at the monstrosity that is every-day life. Humor is a panacea for most of life’s ills.
Catch a Falling Star 