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
Simple Christmas Gifs
No, that is not a typo. I only meant “gifts” in pun form. Sometimes you don’t feel much like talking and, after all, the “picture can be worth a thousand words”, especially if the picture moves.
As you can see, I am spending the day with the Ghost of Christmases Past. Have a wonderful holiday, however you may celebrate it. I will offer more goofy stuff by Mickey after the Ghost of Christmases Future gets done with me.
Filed under Uncategorized
Writing Every Day
Teachers of serious writing will often tell you… or more correctly, give you the Word of God, “You want to be a good writer? You have to write every single day.” And having been a teacher of writing at the high school and middle school level, I am committed to passing that on to you also as the inviolable Word of God. You see, I have long been, well, not a serious writer exactly, more of a dedicated writer with warped notions of reality and a tendency towards goofiness. You can see by the view of my WordPress insights page that I have steadily, in five years’ time, been noticed and looked at by increasing amounts of thoroughly duped WordPress viewers.
10,373 visitors have viewed something on my blog 17,383 times in 2017. And I know that most are looking at the pictures and moving on. That’s how I get away with writing some of the stupid stuff I post on my blog. But there’s a secret to that too. I drew or painted a lot of the pictures I use on this blog myself. You would think that sooner or later some expert psychologist would trace violence in the streets back to my pictures as the ultimate cause, but that hasn’t happened yet. I am sure that is mostly because not even the psychologists can muck their way through my paragraphs of purple paisley prose. You see, I most often use my writing on this blog to commit atrocities of humor and wit. I only rarely dabble in things intended to be uplifting, spiritual, politically challenging, or sentimental. I complain on my blog a lot. It is also a place for expressing my inherent grumpiness and old-man dyspeptic irritations with life. But viewers tend to take my humor seriously and only laugh at the stuff I am most embarrassed about.
I was supposed to be doing this blog as way to promote my book, Catch a Falling Star, for I-Universe Publishing. They set it up for me. But, as they don’t pay me anything for the work I put into it, and it doesn’t really impact sales anyway, I use it now as writing practice. I have as a personal goal to write 500 words a day. The blog counts. So it means that some days, the 500 words I write in my blog are the only words I get written that day. Though, now that I am retired, 500 words of blog writing plus 500 words of novel writing can get me well past writing 1000 words in a day. It doesn’t take long at that rate to build up an awful lot of words. I shudder to think what would happen if the word dam were to suddenly give way, releasing a word-flood of monumental proportions. Half of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex would drown in Mickian words if that were to happen.
So, do I think that you should write every day? Do I think it makes you a better writer? Do I actually follow my own advice? Yes! To all three. And as I have passed the 500 word mark yet again, I can stop now.
The Smiles We Cherish, the Faces We Miss
“December is a time of year when we used to think about family. What gifts to buy and who they were for… Looking at the lights in the neighborhood and thinking, “How can they afford all that electricity?” Already having the tree up and debating how long it will stay viable after New Year’s Day… And then we became Jehovah’s Witnesses and celebrating Christmas and birthdays made God hate us and want to destroy us… No, that’s not how they actually say it, but they don’t like holidays never-the-less…And so, we overcompensate and buy kids gifts at random times and end up spoiling them more than the once-a-year crowd does their kids… But the point was always to let the important people in your life know that they were impprtant and were loved.
Children grow up, however, and eventually move on to their own lives and their own families. And the generations above us that always took care of us and looked down with smiles upon us get too old to continue… And we must say the permanent goodbyes… And you have to leave the job you love because your own life has become fragile and desperately at risk… And you discover you no longer believe that someone can reward you with everlasting life if only you are careful to only say the right god-approved words… But that’s okay. We don’t really want to live forever if we are being honest with outselves. Life is good. But like a good book, it needs to have a beginning, middle, and end.
And so, we must make the effort to light up the smiles of those we love while we have the opportunity, and look back on the faces never-to-be-forgotten of those who meant the most to us, and not to overlook the near-forgotten and those we too often value far less than we should… But most of all be thankful that this world we live in and our chance to live in it happened at all. It didn’t have to happen. But it did. And there would’ve been nothing if it hadn’t happened. God bless you. Be Happy. The Universe is unfolding as it should… And word-salad like this is tastiest in Merry Christmas salad dressing.
Filed under Uncategorized
Cries of the Writing Addict
For the last five and a half years I have been averaging more than 500 words every day. A rough conservative estimate of that means 17,112,000 words. If words were cocaine, I’d be dead five times over by now.
But writing is not the same as cocaine. The addiction to it has very different effects. I divide my daily writing into at least two parts. The daily blog is itself, more often than not, 500-plus words. So, by itself it can satisfy my daily word-count. And I devote at least 500 words every day to my novel work in progress. So, that means I have produced well over 17 million words in reality. Probably closer to 34 million than to 17. That, of course, is far less than Stephen King wrote in the same period of time, but it is also far more than the average person writes.
And one thing that such an overdose of verbiage does to a writer, is to make him or her a better writer.
I have produced nine novels, between 35,000 and 50,000 words each, in the time since I retired from teaching and began writing and self-publishing in earnest. I have gotten only five-star reviews on the novels that have been read and reviewed. Granted, nobody who read and hated my books hated them passionately enough to leave a scathing review, so the 5-star average is just due to laziness on the part of the reading public. But it is marginally evidence that my storytelling is good.
Another effect I have experienced from my writing addiction is that it has made me increasingly metaphorically naked. My illustrations for this post reveal a little bit of that. It is not only that I like to write in the nude when I can, but that I have used my stories to grapple with everything that was once a deep, dark secret buried in the depths of me. Being sexually assaulted as a child was something that for many years I could never admit even to myself. Struggles with loneliness, depression, and self-hatred are also something I had kept buried until I needed them to tell stories with.
I finally worked up the courage to send a gift copy of Snow Babies to the girl I grew up with whose name I used for the main character, Valerie Clarke. Valerie loved the book and became an advocate for me with both the Belmond and Rowan libraries. I even admitted that the part about Valerie being the most beautiful girl ever born in Norwall, Iowa came from something the boys in our 5th and 6th grade classes at school all said about her. She told me she never knew we had said that back then. Ah, but that was probably an untruth too.
As addictions go, my addiction to fiction is probably a lot better thing to have than addictions to gambling, cocaine, wife-beating, or gummy bears. But it hasn’t made me any richer or healthier either. It has made me older, and possibly a little bit wiser.
Random Thoughts Typed on a New Computer
My old computer finally gets a rest in its old age. I went out and spent some of my farm income on a new computer. It is a Chromebook laptop. I can hear the groans from readers already. Yes, it has all the drawbacks of a Chromebook computer with the added negative that I have to learn a whole new operating system. I got spoiled by Windows 10 on the last two laptops. And I can’t store my usual plethora of images and documents directly on the Chromebook’s limited harddrive.
Oh, well! The Arizona Cardinals are winning again. They have the best record in the NFL right now at 10 wins, 2 losses. And star players Kyler Murray and DeAndre Hopkins are both returned from injuries. And Colt McCoy proved he was a superior back-up quarterback while Murray was out. Either some really good things or a huge disappointment lie directly ahead. You know me. I am preparing already for the playoff loss in the first round.
I am enjoying the new work-in-progress. The Necromancer’s Apprentice is really flowing and coming together in amazing ways. It is possible that the fairy pictured above is actually helping me write it. But as I reread each chapter, it definitely sounds like me. So, she must be doing a really good job of imitating my style while, at the same time, typing with her feet..
My two sisters and I have got the farm paperwork pretty much under control. My sister Nancy is now retired and living on the farm place that my great grandfather established in the 1860’s. It is a joint ownership between me, Nancy, and Mary. The productive farmland is being farmed by a local farmer who needs to grow more crops to make ends meet than his own farmland provides. So, we get to collect rent, own the family farm, and help feed the world with corn and soybeans.
I continue to roll Moosewinkles at bowling pins and knock enough of them down to win at Moose Bowling… for now. You never know what tomorrow will bring. Maybe Moosewinkles guilty of over-eating, or bowling pins made of concrete.
Moose Bowling
Life is like Moose Bowling. In order to knock down all the pins and win, you have to learn how to throw a moose. (Yes, that’s what it says in the cartoon above.)
So, it is good to have a new computer. I wrote this post with fewer glitches to repair and curse words to shout than I have with any other post in the last five years. Life is good again. At least, for now.
Filed under Uncategorized
Aliens Among Us
Now, in older age, I am beginning to understand the life and work of Stephen Hawking better than ever before. I mean, he ended his life completely unable to move by his own muscle power, but his mind traveled light years and saw things that most of us can’t even begin to understand. My own muscle power is decreasing. Arthritis is confining me more and more to sitting on my bed with my laptop being my means of exploring the universe. That and the power of my imagination (a puny little thing compared to Hawking’s massive one.)
http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/epsilon-eridani-system-04831.html
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/system-of-super-earths-discovered-around-a-nearby-star
The truth is, one of my irrational religious beliefs is that we are not alone in the universe. First of all, there are definitely planets of earth-like composition, size, and position around two neighboring sun-like stars. The two articles I linked to above give you some insight about what we currently know about Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti.
Now, information like that goes automatically into my mental salad bowl of imagination where it gets mixed with vegetables of prior learning and gets covered by the salad dressing of fiction-generating speculation (which tastes like spicy Italian.)
So, here’s some prior learning salted with speculations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001
Yes, you probably recognize it. There was a Martian meteor found in the Arctic that had in it structures that look amazingly like fossilized bacteria. I know that you can say with some conviction that it hasn’t been generally accepted by science that these are indeed fossilized lifeforms from Mars. But it also has not been proven that are ordinary geological formations, and scientists do generally agree that the Allan Hills 84001 meteorite is actually blasted off the surface of Mars in the distant past. I can’t summarize easily the geological proof of that fact, but you can certainly do the research online yourself.
So the syllogism goes like this;
- Life is not only possible but probable elsewhere in the universe.
- Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti are both places where there are probable places conducive to evolving life.
- Therefore those two planetary neighbors in our galactic neighborhood are highly likely to have life. And if they have life, they may also have intelligent life like us.
Because of what the former Israeli space security chief said about a Galactic Federation of aliens recently, I searched out and watched a video by Linda Moulton Howe (the formerly award-winning ecological journalist who is now labelled a “kook” because she turned her attention to UFOs after doing a documentary about cattle mutilations in the Southwest.) In this video, an Anonymous video that I could not share here for the usual reasons, Howe went over a transcript of a briefing Ronald Reagan got from CIA chief William Casey in which they discussed what Majestic 12 knew about alien visitors. They were explicit about the EBEs we made contact with as a result of the two Roswell crashes of 1947. They come from a twin-sun system called Zeta Reticuli. And they acquainted us with at least three other extraterrestrial peoples who are now and long-time have been visiting Earth. One of those is a potentially hostile race believed to be from Epsilon Eridani.
Now, of course, like any religious belief, I can’t prove anything except by faith. Although, based on a large number of events, investigations, and anomalous artifacts, there is probably more proof of my beliefs than there are that Jesus was real. But, consider this, they always point out that if the government was trying to keep this secret from us… well, the government is really bad at keeping secrets. So, where are the aliens?
Well, Nixon showed them to Jackie Gleason in the 1970s.
The government hasn’t kept any secrets very well. Not the U-2, not the SR-71 Blackbird, not the Stealth Fighter… not even the Manhattan Project which the Russians duplicated within a decade. The Roswell crash, the Travis Walton abduction, Eisenhower’s 1950s meeting with aliens at Holliman Air Force Base, all of these things are documented and witnessed to by enough journalists, physicists, soldiers, government officials, deathbed confessions, and whistle-blowers to not be easy to dismiss as lunacy.
So, I say again, I am convinced we are not alone in the universe. I also think they are here already and the government knows that. I have seen UFOs more times than I have fingers, though I know most of them belong to our government. I live in Texas, the home of military air-bases and more nuclear plants than is comfortable. I am not saying I can prove anything. If I could, it would already probably be censored by now and you wouldn’t be reading this. Lying to the public is one thing the government is really good at.
Don’t Think Too Much
These days my head works overtime, filling itself up with memories, fears, complicated notions, and problems that need to be solved.
Today I need to uncomplicate the clutter in the entryway to the thinking room (what you might call a study) in the quaint little labyrinth of my stupidly dense and moronic, overworked little mind.
Today I am simply going to re-compose my 1965 letter to Santa to ask for things I should’ve wanted, rather than the junk I asked for.
Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots! Yes! Those would help me relieve that 9-year-old’s stress I earned by a foolish insistance on spelling words the way they sounded instead of the way that would get it right on Miss Mennenga’s spelling tests.
Punching things more might’ve made it easier to cope with a 9-year-old life.
But there are things in the 1965 Monkey Ward’s Christmas Catalog I saw, and maybe would’ve played with more than the G.I. Joe junk I was obsessed with, and would’ve been better for me in the long run. The rubber G.I. Joe scuba suit I got that Christmas melted a couple of years later in the box I was keeping it in when I left it on the back window ledge of the 1961 Ford Fairlane. I could’ve tried…
Gumby, dammit!
He wouldn’t have melted. He would’ve simply galvanized into a brick-hard substance that would never bend again, the way my little sister’s red Gumby did a couple of years later. Maybe a brick hard green Gumby couldn’t have been played with either. But it would’ve been useful for throwing at sisters when I was mad.
And I could’ve gotten my own Barbie and Ken.
Then I wouldn’t have had to borrow my sister’s dolls to look at them naked and marvel at how much they didn’t look like real people naked. Or practice making hangmen’s nooses from bright-colored yarn, sentence them to hang by the neck from the bottom rails of the upper bunk, and blame it all on my little brother. (Really he should get all the credit anyway, since he and my littlest sister actually got caught doing it the first time by my other sister, and I just stole the whole idea from him.)
I definitely could’ve learned more about the world of 3-D cartoon characters if I’d gotten one of these. In fact, we, the four of us kids, did get one two Christmases later. I know a heckuva lot about 3-D Woody Woodpecker, looking at those six discs a thousand times each.
And building toys like these kept us fascinated for hours.
And we argued for hours more whenever Mickey built a helicopter or a submarine or a windmill that he didn’t want the other three to take apart again to build something else.
This thing was great at teaching patience and focus. You wouldn’t believe how easily the pen would slip, or the little gear teeth wouldn’t mesh properly. The few bad words I actually knew in 1967 got practiced too often for these very reasons. It would be two more years in the future that we got one of these to share too.
In 1965, Dear Santa, you should’ve thought more about how to train an evil little mind than how to make a little G.I. Joe-obsessed boy happy.
Although, you sure did get it right in 1966 with that Mercury Capsule for G.I. Joe.
Filed under autobiography, nostalgia, oldies, playing with toys
The Necromancer’s Apprentice… Canto 10
Derfentwinkle’s Headache
Once Master Eli placed the Magic Hat on my head, I immediately felt something probing deeply into my brain. It wasn’t some passive little look-see either. It was a painfully grinding drilling sensation that caused a massive pain between my eyes.
“Ah, you have been abused, child,” said a voice from within the hat. “You must forgive me, but I will have to remove the life-draining sex spells and take away your memories of Kronomarke’s insidious abuse.”
“Help yourself,” I silently told the voice in my head with my own voice in my head.
The memories of the naked necromancer hitting me and harming me began to dry up, shrivel, and disappear from my conscious memory. I was not unhappy to see them float away into darkness.
But I was no longer seeing the room in the Sorcerer’s Tower where I knew I physically still was. Instead, around me there was little beyond darkness.
Then the darkness parted and a glowing white stag, a white male deer with an eighteen-point rack of horns and an extremely regal bearing walked up to me. Towered over me, in fact.
“Child, speak your name.” He spoke directly into my head without any lips moving or obvious speech forming in his deer mouth.
“But that will give you power over me.”
“I already have that. I am here to help you, not do you further harm.”
“I am Derfentwinkle the lowly necromancer’s fifth apprentice. But who are you?”
“I am what you might call a demigod. I was the master and teacher of the wizard Dezmodotto. And I am the friend of Eli Tragedy. If you must name me, I am called Father of Many Erlkings.”
“That’s impressive.”
“I have no need to impress you. I am only here to help you.”
“How will you do that?”
“I have already cleansed your memory of most of the badness that Kronomarke has taught you. He is an evil man. You must not return to him. I will make certain that you continue to belong to Master Eli.”
“Like a slave?”
“Like a daughter. And I will give him to you as a father.”
I was stunned. No one had ever been so kind before. And his voice filled me with warmth and confidence. It would be right because Father… of Many Erlkings, made it so.
“Is Eli Tragedy really magical?”
“You ask because your magic intuitions tell you most of his magical effects are really Slow-One science and technology disguised as sorcery. You are a true wizard, and Eli is a very clever manipulator of many things.”
“Um, yes, I… guess so…”
“You must listen to him well and learn his ways. They will make you stronger.”
“Yes, okay…”
“And I sent the crows Homer and Bert to be your familiar… one of the two, at any rate.”
“Why full-sized crows?”
“You will need to ride them as steeds in the air. And they can be quite entertaining, those two.”
“And what is it that I feel you have put into my head?”
“Spells, beloved. Spells to keep you and yours safe. And help along the quest I must give you.”
“What are these spells you speak of?”
“You will need to discuss them with the apprentice Bob. He is known to me as a very wise and capable young man. He will transcribe them on parchment for you so that you may learn them in the way of non-necromantic wizards.”
“Can you tell me now what the spells are? By name?”
“The ones I am allowing you to keep from your necromantic training are the Ghost-Light Spell, The Turning Spell of the Undead, and the reverse of the Harming Spell, which in your hands will instead be a Healing Spell.”
“And the ones I don’t already know?”
“The Spell of Gingerbread Summoning, The Fairy-Resizing Spell, the Spell of Water-Breathing, the Alter Shape Spell, The Spell of Slow-One Summoning, The Witch-Armor Spell of Zam the Leaf-Witch, and the Spell of Storybook Summoning. These will go into your spell-book as Bob helps you translate and write it.”
“Why am I worthy to be treated in this way by a demigod? I came here to kill the fairies of Cair Tellos.”
“That is why you were sent here, but it is not why you came here and fell into the care of Eli Tragedy.”
“Thank you, Father…”
I felt faint. Everything changed around me.
“Um, I am not feeling well,” I said. “Can I lie down and sleep a little?”
I fell into someone’s arms and I was lost in the softness of deep sleep.
Filed under fairies, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Catch a Falling Star 