Don’t make the mistake of thinking I have any earthly idea where writing comes from or how it began. I am only talking personal history here, nothing grander or more meaningful. This post is only self-referential hoo-haw, which is a fancy way of interpreting “conceited crap”.
So, the truth is, I am writing about Charles Dickens because he is the author I most want to become. True, I rant on and on about Twain and his humor. And a good deal of my artwork owes everything to Disney, but everything I am good at in writing is based on Dickens.
The first actual Dickens novel that I read was accomplished during my extended illness as a high school sophomore. I read in bed, both at home and in the hospital, from my library copy of The Old Curiosity Shop. I was enthralled by the journey and subsequent tragedy of Little Nell. I thoroughly loathed the villain Daniel Quilp and was roundly thrilled by his well-deserved fatal comeuppance. It was my first encounter with the master of characters. I followed that reading with a biography of Dickens that revealed to me for the first time that his characters were based on real people. Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield was actually Dickens’ own father. Little Nell was the cousin he dearly loved who died in his arms. The crafty Fagin was a caricature of a well-known fence named Soloman, a Jew of infamous reputation, but not without his redeeming quality of caring for the orphaned poor. So it is that I have chosen to make my silly stories about real people in much the same way Dickens did. If you are now worried that since you know me, you may end up in my books, never fear. I change names and splice characters together. You will have to make an effort to recognize yourself. And, besides, nobody reads my books anyway.
I also like the way Dickens uses young characters and follows them over time as they grow and change. Oliver Twist was the first child protagonist in English literature. David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, and Pip in Great Expectations are also like that. David Copperfield, in fact, is Chuck’s own fictionalized self. I fully intend to do the same. It is the reason my books fall into the Young Adult category. I also intend to employ the same kind of gentle, innocent humor that Dickens used. I mean to portray things that are funny in a disarming, absurdist way rather than resorting to attack humor and bad words.
There it is, then, my tribute to Charles Dickens, a writer who makes me be who I am and write what I write. I am not supposed to do Christmas posts because of my avowed religion, but you can consider this to be as close as I can come. The author of A Christmas Carol… it doesn’t get much more Christmassy than that.
Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Walt Disney, and Edgar Allen Poe (the four clowns depicted above) all probably had times in their writing life when they didn’t really have anything to write about. Charles Dickens couldn’t think of anything but his time in the boot-black factory and the misery he felt as a child raised in poverty. So, what did he do? He created Wilkins Micawber as a stand-in for his ne’er-do-well father who always believed, “Something will presently turn up.” And he wrote the semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield.
William Shakespeare didn’t actually write anything with his grade-school education and limited knowledge of the world. But when the Earl of Oxford who used his name as a nom de plume could think of nothing, he thought of ending it all, and the “To-be-or-not-to-be…” play, Hamlet, poured out of his quill pen onto paper.
And when Walt Disney rode the train in defeat, having lost his best comic character for cartoons, Oswald the Rabbit, to his old boss, he doodled a mouse and named him Mickey, even providing Mickey’s falsetto voice for decades on the silver screen. Oh, and claiming the rights to any further characters his studios produced… to this day.
Poe looked at the bust over his chamber door… and saw a raven. Instantly, NEVERMORE.
Now it’s Mickey’s turn to write about nothing, and try to live up to the nothing-masters’ artistic masterpieces of yore. For instance, the boy in the picture. I drew him from a nude model in a black-and-white photo. Nobody in class, not even the one who brought the picture, ever told me his name. And the class was forty-four years ago now. So, assuming the picture wasn’t old back then, the boy is now older than fifty-four, and possibly significantly older than that now. So it is a picture of a nude nobody in front of an abandoned house in the snow however-many years ago in a place that is probably nowhere now. And I won’t even mention the imaginary puzzle pieces floating through the air for nobody to put together. What’s that? I just mentioned them? What did I mention? They are really just nothing.
So, there is a time and a place for writing about everything. Even if that everything includes nothing… and that nothing is nowhere… and is about nobody.
If you have the bad habit of reading this particular blog more than once, then you are probably aware that I used to be a public school teacher. Even worse, I used to be a middle school English teacher. Aagh! Seventh graders! It explains a lot about how life has warped my intelligence, personality, and world view. It also explains somewhat where I found such a fountain-like source for some of the worst jokes you ever heard.
Now, as to the question of why I have chosen in my retirement early-onset senility to become a humor-blogger… well, that is simply not something I can answer in one post… or even a thousand. But kids are the source of my goofball clown-brain joking around.
Kid-humor, you see, is stunted and warped in weird ways by the time period you are talking about. The eighties, nineties, two thousands, and the tens are all very different. And those are the various sets of students that I attempted to learn moose bowling from by teaching them English.
Still, there are certain universal constants.
Potty humor really kills. If you want to make a thirteen-year-old crack up with laughter, roll around on the floor, and maybe wet his or her pants, then you only need to work the “poop” word, or the “nickname for Richard” word, or the “Biblical word for donkey” word into the conversation. Of course the actual words, even though we all know what they actually are, are magical words. If you actually say them to kids in school as their teacher, those words can actually make you magically and permanently disappear from the front of the classroom. All kids are big fans of George Carlin and his seven words, even though most of them have never heard of him.
And violent humor is popular with kids from all decades. The most common punch line in the boys’ bathroom is, “… and then he kicked him in the Biblical word for donkey!” followed closely in second place by, “… and then she kicked him in the Biblical word for donkey!” I am told (for I don’t actually go in such scary places myself) that in the girls’ bathroom the most popular punch line is, “…so I kicked him right in the soccer balls, and he deserved it!” Why girls are apparently obsessed with soccer, I don’t know… or particularly care.
So my education in humor began with bad-word jokes, slapstick humor, put-downs, and rude noises coming from unfortunate places. Humor in the classroom is actually a metaphorical mine field laced with tiger traps, dead-falls that end with an anvil hitting you on the head, or being challenged to a life-or-death game of moose bowling. (Don’t know what moose bowling is? Moose bowling is a very difficult game that, in order to knock down all the pins and win, you have to learn to roll a moose down the alley.) Sounds like I spend too much time watching cartoons and playing video games, doesn’t it? Well, there’s more. And it gets worse from here. But I will spare you that until the next time I am foolish enough to try making excuses for my really bad jokes.
This holiday season has not been all blues and depression as I have probably been sounding like in this blog this week.
It is true that the still-progressing pandemic has been rather hard and grueling on me and mine. Since it began I have lost both parents, though neither caught the disease itself, and the impacts on funerals and family support of each other has been difficult. I also lost a cousin, two friends from high school, and possibly an uncle on the Beyer side that we haven’t heard from since before it all started (his surviving children and their families don’t have our contact information, and we don’t have theirs.)
But it never pays to only put the dark things on the scale, and ignore the side where happiness goes.
I have had a lot of good gingerbread to eat, and , ooh, boy! Pumpkin pie!
I got to see Spiderman, No Way Home with my kids in the theater. And I got to see the whole Hawkeye series on Disney +.
Both of those stories were epic and made my comic-book-loving heart warm and happy.
I have become a third-part owner of the family farm in Iowa, the farm where my Grandma and Grandpa Aldrich lived when I was a child and spent a considerable part of every Thanksgiving week and every Christmas week there I and my two sisters successfully bought our brother’s share, and the farm will continue to be a part of our family into the future. The older of my two sisters is now living on the place and managing the farm, though a renter actually grows things on the farm.
My mother’s final Christmas gift turned out to be an inheritance large enough to pay off property taxes and finish off my Chapter 13 bankruptcy. I was also able to replace my failing computer and old cell phone.
So, of the three Christmas ghosts, the Ghost of Christmas Future might be the most welcoming ghost of them all.
My heart fell as I saw Bob dropping through the air, destined to splat on the ground like a fallen fruit. I knew it was my fault and I would fall into despair at the loss. But, somehow, the two crows knew my every thought. As Bert carried me off towards the fairy ring near the abandoned barn, Homer dove after Bob, grabbing him by his left foot a mere ten inches above the dirt.
Soon, Homer and Bob were winging next to us, poor Bob hanging upside down by one foot.
“Ah, Derfentwinkle, we meet again,” said Bob.
“I didn’t mean for you to leap off the balcony. I was going to come back after this temporary escape.”
“My master told me to protect you. And I knew you wouldn’t let me die.”
“But I didn’t know I had the power to save you!”
“Never fear, Mistress. Bert and I will always do your bidding the moment you wish it.” Homer the crow blinked his eye on the side that could see me.
“Which one of you is actually my familiar?” I asked.
“We both are equally. I wrote a contract and Bert signed it.”
“No, we didn’t… that I can remember,” said Bert.
“Don’t you remember? I wrote it in the mud on the riverbank. You signed it with your bill.”
“No, I didn’t. I was digging for a worm. Besides, that wasn’t writing. It was just random scratches in the mud.”
“You don’t know the truth of it because you can’t read.”
“Well, yes. But you can’t read either.”
“What’s your point?”
“Okay, stop arguing,” I said. “You are both my familiar, I guess. And you can read if you look at the writing and let me see it through your eyes.”
“Oh, good, that makes me feel smarter already,” said Bert.
“Your crows are funny,” said Bob.
It wasn’t far as the crow flies. I hope that is something I can say at this point because I know that is used so often it becomes meaningless. But it was literally only a mile and a half north of the willow castle, and we were flying in a straight line as crows do, and we were in the grasp of literal crows. Not literate crows, mind you, but literal ones.
“So, you kidnapped me to bring us to a bovine sanctuary on a Slow One’s private kingdom?” Bob asked.
“I didn’t kidnap you… intentionally. I was going to meet my contact here, but I had always planned to return to my captivity with Master Eli… and you.”
It was embarrassing to even hint to him that I admired the shape of his buttocks… and his gentle, quiet ways. You must understand… I liked him in more than one way.
Circling to the northeast of the ruined barn, we came down next to the fairy ring of white toadstools. Homer dropped me on my feet. Bert dropped poor Bob on his head.
She was there to meet me already. Dollinglammer was a raven—haired butterfly child with beautiful blue, black, and green wings.
“Derfentwinkle! You’re alive!” she exclaimed with a surprised smile.
“Yes, and I am more than a little lucky that it is so.”
“How did you get the birds to bring you here? Necromancy?”
“No. I somehow seem to have acquired wizarding skills on this adventure. The birds are my familiars.”
“You’re kidding! And who is this lovely lad you have brought me?”
Bob walked up beside me, expecting, I believe, to be introduced.
“Dollinglammer of Mortimer’s Mudwallow, meet Bob, the apprentice of the powerful Sorcerer Eli Tragedy.”
“Sorcerer? Really? As powerful as the lamented Yens Sidd?”
“I really don’t yet know the answer to that,” I said with a sigh. “What do you think, Bob?”
“I don’t know the sorcerer you speak of. And Master Eli is, as you have seen, more a master of parlor tricks, Slow One Lore, and chemistry than actual sorcerous magics.”
“Still, he’s powerful in the way of treating people better than they probably deserve.”
“You only say that because you have never yet been turned into a pigeon by him.”
“Pigeon? Where? I hate pigeons!” declared Bert.
“Why are we meeting here? Be honest with me,” Bob pleaded.
“Derfentwinkle was taken by the evil necromancer. The one who slew Master Yens. We are part of a plot to drive him out of our village of Mortimer’s Mudwallow.” Dollinglammer put a hand on each of Bob’s shoulders and looked him squarely in the eyes. “Derfie sacrificed herself to try and free her sister from the villain’s clutches.”
“And I failed, Bob. I would’ve had to destroy Cair Tellos to succeed and free her. And all I could manage was to get captured.”
I let the tears flow at the thought of what Kronomarke was probably doing to poor Poppensparkle.
“So, what’s the next part of your plan?” Bob asked. He was looking at me with smiling eyes, as if he were amused by our plight.
“We don’t have a next part of the plan. I thought I would only make this meeting if, by some miracle, I actually succeeded in destroying Cair Tellos. I really thought I would be dead by this point.”
“We shall have to think of something,” Bob said with a smile. I couldn’t believe what a kind and helpful boy Bob was.
“When we need a plan, we take wing and just fly by the seat of our pants, Bert and I,” declared Homer.
“Homer, we never wear pants.”
“We never make plans either, so what’s your point?”
“My boyfriend, Torchy, had a suggestion,” offered Dollie.
“Really? That Fire Wisp? He’s your boyfriend now?”
“Derfie, he’s a good boyfriend. And he used to live in Cair Tellos.”
“Oh, I know… I just don’t want you to get burned in the relationship.”
“He has his powers under better control than most Wisps.”
“I remember Torchy. He’s a relative of the great Wisp hero Gariss the Overheated,” said Bob. “So, what was his plan?”
“He knows a Slow One that could help us.”
“No way!” I said.
“Let’s all go back to Cair Tellos and talk it all over with Master Eli,” suggested Bob.
“Even me?” asked Dollinglammer.
“Especially you with Torchy’s plan. Master Eli was always fond of the way Torchy would burn up things the Master didn’t want around anymore.”
It was settled then. Homer and Bert would take me back to my prison with a glimmer of hope that someone might actually help me for a change.
One of the side “benefits” of having diabetes is that it often comes with an extra helping of diabetic depression. I had the blues really bad this week. I am not the only member of my family suffering.
So, what do you do about it?
Or, rather, what does a goofy idiot like me do about it?
Especially on a windy day when the air is saturated with pollen and other lovely things that I am absolutely, toxically allergic to?
Well, for one thing, I used the word toxically in this post because it is a funny-sounding adverb that I love to use even though the spell-checker hates it, no matter how I spell or misspell it.
And I bought a kite.
Yes, it is a cheap Walmart kite that has a picture of Superman on it that looks more like Superboy after taking too much kryptonite-based cough syrup for his own super allergies.
But I used to buy or make paper diamond kites just like this one when I was a boy in Iowa to battle the blues in windy spring weather. One time I got one so high in the sky at my uncle’s east pasture that it was nothing more than a speck in the sky using two spools of string and one borrowed ball of yarn from my mother’s knitting basket. It is a way of battling blue meanies.
And I bought more chocolate-covered peanuts. The chocolate brings you up, and the peanut protein keeps you from crashing your blood sugar. I have weathered more than one Blue Meanie attack with m&m’s peanuts.
And I used the 1957 Pink and White Mercury of Imagination to bring my novel, The Baby Werewolf,home. I wrote the last chapter Monday night in the grip of dark depression, and writing something, and writing it well, makes me a little bit happier.
And I have collected a lot of naked pictures of nudists off Twitter. Who knew that you could find and communicate with such a large number of naked-in-the-sunshine nuts on social media? It is nice to find other nude-minded naturists in a place that I thought only had naked porn until I started blogging on naturist social media. Being naked in mind and body makes me happier than I ever thought it would.
And besides being bare, I also like butterflies and books and baseball and birds, (the Cardinals have started baseball season remember) and the end of winter. “I just remember of few of my favorite things, and then I don’t feel so bad!” Oh, and I like musical movies like The Sound of Music too.
The monsters of deep, dark depression are being defeated as we speak.
I went to the Spiderman movie yesterday whose title provides the title for today’s post. But this is not a movie review… other than to say that it is, in my opinion, the best Spiderman movie ever made. It is the best Spiderman movie because is brings together so many story threads from so many other movies that, like the previous Marvel movie Endgame, it creates an ultimate completeness that satisfies the needs of someone like me who needs stories about life that have a beginning, middle, and end. That’s what this story is about.
This little girl in this old picture is my distant cousin Patty Berilla. She was older than me by about three years. She was the first non-sister girl I ever saw naked. I was five, and I was talking to her, and I followed her into the bathroom. She had to pee and had no younger brothers and mostly older sisters. So, she was not shy, and kept right on talking to me. Until one of her older sisters got mad and pulled me out of there and made Patty close the door. I remember being good friends with her during that week’s vacation at the Opal and Louis Berilla home in Cleveland, Ohio. We saw seals and polar bears and a baby giraffe at the Cleveland zoo. And when we went to the Museum of Science and Technology, there were two statues on either side of the main door, a man and a woman, both of them nude. Patty thought that was very wrong to be naked in public. She was even more shocked at the invisible woman medical presentation inside. The nude woman was made of glass. And they lit up the parts inside with colored lights, showing first the muscles under the skin. Then the organs, respiratory system, nervous system, and finally the skeleton. Patty told me that that awful woman got naked down to the bones. For some reason the adults laughed at that more than Patty and I did.
She became a nurse. My mother was also a Registered Nurse. There are a number of nurses in our family. I never saw Patty more than twice in the intervening years of our lives. But in 2020 she caught Covid 19 while working in the ER. She died on a ventilator in that same ER. I actually cried when my mother told me about this last summer. It surprised my family. I was crying for someone I was distantly related to that I probably wouldn’t have recognized if I saw her again as an adult. All I really knew about her life was what she looked like naked when she was seven-and-a-half years old. But I loved her not just for who she was and what she taught me about life when I was little, but for what she sacrificed and how she died.
I wonder if anyone holds on to a memory of seeing me naked at seven and a half riding my bike in the Bingham Park Woods. No one saw me that I know of.
I lost both of my parents in the Covid pandemic. Neither of them died of the pandemic virus. Dad was lost to late-stage Parkinson’s disease. Mom died of complications with both her heart and her kidneys. Covid interfered with both of their hospice stays, but they never got the viral infection.
When the pandemic began, I anticipated that I would catch it and die. When my number two son came down with it that first summer, before the vaccine, I figured my last week of life had come. But when the quarantine was over and I got tested, the test was negative. But I began to see then that it would be impossible to ever really go home again. It was not just a matter of travel restrictions and quarantines. The home I knew was no longer really there. It’s like John Steinbeck said, “You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.”
The Spiderman movie, No Way Home, is about Spiderman’s identity as Peter Parker and everybody who knows his secret identity as a superhero. Peter Parker does not get the chance to go home again even more severely than my own sad case.
So, what I have to do is salvage my own secret identity. I am a story-teller and a cartoonist. But very few people know that. Mine is an identity easily erased by my looming demise.
There is no longer a hope of going home again. It’s the mothballs of memory situation. Now, the thing that remains to be done is to finish weaving together the threads of the story of my life and times, and make of it a masterpiece of a tapestry… so that it can go into the mothballs with flair.
When you spend most of your time writing and thinking with the Sword of Damocles hanging over your head and the hourglass of your life looking more and more like the sands of time are running out, you are tempted to take the curves too fast and make extremely stupid mistakes that make your brain crash into a brick wall of stupidity. You are stuck in a stupor of stupidity that must somehow un-stupid you with downtime and do-nothing brainless activity. I won’t try to explain what I did wrong, because, after all, I am still stupid at the moment and don’t really know what I did wrong.
A Hermione Harry-Potter doll which is my birthday present.
I bought myself a doll yesterday. I spent some of my birthday money on it. My octogenarian mother sends me birthday money every year to remind me how many years beyond sixty I have aged, especially now that, after more than twenty years spent not celebrating birthdays as a nominal Jehovah’s Witness, I am now no longer associated with prohibitions from God due to the arbitrary rules of religion. It was a stupid act based on the fact that I have been avoiding wasting money on my doll-collecting hoarding disorder for a matter of months. It could be like an alcoholic taking a drink after months of being sober. But the doll is pretty in a magical sort of way and provides me with someone else to talk to when I am brooding about being stupid.
It may seem like, since I am writing this while still stupid, that I am saying that being stupid is, by definition, a bad thing. If I am saying that, it is only because I am currently stupid.
If you look at the smiles on the faces of the gentleman with the brown cap and Scraggles the mouser, you can easily see that being happy is a simple thing. And it is the province of simple people, not complicated and extremely smart people. I can testify from hard experience that being too smart is a barrier to being simply happy. So, I benefit emotionally from being stupid this Sunday.
As to being stupid today and what caused it, well, it may have something to do with the fact that I am currently editing The Baby Werewolf, the most complex and potentially controversial novel I have ever written. Horror stories often mine and expose the author’s own traumas and fundamental fears. And I am trying to publish it as the fourth novel I have published in 2018. Is that biting off more than I can chew with my old teeth? I don’t know the answer. I am currently pretty stupid.
Catch a Falling Star 