Humble Pie

The difference between who you want to be and who you are is humbling.

The recipe for humble pie requires good, clear eyesight.

And you need a reliable mirror that only shows the flaws in the reflected image, not in the mirror itself.

And you need to look at every detail in the whole of you. Even the secret things that you tend to conceal from everybody, especially yourself.

And writing a novel, if you do it right, is a form of baking humble pie.

The good and the not-so-good is reflected in reviews, which are often written with mirrors that have flaws.

But what you see, if you are honest with yourself, can show you that, even though you are far from perfect, you are exactly what you are supposed to be.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, irony, Paffooney, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

It is, of course, one of the most powerful, masterful, and best-known pieces of music ever written.

Mozart completed the “little serenade” in Vienna in 1787, but it wasn’t published until 1827, long after Mozart’s untimely death.

The Serenade is incorrectly translated into English as “A Little Night Music”. But this is and always has been the way I prefer to think of it. A creation of Mozart written shortly before he hopped aboard the ferryman’s boat and rode off into the eternal night. It is the artifact that proves the art of the master who even has the word “art” as a part of his name. A little music to play on after the master is gone to prove his universal connection to the great silent symphony that is everything in the universe singing silently together.

It is basically what I myself am laboring now to do. I have been dancing along the edge of the abyss of poverty, suffering, and death since I left my teaching job in 2014. I will soon be taking my own trip into night aboard the ferryman’s dreaded boat. And I feel the need to put my own art out there in novel and cartoon form before that happens.

I am not saying that I am a master on the level of a Mozart. My name is not Mickart. But I do have a “key’ in the name Mickey. And it will hopefully unlock something worthwhile for my family and all those I loved and leave behind me. And hopefully, it will provide a little night music to help soothe the next in line behind me at the ferryman’s dock.

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Horatio T. Dogg… It’s Finished!

The book I have been using as a demonstration of my writing process, showing you the second edit of each chapter at one chapter per week, is now finished. It is also published and available on Amazon.

The book is a novella, meaning it is only about 15,000 words. I have not shown you the last few chapters on Tuesdays, but if you have been reading every chapter in order, it isn’t too much to expect to charge you 99 cents to get the whole thing from Amazon, is it? Not everything in life is free. At least, not in my experience.

The next Tuesday offer will be The Necromancer’s Apprentice, either another novella, or a short comic fantasy novel.

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Islands of Identity

Island Girl2z

Who am I?

Why do I do the things that I do?

No man is an island.  John Donne the English poet stated that.  And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it.  We need other people.  I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines.  She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.

Gilligans Island

When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan.  My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island.  This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!”  By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan.  But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island.  And no man is an island.  Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.

20160730_061115

You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be.  It was who I was as a teacher.  Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan.  Being a teacher gave me an identity.  And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger.  Not a bad thing to be.  And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.

But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here.  Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now?  We never really find the answer.  Answers change over time.  And so do I.

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Filed under artwork, being alone, feeling sorry for myself, finding love, humor, insight, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Still Reeling…

My mother is gone. And I will recover from it… eventually. But today I am still sad.

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Danny Kaye

Archive photo from the Los Angeles Times

Archive photo from the Los Angeles Times

My childhood was shaped by television events like the annual showing of The Wizard of Oz and classic movies on Friday nights when I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime to watch the whole thing.  I have told you before how much I loved the comedy of Red Skelton.  Another comedian who shaped who I am through his wondrously manic movie performances was Danny Kaye.

One of those Friday movie classics that really struck home was the wonderful, kid-friendly movie Hans Christian Andersen.

1952 movie poster from Wikipedia

1952 movie poster from Wikipedia

The movie was about a storyteller from a previous century and embroidered his biographical story with his famous children’s stories in the form of songs.  And Danny Kaye could trip through multi-syllabic, fast-paced musical numbers like no other rubber-faced clown I have ever seen.   I wanted to be such a story-teller from a very early age.  I even wanted to write the kind of stories that could be made into songs.  Let me show you a few of the bits that amazed me and killed me with laughter.

This song from the Inspector General was doubly engaging because the corrupt businessmen were trying to poison the character Danny played with the wine he was supposed to drink during the drinking song.

The_Five_Pennies

The movies Danny Kaye was in were mostly about the musical comedy.  But sometimes they were just about the music.  He appeared in musicals like White Christmas with Bing Crosby and stage musicals like Lady in the Dark which won him awards on Broadway.  He made movies about music like The Five Pennies and A Song is Born.  He always said he couldn’t read music, but he demonstrated perfect pitch and scored a number one hit with The Woody Woodpecker Song recorded for the animated cartoons of Walter Lantz.  How cool is that?

And you already know that The Wizard of Oz is my favorite movie of all time.  In 1964 Danny became the host for CBS’s annual showing of the film.  He was able to do funny songs that made you snort your hot cocoa through your nose from laughing, and he could also do beautiful ballads like these.

I will always take the opportunity to watch a Danny Kaye movie one more time, whether it comes on YouTube or a Netflix oldie or a $5 DVD from the bin at the front of the Walmart Superstore.  And I will always think of him in his role as Hans Christian Anderson.

Oh, and he was a very funny comedian too when he wasn’t singing, as in The Court Jester and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

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Filed under autobiography, comedians, humor

When There Aren’t Enough Words…

My mother died today at 5:30 in the morning. Of course, she was in hospice care in Iowa, and I was stuck in Texas. Covid and my poor health stopped me from being there at the end. Fortunately, my two sisters were there. She wasn’t alone at the end.

My mother was an amazing person. She was born in the 1930’s in a little farmhouse in Iowa. She grew up on a farm. She and her two brothers grew up with Jack Benny, Arthur Godfrey, and President FDR’s fireside chats on the radio. It was a time before indoor toilets, television, and fluorescent lights were anything but a rare novelty in Iowa. She attended a one-room schoolhouse with grades one through eight taught by the same teacher. High school occurred in the brick schoolhouse built by the WPA and she played basketball in the building’s basement court for the Rowan Trojanettes.

She attended nursing school in Marshalltown where Aunt Jean was her classmate, and she was introduced to my father when he was fresh out of the Navy during the Korean Conflict.

They were married in January, 1956.

I was born in November of the same year. Nancy, my sister was born two years after that. Mary came along after another two years. David is eight years younger than me.

Michael
Nancy
Mary
‘David
Mom is here in this picture with her surviving brother and her older brother’s wife.

She was a registered nurse for more than forty years. She was married to my father for 64 years until he passed away in 2020. And she was always there for me, my entire life, until today.

God bless you and keep you, Mom. I love you. And I will love you still when this whole world is no more.

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Imperatives for Today

Sometimes Life just happens. But sometimes Life is what you do about it. Sometimes you must make it happen.

I have done some of that today.

I have a year and four months left on my bankruptcy. So, I paid my monthly payment.

Take that, Bank-o Merricka! I shall sink your cursed pirate ship of usury with cannonballs of cash fired steadily every month for almost four years now.

I ran the washing machine with my son’s police uniform in it. He has completed the Academy. got his certification, and is now on a delayed weekend break.

Take that, criminals of Dallas. Officer Beyer is now officially combatting you!

But Mom is in the hospital today, scheduled for an angiogram this afternoon.

If they find any blockages, as they suspect they will, they will attempt to fix them by placing in a stint as soon as the problem is revealed.

How wonderful it is that medicine is so advanced now that they can do this remotely as if it were a videogame. The doctor says she is too weak to withstand the older methods of heart surgery.

Mickey, once upon a time…

We are no longer who we once were.

We face different imperatives than we did fifty years ago.

And we still look to the future (through nerdy glasses) hopefully to face future imperatives.

But only if we can accomplish what we must do today.

My sister Nancy, once upon a time…

My two sisters are both now up in Iowa, staying near the hospital to be with her constantly.

Nancy takes the lead in that, the practical, no-nonsense member of the formidable foursome.

My sister Mary, once upon a time…

Nancy is retiring from her career as a public health inspector for the State of Missouri. She will move into the farmhouse in Iowa to take care of Mom.

Mary’s family, is like mine, grown and independent. But she still has a job she’s not ready to retire from.

Both I and my brother David are retired, but both live in Texas. We will go to Iowa when we can, but at our respective ages. a thousand miles of travel is hard.

My brother David, once upon a time.

But for all of us, we do the things that must be done. And one day we will all be together again to say our goodbyes, because no one lasts forever.

But that day has not yet come. Today we still must do that which is imperative to do… for today.

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Art on the Calendar

My blog began in 2013 after the publication of Catch a Falling Star.

This picture/illustration from my failed novel, AeroQuest, appeared on the blog that first year.

2014 Davalon and Farbick from Catch a Falling Star

In 2015 my book Snow Babies killed an Indie Publisher and I found a rip-off publisher for Magical Miss Morgan.

In 2016 I realized I could publish for myself with Amazon.

In 2017 I began publishing at least 2 novels a year.

By 2018 my blog was percolating along with a post every day.

2019 found me publishing novels set in 3 different decades, the 70’s, 80’s, & 90’s.

The pandemic in 2020 made me more productive, publishing 6 books.

2021… I have now shown you one artwork from each year of my blog.

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The Golden Age

I am certainly no expert on the Golden Age of Comics. I was, in fact, born the year that the Golden Age ended. I am a child of the Silver Age (1956 to the early 1970s) and those were the comics I grew up with. But I admit to a fascination with the initial creation of the characters I love, including Batman, Superman, the Flash, Captain America, the Phantom, Steve Canyon, Wonder Woman and numerous others who were first put on the comic book pages in the Golden Age. And being subject to comic book prices that zoomed upward from a dollar an issue, I was bedazzled by the ten cent price on old comics.

Comic books owe their creation to the popular newspaper comic strips from the Depression era and WWII wartime. Originally, comic strips were gathered and printed on cheap paper. Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon, and other adventure strips would lead to the war comics and hero-centered comics that would morph into superhero comics.

Some of the artwork in Golden Age comics leaves a lot to be desired. Especially original, straight to comic book publications that were produced fast and furiously by publishers who would open one week, produce three issues. and go out of business three weeks later. But in the mad scramble, some truly great artists formed the start of their illustrious careers, Will Eisner, Hal Foster, Milt Caniff, and Bill Elder learned to master their craft in the newspaper strips, and all later created comic books and graphic novels. True geniuses like Jack “King” Kirby and Bob Kane and Jack Davis grew directly from comic book studio madhouses into comic-book-artist immortality.

As with most things that have a Golden Age, the truth was that later comic book eras were superior in most ways. But this Golden Age was the foundational age for an American art-form that I truly love. So, flaws and warts are overlooked. And some of these old ten cent books on super-cheap paper are worth huge amounts of money if you still have a rare one in mint condition. Ah, there’s the rub for a manic old collector guy like me.

Most of the Golden Age comic book images used for this post were borrowed from the ComicsintheGoldenAge Twitter page @ComicsintheGA. If you love old comics like I do, you should definitely check it out.

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Filed under artists I admire, artwork, comic book heroes, comic strips