Since my daily blog-posting streak reached 99 days, the WordPress Notification bell has been reminding me daily that I am still streaking. Today is day 125. That, of course, is really no big whoop. Back in 2015 I managed at least one post every single day of the year. Celebrating writing every day is kinda like celebrating breathing every day. I should be grateful for such a sustained life-maintaining function, but that is precisely what it is.
I would be dead by now If I could not write every day.
Of course, there are days when I am sick and don’t type.. There are days full of travel and doctor’s office appointments and general business that keep me from posting some days. But the writing voice in my head keeps on dictating jokes, observations, questions, and all manner of other things poetical worthy of noting… and writing down somewhere if possible.
My brain goes berserk if I cannot make connections between things. It gets weary from the thought of too many golden ideas being crowded out of my head by new thoughts, spilling out of my ears before being recorded, and evaporating into the ever-present ether of forgetfulness.
I write because I have to. It is as simple as that. Even though it makes me metaphorically naked before the entire world, all of my innermost private things eventually revealed. if I did not do it, I would simply no longer exist. The sentence would simply stop in the middle and…
** Note** This is the new work in progress displayed on Tuesday while AeroQuest 4 is undergoing final edits and publication.
Bobby Niland, Farm Boy
Bobby was absolutely certain that turkens were the absolute stupidest birds ever to haunt a farm yard. His dad and his grandfather had both had the challenge of raising hogs and keeping milk cows in the barn. But no more. In the 1990’s you raised corn and soybeans in alternating fields. And if you raised any farm animals at all, it was only a calf for 4-H projects, a pen of hogs, either black-and-white Hampshires or white American Yorkshires. Or some kind of chickens.
And turkens were a kind of naked-necked chickens. Yes, like a half-turkey, half-chicken thing with a featherless neck. In Iowa, no less! The stupid things, by rights, should freeze their stupid heads off in the cold of an Iowa winter. But miraculously, the buzzard-necked little uglies were better at surviving winter for some reason than actual chickens were.
Mom actually liked turkens. She said they were much more like pets and easier to handle than regular chickens that her parents, Grandpa and Grandma Wickham always had on their farm when she was a girl.
But the turken in the old horse trough that morning had to have been the dumbest damned bird in the history of stupid chickens. How does a stupid bird like that, one who’s supposed to be scratching around on a farmyard for worms and grubs and kernel corn that Bobby dutifully fed them, end up drowning in a horse trough? Did it suddenly wake up that morning and think it was a duck? Or maybe the local fairies had put a spell on it and convinced it that it should be a penguin for a day. However it happened, Bobby now had to tell Mom that one of her birds was dead. Drowned in the horse trough that she had been nagging Dad to get rid of.
As Bobby trudged towards the back door of the farmhouse, Horatio came bounding up to greet him.
Horatio was a collie. An old one, but a good one.
“What’s the matter now, Robert?” Horatio asked.
Did I forget to mention that Horatio was a talking dog? Sorry about that. He also wore a green pork pie hat and smoked a Meerschaum pipe. Really, he did. At least, that’s the way Bobby saw him.
“It’s the stupid turken. You know, the rooster Mom calls Little Bob. The damned thing drowned in the horse trough out back of the barn.”
“That is most unfortunate. Especially since she named that one after you.”
“She didn’t. I told her I didn’t want no chicken named after me. And she said it wasn’t named after me. She named it after Great Uncle Bob. Grandpa’s older brother.”
“Of course she did. But maybe you are named after him too.” Horatio puffed on his pipe and blew some smoke rings out of the side of his mouth. That was a real good trick too. People who blow smoke rings from pipe smoke, like Great Uncle Randall, Grandpa Wickham’s younger brother, take the pipe out of their mouth to do it. Of course, Horatio had no hands. “Why don’t you come with me over to the horse trough, Bobby? Maybe I can apply my sensitive nose to the area and gather some clues to what really happened.”
“Okay. That can’t hurt.”
So, together, the boy and his dog walked over to the horse trough behind the barn. Horatio sniffed around the area and found some loose turken feathers.
“It seems there may have been an unwelcome visitor here,” Horatio said between puffs on his pipe.”
“What kind of visitor?”
“The verminous kind.”
“That’s a good word. I read it in the Sherlock Holmes book I’m reading at school. It means a pest like a rat or a mouse or maybe a weasel. Can you say which it was?”
“Of course not. You don’t know the answer to that question yourself, and dogs don’t really talk.”
“Well, can you at least guess?”
“Sure. Those tracks in the mud are mostly turken tracks, but some of the littlest feet might be rats.”
“Oh, yeah. I see that now.”
“A better theory to tell your Mom than that the turken thought it was a penguin for a day.”
“Well, fairies mighta cast a spell on him.”
“But you know fairies aren’t real either, right?”
“You know I saw one last year when I was in Miss Morgan’s class.”
“Yes, but you also thought you were turned into a swan by fairy magic at one point. That couldn’t have been real either.”
“I know you are right, Horatio. But there are some things that I just would prefer were real.”
“Like a talking dog who can solve crimes and smoke a pipe?”
“Yes! Exactly like that!”
You may be about to hear a story now that is seen mostly through Bobby’s eyes. And believe me, that is an unusual experience to have. So, hang onto your green pork pie hat, and let’s go on that sort of adventure that liars and fools always are having.
It is enjoying its moment as a free book on Amazon for a five-day promotional period that ends tomorrow , 6-22-21 at midnight. You can still get a copy. It is a novella, so it is a very quick read. It is a novella of only 15,ooo words, so it is a quick read. It is a YA novel with a 12-year-old female protagonist. There are no living human adults in this story (except for artificial ones via hologram.)
The promotion has given away seven copies of Cissy Moonskipper’s Travels at this writing. It is one of 19 self-published books. I still have one book with I-Universe, that being Catch a Falling Star.
My contracts with Publish America and Page Publishing are both ended. I couldn’t recommend either publish house. Self publishing is better.
My blog, the one you are looking at at this moment, has 2013 followers.
I also have 3,033 followers on Twitter. @mbeyer51
My Facebook page, @telleronsinvadeiowa · Book, has 1,045 followers.
I have been writing my whole life long, but only publishing that writing since 2007. I have been actively marketing my books since 2013.
Losing the pool this summer was a humbling experience. I had repaired it before and got it working properly again, so I knew in my heart I was capable of salvaging it. But everyone was against me. The city was convinced that I was a deadbeat letting it slide and simply lying about it taking a long time because illness and financial reversals were slowing me down. My family was against me because they no longer had any confidence that I could still do it, and they feared me killing myself in the attempt. And then Bank of America won their lawsuit and prevented me from paying for the effort, thoroughly punishing me for the mistaken notion that I had any right to get myself out of medical debt even with the help of a lawyer. And the electrical problems, which I could not correct myself, put the pool restoration out of reach. I failed to do what I knew in my heart I was capable of. I failed. I was the only one who believed I could do it, and I only managed to prove everybody else right.
But Michael Jackson’s somewhat creepy nudie video with the weird Maxfield Parrish parody in it is actually a theme song for what I learned about myself. I was alone in the pool-restoration struggle. But I am not alone in life. I will never be alone, even if somehow I ended up the last person alive on the planet. Because we are all connected. We are all a part of one thing. We are not alone, even when we are.
I think I learned that best from my Grandmother, Mary A. Beyer. She was a rock-solid believer in Jesus through the pragmatic Midwestern arm of the Methodist Church. She also gradually became an isolated, lonely individual, living by herself in Mason City, Iowa. Grandpa Beyer died in his fifties, when I was about ten. Great Grandpa Raymond, who lived with them for as long as I can remember, passed away a few years later. But she was never really alone. Jesus Christ was a real person to her. She read her Bible and her weekly copies of the Methodist publication, The Upper Room, constantly. And she was always a central part of our lives. Christmases at Grandma Beyer’s place are deeply woven into the fabric of my memory. The bubble lights on the Christmas tree, the carefully saved and re-used wrapping paper from the 1940’s, the hot cocoa, and Christmas specials on her RCA color TV… I still draw strength and love from those things, and from her faith, even after almost twenty years pretending Christmas was evil as a Jehovah’s Witness. Simple truth and faith shared are some of those essential things that bind us together even though they are invisible to the eye. My Grandma Beyer is still with me even when I am fighting off the pool harpies all by myself because the things she taught me and the love she had for me still live in me, still affect who I am and how I act and what I truly believe in.
I am not alone.
And you aren’t either. I am here for you. I value you as human being. God tells me I should, even though God is probably not real, and I believe Him, even though I am a fool who probably really doesn’t know anything And it is true even if I do not know you and never met you. Heck, you may be reading this after I am long dead. And it is still true. Because we have shared life on this planet together. We are both humans. We both think and feel and read and believe stuff. And I love you. Because my Grandma taught me that I should, just as someone, somewhere in your life taught you.
What do I really think the future holds? That’s a question where, if I answer it truthfully, I will be told, “You should not think that, stupid man! What good does it do to be that negative? Lighten up or we’ll burn you at the stake for evil thinking.”
Okay, okay. I get it. The truth makes you afraid. And it should.
As California, Arizona, and Nevada, as well as the aliens working with the military-industrial complex at Area 51, are all burning up with record heat, drought, and wildfires, we are definitely going to need to find a new, cooler place to live.
Maybe a planet in the Tau Ceti system. Tau Ceti is a star system with a solitary G-class Star only 12 light years (3.7 parsecs) away. Do you think the Tau Cetians will mind us colonizing. Or do the Republicans plan on simply invading?
Or there is Mars. But do you really think Elon Musk will be willing to share? And we do have to figure out how to breath mostly carbon dioxide to thrive there. Or do the Republicans plan on just taking a lot of stinky Earth air with them? That’s still a matter of learning to breathe carbon dioxide, along with methane cow farts and whatever chemical crap Dow and Monsanto have been burning and pumping into our atmosphere.
But you know full well the Republicans are not planning to spend any of their vast fortunes earned by all their hard work investing money in stocks and avoiding taxes to take the rest of us along wherever they plan to go. They will leave us behind to enjoy the climate change catastrophe that they have worked so hard to convince us is still not happening.
But all of that doesn’t mean I necessarily believe we are all gonna die a horribly hot death being unable to breathe on the garbage ball that Republican Space Forces will leave us all behind on. Not necessarily… just probably.
But I do have a certain amount of faith in the ability of people who actually have beating hearts in their chests rather than empty spots for installing safes packed with gold bars to use their problem-solving abilities to teach us all about carbon recapture, solar and wind power, carbon sequestration, air scrubbers, vertical farming, and reforestation. Before we get a total grip on weather control, we may have to move into underwater cities and spend some time countering the acidification of the oceans. We will also have to apply conservational farming practices to fish and kelp and shellfish, because if we let the oceans go sterile and lifeless, we’ll all be doomed anyway.
Human beans (of course, I meant to say “beings,” as I would never get that wrong on purpose only for the sake of a bad pun) are better under pressure than you probably believe. We have survived terrible things before. And, I am sorry, T.S. Elliot, but it is more likely to end with a bang rather than a whimper. Beans in the pressure cooker explode rather than deflate or dissolve. We will succeed in becoming successful carbon-dioxide-breathing baked bean-people or go out with an impressive bang while trying.
As weekly rituals go, one of the most important ones came every Sunday morning when I was a kid. My parents were 50’s people. By that I mean they were teenagers and young adults during the post war boom of the 1950’s when everything seemed hopeful and bright and alive with wonderful possibilities. As a kid in the 1960’s the Sunday morning routine was this;
Wake up grouchy from staying up too late to sneak a look at the late-night monster movie on Saturday.
Read the funny papers.
Learn life lessons from Family Circus, Dagwood Bumstead, Pogo, Lil’ Abner, and Steve Canyon.
Eat scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.
Complain about having to go to church and Sunday school.
Go to Sunday School and church at the Methodist Church in Rowan, Iowa.
Complain about having to go to church every Sunday on the way home from church.
Pray over Sunday dinner and be really, actually thankful for all the positive good things in life.
Obviously the most important thing in that routine was complaining, because I listed it twice. But when it got down to it, we were thankful for all the good things about life. We were positive people. We sometimes listened to Norman Vincent Peale on the radio. We knew we ought to be positive and thankful and love goodness and be kind.
Somewhere along the way, though, the world forgot the life lessons of Family Circus.
Somehow we managed to screw things up.
Environmental scientists like Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, warned us that the world could soon be ending. And we ignored them.
Richard Nixon taught us not to trust politicians any more.
We stopped believing in things like the wholesome goodness of scrambled eggs.
We let corruption in our government and inequality in the economic sphere become the norm. The greedy people who were cynical and had no empathy for the rest of us took over. That is how we ended up with someone like Donald Trump. Racism, fear, and complaining now rule the emotional landscape in America and most of the world.
So, what is the answer? What do we do?
Well, The Family Circus is still out there. We can learn from it, laugh a little, and apply some of those life lessons. Especially this one;
There was a time when Tarzan was one of the ruling heroes of my boyhood fantasies of power and self-fulfillment. And, while Tarzan was a cartoon show on Saturday morning, comics by Burne Hogarth, movies in the theater in color with Mike Henry, or a weekly series on TV with Ron Ely, he was always Johnny Weissmuller to me. Weissmuller who played both Tarzan and Jungle Jim in the Saturday afternoon black-and-white movies.
I have to admit, I didn’t identify with the character of Tarzan as much as I thought of myself like the character “Boy”, played by Johnny Sheffield in movies like “Tarzan Finds a Son”. It was a significant part of my boyhood to imagine myself being like Boy, free from practically all restraints, able to gad about the dangerous jungle nearly naked with monkey pals and no fear. If I got into trouble by believing my skills were greater than they really were, I would save myself with ingenuity, and, barring that, Tarzan would rescue me. And, believe it or not, sometimes there were fixes that Tarzan got into that he needed me and Cheetah to be creative and get him out of. I knew in my heart that one day real life would be like that, especially once I grew into Tarzan and stopped being just Boy. That idea was in my head so loudly that several times I went to Bingham Park Woods, stripped down, and played Boy in the Jungle.
As in the previous essay about Heroes of Yesteryear, I learned important things from Johnny Weissmuller on Saturday TV. He taught me that all you really needed, even in the darkest jungles of Africa, was confidence and courage. You could stand up to any deadly danger without the protection of any armor, practically naked, in fact, if only you had that heroic goodness of heart. The little boy I was then still believes that whole-heartedly even in the aging body of an old man.
So, Tarzan continues to live in my memory, a part of me, an essential part of my education. He is me and I am he. But only in my mind. Me in a loincloth, swinging on a vine now… and probably going splat like an overripe melon on the jungle floor… well, that is too ridiculous to even imagine being real anymore. Yet he lives on in me. And he battles the metaphorical leopard-people of modern life through me. Unarmored. Confident. And unafraid.
Today is a day I normally take it easy, relax a bit, and do some thinking and reflecting. On Simple Saturdays I simply post old artworks that I hadn’t thought of in a while. Now that I am going blind, losing the ability to travel, and possibly facing the last days of my life, it is important to pace myself and not rush anything. The finish line is near. And this race isn’t won by crossing the final line first.
Not all works of art are done with pen and ink, or colored pencil. Some require dolls and camera.
Some require camera and colored pencil.
Some pictures require a little Chopin in the background.
Is this both funny and creepy at the same time?
Sometimes the individual pictures I select seem somehow strange and off-kilter.
But mostly, I think, it’s just about the weird way my stupid old mind works.
You will have to forgive me for the nude art in this post, but empathy is something that makes you emotionally naked before the whole world. Especially if you are fool enough to write about it. And I am definitely fool enough.
Part of what makes a teacher good at her or his job is the amount of empathy they are cursed with. I have to admit that some people who work with kids are demanding, strict, harsh, and have absolutely no empathy at all. And some of them are among the best teachers there are, especially if they are sports coaches, foreign language teachers, or math teachers. They put you firmly through the discipline and make you know your stuff. Or they break you down and rebuild you so that you are stronger than before.
And there are those teachers who, on rare occasions, have too much empathy. Those teachers are the ones that cry hard when the principal has to bail them out of jail because they confessed to the crime of burglary at the motel because they happened to learn that Jose actually did it and Jose’s home life is hard because his family is so poor they have a dirt floor in their home and no working plumbing. Jose can’t possibly deserve prison, and they feel it in their hearts. And somehow they believe that, if only given a break, Jose will be an angel. Their hearts tell them things that a working brain could never accept.
But the average to good teachers, the ones who can lay claim to the appellation of “competent,” have to have a very clear idea of what it feels like to be a kid in their classes. They have to know what hurts and what heals and how you have to talk to a kid to make him feel better when he accidentally pooped his pants in class due to medical challenges. Or how to make that shy girl who rarely talks in class feel empowered when she correctly identifies Scout’s motivation when she defies Calpurnia, her nanny, to help out a friend in the book, To Kill a Mockingbird. Average to good teachers always walk into the classroom knowing that every kid in the room is mentally and emotionally naked for most of the school day… no matter how many layers of clothing they may be covering it up with.
And it is not easy being in rooms full of naked kids every day if you have more than the minimum share of empathy. Empathy makes you feel what they are feeling, all the anger, disgust, fear, sadness, anticipation, joy, and sorrow… all the embarrassing feelings brought on by being emotionally naked in front of peers and teachers… and that hot-looking new girl from California. You feel their pain. You feel their awkwardness. And if they are a wicked little pervert, you feel sick to your stomach as you realize you are seeing them as their least-acceptable, naked self.
And the curse doesn’t just end at the close of the school day.
You have to know going in that if you watch that Disney movie on TV you are going to cry at least three times, possibly endure heart-wrenching angst twice, and laugh unattractively like SpongeBob more times than you can count. And those are only fictional people. Curse it, you even cry during telephone commercials. Your daughter tells you about seeing the cyclists in the park almost run over a skunk, and you can practically smell it and feel the nausea in your gut. Your dog whines about the empty food dish and you feel that too. All because of the curse of empathy. If you have it, you are going to feel whatever they feel, whoever they are. Even if you don’t really want to.
Catch a Falling Star 
Forever Fumbling Forward
What do I really think the future holds? That’s a question where, if I answer it truthfully, I will be told, “You should not think that, stupid man! What good does it do to be that negative? Lighten up or we’ll burn you at the stake for evil thinking.”
Okay, okay. I get it. The truth makes you afraid. And it should.
As California, Arizona, and Nevada, as well as the aliens working with the military-industrial complex at Area 51, are all burning up with record heat, drought, and wildfires, we are definitely going to need to find a new, cooler place to live.
Maybe a planet in the Tau Ceti system. Tau Ceti is a star system with a solitary G-class Star only 12 light years (3.7 parsecs) away. Do you think the Tau Cetians will mind us colonizing. Or do the Republicans plan on simply invading?
Or there is Mars. But do you really think Elon Musk will be willing to share? And we do have to figure out how to breath mostly carbon dioxide to thrive there. Or do the Republicans plan on just taking a lot of stinky Earth air with them? That’s still a matter of learning to breathe carbon dioxide, along with methane cow farts and whatever chemical crap Dow and Monsanto have been burning and pumping into our atmosphere.
But you know full well the Republicans are not planning to spend any of their vast fortunes earned by all their hard work investing money in stocks and avoiding taxes to take the rest of us along wherever they plan to go. They will leave us behind to enjoy the climate change catastrophe that they have worked so hard to convince us is still not happening.
But all of that doesn’t mean I necessarily believe we are all gonna die a horribly hot death being unable to breathe on the garbage ball that Republican Space Forces will leave us all behind on. Not necessarily… just probably.
But I do have a certain amount of faith in the ability of people who actually have beating hearts in their chests rather than empty spots for installing safes packed with gold bars to use their problem-solving abilities to teach us all about carbon recapture, solar and wind power, carbon sequestration, air scrubbers, vertical farming, and reforestation. Before we get a total grip on weather control, we may have to move into underwater cities and spend some time countering the acidification of the oceans. We will also have to apply conservational farming practices to fish and kelp and shellfish, because if we let the oceans go sterile and lifeless, we’ll all be doomed anyway.
Human beans (of course, I meant to say “beings,” as I would never get that wrong on purpose only for the sake of a bad pun) are better under pressure than you probably believe. We have survived terrible things before. And, I am sorry, T.S. Elliot, but it is more likely to end with a bang rather than a whimper. Beans in the pressure cooker explode rather than deflate or dissolve. We will succeed in becoming successful carbon-dioxide-breathing baked bean-people or go out with an impressive bang while trying.
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