August 5, 2018 · 9:59 pm

Some Silly Sunday

tenor

It is entirely too hot in Texas.  Hot enough, I think, to make Tinmen dance and old retired teachers like me sleep so much of the afternoon that they can’t get any wisdom written.

I believe I have finally reached an end of having to reset passwords for my backup computer.  I managed to pay most of my online bills after resetting and being basically 100% forgetful of passwords.

I am still at war with my new scanner/printer.  It refuses to be used for scanning or printing even though it is online, networked, and it occasionally pukes out a random print that 50% of the time is actually what I asked it to print.  It is a nightmare of router PINS, printer drivers, and online help instructions that never seem to actually fit together properly.

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I think that I have used pictures of metal men in this post because I have been mechanically going through the motions today.  I move like a stiff-legged tin soldier as I try to wash dishes, work on computer issues, and deliver food for Uber in my hot automobile.  I don’t seem to be getting much done.  But I can live with that as long as I can live to write another day.

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August 4, 2018 · 6:19 pm

Sunflower People

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Sunflowers can be beautiful.  They are the State flower of the State of Kansas.  They are also weeds.  I know this because as a teenager I had to walk up and down beanfield rows in Iowa and pull them out of the ground by the roots.  They were slightly harder to be rid of than the hated button weeds and cockleburrs that made up the bulk of farm boy plant war enemies.

To be clear, a weed is a plant that grows where you really wish it wouldn’t.  Weeds can aggressively take over in places that are outside their natural environment.  They can, like sunflowers, be volunteer crops that come up amongst the desired plants, aggressively and with malice, to take away the moisture and the nutrients from the plants you are trying to cultivate.

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A picture from Holmes Seed Company… some people pay for sunflowers.

But sunflowers can be a useful plant in their own right.  As a farm product they can produce edible seeds, and sunflower oil, like soybean oil, has a multitude of food and industrial applications.  Plus, as flowers, sunflowers have a certain hardy and steady beauty that metaphorically symbolize happiness and hope.  It is probably the reason Kansas chose it as a State flower, more than the fact that Iowans hate it as a pernicious weed.

People can be sunflowers.  I know at this point you expect a little Trump bashing, as both Trump himself and Iowa Congressman Steve King are examples of sunflower people.  They thrive where you really don’t want them, and they are very hard to remove from your beloved country crop field.  But hopefully, the system will pull the racist weeds out of the soil by the roots so they don’t grow back right away.  Robert Mueller as special counsel has his farmer gloves on and he is already going up and down the rows.

So, enough about the weeds.

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Let’s talk about the sunflower people we all know and love.  They can be weeds, at times, too, but the most important things about them have to do with their basic flower-ness.  Just because they tend to vote Republican does not make them weeds.  They are all about a primary color.  Yellow.  That is the color of warmth and sunshine.  One thing that always holds true about sunflower people is that they definitely love the people they love, and while living in rural farming communities full of sunflower people, you will be warm in the embrace of a culture that knows how to keep you fed and happy.  Yellow is also the color of happiness.  Sunflower people know how to celebrate.  They get together in large family reunions with lots of grilling and lots of potato salad.  They can sing country western songs, and often play the guitar.  The women get together in quilt-making clubs that produce beautiful works of blanket art that makes you happy on cold winter nights.

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And sunflower people have smiles that radiate who they are in the same way a sunflower does, mirroring the firey orb in the sky the flower is named after.

But make no mistake either.

Sunflower people can burn you with the force of their angry fire if you don’t do the right thing.  Their frowns and displeasure can wilt you under righteous heat.  And they can do it with just a disgusted look, leaving you as sunburned as a day at the nude beach without sunscreen.  They can take root in your life and take hold in a way that eventually takes over, like the sunflowers dominating the flower garden.  You had better pay heed, or your other blossoms are lost to you.

Well, that being said, I’ve already written too many words about it for today.  I know many sunflower people.  I live with some and was raised by others.  And you are probably surrounded by similar blooms yourself.

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Because I Want to Fly…

Wings of Imagination

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August 4, 2018 · 1:35 am
August 2, 2018 · 4:04 pm

How Mickey’s Brain Percolates

Animal Town212

I tend to do a lot of thinking about thinking.  I pay attention to what sources of input and images I use to bring the old brain to a boil.  It is entirely possible to turn into a malevolent moron in this age of Trumpalump Twitter Twit-Tweets if you pay too much attention to its anger-inducing misinformation and rage-ranting.  So I have to limit how much I think about calling Trump and the other elephant-heads names.  I enjoy it, true, but I really don’t want to become a malevolent moron.

Val in the Yard

The anti-moron medicine comes in the form of remembering who I used to be and how problems were solved as an educator, mentor, and advocate for young people.  I remember how the times I used name-calling and anger in place of problem-solving tended to only make the problem worse.  If you deliberately brainstorm solutions to the problem instead, I have found that after you test several solutions and have them spectacularly fail, your persistance eventually yields a solution that works.

So when I think about how to proceed with the daily problems of life, especially the age-old question, “What the hell am I going to write about today?” I find that I tend to leap out of the box, think all around the outside landscape, and seize on something silly in a very round-about and experimental manner.

The things I choose to write about in book form are all based on my own real experiences.  But I have the unfortunate gift for having an overdose-level vivid imagination.  So my books are about fairies and ghosts and aliens as well as the kids I have taught, the people who raised me, and the people who have always surrounded me.  I write about ideas in some depth, but always from a sideways viewpoint that reflects my beliefs in non-violence, rationality, and love.

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My mind works like a match in a firecracker factory.  But I try not to use it for evil.  And now that I am done revealing the secret of how Mickey’s brain percolates, feel free to tell me how stupid it all is and call me whatever bad monkey-names you can think of for me.  I can take it.  And when I take it, I most likely will use it to make something surprisingly good.  Mickey-brain tea… now there’s a weird, wild, and wonderful metaphorical brew.

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August 1, 2018 · 3:58 pm

A Poem Written on an Envelope

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Yes, I actually did it.  I woke up with a poem-thought in my stupid old head.  I frantically searched for a pen and something to write on.  I found an envelope with a blank backside.  And I committed an act of spontaneous bad poetry.

Here is a readable copy of the insidious verse;

Bad poem # 347

 

So after I had created this awful, spontaneous, and possibly evil bit of poetry, I began to seriously wonder what the purpose of this particular unfortunate act of creativity really was.  Could it be used for anything constructive?  Anything at all?

And then I had a thought…

But that was actually not a thought but a sudden need to pass gas.

And then I had another thought.  And even though the second one was authentically a real thought created in my allegedly real brain, it was not quite as useful and stress-relieving as the first.

“I could use this piece of poetic  abominationhood to rob a bank,” I thought stupidly.  “If I walk into a bank lobby and read this poem aloud to everyone, then they will all become suddenly violently ill, and I could clean out the tellers’ cash drawers while they were violently wretching and projectile vomiting.”

But then I had another, far more useful thought, when I realized that reading it aloud might make me ill also, rendering me susceptible to wretching and projectile vomiting myself, and rendering me completely unable to nefariously profit from my bad poetry.

(**Note** Please don’t try reading this aloud to see if it really has the above-mentioned effect on yourself.  No amount of smug I-told-you-so’s is worth the risk of not being able to prove me wrong.)

So, what else could I do?  I had one more spurious and possibly vile thought on the matter.  It is possible to interpret this awful, horrible, smelly snippet of truly bad poetry as a sort of metaphorical pornography.  I could use it to appeal to the prurient interests of geometrically-shaped people.   I am told there is money to be made in pornography if you are the right kind of person (meaning, of course, people who are definitely not me).  But nowhere on the internet could I find a country populated by people who are geometrical in nature.  Not a county, city, town, villa, shopping mall, or gas station either, for that matter.  It is as if such people don’t actually exist in real life.

Oh, well…  I managed to fill up a post with words in it anyway.  That has to count for something, doesn’t it?

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August 1, 2018 · 2:48 pm

Facing Life Like Tarzan

A good old blog.

authormbeyer's avatarCatch a Falling Star

Tarzan

There are now two days left in my career as a teacher. I only have five more classes on two test schedule and early-release days.  I will soon have to completely change my life.  It is as if a shipwreck will cause me to be raised naked in the jungle by apes.   …Okay, not the smoothest analogy segue ever written.   But there is some validity in my goofy comedy statement.  Tarzan went from a gentrified country life sort of future to a naked in the jungle and raised by apes sort of future overnight.  He faced an adoptive father who wanted to kill him, a malign gorilla who tried to kill him when he first discovered the knife, and Kerchak, Lord of the Apes who kills all challengers to his authority.  And, of course, there are lions, alligators, and leopards to overcome.  …Well, maybe that’s stretching a metaphor…

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July 31, 2018 · 2:13 pm

Aeroquest… Canto 32

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Canto 32 – The Palace of a 1,000 Years

    The city of Kiro, Gaijin was a heavily populated place.  The city was full of high-rise pagoda towers and Kyoto-style castles.  Dominating the skyline was the huge obsidian sculpture of a Black Cat atop the Temple of the Four Pillars of the Secret Way.  Naylund Smith explained it all to Ged Aero as they made their way through the ornate city.

Ged and Dr. Smith were accompanied by the two children and Xavier Tkriashav.  All the newcomers were overwhelmed by what they saw.

“This place is more beautiful than anything I ever saw in my visions,” said Tkriashav.

“Do I understand correctly that you are the Master Telepath and Psion?” asked Naylund Smith.

“Yes.  I am a powerful telepath, teleport, and clairvoyant.  I am not the most powerful of my people, however.”

“Perhaps,” said Dr. Smith, “but you figure prominently in the Prophecy of Shan.”

“If that is a book, I’d like to see it,” said Tkriashav.

“In time.  It is a holy book to these people.”

All around the small group, silk-robed people had been gathering to watch as if the five people were a circus parade.  Many shouted “White Spider!” as if prayers had been at long last answered.

“Can you tell me why I am supposed to be this White Spider?” asked Ged as he took long strides to hurry past lemon-yellow-skinned admirers.

“It is destiny.”  Naylund smiled and nodded his head indulgently.  “The web of outer space has brought you to us to pick up the threads woven by the last White Spider.  The last spider wove this world and its society.  You have come to link it to other webs and expand this world.”

“You talk a lot of poetic nonsense.”  Ged looked away at the sky.

“Poetic nonsense is also sometimes Truth,” said Dr. Smith.  “I will help you to learn that in time.”

Finally, they came to a beautiful castle made of white stone and Gaijinese Teak wood, inlaid with bright blue sapphires.  It appeared to have been their destination all along.

“This,” said Dr. Smith, “is the Palace of a Thousand Years.  It is your new home.”

“We will live here?” asked Junior.

Dr. Smith looked at the blue boy.  “It is the palace belonging to Shen Ming.  It is the traditional home of the White Spider.  It is the place where the last White Spider, Shan Sasaki once lived and worked.”

“Do you expect me to give up space travel?” asked Ged.  “It’s the only life I’ve ever really known.”

“It will be part of the life you will lead as the White Spider.  It is the work you are expected to do for us.”

“Hmm.”  Ged stared up at the curved roofs of the Palace of One Thousand Years.

Naylund Smith led the way into the palace through a large wooden gate.  Inside they came into a courtyard that bustled with activity as if it were a small town all by itself.  The courtyard had an ornate Tori-i arch that marked the center of the great building.  There were practice yards there where groups of children under the care of a schoolmaster were learning martial arts, probably karate.  There was a large oriental garden for quiet contemplation inside the palace, as well as the entrance into a riding stable filled with two-legged llama-like mammals called kians.

Naylund pointed out the two master towers where the instructors lived.  There was a massive central building which Naylund called the Akito House.  It contained the vast White Spider library, a place that had almost as many bound volumes of books as books on computer memory crystals.  Finally he pointed out Shen Ming’s Hall, which, he informed them, was the White Spider’s official residence.

They entered Shen Ming’s Hall through a double door that proved to lead to a huge indoor bathing pool.  Naked yellow men, women, and numerous children were all bathing there.  Junior Aero would’ve blushed if his skin hadn’t been blue.  Ged’s skin turned crimson.

Up a marble stair, they came into the Administrator’s Hall, and a large, stately office.  Behind the desk was Shen Ming himself, looking spry for a man of nine hundred years.  He was bald as a cue ball and looked like a wrinkled Alfred E. Newman.

“Honored Shen-sensei,” began Dr. Smith.  “I bring before you Ged Aero.  He is…”

“I know, Naylund-sama, I know.  He is the new White Spider.  I would know him anywhere!  He is just as Shan-dono described him in the Prophecy.”

The silk-clad ancient moved swiftly out from behind the desk and took Ged’s hand.  He placed it on his own hairless head.

“I pledge to you all that I have, White Spider,” Shen Ming said in tones of awe.  “I will serve you all of my remaining days.”

Ged couldn’t begin to speak.  The place and the situation filled him up.  Tears welled up in his eyes.

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July 30, 2018 · 3:53 pm

Being Prosaic

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I admit it.  I am prosaic.  I think in sentences.  I speak in paragraphs.  I write in 5-paragraph essays.  I should stop with the repetition of forms and the parallel structures, because that could easily be seen as poetic and defeat my argument in this post.  I write prose.  Simple.  Direct.  Declarative.  But those last three are sentence fragments.  Does that fit the model of prose?  How about asking a question in the middle of a paragraph full of statements?  Is that all simple enough to be truly prosaic?

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Prose is focused on the everyday tasks of writing.  It seems like the world thinks that the mechanical delivery of information in words and sentences should be boring, should be functional, should be simple and easy to understand.

I don’t mean to be pulling your reader’s mind in two directions at once, however.  I need to stop confusing you with my onslaught of sentences full of contradictory and complex ideas.  I should be more clear, more direct, and more to the point.

So here is my thesis, finally clearly stated; The magic of writing prose, it turns out, makes you the opposite of prosaic.

20160705_214055Ah, irony again!  It ends up being anything but simple.  You can write in simple, adjective-and-adverb-free sentences as Hemingway did, and still manage to convey deeply complicated and thoughtful ideas.  One might even suggest that you can create poetic ideas in mere prose, dripping with layers of emotion, conflict, theme, and deeper implied meaning.  You can also write prose in the intensely descriptive and convoluted style of a Charles Dickens with many complex sentences and pages-long paragraphs of detail, using comic juxtapositions of things, artfully revealing character development, and idiosyncratic dialogue all for comedic effect.  Prose is a powerful and infinitely variable tool for creating meaning in words.  Even when it is in the form of Mickian purple paisley prose that employs extra-wiggly sentence structure, pretzel-twisted ideas, and hyperbolically big words.

Simply stated; I am a writer of prose.  I am too dumb about what makes something poetry to really write anything but prose.  But I do know how to make a word-pile like this one that might just accidentally make you think a little more deeply about your writing… that is, if you didn’t give up on reading this three paragraphs ago.  I find it useful to examine in writing how I go about writing and what I can do with it.  I try to push the boundaries in directions they haven’t been pushed before.  And hopefully, I learn something from every new essay I write.  What I learned here is that I am prosaic.  And that is not always a bad thing.

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July 29, 2018 · 12:15 am

Scary Uber Stories

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After driving for 45 minutes today, I discovered that I had earned only $4.16.  And this after having the air conditioning give out once, having the engine overheat twice, and having to change which direction I searched for building number 210 three times before I found the guy’s second-floor apartment and delivered his 40 chicken nuggets and two large orders of McDonald’s fries.  Normally when it takes that long to deliver food over more than 10 miles of city driving you make more for the effort.  But they don’t start paying you until you pick up the food, and from home to Ronald’s place in Irving, Texas was easily eight of the ten miles.

Really scary story, huh?

But that’s what Uber driving is like.  It is benign sort of slavery where you use your own car and gas money, your own car insurance to protect you from Texas Bubbas in Chevy pickups, and your own wits to survive and deliver hot food in the punishing Texas summer heat.

meethxx234569The worst experience I got from this summer’s food delivery came at the hands of a fellow school teacher.  I had to deliver faculty lunch to an elementary school in the last week of summer school classes.  It was a large lunch with two bags of burgers and a tray loaded with drinks in flimsy cardboard cups.  It was a short drive from the restaurant to the school.  But when I got there, it was a school with many entrances and kids playing on two different sides of the building.  I went to the door I thought the Uber navigator was directing me to.  I knocked.  When I got no answer, I called the lady who ordered everything.  I told her I was at the west door.  She told me that I had to find the main door on the south side of the building.  So I managed to juggle the two sacks and the easily spillable drinks to three different doors on the south side, all locked.  I called again and was told I must have the wrong building, so I went to the school building across the street and found an office building with only kindergarten and daycare kids present.  I called again.

“How can you mess it up so badly?  Our food will be cold and we have no time left to eat it.  And you are at the wrong building!  None of the other Uber drivers had this much trouble.”

So, after having been called an idiot, I quickly found a playground guardian to ask and was directed to the proper door on the NORTH side of the building.  I apologized and delivered the food.  She made complaints to Uber and told them that my behavior was unprofessional and the food was late.  So my job as an Uber driver was briefly in jeopardy.  I called the Uber driver masters and offered to refund my four-dollar fee to the customer to make amends.  They told me they appreciated the sentiment, but they NEVER give the money back.  So I went home grumbling, dripping gallons of sweat, four dollars richer and an hour’s worth of misery wiser.

I hope you appreciate that I waited four weeks to write this horror story.  It was the only way I could write it without profanity or bad words.

 

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Saturday Night D & D on Sunday

Here’s a re-post for D&D Saturday that should prove very confusing, since I initially posted it on the wrong day. I’m the only one who ever does that, right?

authormbeyer's avatarCatch a Falling Star

Yesterday I forgot that it was Saturday.  But that doesn’t matter much in a D & D campaign.  You may not play at regular times… or at all, like this week.  But you do what you can when you can.  Just like in real life.  So let me share a character gallery, in order to give me my weekly dose of fantasy sword and sorcery nonsense.

These illustrations all come out of my D & D notebook.  They are done in colored pencil on colored paper.  Many are copied from models in catalogs, action movie stills, comic books, and illustrated Dungeons and Dragons products, but always interpreted in my own style and costumes.

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July 28, 2018 · 11:27 pm