October 15, 2017 · 4:18 pm

You Are Not Alone

Mary Murphy's Children

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.

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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.

You are not alone.

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October 14, 2017 · 7:44 pm

The Encounter

Life, like a good Dungeons and Dragons game, is basically controlled by rolling the dice of random encounters.  Even if there is a great over-arching plan for this reality in the brain of the Great Dungeon Master in the Sky, it is constantly altered by the roll of celestial dice and ultimate random chance.

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Thusly, I managed a D & D encounter in the middle of the night last night.

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I generally have a sleeping skill of only +1.  That means, that if sleeping is a simple skill, I can add my +1 to the roll and only have to get a 6 or higher on a twenty-sided dice.  At 3:10 a.m. I rolled a 3.  I had to get up and wander bleary-eyed to the bathroom, a -2 for terrain effects to successfully to make it to the bathroom and pee through a prostate that is swollen to the size of a grapefruit, most often a difficult task, requiring a 15 on a twenty-sided dice.  I got lucky.  I rolled a 19.  Then, on the way back to bed, the dog rolled a natural 20 on her get-the-master’s-attention roll and let me know she had to go to the bathroom too.

I have to tell you at this point, that since I am trying to be more of a nudist, I seriously considered taking her out naked (by which I mean me, not her).  Dressing up in the middle of the night can be daunting.  And no one was going to see in the dark of the park at 3:15 a.m.  But I thought it probably wasn’t a good idea to go adventuring without armor in the darkness, so I at least put on shoes and a magic +4 bathrobe.

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So, we went out to let the dog poop in the park, a thing she can do profusely on a roll of 3 or higher.  We got it accomplished with little fuss.  Oh, there was some complaining and growling, but the dog manage to ignore me when I did it.  Then we had to find our way safely back to the house, and bed…. but we had a random encounter roll that didn’t go in our favor.  I am always on the lookout in the dark for aliens or black-eyed children or even the onset of the zombie apocalypse.  But what I got was the monster from under the bridge.

One of the denizens of the city suburbs that most enjoys the nightlife in the city and thrives even though it isn’t human is the horrorific creature known as a raccoon.  She’s a sow that I have seen a number of times before at night.  She lives under the bridge in the park and often has three or four cubs trailing behind her in the spring.  And she has nothing but contempt for humans with dogs.  She immediately launched into her fear-based hiss attack.  And coming from a possibly seven-foot tall monster sitting atop the pool fence and hissing in the night, it seized the initiative with a very effective attack.  She rolled an 18.  The attack succeeded.

I tried the ever-popular pee-your-pants defense, but failed, rolling a 2.  The reservoir was previously emptied, and I wasn’t wearing pants.  The dog bolted for the kitchen door and dragged me with her.  Her magic bark attack wasn’t even tried.  We were in the house before my heart skipped its third beat.

Surviving the encounter in this way is probably good for the heart.  It beat really hard for a bit and got thoroughly exercised.  But I went back to bed and reflected on the fact that random encounters like that are entirely dependent on the roll of the dice.

 

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October 13, 2017 · 2:12 am

Adjusting the Barbie Shelf

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I put up Christmas lights over my bed again to use as winter night lights.  But this year I installed hooks to hold them.  Needless to say, the drilling and hammering of hooks made numerous Barbies and other dolls leap headlong off the shelf and into my bed below.  So, once the construction stopped I had to lift them back up into place.  But there were new places for old residents and new residents to fill old places.

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Most of the Minions now occupy new spots where they are less likely to dive off the edge.  Their little unposeable feet don’t balance very well, so it is helpful to put them where they are held back from suicide a bit by Barbie legs and other Minions.  Frankie Stein from Monster High joined the guitar-girl Barbie next to Stacy dolls and My Little Pony Fluttershy.

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Esmeralda is a Goodwill-rescue Disney doll that joined the shelf near bare-chested Ballerina Barbie, also a Goodwell rescue doll.  I haven’t figured out how to keep Ballerina Barbie’s bazzoom-ohs covered by the buttonless jacket she wears.

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The third and final picture shows the remaining shelf leapers back on the shelf with Cat-Burglar Barbie added where she’s never been before.  My Little Pony Applejack decided she was too tired for upright just before the picture was taken.  Oh, well, leaping off shelves really takes it out of you.

I know there is more to show of the Barbie shelf, but it will have to be saved for another day.  All the leapers came from the East end where all the hammering happened.

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October 12, 2017 · 3:01 pm

The Creature I Have Become

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I identify as a humorist, writer, cartoonist, and certified fool (Yes, I have a certificate from the Children’s Writer Institute that proves I once foolishly believed I could learn how to make money as a writer).  But my current novel project is a horror novel, The Baby Werewolf, which I twice before tried to turn into a completed rough draft novel. This time I mean to follow through to the bitter end.

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Torrie Brownfield, hypertrichosis sufferer and possible werewolf.

In order to reign in the goofiness enough to deal with the issues in this novel I have been doing a lot of horror reading. I have also undertaken the reading of a very good author examination of the life of Edgar Allen Poe.

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Poe’s life was highly instructive.  You may not have realized this, but most of the giants of American Literature prior to and contemporary with Poe did not make most of their money as writers.  Emerson was a clergyman.  Nathaniel Hawthorne worked as a customs clerk. Poe, the first to try to make a living solely on work as a writer, editor, critic, and poet, was subjected to the horrors of poverty, illness, and want.  His wife was chronically tubercular and ill.  He never made the money he was obviously worth as a creator of popular horror fiction, poetry, critical essays about other authors, and as an editor for profitable magazines of the day.  Other people made loads of money from his work.  Poe, not so much.

It is instructive to a writer like me who can’t seem to land any sort of income from my own creations.  There is no demand because there is no recognition of my work.  I have come close, having my work praised by editors and fellow authors, and being a finalist in novel writing contests twice.  The goal is good writing.  I will probably never see a return on my investment in my lifetime.  My children may not acquire anything by it unless one of them really devotes a lot of effort to it.  Like Poe with his drinking problem, chronic depression, and ill wife, I face physical limitations and poor health, grinding financial issues, and family factors that make it near impossible to put marketing effort into my literary career.

And this novel is a hard journey for me.  I was sexually assaulted by an older boy when I was ten.  A lot of the fears outlined and elucidated in this particular story leap right out of that iron cage in my psyche where they have been contained for fifty years.  Fear of nakedness.  Fear of sex.  Fear of being attacked.  Fear of the secret motivations in others.  Fear of the dark.  And, most of all, fear of what fear can make me become.  Fear of being a monster.

But I have not become any of the dark and terrible things that fear can make me into.  Instead I became a school teacher, mentor to many.  I became a family man, father of three children.  I became a nudist, hopefully not a dark and terrible thing in itself.  I became Mickey.

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October 12, 2017 · 2:57 am

1,200 Followers

The-Muppets

There are now more than 1,200 people following my blog, Catch a Falling Star.

That’s more than 4 times as many people as lived in the little town where I grew up back in the 60’s and 70’s.

It is hard to believe there are that many foolish or incredibly daring people cruising WordPress.  I wonder if any of them are actually Muppets?  None of the ones whose blogs I have read seem to be Muppets.  Some of them seem to be businesses or corporations.  Probably more properly, Buppets and Cuppets.

I wonder if my blog has caused mental issues for any of them.  It certainly has that potential.  My blog is a lot like a boomerang fish act.  I throw a stinky fish into the wind and if you don’t get it when it comes back around, it can smack you in the head.

Concussions are mental issues, right?

I hope more people will read and like my goofy blog in the future.  And if the stinky fish ideas come back around too often for your taste, you don’t have to catch them.  You can always duck.70512-lewzealand_and_fish

This image of Lew Zealand and his Boomerang Fish Act was shamelessly stolen from an interesting blog called The Muppet Mindset.  But the stinky fish metaphor is entirely my fault.

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October 11, 2017 · 2:44 pm

So the World Ends Dinky Finky Doo

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He says things daily that are provably untrue.  He makes huge messes that nobody is willing to clean up, both internationally and domestically.  He throws fits and Tweets like a Twit on Twitter.  He insults people with impunity and tries to wreak vengeance on those that give as good as they get from him.  How can he possibly be the President of the United States?  Well, he can’t.  If this were an actual democracy, he’d never have been voted in, let alone stay in the office this long without being impeached and removed.  Most intelligent people who haven’t been hitting themselves on the head with hammers of prejudice and party ideology can see that.  Even some Republicans.

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The selfish, orange-headed moron only cares about what affects him directly.  He constantly seeks attention and plays to the camera and to friendly audiences.  He is deliberately provocative because it gets him the attention he craves, whether it is positive or negative doesn’t seem to matter.  His decisions are guided by virulent racism and misogyny.  He will provoke conflict and do irreparable damage to the functioning systems that keep this country running.  And the Republican controlled Congress will let him do it because they got that control by cheating.  All the levers of power are in their corrupt, feckless little greedy hands.  And they will let the monkey throw poop everywhere until we all succumb to poop-related diseases.

I am already today feeling quite ill.  It helps slightly to take out some of the bad feelings on the Nazi clown that is now in charge.  But only slightly.  At some point I’m still going to die.  And we the people are probably never going to be in control of the government again.

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Much scarier than Batman’s Joker, isn’t he?

So I am bummed.  Things are not going well.  I have hand cramps from shooting the bird at the TV news every day, every time Monkey-face Cheetos-head is talking.  Bile is my ruling humor this morning.  And I need a nap so I can feel better.

 

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October 10, 2017 · 2:19 pm

Stardusters… Canto 67

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Canto Sixty-Seven – The Arboretum Again (We Can’t Seem to Get Out of There)

When Farbick and Starbright finally got to the Arboretum where everyone else had gathered, they got in on the very end of Alden Morrell’s third re-telling of the final battle and deaths of Tedhkruhz and Makkhain.  Alden had gotten rather good rather quickly at telling the tale, complete with the sound effects at the climax of Lester smacking his huge petal-lips as he/she/it devoured both combatants.

Starbright then went to Science Officer Shalar to see if she could help with the medical care for the little wounded lizard girl.

“Was she badly wounded?” Starbright asked.  Farbick continued to hold her hand even as she asked it.

“Yes,” answered Shalar, “It seems she would’ve died if not for the application of this alien device to her throat as she was dying.”

The weak and pale little lizard girl smiled up at them.  “It’s a tissue-knitter given to our people by the  Zeta Reticulans as a gift when they left our planet for good.  Makkhain wasn’t supposed to have it, but he stole it from the evil Senator’s treasure room to save me if he was forced to try and kill me.”

“You were lucky that Makkhain was still himself even though he was a clone,” said Gracie Morrell.

“That was Senator Tedhkruhz thinking he could completely control the clone with his hypno-programming.  Makkhain was still free to do whatever the Senator had forgotten to tell him not to do.”  Sizzahl smiled at Gracie.  “I think you know something about the value of love when it comes to clones,” she said to Gracie.

“Yes, if a simuloid Telleron clone had not sacrificed himself out of love for humanity, I would not even be here,” Gracie said.

“And you wouldn’t be a child again either,” added Alden, somewhat ironically.

“But, Alden, don’t you love being young and fresh and full of energy again?” Gracie asked him.

“Yeah, I suppose I do.  We are going to need it raising those clone children.”

“What’s this about children?” Starbright asked.

“Sizzahl used some of Alden’s DNA to create five little boys and five little girls that  are half human from Earth and half lizard people from Galtorr Prime.”  Gracie was beaming like an expectant mother, even though she looked like a little girl herself.

“I was expecting the fusion children to be the new people of this planet.  I really didn’t think any Galtorrians would survive,” Sizzahl said.  She was still weak and looked ill, but as she rested in Shalar’s protective embrace, she was obviously recovering.

“So, let me understand this,” Starbright said.  “The Morrells are finally going to have children of their own, and all of the survivors are going to restore and repopulate this planet?”

“That’s about how I see it,” said Shalar, the Science Officer, giving the idea the rubber stamp of scientific approval.

“Well,” said Starbright, “It’s about time we got in on this whole love and marriage thing too, Farbick and I.”

“The two of you are going to get married?” asked Alden, looking shocked in the fakest possible manner.

“Well,” said Farbick, “She hasn’t officially asked me yet.”

“Farbick, will you marry me?” Starbright asked, smiling  brightly, like a star.

“Of course I will, my love.”

“Gee, that’s just like in some old movie,” said Alden.

“I don’t remember the name of it,” said Farbick, “but it was an old black and white movie I got it from.”

Farbick laughed as Starbright slugged him on the shoulder.

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October 9, 2017 · 2:48 pm

Mickey at Sixty, Part Two

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As often happens with doddering old doofuses, you can easily reach 500 words and have to stop for the day even though you are still not through with saying all the stupid stuff you have on your doddering old doofus mind.  So that’s when you get a part two the next day.

Things have happened to me in the middle of the year following the sixtieth anniversary of the blizzard I was born during in 1956 that I still haven’t talked about during this Mickey at Sixty topic.

I am, after all, a survivor, about to pass birthday number 61, the year beyond which Robin Williams never made it.  I have always said that if the old saying, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” is actually true, then I must be Superman by now.  I am now in my third year of not being able to afford the medicine the doctor thinks I should be taking daily.  I have had arthritis for 42 years.  I have been a diabetic for 17 years.  I have been a cancer survivor since 1983.  By all rights, I should be long dead by now.  How God ever made that mistake, I will never know.  Surely it was an oversight on His part.  “What? Mickey is still alive on planet Earth?  How could I let that happen?  Oh, well, maybe we give him one more year to see how that turns out,” God says, and all the angels agree with him because angels never think for themselves, at least, not after Lucifer, that nutty angel in the red pajamas that always carries around a pitchfork.

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And what am I actually doing with my year of life that I probably wasn’t supposed to have?  Constructive things like becoming a nudist and giving up on wearing clothes.  (Probably not a great idea for someone whose corpus strangioso is so intolerably unsightly to normal people.)  I went to the nudist park in Alvord, Texas one time.  And I liked it.  And I have thought about going back on another weekend, but something always seems to come up and prevent me from following through with the plan.  But it has been remarkably good for my blog.  Apparently having my post Becoming a Nudist appear on clothesfreelife.com refers loads of readers to my WordPress blog.  Who knew that nudists were such avid readers of humor blogs by goofy Mickeys?  They have helped make my blog post Why Do You Think That? Part Four one of my most popular blogs of the year.

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This is also the year of my life in which I was forced to give up on the idea of restoring the swimming pool to life and having it removed, thanks to the bully-boy encouragements of the city pool inspector and the rest of the Nazis down at the City Environmental Services Office.

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Dreams die hard… and expensively… by stages.  It took most of the summer to get it done, but now my swimming pool is no more.

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So now Mickey is a sadder-but-no-wiser Mickey with no more swimming pool.

But Mickey is still Mickey, even at sixty.  He will break out the paper and colored pencils and still do the doings that old doofus Mickey will do, writing a bunch of nonsense, and coloring…20171008_211247 stuff, and doing some of it naked.

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October 8, 2017 · 4:08 pm

Mickey at Sixty

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It is true that I am now only a month away from being 61.  But this reflection is based on what happened to me while undergoing the year past.  My fictional character, Valerie Clarke, took the selfie above of the two of us.  She doesn’t have her own smartphone, after all, she’s a fictional character, so she used mine.  It shows in the picture what she looked like at eleven and what I looked like at sixty years and eleven months, in other words, this morning.

So, what exactly does the picture reveal about us?

Well, for her, it is fairly obvious that she’s only an imaginary person.  She was eleven in 1984, the year of the fictional snowstorm in Snow Babies.  She’s a bright and vibrant young girl with hopes and dreams ahead of her.  She’s also known tragedy, especially after her father’s suicide.  But the fact that she’s fictional and based on more than one real person from my past does a lot to explain why this reflection is not about her.

For me, however, you get a look at a grumpy old man with a straw farmer’s hat, an author’s beard, and silvery Gandalf hair.  More of my drawings are glimpsable on the wall behind me.  I look like the kind of seedy old curmudgeon who yells at neighbor kids who walk on his lawn.

But I’m really not what I look like.

I am a writer.  So I am full of experiences, ideas, and feelings.  And I am also full of people.  Valerie is only one of those.  I create fictional people from the people I knew or knew about in my little Iowa town, Rowan, where I grew up.  Kids that went to school with me.  Their parents.  Shopkeepers and business people and creepy old people that I sometimes encountered.  Hot tempered people.  Wise people.  And stupid people who were often laughed at for good reason.

I can also draw on (and draw pictures of) all the people I knew as an educator.  More than two thousand kids who passed through my classes in four different schools, some of whom I knew as well as I knew my own children, were available to pull details from to mix and match and make fictional characters from.  Fellow teachers, some gifted with a natural way with students, some hopelessly lost in the wrong profession with the wrong sort of personality were also available to make characters from.  Fools and idealists.  Bullies and shrinking violets.  Heroes that possible readers could look up to and love.

I am the kaleidoscope, the thing that you can look through to see the world and have it refracted and patterned to make it beautiful, even in its ugliness.

But all of this reflection is only that, the view in the mirror, the outward look of the man who is me.  Mickey at sixty is many things, not all of them pretty, not all of them wise.  But some of them are.  And some even better than I think they are.

 

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October 7, 2017 · 4:08 pm

Life By a Roll of the Dice

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These are Warhammer 40,000 Harlequin Warriors I painted myself.

Over the years I have played many role-playing games.  Virtually always I have done so as the game master, the dungeon master, the story-teller behind the action.  Players decide what to do about the story problems I represent to them.  They have characters that have painstakingly advanced in skills and levels of skills to use for the problem-solving the plot centers around.  But ultimately, when they take action, the outcomes are decided by a roll of the dice.

Life is like that.  You labor hard to control what happens next in your life.  But random chance intervenes.  If you are the Harlequin Space Elf known as Smiley Creaturefeature (the masked elf in the green robe on the front row, far left in the picture above) and your band of high level Harlequin War Dancers have come to Checkertown City Square hunting for your hated enemy, Bone-sucker the Space Orc, it is entirely possible when you use your scanner operator skills to find him, you could roll a “1” on the twenty-sided dice.  This would mean failure.  Not merely failure, but failure on a spectacular level.  The scanner would explode, killing your entire squad, yourself included.  And all those weeks of building the character up to level 17 in order to defeat Bone-sucker and his mutant minions, would be lost and become all-for-nothing in the disappointment department.

Of course, a benevolent game master would alter the outcome in some way to keep the story going.  Perhaps the exploding scanner, instead of killing everyone, created a mini worm hole in the fabric of space-time and transported them to a parallel dimension where Bone-sucker is actually the chaotic good hero of Checkertown, and you must now work out an alliance with him to fight his enemies, the other-dimensional versions of you that are actual Evil Smiley Creaturefeature and his band of Evil Harlequin Space Elves.  You must then defeat your evil selves carrying out the evil plot that the game master had originally designed for the villain Bone-sucker to employ before returning to your own original dimension.

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Real life does not work that way.  It works more like you see above.  The lovely, metal-bikini-clad female barbarian of swimming pool repair is faced with the attack of the giant rats of city pool inspection, necessary electrical repair, and limited finances.  You can see, if you look incredibly carefully at the purple twenty-sided dice, that her defensive attack roll is a “2” for catastrophic failure.  Her sword cuts off her own leg and causes personal bankruptcy.  The giant rats roll a lucky “13” on the black twenty-sided dice for successful tooth and claw attacks.  They then go on to eat her and force the pool to be removed from the property, using up all the money the player (who is me, by the way) has left.

No game master steps in to create a more reasonable outcome.  The worst possible outcome is what happens.  That is how real life works.  Roll the dice, and lose your swimming pool.

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