March 30, 2015 · 12:10 pm

Those Were the Days

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Pictures from picturehistory.com, www.edb.utexas.edu, texasescapes.com, and lbjmuseum.com

My personal history as a school teacher begins in the 1981-82 school year in a little town in South Texas called Cotulla.  Without realizing it, I was following in the footsteps of former U.S. President LBJ.  Really!  It’s true!  To prove it, here is a picture from the LBJ Museum showing the big-eared, jug-headed goofball with his class of Mexican American Cotullans.

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His class looked a lot like my first class, only a lot smaller.  I was hired by the new junior high principal to be the 8th-Grade English teacher for Frank Newman Junior High.  The school had basically imploded the year before.  Gus the janitor told me that the previous principal had been robbed several times, with kids breaking into the main office in the middle of the building during the middle of the night.  They even broke open the safe.  Some of the same kids I was supposed to teach had been arrested for assault the previous year, and some of the kids were caught making babies in the school cafeteria.  I went into the same classroom that the previous year’s seventh grade class had used to drive poor Miss Finklebine out of teaching for life.  They had set off firecrackers under her chair.  They threw erasers and chalk at each other.  They almost got away with murder…  In fact, they may have gotten away with it.  Miss F was never heard from again, and I found a very long list of self-destructive rantings (in the form of discipline reports that had apparently never been turned in) in her desk that threatened the lives of several students whom I knew for certain had survived because they were in my eighth grade classes that year.  I don’t think they tracked her down and got her… but what they did to that poor woman’s mind may have pushed her over the edge.  I had a tough year that year.  The two boys who threatened to beat me to death with a fence post they picked up when I was marching kids in a line to the cafeteria, El Mouse and El Talan, both went to prison withing five years of being in my class.  Both of them are now deceased.  El Mouse by suicide after the Texas Syndicate wrecked him in prison, and Talan was shot and killed by a rival drug dealer while his wife and family looked on.  I hope you are not laughing at the moment.  I do often exaggerate for humorous effect… but that is not what I am doing here.

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Cotulla was once a wild west town, probably worse than anything Hollywood ever put up on the silver screen.  Former Mayor and descendant of the town’s founder, Bill Cotulla, once told me that they had six-gun shoot-outs on Front Street in the 1880’s.  I met Mr. Van Cleve the former Texas Ranger whose picture is in the Waco Texas Rangers’ Hall of Fame because of the border machine-gun shoot-out in the 1940’s.  In fact, I taught English to his grandson.  The school, just like the town, was a tamable thing.  I spent the next 23 years of my life there teaching mostly Spanish-speaking kids about the wonders of English, literature, and writing.  I saw the school go from a rough-and-tumble wild beginning into a program that routinely out-performed other small schools our size in everything but Math.

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I know that you may find this part difficult to swallow… in the same way a goat has never managed to swallow an entire school bus… but my fiction books about school kids in Iowa are really mostly about characters I knew and taught in Cotulla, Texas and only slightly merged with the white-bread Iowegians I grew up with in Rowan, Iowa.  Texas and Iowa have more in common than you might think…  Me, for one thing.

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March 29, 2015 · 1:34 pm

Art Self-Edited

I have been working at illustration and drawing for the majority of my life, but it took computer technology and digital photography to allow me to maximize the use of my abilities.  Let me go through a couple of case in points.

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The Red-Haired Girl picture is a good example of what I can do.  I originally drew the picture to illustrate a Charlie Brown poem.   Here is the poem if you don’t remember it.  (A convenient excuse to re-post something and fill this post with words already written.)

Little Red-Haired Girl

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

That little red-haired girl, so cute, so nice

You only looked and looked from afar

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

You could’ve held her hand

You could’ve walked her home from school

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

She never got your Valentine

At least, you forgot to sign your name

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

No hope of marriage now, nor children for old age

Happily ever after has now long gone

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

Now every love poem is a sad poem

And the world is blue and down

You never told her that you loved her…

You never told her that you loved her…

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown.

You may not see what I did without looking at the two pictures very closely.  The better, more brightly-lit photo is not the answer.  I originally created the Red-Haired Girl as a Charley-Brown-y creation complete with a bigger than natural head, a Charley-Brown head.10305044_602428713227020_8427155857664240183_n

I have ulterior motives for my evil cartoon manipulations.  I like this image I have created very much, in fact, one might say that I have fallen in love with it just a bit…  Pygmalion-like.  I wanted to use the image to illustrate Anita Jones, a character from my book Superchicken.  Anita is the fictional re-imagining of a girl that I had a deep and abiding crush on (possibly still existing today, though she is now a grandmother in real life.)  She is literally my little red-haired girl.  So what did I do?  Look closely.  I lovingly shrank her head.  Yes, like the headhunters of old, I used the paint program on my computer to shrink it, re-attach it, and make it more human-like.  Realistic proportions, though only a very slight change by actual percentages, make a realistic difference in how real the viewer perceives her to be.

I know you probably think I am full of goofy-gas to make such claims.  If you don’t see the difference in the first example, perhaps you will see it here.  Compare these two David Copperfield pictures carefully.  Look at Little Emily’s head.

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You don’t have to believe me, but it does make a difference.

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March 28, 2015 · 3:20 pm

Picture Tricks

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I have discovered things about being an artist by blogging.  I have discovered things by learning from other artists.  I have also discovered things by trial and error.  I have also discovered things by random acts of God.  So let me share some of the ill-gotten picture secrets that I have added to my vast bag of useless incunabula-juice squeezed out with my arcane-secret juicer and internet blogger good luck.

#1.  Save everything arty… as you see above, I have three different pictures of my Catch a Falling Star character Dorin Dobbs, all made from the same pen and ink line drawing.  All the color is digital paint from my computer’s own paint program.  Simple and cheap to do.  Save functions multiply the pretty.

#2.  Splice stuff together and make new stuff…  I have the cheapest possible photo-shop program, but using its entire $7 value every time I paste with it, I am able to create new art out of old.

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New art out of old;

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#3.  Weave things together to create unity…  My art is not for its own sake.  I am not Picasso or Van Gogh.  My art is very much tied to the stories I tell as a writer of Young Adult novels.  (Snow Babies is awaiting its turn with the editors of PDMI LLC Publishers.)

#4.  Promote the art and writing of others…  I have spent a ridiculous amount of internet time stalking artists like Loish and sharing their work on my blog.  Writers too.  I do my little book reports in order to connect the reading and the literary influences I have completed (or stolen from) and show where much of my own style and je nais se quois comes from.  If the artist or writer is still living and notices what I have done, they will often return the favor (hopefully, if they don’t find my work to be an offense against the gods of art).  If they can’t return the favor (because they are quite dead or thoroughly disgusted by me), I have at least associated my work with theirs in the minds of my readers,

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#5.  It’s all about digital photography…  In order to share my colored-pencil menagerie of live Paffoonies on the internet, I have to get better at photography.  I have taken far more photos of drawings in the last two years than I have drawn drawings.  That has not been a life-long way of things.  I love color, and poor photography skills turn out various shades of gray.  Sunlight?  Incandescent?  Fluorescent?   I haven’t discovered that secret yet, but it will never be uncovered if I don;t keep trying.

#5. Find connections that help pull your work together in one big, messy bundle…  Facebook, WordPress, and Deviant-Art are all better forums if you can connect them.  I did this by labeling everything Mickey with a meaningless made-up word that no one else in their right mind would use.   The word is Paffooney.

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A picture search on Google using the words “Beyer Paffooney” gives you an almost complete gallery of my artwork and nonsense.  Googling the word itself yields a link to a plethora of my old blogs.  Do you not know what plethora means?  Try it and you will learn that very good word.

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March 27, 2015 · 1:54 pm

Finding Answers with the Right Questions

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Yesterday I burbled purple paisley prose all over the page and, in trying to answer the question “Why do I Blog?”, only managed to come up with a lame sort of “I don’t know.”  but I also referenced Douglas Adams’ answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything which turned out to be 42.   You see, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy we learn that the Earth is nothing but an alien-designed supercomputer run by highly intelligent mice to find the actual question that goes with that ultimate answer.  Unfortunately, after the planet Earth is destroyed by Vogons to make way for an interstellar bypass, the question is put on hold.  That’s really what I did yesterday.  I put the question on hold.

But today, feeling ill and a little blue, I decided to percolate the old teapot of wisdom one more time to see if I could find an answer in the tea leaves.  I am not a well sort of individual.  As I have posted before, I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor since 1983.  Every day I wake up to a new dawn is a bit of a miracle.  But the sand is running out of the hourglass.  There are things I have to put right, and blogging is a way to do that.

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In this photo Paffooney I am sharing one of my recent miracle sunrises.  6:55 looking East from the Greenbelt in the middle of Carrollton, Texas.  The dog exercises me every morning in order to keep me alive on the off chance that I will drop some bacon on the floor one morning in the near future.  She also uses me to bag up poop so she can stay out of trouble with the city.

Every morning is like that now.  I am retired.  That is a less-painful way of saying “waiting to drop dead”.  I spend a good portion of my day now alone and able to write and think and not do very much else.  So what I write and think has to be the real work that I am doing now to justify the amount of food I eat and air I breathe (and bacon I drop as the dog has just reminded me.)  I have recently finished two novels.  I have a novel waiting to be published, with a contract and everything at a small, but very real publisher.  I have two books already in the marketplace, Catch a Falling Star and Aeroquest.  You can find them and ignore them on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com just like everyone else has been doing.  The books are what I am technically blogging about.  I am blogging by command of I-Universe publishing.  But that’s not really why I am doing it.  There is so much more to it than that.

Here’s the realist’s assessment of my writing… it has become a very expensive and time-consuming hobby that eats up my remaining days like a ravenous wolf.  At the rate I am going, I will not live to see the day when my writing finds wide-spread acceptance.   I have the word of professional editors and other writers that my work is very well-written, and there was a time in my life when I might’ve made a decent living at it like Terry Brooks or R. A. Salvatore.  There was a time when good books found a publisher.  Now, there is the little problem of a world teeming with books all clamoring for notice of their own.  I am generally ignored by the masses.  The local library didn’t even put the gift copy of my book, paid for with my own money, on their shelves.  They didn’t give it back, either.  My time is not yet, and my audience is probably made up of people not born yet.  Maybe they simply don’t exist.

But all those mulched-up and melancholy things I have said about my writing amount to nothing in the face of the question, “why are you still bothering to blog?”  Truthfully, in the past few months I have made myself laugh and made myself cry by writing and telling stories… by mangling metaphors and propagating purple paisley prose… by blogging.  And I really don’t care if no one ever reads my blog full of blather and allusive alliterations.  They exist.  They are real.  And I have offered them to the world.  Why do I blog?  I still don’t have any idea.

first flowers

These are the very first flowers that bloomed in our neighborhood this year that didn’t die a horrible death by freezing.  Sure, they are only common dandelions and many think of them as weeds… but they are also proof that for now the sun continues to shine and possibilities continue to bloom.

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March 26, 2015 · 12:18 pm

The Meaning of 42

little Toy Trio

I get goofy ideas for blog posts when I am reading other blog posts, when I am reading books, and when I am letting television suck the smart out of my brain cells.  I was first inspired by reading this blog post from In My Cluttered Attic.  He was talking about why he chooses to blog in the face of a plethora of common-sense reasons not to.  “Good idea for my own blog post!” said the insane voice that inhabits the dark space behind my mind’s own creative filing cabinet #42 in the second dungeon under my memory.  I immediately filed the idea away in that cabinet because the cabinet was close at the time and I might never find it again later.  Then I leaped to a post by The Off Key of Life in which I found a beautiful song beautifully sung that made me trip over another file cabinet that was behind the mechanical letter-sorting machine on the stairway landing to the sub-basement of the second dungeon.

Some old memories spilled out on the stone steps because I used to sing that song to my three babies when I rocked them to sleep twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, and thirteen years ago.  That song, and “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Disney’s Pinocchio.  Both of those songs are about one day finding the key to happiness… or possibly the key to understanding… but definitely about the search for the key.  I always believed that those songs would give my children sweet dreams… and I prayed that the songs would never become the source of nightmares.

And then I was watching Hulu, an episode of Arrow in which Oliver Queen must decide on the reason why he was doing the whole superhero-vigilante thing and risking his life constantly.  Unfortunately I didn’t find the file box that has superheroes in it that I was looking for in hallway leading to Area 51 in the upper dungeon.  But I knew the topic was going to be “Why I Blog”.  That settled, I began to write and paste in all sorts of random stuff.

“What is the meaning of 42?” you ask?  How clever of you to ask that!  In Douglas Adams’ seminal series of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books

the_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galaxy 42 is revealed to be the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.  Practically everything that he adds to that epic trilogy of five-or-so books is basically random.  And yet, it is not.  He is telling us about the apparent randomness of Life, the Universe, and Everything while carefully explaining how all this random madness that is Everything actually fits together in a very random-mad way.  There is a certain asymmetrical symmetry about it all that has a certain contradictory sort of beauty, if you get what I mean.  (A certain ugly beauty if you don’t get what I mean.)

So why do I blog?  Good question.  I don’t really have an answer to it.  I blog because my first publisher told me I had to do it to promote my book, Catch a Falling Star.  My book has netted me $28 so far, as long as I am not fool enough to start subtracting all the money I have spent trying to advertise and promote my book.  I’m not fool enough.  I stay out of that corridor in the maze of my complicated little mind.  I blog because I can share all the private drawings and poems and insane nonsense that fills the filing cabinets in my mind without paying a hefty psychiatrist’s fee.  Your underwear drawer needs to be aired out once in a while even if you do remember to wash your underwear.  And it is liberating to walk around figuratively naked in front of an audience that potentially includes little old church ladies, God, and everybody.  I blog because writing is something that I do, have always done, and will continue to do until they put my smelly corpse in a pine box and bury it under the garbage pile out back.  All that scribbling has to count for something sometime.  And maybe that sometime is now.  If you are one of those poor souls suffering from Serial-Mickey’s-Blog-Reading Disorder (a condition the CDC has taken to labeling SMBRD… not to be confused with small-bird flu), and you actually read the posts and look at all the random junk piled into those mad paragraphs, you may just accidentally stumble across that key we have all been searching for for eons… and unlike the majority of the world, you will be giggling insanely for a reason!

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March 25, 2015 · 12:02 pm

A Maker of Books

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For an awfully long time I have been filling blank pages with junk and goofy stuff and saving it in book form.  I think it began when I was a Junior in high school.  At least, that is the oldest of the homemade books I could find.  I fill these handmade and factory-made blank books with stories, drawings, poems, clipped pictures, nonsense, secrets, shamelessly plagiarized gunk, and anything and everything.  At 58 and one half years of age, I have been doing this insane thing for a very long time and have quite a pile of it.  The above is my Tales of Fantastica, a cartoon journey into my own dreams and personal life.

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I believe, based on physical evidence that the first collected writing I have done is in my Journal, Rage.  It is called that because I named it after a Dylan Thomas poem in which he “raged against the dying of the light” because he was venting on the subject of his father’s death and the dread of living a life without being allowed to really be alive… to really live.  I wanted to write down everything I noticed about being alive… my hopes, my fears, my dreams as fully as I could remember them… and it became, over time, quite ripe and fertile, as stored garbage usually will.  I was able to use it as a source for other stuff.  I have at least nine volumes of this journal composed over a period of twenty-some years… before I started depositing my daily dose of words and interior monologues in other places.

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My old drawing notebook goes all the way back to 5th grade.  I saved almost every drawing and doodle I did as a grade-school-and-middle-school doodler.  It has some of my very first cartoons and bird drawings and monsters that I filled my quiet hours in childhood with instead of doing the homework I was supposed to be doing.

In college, specifically Cow College… Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, I first began putting stories into novel form.  These I kept in binders and neatbooks that I had to illustrate the covers of with my own story-specific logos.

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Here is the first manuscript of Superchicken, the first manuscript that I actually finished and followed all the way through with.

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This book-maker-mania followed me even into the classroom.  I collected classroom drawings from students, either as gifts from them or confiscated from them and put them into the binder I call my Gallery.  This will make an interesting post of its own in the near future.

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And I am still not cured of making my own covers, even though I am now trying to make them into traditionally publlished books.  Here is the cover for Superchicken.

superchick_novelI suppose I will never really be cured of this mental aberration for as long as I still live.  I don’t know what my heirs will do with them when they are finally rid of me once and for all.  But it is all something I don’t regret doing.  And besides, I couldn’t help it.

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March 24, 2015 · 11:04 pm

Another Self-Promotional Announcement from Mickey

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I’m not bragging.  I know it is not that much.  But it’s more than twice what I had at the start of 2014.

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March 24, 2015 · 11:57 am

More Powerful than a Locomotive

There is an old saying… “What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.”

I have an addendum to add… “If what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, then I must be Superman!”

Lying here now in pain after having surgery this morning, that is exactly what I have been telling myself.  No more Kryptonite today, thank you.

Superman 1

I may have mentioned before on this blog that I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor since 1983.  (If I haven’t mentioned it before, then it was only because I mistook complaining loudly and relentlessly about it for mentioning.)  I have arthritis, diabetes, COPD, hypertension, psoriasis, and benign prostatic hyperplasia.  Two of those diseases ganged up on me recently.  I had a sebaceous cyst on my lower back that had gotten infected because psoriasis had flaked skin off the top of it until there was an ulcerated infected hole there and it caused me enough pain to prevent sleeping.  (I know you didn’t really want to know about that… but. then, neither did I).

I got the thing surgically excised (whacked off with scalpel and scissors) and had the hole sewn back together with a few butterfly Band Aids slapped on the top.  I had been given a topical anesthetic that deadened the nerves while I was being carved up, but wears off shortly after and then all the pain that has been saved up comes rushing back to fill the void.  The doctor said I could take aspirin, but I have a big bottle of Aleve next to the bed for arthritis, and my body is so used to the medicine that I might just as easily have taken a sugar pill for the same effect.  (Of course then my diabetes would come knocking on my brain.)   So, I am in pain.

But less than an hour after surgery, I had to go in to the counselor’s office at school and discuss for 45 minutes the life-and-death future consequences of the schooling of one of three kids.  It is no kind of chicken barbecue or country fair to have to explain to a school official everything you have been doing to solve the life-or-death problem for the kiddo while pain medication is wearing off and anesthetic is wearing off and patience is wearing off and mental acuity is disappearing faster than a rabbit-man can teach irony to middle-schoolers…. wait, what?  Perhaps I should rest now and let the medicine do its work.

Naw, can’t do that.  I’m Superman.

But, wait… wasn’t I Popeye just yesterday?  Who the heck am I really?  A goofy old writer-guy, most likely.

Superman 2

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March 23, 2015 · 12:05 pm

Talk Like Popeye

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I have long identified with Popeye.  Let me review that notion by re-posting a bit of an old post in which I explain while talking like Popeye;

I am Popeye, I sez, because I just am…  Yeah, that’s right, I yam what I yam.

First of all, I looks like Popeye.  I has that cleft in me chin, very little hair left on me ol’ head, and I gots the same squinky eye (what squinky eye?).  I has had that same squinky eye since I wuz a teenager and got kicked in the eye doin’ sandlot football (bettern’ sandlot high divin’, fer sure!).  I also has them same bulgy arms, the ones that bulge in the forearm and is incredibobble thin on the upper arms.

Second of all, I has Popeye Spinach-strength.  I look weak and scrawny, but I is a lot tuffer than I looks.  I go into classrooms full of wild, crazed middle schoolers, and grabs their attention, tells ’em what’s what, and makes ’em woik.  (Woik is a voib, and that means I is woikin’ when I makes ’em do it.)  I kin stands ridicule and kids what will remarks on the hair in me ears and me squinky eye.  I tells ’em that the scar on me face was did by a bloke with a knife (which it were, cause I had skin cancer and the doctor used a knife to get it off).  I has taken all kinds of nasty punches from life (diabetes, blood-pressure problems, prostatitis, arthritis) and I still keeps comin’ back fer more.  In fact, I can winds up me arm and give that ol’ Devil a good Twisker Sock right in the kisser.

Third of all, I has a typical Popeye Sweet Patootie.  My Island Girl Wife is like Olive Oyl in very many ways.  She is always tellin’ me what to do.  She compares me to ol’ Bluto.  She panics and flails her arms when there’s a crisis.  And she expects me to always save the day and never says “thank you” after.

So, I mean it when I sez “I am Popeye”.  I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!

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See?  I kin talk like Popeye because in many ways I AM him… He of the mangled-mouth vocabubobulary created by Elzie Crisler Segar on January 17th, 1929 for his comic strip Thimble Theater for King Features Syndicate.  He doesn’t talk right because his brain is so full of goodness and spinach that he has no room left for spelling and pronunskiation.  Ak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak….  Popeye is just a simple sailor, and has been for 94 years.  He expresses himself horribly, but only in the very best of ways.  So when I mangle a word on purpose… or by happy accident… it is just me honoring that old one-eyed sailor.  It is not me just being a stupid addle-pated blarney goon who don’t knows how to talk right.

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Comic strip from comicskingdom.com

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March 22, 2015 · 2:58 pm

The Quest for Pinkie Pie

The day before yesterday I wrote a post for 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion that basically tore my heart out.  It made me relive one of my worst defeats as a teacher who cares about teaching and students.  I have to admit that I spent an awful lot of time crying the past three days.  But I am not a sorrowful Sad-Sack with a sourpuss’ simpering sarcastic smile.  Not I.  I come back from downers by doing silly stuff… kinda like over-dosing on alliteration in that S-filled sentence.  So what silly stuff am I up to after a triple-down darkness-dealing downer like the one from that post? (When Compassion Fails)  I took up the Quest for Pinkie Pie.

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I borrowed the My Little Pony image above from Jessica Ann Hughes whose very eloquent post laments the series update as a sexualization of the thirty-year-old toy franchise in the newer series, My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic.

But I have to argue that it doesn’t sexualize anything beyond the surface.   After all, these ponies are really little girls that have charming little-girl personalities and act in stories that have little-to-nothing to do with sex.  Yes, I have seen the wedding episode where Twilight Sparkle’s big brother gets married, but that episode is about trusting your own instincts when something seems wrong.  If somebody like me is getting sexual vibes from that cartoon, then something is seriously wrong and that somebody should seek therapy to avoid becoming some kind of pedophile.  I mean, it is important to self-censor.  When I was getting a soda at QT this afternoon, I was happy to see two pretty girls in short pants for the first time in a long time.  6a00d8341c562c53ef01676098b1fd970bTexas weather has been rainy and dreary for the past few weeks and the sun has finally come out.  But… wait a minute!  Why am I looking at middle school girls’ legs?  I am a miserable, broken-down, spotty old man.  And I have been busily watching this My Little Pony show on YouTube where all these little girl ponies are walking around naked all the time!   But, am I not over-reacting?  Yes, the ponies have big eyes and shortened muzzles… but I haven’t been obsessing about ponies because of hormone imbalances or something.  I thought the whole Brony thing was ridiculous up until a very short time ago.  Pinkie-Pie-my-little-pony-friendship-is-magic-20424750-570-402I mean, grown men watching a cartoon about little-girl ponies and singing the songs and buying the toys and wearing ponies on T-shirts.  Is there therapy for that?  I am hoping so… because I think I’m going to need it.

My doll-collecting mental illness began, as I tried to explain and tell lies about yesterday, when I was a child who had been given dolls for birthdays and Christmas (I meant to say Action Figures… No!  Really!) and only really had sisters to play with at home (my little brother was eight years younger than me, and my friends from school lived in the country, miles away from town on farms.)

As a young man, I regained my dolls… I mean Action Figures, and tried to restore them (not play with them… I never said play with them).  When I got married, my wife and I actively began collecting them.  She was initially charmed by my love for my old pieces of plastic.  We began looking for what was out there.  Captain Action and G.I. Joes for me, Barbies for her.  When she lost interest (or found a cure for that particular mental aberration), I kept on.  The rules for collecting included; Twelve inch tall figures.  Never pay more than $20 for a toy.  Never spend more than $50 a month.  Find rare dolls for little money.  Rescue dolls who somebody once loved and played with, or that are on the verge of the ignominious end to be found in the department-store dumpster.

Rainbow Dash started me down the slippery slope to Brony-ism.  I just happened to find, on an after-Christmas clearance table at Walmart with all the other damaged toys that didn’t realistically survive the seasonal play-with-it-in-the-store-while- mommy-shops damage, a cheap and forlorn Rainbow Dash with extra hair.  She looked at me with those big, sad eyes and pleaded with me to buy her and save her from the dumpster (or the sadistic little girl that would buy and dismember her because she was just a cheap thing from Walmart).  I’m too stupid to resist.20150105_161300

Then I began examining my purchase because I didn’t really know what it was… the Brony-thing warning lights were going off somewhere in the back of my goofy-old-man head, but it took some research before I learned what Equestria Girls were and that there were six of them.  Six of them!  A set of six to collect!  But also the original ponies!  A set of twelve!

And the disease had me.

Ponie girls

So, here you see the tangible evidence that I am acutely infected.  Brony-itis?  Possibly.  Fatal?  Hopefully not.  If you’re counting, they still are not all here.  Apple Jack, Rarity, Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash as Equestria Girls.  Apple Jack, Rarity, Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, and Pinkie Pie as ponies.  But no Fluttershy at all.  And… what’s this?  No Pinkie Pie?  The most popular pony with little girls, I could not find her in Equestria Girl form?  Well, I could… but not for under $20.  I went shopping at Toys R Us yesterday with the Princess in tow.  We bought toys, but no Pinkie Pie for less than twenty one.  And this collection represents $14 in January, $30 in February, and $25 already this month.  I’m guessing the rules might save me from this disease yet.  Does that mean no Pinkie Pie ever?  Well, I watch the stupid cartoons incessantly now on YouTube… I’ve learned that Friendship is Magic and as long as you can remain true to your friends, you can overcome almost all of life’s problems… together… with love.  And Pinkie Pie is totally random… and funny… and everyone’s friend.  There are good lessons being taught to little girls and old men who watch these things.  Pinkie Pie’s is probably the most important one of all…  So Pinkie is my favorite.  I haven’t found her yet in a way that stays within the rules, but I am not some creepy old man who breaks the rules.  I have the rest of my life to complete this quest.

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