It’s not easy being green. People see you when you try to hide in plain sight. Just stand around like a normal person… look like a normal person… talk like a normal person… don’t use that lexicon full of exotic vocabulary… say simple words… Don’t worry about looking stupid. Stupid people fit in and are easily accepted. But they see through me.
“Hey, Mickey, why do you always look so green? Why are you such a know-it-all?”
Being too smart is a curse. You don’t fit in anywhere. Nobody will talk to you because they don’t understand you. You talk in paragraphs with topic sentences and supporting details. They talk in words and phrases, mostly profanity, and hate-filled words. You understand what they say, but would really rather not understand them.
And I am not a know-it-all. Socrates always said that he knew nothing at all. That’s because nothing that can be known is one hundred percent provable. And I am not as smart as Socrates. So, I must know less than nothing. They made him drink poison for being too smart and teaching kids to be wise guys.
“Mickey, weren’t you a teacher?”
“Um, no…?”
Yes, somewhere near, a mallard or a pintail or a wood duck or a Muscovy duck has his beady little duck eyes trained on the back of my head. I can feel the hatred from afar. And it is invariably a duck with teeth… a full set of Michael-biting dentures sharpened to a .pirahna-like edge
“But, Mickey, phobias like that only happen in the brains of crazy people.”
Yes, mental diseases and traps of thought and overthinking are caused most often in the brains of people who are too smart. Smart people can perceive dangers that stupid people can’t. Sometimes they are real things, real dangers. Sometimes they are not. Keeping your balance on the highwire of daily life over the bottomless pit of bad things that could happen, is hard work. And missteps will happen.
Hide me from spying ducks, my friend, and I will try to tell you in upcoming posts how to learn and what knowledge is really all about.
Lately I have been having memory troubles. You know what I mean, when you walk through a doorway with a definite purpose in mind.and then, on reaching the other room, you have no earthly idea what that purpose was. It happens to me regularly. In fact, I can even start writing a sentences, and then I… What was I talking about? Oh, yes. I need to practice writing some more spectacularly bad poetry, before I forget how to do it.
Why did I use this picture? I don’t know. I have forgotten.
Re-minders
Sometimes…
My mind slips out of my left ear…
And I can’t remember things.
So, I have to search under the table…
To find my mind…
And then I remember that that’s not how a mind works.
Yep, I still obviously remember how to write spectacularly bad poetry. It is my contribution to literature. Virtually all poets will be able to say, “At the very least, I am a better poet than Beyer.”
It is probably evident that comments or verbalized reactions can easily enhance or spoil the beauty of these works of art. “That’s just AI junk ,” “Mickey is some kind of pervert,” “Pastel colors make me feel calm and quietly happy,” “Sleeping nude provides better, more restful sleep,” “Getting the lighting right can make or break the beauty of the picture.” There is a place for comments below if you have anything to add. Don’t beat up my pictures too badly.
And what does this oil painting signify? It’s called “The Madonna of the Golden Door.” But the door is obviously made of brown wood, surrounded by all the gold paint the doofy artist could afford at the time.
And is this a painting of a naked young girl, or a shirtless boy with long hair? And how can there be an ocean in the background if the painting was done in Iowa, as far away from the ocean in every direction as you can get in North America?
And no explanation of this is worth the time it would take to explain.
Are they green because they are aliens? Or do they just eat too many leafy vegetables?
One of the models in this picture didn’t show up to pose for this picture… but his clothes did?
So, maybe this post is geared toward artworks that Mickey doesn’t reveal very often because they show some of his mistakes and tendency to bad judgments. Yeah,, that’ll do, unless he decides to tell us the real reasons at some later time.
The situation began to feel more hopeful as Princess Verumi took off to lecture Prince Porodor and make him regret being born. Cissy’s small crew, with Wylo and Taro’s family decided to hunker down and await whatever was going to happen in the little white house.
“Do you think your cousin can get us freed from this mess?” Cissy asked Suki.
“Verumi has a very forceful personality. But she hates Porodor nearly as much as he hates her. Her rank in the clan is equal to his.” Suki looked out the window nervously after answering.
Crocodile Guy shimmered back into visibility.
“The space whales are on our side,” he said. “They have been talking about the situation amongst themselves. They are very intelligent, maybe more so than me. But they don’t have much in the way of mechanisms or powers to help us in any way.”
“Well, that’s a good thing,” said Cissy, understating the fact of it by a factor of a million.
“You really think the space whales are smarter than the average Nebulon?” Suki asked Crocodile Guy.
“They have a collective intelligence. Anything one whale learns is almost instantly known to all of them. And they are discussing things all the time. Only a few Nebulons with Psionic powers know that they talk like that. And the mind-readers among your people generally keep their knowledge of whale talk to themselves.”
“That figures. The warlords and royalty generally punish and limit that kind of power among our people.” Suki frowned.
“Judging by their statements of philosophy and rationality, they are very wise, very empathetic, and possessed of an inner peace far greater than any I have encountered among any humanoid species in the galaxy,” Crocodile Guy said.
The group awaiting punishment engaged for a while in the Nebulonin games of Phokkocaraht and Akkohrahtia for the remainder of the afternoon. The Earther nearest-equivalent games would be checkers and tiddlywinks.
Along about supper time Crocodile Guy had more news via whale observations.
“I am afraid things did not go well for Princess Verumi. The whale saw her confront Porodor, become exceedingly angry, and she threw ceremonial dinnerware at his head. He responded by yelling and having his honor guard throw their ceremonial halberds at her. She received two flesh wounds and still managed to escape capture or being killed. The guards are searching for her now, not realizing that the space whale is helping her hide from them.” Crocodile Guy delivered it in a deadpan voice.
“Ooh! I iz maddening up!” declared Friday.
Diznee, sensing the little Lupin’s distress, put her arms around the puppy girl’s neck to calm her down.
“The Prince has dispatched an execution squad to deal with all of us,” said Crocodile Guy.
“Oh, good grief!” said Cissy in answer.
“Can the whale hide us?” Suki asked Crocodile Guy.
“It says to get the condemned into the tailward corners of the house.”
“Tahkaarac nah timbuhran,”said Taro. “Ahckah na Saronac sah!”
“What did he say?” Cissy looked at Suki.
“He says we do what the whale says. He and his family will deal with the squad and send them away.”
So, Cissy, Suki, Friday with Diznee around her neck, and Waylo took up positions along the tailward wall. Taro, Sonno, and their sons put themselves in between the door and the wall where the prisoners stood. A section of the floor bulged and grew like a blooming vegetable and formed itself into a new interior wall, concealing the prisoners, and shortening the room in ways that were barely discernable to anyone who hadn’t seen the transformation take place. Crocodile Guy made himself disappear once again.
When the execution squad showed up, they confronted Taro with a lot of angry yelling in the clakkity-clack-ur-ack language of the Nebulons. Suki didn’t translate and no one was even breathing loudly behind the partition. Then they heard what could easily have been some sort of shooting and Taro’s voice was not heard again. Friday hugged Diznee tightly to keep her silent.
There followed further thumping and dragging and scraping sounds, followed by utter silence as the executioners gathered things and left, presumably to find the escaped prisoners.
When the secret wall finally came down, only Crocodile Guy stood in the empty room with a stunned look on his holographic face.
“Taro sacrificed himself and his family to help us escape.”
Diznee now sobbed uncontrollably.
Suki looked grim. “It is up to us to make sure his sacrifice was not for nothing.”
I am certainly no expert on the Golden Age of Comics. I was, in fact, born the year that the Golden Age ended. I am a child of the Silver Age (1956 to the early 1970s) and those were the comics I grew up with. But I admit to a fascination with the initial creation of the characters I love, including Batman, Superman, the Flash, Captain America, the Phantom, Steve Canyon, Wonder Woman and numerous others who were first put on the comic book pages in the Golden Age. And being subject to comic book prices that zoomed upward from a dollar an issue, I was bedazzled by the ten cent price on old comics.
Comic books owe their creation to the popular newspaper comic strips from the Depression era and WWII wartime. Originally, comic strips were gathered and printed on cheap paper. Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon, and other adventure strips would lead to the war comics and hero-centered comics that would morph into superhero comics.
Some of the artwork in Golden Age comics leaves a lot to be desired. Especially original, straight to comic book publications that were produced fast and furiously by publishers who would open one week, produce three issues. and go out of business three weeks later. But in the mad scramble, some truly great artists formed the start of their illustrious careers, Will Eisner, Hal Foster, Milt Caniff, and Bill Elder learned to master their craft in the newspaper strips, and all later created comic books and graphic novels. True geniuses like Jack “King” Kirby and Bob Kane and Jack Davis grew directly from comic book studio madhouses into comic-book-artist immortality.
As with most things that have a Golden Age, the truth was that later comic book eras were superior in most ways. But this Golden Age was the foundational age for an American art-form that I truly love. So, flaws and warts are overlooked. And some of these old ten cent books on super-cheap paper are worth huge amounts of money if you still have a rare one in mint condition. Ah, there’s the rub for a manic old collector guy like me.
Most of the Golden Age comic book images used for this post were borrowed from the ComicsintheGoldenAge Twitter page @ComicsintheGA. If you love old comics like I do, you should definitely check it out.
The question before me now is, “What do you know, and how do you know it for certain?”
Well, I really don’t know anything. How do I know that I don’t know anything? Well, Socrates always told everyone who would listen that he didn’t know anything for certain, and he is obviously much smarter than I am. So, being super-stupid by comparison, I don’t even know as much as Socrates.
So, like Socrates, I need to ask questions. But who will I ask? I can look at the picture above for answers, and I can ask you, the reader, the questions.
The picture is one of the most favorite ones I have ever drawn. By that I mean it is one of the pictures I drew with colored pencils that I like the best. It is, therefore, basically a self portrait of things inside my silly head.
Do the soldiers look familiar to you? If they do, it is probably because, like me, you have seen the soldiers from Disney’s Babes in Toyland. Hopefully they are just generic enough that Disney wont sue me for modeling this fantasy on something I saw in their copyrighted movie. I didn’t intentionally copy anything, and I have never knowingly made a single dime off of this picture. So, they don’t need to sue me, right?
Okay, those weren’t Socratic questions. They were leading and focused questions. So, let’s start the Socratic stuff.
Do you see anything in the picture that is innocent and childlike? Could this be illustrating a childish fear of the darkness? Did you notice the darkness they are marching towards on the left of the picture? Could this also be showing a progression towards maturity? Are the children and the soldiers not approaching that darkness… whatever it might be? Are they not getting more prepared to face the darkness as they get closer to it? The weapon pointed straight at the darkness is the bugle. Does the bugle, being an instrument for announcing something in combat, not have some symbolic meaning here? Does the darkness they are approaching not represent something like death? Does the boy with the drum suggest how we might deal with the darkneness in our own too-near future?
Yes, one of the two models in this painting is me.He was wearing a Royals Little-League shirt, so I changed it for a better one. The ’85 Series was decided by an umpire!He was actually a she, wearing a bikini top, and Asian-American, not Native-American.You probably guessed already that she was not actually blue.The dog was real too.From a Yearbook photo, but Sasha wasn’t wearing a hat. She thinks I made her look like Charlie McCarthy.Only the girl in front wearing her Carl Eller Vikings jersey was real.The people were real, but the flag was photo-shopped behind them.
A balloon filled with loony baboons piloted by a buffoon poltroon with a laugh like the State bird of Minnesota (the common Loon) was whipped round and round by a cyclone (an Iowa State alum like me) until it worked like a blender to tender the gruel (or is that grool?) that makes the makings of a Paffooney. Yes, I took letters from many of those words and pasted them together with Elmer’s glue to create a new word to apply to a picture that accompanies a short piece of Mickian writing.
The girl in the Paffooney above should not be construed to be the poltroon who pilots the balloon. Breanna laughs more like a canary than a loon. That particularly pallid poltroon looks more like Ted Cruz, hence I chose to put Breanna in the picture in place of the Grandpa Munster look-alike that would otherwise offend your eyes. Paffoonies should be interesting to look at. Not sickeningly horrid.
The idea of a Paffooney is that it must contain a little bit of me… Illustrate a piece of my soul so to speak. It has to show a little bit of the self-examination that makes me bend and twist who I am until it fits into the pretzel-shaped container of who I am meant to be. I suppose I am meant to be an artist. Michael was, anyway. Mickey? Well, he’s a cartoonist. Don’t believe me? You could go to Google Image Search and search Beyer Paffooney. You will get a collection of what the algorithm thinks a Paffooney is, and hopefully at least a few of the ones I have created with my magic word attached that the algorithm judges you are mature enough to see.
Catch a Falling Star 