April 19, 2024 · 1:09 am

Drawing for a Lifetime

I was born an artist. It has to be developed and nurtured and practiced over time to become what it can truly be, but artistic talent is something you are born with, and there is a genetic aspect to it. Great Aunt Viola could draw and paint. She produced impressive art during her lifetime. My father can draw. He has demonstrated ability a number of times, though he never developed it. Both my brother and I can draw and have done a lot of it. All three of my children can draw and paint. My daughter, the Princess, even wants to pursue a career in graphic design and animation.

One of the factors that weighs heavily on a career in art is the starving artist factor. To be a serious artist, you have to study art in great detail. You need lots of practice, developing not only pencil-pushing prowess, but having an artist’s eyeball, that way of seeing that twists and turns the artist’s subject to find the most novel and interesting angle. It takes a great deal of time. And if you are doing this alone, you are responsible also for building your own following and marketing your own work and creating your own brand. You need to be three people in one and do this while potentially not being able to make any money at all for it. I have taught myself to do the art part, but I paid the bills with something else I loved to do, teaching English to hormone-crazed middle-schoolers.

An important part of art is what you have to sacrifice to do it.

Many artists become alcoholics, drug users, or suicidal manic-depressives. There is an artistic sort of PTSD. Doing real art costs a lot because it alters your lifestyle, your mental geography, and your spiritual equilibrium. Depending on how much of yourself you put into it, it can use you up, leaving no “you” left within you.

I am not trying to leave you with the impression that I mean to scare you into not wanting to be an artist. For many reasons it is a great thing to be. But it is a lot like whether you are born gay or straight… or somewhere in between. The choice is not entirely up to you. You can only control what you do with the awful gift of art once it is given to you. And that is a serious choice to make. Me, I have to draw. I have to tell stories. My life and well-being depend on it. It is the only way I can be me.

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April 18, 2024 · 1:45 am

Mickey the Poet

Mickey is doing Mickey stuff again. Today, his first book of poetry. It is now available in e-book form from Amazon. Book number 24.

I have to admit, I have never seen myself as a poet… at least, not a competent poet. But it feels empowering to put key ideas from your life as a teacher down in a book in verse form. I feel almost as confident as the poets I admire, Robert Browning, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and all…

But as I really seem to be gradually crumbling into the dust of the deceased, I am aware this could well be my final publication. Words are coming harder. The jokes are not as funny. And Irony creeps into the realm of graveyard humor.

So, now I am a published poet. Probably the worst one you could ever find. But capable of pithy poesy and straight-on wordsmithery. the link. Enjoy the loony lyric verse. See how evil this poetry really is.

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April 17, 2024 · 1:36 am

Word Salad and Idea Casserole

In a world filled with interesting and engaging ideas, I get frustrated with the constant barrage of word salad on social media tossed at me by conservative friends.  As Trump seems to be coming closer and closer to ending his administration with his own chaotic behavior, those who supported him are tossing more and more flavorless lettuce and rotted vegetables in the mix.  I have to resist the urge to throw the same thing back at them.  I do not resist such salad-making well.  Witness my attempts to alter this stupid meme from a friend;

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I admit, I kinda barfed half-digested word salad all over this one.  I get tired of debating the issues only to be insulted like this and then accused of only insulting Trump and avoiding what they call the “Real Issues”, like Hillary giving a gazillion per cent of our uranium wealth to the Russians and Obama being the one guilty of colluding with Russians.

But, enough of that.  It is time to make something healthier out of words and ideas.  I have a lot of things on my mind, and I want to get a lot of them said before I die.  So let me make some idea casserole, cooking a whole lot of very different ideas into one multivitamin dish.

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  • Trump, for all the damage he’s done, will end up being good for us if we can just survive his administration to the end.  Scar tissue is always tougher than the surrounding flesh when the wound heals.  Repairing the damage he has done will leave us stronger, wiser, and more able to cope with the root causes of the Trump phenomenon.
  • My friends and family who supported the whole Trump mess primarily to hurt people whom they feel are smarter than them and so more stuck-up and self-important than them, will eventually get back to leading more productive lives than they did before.  And they will continue not to credit the ones who actually made that happen the way they didn’t credit Obama for healing the blunders of Bush.
  • I will get back to writing gentler, non-political-type humor novels.

  • I have my novel Superchicken half-way through the final edit to publish it on Amazon Kindle.  You can see I have been playing with cover ideas.  I plan to write Sing Sad Songs next.  Also I have two more novel ideas that I will add to this casserole as separate ingredients.  And I have The Bicycle Wheel Genius, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, and The Baby Werewolf finished and ready to edit as well.
  • Here’s new idea number one; The Boy Who Lived Forever is a fantasy novel about Icarus Jones coming to stay with the Jones family of Norwall.  He has survived a house fire that killed his parents and now must evade the dragon that pursues him while trying to figure out what is wrong with him health-wise.  Could he be dying?  Or did he survive the fire because he somehow can’t die?
  • Here’s new idea number two; Kingdoms Under the Earth is a fantasy novel about Blueberry Bates, a troubled young girl, falling seriously ill, and the measures her boyfriend, Mike Murphy, and her friends have to take in a realm made of magic and fever dreams to save her.

The truth is I really can’t do anything about politics and government beyond expressing my beliefs and voting my conscience.  I need to concentrate on telling stories.  It is the one thing that still gives my life meaning through the pain, illness, and suffering.  I am not dead yet.  And, not being dead, I need to be writing.

 

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April 16, 2024 · 12:37 am

Is Mickey Icky?


This post is about writer doubt. And Stephen King. Do those two things go together? If they don’t then Mickey is an awful writer and does not know how to do what he does. It would mean Mickey is icky.
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I used to think Stephen King was a totally over-rated writer. Back in the early eighties I read Carrie, King’s first novel, and got halfway through Firestarter, and had to give up. Partly because the book was overdue at the library, and also because I found the books mechanical and somewhat joyless in the writing. I thought he suffered greatly in comparison to writers I was in love with at the time like Ray Bradbury and Thomas Mann. I began to tell others that King was somewhat icky.
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But King was obviously also somewhat successful. He began to get his books made into movies and people who don’t read discovered the evil genius of a man who tells stories to scare them and laces them with a bit of real humanity, real human feeling, and love.
I saw it first in Stand by Me. That movie, starring young Wil Wheaton as the Steven King autobiographical character, really touched my heart and really made for me a deep psyche-to-psyche connection to somebody who wasn’t just a filmmaker, but somebody who was, at heart, a real human being, a real story-teller.

Now, the psyche I was connecting to may very well have been Rob Reiner, a gifted story-teller and film-maker. But it wasn’t the only King movie that reached me. The television mini-series made from It touched a lot more than just the fear centers of my brain as well. And people whose opinions I respect began telling me that the books The Dark Tower Trilogy and Misery were also amazing pieces of literature.
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So I picked up a copy of Hearts in Atlantis at Half-Price Books and began reading a Stephen King novel for the first time since the 80’s. MY HOLY GOD! King is not a little bit icky. He is so NOT ICKY that it makes Mickey sicky to have ever thought King was even a little bit icky! Here is a writer who loves to write. He whirls through pages with the writer’s equivalent of ballet moves, pirouettes of prose, grand jetés of character building, and thematic arabesque penchées on every side of the stage. I love what I have discovered in a writer I thought was somewhat icky. Growth and power, passion and precision, a real love of both the words and the story. He may not know what he is doing. But I know. And I love it.
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And so, while I have been editing the first novel I ever wrote, Superchicken, to make it ready for self-publishing, I have begun to ask myself the self-critical question, “Is Mickey really icky when he writes?” My first novel is full of winces and blunders and head-banging wonders that make me want to throw the whole thing out. But I can’t throw it out. It is the baby in the first bathwater that I ever drew from the tap. The answer to the questions of Micky ickiness have yet to be determined, and not by me. I guess I have to leave it up to you.

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April 16, 2024 · 12:36 am

Conundrums

More and more it feels like my digital drawings are turning out cross-eyed girls. I look at this portrait of the Black Child of Quaran, and though I know she’s focusing straight ahead, the more it seems her eyes have gone medically wrong and crossed… a neural disorder.

This is the original picture in colored pencil that I made the digital copy from. I put this picture on the digital drawing board by uploading it. Then I put a layer on top of it and began tracing the original with my digital stylus using both the pen and brush settings. Of course, arthritis in my fingers messes that all up, making bizarre quirks in the picture that I must repeatedly erase and redraw.. So, I edited the picture with my AI Mirror app and rearranged the lines to conform to a realistic anime style. That widens the eyes and shrinks the nose, making changes to my drawing of up to fifty percent.

Here’s an intermediate step in the creation of a digital drawing completely from scratch, not tracing anything. It started from mere blobs of color in human shapes that I manipulated for a couple of hours. You can see I have not put in a background yet or added clothing. And the girl on the right is totally cross-eyed..

Here’s a variation of the same picture that I worked on for another hour trying to cure the crossed eyes. Better, but still a problem. One of my high school friends from Iowa pointed out the cross-eyed problem in drawings I had posted on Facebook. He suggested it was using the AI app that caused it. I experimented. And he was right. The inner parts of the eye, closest to the nose, will have the white parts shrunken or eliminated when the AI makes the eyes larger than the drawing I used it on.

I discovered the key to fighting that problem was to exaggerate myself, making the whites of the eyes larger so that they would appear more normal when the AI did its fifty percent thing and shrunk them.

You can see here the difference the exaggerations made when I edited the previous picture using the AI tool on the eyes and face.

But sometimes I sort of fall in love with the cross-eyed princess and decide to leave her that way. She’s kinda quirky and cute like that. And I don’t like feeling that the hours of work were wasted.

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April 15, 2024 · 2:59 am

In the Winking of the Eye

The Angel with her Puppy… this was made from a puzzle picture I finished on the Tap Color App. It is basically a redrawing of the puzzle picture in a more cartoonish anime style. Using digital tools I didn’t have to be satisfied with a straight-up copy of the original picture.

The Angel with her Puppy 2… I made some big changes. I used photo-shopping tools to copy a more realistic face onto the angel. I also gave her bare legs, something I like to draw, especially on children with their soft and subtle shadowing. The dog was fun to draw too in both pictures. The angel wings were in the way of drawing the dog, so I put them on the girl’s headdress instead, making her a little more human.

A Sylvan Tea Party in the Butterfly Bedroom... This one is harder to explain. I wanted to picture naked innocence between a male faun and a female fairy. I was even going to put fairy wings on the dog. But I finished the nude figures in ways I wanted to preserve, so I didn’t put horns on the faun or wings on the fairy and her dog. Those things may come later. I have about seven versions of this picture, and am not yer satisfied with any of them.

Ashlynn and the Blue Wall… I decided to daydream while drawing a little less here and just do a portrait of the girl from Instagram.

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April 14, 2024 · 2:30 am

The Writing Imperative

I am a writer because I write.

I write because I have to.

I have to because somebody has to control the words.

People are made of words.  Their identity, their inner self, their reason for existence… all made of words.  The very thoughts in their heads are… words.

If I want to control the words I am made of, then I must be the writer who writes his own story.

I don’t want anyone else to write the words that essentially become me.  Do you?

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Of course, authors create characters.  Even autobiographers create characters.  Carl Sandburg could no more make his words into Lincoln than a bird can make its tweets into a cat.   Sandburg can, however, help us to understand Lincoln as Carl Sandburg understands the words that are Lincoln.

Lincoln probably did not have the words for “bikini girls” in his head when he wrote those words in the second quote.  But somebody thought that the picture would help us understand the words.  By all accounts, Lincoln was not a particularly happy man leading a particularly happy life.  But he showed us the meaning of his words when he stood firm against the strong winds of harsh words and bad ideas in a terrible time.  And he was as happy about it as he made up his mind to be.

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I, too, have not lived a particularly happy life.  But I was always the “teacher with a sense of humor” in the classroom, and students loved me for it.  Funny people are often not happy people.  But they make themselves out of funny words because laughter heals pain, and jokes are effective medicine.  And so I choose to write comedy novels.  Novels that are funny even though they are about hard things like freezing to death, losing loved ones, being humiliated, being molested, and fear of death.  Magical purple words can bring light to any darkness.  I am the words I choose to write in my own story.  The words not only reveal me, they make me who I am.  And it is up to me to write those words.  Other people might wish to do it for me.  But they really can’t.  The words are for me alone to write.

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And so it is imperative that I write my words in the form of my novels, my essays, and this goofy blog post.  I am writing myself to life, even if no one ever reads my writing.

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April 14, 2024 · 2:26 am

More Digital Art Practice

Yes, I know her manic smile looks somewhat crazed. But in the photo she shared with me, she was perfectly cute and pleasant. I didn’t realize I overdid the expression until I posted it the last time.

This girl was also sweet and pretty. I messed up the eyes in the first version of this picture, making her look cockeyed. I worked hard to fix that.

This is the same girl as in the picture directly above. Different dress, a different pose, a different day, and I got this one right the first time.

She’s a teenage swimsuit model, and in my opinion, a future supermodel.

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April 13, 2024 · 12:50 am

What Internet Memes Mean to Me…Me

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Internet memes apply to me.  It says it in the name.  In fact, it says it twice.  “Me+me = meme”.

This one is uncanny.  I revere Mark Twain.  Apparently I walk in his shoes enough that I am imitating everything he did except becoming wealthy and famous.

And maybe I am not as good of a writer as he was.   Maybe.  But I am heck at living an unhappy life and going bankrupt in the process.

And this is not the only meme that uncannily defines my life.

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They put  a stupid, orange-faced man in charge of the government because they wanted to tell Mickey, “F*** You!  You are not better than me just because you are smarter than me.  We are going to burn it all down to get revenge for your superiority!”  And they are laughing and enjoying it now as the flames get hotter, even though their houses are on fire too.  But stupid people aren’t really winning the game.  There are evil people lurking in the background waiting to exploit and make money.  They are winning.  They hate Mickey too.

Of course, I never said anything about being better than them.  Mickey is smart, but humble.  I suffer from the wildfires anyway.

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But if you know where to find it, there is helpful wisdom in memes.  Short, pithy wisdom, but wisdom never the less.

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The “Me”” of the memes can be hurtful at times, saying things out of anger or fear.  But he can also be uplifting, making hearts sing and soar.  There is magic and power in words… if they are the right words, delivered in the right way.

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Sometimes people need be appreciated and built up rather than torn down.  Some groups have been hurting more than others.  Having been a teacher, I know this is particularly true.  Teachers need to hear thank yous.

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And I find memes to be a useful way to gain that temporary feel-good nugget of wisdom.  I think it is probably a chicken nugget of wisdom.  You know, bite-sized pieces of white meat protein to fortify you against the cold and the darkness.   And it is important to turn away from the angry and the fearful memes.  Going positive instead of negative is a bit of an antidote to the illnesses that infect social media.  And I know Facebook is evil, but we are sorta stuck with it, so we might as well use it for good as it uses us and our data for evil.

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So, I have shared several memes with you today because that is me…me.  I do stuff like that. And you can’t tell me I am doing it wrong.

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April 13, 2024 · 12:46 am

P.T. Barnum

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Last night my wife and my daughter the Princess went with me to the movie musical The Greatest Showman at the dollar movie.  I was enchanted.  My wife laughed at me for how much the movie made me cry.  But it was a very touching and timely movie for me because it was about pursuing dreams in spite of economic hardships.  The award-winning songs promote with energy and stunning beauty the notion that you should follow your passion no matter the risk, and that choosing to do so will produce rewards as long as family and love are with you and along for the ride.

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Of course, one has to remember that the whole story is based on the life and work of Phineas Taylor Barnum, a man who is a lot more like Donald Trump than he is Hugh Jackman.  I really doubt he could sing and dance the way the movie portrays him.  And words like “humbug”, “fraud”, and “exploiter” apply to him in a very real way.

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Barnum was actually one of those wheeler dealers who wants to control the story.  He actively found ways to alter the public narrative about himself and used criticism to help promote his money-making shows.  The idea of bad publicity being just as good if not better than good publicity actually makes its presence felt in at least one scene in the movie.  There is ample evidence that more than a little of Barnum’s efforts were aimed at making himself a star.

And although the movie sentimentalizes his exploitation of freaks and special individuals, giving him credit for giving them self esteem and a means to make a good living, that was really only the fictional Barnum created by Barnum’s own media efforts.

Clofillia, Josphine [Madame Clofullia, P.T. Barnum’s “Bearded Lady of Geneva”]. Daguerreotype by Thomas M. Easterly, 1853. Photographs and Prints Collections. Missouri History Museum. Easterly 321. NS 17387. Scan © 2008, Missouri History Museum.

The truth of the matter, though far more fascinating than the movie version of Barnum, does not make for a good musical libretto.  In the movie the theme of special people outcast from the society because of their uniqueness coming together to support each other in a circus is strongly woven into both the story and the music.  The song “This is Me” performed by Keala Settle playing the part of bearded lady Lettie Lutz is a powerful anthem for everyone who feels smaller than they really are because of prejudice, bullying, racism, sexism, or any of the other forms of moronic stupidity that humans are so often guilty of.  I have to admit, the song made me cry even as it filled me with joy.  The musical score of this movie is one that I intend to listen to again and again and again.  It makes the circus seem like an answer to life’s problems.  It is the same feeling that I got the first time, and every time, I ever saw the circus with all its clowns and jugglers, acrobats and lion tamers, bare-back riders and elephants.  And I knew it was all illusion.  All humbug.  But it was pure joy worth the price of the ticket never-the-less.

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The movie was only rated 56% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.  But I rarely pay attention to things like that.  This musical goes into the category with The Sound of Music, The Music Man, Oklahoma!, and Mary Poppins of musicals I can’t live without.  Never mind the greedy little man that it is based on.  This movie is about big dreams and even bigger achievements.  And it is well worth the price.

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