December 24, 2023 · 2:06 am

Blue Holiday Time

Christmas time has come again. And my family, still attached to Jehovah’s Witnesses, avoids everything important to the world around us at this time of year. My wife and daughter, the only members of my immediate family that still live with me, took the RV to San Antonio to pick up my mother-in-law who miraculously escaped hospice care in 2023, and took her to South Padre Island to spend time with her that statistically they should never have had a chance at. So, I, also in poor health, am left at home with the dog to spend the holiday we don’t celebrate all alone. I am not bitter. I have time to draw and write stories and poetry.  And I can watch others here in Dallas enjoy a holiday that once made a big difference in my childhood every year. I can reflect on loved ones now gone and memories those loved ones once shared with me about family meals at reunions and holiday gatherings at Grandpa and Grandma’s place, cousins by the dozens with shining smiles, and live Christmas trees in stands filled with sugar water and decorated with blinking lights and bubble lights and handmade ornaments and antique glass balls of many colors, some of which were handed down all the way from Germany where once our ancestors lived and loved and celebrated Christmas.

Yes, I am not bitter. Nor really lonely, depressed, or bored. The dog and I have our ways. There are songs sung to nobody. Arthritic dances that no one sees or laughs at. I am old enough to know that there is enough love stored in my heart for several more lifetimes if need be. And if there is no one to share them with for now, that’s not my loss. 

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December 24, 2023 · 1:07 am

That Time of Year Again

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December 23, 2023 · 2:44 am

Where Do Ideas Come From?

When you make the mistake of admitting to others that you are a writer, they immediately assume you know things that are kept secret from “normal” people. For instance, they will simply assume that you can tell them where you get your ideas for writing. Well, I am fairly sure that I got the idea for this post from watching a YouTube video in which the Master, Neil Gaiman, says that every author has a joke answer for that one with enough sarcastic wit in it to punish the asker with public humiliation.

I asked the dog if she knew any jokes like that which I could use to prepare for someone asking me that question in public. She said, “You could tell them that your family dog tells you what to write every day.”

“No,” I said, “people would never believe it.”

“Well, it is supposed to be a joke. But you are right. No one would ever think you were actually smart enough to write down what a dog tells you.”

“Yes, it’s a good thing for me that you know how to speak in English. I could never translate and transcribe Barkinese.”

So, I began thinking of where some of my best ideas came from.

Dreams

Some of my stories come directly from dreams that I had. The nightmare about being chased down a street in Rowan at midnight by a large black dog with red eyes was an actual dream I had in the 1970s. So was the nightmare of the werewolf climbing out of the TV during a late-night viewing of Lon Chaney in The Wolfman.

Those two dreams together were the start of the story that became my recently published novel, The Baby Werewolf. Both dreams visit the protagonist in the story I wrote almost as if they were his dreams and not actually mine.

Events

Snow Babies, the best novel I have ever written, was based on two different blizzards I experienced, first as a child in the 1960’s, and then again as a high school kid in the 1970s. Each blizzard involved being snowed in for a week at someone else’s house. As a child, I was stuck at Grandpa’s farm place until the snow plows could finally do their work and open the gravel roads. As a teen, I was stuck in Great Grandma’s retirement apartment near the high school in Belmond.

That novel also is based on the next source of ideas;

Characters

I can’t think of any story I have written that isn’t based on real people I have known in one way or another. Valerie in the novel above is based on three different girls I have known or taught. One of those three is my own daughter. The four orphans on the bus in that story are all boys from my junior high classes in the 1980s.

Lucky Catbird Sandman, the hobo who wears the quilted coat of many colors, is based on the poet Walt Whitman, whom I knew well in a past life, and my own shiftless, storyteller self. Some characters are just so key to a story idea that they themselves are the reason for a book to exist.

In conclusion, the dog doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. None of these things are really where I get my ideas. But I am out of time. I will have to write about the bottle imp another day. No, really. A magical imp trapped in a bottle. You can make one of those give you ideas for novels with only a slight risk to your life and soul.

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December 23, 2023 · 2:30 am

What is Poetry?

A poem is the shortest, clearest, best words and ideas to say something profound that shakes the bones of the Universe.

I can say these things because I taught poetry in middle school and high school English classes for thirty-one years. And I am myself a terrible poet in every way possible, as I know what poetry is and how hard it is to write a perfect poem, and yet I constantly try anyway… failing spectacularly.

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December 22, 2023 · 3:26 am

Superstitions *a free verse poem***

Of course, it goes without saying that you should not be superstitious.

You are, after all, hearing this from an atheist who believes in God

But is still an atheist because anything you cannot verify by evidence is superstition.

For instance, your mother probably stressed when you were growing up,

You should wait at least an hour after eating lunch before going into the pool…

Or in the ocean, the Iowa River, or the roped-off area of the lake for designated swims…

Because you will get a cramp and curl up in a pretzel pose and drown to death.

But studies using science show that this is foofy nonsense… a superstition.

Still, you do it the way your mother said because she loved you and was always

Looking for ways to keep you from drowning or any other kind of random death.

Or another example is the way that Mickey always capitalizes the beginning of each line

Even if it starts in the middle of a sentence which is against basic sentence rules.

Which he does because this is not just a glob of nonsense sentences… 

It is allegedly a free-verse poem.

So, Superstitions are something you do because it is a habit or a false belief

That gives you comfort somehow… Even if it is only feeding an obsession.

So, don’t get me started on avoiding the number 13. Because you know about the Knights Templar

And the terrible things that happened to them on the 13th of the month on a Friday in 1307 A.D.

Even though you know you have no gold and treasure coveted by the King of France

You are still wary of all instances of the number 13 intruding on your life.

Wait a minute… are you unsure whether you know what the heck Mickey means? 

Well, you are fortunate enough to live in the computer and internet age… You can Google it.

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December 22, 2023 · 2:25 am

Happy Hoppy Poppy

Dumb Luck

This is Poppy

Poppy is happy

But Poppy is also sloppy

So he is a sloppy happy Poppy

And being sloppy can make him droppy

So he is a sloppy droppy happy Poppy

And Poppy calls his baseball bat a boppy

And he dropped the boppy on his foot

So sloppy droppy happy Poppy became hoppy

He was a sloppy droppy happy but hoppy Poppy because of the boppy.

And his hat is becoming floppy… er, what’s that disgusted look on your face?

Okay, maybe I better stoppy.

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December 21, 2023 · 3:00 am

Wowsers for a Change!!!

Today I got a book of all my Instagram art posts for the year of 2023. It was expensive. But that’s the thing about my books and my artwork. It costs me way more money than it earns for me. I don’t do these things for profit. I create these things because I have to make them exist.

Here are a few examples of what I have been working on.

The storytellers of the village all say that the heroine Dulcinea of the far north was raised by polar bears.

Missy is not only adorable and sweet, you can’t resist doing anything and everything she asks of you.

I am proud of the digital art I have learned to do in the last year.

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December 21, 2023 · 1:21 am

Merry Christmas… (maybe)

This holiday is going to be different. Different from the holiday I grew up with. Different than the celebrationless non-holiday I lived with for twenty years. And different from the new traditions we established, my kids and I, as we pulled away from my wife’s religion. The pandemic affects everything.

I was born into a family of Iowa Methodists living in North Central Iowa in a tiny farm town called Rowan.

I remember Christmas being the most magical time of year. I believed in Santa Claus. I felt like the Christmas magic that we saw in seasonal specials on TV in black and white were so real… the realest reality there could be…even if Andy Williams wasn’t the host of the program. Candy canes and Christmas trees and sitting on Santa’s lap being terrified of getting it wrong… and making him think I was asking for a talking Chatty Kathy doll even though I was a boy… FOR MY SISTER, SANTA! FOR MY SISTER… Oh, gawd, that really went wrong. And we had family gatherings where we ate pot-luck family meals with Swedish meatballs and turkey and mashed potatoes with brown gravy and casseroles of fifteen different kinds and nuts and candy…eating ourselves into a semi-stupor as we also did only three and a half weeks before at Thanksgiving.

And presents. Everybody gave presents. And Christmas Carols in Church.

But time goes on. You grow out of believing in Santa Claus. You even grow out of believing in Andy Williams. Perry Como was better. And it was getting so commercial. And Christmas shows we loved as kids seemed so simple and lame when watched again as young adults.

And then I married a Jehovah’s Witness. If you are not aware of it, Christmas originated as a pagan holiday, the Roman Saturnalia. It was a night of feasts and orgies and excess. And Jehovah’s Witnesses believe their beliefs are the only true beliefs, and celebrating Christmas is of Satan. I celebrated Christmas for the last time in 1994. I married in 1995.

For the next twenty years I did not celebrate Christmas. At least, not out loud where Brothers and Sisters in the Truth could hear. And the season became very austere and sanitized for me by the religious integrity of those around me in the faith.

But there were friends in the faith that lost their faith and left the congregation permanently. And the people around me changed. And I was beset by illnesses, mine and my family’s. And Jehovah’s Witnesses are very good at helping the sick. But, apparently only for others, not me and mine. They began turning away.

I am probably disfellowshipped now. They have turned away from me, and I am now isolated from all those who used to be friends and acquaintances. My wife is still a member of the congregation. And this is good because she desperately needs to believe. It is a good life for her and keeps her relatively well. But I know they disfellowshipped me, even though nobody told me so like they always do in such cases. My wife barely talks to me now. And this is probably because members of the congregation are supposed to shun the disfellowshipped, even if they are family.

But I bare no one ill will. That may be part of the problem. The Bible directive is to “Hate what is bad.” And blood transfusions and psychiatry are both bad things according to the Witnesses’ understanding of Bible commands.

I didn’t need any transfusions, and though I have significant stress and diabetic depression, I was never hospitalized for that. But I did kinda fake some disfellowshippable offenses so that I would be the one, and my wife would still be able to be a Witness. She needs it more than I do.

And, to be quite honest, I need to feel a little bit of Christmas now in my old age and infirmity. After all, it is a holiday all about making sacrifices in order to give gifts to others. I know that this post will make Jehovah’s Witnesses cringe. But now that they are shunning me, I guess they won’t be seeing this anyway. And I wish them a Merry Christmas in spite of it all.

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December 20, 2023 · 2:10 am

To Laugh… or Cry

I have claimed that I am a humorist and all my novels are comic novels, to some degree at least. But it is often pointed out to me that I write about things that make people cry. And I freely admit that I most certainly do.

But if you think about it carefully, analytically, or even emotionally, you have to admit, even a book like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has some weep-worthy moments in it. I have read the book more than once myself, and I never get past the scene where Huck looks down at the body of his young friend Buck Grangerford, killed in the Shepherdson/Grangerford feud about something nobody living even remembers, without shedding gushers and gushers of heart-busting tears.

And in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, as much as I laugh and guffaw at the antics of quiet Mr. Dick and his kite, or the much deserved downfall of villainous Uriah Heep, it is the drowning of Little Emily on the boat with David’s school friend and idol Steerforth that leaves me surrounded by puddles… nay, lakes… that I have wept.

And I think that I may justify the sad parts in so many of my weary works with the fact that I am merely providing the necessary counterpoints to my merry-making and mirth.

Francois is a character from Sing Sad Songs.

There has to be that necessary balance, that well-roundedness, to a story that makes it feel truly complete. And, of course, we know that even in a horror novel by Stephen King, you find humor used as a balance point to lighten the moments just before the monster delivers its liver-shaking, earth-tilting scare.

My novel, Snow Babies, is still only a dollar. The free-book promotion has run out. But it is still a sale price for clicking on it at Amazon Books https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077PMQ4YF/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i7

Snow Babies, among my published books, is a good example. It is a story that celebrates how a small Iowa town comes together to survive a deadly December blizzard. And while it tells funny stories of kooky characters battling the elements, and both surviving the blizzard and ’84 Reagan/Mondale political debates, as well as putting up Christmas trees, it is still also about death and loss of loved ones, finding and losing love, and just what sort of self-sacrifice or other accidental happening truly makes someone a hero. Or a bus driver… this book has more than one bus driver in it.

So, I think, in the end, that I have made a cogent case for the notion that in order to be a humorist, you have to manipulate many emotions, not just mirth, but sadness also. As well as fear, bitter irony, and pain. And that may well also be the underlying reason that comedy is harder to write than tragedy.

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December 19, 2023 · 2:03 am

The Next Thing to Do

I know all the arguments against it. Nobody wants to read poetry from a simpering fool who is not a poet. Or, wait a moment, if Mickey is a poet, there is still that thing about him being the worst poet in the history of American Literature. And who knows the truth about all those missing middle school students rumored to be in shallow graves in South Texas? Do we know for a fact they weren’t killed by being forced to listen to Mickian poetry until their brains turned to oatmeal and leaked out of their ears?

But Mickey does write poetry. Terrible poetry. We know about the oatmeal-brains thing because of the poetry posted on this very blog site. Terrorists could use it for evil purposes.

But he has already posted a test cover for a poetry book. That is a REALLY BAD OMEN!!!

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