I started drawing with crayons and pencils sometime before I was five. I started telling stories around age seven and thoroughly scared my sisters and girl cousins. I became an exiled alien living in secret on Earth in second grade. I won an art contest in my fourth-grade class during fire-prevention week. That got me interviewed on television by Channel 3, KGLO TV from Mason City. From a very early age, I was a sponge, soaking up colors and shapes and weird connections, beautiful things, scary things, and taxidermied jackalopes that cost twenty-five cents to look at. And it filled me up to overflowing and spilled out on drawing paper and took up most of the pages of the spiral notebooks I was supposed to be using for school.
What came out of me was art.
I can’t claim to be a professional artist. I have to admit that most of the money I have made in life was earned by being a school teacher, babysitting in the monkey house and taming other people’s house apes for over three decades. I may have sold a hundred books as an author, but less than two hundred. I have never made a dime just for drawing or painting and making visual art pictures. Any art published in media by me has been for nothing more than exposure to the publication’s audience. So, can I truly claim to be an artist?
My entire life has been lived for art. I became one of the world’s all-time worst poets. I became one of the’ best story-tellers that nobody ever reads. And I enthralled over two thousand kiddoes as a teacher who told stories and intentionally made kiddoes laugh in class and try to tell stories themselves.
Why am I full of art? That’s what I WAS BORN TO BE.
How It Should Be… According to Mickey
My bicycle was red. It was red and looked just like the ones that Captain Kangaroo had in his commercials that we watched on a black-and-white TV every day before we walked or rode our bicycle to school, across town a whole long seven blocks away. After school I could ride it out a whole mile and a half to Jack’s farm with Bobby and Richard and Mark the preacher’s kid to go skinny dipping in the cold creek in Jack’s South pasture. Jack was younger than any of us except Bobby. And it was a golden age.
Spiderman comic books and Avengers comic books cost twelve cents to own, but they were forbidden. And as much as we sneaked them and passed them around until they fell apart, usually in Bobby’s hands, we never knew that Dr. Wertham had gone to Congress to make our parents believe that comic books would make us gay and violent. He was a psychiatrist who wrote a book, so even if you didn’t believe him, you had to worry about such things.
I believed in Santa Claus until 1967. And after I found out, I only despaired a tiny little bit, because I began to understand you have to grow up. And adults can lie to you, even if they don’t do it to be mean. And the world is a hard place. And the golden age ended in November of 1963 when JFK was assassinated.
In June of 1968 I rode my bicycle out to the Bingham Park woods, Once there, I took off all my clothes and put them in the bicycle basket, and then I rode up and down the walking paths through the trees with nothing between me and God but my skin. I had a serious think about how life should be. All the while I was terrified that someone might see me. I was naked and vulnerable. A mere two years before that I had been sexually assaulted and was terrified of older boys, especially when I was naked and vulnerable. But I was a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and Bob Gibson. They were repeated World Series winners. And they beat the Yankees in the series in 1964. And more important than that, cardinals were the little red songbirds who never flew away when the winter came. You don’t give up in the face of hardship. You face the trouble. No matter how deep the snow may pile up.
And in 1969, the first man to walk on the moon showed that a Star Trek world was in reach of mankind. Star Trek was on every afternoon after school. I watched a lot of those episodes at Verner’s house on his family’s black-and-white TV. The Klingons were always bested or beaten because the crew of the Enterprise outsmarted them. You can solve the problems of the universe with science. I know this because of all the times Mr. Spock proved it to me not just by telling me so, but by showing me how you do it. And what you can achieve is greatly enhanced if you work together like Spock and Kirk and Bones… and sometimes Scotty always did.
So, what is the way it should be? What did Mickey decide while naked in the forest like a Dakota Sioux shaman on a spirit-quest?
JFK’s 108th birthday was on May 29th. Dr. Wertham has been dead for 44 years. Bob Gibson was 85 when he passed away in October of 2020. Captain Kirk turned 94 in March of this year.
The Golden age is long gone. There is no single set of rules that can clearly establish how it should be now. But I like those ideas of how it should be that I established for myself while naked on a Schwinn Spitfire in a forest long ago.
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Tagged as art, books, fear, golden-age, movies, nakedness, Star Trek