A big share of my surrealistic bent comes from the influence of Walt Disney on my childhood. Lady and the Tramp, Babes in Toyland, the Junglebook… Disney made me dance and dream.
Tag Archives: humor
Being and Artistry
Being an artist is a matter of genetics, luck, and loads of practice. I began drawing when I was only four or five years old. I drew skulls and skeletons, crocodiles and deer on everything. My kindergarten and first grade teachers were constantly gritting their teeth over the marked-up margins of every workbook and worksheet. I drew and colored on everything. I eventually got rather good, drawing in pencil, crayon, ink, and as you see here, colored pencil. I loved to draw the people and things around me. I also drew the things of my imagination. I drew my best girl, Alicia, and I drew the half-cobra half-man that lived in the secret cavern under our house. I drew a picture of the house across the underpass from Grandma Mary’s house. I drew cardinals, and I drew Snoopy cartoons. I drew my sports heroes in football and hockey, Donny Anderson and Gordie Howe. I drew monsters with fangs and fuzzy animals with huge soulful eyes. I still draw and it’s mostly the same things that I drew when I was a child. I will post more of the drawings here in the near future to dazzle you with my talents and ridiculous sense of the absurd.
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Rooster Riding
Do I believe in the little people? Of course not. If Tinkerbell depends on me, she is dead meat… or maybe dead fairy dust.
But if they do exist, then they are like the rooster riders in my picture, exploiting the world in the same way the big old slow ones do.
They are not our inferiors or our superiors. They are us. They mirror us and our beliefs, our dreams… our nightmares, and all the things deep within us that could ever possibly go bump in the night.
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Novel Nooz
This drawing was created when I started this blog as a way of illustrating the kind of writing I wanted to do. Not only the book I published called Catch a Falling Star, but everything else I have written and plan to write. There’s a certain surreal philosophy expressed in this picture if you look at it right (squint your eyes and tap yourself on the temple hard with a brick).
December 15, 2013 · 8:44 pm
The Creative Process (Something Blossoms in my Brain)
Let’s see… I left off at step seven… come back to it. So I did. Here is the piece with photo-shopped background borrowing a snow picture from friends and relatives back in Iowa.
Step eight… Take a hammer and bash out some new connections and fresh ideas to justify the project (I didn’t steal this idea… Really! I did not!)
Step nine… Knowing this idea reminds me of Dickens somehow… Little Nell, Agnes, Nancy, maybe even Tiny Tim… (That’s it! I’ve been obsessing about Christmases past!)
Step ten… finally realizing there is no final step (Okay, this is weird. Why ever did I do such a silly, stupid thing?)
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Long Ago It Might Have Been
This Paffooney was created with the mistaken idea that I would never have a child or be a Dad. Little did I know that after I turned 37 it would happen three times. This picture is one of my dream children, of the sort Charles Lamb once wrote an essay about. This is little Disney-Michael Beyer… a child who never was and re-created me in the birthing.
December 14, 2013 · 2:05 am
Mego Men
In 1976 I ordered a Mego Spiderman from the ad in my Avengers comic book. It came by mail. It was only 8 inches tall, not the 12 that would become the basis of my action figure (don’t call them dolls) collection. I love Megos. I should’ve bought more of them, but I was in college and had limited space to keep them. I ordered the Wolfman second, then the Lizard, and finally Iron Man. I was going to buy a Captain America next, but Mego stopped making these things at the end of the 70’s. That, of course, is what makes them valuable. The last time I priced them in the collector’s market, Iron Man was going for fifty dollars, and Spiderman for forty five. I have no intention of selling them. They will one day belong to my own children to play with or do with whatever destructive thing they will. Until then, they are mine to play with.
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Ice Storm 2013
It began last Thursday evening. My wife and younger two children were making a trip to Florida to a religious convention, so they weren’t in Texas. I had picked up my oldest son from high school and we went to get emergency supplies in case the coming ice storm caused us to have a snow day. We got the essentials; gingerbread cookies, milk, hot chocolate mix, and crackers. You know, stuff you can’t live without during a winter storm. I really didn’t think we would miss school. I thought I would just be forced to drive through nasty weather on my commute the next day. How foolish can I be?
That night the icy rain covered everything in a quarter inch case of ice. Branches, leaves, and even one whole neighborhood tree came down, brought down by the weight of the ice. My car was plastered and rendered inoperable, a fact I didn’t discover until I tried to get out the next day. Before 8:00 both my school and my son’s school had canceled classes the next day. It was good that we had no school since I left my winter sense back in Iowa long ago and have no shovel to clear the sidewalk. Heck, I’m too weak nowadays to break through the ice coat anyway.
Our poor dog was unable to get out to go poo, and when I did take her out, not only did I slip and fall on my arthritic old knees, she found it too cold outside to actually go. Great! Swollen knees… more aches and pains… and doggy doo hidden somewhere around the house.
Saturday, I could take the cabin fever no longer. Driven by a need for caffeine (I forgot to buy any Diet Coke and I don’t drink coffee) we got out of the house and walked several blocks to Jack in the Box. Yes, we let that creepy clown do our cooking. I got a lot of writing and some drawing done. I slept poorly because of aching arthritic bones.
Sunday brought more falls while walking the danged dog, who still didn’t poo (at least not outside the house where she was supposed to do her duty). By noon the temperature had climbed to 32.9 degrees Fahrenheit. I tried the car, and no longer frozen solid, it started. We celebrated by going to Walmart and buying groceries, and we ate McDonald’s food, not because we like it, but because nothing else was close by and open.
So, I hilariously believe I have survived another Texas weather event that seriously tried to hurt sick old me. Of course, my son’s school is already canceled for tomorrow. Will I get another break too? Or do I have another 45-stoplight commute in the morning over ice, and laced with idiot white people driving GM death machines too fast in bad weather? We’ll have to see who laughs last.
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Rabbit Walking
In the novel I am working on at the moment, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, I have a character that does something weird with rabbits that I used to do. I had a plastic dog-walking collar and chain that I used on a pet who definitely was not a dog. Ember-eyes was my New Zealand White buck rabbit. He was a large rabbit with bright red eyes, whiter than snow. He liked to go for walks, but it was definitely a dangerous undertaking for him. Dogs lurked around the neighborhood wandering loose and uninhibited. Dogs, of course, viewed old Ember-eyes as a tasty snack. I never really got into trouble with that, though, until my neighbor and friend Harry brought home a baby raccoon. He also bought a dog collar and chain, planning to walk the raccoon as I walked my bunny. Did you know raccoons will attack and eat a rabbit? Me neither. But they will. Nasty little hissy things they become when they are presented with food at the end of a chain. And of course, it was a baby coon, so my buck rabbit was larger and more muscular than her. And Ember-eyes didn’t like the idea of being a rabbit-burger for any teeny bandit that wasn’t even a proper predator. So the scratching claw-fight went on for about fifteen hare-raising seconds. I ended up carrying the victor back to his hutch, his heart beating so hard I could feel it with the hand I had under his behind. Harry had to figure out how you treat claw wounds to the nose of a raccoon. The vet didn’t want to see a vermin like that on his exam table any more than Harry’s dad wanted to pay the bill for it. Some salve on the tip of the nose was the eventual solution.
In the Paffooney I have a picture of Tommy Bircher and his pet rabbit Millis. Here he’s crossing Main Street Norwall in front of the VFW Hall.
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Gingerbread Men
Gingerbread men may actually have saved my life. You may not have realized this, but ginger has a significant power over inflammation. I have had numerous struggles with bronchitis, chest congestion, and in the last few years, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. I discovered by yielding to the temptation to eat gingerbread men two winters ago, that the ginger in them actually makes it easier to breathe. They also help with acid reflux, a health scourge that plagued me until I discovered that eating ginger cookies, gingerbread men, and drinking ginger tea could actually make reflux go away.
Now, snowed in on a Friday when I should be teaching kids who are already shutting down for the holidays with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads, I am dreaming of gingerbread men, having used a last-minute-before-the-ice-storm trip to Walmart to lay in a supply of gingerbread men. They are the most important survival tool for me during the weather event
In my dream, the little brown-bodied cookie-men gathered around me to stare at me with raisin eyes. They wear only gum-drop buttons, white frosting squiggles, and red cinnamon sprinkles. Some brandish peppermint-stick spears and candy-cane clubs dangerously, letting me know that I better choose every move with great care.
“Why have you come to the Land of Gingerbread as an eater?” said one.
“I can’t talk to a cookie,” I said. “I am a human being, and I am supposed to be rational.”
“What are we supposed to do with a human bean when he’s trying to be rational?” a cookie man asked another cookie man.
“Let’s take him to the Ginger King. He’ll know what to do.”
So, I was surrounded by dangerous little cookie guys and escorted into a magnificent gingerbread castle. The castle stood on the edge of a cliff next to the Bitter Butter Sea. We made our way round the candy court until we reached the peppermint throne.
“So, great and hungry eater, why have you come to this part of the Dreamlands with your big hungry mouth and prodigious stomach?” The king addressing me was an even smaller gingerbread cookie than his subjects. He did have, though, a very large gingerbread crown, jeweled with red hots and candy corn.
“I ate gingerbread men last night to help me breathe and help me sleep without acid reflux.”
I was prepared to be the victim of their anger and recriminations. It was justifiable that they would be deeply offended and incensed.
The Ginger King smiled at me. “You have our blessings and our thanks,” he said. “It is the purpose and the goal of all gingerbread people to make your life better, and to make you happy.”
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Catch a Falling Star 