I painted this oil painting looking West on Highway 3. My home town in Iowa is just beyond the next hill.
On The Highway
Leave dirt roads behind…
On the highway you go faster.
Pavement gives you ease to speed.
In fact, why use that two-lane road?
The Interstate is faster.
Limited access off and on…
The legal limit goes up to 70…
Or even 75…
85 with no cops around.
Straight over the horizon…
Into the mist-blue distance…
You are not really going anywhere…
But you will get there faster!
Filed under humor, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Okay, people, I am not a poet and I’m sure you know it… But sometimes cartoonists rhyme for no good raisin… and make bad puns too. Today I will share with you a bit of versicular (verse+ick+ular) goofiness that I tend to call poetry. I am putting some in my vault, here; Poetry in the Vault (Mickey’s House of Fiction)
Sleeping Beauty (a Silly Poem of Love and Illusion)
In the dark and in the light
In candle flame and purple night
The beauty sleeps and fails to heed
The young man’s life of lust and need
What happens next is often sad
The want, the hope, the love so bad
And fluttering faery wings of light
Carry life and love and fuel the sight
With never a thought to what could be
If only love would call to thee
And wake the sleeper from her dream
To make the two but one to seem.
Hear the Music (a love poem)
The singer sings his song,
And wants the world to sing along,
Though the world has gone all wrong,
And the darkness stays too long.
The singer warms and croons,
Under bright romantic moons,
And carries hopeful tunes,
To the listening dolts and loons.
Can a song bring truth to light?
Can it help us win the fight?
Does it ease the world’s plight?
And set the wrongs aright?
Yes a song can save the world,
Though the truth must be unfurled,
And the listeners’ ears are twirled.
So the hurts will all be pearled.
Mickey at the Wishing Well of Souls
I found a country well, and I thought I had a quarter,
But I fished in pockets hard, and found nothing for the warter,
And since I had to warp a line to make the poem rhyme,
I figured I would just look in, because I had the time.
I looked into the warty water which sat there still and deep,
And could not see the bottom, and I began to weep.
The water was clear and dark and black,
And the only thing I saw… was Mickey looking back.
And nothing of the wishing well, its magic could I see,
For only there just staring back, the secret thing was me.
Mental Pie
I’d like to offer you a piece of my mind,
Though not a lecture, rant, or complaint,
But rather a piece of mental pie.
Its taste will be very sweet, you will find,
As I’m constantly thinking in ink and paint,
That gives you wings and allows you to fly.
The Cookie
Once I had a cookie… But every time I took a bite, It became smaller and smaller…
With each bite I had less and less cookie left.
But when it was gone, the sweet taste of it…
Lingered on… as memory.
Icarus (A Song Lyric with No Tune)
“You never believe in me,
You only hear the lie,
You never believe in me,
You never even try,
You never see the good in me,
You only fear I’ll die,
You never hear the words I say,
You never tell me why,
You never care how I plan,
Or why I touch the sky,
You’ll never lift me up,
You never let me fly,”
That’s how it always was,
Between my father and I,
Until the day I reached the sun,
And burned my hands on high,
And so it is he’ll never know,
How much his son was worth,
Because he couldn’t understand,
The day
I fell
To Earth.
When you are small, there is something intimidating about a man in strange clothes and a garish pattern of white and red and blue all over his face. What is he hiding? What does he want? Why does he squeeze off a blast from that ridiculous little horn with the big red squeeze bulb right in your little-boy face? His big floppy shoes suggest monstrous feet. Why does he have such a big mouth with red paint all around it? “The better to eat you with, my dear!”
But clowns have a purpose for those of us who are no longer frightened little boys. They parody our actions and exaggerate everything. They look like us, sound like us, and behave like us if only we are able to look at ourselves times twelve or thirteen. They are essential to our lives and our happiness. Why, you ask? Because, my friend, we should never take ourselves too seriously. If we look at life only through serious eyes, we will never get enough of weeping. When we fill up too many balloons full of air with our face painted on them, balloons of self-importance, as serious adults are wont to do, then we need to find the maniac with the pin. He’s not always a professional with face paint and floppy shoes. Sometimes he is the mailman, the local grocer, or even your deadbeat brother-in-law. But the point is, no matter how scary he sometimes seems, we all depend on the clown. We all need the foolishness of the most foolish among us. It keeps us sane.
Why then did I have to take it upon myself to give the world clowns? After all, that is precisely what I am doing as a writer. I am physically miserable with my six incurable diseases. I have diabetes, arthritis, hyper tension, psoriasis, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder, and I have a prostate the size of a cantaloupe. I can’t walk without a cane. I can’t breathe while I’m walking. I can’t pee without pain. I can’t draw as much as I’d like. And I have already been forced to retire from teaching… the single greatest thing I ever did with my foolish little life. Oh, and every night while I’m trying to sleep, I itch the top layer of skin off all my most sensitive anatomical parts thanks to the gift of psoriasis. I have every reason to just curl up in a ball and cry. But that’s not what a clown does. A clown picks himself up and dusts off that rusty tin can that he keeps his sense of humor in. He takes a pinch of clown snuff out of the can along with the rusty pin and induces an eye-opening sneeze of monstrous proportions. A clown looks at the world around him with newly enlarged eyes and sees all the really absurd things that are there. He looks at the way high school students act. He sees politicians like Ted Cruz strutting around like a peacock in the U.S. Senate. The clown sees injustice, moronic balloons with Ted Cruz’s face on them getting bigger and bigger and probably presidential, people on Texas roadways turning road rage into performance art, and even the contradictory things the clown’s wife says to him in little cartoon speech balloons that never seem to agree with each other and fight back and forth until they fill up the entire Cartoon Panel of Real Life. The clown sharpens that sense of humor, that crooked little pin, until it is balloon-popping razor sharp. It suddenly becomes time to pop a few balloons.
There are clowns in my writing not just because I like to write humor, but because it is the only way I can truly fight back. I must crack a few jokes. I must take a few metaphors and push them and pull them until they are so out of shape they form a picture of Ted Cruz’s face. I must puncture things and blow things up. I must toss sarcasm-berry pies at Ted Cruz’s face. (Actually, I love Ted Cruz. What wannabe humorist wouldn’t? He’s such an easy target.) I must mock things and ape people. I must sock things and grape people… waitaminnit! Grape people? Is that what a one-eyed, one-horned, giant purple people eater eats? I must do all the funny foolish things that a foolish funny clown can do to make the tears turn to laughter and pain to be ignored. Ted Cruz to be ignored too, if possible.
I have a riff or two to do on the clown heroes who inspire me. Red Skelton, Milton Berle, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and even Charlie Chaplin. But maybe that has to wait for another day… another post. As teachers and other clowns must always be aware, the attention span of the audience wears out quickly. If you have read this far, you are getting sleepy… sleepy (Michael Beyer is the funniest writer you ever read and you will not remember that I am the one who told you so).
The problem, as you can basically see, is the complexity of life on Earth and the convoluted way you have to understand the game to win it. I do not trust the ladders. They are not sturdy. They are not strong. And I fear the snakes. Will they not bite with poison? Will they not encircle me and constrict the very marrow out of my old bones? And when you play the game with M. C., he cheats. He plays in the fourth and fifth dimensions.
It is obvious that I don’t play the game well. You can tell, for instance, that I am struggling to get a camera to take a picture of a pencil drawing and get all of it in focus enough to bring out the nuances. It is the tricks of shading and juxtaposition of bizarre elements that got me the “A+” for this assignment in Drawing 303 at Iowa State University. I couldn’t capture some of the most subtle usage because the paper of the drawing has aged since 1978 and the shading is harder to make stand out against the graying and yellowing paper in the background. And it is increasingly hard to pick the thematic core of my message out of the hoogah-boog and chizzly-goober mishmash of my prose.
But it boils down to this, with school starting again, and money for bills running out, and arguments with the wife, and kids who sleep all day and play computer games all night, the whole two-steps-forward and one-step-back dance that I must do is making the game too hard to play. It is too hard to win. And I must simplify. No more hopping from double planes of existence into a room where you will fall up to the floor from the ceiling. And I must take success where I find it.
Heat of up to 105 and drought returning after months of deluge, makes me take pride in simple steps I have taken in the game. My flower wagon is blossoming only one blossom at a time, but there is bloom… there is success… and flowers seek the sun.
So what does my post for today mean? Don’t worry about it. M.C. Escher cheats when he plays the game. His physics break the laws of physics, and his genius turns around corners that are not really there. And maybe I only scored a “1” on my roll today. But it is a good one. And I have a piece in the game. I am a player on the board. And the next turn will come.
M.C. Escher’s faulty physics.
I would post a picture of my son the Marine in his uniform, but I have promised him never to use his real name, or pictures of him in his military persona, or even reveal destinations where he was going for the armed forces. He is not going on secret missions, but he likes to play like it is so, and is capable of getting very, very mad about it. So you will have to be satisfied with the harrowing tale of delivering him to the airport, putting him on a plane to… somewhere… and finding out first hand what the term SNAFU is all about as it relates to the military and deployment.
You may remember that I posted about collecting him from Love Field and what a wondrous, lovely adventure that was, at the start of his leave for the holiday. (Texas Airport Adventures) Well, unfortunately, we didn’t have the same easy time of it on the butt end of his journey home. We had to go to DFW… The Texas-Sized airport that makes you appreciate how loud and braggart-y and smug and foul-tempered Texas is as a whole. Practically nothing went as planned.
I used this scene to represent the airport and blurred it on purpose (yeah, right!) to protect the identities of the random airport denizens I was photographing because I obtained a release from no one and no faces can be actually visible. (I also thought the pretty little Asian girl dressed in blue was particularly cute, but wanted no part in taking some sort of weird stalker photo.) To use this photo to imagine what the airport is really like, you have to realize that this is one of thirty-five-something waiting areas in only one of the Terminals A, B, C, D, and E that litter this monster airport. You have to take this particular photo times one-hundred-seventy-five-something to get an idea of how labyrinthine and utterly foul and soul-munching this cesspit of Texan humanity and lurking random monsters truly is. And we didn’t even have the misfortune of finding the Minotaur in the middle of the maze.
We started our quest at Terminal C, not quite sure which of the many, many American Airlines spots we were supposed to find out of all the x-marks-the-spots x-es that were to be found on the GPS and Google Maps. We checked his bags and asked about boarding, and if we could get passes to eat dinner at one of the terminal restaurants with our boy before he winged off somewhere into the military world far, far away. Helpful little lady in the official red jacket said we had to go to Terminal B to the USO office and get passes because he was military and that was a USO responsibility. Then she said we should hustle onward to Terminal A to catch his plane. So we went to terminal B. The nice lady at the USO said she had no earthly idea what red-jacket-supposedly-expert lady was talking about. We needed to get our passes from security at the Terminal where we were actually putting him on the plane. So by now, we didn’t trust anything that red-jacket-lady had told us and checked the ticket to see if she had given us the wrong terminal as well. Sure enough, the ticket said we were to put him on a plane at gate D20. There is, of course, no such gate in Terminal A. So we went to Terminal D. There we tried to get passes. The ticket agent that was helping us said we had to go to the special customer services desk at the other end of the free-world side of Terminal D. So, armed with my cane and two aching knees (from arthritis pressed into walking too far already) we stumped and slogged and slithered down to the far end of Terminal D. On the way (during one of my frequent puffing and panting and gasping stops) I checked the departure board for number one son’s flight and saw, to my shock and dismay, that his flight was leaving not out of Terminal D, but out of Terminal A, from gate A11.
The red-jacket-supposedly-expert lady from the far end of Terminal D apologized profusely that we had been misdirected by red-jacket-but-know-nothing lady and recommended that we get our passes from the special customer services desk that was now within fifty feet of where we stood. We went there and lucked out with a quietly competent special-customer-services guy who quietly and competently issued us each of the four passes we sought. (The poor Asian gentleman arguing with the next ticket agent over had already missed his plane because he had been waiting in long airport lines through boarding and take-off. I was so glad not to be in his shoes that I overlooked the fact that smoke was already rolling out of the soles of my shuffling shoes.) From that point on, we got what we wanted. We went to Terminal A and got in through security without being strip-searched… completely (only my feet were actually bare). We found a nice, expensive airport restaurant and consumed enough carbohydrates that it should have killed diabetic little me. The waitress was even a bit smitten with number one son, although the boy did not even notice her big brown calf’s eyes. And then we got him on his plane. And he was gone. Of course, the SNAFU (Situation Normal, All-French-worded-Up) was not completely done with number one son. He reached the place where he was supposed to go from American Airlines to the military transport flight, and was promptly grounded for a couple of days as there was a huge, nasty weather event across the ocean at his destination.
So, there you have it… the abridged to less than one-thousand-one-hundred-words version, anyway. More airport follies to tickle your glee-and-giggles center in your brain. And I may live long enough to go through similar stuff a number of times more. Such is the life of a military parent. But when we got home, just like the last time, the flower wagon had another surprise for us… just before the thunderstorm.
Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies
Some people might say I was born in the wrong century. I love castles and knights and everything medieval. Of course, the Dungeons and Dragons part of my life, my twenties and early thirties (1980’s and 1990’s) only made the situation worse. I am cursed by a desire to build castle walls.
I mean both figuratively and literally, of course. I have blogged already about incessant cardboard constructions that I can’t help but build and add to my ever-increasing set of Dungeons and Dragons toys. And always it is for the sake of the story. I love not only making the castle walls and castle buildings, but also the castle people. It flows in an unbroken stream of goofiness from cardboard and paper to brick and wooden towers and finally to knights and wizards and commoners and goblins. It takes all kinds to fill a kingdom.
Figuratively, I keep hoping to build ramparts against the coming enemies that I know are lurking, waiting to attack and take my life. I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor. I had two benign lumps removed from my body this school year. I can no longer teach because of health. I can’t supplement my retirement income, because part-time jobs I can physically do are either too distant to travel to or simply not available. The Dire Wolf of Poverty and the Grim Reaper are both sniffing around my barbican, looking for the way inside the castle.
But I continue to people my castle with new and fascinating folk. Endless elves and half-elves, were-creatures, and halflings all take up residence in my imaginary castles. They take over my art, my house, and sometimes… even this blog.
These are just a few of the interesting folks I’ve invited into my house and my life through the windows of my imagination.
And the most fascinating thing about this whole castle-building thing is that it touches my life in so many places. I am sincerely addicted to castle-building games on Facebook like Magecraft and Stormfall.
I have used those moments when I am waiting for things… telephone calls to insurance offices that put me on endless hold, those times after midnight when body aches wake me and I can’t get back to sleep, winding down after doing whatever yard work or house work that I can, and even when I am in the pre-writing stage letting ideas percolate. I came up with this lame idea for a blog while watching my troops take down marauders in Magecraft. And these games let me people the castles too.
So I spend a good share of my days now building and mending castle walls. Of course, I know the enemies I am trying to defend against are both undeterred and unimpressed by castle walls. They are immune to my vain attempts at constructing defenses. But even though the darkness looms on the horizon, I still have some of my bright, shining day left. And there is something majestic about castles with towers and walls.
Filed under humor, making cardboard castles, Paffooney
Once upon a time, the English poet and, I would argue, cartoonist, William Blake once said, “You look at the sky and see clouds, while I see the assembled heavenly host!” This is why my literature class in college about the Romantic Poets of his day made him out to be a certifiable nutcase who probably belonged in in a mental institution. (And back then, in the 1800’s, the sanitarium was a place where inconveniently crazy people went to die.)
Look at a couple of my cloudscapes. Do you see angels?
Cloudscapes (a poem)
Blue and white and filled with light…
The cloudscape burns with angels…
And wholly bought with grace unsought…
I long to fly with angels…
Are they really there in the cloud-filled air?
I see them there, they’re angels!
So, there you have it. I’m a loon. I don’t even have the excuse of being a Romantic Poet and well-known for my poetry as a defense against the loony bin. But as the matter stands, I am fully willing to accept the consequences. Creativity has its price. And, while you may not agree that I am somewhat creative, I am swimming in a vast ocean of perceived revelations that enriches me and fulfills me at the very same moment that it drains all the energy from my soul. If that is not what it means to see angels… then I do not know anything of use to anyone but me.
The word “angel” (according to Wikipedia, the source of all true knowledge) comes to English via Late Latin and the word “angelus” which the Romans stole from the Greek ἄγγελος ángelos, The ángelos is the default Septuagint’s translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal’ākh denoting simply “messenger” without specifying its nature. (Notice, I am giving full credit to Wikipedia because it is far more all-knowing than I.)
I have many atheistic and agnostic notions in my ultimate belief systems, but still, I claim to be a Christian and believe in God Jehovah… within limits. I still communicate with God on a daily basis, and while I don’t publicly pray anymore (a notion promoted by the Biblical Jesus) I find answers to my questions and solutions to my problems from the observable universe around me.. the messengers of God. So, now that I have fully rationalized being crazy as a loon, I am going to tell you where that craziness is taking me. I started a new Paffooney for one of the books I am working on. Here is the pencil sketch;
This will be a picture of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, the farmer Kyle Clarke. In my fiction, Kyle loses his farm to the bank (in the Family Farm Crisis of the 1980’s) and believing himself incapable of any longer supporting his family, kills himself. But the thing is, the love of his daughter transcends death for Kyle. She is able to reconnect with him time and again because the angels work for her as well as for Kyle. I may be loony and ill in real life, facing the Angel of Death myself, but I am not done doing God’s work… not yet… not for a long time to come.
When you get to be old and burdened with deteriorating health like I am, you appreciate the renewal of spring with a new intensity. This year has been like that. Cold weather and dehydrating cold were worse this winter than I can remember… especially since I feel it in the marrow of my bones now more than ever before. But the inevitable rebirth did eventually come. The apple tree my wife planted in the hope that Texas heat would not destroy it is putting out more blossoms than ever before.
The first flowers to put out their winter-weary heads this year were relatively stupid daffodils. They came out in February only a day before an ice storm came along to slay them for their daffy dunderheadedness. I didn’t take their demise very well. I suffered a lot this winter and was looking for the sun with desperation.
But then, in March, dandelions poked out their bright, dandy heads and decided to stay.
And, though we have had plenty of wet weather and rain, the flowers apparently all had a big meeting and decided the time had come to make their yearly assault and wrench the world out of the hands of Jack Frost and his icy minions.
Wisteria began climbing the back corner of the house. They like to spread their purple majesty out over the area by the cracked and derelict swimming pool. It is moist and shaded out there, somewhat protected from our cruel Texas sun.
My wife’s bed of roses, both red and yellow marched out into the open air and began to dance gently in the wind like grand ladies decked out in their Easter best , showing off their color and their sass for all the world to see.
I am coming back now too… less seriously depressed. I completed a doll collection last week. The educational problems my children were facing are now seemingly straightening out. It is a time of rebirth… happiness… and flowers. My smile has returned.
Filed under happiness, humor, photo paffoonies
We have a second day off from work and school. The ice and potential snow is far from a blizzard, but sometimes the mere presence of snow can aid the death that stalks on silent cat feet.
My novel, still in the process of publication, called Snow Babies, has a central problem that concerns a blizzard. The primary threat, or possibly antagonist, of the story is a deadly blizzard that descends on a small Iowa town. In the midst of blizzard, whether they are actually hallucinations, ghosts, or banshee-like harbingers of death, are a number of snow babies. I call them snow babies. The Japanese call them yuki onna. They are spirits of the snow that can both lure people to their demise and help to save them for brighter things in their later lives.
I can’t actually speak about who or what the real life ones stalking about the suburbs of Dallas actually are. Lives are at stake in my world right now. I have to deal with some serious depression and mental challenges right now. The foretold consequences include things worse than death. I can no more name them than the owner of a glassware factory can afford to take up throwing stones. Things will shatter that I am trying desperately to protect. One thing that will definitely help is the passing of the snowstorm. Just like in my book, people are forced together in the areas of love and warmth that they depend on to survive. The snow babies themselves are, as you can see by my paffooney illustration, naked children bleached snow At this post is not meant for you. It is done for me. It is a statement of resolve and personal refusal to accept that what comes is due to fate alone… that no one can ever change an outcome. No story-teller ever believes that is the case.
So, here is a post from the snow. I was born during a blizzard. I have always known that the snow will come for me in the end. And it is very cold now where I live. More snow is in the forecast. But I will never give up trying to be warm.
Filed under Paffooney, philosophy
Of late I have encountered many roadblocks on the road to creativity. Illness gets in the way. It is hard to think when I have too much arthritis pain. I have a hard time composing anything on days like yesterday when my blood sugar is out of whack. I haven’t been chased by car-driving crocodiles in red fright-wigs and green race cars. At least, not while I was awake. I am trying to follow a writing schedule that has me editing a novel for a contest in April, writing two other novels simultaneously, a set of short stories, and this daily blog that I am trying to average 500 words per day in every day (and succeeding now for roughly 41 straight days) (some days I write less words, but some days I go way over the stated limit). I end up squeezing the toothpaste tube of new ideas from both ends until the big wad in the middle finally bursts and gets white gobbets of creative-idea paste on everything in the room. I will admit that I mangle a metaphor or two, and give meaning to random blobs of description merely for the sake of adding more words. And what is this bit about, then? Clearly I am thinking about how I think and it is not a pretty sight. Sometimes my children bounce out of the rumble seat towards the river of man-eating fish, and I have to depend on the odd three-eyed alien tootling along in a space-doughnut to catch him or her in the nick of time. But sometimes, too, I am the rabbit, calmly watching from the sidelines hoping not to get run over but too fascinated to look away from the slap-dash slap-stick chase scene that is my actual life. This particular bit of tooth-paste squeezing is known as free writing, where I just keep stringing words and phrases together for as long as I can keep my aching fingers from falling off. I make corrections as I go, but there is no outline here, no discernible pattern, and very little logical coherence. Like the picture Paffooney, once it gets started, it just goes. And goes and goes. I have bounced over broken bridges and landed squarely on the pavement on the other side more than once of late. I paid the tax on the house and managed to remain a homeowner for another year. I fought off numerous bill-collecting crocodiles set on me by credit-card banks who are after me to pay off mountains of accumulated debt and interest after my multiple career-ending illnesses. I have lawyers helping me with debt reduction, the step before bankruptcy, which is also probably the step before stepping off the ledge at the top of the Chrysler Building. I continue to draw stuff that makes little or no visual sense, and post them here to further delight, dazzle and delude you. And, of course, I have the audacity to label this word free-for-all as humor… but I have reached five hundred and five words.
Catch a Falling Star 