No man is an island. John Donne the English poet stated that. And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it. We need other people. I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.
When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan. My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island. This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!” By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan. But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island. And no man is an island. Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.
You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be. It was who I was as a teacher. Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan. Being a teacher gave me an identity. And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger. Not a bad thing to be. And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.
But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here. Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now? We never really find the answer. Answers change over time. And so do I.
This post originally appeared here on April 21st, 2015, the anniversary of Mark Twain’s expiration date.
If it is inevitable that I will surely drop dead some day, and if it is likely that it will come sooner rather than later, then I hope to go out with a bit of style and leave something behind that speaks not only to my own children, but to anybody searching for truth and beauty, people of the future that I will never know who are living beyond the confines of my little life. What makes me think that I can do it? Well, I’m a writer… and Mark Twain did it… and I don’t have to be vain or loopy or maniacal or delusional to make the same thing happen.
On this day one-hundred-and-five years ago, April 21, 1910, Mark Twain left the world of the living. He caught a ride on Halley’s Comet (It deposited him on Earth in 1835, appearing in the sky when he was born, and took him away when it appeared in the sky again in 1910… He didn’t have to be some kind of suicidal Heaven’s Gate nut to manage that.) But it wasn’t the comet that showed me the truth… it was his books. I learned to take a wry view of a complex world that I could do nothing to change and tweak it with intelligence and understanding from the story of racism and justice he left behind in Pudd’nhead Wilson. I learned the value of ingenuity and opportunity and how to use them properly from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I also learned a profound love and understanding for small town people like me and the people of my little hometown in both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Samuel Clemens, Mr. Mark Twain, left himself behind in stories to speak to the ages. He spoke to me… directly to my heart, and he had been dead for 46 years before I was even born. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
media.npr.org
Now, I am not a fool (wait a minute! I know you have proof to the contrary if you read my blog posts, but I am not an UNINTENTIONAL fool), so I do not think that my words and wisdom are ever going to have any sort of effect on the entire world the way Mark Twain’s have. I can accept reality. This whole world is dying and may not long outlive me. There are a large number of talented fools… er, I mean writers, out there who have put out a number of published good books, and have, like me, made diddly-zero-bupkiss in dollars on the deal. I have no delusions. My work is good enough to turn into a best-seller or maybe two, but I do not have the time or the backing to make it happen. If anything other than obscurity embraces my books, I won’t live to see it. Only eleven per cent of published authors make a livable wage from writing and I will never be one of them. But I have ideas that resonate. I can write in ways that touch the heart (as you may have seen if you have read my post “When Compassion Fails” that was a minor hit with the 1000 Voices Speak For Compassion group).
So, I am satisfied to confess my girly addiction to Barbie Dolls and My Little Pony… talk about cartoons and cartoonists on WordPress… make people giggle a bit… or even guffaw, and put together books that my family will read, and only be mildly embarrassed by, and maybe one day will reach and touch the heart of some boy or girl who really needs to read what I wrote at a time in their lives when it can actually help… the way so many other philosophers, wits, and word-wizards have helped me. (How’s that for some prime purple-paisley prose?)
I have made up my mind to risk investing more money in getting another book published. Being an author, especially an unknown Indie author, is really just an expensive hobby. Even investing in professional editorial services and print-on-demand publishers can’t help you make any money at it, even if you are talented and good at story-telling. The best I can really hope for is to get my books in print and pray that people will discover them and like them after I die, beaten to death for a crust of bread in debtor’s prison.
So, why would anyone in their right mind want to be a writer?
It is entirely possible that I was simply born that way. I have been drawing cartoons and telling stories since I was about five years old. Maybe even before that. I don’t have many clear memories of my pre-school years. It is possible that I was lost in a library once… or dropped on my head… or in a library and having a book dropped on my head… something set it off if it wasn’t simply in my genes.
I am planning to publish Magical Miss Morgan with Page Publishing. They are a pay-to-print publisher who are slightly more affordable than I-Universe that I used to get Catch a Falling Star into print. I feel like I have to get it published before I die because it is the distillation of my entire life as a classroom teacher. Books like this are important to me. In the Bible, there are prophets and holy men who are filled with the Word of God, men like Jeremiah, that claim the Word is burning within them, and will burn its way out of them if they don’t speak it. My stories that I am working at turning into books are like that. They are consuming me from the inside out. I have to get them written and printed if I possibly can.
I have recently tried and failed to get novels like Snow Babies, Magical Miss Morgan, and Superchicken published with publishers that don’t charge for their services. I got several rejections and one contract that came to nothing because of the economic failings of the publisher. I have tried being infinitely patient. It doesn’t work.
I will try to bargain for the most affordable deal I can to get Magical Miss Morgan into print. They will apparently let me input artwork into the final cover. I understand that successful writers tend to starve for at least fifteen years before they see any success and profit. At best, I have six more years of that to go. But this, after all, is my life now. I need to write books and I need to get them published. I am, unfortunately, a Writer.
This being an old post reposted, I now have this book available on Amazon.
I came to Texas from Iowa. I was well-versed in how to speak Iowegian. (I was, don’t-ya-know, and spoke it fluently, you-betcha.)
Then I arrived, fresh-faced and ready to change the world as a twenty-five-year-old teacher, and began working in a mostly Hispanic middle school in deep South Texas. Dang! Whut language do they speak? (Yes, I know… Spanish. But my students straight from Mexico couldn’t understand the local lingo either. South Texas Spanish and Castilian Spanish from Mexico are not the same language.) I couldn’t talk to the white kids either. It is possible to communicate with Texicans, but it took me years to learn the language. It takes more than mere usage of “ya’ll” and “howdy”.
You can probably see what I mean when you look at these fake quotes based on the things real Texicans actually once said to me. Of course, I can be accused of being a racist by interpreting things this way. Texicans are concerned that you understand that they are not racists. They merely rebel against being “politically correct”. Apparently the political-correctness police give them all sorts of unfair harassment about speaking their minds the way they always have. I should note, however, that I had to use a quote from Bubba rather than Dave Winchuk. Dave is so anti-political-correctness concerned that he regularly said to me things with so much racial heat in them that they would even melt the faces off white people. Face-melting is bad. If you don’t believe me, re-watch the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
And to speak Texican, you must actually learn a thing or two about guns. Yes, Texas is an open-carry State. Apparently, Second Amendment rights are the most important rights in the Constitution. My two sons grew up in Texas; the oldest is a Marine, and the younger is in the Air Force. Guns are important to them. I have those same arguments with former students, too. I have learned to say the right things so that they will tolerate my unholy pacifist ideas about how the world might be safer if everybody didn’t have five guns in the waistbands of their underpants. So gun-stuff ends up as a part of the Texican language I have learned to speak.
The point of it all is, language is a fascinating thing that grows and changes and warps and regresses. I love it. I try to master it. And the mistakes I make usually sound purty funny.
This is a repost of a classic bit… A post written by my dog using her tongue to lick-type. I offer this now nostalgically because she left us behind for dog heaven a year ago.
Okay, like, my name is Jade Beyer. I know I look like a dog, but my family lets me be a people sometimes. They let me eat enough people food from their table to turn into one of them. You know, like, all fat and unhealthy and some stuff. So, since Mickey is being lazy today, he said I could write his blog for him. It won’t be very long because it is taking forever to pick out the right keys with my nose. And my nose is bif… I mean big enough to hit the wrong key sometimes. So I have to edif caretully and ofren.
My family does a lot of funny stuff I can tell about. Like how they pee. They go in my extra drinking places. You know, the white things with the extra funky tasting water. Why are you not laughing about that? Don’t you get it? The house is full of carpets where they could pee and mark their territory with their scents. But they would rather just pee where I drink. I don’t get it. And why is Mickey yelling at me that I can’t write about that? I just did, didn’t I?
But besides that I can tell you about my Momma. Mickey is my Momma. Why do I say that even though Mickey is a man? Well, when I was a wee little puppy and my family found me in the street, Mickey was the first one to pick me up and hold me. He was the first one to feed me. He says I must have “imprinted” on him as baby animals sometimes do. And that’s why he’s my Momma. I love him best. Even when he is grumpy and mad at me. I chew up a lot of his stuff because it smells like him and I love him so very much.
I am writing this today because Mickey is busy shaving off his face fur. He found some old pictures of himself for yesterday’s post, and it made him wonder if he could look anything like that again. I tried to chew the old pictures so I could love them even better, but he just got mad at me and swatted me on the ears. He said I could show you the old pictures, and not eat them. So here they are before the temptation gets to me;
Wasn’t he a goofy-looking kid? I like him better with glasses. I tasted his glasses once, but not the ones in the picture, the ones he is wearing now. His face doesn’t look anything like the third grade pictures any more. I would very much like to lick that little-boy face with the same tongue I use to lick my own butt, but Mickey says he’s glad I can’t because that kid was dumb enough to let a dog lick his face. Apparently when people get older, you just can’t lick them as much. It just makes them grumpy.
Mark Twain had a lot to say about lying. Like in this quote from Following the Equator ; Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar; “There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”
Now, I would have to agree with the Biblical admonition against lying to get the people you dislike thrown into prison or beheaded. I am especially concerned with some of the false witness pooping out of the mouths of some presidential candidates that would like us to believe their anti-science, anti-climate change, and anti-immigration lies would make good laws for our country. If they go with Donald Trump’s idea of taking away birthright citizenship from the children of immigrants, then my three children will lose their citizenship and could be deported from the only country they have lived in. After all, after twenty years of marriage and applications and legal fees and enough frustration to make her give up on the whole idea, my wife is still not an American citizen. She is from the Philippines, and Filipinos are one of the main groups that politicians site as reason for taking automatic citizenship away from foreign-born marriage mates back in the 1980’s. And if we truly believe that climate change is a hoax and disproven by having Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe bring a snowball into the senate chamber, I believe we are all going to fry in Venus-like atmospheric conditions (Venus is 400 degrees Centigrade on the surface due to rampant greenhouse gasses like those emitted by the factories of Senator Inhofe’s primary campaign donors). Some lies have fatal consequences, (and also, apparently, got Senator Inhofe the chairmanship of the Senate Science Committee).
But not all lies are bad lies. Twain also says; “In all lies there is wheat among the chaff…” – A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
And; “The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend is immortal.” – “On the Decay of the Art of Lying”
So I have actually started to think that the lies not forbidden by the Bible because of their fatal consequences are actually all good things, and not bad. Yesterday in a post about talking to stupid people, I suggested that you should tell them lies about how you care about them and want the best for them, and you should lie about it so hard that you believe in the lies yourself. After all, story-tellers like me tell nothing but lies. My made-up stories are based on real events and people, and reveal real perceived truths about life, but they are basically nothing but lies. This essay is a lie. I was brought up in Iowa to be truthful and always tell the truth… and that was repeatedly reinforced by religious training from every church I ever attended. And yet, the more I tried to tell the truth, the more I realized that I could never say anything that was not a lie. Think about it, what is there in all the factual things that you know that you can actually prove is true? “I think, therefore I am,” (a quote from Rene Descartes) is the only thing anyone has ever said that I can prove by my own perceptions. Every scientific theory is constantly reviewed for lies and untruth and inaccuracy so that they can be revised for something better that is also not ultimately provably true in every detail. It is entirely possible that everything else truly is a lie, and then the whole universe, science, physics, logic, and everything is basically untrue.
So, what do I do? Anything I say is a lie. Some of the lies are hurtful, even deadly. So I have to be careful about those lies. I should fight against those lies. But the lies that make our existence in life meaningful and full of hope and mystery… I have to let those lies live, and even learn to do them artfully.
“One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.” – Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain.
Yes, yes, I know it is supposed to be Ray Bradbury, not berry. But now that the master has gone, I don’t want to think of him as bury which is too grave a term. He was a master of metaphor and rhythm and image in writing. His work is much more berry-flavored, and if you really intensively read a novel like Dandelion Wine, you can very easily get drunk on the richly fermented contents of his beautiful writing.
angel by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905)
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.
You see, I think the literary mind does not have to sink to mundane and dark and dreary thoughts and ideas to accomplish lofty goals. Often it is the special dollop of sugary metaphorical conceit that makes a Ray Bradbury or Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut to soar through the astral plane of ideas. I know that’s cartoony thinking, and somewhat loony besides, but I am often frustrated when it seems that the only “realism” modern readers and audiences accept is what is gritty and bloody and depressingly painful. Oh, I get it. Douglas nearly dies in the course of Dandelion Wine. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Billy Pilgrim all suffer as much as we laugh in order to make their points in the novels they inhabit. But the misfortune makes the moment of taking flight that much sweeter. And it is in the language. The loving description of everyday things and everyday events that become extraordinary through extra-close examination. Sometimes silliness and humor and logical reason are not enough, and we have to speak in poetry. We put in metaphors as peaches and plums. Sensory details are raspberries and strawberries. Sing-song rhythms and elegant pacing makes the batter whole and delicious. And I know this whole post makes no earthly sense. But sometimes you write for earthly reasons… and sometimes you try to reach heaven. That is what Ray Bradberry Pie is made of.
While the Republican President continues to shoot his mouth off… and sometimes shoot his own foot off… or put his foot in his mouth and shoot both off… (Dang! See what you get for being too friendly with the NRA, Republicans?) I decided to track down the mythical creature that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Watters… (no, that last one is not smart enough to know who I am going to name) constantly warn is the socialist-communist-terrorist-really-bad-guy behind everything President Obama and liberals do, Saul Alinsky.
You see, I have been battling the evil Bond villain Badfinger for days now. He has been exercising his evil on my more Republican and conservative Facebook friends for a while. They have been posting up a storm of crap about how terrible Obama is, the Biden Crime Family, and how false climate change is, and how we should not try to lift up the poor by tearing down the rich… things that sound suspiciously like talking points on Fox News where they mention Saul Alinsky a lot. (Yes, I do watch Fox News sometimes. It is always on at my favorite A&W in Lewisville. And besides, sometimes it is therapeutic to induce vomiting when you’ve had too much poison and disrespect.)
A truck-driver friend posted this on Facebook trying to save me from my liberal Democratic urges.
Boy, Saul Alinsky sounds like a real monster! But if Saul Alinsky really said this, and he really is a socialist, why do so many of these sound so much like fascist/capitalist ideas? The kind of control they are urging is what appears to me to be the thing that would benefit fat-cat oligarchs and rich-old-guy control freaks. So I turned to Wikipedia to learn more about this evil, very evil guy. (I know, Wikipedia is discredited because it is edited and referenced by the people who use it… but a source that is factually checked and edited daily can sometimes be more accurate than the rarely updated articles in Encyclopedia Brittanica.)
Wikipedia says that he was a Jewish-American community organizer and writer. (Red flags have to go up for Republicans for that alone.) And worse yet he was focused on improving the lives of poor people in American cities, particularly black people. He was working with black people in ghettos in New York City, Detroit, and other notable “trouble spots” in the 1950’s. How did he avoid the wrath of righteous commie hunters like Senator Joe McCarthy doing a work like that? Oh, wait a minute… It says in the article that William F. Buckley praised him as an “organizational genius”. How did he avoid prison after being endorsed by a commie like that? Um, right?
His book, Rules for Radicals, begins like this; “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”
There’s the damning evidence right there. He means to punish the wealthy and the greedy and the powerful by taking away some of their excess and giving it to the powerless who are starving and suffering from want. No communist except maybe… Jesus Christ… could have proposed anything more radical and perverse.
And look at some of the terrible methods he used. He once used what he called a “fart in” to disrupt rich folks’ sensibilities at the Rochester Philharmonic concert in Rochester, New York. He organized a group of classical-music-loving radicals to eat huge quantities of baked beans, then go to the concert and intentionally alter the atmosphere for rich patrons of the arts. That will either bring down Western Civilization as we know it, or make somebody die laughing. You can’t get much more evil than that, can you?
When asked whether he hadn’t actually considered joining the Communist Party, Alinsky responded like this; “Not at any time. I’ve never joined any organization—not even the ones I’ve organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it’s Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as ‘that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you’re right.’ If you don’t have that, if you think you’ve got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.”
Man, oh, man! I owe such a debt to my conservative Facebook friends for exposing this monster to me. I didn’t know what Fox News was ranting about until now. I now believe this evil Saul Alinsky may actually be worthy of respect. They may have actually reinforced my loony liberal belief that the American Government exists to better the lives of all its citizens. It has definitely opened my eyes to the dangers of…thinking like a Republican.
Truthfully, I have always expected the worst out of life. That expectation has never let me down. In fact, it has made me a much happier person. “How is that possible, you dim-witted dolt?” you ask. Well, just as Franklin said it. I am never taken unpleasantly by surprise. In 1983, when I was diagnosed with malignant melanoma, skin cancer, I prepared myself to die at 27. But I was pleasantly surprised. I not only survived, but it was completely eradicated by surgery. No chemotherapy. No recurrence. No more cancer worries (beyond assuming each and every mole I had removed after that point in my life was melanoma revisited). I can now celebrate 42 years of being cancer-free.
Watching politics as a humorous hobby benefits greatly from a pessimistic outlook. I just assumed that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz would win the Presidency in 2016, and I prepared for that dismal dip into depressing gloom. If Rodeo Clown Bush the Sequel had been elected, or Scott Walker got the nod, the more likely scenarios, I would have been pleasantly relieved and surprised, even though I would still have been expecting the ultimate heat-death of the planet to come from those administrations. If Marco Rubio got the nod, better still. He’s kinda young for a senator and stupid, but he’s demonstrated that he does care at least a little bit about the common man, and he doesn’t really want us all to die. He’s even demonstrated the ability to learn from mistakes. And if a Democrat had won, especially Bernie Sanders, that would have been a repeat of the marvelous surprise we all got in 2008 from the election of Professor Obama, man of the people. Of course, the worst happened, and the evil Pumpkinhead won in both 2016 and 2024. I will be preparing for the world to end after this next election, but there is actually a higher percentage chance of survival and limited suffering. After all, people, even the mega-polluters in China and India, have recognized the need to try to repair the planet.
I was, honestly, as a pessimist, expecting to be dead before the new school year started in 2015. So I was pleasantly surprised to be able to start a new collection of morning-dog-walk sunrise pictures. I am prepared and at peace with the world because I always expect the worst to happen. Looking at everything from the dark side is ironically the way to find the light and hope in the new day dawning directly ahead.
I told you before that I make a lousy movie critic because I watch anything and everything and like most of it. You don’t believe me? You can look it up through this link; The Uncritical Critic
I hate to tell you this, but it is almost exactly the same for books too.
The Paffooney is an illustration for a proposed collaboration on a children’s book. My friend and fellow author Stuart R. West (Stuart’s Blogspot about Aliens) had a story about three kids taking a balloon ride when they accidentally gave the goldfish bubble gum to chew ignoring their mother’s warning that dire consequences would follow. He decided the project was too ridiculous to follow through on, or at least my Paffooney power wasn’t up to making sense of his brilliant literature, and the book did not happen. And I am sorry about that because I couldn’t wait to find out how it turns out. I love weird and wild stories of all kinds. And, unfortunately, I love them uncritically.
So, what kind of books would a goofy uncritical critic actually recommend? Let me lay some bookishness on ya then.
Here is the review I wrote for Goodreads on Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
I have always felt, since the day I first picked up a copy of Mort by Terry Pratchett, that he was an absolute genius at humor-and-satire style fantasy fiction. In fact, he is a genius compared to any author in any genre. He has a mind that belongs up there with Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and William Faulkner… or down there as the case may well be. This book is one of his best, though that is a list that includes most of his Discworld novels. Amazing Maurice is a magically enhanced cat with multiple magically enhanced mice for minions. And the cat has stumbled on a sure fire money-making scheme that completely encompasses the myth of Pied Piper of Hamlin. In fact, it puts the myth in a blender, turns it on high, and even forgets to secure the lid. It is funny, heartwarming, and changes the way you look at mice and evil cats. This is a book to be read more than once and laughed at for the rest of your life.
You see what I mean? I uncritically praise books that make me laugh and think deeply about things at the same time. It is as if I don’t have any standards at all if something is brilliantly written and makes a deep and influential impression on me.
Here’s another book that I love so much I can’t be properly critical when I reread it. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I cannot help but be taken in by the unrequited love the dissolute lawyer Sydney Carton had for the beautiful refugee from the French Revolution, Lucy Manette. Tragic love stories melt my old heart. And I can’t help but root for Charles Darnay as well, even though I know what’s going to happen in Paris at the Bastille because I have read this book three times and seen the Ronald Coleman movie five times. I also love the comical side characters like Jerry Cruncher the grave-robber and hired man as well as Miss Pross, the undefeatable champion of Miss Lucy and key opposer to mad Madam Defarge.
I simply cannot be talked out of praising the books I read… and especially the books I love. I am totally uncritical as a reader, foolishly only looking for things I like about a book. Real critics are supposed to read a book and make faces that remind you of look on my little brother’s face when I had to help him use an outhouse for the first time. (Oh, what a lovely smell that was!) (And I mean that sarcastically!) Real critics are supposed to tell you what they hated about the book and what was done in such a juvenile and unprofessional way that it spoiled all other books forever. That’s right isn’t it? Real critics are supposed to do that? Maybe I am glad I’m not a real critic.
Catch a Falling Star 