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.
Filed under Uncategorized
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).
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?)
Filed under Uncategorized
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.
Step one… perform some random act. (choose a random illustration from Spiegelman & Mouly’s Classic Children’s Comics)
Step two… redraw in the Mickian style (stupidly recast images in garishly wrong colors and cutsie goofishness)
Step three… realize you don’t have any idea what you are doing this for (What am I doing this for?)
Step four… yield to despair and get depressed (let me think about this too much and end up moping)
Step five… do other things and try not to think about it (What was that movie I wanted to see?)
Step six… give it time to percolate or get forgotten (Say what?)
Step seven… come back to it eventually (maybe later this week… or in 22 years)
How’s that for a Pointless Paffooney Prose Poem?
Filed under Uncategorized
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.
Filed under Uncategorized
Yep. Danged snake-men used to keep me awake as a kid. Kept checking under the bed… the closets… Could one of them swim through the plumbing and get into the upstairs toilet? One never knows. Drawing them was a way to make them go away.
Filed under Uncategorized
You may have noticed the word “Paffooney” used in some of my posts. You may have been deceived into thinking it is some kind of real word. Sorry. It isn’t. It’s my own original made-up word for postable buffoonery, baloney, and goofiness… with accompanying picture. Yes, the picture is the key, though it may have no discernible connection to whatever the heck I happen to be writing about. It is an illustration for illustration’s sake… and a story for the sake of putting words with the picture. I confessed early in my blogging endeavors that I am basically a surrealist. I juxtapose disparate images and ideas and make meaning by forcing the relationship. Of course, you have no idea at all what I just said, and rightly so, because I tend to speak in college-art-history-meta-cognitive-gobblety-gook-speak, a language I first learned in college and have since banged into weird word-sculptures over the last thirty-three years by trying to explain things in a classroom to teenagers. (I love the job, but I do not recommend it for those with a loosening grip on sanity.)
So, here is the definition; Paffooney, proper noun, (Origin from a silly blogger’s head, consisting of Paff, meaning a silly cartoon sound effect, and fooney an even sillier derivation from buffoon and looney.) A silly picture and post combination caused by a brain fart or other gaseous anomaly inside Mickey’s head.
Forgive me, for I know my sins are many.
Filed under Uncategorized
This is a re-post of an old poem with a new Paffooney.
Icarus
“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.
My teenage son and I have been through some rough times. One time, though, we sat down and talked about him wanting to be a music composer. I realized then that the things I have been through as a writer, being discouraged by other, more sensible people, having to defend my art, and not even being believed in by my own family, were the very things that he was talking about. So I wrote a poem about it. The central metaphor is Icarus from classical mythology. I even suggested he use it as lyrics and turn it into a song. Of course he told me how stupid that idea was. So let me put the poem here and see what you think.
Filed under Uncategorized
Life is like a cartoon car chase in one of Floyd Gottfredson’s 1930’s Mickey Mouse comic strips. No, really, it is! You never know what is going to happen in the next frame. Will the alien space craft scoop up Junior as he flies out of the rumble seat? Fifty-fifty chance, don’t you think? Will Crocko Diddly-Dial catch up and eat everybody in the car? Probably not if it was a G-rated comic strip… and it was.
The only control we have over life are the reactions we can manage as we go and bad things continue to happen to us. We are trapped by the cliff and the river, so we jump the car successfully across. If we are successful, we bounce onto the road on the other side, and Crocko falls into the river. Of course it is the road to nowhere and the chase only ends when the cartoon of life reaches the last panel.
Okay, so that all sounds very scary, and we must hope that Mickey is merely crazy, and not on to something real in this metaphorical thesis of mayhem. Yet, there is a way to effectively deal with the car chase. We need to treat it all as a cartoon, a comic book story, and simply laugh.
Filed under Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 