The award that was given to me yesterday was not so much this blog as it was for my little vault. I opened a can of worms a while back when I created a second blog on WordPress more or less by accident. I wasn’t really interested so much in giving myself more writing tasks to do, rather, I decided I would use this other blog to store whole stories, poems, and cartoons. I really haven’t figured out how to link this blog to that one, or that one to this… and since WordPress “improved” everything by changing all the controls, I really don’t know how to properly link something or put a URL into this prose, but here is the web address for that blog;
It is a place where I have posted more complete works that, though mostly still unfinished, will take a little bit longer to look at and read. I know that my daily 500 words on this goofy blog is too much for most internet readers, and these things take way more time to read than is good for you. But some readers of this blog have recently discovered that the thing exists, and I have had a sudden burst of interest. I gained five followers to the vault yesterday. I think I have six total. I don’t post there often enough to generate traffic, but I do keep stuff there that certain of my followers here are likely to enjoy if they are foolish enough to buy into this whole artwork and wordswork nonsense that I constantly do. So, there it is… a little bit more of me than you were probably ready for.
I woke up this morning to an award from Dear Kitty, Some blog. I want to thank this very talented blogger for making the mistake of nominating little old me. You can find her at this link; https://dearkitty1.wordpress.com/ , although I don’t know how to process a link on WordPress any more so that you can just click on it.
The maker of this award wrote that these are the rules for it:
For the award, post the picture of it in your post and thank your nominator while linking to them. Tell the blogging world 5 things about yourself and/or your blog. Select 5 nominees, name and link to them. Put their names in a list then hi lite them and go to the top of the editor and see the chain link, click that and paste their homepage URL. Then send a copy of your finished post’s URL to each person in their most recent post and you are all done.
So, five things about my blog;
I didn’t start it myself. This blog was set up for me by I-Universe to help me market the book I published with them in 2013, Catch a Falling Star. Began blogging by following the directions my marketing adviser gave me, and it took me at least a year to discover she was all wrong about her suggestions. I have made a total of $16 from I-Universe on a book I invested in to get published. It is, however, still available from I-Universe, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. My blog is no longer ignored the way it originally was, but my novel still is.
I use my blog to publish the cartoons, artwork, and seriously goofy poetry that I am also guilty of creating. As an old, retired school teacher, I am quietly going to seed with nothing better to do than this silly blog. If you would like to see a gallery of my artwork, go to Google and do a picture search of the words “Beyer Paffooney”. Hopefully the result will not make you insane or blind or both.
Students in my classes often didn’t realize it, but I communicate primarily with humor. I guess if you don’t laugh at your own joke while telling it, they don’t catch on that it is a joke. Still, I consider this blog a humor blog. Yes, even if it doesn’t make you laugh.
Since 2013 I have posted something on this blog 838 times. I posted every single day in 2015. 8,542 visitors have seen my blog, and no one has prosecuted or incarcerated me for it yet. I have 790 followers. I know all this is hard to believe, but I swear that it is true according to the WordPress statistics page.
I continue to blog about my writing and have at least two more novels seriously invested in the pipeline to be published. You can read about them in my blog.
I will nominate 5 bloggers in the comment section below.
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
Today I bought a used car from the people who rented me the chibi clown car after my poor little pony was murdered while parked in front of my house. (Murdered in a sense that the drive-by crasher broke its leg, and you shoot a pony with a broken leg, which my auto insurance cold-heartedly did for me.) So last week the auto insurance sent me a check to cover the purchase of a used-car replacement. The auto insurance put my wife’s name on the check even though it was not on the title of the car or on the bank account I am now using for my retirement money. So, when I tried to draw out the money for the down payment, the lovely bankers told me there was a problem with the check. Even though my wife endorsed it and they put it into my account, I could not withdraw it again because my wife’s name on there turned it into a third-party check. Apparently her signature isn’t proof enough that she agrees I get to spend that money on a car. The banker said they have to have her fingerprint and a copy of her driver’s license. She, of course, is out knocking on doors as a Jehovah’s Witness and they couldn’t do anything anyway since today is Saturday and not technically a business day. So I went to buy the car without the down payment, which it turns out is okay because the car I want to buy is in Independence, Missouri. It will take seven to ten days for it to arrive. Oh, and there is a transportation fee to get the car from there to here, and an insurance deductible, and fees of all sorts like title and license, so that my $10,000 used car is actually going to cost more like $15,000 by the time it is paid off, almost as much as the car that was destroyed which was nearly paid off after five years. So, bankers, car dealers, rental car people, and insurance people are all happy with their respective profits in the ordeal, and I still have to drive the chibi clown car for another week (which I must pay for myself). I really don’t have to write any new jokes to make this post humorous. Existential irony has pretty much taken care of that.
Every Dungeons and Dragons player, especially game masters, know about the oubliette. In the foundations of towers in the castles of the French you often find a windowless room with the only entrance in the ceiling. It is a dark hole where you throw captives you want to simply forget. In fact, the name comes from the word in Middle French, “oublier” which translates to “forget”. Now, of course, as a former school teacher, I know about oubliettes. I have been in one more than once. I have tossed bad kids in there more than once. But the thing I had to learn about “forget holes” is that there is always a way out.
I had a principal who decided I had betrayed him because he overheard me talking sympathetically to a teacher he had been berating for asking that he discipline students she sent to him for disruptive behavior. He overheard me saying that he would be more understanding if he tried to manage a class himself once in a while. For my indiscretion he took away my gifted class and gave me in its place a class composed entirely of students who had been repeatedly sent to him by teachers for being disruptive and unmanageable. It was a class from hell. Really… from hell… Satan’s stepson was the first student he put in that class. I was told I would have to discipline them entirely without help from him. But as tough as it is teaching twenty dysfunctional learners at once with no outside help, it was do-able. In fact, I liked some of the kids in that class. (Hated some too, though, because you can’t always like every kid no matter how crappy they act.) I didn’t manage to teach them much English. They all spoke Skuggboy fluently the whole time. But I did endure. In fact, when that principal was suddenly jobless two-thirds of the way through the year and replaced by a new principal, I got a chance to get some back. She overhead Satan’s stepson doing his comic stand-up routine in response to my specific directions and came in to remind him who was in charge in the classroom and who deserved respect. That reminder lasted for a good fifteen minutes and was a prelude to a parent-principal conference that same afternoon. I saw his evil smile turned upside down for the first time that school year.
Whenever I put a student in the oubliette (asked them to stand outside the classroom door until I could talk to them about their bad behavior) I never left them there more than five minutes. I would quickly give the class the directions they needed to continue on their own, and then I would go out to execute the prisoner. It usually was an explanation of how I wanted them to behave, and then giving them a choice, whether they wanted to go back in and do the right thing, or they wanted to visit the office with a written explanation by me of exactly what they did wrong. Even though nothing would probably happen to them in the office, they rarely chose that option.
So, there is always a way out… but there are many forms of the oubliette, and no one is immune to being sent there.
With numerous health problems, I have difficulty with sleeping every night. One of the worst problems I have is nocturnal acid reflux. It makes me wake up in the middle of night with fire in my throat, like some sort of dyspeptic acid-spitting dragon. I have to vault out of bed, arthritis and all, and go toss the contents of my stomach into the toilet. Sorry to be so gross, but it is important to this theme to get a sense of just how bad it is to be on the wrong side. What do I mean by that? Well, I learned from a doctor recently that which side you lie on to sleep makes a big difference. If you sleep on your right side at night, your stomach is oriented in a way that the top opening angles down towards the esophagus. This leads to an unfortunate ooze of stomach acid that sets off the reflux crisis. If, however, you sleep on your left side, the stomach is angled in a manner that allows gravity to work for you instead of against you. I have been intentionally lying on my left side every night for a month. It works. No acid reflux. Until last night. But when I woke up gagging, I had unconsciously rolled onto my right side. So it has become obvious to me, the left side is the right side.
The latest additions to my collection, January & February
Life has to be in balance. But, unfortunately, it constantly shifts back and forth, up and down, and all around. Keeping life in balance is a juggling act that may involve lying only on your left side while you sleep.
I worry too about the balance affecting the world as a whole right now. We are very deeply mired in a time when political right and left are out of balance and have been for too long. In politics, the right is the conservative belief that things should remain the same. Since the Reagan administration, that has meant deregulating in the name of profits, free market capitalism, and letting Wall Street profit-makers do anything and everything they want to do to make higher profits. The left is in favor of change. When I was a kid, I can remember the left being a very bad thing. They wanted communist-style revolution. They robbed banks and blew things up. But most of those leftists are now dead. They still exist, but the far right is just as dangerous, the KKK, the militias, and they are far more numerous in this day and age. The leftist agenda now is more what used to be the moderate position. Senator Elizabeth Warren and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders want to re-regulate the Wall Street trends that caused the economic meltdown in 2008. They want to promote progressive tax systems that move the money out of corporate profit-funnels and back into the hands of the middle class, and the institutions that benefit them. There is a need to shift to the left. There is need to restore balance. Once again I think it is proper to say, the left side is the right side.
Here is some of that leftist thinking from the socialist Public Television initiative.
Communicating with a wife is complicated. In fact, I couldn’t do the whole writer-think thing about that topic without writing a book. But I can successfully ruminate for about 500 words on the that awkward first encounter, the first time I ever was embarrassed in front of a non-sister girl.
In grade school I met my first crush in kindergarten. Alicia Stewart was a honey-sweet little brown-haired girl with a bow in her hair. I was a boy. I was not allowed to like girls. Hating them was the only thing that made sense to my friends and I. But, secretly, I didn’t hate Alicia. In fact, if I was ever to be doomed to be married when I grew up, I would’ve only accepted that horrible fate if it was with her. And in my small town school I saw her practically every school day. In fact, in Miss Malkin’s music class on Tuesdays and Thursdays I sat right next to her in Miss Malkin’s seating chart for six years.
In Miss Malkin’s music class we always did musical stuff like listening to classical records, singing songs for the yearly musical review concert (we did the songs from the musical The Music Man one year… you don’t get more musicky than that), and we did square dancing. Yeah, you heard that right. Square dancing. You had to have a girl for a partner. And one year, Miss Malkin decided it would be cute to have the boys ask the girls to be their partners. Now, as boys… in top secret boy-conversations, we had generally agreed that if such a problem would ever occur, Alicia Stewart was the only acceptable choice. We all hated girls. But we all were secretly in love with Alicia. She was girl-hating-boy approved. When I was twelve, there was another girl that was making me uncomfortable too. Marla Carter was nine when I was twelve. She had big brown eyes and dimples. Her face was somehow heart-shaped, and only Alicia could make my palms sweat any worse than she did. But in top secret boy-conversations it was ruled that she was a booger-eating little girl and totally toxic. Well, I didn’t totally agree, but I was still subject to all girl-hating directives.
“Okay,” Miss Malkin said, “the boys will now pick their partners… one at a time in alphabetical order.”
My last name began with the letter “B”, but my best friend Mark had a last name starting with “A”.
“I pick Alicia,” Mark said.
My heart sank. I had my pick of any girl besides Alicia. Marla was standing about four feet away from me, her hands folded together behind her back, looking at me with those puppy-dog eyes. My throat was too dry to speak.
“Um, ah… I can’t pick anyone…” I croaked. “You pick it, I will dance with it.”
“Now, don’t be like that, Michael. Get on with it!” Miss Malkin commanded. Everyone loved the music teacher, and so everyone obeyed her. I had to submit.
I looked at Marla, dug my toe into the floorboards, and said, “I choose my cousin Diane.”
Talking to girls has always been a matter of embarrassment. The words are always awkward and shaped not by my brain, but by my bowels. This fact has always been a hindrance to my dealings with the female species, but it has been an unending source of potential for writing humor.
Sometimes life is kinda tough. I am in pain as I write this. Cold rain in Texas. But I am at the end of 15 straight months of posting every single day. So this is a place-holder post. It is an easily done and finished post. It is an I-am-almost-done-already post. And it still counts because I say so. I make the rules. I am the writer of my own story. So, this is me being the bright red little bird that doesn’t fly away when the winter comes.
There is a certain amount of frustration that comes with age and arthritis and limited ability to move. A good share of the time I am stuck within my bedroom/studio. Bad weather and weather changes, as well as the strains of housework, stiffen my back into immobility. So, I am stuck exploring not the outside world, but the inner world of stories, pictures, and my own imagination.
Of course, one has to beware of a life lived in imagination and isolation. Some of it can be kinda wicked and dangerous. Okay, maybe not, but definitely in danger of overwhelming goofiness. As you can see, I take a bit of my artwork and use photo-shop to make even goofier arty things. I experiment and stick stuff together just for the heck of it.
I suppose this is probably evidence a good psychiatrist could use to keep me locked up for a while. But I’m kinda stuck anyway in my little room.
Truthfully… I rarely ever tell the truth. I am a retired school teacher who now spends a majority of the time left to me on writing fiction and drawing colored-pencil pictures. Truth is not an asset for that kind of fantastical foolishness. But that doesn’t mean that the truth is irrelevant. In fact, after the last round of politics as usual (if 2016 even remotely qualifies for that) it is more important than ever to divine the trends and consequences for who we are about to elect.
If you look at the events in Flint, Michigan… the world becomes a scarier place. What are the actual consequences of having Republicans in charge? Because of cost-cutting measures by Governor Rick Snyder’s spend-less-on-the-people so we can give-more-tax-breaks-and-wealth-to-the-wealthy initiatives, the water system of Flint, Michigan has been neglected to the point of poisoning everyone who is poor enough to have to drink city water. Reptile-man Snyder reassures people with a Republican grin that shows his fangs. Then he lies, first about the water being safe to give to your children, then that he will do everything in his power to fix the problem… as long as it doesn’t cost actual money. And the truth is every city in America is under the same threat. Texas is a Republican-controlled paradise for billionaires. You can taste the taint in the Texas frogwater that comes out of the tap. Plus, we have all kinds of fracking going on underground, pumping toxic stuff into the ground to pump shale oil out. North of here in Oklahoma, the fracking has caused powerful earthquakes. We have felt lesser shakes here in the Dallas metroplex. The animals are so mad for meat in their feeding frenzy that even the ground under us is not safe from their appetites.
Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.
After the Iowa Caucus it became very possible that the Republican nomination could end up in the claws of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. This shape-changing lizard man is the popular choice among the rabid evangelicals. He is supposedly the most conservative and the most Christian of the Republican candidates. But if you type into Google the phrase “Is Ted Cruz…” you get a result that says “the Zodiac Killer?” Of course, he was not born at a time that allows him to be the actual mysterious serial killer who was never caught. But people are searching this question for a reason. According to the New York Times, in 1997 a young man named Michael Wayne Haley was convicted of stealing a calculator from Walmart. The crime carried a maximum two year sentence. Texas, the loving State that it is, mistakenly gave him 16 years. When Haley tried to get the courts to fix the mistake, Ted Cruz was Solicitor General for Texas. He took the case all the way to the Supreme Court to try to force Haley to serve the entire sixteen years. The Supreme court ruled that Haley should be released for time served after serving six years of a maximum two year sentence. The man has no compassion, no mercy, no Christian love in his reptile heart. It is entirely possible that he could become President of the United States. I confess, ttuthfully…, I am deeply afraid of that happening. He is the Zodiac Killer.
So, I have run out of truth for today. Telling the truth is hard to do. Especially for a practiced liar like me. But I promise you I will tell more truth in the days that are left to me. Truth is important. And the thing about writing fiction, especially humorous fiction, is the point of telling all those lies is to ultimately get at the truth.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Cowboy Code
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
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Tagged as autobiography, childhood beliefs, cowboy code, Daniel Boone, humor, politics, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, Wyatt Earp