I am not well again after a couple of weeks of rain and cold working on my arthritis. So I am going to merely post a few past Paffoonies to make up today’s post. If you would like to see what Paffoonies are all about, then go to Google picture search “Beyer Paffooney”. It will basically give you a Mickian art gallery, peppered with other pictures that I used in posts that aren’t actually Paffoonies (but the algorithm doesn’t know that).
Filed under artwork, Paffooney, Uncategorized
Canto 15 – Beautiful Fur Bikini
Ham and the blue Princess rode into Bedrock proper on the back of their velociraptor. Ged not only looked exactly like the dinosaur, he moved and sounded just as it would. The illusion was perfect.
Bedrock was teeming with unusual activity. Everywhere young people were engaged in buying and trading all sorts of goods, most of which were animals, and all of those were reptiles. Young ladies of fashion were buying bright-colored snakes to drape around their necks. Little monkey-like lizards called Compies were being sold as pets and as remote holo-television controls. People were buying fake plasticized furs of all colors for purposes of all sorts.
“Hello, citizen,” said an apparent policeman in a blue fur with gold insignias. “Isn’t that Dino6476 you’re riding? Where’s Fred3576?”
“Oh, he’s my cousin,” lied Ham quickly. “He loaned me Dino2466 for the day.”
“Oh?” said the officer suspiciously. “That foul-tempered beast always used to eat anyone who tried to ride him but Freddie!”
“Oh, ha-ha,” Ham laughed nervously, “I have a way with animals.”
“…And how about the girl Smurf and the blue brat? You know it’s against the law to bring them into this part of town. They have their own ghetto to live in!”
“Oh! Is that so? I don’t think I like that small-minded attitude.” Ham bristled. He wasn’t in love with the Princess or anything, but he wasn’t going to stand for that sort of rot.
The policeman drew out a large, silly-looking rock caster and aimed it at Ham.
“What! Is that supposed to scare me?”
Suddenly Ham heard a girl’s voice in his head. <“You are very brave, but don’t force the race issue here. I will help you find the ones you seek. I saw Trav Dalgoda, and there’s one I know who will be a far greater help to you than Goofy!”>
“Who are you?” Ham asked of the air around him.
“My name is Cary Granite,” said the policeman, “And you are under arrest!”
Suddenly a beautiful young girl, maybe sixteen years of age, came out of the crowd and approached Officer Granite.
“Don’t shoot!” she cried. Ham noticed how pretty she was in her leopard-skin bikini. “He really is Freddie’s cousin. I can vouch for him. The Smurf girl is his slave, and he forgot about the law in this part of town.”
The officer smiled and nodded. “Of course, Tara, whatever you say.”
The officer put away his hand-held catapult and wandered off as if he’d forgotten all about it already.
“Thanks, Tara,” said Ham. “Why did you lie for me? And how did you know about Goofy?”
The pretty young brunette with barely any clothes on smiled up at the handsome young man with barely any clothes on riding on the back of a carnivore.
“I’m a telepath, Ham. My name is Tara Salongi, and I’m a Psion like your brother Ged.” She nodded toward the velociraptor with the unusually intelligent gaze.
Ham’s mouth dropped open.
“Come with me. I can introduce you to the Psion Master of Don’t Go Here. He’s been waiting for you four to show up for five years. He can teach Ged how to use his power. He can even help the little boy.” She pointed at the naked blue child riding in between Ham and the Princess.
“I don’t understand. How did you know all about us?”
“Master Tkriashav is Clairvoyant. He can look into the future!”
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
Last night I spent a couple of hours avoiding washing the dishes that piled up in the sink for the weekend by submitting my rough draft novel Recipes for Gingerbread Children to the Inkitt free novel contest. I am pretty sure that was a stupid thing to do. I created the above cover to complete the submission. I had previously decided by researching Inkitt that it was probably a bad idea to go for this kind of publishing scheme. I cannot afford another vanity press price. I can only manage free publishing opportunities. I am probably better off publishing through KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing).
The novel is not entirely a stand-alone. It is the companion story to The Baby Werewolf whose climax I am working on last week and this week. It wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t a pile of irresistible weird stuff left over from the creation of The Baby Werewolf and Superchicken. It is full of fairy tales, “real” fairies created by fairy tales, Nazis, teenage nudist girls, and a sweet old German lady who managed to survive the holocaust.
The contest will only have four winners this month, and I did not submit it until four days before the end of the month. Snowball’s chance in H-E-double-hockey-sticks, right? I cannot afford to pay them to publish it. So if it doesn’t win, I tell them no.
I mistakenly believe I am a good writer and story-teller. But that may be a totally delusional belief. I am not any good at the publishing and promoting game. I am forced to trust to luck, and am probably the unluckiest goober who ever lived.
And while I was tackling the crisis point of my horror novel last week, my Republican friends and family, rabid Trump supporters all, were on my case in social media about why I, as a former teacher, wasn’t completely on their side about making teachers with guns a line of defense against future school shootings. I have to be careful what I say and support, because a single wrong word can blow up my friends on Facebook with an incendiary display of name-calling, Fox News facts (which are pretty far removed from true facts), accusations, recriminations, and crying about my stupidity. And through it all, I am not totally convinced that the stupidity is all on my side of the word war.
So, we shall wait and see. I did a stupid thing. I said some stupid stuff. I have risked a lot on the current direction of the wind. And soon I will know if my stupidity has scuttled me, and I come crashing down in my sailboat to bottom of the sea… or if I am somehow right, and allowed, for now, to sail onward.
I received this Versatile Blogger Award from one of my followers, The Educated Unemployed Indian. If you follow this link back to the blog, you will find a talented young writer with some journalistic skills and a command of literary English that is obviously developing swiftly. I would like to thank Binita for believing my goofy little blog deserves this award.
This award, while it is an honor, is a chain award, meaning that when you receive it, you are obligated to pass it on.
These are the rules;
I am not sure I really like chain awards. I am superstitious enough to fear that there are negative consequences lurking for the winners of this award as well as for the ones who break the chain. I am also smart enough to know that superstition is a form of ignorance, so I have to keep that under control.
If I have tagged you with this award, then here is an award certificate you can copy and use on your blog to identify yourself as receiving this curse (oops!) honor for your blog.
Here are the seven things that Binita didn’t know about me before making the error of giving me this award;
I have not yet determined the 15 bloggers I will tag for this award, and I will edit this post and put links to the cursed ones winners below sometime in the next couple of weeks. As always, you can leave a comment of if you wish to plead to be spared this curse honor, or if you wish to inquire how to offer me a suitable bribe. And, no, a collection of used chewing gum does not work for me as a bribe. My wife threw the last one of those in the garbage and cussed me out in a foreign language for accepting it.
Filed under announcement
The question may arise if anyone who wasn’t forced to read the novel Aeroquest because they have the misfortune of being my relative ever actually reads the book, “Why did you ever write such a gawd-awful thing?”
The truth is, I didn’t write it, not by myself at any rate. The essential plot of the novel is such a jumbled mess because the story is lifted directly from a game of Traveller, an RPG from Game Designer’s Workshop. The basic characters in the novel were all player characters. Their design and personalities are created by adolescent boys in the 80’s and the paths they chose in the story strongly reflect the chaos of youth.
The Aero Brothers, Ged and Ham were both created by one of my favorite students of all time. I will refer to him here as Armando Carrizales, though that was not his real name. I am trying to explain the novel here, not mortify an adult former student living somewhere in Texas, or even elsewhere. Armando’s idea was to use Star Wars characters. Hamfast Aero was actually Han Solo in the game. And when Armando wanted to create an all-powerful psionic character, he created brother Ged Solo, using the first name of Larry Winslow’s character Ged Stryker (And Larry did not know how to spell “Jed”). Because I really liked Armando, and he was bright, creative, and a good problem solver, I eventually chose his characters as the main characters of the novel. He was good at organizing expeditions, collecting gear and matching it to the purpose in the adventure before him. But you do need more than heroes for an adventure game, or for a novel.
Emilio Jalapeno was a very different kind of kid, but also Armando’s real-life best friend. He was a skinny kid with a goofy grin, and was always ready with a joke or prank that would either make you laugh, or make you palm your forehead and consider murder. His first Traveller character lasted all of fifteen minutes because he decided he wanted to take his shiny new pistol and kill everyone on the entire planet they were on. That character, whose name I have forgotten, was actually gunned down by his own adventuring party. So Emilio had to start again.
He created the character Trav Dalgoda. He got the name from the first syllable of the Traveller game and a name he spotted on the cover of a magazine laying on the table. Trav was simply Emilio in an RPG form. He wanted to have an eye patch like a pirate, but he wanted to have two eyes. He wanted to wear wide ties with messages on them, like a cartoon screw next to a baseball. And he dearly loved to blow things up. A time would come in the adventure where he had access to really big weapons, and we had to let him experiment with killing everybody on an entire planet. This, then, was the needed comedy relief that kept us laughing through shared adventures. And Trav’s ability to get into really big trouble would eventually drive the plot forward.
Sinbadh the Lupin, a dog-headed humanoid alien, was also Emilio’s character. The fact that he based his entire character on talking like a pirate from Treasure Island was a source of endless hilarity.
Tron Blastarr, the scar-faced villain, was created by Armando again. There was a time when Larry Winslow wanted to create a villain character in the most desperate way possible. But the evil villain Mantis, who was really just a living head on a robotic body, and the enigmatic psionic Xavier Trkiashav never really got their chance to be truly villainous. One became a laughable boob while the other became a hero and the leader of the Psionics Institute. Tron, however, was a perfect pirate. He led the band of adventurers on merry chase after looping, curling space chase, eventually becoming the first player character to get married and have children. He retired as a villain with a fleet of stolen space ships, and a planet (the airless world Outpost1) as his pirate treasure.
So, to claim I wrote the novel Aeroquest on my own is to completely overlook my collaborators. It is a mess of a comedy sci-fi novel that I am still trying to iron out and rewrite, but it is also a story I shared with some who were very near to my writer’s heart.
And The Rain Comes Down…
Through the wet broken window,
And a dark-colored screen,
I increasingly look down,
On a darkening scene,
On world without rainbows,
Feeling soon I will drown.
“Geez, Mickey,” you will say, “Why-ever would you write such a gloomy pessimist’s poem?”
“Because I prepare myself for the worst. The worst in this case is that the President of the United States says the solution to school shootings is putting guns in the hands of teachers. He wants those of us whose hands were made for using chalk on chalkboards, and hearts were made for talking to kids, learning who they are, and guiding them toward a better future, to pick up a gun and accurately take out a threat coming in with legally purchased weapons of war that can shoot more rounds faster than any weapon that the school system will be able to put in my hands. It is a terrible idea, and he is going to make it happen just because he stupidly can.”
One time at a middle school I taught at, a child did bring a gun to school. It was a handgun concealed in a back pack. He apparently meant to shoot his former girlfriend. But, as kids will, he told friends about it. They told a teacher. The principal called the police and confiscated the back pack. Not only did the target survive without being shot at, the perpetrator, after his brush with the law and time served, was able to right his boat again and sail on into adulthood, a job, a wife, and kids. He even told me later that he was grateful to have been stopped from ruining his life, even possibly ending his life. The problem was solved without a shooting because of teacher skills, being able to talk to kids, being approachable to talk to about problems and unsettling rumors, and knowing where to turn for the proper help at the proper time.
Of course, we were lucky on that one. Stopping that shooter was not 100% guaranteed. And it happened in the 90’s during the assault rifle ban. He was immature enough and excitable enough to have killed many with a more powerful weapon.
If it were up to me to become a weapon-toting defender of the innocent, I am fully aware of how little chance I have to be successful at such a thing. I am a lousy shot. If I had to face down an AR-15 with the cheap school-district pistol, I would become one more obvious target that any shooter will obviously take out in seconds. That’s the best possible outcome for the school, because my missing shot would probably hit some poor innocent bystander.
And, of course, conservative Facebook friends won’t stop insisting that teachers need to be armed. A good guy with a gun can defeat a bad guy with a gun, you know… assuming the SWAT team doesn’t shoot the good guy, mistaking him for the bad guy.
So, even though I don’t like it, I guess I have to be prepared for schools to become battlegrounds. Every day a shootout at the OK Corral. I just hope Wyatt Earp is on my side.
And it really is raining outside today. Cold, February rain… and it depresses me.
Filed under angry rant, autobiography, Depression, gun control, humor, Liberal ideas, photo paffoonies, self pity, teaching
One good thing about being a humorist is, if somebody calls you out for an error you made in your writing, you can always say, “Well, it’s a joke, isn’t it?” Errors are for serious gobbos and anal-retentive editors. I live with happy accidents. It is a way of life dictated in the Bob Ross Bible.
Yeah, I know it’s supposed to be “oops” not “OPPS”, but after all, this isn’t even a list I made up myself. I stole the whole thing from another writer on Twitter.
You have no idea what a cornucopia of ravings from knit-wit twit-tweets Twitter really is.
Oh, you waste time time on Twitter too?
Then you know already.
Twitter makes you want to shout at your computer, and has so many Trump-tweets and conservative blather-bombs on it, that it can seriously impair your editing skills.
So I look elsewhere and elsewhen to sharpen my critical English-teacher eye.
Yes, the illustrator of that meme doesn’t get the blame for the content. I wrote that violation of the sacredness of classic literature myself. I think we should thank God for the fact that neither Charles Darwin nor Dr. Seuss decided to act on evil impulses. The world is a better place for their decision on how to use their genius, and how to edit themselves.
So, this is me writing today’s post about editing as a writer, and failing miserably to edit my own self. I got the pictures from Twitter and edited them myself. Or failed to edit them properly, as the case is more likely to prove. But however I may have twisted stuff and changed stuff and made up new words, editing is essential. It makes the whole world better. Now let’s consider editing the White House for a bit, shall we?
Canto 14 – Sorcerer 3
Trav thought this Dana Cole girl was hot stuff. She seemed to like him. She talked nice to him. She made him feel at home in Slaghoople Manor. She looked really sexy in a fake fur bikini.
“So,” she said, “your name is Trav Dalgoda and you seek the fabled Hammer of God. Why do you seek it here?”
Trav slouched back comfortably on the synthetic rock sofa. “My friend Frieda told me it was here.”
“Who is this Frieda?”
“Oh, she was my invisible friend in third grade at school on the planet Questor. No one else could see her, but she was always nice to me.”
Dana took his hand and slipped an electronic ring on his finger.
“What’s this, then?”
“That is a little something to help me get to know you,” she said. “Now, you say this friend was invisible? Did others think you were crazy?”
“Well, yes. Actually, I sometimes thought I was crazy myself. It’s hard to believe anyone as handsome as me could be as truly wonderful as I tend to be.”
“He speaks truthfully,” said a tiny voice from the ring on Trav’s finger. “At least he believes it is so.”
“How interesting,” said Dana. “I know a man named Count Appleby that you must meet some day.”
“Is he wonderful too?”
“Oh, yes. He believes he’s the reincarnation of Napoleon.”
“Who would that be?”
“Didn’t you study ancient history back on the planet Questor?”
“Oh! Well, I… You know, sometimes there isn’t enough time for study when you’re growing up to become one of the most important men in the Milky Way!”
“He is now untruthful,” said the ring.
“Well, isn’t that something!” marveled Trav, ogling the talking ring.
“Here comes the boss,” said Dana in a purr of dark intent.
“Oh, good!” said Trav.
Rocko Slaghoople was a balding, but massively-muscled cave man who looked quite dangerous. His brutish face had but one thick eyebrow across his beady-eyed visage. His powerful arms looked like they were dragging on the floor. His arms seemed even longer than his legs.
Traveling next to Rocko on metal legs came a white-robed Synthezoid, or artificial man. His soulless white eyes had no pupils and his head came to a point like some kind of conehead.
“Hello, boss,” said Dana Cole.
“Hello, my beauty,” answered the Synthezoid.
“Hello, Mr. Rocko,” said Trav. “I understand that you might know something about the Hammer of God.”
“Whu…?” grunted Slaghoople.
“The Hammer of God! The Ancient artifact! Everyone says you’re the man to see about such things.” Trav’s voice cracked with sudden desperation.
Rocko looked stupidly at the Synthezoid.
“Yes,” said the artificial man, “and my intel claims that you know something about the Crown of Stars. Weren’t you with the infamous Tron Blastarr when he stole it?”
“Well, I…”
“I am even told that you came away with the item.”
“Who… who are you?”
“I am called Sorcerer 3, and I am your new partner in this little quest.”
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
Yes, this post is a self-examination. Not the kind you see Donald Trump enacting every weekend, where he says any crappy thing that occurs to his craptastical very good brain to cover what he doesn’t want us to believe about the truth on Twitter, basically for the purpose of continuing to say he is great and we are poop. I do not like myself the way Trump likes himself. I am an old bag of gas that is in pain most of the time, in poor health, and the subject of endless persecution from Bank of America and other money-grubbing machines that are convinced any money I might accidentally have really belongs to them. But this is not a complain-about-crap fest either.
This is a self-examination that attempts to honestly examine where I am in my quest for wisdom and my affliction with being a writer.
If I am being honest about the type of writer I really am, I guess I am most like the Weird Recluse in the bottom corner. I can’t claim to be as good as Kafka or Dickinson, but I am definitely better than some of the crap that gets published and marketed as young adult literature. The business of publishing is more interested in how many books they can sell, rather than literary merit or good writing. Some of the crap that is out there and being made into bad movies (which I have not seen because I don’t go to movies that don’t pass the fiction-source smell test) is actually a form of brain poison that will mold young people into sexual predators and professional poop makers. And people will take poison happily if it has been deviously marketed well. So far, in the money test, I have made only $16.43 dollars as an author (plus whatever I have made from I-Universe that doesn’t cut a check until it reaches at least $25 dollars). Nobody is buying my books because nobody has read them. I have sold a few copies to friends and relatives. Some of those books are just sitting on a shelf somewhere unread. I have a couple of 5-star reviews on Amazon, and that is it. I will die in the near future not having known any measurable success from my books at all.
I have entered novels in writing contests and done well enough to make it into the final round of judging twice. I have not, however, made a big enough splash that anyone really noticed. I have paid reviewers to review my books online. One of those charged me money, and then reviewed a book with the same title by a different author, a book which was nothing like my book, and then, when forced to correct their error, only read the blurb on the back of the book to write the oopsie-I-goofed-last-time review. They were not worth the money I paid them, money that Bank of America could’ve sued me for instead.
The only thing I have done successfully as a writer is, I think, this goofy blog. By writing every day, I have managed to give myself considerable practice at connecting with readers. I have practiced writing humor and written some laughable stuff. I have plumbed my soul for new writing ideas, and found a creative artesian well bubbling up with new ideas daily. I can regularly manufacture inspiration. I am never truly without an idea to write about. Even when I write a post about not having an idea to write about, I am lying. Of course, I am a fiction writer, so telling lies is what I do best. I am also a humorist, so that means I can also tell the truth when I have to, because the best humor is the kind where you surprise the reader with a thing that is weirdly true. Like just now.
So, somewhere ages and ages hence, I hope there will be a trove of old books in a cellar somewhere that will include one of mine. And some future kid will pick it up, read it, and laugh. The golden quality of that laughter is the only treasure I have really been searching for. It is the reason I write. It is the reason I continue to be Mickey.
Since I wrote this blog post originally, I have added a few books published on Amazon. You can find information about this random noveliciousness here at this page in my blog. Click on this linkie thingie here.
Catch a Falling Star 
Cranky Old Coots Complain and Don’t Care
Yes, I am a coot. I became a coot in 2014 when I retired. I have the hair in the ears to prove it. I sometimes forget to wear pants. The dog is learning to hide from me on days when my arthritis makes me cranky.
So I am a practicer of the ancient art of being a cranky old coot. I have opinions. I share them with others foolishly. And I am summarily told to, “Shut up, you danged old coot!” And, of course, I don’t shut up because that would be a violation of number five in the by-laws of cootism. Obnoxiousness is our only reason for still being alive.
Lately, my group of coots on Facebook (who call themselves a “pack” like wolves, but, in truth, a group of coots is called an “idiocy”) are talking about politics… very loudly salted with firmly held opinions, beliefs, and bad words in several languages. I mean, it’s texting each other on memes we disagree about, but we do it LOUDLY, like that, in all caps. We also do it in such an infuriating manner because, if no one ever bothers to tell us to “Shut the hell up!” we will begin to suspect we have actually died and gone to purgatory where we are still being obnoxious, but nobody knows we are doing it. That is rubbing coot fur in the wrong direction.
The radical right (otherwise known as coot paradise) have been cooting up a storm about school shootings and gun control of late. They have more or less turned their ire on me because, knowing I was a school teacher, they have seized on the Coot in Chief’s notion of arming teachers to protect schools. Obviously a majority of old coots agree that requiring a few “volunteer” teachers to conceal carry and learn how to handle a school shooter crisis situation with a gun instead of the way teachers are actually trained and practiced on handling such a situation, is the only economical way to defend schools from crazed lunatics with assault weapons. Of course, it is definitely more economical than hiring full time police officers to handle security because “volunteer” teachers does not mean that they are necessarily willing to do it, but rather that they are doing it without pay. And of course they shout at me things like, “Why don’t you just admit that you are too scared and unpatriotic to carry a gun as a teacher, and cowardly allow some female teacher with a big pistol to step in and do the job for you?” That is a very coot thing to say, and is hard to adequately counter, because if you try to argue using logic other than coot-logic, like the notion that since a majority of teachers in this country are female, you are asking women who are fierce enough to do the job (and I have known more than a few who would take it on no matter how hopeless their prospects) to take a handgun that the principal bought at Walmart with money from the Coke machine in the hall and face down a suicidal maniac with an assault rifle, you will not even be heard over the cacophony of coot braying and chest-thumping, let alone be understood.
And, for some reason, coots love Trump. Maybe because they feel he is truly one of them. He is older than dirt. He has an epicly bad comb-over to hide his bald spot. He says bad words very loudly in front of women, children, and everybody. He says, “Believe me,” a lot, especially when telling lies. And he’s not afraid to fart in public and blame it on the dog. I admit to insulting Trump in front of them only because I like to see coot faces fold up in extra wrinkles, and coot heads turn various shades of angry red and apoplectic purple.
So, yes. I am a coot. Not proud to be one… that I can remember, but a coot never-the-less.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, goofy thoughts, grumpiness, gun control, humor, Liberal ideas, oldies, Paffooney, teaching
Tagged as coots, gun control and coots, obnoxious coots, old coots