The waterfalls near Joplin, Missouri, an odd travel stop.
A portrait of a young nudist friend, in pen and ink, and later color.
Monthly Archives: July 2022
Art Both Artistical and Photographical… but Recent!
Filed under artwork, humor, nudes, Paffooney, photo paffoonies
Saturday is Art Day!
If I am not going to publish a Hidden Kingdom page every Saturday, I am going to commit to a feature where I post artwork on Saturday. Saturday art fairs are a thing. And I have gotten far more interest in my artwork from WordPress than I ever have from a local art show. So what if I can’t win blue ribbons online?
There is a certain magical quality about the way that over time you can build a portfolio of many parts, and pictures have many uses.
Is it possible that artworks taken all together are like an autobiography??
In some sense, every portrait the artist draws is a self portrait. Every scene, object, and image is a part of the artist’s ultimate story.
So, do you like my gallery? You can always leave a comment or an insult. You are the viewer, and what you do with this is entirely up to you.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, Paffooney
Generations Gone Before
Of the people in the school picture from Rowan Rural School #4 (a one-room schoolhouse from Midwestern history and lore) all the ones who survive are octogenarians. Three of the survivors were at our family reunion for Great Grandma Hinckley’s descendants. My mother and uncle were there. Their cousin was also there. The school house stood on the Aldrich corner, near the house where my Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich lived, the farm house of a farm that’s been in the family for over a hundred years. My mother and Uncle Don and Uncle Larry could easily walk there. The rest came from country miles around by horse-drawn wagon.
Uncle Larry is now gone, but they have survived from the time of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the time of Criminal President Doofenschmertz Jehosephat Trumpennoodle. Things have changed. The house I now sit in was, back then, a place with a windmill and hand-pump for water, an outhouse for bathroom chores, and a radio for entertainment.
If they hadn’t endured through World War Two, and Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare, and the assassination of JFK, we wouldn’t even be here. We are the children of hardship, endurance, and conviction of the rightness of life on Earth.
We saw progress through the creation of Disneyland, landing the first man on the surface of the moon, Bugs Bunny cartoons, Scooby Doo, and the Pink Panther… Nixon and his Watergate break-in, Hee Haw and Lawrence Welk, Laugh-in… President Ford falling down stairs, Saturday Night Live, the Peanut-farmer President, Reaganomics… the Iranian hostage crisis… Saved by the Bell, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones… The invasion of Panama… Operation Desert Storm… the second war in Iraq… the downfall of Saddam Hussein… Thundercats, Jerry Seinfeld, Friends, the Wonder Years…
I am especially impressed that they lived through all those Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethons. And Leisure Suits… Aagh!
And their time is not completely up. Mother and Dad and Uncle Don still move on and go to reunions and bury loved ones… and tend to the needs of grandkids and great-grandkids… And pass on the good things to the next generation… and the next. So it goes, towards times not yet dreamed of.
How to Talk to Real People
While visiting in Iowa, I ran into an old high school friend at a local eatery. I remember how in high school and junior high, I played basketball on the same team with him, I listened to his exaggerations about a probably non-existent sex life, and helped him on one or two occasions to get answers on Math homework (even then the teacher in me wouldn’t let me just give him the answers, I always made him work out the answers step by step).
Now he is a judgmental and basically crabby old coot. He is a Trump supporter, hater of immigrants who take American jobs, and an unpleasant arguer of politics. And the sorest point about his intractable coot-i-ness is the fact that, as a classmate, he is the same age as me and I am, therefore, just as intractably coot-y as he is.
So, how exactly do you talk to a mean old coot?
Well, you have to begin by realizing that it is not like the dialogue in a novel or TV show. This is a real person I was talking to. So, I had to proceed by accepting that he thinks I am an idiot and anything I say and think is wrong. Not merely wrong, but “That’s un-American and will lead to a communist takeover of our beloved country!” sort of wrong. I can then laugh off numerous Neo-Nazi assertions by him, make snarky comments about his praises for the criminal president, and generally get along with him like old friends almost always do. I play my part just as furiously as he plays his, and we both enjoy the heck out of it.
We are both of us crazy old coots, likely to say just about anything to get the other one’s goat. Getting goats is apparently vital to the conversations of real people. But we have more in common than we have as differences. We don’t keep score in our world-shaking debates, nor do we count how many goats we get. And that is how you talk to real people.
Fickle and Flighty
Ah, here’s the rub…
If you cannot make up your mind…
You are often called foolish, but even more often fickle…
And nothing is as fickle as a racist dill pickle…
Because you will certainly find…
That pickles hate any color but green…
And are often quite racist and really quite mean…
And if you quite fear them…
For their green-leaning hatreds…
And dill-pickle plots to raise prejudiced retreads…
You will be called flighty…
With shoes that are mighty…
And with flighty bright faces that colored, are beet reds.
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Isn’t it amazing how terrible a poet Mickey truly is?
Filed under foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, poetry
Impossibly Positive
Impossibly Positive
(a poem about positive people)
Oakie Doak was a positive man,
Who smiled as much as any man can,
And said nice things to girls and boys,
And sour-faced men he often annoys.
The whole Doak family always feel fine,
At tables all made with both oak and pine.
But scammers from Nigeria
Took every dime anywhere near ya,
And the IRS did charge him double
In fines they argued were for the trouble
He caused accountants in adding for
The many dollars he had no more,
Doak told his wife, “No problem, Honey,
We still have love, and it’s only money.”
And when the people he loved had died,
He simply said, “I’ve always tried
To make the best of the time we had,
And the memories will always make me glad.”
Oakie Doak is disgustingly happy
And decidedly stupid and also sappy.
But he lives his life on a positive whim,
And, of course, I really wish I was him.
I Can See!
The big thing that the result means is NO SURGERY NEEDED. What a relief that is to know!
I am not saying you cannot know beauty if you cannot see. But to someone like me who has spent a lifetime as a graphic artist (a skill that you can debate if you like, having seen what my pencil-pushing fingers can do when the eyes lead them) blindness is a fear that causes numerous nightmares.
And I am not saying that blind people cannot be effective teachers, because I have known some truly inspiring teachers that were thusly challenged. But I am saying the ability to look into the eyes of someone who depends on you to teach them is a sight I would never willingly sacrifice, even to save my life. Life is given meaning by those priceless images and those lovely loving eyes.
So, I am grateful to still have my eyes and the prospect of keeping my sense of sight to the end of my days. It is important to look into the mirror, looking myself right in the eyes, and seeing both who I was and who I am likely to become.
Filed under Avengers, insight, inspiration, Paffooney
Still on Hiatus… NOT Writer’s Block!
I apologize for not having a chapter of something ready to publish for the weekly novel-writing post. I am caught between projects by extra demands on my time. My number-two son is officially graduating from his basic training in the Air Force over the next three days.
The novella above is nearly finished and will be published in a week or two. So, I do not plan on sharing any more of it here on the blog.
This novella has grown long and deep and is not halfway done. Having already appeared on this blog spot, it will be too confusing to go back to it for just a short period of time. So, this is not an option either.
This novel is the one I have chosen to appear in this spot, hopefully next week. The problem is, although I have half of it written already, it is the latter half of the book. All the new parts will occupy the first half of the book, and none of those are in manuscript form at this point.
There are other possibilities as well. The sequel to Cissy Moonskipper’s Travels, Nebulons, is a possible book for this spot, though I have no cover for it yet. Kingdoms Under the Earth is in the same condition. But, hopefully, something by next week. I hate missing deadlines… though all writers eventually do.
Filed under humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
The Irony of Regular Blogging
This is an old artwork I have never shared before, except when I originally shared this post in 2016 and again in 2018. I can’t say it is my best work. But there it is.
There are many things that I have noticed about being a blogger that are the opposite of what you might expect. Let me list a few…
- Listing stuff makes a daily post easier.
- I have posted something on WordPress as a blogger every day for five hundred and eight straight days. I will try to hit two years in a row without missing a day for the second time.
- Writing every day makes the ideas flow more easily rather than running out of ideas. The well refills faster than I can drink its waters constantly.
- My most popular post is Be Naked More , which gets views practically every day, but including artistic nudes randomly in a post does not increase its views and popularity even when I put “naked” and “nude” in the tags.
- Reproducing artwork on a blog is difficult when you draw things too big for your little scanner/printer. No matter how good the camera and how bright the lighting, white becomes gray, and the sparkle and luster of good colored pencil color is lost.
- Good writing becomes more about writing less. But it also has to be more carefully crafted. The more I brew prose in my black cauldron of a blog, the more it seems to boil down to poetry.
- Readers don’t seem to object to metaphors and purple paisley prose as much as editors and book reviewers do.
- I like writing purple paisley prose (overly-complicated grammatical structures with alliteration, metaphor, and asides that interrupt the flow like this one… taken to the extreme for humorous effect).
- Art pieces can be manipulated and re-used or re-combined to make something new out of something old. Computers make art editing infinitely easier.
- Most people don’t actually read your blog all the way through. Some just like it for the pictures. If you actually read this far, you can let me know with a smiley face in the comments.
- There are many, many good writers on WordPress… as I am sure there are on other blog sites as well. I despair of being able to find and read them all. If you are reading this bullet point, you are probably one of the ones I have found and read and liked. Blogging becomes a mirror that shows you your own self more naked than naked… not just what is under your clothes, but what you look like to yourself in your own head. And the more you walk around WordPress naked like that, the more you want to show it all off. (How’s that for an idea that will pull in the readers from the lonely parts of Siberia?) 🙂
Filed under blog posting, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, insight, irony, Paffooney
Catch a Falling Star 
Thinkology – an Introduction
We each only know one thing for sure. I am here. I am aware. I know that I, at least, exist, even though everything around me could be a complete lie… even a lie I tell myself.
You will have to forgive me if I give you a second introduction. Or, rather, an intro-Duck-shun. You see, the opposite of Thinkology is Daffology.
I don’t THINK, therefore I am Daffy.,
So, even though practicers of Thinkology like me often overthink everything, the important thing is that we do think. If you don’t think, if you are a Daffologist, then you will probably vote Republican on issues that make your rich Congressman richer but will leave you poorer. And Daffologists believe in UFOs just because the guy with the hair, Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, says they were the ones who resurrected Christ.
A Thinkologist like me will believe in UFOs, and I do, based on numerous statements by whistle-blowers, photographic evidence, credible reports by credible witnesses, and personal encounters. but will never be able to say with any confidence that UFOs are real. (Although they are, but I can’t prove it, so I can’t say it without the caveat that maybe the entire American government is engaged in a misinformation campaign to make me believe something is true that really isn’t so they can somehow do their secret evil deeds to my detriment without me actually knowing it.)
When a Daffologist learns that he has been duped, he jumps up and down, swings his fists, says the worst swear words and profanities he knows, and dissolves in incoherent rage. Likely also stomping with his webbed Duck feet.
When a Thikologist learns that he has been tricked, he may utter his favorite swear words and profanities (because it helps the thinking engines to blow the soot out of them), and then rethinks what happened in the hopes that next time he will be less gullible and will have learned something important about protecting himself from falsehoods.
So, I am saying, to be a good Thinkologist… doubt everything.
If you are determined to be a Daffologist instead, then, by all means, accept everything Tucker Carlson says without reservation. Better the Republican People-Eaters feast on your children rather than mine… WAIT A MINUTE! I can’t think that either. Nobody’s children should be preyed upon for reasons of greed, Capitalist manias, or tasty meat! I need to work on identifying what is actually evil, and find a way to curtail it.
Now you know what I think Thinkology is all about… I think… subject to further experiment and evidence… and so, once again I am giving you fair warning about what I am probably going to post about in upcoming essays.
“Ah, if I only had a brain,” said the Scarecrow. “Then I could do some Thinkology about witches.”
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, humor, philosophy