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
Today’s post is basically a picture post. Every metal (or Plasticine) figure displayed in this post was painted by me with Testor’s enamel. Most of the figures were painted back in the 1980’s. Most of them were sculpted by Citadel Miniatures Co. The Indian boy I repainted as a young storm giant was made of an inferior quality Plasticine that melted a bit with the paint’s more caustic ingredients. That’s why looking at him closely makes him appear like a burn victim.
Not all of the figures are from Dungeons and Dragons games. These are figures I used in the Traveller RPG. I also owned the Indiana Jones role-playing game, but the figure was used as a Traveller hero.
These figures were used to play Call of Cthulu as well as Traveller. Cerebus the Aardvark made appearances in both the Dungeons and Dragons game and Traveller, which was fairly true to the character as he appeared in Dave Sim’s underground comic.
I am proud that my arthritic hands once allowed me to paint the tiny details on these miniature sculptures. But the red dragon I wanted to display in this post, that I have pictured before in this blog, is missing for the moment. I spent most of the morning trying to find him. Oh, well… I still got to show off my mini-painting skills.
Filed under artwork, Dungeons and Dragons, heroes, humor, photo paffoonies
The 1957 Pink and White Mercury of Imagination
I don’t have writer’s block. I can write as long as I can think and move my fingers on the keyboard to crystallize that thinking into words. The Pink and White Mercury of Imagination is always moving, either driving forward in the present and towards the future, or in reverse, rewriting the past. It is never parked.
But somewhere along the way today, the route got sidetracked onto a looping detour.
Hence, this car-themed drive through the idea-capturing process.
A picture of me reading painted long ago and not with me in the picture..
I started reading a new novel. It is a 500-plus-pager by Kate Morton called Distant Hours. It is a Gothic novel, but in a very different way from the one I am writing in The Baby Werewolf. That book starts as a first person narrative, and then flashes back to the past as a series of third person narratives focused on single characters per section. My novel is a first person narrative throughout, though told by three different narrators. It would make an interesting writing analysis post, but I haven’t read enough of that novel nor completed mine to a point where I can compare and contrast them. And those of you who get bored easily have already tuned out and just looked at the pictures by this point.
I also thought about writing a post about Uber-driving conversations and how that impacts the quality of my driver-service. But the best stuff there can’t be revealed without breaking confidences. Doctors, lawyers, bartenders, and Uber drivers are tasked with providing a touch of confidentiality.
I wanted to complain more about Trump and evil Republicans. But that gets far too tiring. And if the collection of my posts on WordPress is like a flower garden, the political rants I do are definitely the garden-choking weeds.
A much better thing for my garden is to chase the flitting butterflies of near-perfect ideas with a butterfly net made of idea lists like this particular post.
So, it is true that I never actually have writer’s block. I do get writer’s detours, writer’s delays, and writer’s just-not-satisfieds- with-those-ideas sorts of things. But not today. I made the problems the topic and the topic wrote itself.
Filed under artists I admire, artwork, imagination, irony, Uncategorized, writing, writing humor
-a poem written by Mickey and pasted on a picture.
You reach a point after a hard month has lingered long where you have to eat the leftovers and accept what is. I face challenges in the new year at least as large as the challenges of 2017. When faced with such a situation, I need pie.
So here are some of the things left in my January file for use in this blog. The only reason they are here is because I haven’t used them yet and the ideas have not been knitted together for any rational purpose.
This will be a crazy quilt blog post. But crazy quilts keep you just as warm in winter as any other kind.
My newest Facebook friend is the daughter of my wife’s cousin. I have only known her as the sweet-faced little smiler at Filipino-American family gatherings who sometimes gets my attention by squirting me in the ear with a water gun. Her father is from Greece and teaches Math in San Antonio. Her mother, like my wife, is from the Philippines. I won’t tell you her real name, but we used to call her “Sweetie” because of her resemblance to the little pink Tweety-bird character from Tiny Toons Adventures.
I have also spent considerable time writing to and for nudists I have connected with through their various websites and on Twitter. These two lovely works of nude art were shared with me on Twitter. I have collected a number of nude pictures from Twitter nudists that I can’t use on WordPress because I am still entirely too modest to be the unrestrained naked person that some nudists are. I can’t really claim to be a complete nudist myself. But I do have stories to tell about naked people, and I have been working on them diligently.
Of course, I still miss being a teacher. I was a teacher of English for 31 years. I taught reading and writing in English to over 2,000 kids. I also learned how to stare in Klingon. It is a useful skill for keeping students in line and keeping them from becoming a disappointment to the empire. I miss teaching kids, especially talkative kids. Far fewer people talk to me during a day of retirement than used to talk to me in a single class at school. Those interactions were precious.
And several things are just too confusing for my old brain to explain.
But I do like this picture I found on Facebook of Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor, playing with multiple kittens. I don’t know why, but it makes me happier.
Filed under artwork, blog posting, Dr. Who, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, nudes
Being a sort of amateur artist with extremely artistical tendencies, I naturally love to paint. My daughter also likes to paint. So one way to combine our love for sloshing colors on stuff with paint brushes with our love for playing nerdy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons is to buy and paint our own miniatures to play with in the game. I used to do this a lot when I was a single goofer with time and money on my hands, so I have boxes and boxes of painted little people and little critters made out of lead or pewter or plastic.
When doing these dastardly deeds of nerdling paintery to little metal people, we have to choose how we are going to go about it. Different paints work in different ways. I like to use brightly colored enamels like the Testors stuff I have used since the 1960’s. The Princess prefers acrylic because it is less permanently messy. Once you laminate your fingertips with enamel, you have to wear blue and green and brown on your hands in school for most of a week as it wears off. Acrylic is less socially mortifying, in that it is removed more easily as a water-based paint. Even after it dries on your hands, it still comes off with a little scrubbing and you don’t have to use turpentine.
Finding new figures to paint is not as easy as it once was. You used to be able to locate such things easily in the nearest comic book shop or game shop. Hobby Lobby and Michael’s used to have sections where you could find the figures as well as the paints. Now that those things are becoming extinct and increasingly rare, you have to take advantage of serendipity. We discovered a magically preserved and timeless game shop in a dying mall next to the movie theater where we recently went to watch Jumanji. I bought the elves above in that shop from the young elf running the place all by himself. An elf bard with a fiddle and bow, and another elf with a crossbow. I also found two exquisite sculpts of children which I haven’t even removed from the card yet. All that is left to do now is argue over who is going to paint what. And that can be a difficult thing. I am older and cannier than her, but she outweighs me by ten pounds. The decision has not been made yet.
I am finishing this essay on painting nerdling painter-deeds with a look at two finished works from my glorious nerd-painting past. Ganser the Wizard of Gansdorf is actually painted in acrylic, while Anya the Amazon is painted in enamel. I did them both in the 1980’s. We shall soon see if I can still do as good as I used to do. And if the Princess can match me or surpass me. It is not actually a contest, but I still hope I win.
Filed under action figures, artwork, Dungeons and Dragons, heroes, homely art, humor, old art
I am in the middle of a family health meltdown. In this time when the yearly flu epidemic is turning deadly, my two kids living at home and still in high school are both home sick. And I am finding it difficult to pay for illnesses. My recent trip to the hospital for a faux heart attack has left me staring down an incoming tidal wave of doctor and hospital bills. I have been paying more for health insurance than ever before. The lovely caring government has been mucking about with health care issues to the point that, even though I am paying thousands of dollars more per year for health insurance than I did ten years ago, I have huge medical bills that, due to higher deductables, leave more for me to pay as my portion than ever before. I am paying twice as much for a three day stay in the hospital than I did five years ago when I had pneumonia, and was hospitalized for five days. The Princess’s doctor visit yesterday cost me $77 dollars. Number two son goes to the doctor this afternoon, and I have to hope it won’t cost more than that, because I am running out of Uber money for the month.
Gone are the days when I could afford to be sick. Now, bankrupt and with no credit left to my name, I am going further into the dark lake of debt, hoping for the mercy of lawyers and credit collection agencies. They may as well grind my bones to make their bread. I have little else to give them.
If this sounds like a complaint rather than the humor I usually shoot for, well, that’s because that’s what it is. I am sick and tired of always being sick and tired. But I have to do my part to help the American economy. It is really booming right now. Probably because people like me are investing so much in health care, right before we die because we can’t afford to pay for the medicine the doctor prescribes.
My thanks go out to the ghost of Norman Rockwell for providing the illustrations for this post. The pictures make me long for the good old days when doctors actually cared, and weren’t just making lots of money. Of course, it isn’t the doctors who are making most of the money off piratical health-insurance schemes. Whoever those people are, we never actually see their faces, and the voices we argue with over the insurance help lines are just their employees. Anyway, I am not myself sick yet. That probably comes later. So I will hunker down and burrow my way through a potentially terrible week.
Filed under angry rant, art my Grandpa loved, artists I admire, artwork, feeling sorry for myself, health, humor, illness, pessimism
To be clear, I will have to write a post called Naked Experience to go with this post. It is a William Blake style of thing. You know, that English Romantic Poet guy who was into drawing naked people even more than me? The writer of Songs of Innocence and Experience? You know, this stuff;
Well, maybe you don’t know. But Blake gave the world the metaphor of the innocent lamb and the tyger of experience (tyger is his spelling, not mine, and it didn’t blow up the spell checker, even though it made the thing unhappy with me again). There is a certain something I have learned about nakedness that I mean to innocently convey. I learned it from anatomy drawing class and spending time with nudists. Naked is not evil. Naked is not pornography. Nakedness, itself, is a very good thing.
At this point the avid clothing-wearers among you are probably saying to yourself, “This guy is nuts! If God had wanted us to be nude, then we wouldn’t have been born with clothes on.” And I must admit, I cannot argue with logic like that.
But on a more serious note, I believe nudity is a fundamentally essential part of the nature of art. After all, pictures of naked people are a central part of what people have been drawing since they first started etching them with charcoal on cavern walls. And all art, including this blog, is about the human experience. What it means to be human. What it feels like to be alive on this Earth and able to feel.
And there is nothing sinister and immoral in drawing nudes to portray that fact. I am trying to show metaphorically the music of existence, the pace, the symmetry, the musical score… It isn’t focused on the private bits, what some call the naughty parts, even when those things are present in the picture. “How dare that naughty Mickey show the naked back end of that butterfly! It ought to have pants on at least!” Yes, I am making a mockery of that outrage itself. I am not a pornographer. These pictures were not created to engender any prurient interests. These pictures are part of Blake’s lamb. They will not bite you. Though blue-nosed people who wish to control what others think may very well bite me for daring to say so.
I have posted a lot of writing and artwork on this blog that I held for the longest time to be completely private and personal. I hardly ever showed any of it to anybody before I posted it here. But I am old. I no longer have secrets. I am capable of telling you everything even though I have never met most of you in real life. And I have no shame. I have become comfortable with emotional and intellectual nudity. And when I am dead, the body I have kept hidden from the world for so long will be no more. It’s just a thought. It’s a naked thought. And it is completely innocent.
The sad truth is that as this world progresses in the days since the Trump election, it becomes harder and harder to stay positive and happy. It becomes easier and easier to figuratively stub your toe on the bad news each new day brings and fall into the deep dark pit of black depression.
Just after signing the paperwork for the bankruptcy, I get a couple of explanation pages from my health insurance, assuring me that I will have to pay somewhere around $4500 for my emergency room visit and 3-day hospital stay. After I earned my first $100 dollars as an Uber driver, I ran over a glass bottle and punctured a tire in its sidewall, costing me over $100 to replace it. And my bank account, in spite of scraping and saving and spending money like Scrooge McDuck, a thoroughly squeezed nickel at a time, does not contain near enough money to pay this year’s property tax. In spite of the blood, sweat, and money put into this last summer’s pool crisis, we may still lose the house. I may soon fall off of that cloud that I stand on.
The Trumpinator hasn’t been helping. He got the tax plan passed that benefits him to the tune of $12 million dollars every year, and may give me $50, or nothing, or I may even have to pay more. His tax plan removes the mandate from Obamacare that was its tentpole, probably causing its imminent collapse. $4500 may only be the first wound in that battle. And none of the terrible things he says and does get him even a hint of condemnation from the Republican Toad Army that backs him. We are headed for even greater levels of income inequality, possible revolution and civil war, and general chaos, assuming North Korea doesn’t begin nuking us first.
But the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune do not find their target completely undefended. I have ways of dealing with double-danged downers that are all but unknown to those who are basically unartistical. (Yes, I know that is not a word in English, but I am creative.)
Do you remember that little perfume-bottle figurine that I bought at Goodwill and vowed in this goofy blog to repaint to express my artistical madness and creativiticockle? (Yes, I know that isn’t a word in English either.) I broke out the enamels and the acrylics and the brushes and the other stuff, and invited my daughter the Princess to paint with me. She got out her ceramic dragon, a middle school art project that she never yet finished painting, and we both set to work.
We talked and joked and laughed at the table in the family room. We talked about art styles and painting techniques. We talked about art classes at school. We talked about many important father/daughter artists sorts of things, and the regret we both have for never seriously trying to learn to play music.
And the result was the healing of many old heart-wounds and the painting of many spots of very nice paints. You can definitely fight back against a world of darkness by creating rebellious little acts of artistry.
Homely People
I prefer to write about, think about, and draw pictures of homely people. But don’t mistake me. I am not talking about ugly people. Our President, the giant blood sausage with a bird’s nest on top that we have put in charge of making us all feel sick to our stomachs every day, demonstrates what ugly means. Ugly is not just weird and interesting to look at, it is also repellent behavior that makes physical flaws take a back seat… no, a rumble seat in the trailer behind by comparison.
I am talking about the ordinary people back home. The ones that may be sitting by your own fireplace on a cold day trying to warm their hands after throwing snowballs outside. And, of course, that snowball that hit Maggie Doozman in the side of the face and knocked her glasses off, made you laugh for an instant, until you realized she was crying, and Kirk Longhatter didn’t even apologize for throwing so hard, so you went over and picked her glasses up for her and handed them to her, and she smiled at you through the tears. That is the kind of homely I mean.
There is a lot that is beautiful in homely people. Sure, maybe not a classically beautiful Elizabeth Taylor face or a Gregory Peck lantern jaw. Maybe not even a shapely behind or a graceful step when walking across the street. But ordinary beauty. Kindness. Humility. Determination in the face of long odds. Good-natured jokery. A touch of childish silliness. A moon face that actually shines when a smile lights it up. That is beauty that can be found in homely people.
You’ve probably figured out by now that this post is just an excuse to show off some goofy old off-kilter portraits I did. But that doesn’t change the fact. I do love homely people.
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Filed under artwork, autobiography, cartoons, characters, commentary, compassion, humor, insight, Iowa, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life