Category Archives: autobiography

May 5, 2016 · 7:32 pm

Stuff That Works

What makes people visit your blog and maybe even click “like”?  I should tell you up front, I have no idea how best to navigate the crazy internet.  I want to.  I have a book to promote.  I have ideas and experiences to share.  I am a writer and I would like to make something more than excessive heartache out of being one.  But how you actually go about it is still a mystery.

Ima mickey

I know what I surf the internet for.  I like artwork, especially original artwork.  That is why I try to post as much of my own stuff as I can.  I am an amateur artist, self-taught with a little bit of college art classes, contact with real artists, and a lot of TV Bob Ross.  I surf to find other artists whose stuff catches my eye.  I post about artists like Loish, Maxfield Parrish, Paul Detlafsen, and Norman Rockwell.  I go to sites like DeviantArt (Example at this link) and follow artists like James Brown and Shannon Maer on Facebook.  I help promote their work by sharing as often as I can.  Do I worry about copyright violation with my artwork?  No.  I am long past the point of making a profitable career as an artist.  I like having people see my work and if someone decides to claim they are the artist instead of me, I have the real originals and even some pictures of work in progress.  The Big Eyes thing will not happen to me.

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So sharing pictures seems to matter.  I got lots of hits from the monster picture post because I used a lot of monster-movie images that people normally search for on the internet.  Pictures of pretty girls work too.  It doesn’t seem to matter if I drew them or if they are a picture of a relative, those pictures pull people in too.

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Pictures of photogenic nieces aid my blogging popularity in a rather noticeable way.

Yes, I do believe I have just intimated that Minnie Mouse is my niece, a daughter of my sister-in-law.  Lying is part of blogging.  You have to put spin on things and make people understand the things they want to understand more than you need them to see what is really true in the empirical sense.

Jungle Girl

Being able to put the words “nude” or “naked” in titles or in the tags brings in more views too.  Those words get lots of hits on search engines and some of the people who visit my blog looking for that actually read what’s posted.  Just because an idea is a little bit naughty, it doesn’t mean only perverts and bad people respond to it.

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This is a picture of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. It is NOT a picture of me.

And it doesn’t hurt to be a little funny now and then.  Humor is something I look for in the posts of others.  I try to be funny in my posts too… though whether they are hah-hah funny or merely eeuw! funny is debatable.  Much of my humor is only intended to raise a smirk or half a smile.  I am most satisfied when I make you think, “heh, that’s right, isn’t it.”

Millis

This is Millis, not me. He was an actual rabbit that was turned humanoid by a scientist’s experiment with alien technology.

So why is this post called Stuff That Works if, as I am claiming, I really don’t know anything about how blogging works?  I may have been a little less than truthful when I made claims.  Or maybe I was claiming with a little bit of “tongue in cheek”?  I hope I have demonstrated that I do know how.  The thing I have yet to wrestle with is WHY.  So now I have to get busy and work on that.

 

 

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May 3, 2016 · 2:27 pm

Old Teachers on Facebook

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Sometimes ideas for essays find me instead of making me find them.  It happened to me again tonight.  I have been posting a lot of liberal political gook on Facebook lately to see how many of my conservative friends will shoot me a mad-faced “like” or write a comment about how stupid and blind and ignorant I am (with the word ignorant misspelled).  One angry face came from Ronald Broccoli (not his real name because I don’t do that to students).  I thought I knew who that was.  But I just couldn’t place the name.  Then he messaged me on Facebook chat asking if I didn’t remember him from Creek Valley Middle School.  He was an eighth grader in my English class during the worst year I ever endured as a teacher.  That was the year I had all the worst kids available in the whole school so that the other English teacher on our team could have only good ones.  I had all the emotionally disturbed kids, the low socio-economic-level kids, the kids with discipline files thicker than Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.  It was the year that my diabetes kept depleting my blood sugar to the point that I couldn’t remember my own name by the afternoon.  I even got lost one afternoon and found myself in Lewisville, the next city over,  by mistake, completely lost, but in a restaurant and needing to eat, with absolutely no money on me anywhere.  But Ronny was not one of the bad kids.  (In fact, there were truly no bad kids in my classes, just kids with expectations totally stacked against them.  I was just in very poor shape to deal with them.)  He told me on Facebook that though I was only his teacher for a very short time, I had a big impact on him and his confidence in himself, and that he would never forget me.    If you want to know the truth, he made me cry.  Not tears of unhappiness… tears of joy.  Even if you are lying, if you say something like that to one of your former teachers, you are going to make him or her cry.

This video of Miss Watson is also something that I encountered on Facebook.  I should warn you.  If you watch it, she cries in the video, and you will probably cry too if you don’t remove your heart and hide it safely in your sock drawer first.

I had a wonderful teacher once too.  Her name was Mrs. Houser (That is her real name, because I won’t embarrass her… but I need everybody to know she was a life-changing sort of teacher too.)  When she accepted my friend request on Facebook, I wrote a note on her wall.  I said, “I just wanted you to know that I recently retired after 31 years of being a teacher in middle school and high school.  And a number of my former students have found me on Facebook and told me how much of a difference I made in their lives and how much I meant to them.  I wanted you to know that you were that wonderful, inspiring teacher for me, and I couldn’t have done it without you.”  That goopy little comment got more likes on Facebook than anything else I have ever written.  People all over the United States were adding their thumbs-up to that post.  They were her family and former students.  And it wasn’t about me.  It was about her.  Teachers throw stones into the pools that are the lives of their students.  And sometimes they can muddy the water, but more often than not, they make a splash that needed to be made, and the ripples of it can flow all the way to the ocean.

So, what is this really about?  I have just revealed a secret to you.  If you remember any of your teachers, and you need to get even with them, or you just need to pass it on, now you know how to make them cry… and feel good about it at the same time.

 

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May 1, 2016 · 3:21 pm

The Doorway Straight Ahead

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I just finished watching the last episode of the ABC dramatic television series, Lost.  I watched every single episode of every single season they ever made of that show.  And here’s a major spoiler.  Everybody dies.  Yes.  No one gets through that TV series, or through life itself, without facing death at least once.  And everybody has a last encounter with it where they don’t win.  Except they do.

In my Paffooney above, the door straight ahead is the doorway home.  This Paffooney oil painting is called Poppa Comes Home.  I am hoping that is how it will be for me.  I painted this picture before I had a wife and three kids.  So how did I know?  Or did I simply make it come true?  Is that what the final doorway is all about?  You make it be the doorway you want it to be?  The truth is, I will probably find out before long.  I retired from teaching in rather spectacularly poor health.  I’m not sure I really expected to last this long.  And I may live another twenty years.  But probably not.  The thing is, when the door is finally directly in front of me, I will fear not.  I will simply open it and pass through.  I am at peace.  I have lived a good life.  I was a teacher.  I touched more than 2000 separate lives through my various classrooms over the course of 31 years.  I succeeded some, I failed some, I cried some, and I laughed a lot.  It all means a lot to me.

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As I write this now, I have spent most of the day sealed up in my room, on my bed with my laptop, suffering quite a lot with arthritis pain.  Most of my days since retirement have been very much the same.  My body, especially my joints, is wearing out.  But endurance brings wisdom.  Overcoming pain and the depression caused by pain provides me a deep, abiding faith and confidence in myself.  I don’t know if I believe in Heaven, but I am sure there is no hell.  God does not punish for a life completed, no matter how badly you may have lived it.  And if I die, if the human race goes extinct, if our planet is destroyed, even if our entire galaxy winks out in the never-ending darkness of eternity, we have all accomplished a miracle just by the fact of our existence.  The final doorway is the door home.  I have no doubt.

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April 27, 2016 · 1:59 pm

Synesthesia (Part One; French Blue Monday)

This link will help you understand Synesthesia

Francois spotlight

Yes, Mondays are blue.  Specifically French blue.  Every day of the week has its own color.  Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre,  Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue.  I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints.  I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head.  I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world.  I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name.  It is called synesthesia.

 

 

It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”.  When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence.  I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns.  Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns.  It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color.  Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word.  But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue.  It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”.  And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.

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Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.

I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do.  I certainly was.  I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue.  My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing.  I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word.  I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there.  But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true.   The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded.  I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls.  My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters.  She is left handed and also gifted at drawing.  I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.

Creativity

Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.

Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about.  But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about.  And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases.  It is not a bad condition to have.  In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing.  I could use some good for a change.  Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway.  (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).

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April 26, 2016 · 12:14 pm

Pirate Novels

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My first novel-length piece of writing was attempted in college.  I finished it in four years.  It was a pirate tale about a young man, a pirate named Graff the Changeling.  You see him in this illustration I created in 1980 with his two young sons, Rene and Emery.  Because their mother was a fairy, the boys have pointed ears and horns.    It was an attempt at serious fantasy adventure fiction that was so awful, it became a comedy before it was through.  I called it The Graff Tales, and I still have it.  But I promise you, I will never, ever try to publish the horrible thing.  My sisters served as my beta readers for this story.  They both liked the oral stories I told, and they eagerly awaited something like they remembered from our shared childhood.  They both were a bit disappointed by my first prose attempt.  There was a knight called Sir Rosewall in the story.  He was a hapless knighted fool who lived in poverty and swore to reclaim his honor with great deeds, but as he goes to sea as a kidnapped sailor, all he manages to do is fall down a lot and bump his large head frequently.  In the first scene when he enters the story, long about chapter four, he exits a cottage and has to punt a piglet to get out without falling down.  This pig-punting thing was repeated more than once with this character.  My sisters joked that the “pig-in-the-doorway” motif would be my lasting contribution to literature.  Fortunately for me, it was not.  I am probably the only one who even remembers there was such a novel.

But my biggest failing with writing and storytelling was always that I could be too creative.  The story featured a flying pirate ship that was raised from the bottom of the ocean by fairy magic.  The crew were re-animated skeletons.  The gorilla who lived on the island where the ship’s survivors had been marooned would also join the crew.  His name was Hairy Arnold.  One villain was the pirate captain Horner, a man with a silver nose-piece because he had lost his real nose to a cannon shot.  Another was a red-bearded dandy named Captain Dangerous.  But the biggest villain of all was the Heretic, who turned out to be a demon in human guise.  It was all about escaping from pirates who wanted to kill you and hitting soldiers with fish in the fish market.  There were crocodile-headed men and little child-like fairies called Peris that lived in the city where Graff was trapped and transformed into a monster by the Heretic.

My plot was too convoluted and my characters too wildly diverse and unlikely.  The result was something far too bizarre to be serious fiction.  The only way it could actually be interpreted was as a piece of comedy.  There-in lay the solution to my identity problem as a writer.  I had to stop trying to be serious.  My imagination too often bent the rules of physics and reality.  So I had to stop trying for realism and believability.

 

In the end all the main characters die.  All except for young Rene who becomes a pirate hunter.  Of course, I follow Graff and Emery through to heaven because, well, it was a first person narrative and the narrator died.  So, I vowed to myself that I would never let this horrible piece of nonsense see the light of day.  I would never try to publish it, rewrite it, or even tell anyone about it.  And so to this very day I… oopsie.

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April 23, 2016 · 3:07 pm

Mickey and the Really Cool Car

As a former public school teacher, I have always driven a sensible car.  I was owner of a long line of Ford Tempos, Ford Escorts, and Ford Fiestas.  Cars on a teacher’s budget.  I was lucky to be at least one step above Hondas and AMC Gremlins, though Ford, as we all know, is the acronym for “Fix Or Repair Daily”.  Well, this week I have encountered a Really Cool Car for the first time in my life.  Oh, I have ridden in them before… had show-off-y friends who owned them and rich relatives.  (Did you know I’m related to Nelson Rockefeller?  It’s through the Aldrich part of his family, his mother’s side.  But distant enough to be totally out of the inheritance lottery.)  But never before have I driven one.

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The latest daily repair which involved hitting a pothole in my new Fiesta and destroying a front wheel, required a rental car.  But thanks to recent hail in the DFW area, Enterprise Rent-a-Car had no cheap ones available that the insurance would completely pay for.  Instead, I had to settle for a 2015 Dodge Challenger, a $95 a day expense that would’ve bankrupted me two months ago.  As it is, the cost is taking a big bite out of my newly restored credit standing.  But… hey!  A sports car!

Of course, the threat of more hail has been looming, and though my car insurance would cover the damage (minus the $500 deductible) I would have to continue to pay rent on it each day it spent in the shop… and that could take months.  It gives me pause because I do not have any place to shelter it beyond one live oak tree that spreads her mighty greens out over the street where my previous Fiesta was killed in a drive-by.  But… hey again!  A sports car!

It drives like a dream.  I never imagined a car could handle so easily and have so much potential power under the hood.  The rental people told me there was no mileage limit at this price level.  A weekend in Vegas?  Tempting, but I am a former school teacher.  The level of trouble I could get into as the country mouse in the big city is too scary to contemplate.  I would be some cat’s dinner for sure.  I have dared to drive the thing to pick up kids at school, and driving to Walmart where there are evil decorative rocks lurking everywhere.  But that is the limit of the daring side of me.  I might take my family to a movie at Cinemark later.  But that’s about as wild-side as I ever walk.

Will I ever drive a sports car like this again?  A sleek black Batmobile-looking thing that makes me feel powerful and potentially wild?  Of course not!  It’s Mickey we are talking about here.

 

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April 21, 2016 · 3:23 pm

Gooseberry Pie

I would like to contend that a blog is a form of self-portrait.  Do you want to argue with me?  Have a piece of Gooseberry Pie….

You see, gooseberries aren’t made from geese.  They don’t look like gooses… er, goosei… um, geese.  They aren’t the favorite food of a goose, unless, maybe…  Mother Goose.  The name is a corrupted form of the Dutch word kruisbes , or possibly the German Krausbeere.   You know, because people who speak English don’t know how to talk right.  They don’t have anything to do with geese.  In the same way, a person’s name doesn’t really help you understand the person that wears it.  You have to dig deeper.  Do you know, I have never actually tasted gooseberry pie?  I have seen and even picked the gooseberries.  They are danged ugly, spikey-furred snot-green berries.  I am not tempted in any way to put one in my mouth.  And yet, I should not judge gooseberry pie before I taste a piece.  I know people who adore gooseberry pie.  Maybe you are one of them.

The point is, blogs are exactly the same thing.  An artist, a writer, a producer of something, or a day-dreamy noodling goober has put together a blog to display their wares, show off their creations, and share their words and wisdom.  You have to look at them, warts and all, and actually take a bite.  You have to try them out and test them.  Follow them over time.  Read, absorb, and appreciate… not merely zoom through and look at the pictures… and maybe click “like” at the bottom of the post.

Of course, I admit, I do the very thing I am advising you not to do.  The first few times I visit a blog, I scan through and only focus on a few things that catch my falling stars.  (oop!  Shame on me… I should say “catch my fancy”.  Forgive me for lapsing into Mickian brain farts for a moment there).  But if I am lured into coming back, I dip deeper and read more… tasting it thoroughly, as it were…  And much of what I taste there will end up in my own recipe somewhere down the line.  I begin to learn who that blogger is, and their writing style… sometimes even their thinking style (though I don’t read minds… only smell brain farts and odoriferous mental cooking smells) and I picture them as people in my minds eye.  Sometimes I wonder if they match in real life the person I am picturing.  Of course, the answer is no.  People don’t look like what you think they should look like.  They don’t even look like what they think they look like either… even in photos.  So let me end this goofy pie-based argument about why blogs are self portraits with a few self portraits I have created that aren’t really what I look like , even if it is a photo.

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Me in the mirror, 1980

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Scary pictures of the artist as a creepy old man…

 

Self Portrait vxv

The novelist me…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A wizard selfie taken at Mad Ludwig’s Castle in Bavaria.

 

 

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Who I am and who I was…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Seriously grumpy me…

Gag!  Enough of the gooseberries already!  Or are they gross-berries?  I think that I really don’t look anything like me anymore.

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April 17, 2016 · 8:31 pm

Superheroes from the 60’s

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I was a comic book nut from a very early age.  I started collecting comics in 1966 when I was ten years old.  Almost as soon as I started collecting them, I began copying the drawings, copying Spiderman, Hawkeye, Captain America, Avengers, and Batman.  I am a comic book lover, and I am also a comic book plagiarist.  But I promise to use my own artwork and photographs to illustrate this blog post.  After all, I am illustrating being a copy cat.

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Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad in the style of artist Curt Swan in 1962.

My parents didn’t approve of kids with comic books.  I desperately wanted Spiderman comic books and Avengers comic books, like the ones I read in the barbershop every time I was waiting for a haircut.  But they had gotten wind of Frederic Wertham’s campaign against comic books two years before I was even born.  The learned psychiatrist insisted that comic books corrupted children with sexual images hidden in the artwork (oh, gawd, look where Saturn Girl’s hands are… close anyway), Batman and Robin were homosexuals trying to influence young boys to be gay, Wonder Woman was a lesbian who was into bondage.  This he said in 1954, but it didn’t really reach my parents’ ears in rural Iowa for another 12 years.  The result was severe limits on my comic book ownership possibilities.  But Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes were acceptable, as were Casper the Friendly Ghost and Scrooge McDuck.

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So, my copy above of Curt Swan’s work is from the Legion of Superheroes.  Superman was boy-scout enough to qualify too.  I could get by with Tarzan even though he was a mostly naked guy running around the jungles.  And time and money solve a lot of problems.  I was allowed to subscribe to Avengers and X-men and the Amazing Spiderman once I had field-work money to put towards it.  I drew lots of comic book heroes from that point onwards.

Superman 1

I learned how to draw men with unhealthy amounts of muscles, women with waists that would break in two with the amount of breastly boobage a teenage boy would pack on top, and numerous people who actually seemed to think capes made sense as a fashion statement.  I also learned how to do shading in pen and ink and foreshortening from master artists like John Romita Jr. and George Perez and Barry Windsor-Smith.  And I would be remiss if I didn’t give proper credit to Murphy Anderson and Jack “King” Kirby.  I know you don’t know who those people are because you are not the comic book nut I am… nobody is.  But believe me, they are masters of an American Art form.  And I will never be one of them, because even though I am almost as good as some of them, I chose to be a teacher instead of being a comic book artist, a thing I could’ve so easily succeeded at back in the 1980’s.  You should know this too…  I have never regretted making that choice.

Aquaman

Walker

 

 

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April 6, 2016 · 3:37 pm

Where Does Creativity Come From?

Ima mickey

Okay, I hooked you in with a title that sounds like I actually know something and somehow have some expertise to share beyond the usual brain-drippings of a noodling writer-type idiot.  Unfortunately I don’t.  I am a practicing creative person.  But do I know how it works? I do not.

Self Portrait vxv

I suspect that it has something to do with my actual life experiences.  I am not God.  When I get a creative idea, it is made from known things.   I don’t snap my fingers and make a snerflkuppie, the first one that ever existed, and give it actual substance and reality.  Okay, metaphorically I did just make the first snerflkuppie… It is about three feet tall, has glossy purple fur and three legs.  Four puppy-like eyes, a wide mouth, and no nose… I dare you not to try and picture it in your mind’s eye.  But there isn’t one skipping about in this universe.  I can only take known things and recombine them in unique and surprising ways.  My novels are about kids doing kid stuff… you know, like time travel, being kidnapped by aliens, uncovering werewolf plots, and making magical cookie people.  Stuff that really happened.  And I am a former teacher, so I have experience knowing real kids.

Urkel

If you think kids you see depicted on television and in the movies are realistic, you have never played a video game with a real kid.  You have never had them tell you what they are really afraid of.  You have never come to the conclusion that they actually know a whole lot more about sex than you do.  And kids are not afraid to try something new for the first time (unless, of course, the thing they are going to try is what their parents want them to try for the first time).  You take liquid one and mix it with powder two, watch it fizz, and then drink it.  You don’t know if it will taste good, turn you into a muscle-bound Mr. Hyde-type monster, or blow you up like a firecracker.  But you made it yourself and you are going to try.  We generally think of kids as being creative and undisciplined.  We expect time and experience to take the unruliness, as well as the creativity, out of them.  It is the thing we refer to as, “growing up”.  But I think being creative is, to some degree, remaining a child.  I am a child because I continue to hold play-time in high regard, and do it as often as I can.  Writing words on paper, or on my laptop, is playing to me.  Drawing pictures with pen and ink and colored pencils is also playing to me.  Fortunately mixing chemicals from the cupboard like a mad scientist and testing them on my sister is no longer playing to me.  (And that, Nancy, is just a joke… I never actually did that… I think… I hope…)

The Car Chase of Life

The metaphorical car chase of life… with an old dog behind the wheel.

So, there you have it.  The ultimate answer.  Where does creativity come from?  I do not know.

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April 4, 2016 · 3:00 pm

The Princess is Ill

girl n bird

My daughter started complaining of feeling ill yesterday afternoon.  Her fever hit a high point of 100.3.  But the doctor says it is merely a cold.  A viral infection.  So today’s post is short and to the point… a rare thing for me… because lives are disrupted and we have to follow a trail to recovery.

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