WordPress has put in a new feature for finding old photos from Posts Past.
This allows me to pull from past years much more easily than the scroll-down feature I have been using. Thus, art from 2017.
This has been a look back at pictures posted in 2017, starting in December, and going back in time to January. There is at least one picture from every month.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, old art, Paffooney
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.
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.
Filed under autobiography, Paffooney, philosophy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, blog posting, commentary, humor, nudes, Paffooney, surrealism
I recently posted about being synesthetic and discovering how I am different from normal people. Here is the post if you are interested.. Then I discovered that Kanye West is also synesthetic as he gushed some southern-fried crappie-doo about how wonderful he is as an artist because he sees the colors of his music. Well, now I don’t want that mental affliction any more. I don’t wish to be anything like him. Of course, it has to be incurable, doesn’t it.
Now I am wasting today’s post on another metacognative thinking-about-thinking style of paragraph pile when I could be rhapsodizing about the humor of Dave Barry or the wisdom of Robert Fulghum, the author of
I could be shamelessly promoting the work of artists whose works I love instead of examining the random filing cabinets in the back rooms of my stupid old head. But I can’t because I now need to explain myself to myself again. Self doubt and self examination are features of being an artist. We reach a point where we have to think about how we do what we do, because if you don’t know where the magic comes from, you might not be able to call on it the next time you need it.
I am a self-taught artist. I have had art classes in high school and college, but never professional art training. I know how to manipulate the rule of thirds, directional composition, movement, perspective, and lots of other artsy-craftsy techniques, but it is all a matter of trial and error and an instinct for repeating what works. I have had a good deal more professional training as a writer. But I do that mostly by instinct as well. Trained instinct. I have reached a point where my art is very complex and detailed. And I don’t mean to suggest there are no flaws. In fact, I am capable enough to see huge, glaring mistakes that really skew my original intent and make me feel hopelessly incompetent. But others who see it and don’t know the inner workings of the process can look past those mistakes and not even see them. Given enough time to look at my own work with new eyes, I am able to see at least some of what they see.
Now that I have totally wasted 500-plus words on goofy talking-to-myself, what have I really accomplished beyond boring you to death? What’s that you say? You are not dead yet? Well, that’s probably only because you looked at the pictures and didn’t read any of my sugar-noodle brain-scrapings in loosely paragraph-like form. And if you did read this awful post by a colorblind artist who doubts his own abilities, you probably didn’t learn anything from it. But that’s not the point. The point is, I care about doing this, and I need to do it right. And I managed to learn something… how to ramble and meander and make something that is either a hot mess… or something that vaguely resembles self-reflective art.
Today during the school-drop-off downpour, I was forced to pull into the Walmart parking lot and pass out for a few rainy minutes. Good times, huh? But life is like that with diabetes. I have been a diagnosed diabetic since April of 2000. I have learned to live with my sugars out of whack, my mind potentially turned into Swiss cheese with cream gravy at any moment, and a strangely comforting capacity to weather headaches, both the heartbeat in the temples like a timpani kind, and the red-hot needles of Nyarlathotep boring into my skull kind. I suffer, but I also survive. In fact, the terrible incurable disease most likely to kill me is, in some ways, a sort of a back-handed blessing. I certainly don’t take life for granted with it. I am more conscious of how food can affect me and make me feel. I have had to learn how to take care of myself when taking care of myself is tricky like an Indiana Jones’ adventure in the Doomed Temple of Mickey’s Body. I take going to the doctor seriously and have learned what questions to ask. I have been to the heart specialist and the endocrinologist and the dietitian more than most people, though not more than most people should see them. I have also learned how to make fun of dread diseases… a skill I never imagined I might develop later in life.
My first experience of diabetes wasn’t even my own illness. Back in 1984 I had a boy in my seventh grade class who seemed to be falling asleep constantly. He was a shy little Hispanic boy with curly hair who was usually whip-smart and very charming. But I couldn’t seem to keep his head off his desk. So I asked him what the matter was. He was too shy and worried that he had done something wrong to answer me. So I asked him to get some water to wake himself up. The reading teacher across the hall told me, “You know, Juanito is diabetic. His blood sugar might be low.”
So I asked him, “Is that your problem?”
He nodded and smiled.
“The office keeps some orange juice in the refrigerator for him,” the reading teacher said.
So, I saved his life for the first time in my career without even knowing what the problem was or how to solve it. He came back from the office perky and smiley as ever. And I realized for the first time that I needed to know what diabetes was and what to do about it.
Juanito became one of a number of fatherless boys that adopted me and spent Saturdays hanging out with me to play video games and role playing games. He was one out of a pack of kids that swarmed my home in the off hours and would do anything I asked in the classroom no matter how hard. He was a juvenile diabetic, the son of a woman with severe type-two diabetes (adult-onset). His older sister had become a nurse at least partly because of the family illness. Juvenile diabetics, though their lives can be severely at risk, have the capability of growing out of it. As a seventh grader he didn’t really know how to take care of himself. Teachers who unknowingly offered candy as a motivator could’ve put him in a coma because he was too polite and shy to say no. But I fed him a few times, befriended him a lot, encouraged his interest in sports, and he grew up to be a star defensive back on the high school football team. He gave me the portrait I share with you here for attending so many of his football games and rooting for him to overcome the odds. When he visited me at the school years later, he was basically diabetes-free.
Juanito’s story gives me hope. I know I will not overcome the dreaded Big D disease of South Texas. I will live with it until it kills me. It caused my psoriasis. It gives me episodes of depression and chronic headache. But at this point, I am still controlling it through diet and exercise, not taking insulin or other drugs. (In fact, it was one of those other drugs that was making me pass out at work constantly from low blood sugar. Diet works better than pharmaceuticals.) One day it will give me a fatal infarction or a stroke and be the end of me. But until that time I will continue to do the difficult dance with it and get by, because, after all, dancing is exercise, and exercise overcomes the effects of the disease. Just ask Juanito.
Filed under autobiography, battling depression, humor, illness, kids, psoriasis
Now that she regularly steals people food from the pantry, Jade the dog is becoming more and more like the human race she wants to be a member of. Recently she was reading my blog and got the idea that she could write poetry. So, I was searching for an idea for today’s post and decided I would let her give it a try. So all of this poetry today will be written by the family dog.
Introducing Dog Thoughts
Woof! Grumph-hak-borph-borph… Rrrr.
Did you get that? Or do I have to translate everything into your language?
Boofa-Rrrrr. Bork bork grumph…. okay, we’ll do it your way.
But every time I need to add a tail wag,
Ima gonna go “*************” where each “*” is one wag.
Got it now? People are so dumb!
The family dog after eating enough potato chips to become all people-y…
It Is a Stinky World!
Ooowow! I go outside and I can smell dog poop in the park!
The rabbit that lives in the hedge leaves those little round brown things!
I want to put my nose in a pile of those *********!
I like to eat cat droppings, but you have to dig them up *******
And I am deathly afraid of the white cat… it kills and eats rats!
And it’s almost as big as I am
With breath that smells like dead rats
It is a stinky world! *******
Isn’t that great! ********
Queen of the Couch
Why do you not understand
That the couch is mine all morning and all afternoon?
I will get off when it’s time to eat
And I will get off when it’s time to go outside
But the rest of the time the couch is mine
So don’t disturb me
Or I’ll pee in your shoes!
.
Rats Are NOT Our Friends
I smell them more than see them
With rank and nasty sewer smells
And I never, ever catch them
They don’t come ringing bells
And my master puts out poison
Which they eat with garbage sauce
But it only makes them poison-proof
And I am at a loss…
All I do is bark at them
When I smell them in the walls
And my family’s mad at ME
When all the blame and curses fall.
The Beg-Eye
Do you really not see me here? *****
Here right by your knee? ******
I know you’re eating bacon! *******
I can smell every bite disappearing! ********
Look into my eyes! *********
My big, sad dog eyes! **********
Don’t you want to give me some? **********
I mean, it’s BACON! ************
**************************************!!!
I Do Love My Family
I take my beloved family members for walks
Four or five times a day
It keeps them healthy
With cold, wet noses
And shiny coats of fur
And I always make sure they are on the other end of the leash
How else can I guide them, and keep them safe?
From passing cars?
And other dogs?
But I wish they would be patient
When I stop to sniff all the tree trunks and posts
Where I check the messages from boy dogs
Written in pee
Some of them sure do have healthy bladders! **************!
Filed under autobiography, family dog, humor, Paffooney cartoony, poetry
My path in life has never been straight, never arrived at the destinations I was originally shooting for.
Sometimes you wake up and find a new path spreading out before you.
My dreams were once to go to the Air Force Academy and learn to fly planes.
But bad arches in my feet, poor eyesight in my left eye, and nagging difficulties with allergies turned that dream on its head. I was physically ground-bound, and able to fly only in my dreams.
And then I went to Cow College, Iowa State University, to be an English Major. I was good at drawing. I had endless story-plots bursting out of my fevered comic-book lover’s brain. And I was determined to be a story-teller and comic book artist. But arthritis crept into my hands and slowed the drawing down, my confidence dried up. I realized I was a graduated English major with no chance at ever finding a job just reading books.
So, I went to the University of Iowa, the Hawkeyes, and got myself a remedial Master of the Art of Teaching degree and a teaching certificate. And this time the door actually opened… to a life of a pedagogue. I got to perform my act six times a day in front of a hostile audience for the next 31 out of 33 years, with two years off for bad principal behavior, and time spent being a sub for every kind of teacher that there was. I got to teach everything from autistic special education to P.E. teacher to Librarian to Orchestra teacher.
Some days I was the worst teacher that ever lived. But most days I was a pretty good teacher. And I never let a bad day pass without learning something from it. And I learned to use my drawing ability on chalk boards and bulletin boards and dry-erase boards and overhead projectors. And I learned to be a good story-teller, whether it was by reading aloud or re-telling stories that were mostly factual from history, and funny stories from my own experiences. I became a fascinating nearly-human bean that could keep the attention of even ADHD twelve-year-olds for as much as twenty minutes. A good trick, that.
And when the time came to give it up, I did not go gentle into that good night. I had a miserable last year in 2013-2014 because my health was so poor. I lost money from excessive absences since I had the flu three times that year and had a son spend a week in the hospital. I retired that May and thought my life was over.
And then the real nonsense started.
I published the original AeroQuest in 2007. Then in 2012 I added Catch a Falling Star, published with I-Universe/ Penguin Books.
Once I retired, I published Magical Miss Morgan with Page Publishing. Then, disgusted with traditional publishers whom I paid more money than I ever earned from, I began self-publishing with Amazon.
Snow Babies followed, with Stardusters and Space Lizards after that.
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, Recipes for Gingerbread Chidren, The Baby Werewolf, Sing Sad Songs, and Fools and Their Toys followed that (in order).
Then I doubled down on writing more than one story at a time.
I began rewriting AeroQuest, publishing 1,2, and 3 as of this writing.
I wrote the prequel to Snow Babies, When the Captain Came Calling. I also wrote The Boy… Forever, the sequel to The Baby Werewolf.
I have published A Field Guide to Fauns, a novel where all the main characters are nudists. And I completed a book of essays from this blog, which I call Laughing Blue.
And then I began working even harder to get my books read and reviewed.
I have gotten more five-star reviews than any other level.
I have also published The Wizard in His Keep. I published The Necromancer’s Apprentice most recently.
My current work in progress is The Haunted Toy Store. It is currently at 14, 649 words.
How much more I can get done now until my life has ended remains to be seen. But I keep on trudging on the path into the future, not knowing where it will go next… and not really worrying about it.
Filed under autobiography
The desert cardinal.
It sings and behaves almost exactly like its scarlet cousins. It never flies away from seasonal changes or difficult weather, and it also tolerates drier conditions than its bright red family members.
Why do you need to know that? Because I am a birdbrain. I connect things that are totally unlike each other. I am a surrealist. And for me, being a cardinal is all about never flying away when the winter comes, never giving up.
There was a time in my life when I wasn’t entirely sure of who I would become. Let me say clearly, “I am not now, nor have I ever been a homosexual.” And if I had been one, like a couple of my friends turned out to be, I would not be ashamed to be one. But there was a time, in my high school years, when I really wasn’t certain, and I was terrified of what the answer might be.
And it was in high school that I met Dennis.
Now, to be honest, I noticed him while I was still an eighth grader, and he was in my sister’s class and two years younger. It was in the locker room after eighth grade P.E. class was ended and sixth grade P.E. was getting dressed for class. I was returning to pick up a book I had left. He was standing just inside the door in nothing but shorts. The feeling of attraction was deeply disturbing to my adolescent, hormone-confused brain. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that feeling. But I felt compelled to find out who he was anyway. He was the younger brother of my classmate Rick Harper (not his real name). In fact, he was the book end of a set of twins. But I came to realize that it was Dennis I saw, not Darren, because they were trying to establish their identities by one of them curling his hair, and the other leaving his straight.
Nothing would ever have come of it, but during my Freshman year of high school, I encountered him again. During a basketball practice where the ninth grade team was scrimmaging with the eighth graders, the seventh graders were all practicing free throws at the side of the junior high gym. While I was on the bench, he came up to me from behind and tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and he tossed me his basketball. “Play me one on one?” He asked. I almost did. But I remembered that Coach Rod had warned us to be ready to go into the game when he called on us. I had a turn coming up. So, I told him that and promised I would play him some other time. He grinned at me in a way that gave me butterflies in my stomach. Why? To this day I still don’t really know.
Dennis’s older brother and I were in Vocational Agriculture class together that year and both on the Parliamentary Procedure team preparing for a competition. We were at Rick’s house. After a few rounds of practice that convinced our team we would definitely lose the competition, Dennis and his brother trapped me in a corner.
“Hey, Meyer, how’re ya doin’?” Dennis said. Darren just stared at me, saying nothing.
“It’s Beyer, not Meyer,” I said. Of course, he knew that. The Meyers were a local poor family with a bad reputation, and it was intended as an insult. And it also rhymed, making it the perfect insult.
“Still one of the worst basketball players ever?”
“I try. I’m working on it really hard.” That got him to laugh and ask me to give him a high five.
“Goin’ to the basketball game later?”
“Yeah, probably.”
I knew then that he wanted to be my friend. I wasn’t sure why. He was picking me out of the blue to make friends with. We didn’t move in the same circles, go to the same school, or even live in the same town. He was a Belmond boy, I was Rowan kid. And he didn’t know I was only a few years past being sexually assaulted and not ready to face the demons my trauma had created within me.
Later, at the basketball game, he found me in the bleachers and sat down beside me. In my defense, I am not a homophobe. And neither he nor I turned out to be a homosexual. He just wanted to be my friend and was taking difficult steps to make that connection. He was the one taking the risks. I greeted him sarcastically, and looking back on it, somewhat cruelly, because I was filled with too many uncertainties. I never meant to drive him away. But I will never forget the wounded look on his face as he scooted away down the bleacher seat.
He tried to talk to me several times after that. He apparently never lost the urge to befriend me. But as much as I wanted to accept his friendship, it never came to be. I have regretted that ever since.
Dennis passed away from cancer early this year. It is what made me think about who we both once were and what I gave away. I went on to actually befriend a number of boys through college and into my teaching career. I never chose any of them. The friendship was always their idea. I went on teach and mentor a number of fine young men. I like to think I did it because I felt a bit guilty of never really being Dennis’s friend. I hope somewhere along the way I made up for my mistake. I hope Dennis forgives me. And I wish I could tell him, “I really do want to be your friend.”
The pyrrhuloxia is a member of the family of cardinals and grosbeaks. And it does not migrate away from troublesome seasons and bad weather. There is dignity in being a pyrrhuloxia.
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.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, illustrations, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 
Why We Doo
I remember when Scooby Doo, Where Are You? premiered on Saturday Morning Cartoons in 1969. I was thirteen and in the 7th grade. I had been six during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, seven when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, ten when I was sexually assaulted in 1966, and still twelve when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon in the Summer of 1969. I was obsessed with monsters, horror comics, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the Pirates threatening Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. I knew what fear was. And I was mad to find ways to combat the monsters I feared.
Don’t get me wrong. I was under no illusions that Fred, Daphne, Velma, Norville “Shaggy” Rogers and Scooby Doo were the answer to all my fears as viable heroes and heroines. They were goofballs, all of them, based on the characters I vaguely remembered from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. I was aware that Shaggy was just Maynard Krebs in cartoon form (the hippie character portrayed by Gilligan’s Island actor Bob Denver.)
One of the critical things about the show for me was the fact that there was a rational explanation for the monsters. They were men in masks, special effects and projector tricks, or remote-controlled mechanical things.
And the way you overcame them and saved the day was by having Shaggy and Scooby act as bait, cause the traps to get sprung at the wrong time, and then fall on the villains, trapping them under the butt of the talking dog.
Villains and horror could be overcome by laughing at them. They were more likely to be clowns than carnivores. And even if they were carnivores, the teeth were not real.
There was a universal truth in that. Danger and horror and fear were easier to handle when you could laugh in spite of those things.
And to top it all off, those meddling kids and their stupid talking dog were with me my whole life. Those cartoons got remade and spun off so many times that my kids learned to love them as much as I did. And those four meddling kids and that talking dog are still making new stories even now.
And that is why we do the Doo!
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Filed under autobiography, cartoon review, cartoons, commentary, humor, monsters, Uncategorized
Tagged as hanna-barbera, horror, Netflix, review, Scooby Doo