Category Archives: blog posting

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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Filed under artwork, autobiography, blog posting, goofiness, goofy thoughts, humor, metaphor, Uncategorized

Blog Happy

Gingeyhouse12n

I can’t seem to help blogging daily on this goofy little blog spot.  I am a writer and I write every day whether I publish anything or not.  I am not connecting with readers through my published novels.  In fact, I seem to be nose against a brick wall with publishing anything further in novel form despite doing well in writing competitions.  Publishers exist mainly to make money for corporations, and creators of content of any kind are only paid serious money when the publishers are forced to by the healthy flow of cash into certain authors’ established platforms.  But feeling sorry for myself is a full time job and doesn’t pay very well… actually, if you can’t afford a lawyer, it doesn’t pay anything at all.  Instead I have been looking at the arc of this blog and rereading old posts.  To my amazement, I actually communicate ideas much more interestingly than the goofy-drunk word-flinger I thought I was.  Let me recount some of it so I can get the benefit of clip-show laziness the way television shows do.

Yesterday’s post was about the Lennon Sisters, a nostalgia post where I slathered on some goopy nostalgia about being a farm boy spending Saturday nights at my grand parents’ house and salted it with YouTube videos of the sisters singing some of my favorite songs from the Lawrence Welk Show.

The day before saw two posts about collecting Star Wars Action Figures, the twelve-inch size, not the three-inch.   They are a part of my over-all G.I. Joe/ Barbie obsession and have to be the same size.  One post was about the collection, and the other was a correction because I goofed on font size with speech balloons.

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The post before that was me mooning about this year’s apple blossoms and how I use them to counteract the moaning about how ill allergies make me while doing yard work.

Self Portrait vxv

Before that was an extra-silly post about where creativity comes from, which recognizes the fact that I do, indeed, fall into the general category of “too creative to be outside of a mental institution”, but actually have no earthly idea why.

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That post was preceded by a post about my antique library books that I treat as treasure, though I found them at Goodwill prices or got them free as library discards.  The Sherlock Holmes books were even rescued from the middle school trash bin.

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Prior to that was a post moaning about having to deal with my daughter’s cold.  It gave me an excuse to re-post an old picture I drew that looks remarkably like my daughter the Princess, even though I drew it in colored pencil fifteen years before she was born and eight years before I even got married.

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The post before that was about marketing my published book, and how the review I paid for ended up being about the wrong book (same title, different author).  The mistake made by the book-review company has not been corrected yet even as of this writing.  They haven’t refunded my money either, I have noticed.

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Before that was a collage post of collected artwork and photographs from my Monster Movie file.  It focused mainly on the Universal movie monsters, and it provided a worthy use for my habit of filling my computer’s memory with all kinds of pictures copied from the internet.  I am a hoarder and collector in so many disgusting ways.

Loonies

And on the first day of April I posted an April Fool’s Day post full of pictures I have drawn of fools and photos of foolish things.

The conclusions I have drawn by looking at the last ten days of posting include these;  I definitely do not think in straight lines.  I think in quirky squiggles that double back on themselves and allow freaky ideas to meet themselves mid-sentence.  I also crave loopy levels of variety and my selections of topics and illustrations are completely unpredictable.   I like bright colors.  I dwell mostly in the past, though sometimes in the future.  My mind is a lot like a boomerang, travelling woop-woop-woop willy-nilly through the air, but always coming back to essentially the same things over and over.  I call all of this humor, though not all of this is funny because humor is basically pointed and takes you by surprise more often than not.  But if it is good humor, you can’t help telling yourself, “You know, when you stop to think about it, it is funny, but it’s also true.”

I came back to this post today thinking, “Wouldn’t it be a great idea to take some old blog posts, essays like this one, and put them all together into e-book form.  But then I began tinkering with the mechanics of the format, and then I realized, I use too darn much incompatible media to put into book form under the current Amazon publishing set-up.  And how do I shift my full-color imagination into strictly black-and-white?  So, there’s another blogging notion that requires a re-visit on another day.

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Filed under blog posting, humor, Uncategorized, writing humor

Secrets in the Vault

The award that was given to me yesterday was not so much this blog as it was for my little vault.  I opened a can of worms a while back when I created a second blog on WordPress more or less by accident.  I wasn’t really interested so much in giving myself more writing tasks to do, rather, I decided I would use this other blog to store whole stories, poems, and cartoons.  I really haven’t figured out how to link this blog to that one, or that one to this… and since WordPress “improved” everything by changing all the controls, I really don’t know how to properly link something or put a URL into this prose, but here is the web address for that blog;

https://authormbeyer.wordpress.com/2015/06/

HK1

It is a place where I have posted more complete works that, though mostly still unfinished, will take a little bit longer to look at and read.  I know that my daily 500 words on this goofy blog is too much for most internet readers, and these things take way more time to read than is good for you.  But some readers of this blog have recently discovered that the thing exists, and I have had a sudden burst of interest.  I gained five followers to the vault yesterday.  I think I have six total.  I don’t post there often enough to generate traffic, but I do keep stuff there that certain of my followers here are likely to enjoy if they are foolish enough to buy into this whole artwork and wordswork nonsense that I constantly do.  So, there it is… a little bit more of me than you were probably ready for.

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Filed under announcement, blog posting, cartoony Paffooney, humor, my vault, Paffooney

Blowing Up My Brain (Accidentally, of Course)

Color boy

Yesterday was my best day for views ever on WordPress.  I crossed the 100 view, 59 visitors per hour barrier.   How the heck did that happen?  Why do so many people suddenly want to see my goofiness in blog form?  Have I suddenly realized my dream of attracting readers to my words and wit and artwork?  I think not.  No one post brought this on.  I did not have any sudden aha! moment of perfect post creation.  I posted a post yesterday about lying based on my love/hate relationship with politics.  I posted before that about my Paffooney creating process and my psychotic collecto-mania as it intersects that fantastic life in plastic of Barbie.  None of that should have generated so much interest.  And most of the posts viewed, over a hundred of them, were single-viewer hits on separate posts.  So I now have a conspiracy theory of my own to pursue.  Are the Illuminati or the Freemasons trying to lead me down dark paths of misinformation?  Are aliens suddenly becoming aware of the story told in Catch a Falling Star?  Cool!  But probably not the answer.  The only factor I could seize on that might explain this anomaly is the fact that somebody re-posted my Barbie Shelf post.

The Militant Negro (://theobamacrat.com/) The Militant Negro, a progressive political site with keen insights and a lot of followers re-posted my foofoo post about collecting Barbie dolls.  I haven’t been brave enough yet to ask why.  Maybe I should’ve kept it all more of a secret.  Maybe they are all examining my posts now for evidence of dementia or possible lunatic plans to take over the world through manipulative toys… or maybe my paranoia.  But for some reason, I must’ve sparked curiosity in a part of the blog-world where I never suspected it would be.

Creativity

Hopefully I haven’t shot myself in the foot with this post which includes bare butts and butterflies.  Oh, no!

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Filed under blog posting, humor, Paffooney