Category Archives: goofy thoughts

April 3, 2017 · 3:15 pm

Ladybugs Conquer Cartoonland

C360_2017-04-02-08-07-13-140

Yes, Mickey couldn’t help it.  The toys hit the shelves in Walmart.  He discovered the silly superhero junior highschool romance thing first on Pinterest, then on YouTube.  Miraculous, the Adventures of Ladybug and Cat Noir.   The silly thing is on Netflix now too.

So, why would a goofy old man like me be interested in a thing like this… a thing aimed at an audience of pre-teen girls?  That’s disturbingly creepy, isn’t it?

Well, I never claimed to be cool.  I was an English teacher for 31 years.  Cool was never an option.

C360_2017-04-02-08-07-25-860

And I collect dolls… erm… action figures… uh… well, I might as well be honest.  I have more Barbies than G.I. Joes.  I have a hoarding disorder fixated on 12-inch dolls.  And when I saw this doll for less than 15 dollars at Walmart, I had to buy it.  And it has the other super hero, Cat Noir right beside it.  Both under 20 dollars so they fit under the 20 dollar limit.  And both together only cost 30 dollars, so it fits under the 50 dollar per month limit as well.  Those collecting rules are important in saving me from my own juvenile regressive self and helps me have enough money to buy food all month long.

C360_2017-04-02-08-09-19-133

The people in the store don’t look at me funny.  I am not the only old man buying toys and dolls in Walmart.  I am just the only old man there not buying for his grandkids.  I don’t have any grandkids yet, and my own kids are definitely older than the toy-wanting stage.  The people would be far more disturbed if they knew I was now struggling with the question, “Do I preserve these dolls mint-in-box?  Or do I take them out and play with them?”  And if you have read any of my lunatic “he-plays-with-dolls” posts, you probably already know how that one will turn out.

People might also be deeply disturbed to know that I have already watched two episodes of Miraculous, and (shudder) liked them in spite of the moronic romance and love-triangle bull poop.  I can’t promise that I will not watch more and turn away from this new filthy habit.  The stories are stupid villain-of-the-week stuff.  But the CGI animation is brightly colored, smooth, and highly interesting… to the point that I and any available chimpanzees or monkeys will be enthralled with it.  Oh, and pre-teen girls too.  I won’t go into the connections between those things.

tumblr_o1fg9nMT1K1uu5wooo7_1280

I could probably spend a lot of words telling you more about how this cartoon is set in Paris, France, and how Marinette and Adrien, the secret identities of the two superheroes above, are both in love with each other, but don’t realize it because neither one knows the secret identity of the other.  But I won’t.  This post is not a review of the cartoon show.  This post is a goofy commentary celebrating the fact that I bought myself two more dolls, and now must somehow rationalize that weird, compulsive act.

23f

Leave a comment

Filed under action figures, anime, cartoon review, cartoons, collecting, doll collecting, goofy thoughts, humor, toystore quests

Tagged as , , , , ,

March 29, 2017 · 2:38 pm

Illustrating in Novel Ways

I have just finished a novel project that I worked on for a year, from Spring of 2016 to Spring of 2017.  And part of my personal project procedure involves using drawings to help me visualize the characters in the story and begin to view them as real people, even when they most certainly aren’t real.  I even have this derfy Mickian idea that Paffoonies (those picture ideas that are inseparably fused to words) are essential to Mickian fiction.  (Mickian fiction= another frighteningly goofy idea that needs to go unexplained.)

Gingerbread Children

The book, Recipes for Gingerbread Children is about an old woman, a German immigrant and Holocaust survivor, who comes to a small Iowa town with a gift for story-telling and a gift for baking things, especially gingerbread cookies.

20160628_200505

Grandma Gretel Stein, seen in the Paffooney on the left, is the main character of the story.  She tells stories, mostly fairy tales, that have lessons about being true and faithful even in the face of great evil.  The fairy in her hand is General Tuffaney Swift, an immortal Storybook fairy who leads the army of the local fairy kingdom called Tellosia.    Gretel believes he is real  Honestly, she gets so into story-telling that her fairy friends seem absolutely real to her.  And who is to say that there aren’t little magical people living in a hidden kingdom among the cornfields in Iowa?  Gretel convinced me that they were real.  She even has a hand in making new fairies by the baking of gingerbread.  She gets a magical recipe from the fairy Erlking, a wise and magical being, and uses it to create living gingerbread boys and gingerbread girls.

C360ggg7

The gingerbread girl on the right is Anneliese, named after Gretel’s own daughter and decorated with frosting, food coloring, and gumdrops by the favorite story listener who constantly listens to Gretel’s stories and helps bake Gretel’s gingerbread, Sherry Cobble.

Sherry is a beautiful young eighth grade girl who reminds Gretel of her long-lost daughter.  Sherry has a twin sister named Shelly and they are identical twins, but Sherry not only looks like Anneliese once did, she acts like her with the same confidence and enthusiasm for life that Anneliese once had before the war.

Sherry and Shelly are both part of the Cobble family, who have a reputation locally as wacky-pants loonies because they believe firmly in being nudists and engaging in nature completely naked while not actually wearing any wacky pants.  I haven’t done any actual pictures of Sherry  in the nude, but if you look carefully at the first picture of her above and see clothing, then you are seeing things that are not there.  Yep, the girl bakes and decorates gingerbread men in the buff, wearing her pale pink birthday suit, even when the weather outside in Iowa makes that nonsensical.

Gingeyhousegg1n

So by now you can probably draw several conclusions about me as both a novelist and an illustrator.  #1, There is definitely something a little bit off about me.  #2, I haven’t said anything yet about this book having dead Nazis and a werewolf in it, even though I rarely talk about this book without throwing those things in somewhere.  #3, Number 2 is actually taken care of in a backhanded way if you are reading this whole list carefully.  #4,  This story is probably about things that really aren’t just gingerbread recipes.  #5, You should congratulate yourself if you read this far in this post.  You have unusual amounts of patience and curiosity, and an extremely high tolerance for levels of goofy that put actual Goofy to shame.

Leave a comment

Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, nudes, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor

March 26, 2017 · 3:23 pm

Three Books at Once

No, this isn’t some kind of multiple-book book review.  This is an ungodly silly claim that I can actually read three books at once.  Silly, but true.

Now I don’t claim to be a three-armed mutant with six eyes or anything.  And I am relatively sure I only have one brain.  But, remember, I was a school teacher who could successfully maintain a lesson thread through discussions that were supposed to be about a story by Mark Twain, but ventured off to the left into whether or not donuts were really invented by a guy who piloted a ship and stuck his pastries on the handles of the ships’ wheel, thus making the first donut holes, and then got briefly lost in the woods of a discussion about whether or not there were pirates on the Mississippi River, and who Jean Lafitte really was, and why he was not the barefoot pirate who stole Cap’n Crunch’s cereal, but finally got to the point of what the story was really trying to say.  (How’s that for mastery of the compound sentence?)  (Oh, so you could better?  Really?  You were in my class once, weren’t you.)  I am quite capable of tracking more than one plot at the same time.  And I am not slavishly devoted to finishing one book before I pick up the next.

I like reading things the way I eat a Sunday dinner… a little meatloaf is followed by a fork-full of mashed potatoes, then back to meat, and some green peas after that…  until the whole plate is clean.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson is the meatloaf.  I have read it before, just as I have probably had more meatloaf in my Iowegian/Texican  lifetime than any other meat dish.  It’s pretty much a middle-America thing.  And Treasure Island is the second book I ever read.  So you can understand how easy a re-read would be.  I am reading it mostly while I am sitting in the high school parking lot waiting to pick up the Princess after school is out.

fbofw1Lynn Johnston’s For Better or Worse is also an old friend.  I used to read it in the newspaper practically every day.  I watched those kids grow up and have adventures almost as if they were members of my own family.  So the mashed potatoes part of the meal is easy to digest too.

51+ETSVSDJL

So that brings me to the green peas.  Green peas are good for you.  They are filled with niacin and folic acid and other green stuff that makes you healthier, even though when the green peas get mashed a bit and mix together with the potatoes, they look like boogers, and when you are a kid, you really can’t be sure.  Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter wrote this book The Long War together.  And while I love everything Terry Pratchett does, including the book he wrote with Neil Gaiman, I am having a hard time getting into this one.  Parts of it seem disjointed and hard to follow, at least at the beginning.  It takes work to choke down some of it.  Peas and potatoes and boogers, you know.

But this isn’t the first time I have ever read multiple books at the same time.  In fact, I don’t remember the last time I finished a book and the next one wasn’t at least halfway finished too.  So it can be done.  Even by sane people.

3 Comments

Filed under book review, comic strips, education, goofy thoughts, humor, old books, philosophy, reading

Tagged as , , , , ,

March 20, 2017 · 3:12 pm

…In the Eye of the Beholder

20160530_145416

Meet Xandu, the Beholder… I can’t say he’s a bad guy, but only because he’s a giant floating head full of eyes, and doesn’t have the proper parts to be considered a guy.

Those of us who were nutty about playing Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980’s hear the phrase, “Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder” and we’re automatically thinking weird thoughts about Xandu, and maybe even questioning, “Which eye do you mean?”

Beholders have one big eye, and a lot of little ones equipped with death lasers, gazes of perpetual sleep, nausea looks, and fear-eyes that make you run away in terror.  With that kind of surreal right-brain crapola going on in my stupid old dungeon master’s head, it’s no wonder I might go into this discussion of the Beholder with monsters on the brain when I really intended to talk all along about this particular beholder;

tomi

Tomi Lahren is the darling of the right wing media, broadcasting her loud, angry racist-Barbie rants for Glen Beck’s lovely fear and hate smorgasbord known as The Blaze.  You can tell just by looking that she is a genetically German/Norwegian Midwesterner who could be an Iowegian if only she had had the good sense to be born in Iowa instead of the big bowl of blah that is Rapid City, South Dakota.  I know that may sound like some kind of reverse racism to say I can tell those things “just by looking”, but it isn’t, because I meant you can just look those things up on Wikipedia like I did.   To hear her shout her opinions on immigration in her closing segment called “Final Thoughts” you could swear she was channeling Donald Trump and lulling you into a stupor with her gaze of perpetual sleep power.    She is also known for giving San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick the nausea look for silently protesting racism and social injustice by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem.  And she reserves both the fear eye and the laser death eye for Black Lives Matter activists, calling them the equivalent of the KKK because…  Well, I can’t read minds, especially hard little white power minds that say “all lives matter” because they really want to say “black lives DON’T matter”.

But, honestly, I don’t dislike this blond beholder who is more than just a floating head full of evil eyes.  She was cute on The Daily Show talking to Trevor Noah.  And she used her indoor voice even when saying slightly racist things.  The two of them seemed almost friendly, though ideologically they are worlds apart.

landscape-1480609064-lahrenoah

And this is what we really need to see more of, the two sides of an issue actually being able to talk about issues acknowledging that each side has a right and a reason for the views they personally hold, and you can’t get the bugs out of the batter before you bake the cake if you don’t work together.  Lahren was even willing to be brave and appear on the liberal comedy talk show Real Time with Bill Maher where conservatives are often chewed up and spit out in front of a distinctly liberal audience.

But she is still a beholder.  She views the world through one big eye, one point of view, with little room for opposing viewpoints.  You will definitely have to decide for yourself as you enter the next dungeon room and come face to face with the beholder, which one is worth the roll of the dice to defeat, and which one you should run away from screaming like a little liberal snowflake girl.

 

 

 

 

1 Comment

Filed under angry rant, commentary, Dungeons and Dragons, goofy thoughts, Liberal ideas, politics

Tagged as , , ,

March 16, 2017 · 3:17 pm

The Lyrical Imperative

Creativity

I am always amazed by the fact that things which are inherently silent in nature make music in your mind.  Writing is like that for me.  Drawing is like that.  And so is photography.  That is an actual musical score from Chopin in the background.  My son recognized it from a book of piano pieces I bought for him because he reads music and can turn those squiggle-bugs on the fence into the right plinkety-plunks on a keyboard.  But there is more music in that picture besides.  The nude young girl at the keyboard softly rendered in velvety colored pencil tones is also musical in nature, for more than just the fact of fingers on a silent colored pencil keyboard.  The lyrical loops of black and yellow in the wings of the tiger swallowtail butterfly also make music in my head, sprightly piano music like Chopin’s, or possibly Vivaldi’s violins.

Did you listen to the music?  I don’t mean Vivaldi’s, although if you haven’t heard it, you certainly should.  I mean the music in the words.  The music has to be there for me for the writing to be good.  That’s why I consider Ray Bradbury and Walt Whitman to be masters and Stephenie Meyer and E. L. James to be unreadable hacks.  The beat and the flow of the words need to be patterned and patient and wily.   Do you not hear it in that last sentence? The alliteration of the first two adjectives set off by the counterpoint of the stressed-unstressed beats of the third?  How can I explain this?

Iambic pentameter is the true genius of Shakespeare’s plays.  What the heck is iambic pentameter, you ask?  Well, I realize you have probably never needed to teach poetry to seventh graders, a truly impossible but infinitely rewarding task.  So let me tell you.  Units of stress called iambs consist of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.  So naturally, if iambs are put into pentameter, then there must be five of them in a line of iambic pentameter poetry.  It is a simple, rhythmic way to say something profound and interesting.  The classic example is the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18;

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Translating that into X’s and O’s where X=stressed and O=unstressed;

O X O X O X O X O X

It’s simple, five oxes, all in a line.  Except that last one about oxes is actually O X O X X O O O O X, a less simple pattern, yet still organized on the beat.  Two iambs, a dactyl and an anapest.  Okay, now I am talking like a poetry geek, and I have to stop it before I hurt someone.

The whole point is, words should be musical, even when they are not the words to a song.  And now I must close on the verge of starting a ten-thousand word thesis.  I shall shut up now.  Here endeth the lesson.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under colored pencil, education, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, metaphor, music, Paffooney, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as , , ,

March 8, 2017 · 4:15 pm

The Centaur

Mythos

The centaur… Kentaur, Κένταυρος, Centaurus, Sagittary… human from the waist up,horse body from the waist down… I hate to break it to you, but the damned things are only imaginary.  There are no real ones anywhere.  Not even in Thessaly.    The half-horse children of Ixion and Nephele are totally made up by goofy story-tellers in the distant past.

And yet, what they actually represent in poems, plays, stories, and myths is a very real part of what it means to be human and what it means to be alive.

There are many centaurs in literature, going all the way back to the Greeks.  But my favorite depictions of the man-horses of literature occur in what are basically children’s books.  In the Chronicles of Narnia C. S. Lewis portrays centaurs as wise and noble, gifted at star-gazing, prophecy, healing,and warfare.  Aslan the Lion, the Christ-figure of the tales, relies on their steadfast faithfulness in his battles against evil and the White Witch.  In the Harry Potter books of J.K. Rowling, the centaurs live in the Forbidden Forest just outside of the Hogwarts grounds, always in hiding from the human world and shy, at least until Firenze comes Chiron-like to join the faculty, aid in the teaching of magic, and help in the struggle against the evil of Voldemort.  In the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, Chiron himself of Greek myth teaches the young heroes, though the rest of the centaurs you meet in the stories are very Dionysian and basically a bunch of drunken party boys… err… party horses… err… horseboys.

So essentially the centaur has a dual nature.  On the one hand they are cultured and learned and wise.  On the other hand, they are directly connected to the earth and the natural world, liking the sensual half of the human experience.  And it might be important to note… centaurs never wear pants… in fact, could never wear pants.

Centaur1

In Greek mythology, the Centauromachy, or war between the centaurs and the Lapiths, represents a central struggle in the human psyche.  The centaurs are pictured as being as wild as untamed horses.  They are sensual and willful and try to disrupt the wedding of Hippodamia to Pirithous, King of Lapithae by kidnapping Hippodamia and all the other Lapith women and girls.  It turns out badly for the centaurs because they represent unbridled sensuality without rules while the Lapiths (who are directly related to the centaurs as cousins) represent rules and rationality.  We all know how that is expected to play out in human society… so of course that is what happens in the myth.  The rational always rules in the end.

Disney centaur 2

So I identify strongly with the idea of the centaur.  The rational man-part guiding the sensual horse-part.  The whole teacher-y Chiron thing…  and getting to walk around naked… on four legs.  The centaur is a thing to draw and a thing to tell stories with and a thing to invade your dreams.  Part man, part horse, and totally unreal.

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, commentary, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism

February 22, 2017 · 12:06 pm

Doodlefox

c360_2017-02-21-18-13-43-545

While watching Netflix yesterday afternoon, a retirement activity that becomes the majority of my social life when the diabetes demons are eating me, I started doodling a fox.  It was a pencil doodle at first.  And I was not drawing from life.  I was drawing the fox in my head.  I suspect it was the fox from Antoine de Saint Exupery’s masterwork, The Little Prince.

2972da5d3eb623582852db74ddc9327e

Yes, that fox.  The wise one that knows about taming little princes, and loving them, and being reminded of them in the color of wheat fields.  I began to need that fox as my doodle pen uncovered him on the blank page.  There he was.  Surprised to see me.  Either he was leaping towards me in the picture, or falling down on me from the sky above.  I don’t know which.  But I realized I had to tame him by drawing him and making him as real as ever an imaginary fox could ever be.  You will notice he does not look like a real fox.  I did not draw him from a photograph, but from the cartoon eye in my mind where all Paffoonies come from.  And this was to be a profound Paffooney… a buffoony cartoony looney Paffooney.  It simply had to be, because that is precisely what I always doodle-do.

20170221_184619

And so he was a fox.  He was my doodlefox.  I had tamed him.  And then I had to give him color.  And, of course, the color had to be orange-red.

20170221_190927

And so, there is my fox.  Like the Little Prince’s fox he could tell me, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.  It is only with the heart that we can see rightly.”  And I put him in a post with lyrical and somewhat goofy words to give you a sense of what he means to me, in the same way one might explain what the thrill of the heart feels like when a butterfly’s wing brushes against the back of your hand.  Yes, to share the unknowable knowledge and the unfeelable feeling of a doodlefox.  A demonstration of precisely what a Paffooney is.

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, doodle, finding love, goofy thoughts, humor, metaphor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

February 18, 2017 · 4:33 am

The Dancing Poultry Conspiracy Theory

You’ve heard of the sinister 9-11 tale of the dancing Israelis?  Some conspiracy theories are very concerning.  You have to be concerned about whether the conspiracy theory is true and aliens from Zeta Reticuli really have been cloning Elvis, or whether the conspiracy theorist is a nut-bag like Alex Jones who simply needs to be locked up to protect him from himself.

 

But no conspiracy theory worries me more at the moment than one about the existence of German ninjas who advance the neo-Nazi agenda by the use of the secret martial art of der Ententanz.  That’s right, they do violence to opponents (and possibly themselves) by aggressively doing the Chicken Dance. 

You really have to watch the video above to truly appreciate the perfidy of Ententanz Fu.  Notice how it starts with the pinching-fingers castanet attack, useful for grabbing the opponent’s nose or other sensitive protruding appendage.  It is followed by the flapping elbows move that can stun the enemy by its sheer ridiculous flappiness.  And then the bouncing butt attack, which can potentially paralyze the adversary by bouncing them around the room.  All of this is followed by the dancing in a circle maneuver which renders the viewer unconscious with insane levels of laughter.  Yes, the aggressive use of the chicken dance can literally make you laugh yourself to death.

c360_2017-02-17-10-38-01-138

Now, if you truly believe I am not totally serious about the dangers of ninjas doing the chicken dance in order to assassinate ordinary tax-paying citizens, I should warn you…

I mean, most people think of Ententanz Fu as merely another way German-themed tourist traps like the ones in Fredricksburg, Texas make relentless fun and ridicule targets out of clueless white people during Oktoberfest, but in reality…  Yes, it is that, but it can be so much more.  Take it from somebody who narrowly escaped from a chicken-dance-induced coma fairly recently, it is possible not only to die laughing from this dancing-poultry scourge, or be embarrassed to death, but you can also accidentally tie yourself up into a German pretzel… at which point, chickens will dip you in mustard and eat you.

So be warned.  This is a danger not even Alex Jones on InfoWars has warned you about.  (Though, if you give him enough time alone with hammers to hit himself in the head with, he may come to the same conclusions soon enough.)

4 Comments

Filed under birds, conspiracy theory, goofiness, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, sharing from YouTube

Tagged as , , , ,

February 13, 2017 · 3:50 pm

The Curse of Being Creative

“Oh, I just hate you, you can draw so well!  I always wished I could draw like that.”

Yes, the perfect thing to hear when you are a twelve year old boy in the sixth grade, and you are hearing it from the girl in your class whom you most want to have a chance to see naked when you grow up.  Being smart, creative, and according to Alicia when we were twelve, “You’re so funny,” is not really as fun and wonderful as you might imagine.  There’s a downside to being highly creative.

creativity

First of all, there’s that.  Yes, the naked part of the illustration above.  An artist, especially one who also writes and knows how to write from the heart, makes himself or herself naked all the time.  The secret parts on the inside come out constantly.  You can’t have a private, embarrassing, or secret thought without it being obviously discernible somewhere in the artworks you create.  Even the perverted ones like the one about wanting to see Alicia naked when I was twelve.  If nakedness is one of things that is on your creative little mind even though it is the one thing that you wish really wasn’t there at all, guess which of the many things on your creative little mind is going to come out first.   Artists walk around naked in front of the world all the time, no matter how many clothes they put on.

10676187_666527206786670_8657747675349295247_23n

Secondly, you don’t seem to be able to think like normal people do.  Normal people are not divergent thinkers.  They are not constantly trying to stand on their head before looking at the world, connecting bizarre things together and seeing the world in constantly shifting and highly exotic colors.  I imagine normal people probably walk around all the time with Elton John tunes playing in their head, thinking only about what they ate for lunch and then posted pictures of on Facebook.  The lights are not always on in their attic, and they certainly don’t have ghost dogs and booger-men named Douglas playing noisy games of full contact tackle Parcheesi in there during the middle of the night.  They don’t have wake-up-sweating nightmares about being attacked by ducks with gigantic white dentures.

Kops aa

There are no Clowntown Kops throwing pies at them in their daydreams about rescuing naked Alicias from sinister bald villains with trained seals for evil minions.  Their minds go round and round on a single railroad track on an ordinary oval path.  Unlike my mind that is a multi-tracked switch yard where you have to approach going at least ninety miles and hour, losing a single car at every switch, nearly careening sideways off the track at least three times, and having to come together as a train on the other side, collecting all the cars again at high speed and chugging down the tracks to destinations unknown.

And it is all too easy to see the future when you are both creative and at least mildly perceptive.  I knew the Cubs were going to win the World Series.  I knew Trump would become our leader.  I still pray that I am wrong about the whole world-ending thing.

Being creative is not easy.  Sometimes it hurts more than it makes you laugh.  It leaves you naked and vulnerable.  It makes you think in abnormal ways that are studied by abnormal psychiatrists.  And it makes you see and understand things that you really wish you were still ignorant of.  But would I trade it for anything else?  Hmm… let me think about that one for a few more years.20161112_205317

 

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, autobiography, clowns, dreams, feeling sorry for myself, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

February 11, 2017 · 4:51 pm

The View From My Little Town

c360_2017-01-15-20-03-23-515

An aerial view of Toonerville in Winter 

As immigration officers round up school children and their families blocks from a school in North Carolina, Trump minion Flynn is being accused of violating the Logan Act over discussions with the Russians before Trump took office, and DeVos is being chased away from a Washington middle school by angry protesters who don’t want her sucking the intelligence out the students, I am reminded there are quieter places to go and get away from all the insane noise that is trying to kill us.  Thus I head back to Toonerville, my HO scale model train town that has been packed away since we moved to Dallas in 2004.  I have laid the downtown and part of the residential area out on a snowfield on the spare bed in my bedroom.

c360_2017-01-15-18-04-28-900

I am reminded, as I revisit Toonerville (with the Toonerville Trolley waiting down front from the train station), that I am a humor writer that writes about small town experiences and the teaching of children.  I am imaginative and creative, and I have working strategies for dealing with the stress and insanity caused by all the political baboons doing the politically-charged things that political baboons do baboonishly every baboon day.  There are places to go to get away from the Trump Circus’s endless monkey-house of horror.

C360_2017-01-16-09-12-30-851.jpg

In Toonerville, none of the clocks keep the correct time and none of them agree what time it is.  Certain things are timeless.  The village works together to solve its problems.  What the wits and twits who chew Red Man tobacco down at Al’s General Store think about politics never leaves the checkerboards in front of the fire place.  Mayor Moosewinkle at City Hall has no plans to run for State or Federal office.  (Thank God for that, he’s a nut.)  And officer Billy Bob Wortle, formerly from Texas, has never shot anybody of any color.  The County Sheriff doesn’t even trust him to own bullets for that big old gun of his.  As far as executive orders from Washington go, we mostly don’t give a damn.

c360_2017-01-16-09-13-01-861

Down at the Post Office, Mr. Murdoch the postman has never “gone postal” and wouldn’t hurt a fly.  He loves to gossip, though.  And Mr. Santucci, the hot-headed Italian owner-operator of the Farmer’s Market (who looks just like Santa Claus in the Coke ads, but is one very foul-mouthed Santa at Christmas time) secretly believes that it is the many differences between the various residents of town that keep life interesting.  And old Ben Johnson, the town’s only black man, is his very best friend.

c360_2017-01-16-09-13-23-480

It’s a truly good feeling to live in a small town where all the people bicker and throw fits, but no one would every want to throw anyone out of town.  People belong together, working for the common good.  And it is a rather sad thing if the only place such a town can exist is inside my goofy old head.  But if we bicker a little less and throw fits less often on the inside, won’t we be better people on the outside too?

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, commentary, compassion, goofy thoughts, humor, imagination, insight, inspiration, Paffooney, photo paffoonies, playing with toys, satire, strange and wonderful ideas about life, the road ahead