But however you look at it, pen and ink is fun.
Category Archives: humor
Pen and Ink Storytelling
Filed under artwork, autobiography, characters, humor, illustrations, Paffooney, pen and ink
I Sweetpotato What I Sweetpotato
If you are as goofy and cartoon-obsessed as me, you may remember that Popeye the sailor was known for the catchphrase, “I yam what I yam”. And if you do remember that, it will not surprise you that, when told a yam is another name for sweet potato, Popeye was furious. “It cannot be!” he argued. “I would not say I sweet potato what I sweet potato! That’s ridicumess!”
Well he has a point.
But I would like to talk today about the things that I sweet potato, and why I sweet potato those things.
First of all, I yam a humorist.
I yam this thing not because I am funny. You may think I yam funny because I say really goofy things for no apparent reason, and then keep on talking long enough to convince you that I did have a point to make, but my brain leans so far to the left that I am hardly right about anything.
And I make bad puns a lot.
You see, I have to use humor constantly to deal with all the hard things in life, because being too serious in the face of the world’s basic uncaring cruelty only leads to depression and taking a beating from life. In fact, I can think of any number of situations in my past where I avoided a beating only because I made a joke that made the bully laugh.
So, being a humorist is a survival tactic. Humor keeps you alive.
You see someone like me has to face all the pain and heartache and cruelty the world has to offer by using humor. The real reason is that, when faced with a bad situation, if the humor gland can’t empty itself of all the jokes it produces, it will begin to swell. The humor gland is located either in the brain or maybe in the behind (I am not medically qualified to tell you which it really is), and it can only swell to a certain point, and then it will explode. This is very bad thing for you, if you survive it, and certainly unpleasant for anybody nearby.
But the joke, properly launched at the target, will make somebody laugh, even if it is only the humorist himself. And laughter is the best medicine. Unless it kills you. You have to be careful not to die laughing. The angels will be offended, and the demons will all laugh too.
But I yam not only a humorist. I yam also a teacher.
I began to realize that I might be a teacher when, in graduate school to get a remedial master’s degree to help with the fact that plain English majors all starve to death, I discovered I had a talent for explaining things in simple terms. And then, immediately afterwards, I discovered I had an even greater talent for being ignored while the people I was explaining to made the mistakes they wouldn’t have made if only they had listened to me, before they failed spectacularly, and then realized how the solution I had explained would’ve made them succeed instead. There is apparently no better way to learn an important lesson.
Teaching is, of course, a pretty cool job. You tend to have the summers off. And you get paid for summer because they split the amount of money you earn for the year (which considering what a babysitter makes on average per child and per hour is far too little for the hours you put in) into twelve monthly pittances.
Of course you are expected to have a university degree (although no teacher college in the world can teach you what you really need to know in order to face that many little monsters… err, darlings… every day) and preferably some grad school, and a certification to teach in your chosen subject, and an additional certification if you are going to teach more than one subject (and ESL and Speech and Journalism, all of which I was expected to teach, are separate certifications) and you have to take hours of additional training every single year, and you have to get re-certified every five years, and… Well, you have to be basically smarter and much better-educated than Bill Gates… But the school janitor will probably be making more money per month than you do.
Anyway, it’s a job you just gotta love. I yam a teacher.
And really, there are a whole lotta yams in my basket yet that I could tell you about. I yam a Red Skelton fan. I yam sometimes a nudist (when I don’t have to put on clothes to keep myself from scratching all my psoriasis-plagued skin off). I yam also an artist (of the type known as a cartoonist). I yam pig-headed sometimes, and I yam Grumpy sometimes (so I go from being Porky to one of the Seven Dwarfs.) I yam a lotta things. And my sweet-potato basket is large.
But I can’t talk about all of my yams today. Too many yams are bad for my diabetes.
But here’s one last yam. I yam a storyteller. And I have a free Kindle e-book promotion this weekend. The book is the first in my series of AeroQuest books. It is a science fiction story with a humorous bent. And I mean, it is seriously bent in some places.
So, click on the link and get yourself a copy. It’s funny. And I will save the other sweet potatoes for another day.
Filed under humor, metaphor, novel writing, Paffooney, self portrait, writing teacher
The Making of a Paffooney
There is a certain amount of worry now in Mickeytown. My hands have begun to tremble. I see things that aren’t there. I have become excessively forgetful. Possibly Parkinson’s… but not diagnosed by a doctor yet.
Maybe it’s only paranoia… but that’s a Parkinson’s symptom too.
And it worries me because I need to be able to draw new Paffoonies. But it is definitely becoming harder.
Yesterday, when my computer was breaking down again, the scanner miraculously reconnected itself and began to work.
I scanned this old pen-and-ink drawing.
Do I know why I drew it, or what it is supposed to be about?
I do not.
But I can still swirl colored pencils and color within the lines, at least as well as I did when I was nine.
You may remember this one from yesterday,
Of course, forgetful me, I couldn’t remember where I had stored my best art pencils. I had to crack open the bag of old school pencils that I still have from my last hurrah as a Texas pedagogue (a word that means a teacher of children, not that other thing that the evil-minded ones among you were probably thinking.)
So, now I have a colored picture of a young-girl space traveler. What to do with it?
Like any old mad god who makes a girl come to life like this (old mad god of colored pencils, a little “g” god, not a blasphemous big “G” one,) I needed to name her and give her a story, a purpose in life.
So, I called her Cissy Moonskipper (a suitably satirical and comic sort of name playing off of Luke Skywalker.)
And I stranded her on a family-owned free-trader starship, alone in deep space. Her family is gone permanently. The ship has everything she needs to survive. She is a sole-survivor on a deserted island in deep space in an unexplored star system. And all she has is a starship owner’s manual and a copy of the novel Robinson Crusoe.
So, I added a background and now I have started a new book idea. That is essentially what a Paffooney is. Words and pictures by little ol’ me.
Filed under aliens, characters, humor, illustrations, new projects, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction
Cissy Moonskipper
She scrambled over the railing and made it hurriedly to her brother’s side. She scraped her right knee in the effort. He was lying where he fell in the middle of the arboretum. The sky portal was still open to the stars, especially Veda 257, the star whose system the ship was now a temporary part of. Bright starlight streamed in to nourish the food plants and her late mother’s flowers.
But when she reached Wosely Moonskipper, he was no longer alive. The Lupin’s slug-thrower had penetrated his energy shield and hit him in his stupid melon of a head.
“How could you do that to me, Wose? How could you leave your baby sister all alone aboard a starship going nowhere in an unexplored star system?”
Of course, the dummy didn’t answer. This was, however, the first time he had an actual good excuse for it.
She looked over at the smoking pile of debris that was all the derfbag Lupin space-werewolf left behind as Wosely had disintegrated him. Stupid Stardog pirate! He got what he deserved.
But, wait! The pirate had brought his vehicle aboard in order to try to get ahold of the Moonskipper family spacecraft.
She lamely spent a dozen extra minutes trying to get Wose to raise himself from the dead. But 53rd Century medicine didn’t work like that. Full resurrections had to be carefully planned ahead of time. Wose hadn’t planned in the early morning hours to accidentally allow a dog-headed alien pirate to come aboard and murder him. At least he had the good sense to shoot back before he went down. No telling what would’ve become of twelve-year-old Cissy if he hadn’t.
Then she went to inspect the Lupin’s remaining possessions. In the docking bay she found the little two-man space skiff, an anti-gravity pod with a sub-light engine. A wonderful thing to have if she hadn’t lost Wose. the only one who could drive the thing. That was the good thing about old Wose. At thirty-five he knew how to build, fix, or repair practically anything that could travel in space.
That was the next problem to think about. She was alone on the starship now. Since Mom died and her father went so crazy with grief that Wose had to maroon him on that jungle moon seven months ago to prevent him from flying the ship into the heart of the nearby star, they had simply wandered. Nobody remaining on board knew how to navigate other than randomly drifting from star system to star system by line of sight.
Food was no problem. The arboretum produced all the organic matter they needed to create food from the replicator. And Wose had taught her how to scoop fuel from the outer levels of the clouds in a gas-giant. But how was she going to pilot the thing? And what would she do when something broke down?
She was moping about in the bridge when she happened to open the right storage drawer in the captain’s table. There were two books inside that immediately caught her eye.
She grinned to herself. She still had to see to Wose’s funeral. But she was grateful that Mom had taught her to read. She now possessed the ship’s owner’s manual that explained enough about everything to make life on a starship possible, and a copy of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
Filed under aliens, humor, irony, Paffooney, science fiction, short story
Magical Thinking
People accused of doing magical thinking are basically being accused of doing something awful. Like Republicans telling us that if we cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, working class and middle class citizens will prosper because of it. Of course, they actually know better. So, it isn’t really magical thinking. It is really evil magical thinking.
But when I am actually guilty of magical thinking, it is more along the lines of me pinning my hopes on an intuition brought about by calculations in my overcrowded imagination that are probably horribly miscalculated but that I need to turn out to be accurate and miraculously pull me out of my current difficulty. And then, because I intuit really, really hard… it turns out all right.
Magic is after all, merely what we call science and situations where something amazing is created, but we have no idea at all how and why.
Our movies nowadays are really quite chock full of magical thinking. Wish-fulfillment, fantasy, and violence-laden revenge stories are what fill the cinema with seekers of escapism and relaxation. That is magical thinking of an epic sort. Go see the Black Panther movie and “Wakanda forever” solves racism.
So, what is the point of this little essay? What am I actually thinking about the subject of magical thinking? Well, I needed a topic today to keep my every-day-in-April posting goal alive. And magically…
Filed under fairies, humor, magic, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
AeroQuest 4… Canto 137
Canto 137 – Wild Ride
Gyro was no ordinary Nebulon.
Nebulons, known to many in the Imperium as “Space Smurfs” for reasons long forgotten, were the child-like blue people who inhabited deep space in their living starships. Many thought the blue skin, yellow hair, and red apple cheeks showed evidence they were not just humanoids, but human space travelers mutated by the exotic radiations of the nebulae where Earthers and other humans had first discovered them.
Gyro had the red cheeks, the blue skin, and the bright yellow hair, but he also had qualities that were extremely rare in Nebulons. For one thing he was a Psion, a being with the right brain mutation to perform powerful brain functions that seemed like magic to the ordinary space traveler.
His own special psionic ability was even rarer than the usual Psion. He could not only use telepathy, but use the power of his “inner eye” to see and alter the molecular structure and overall organization in any finite piece of matter.
In other words, he could change lead into gold with the power of his mind alone. To Gyro it was just a matter of pushing the funny little atomic balls into new configurations in the creative imaginings of his “inner eye”.
Being a Psion inside the borders of the Galactic Galtorrian Imperium, the so-called “Thousand Worlds”, was a dangerous enterprise. The Imperials were so afraid of psionic powers and what they believed they could do, that having psionic power brought an immediate death sentence.
That was the reason that when Gyro and his family, and Billy Iowa, also a Psion, had to leave the Pan Galactican Union, they had journeyed eventually to the distant world of Gaijin to find the master of Psionics, the White Spider, Ged Aero. Ged Aero-sensei had taken in both boys, given them a home, and taught them how to master the powers of the “inner eye”.
So that was the reason that Gyro now sat on the planet Cornucopea beside a huge dead bug and pondered the possibilities of escape for himself and Billy. Ged Aero-sensei and his White Spider Mutant Space Ninjas had come as explorers to the planet, and run afoul of the living plants, specifically the Throckpods, who inhabited it.
As Gyro and Billy had been heading back to base camp, they were attacked by a large group of the ugly sentient flowers and their pet gargantuan dragonfly.
Billy, being a good student of Ged-sensei’s Martial Arts training, delivered a jump-kick to the chitinous face plate of the dragonfly that put a hole in it, driving his foot right into the thing’s syrupy brain tissue. It dropped dead next to them as Throckpods moved menacingly around them in a huge circle of weed.
“We are totally cut off,” said Billy. “And I think they mean to kill us.”
“They’re flowers! Flowers can’t eat people… can they?” asked Gyro nervously.
“They are intelligent flowers. How can you know what they eat and don’t eat? Especially after Sara told us about how they tried to take all of her blood?” asked Billy in return. His Dakota-Sioux features scrunched up into a frown. “I am at the height of my power. Let them come! In a sacred manner I resist them until my very last breath! It is a good day to die!”
Gyro’s eyes got wider. It was a very Native American sort of thing for Billy to say, but Gyro didn’t really want to hear it.
“You give me a few minutes to think,” said Gyro, “and I will find a way out of this mess.”
Billy resolutely turned to frown at the approaching grove of ugly flowers.
Gyro looked all around, and finally settled on the dragonfly. In some ways, the huge insect already resembled an anti-grav cycle. It wouldn’t take very much manipulation to…
Gyro’s imagination started turning chitin into glass-steel. The dragonfly’s bowels were easy to shape into a small fusion-powered engine. The blood only had to be separated to get the hydrogen necessary for fuel. With a few pops and crackles and one big POOM, they had a working grav cycle.
As Throckpods started throwing thorns, and Billy swatted them out of the air with Wushu defensive strikes, Gyro revved the engine and pulled Billy onto the upholstered seat behind him.
“Time to bug out!” said Gyro with a huge blue grin. The grav cycle immediately and silently lifted into the air on anti-grav repulsor lifts. Then, with a roar, they zoomed skyward, not only out of the reach of Throckpods and thorns, but also out of reach from the devilish dragonflies that were swarming towards them from somewhere in the eastern sky.
“I guess it’s a good thing you can change stuff like that,” said Billy, holding tightly onto his Texas sombrero, “but if you had never made that stink-language translator, maybe we would’ve never got into this mess.”
“I don’t think the translator is the big problem,” said Gyro. “These flowers seem to have an agenda that doesn’t include looking pretty and smelling nice. I think they don’t like us as plant-eaters and potential invaders. After all, this is their world.”
“Okay,” said Billy. “Get us back to camp and Ged Aero-sensei, and I’m all for leaving this dirtball to the plants!”
“Yeah, um… maybe you better teach me how to fly this thing first.”
“Oh, Smurf! You made the thing.”
“Yeah, well… Hang on to your hat, then!”
They managed to fly a haphazard corkscrew pattern on their way back to camp. It was unbelievably dangerous and life-threatening. But the boys made it back safely and walked away from the crash. And Gyro had some real fun with his driving skills.
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction
Astronuts in Spacetime
I have always cherished science fiction. Not just Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Not just Star Trek and Star Wars. But all of it. Buck Rodgers, Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford, Galaxy Quest, Mars Attacks, and E.T.
Space is important to me. I feel like all of mankind will be a failure as a species if they don’t start moving out amongst the stars.
It’s not just that I am ensorcelled by the magical adventures that space-travel stories mixed with a romantic view of facing existential danger with a smile and a ray-gun can provide.
I watched with wide 12-year-old eyes when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon for the very first time.
That was all the way back in 1969!
I am disappointed that my George-Jetson expectations of life in 2021 have not even remotely been met.
Sure, computers are great. But where are the flying cars? The fishbowl helmets for walking on the Moon? Personal jetpacks to get to school and back?
It isn’t the dreamers, it’s the doers that have let me down.
And I know we could well run the risk of meeting something out there that might want to eat us.
But are we truly alive anymore if we are afraid to risk death in the face of Space Exploration and Discovery? We are not immortal. We need to achieve things that outlast us to justify our existence.
So, come on, people! Let’s make the world over again and start building cities on Mars.
Let’s start building what we have dreamt of rather than hiding from what we fear!
Filed under aliens, humor, inspiration, science fiction, self pity
My Version of Fantasy Art
All of today’s artwork was uploaded to this blog before the start of 2015.
Filed under artwork, humor, Paffooney, surrealism
Black Humor
I think I know what you’re thinking. He’s just going to retell a bunch of Eddy Murphy, Richard Pryor, and Flip Wilson jokes from the 1970’s which his fuzzy old-coot memory will get wrong in slightly amusing ways. Or he’s got dementia now and has turned totally racist. Or both.
Well, maybe. I am old after all.
But, no. I am writing about that kind of humor where you laugh when someone in the story dies a horrible death in an unusually humorous way. Or most dead-baby jokes. Or the part of “The Producers” where “Springtime with Hitler” turns out to be a Broadway hit musical even though the two con men in charge were gambling on it being a failure.
Bad things can be funny, you know.
At least if you have a brain-damaged sense of humor like mine.
Kurt Vonnegut was a master of very dark black humor. In his novel, Cat’s Cradle, (Spoiler alert!) the world ends at the end of the novel because the mad scientist commits suicide by swallowing his invention, Ice Nine, freezing solid in a way that couldn’t be melted at room temperature or above, and then falling into the ocean, thus permanently freezing the entire planet Earth. Golly, what a laugh fest!
Black humor is, of course, highly dependent on dramatic irony and the fact that people smart enough to read and enjoy Vonnegut, usually are smart enough to realize if you read too much ironic humor you are not in danger of actually rusting from the brain outward.
I, of course, am a black humor aficionado of sorts. I thoroughly enjoyed all the torture, death, and deadly mistakes of Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder. Of course, I had a ridiculously hard time gaining access to the show which originally aired on the BBC and didn’t appear on American TV channels until our household gave up television to save money due to ever-rising cable costs.
Fortunately, during the yearlong imprisonment of the Covid pandemic, I discovered the entire series available on Hulu which is cheap enough to stream on my laptop. Only in excess of 500,000 people had to die for me to get the chance to binge on all the historical reiterations of this amazingly dark show full of humorous English demise and occasional accidental murder.
So, that is what black humor is to me. As defined by Professor Wilson at Iowa State when I was assigned to read a novel by Saul Bellow and ended up reading three, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, and The Adventures of Augie March. Of course, I am not sure which novel was the assignment. They were all deadly hilarious. And I am, after all, old enough to probably be demented and a closet racist. Is Saul Bellow Jewish? I ask because I am also forgetful.
Dippy Duck Dreams
The hardest dream-to-reality connection to make is my duck nightmare. I know I bummed the world out yesterday with unfunny dream deliberations. But in this post I explore the lighter side of nightmares. It all began when I was about four years old and we went to the Deer Park Zoo in Mason City, Iowa.
Truthfully, when you look at it from the proper point of view, at four you are small and all animals look like monsters. The three ostriches they had in a chicken-wire pen were at least several hundred feet tall. The deer were huge with giant Bambi-eyes. I was little and still very much in a touchy-feely stage of life. And the goose-pen had a large hole in the front, just large enough for a goose head and neck to fit through at high speed. That is exactly what happened when one wide-eyed nerd-child wandered close enough to give a gander a premium chance at a beak-first goosing. Whether my pants had to be changed immediately afterwards is something I have yet to work up the courage to ask my parents about. No rush. They are only in their eighties now.
Anyway, I was left with a recurring nightmare, always involving a duck or very similar waterfowl with big, massive, white dentures. Yes, you heard right, a duck with teeth. It’s all right for you to laugh now, but I woke up in cold sweat every single time I had that nightmare. Right from the moment when I realize that the evil little duck-mind has fixed its wishes on taking a nice, big bite, to the split second where the toothy duck-head zips towards me, I am gripped with total existential terror. And it wakes me up.
So what does this doozy of a dream mean? Do dreams have to have a meaning? All two-hundred-plus times? (I lost count, so sue me.) I do believe, however that it must be some kind of anxiety dream. And the last occurrence was now four years ago, so the possibility of duck-dream remission is very real to me.
If my last post chilled your innards, then hopefully this one lit them up with laughing gas.
This closing Paffooney from yesterday is entitled “The Leap of Faith”. I’m not sure why that is important to know, but it is.
Catch a Falling Star 