Category Archives: humor

January 29, 2019 · 3:47 pm

When the Captain Came Calling… Canto 4

Canto Four – Machine Shed Blues

Valerie was thinking about chores when she wandered out to the machine shed.  She hadn’t gone into the house yet for a reason.  Feed the chickens and check for eggs.  Put fresh water in the water bottles.  God, she hated Mr. Boofoo chickens!  …Err… un-cool chickens.  The ones that were going to peck at her for checking their nests were all Mrs.  But the other part fit.   Lingering outside meant she didn’t have to march out to the chicken house immediately.  She’d get it done… just not yet.

As she wandered into the machine shed, she saw her Daddy there, leaning up against the combine.  The engine housing was up and various parts were laid out on the white concrete floor in a very careful rainbow of different size pieces, bolts, and screws.  Kyle was leaning up against the combine with a paper in his hands.  He stared at it with red eyes.  Had he been crying or something?  It looked like a bill, this paper that seemed to be making him sad.  Then, he suddenly wadded the thing up into a ball and pitched it across the shed.   It plinked off the corrugated tin wall and banked directly into the empty barrel there.  Two points!  But it did not make him happy.  Then he noticed Val was watching him.

“Oh, hi, Princess.   You are looking lovely tonight.”  His face was happier by a mile and a quarter, but the redness of his eyes still showed.

“Is something wrong, Daddy?”

“Of course not.  You haven’t done your chicken chores, though, huh?”

“Well, not yet…   I will go in a minute.  I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Oh?  What about?”

That was the thing.  What about?  She didn’t really have a what about.  She just sensed that she needed to talk to him.

“You know how everyone thinks Pidney Breslow is going to be a great football player this year?”

“Yeah.  The big goof is just a freshman and he’s already made the varsity team.  What about him?”

She had to say something fast… but that usually meant saying something stupid because she couldn’t think fast.

“Do you think he would make a good boyfriend for me?”

“You are ten, Princess.  He’s fifteen or sixteen, isn’t he?”

“I’m eleven.  Mom is younger than you are.”

“Only by two years.  Not as big a deal.”

“You don’t like Pidney?”

“I like him fine.   But you are ten.   Any boy who thinks he’s going to be your boyfriend will have to get past two bear traps, some electric fencing, and my shotgun loaded with rock salt.”

“Why rock salt?”

“It won’t kill him, but it will sting like hell.”

“Oh.”

“Besides, don’t Pidney and that girl Mary Phillips already have a thing going on?  They are always together.”

“They are best friends.  They live next door to each other.  More like brother and sister.”

Kyle laughed.  “Pid’s a red-blooded American boy.  They may say friends to each other, but when they are alone together, well…  Dagwood Phillips needs to have some rock salt in his shotgun for that.”

“Nobody’s gonna shoot Pidney are they?  I mean, I think I am in love with him.”  There may have been a look of terror on Valerie’s face at that point.   She really wasn’t sure.

“No, Princess.   No one is really going to shoot him.  It’s just a joke that fathers say whenever they are thinking about their daughters and young men.  Besides, I never figured I’d have to shoot Pid anyway.  I always reckoned it was more likely to be somebody like that Murphy brat.”

“You’d shoot Danny?”  She wasn’t sure how she felt about that one.

Kyle laughed.  He walked over to his daughter, put his big greasy hand on her neck and gently pulled her face up next to his heart.

“I love you, Princess.   I would never intentionally do something to break your heart.  But I will do everything I can to protect your heart from being broken.  Just try not to like the boys I might have to shoot for something, okay?”

He said that last with a laugh that told her he loved her and was only playing with her.  Daddy was her real handsome Prince.                                                                                                

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January 28, 2019 · 5:41 pm

Here is My Heart

Yesterday I posted another maudlin doomsday post. I probably gave you the opinion that all I do with my time is mope around and think about death. And maybe write a little creepy black Gothic poetry. But that’s not me. I am a lover of the humor in stories by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Kurt Vonnegut. I am a former teacher that managed to teach the entire zoological range of possible middle school and high school students in Texas and did it without being convinced to hate them rather than love them. Yes, my heart is full of mirth and love and memories of weird kids and troubled kids and kids that could melt the meanest of hearts.

My passion is writing fictional stories about the kids I have taught, including my own three, and setting it in a fictionalized version of my little town, the place in Iowa where I grew up. And I put them in plots of impossible fantasy and science fiction in a way that can only be explained as surrealism.

Nobody reads my books. So far, at any rate.

But that isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that, despite my illness and deteriorating quality of life, my books now actually exist. I put off being a full-time writer for 33 years as I finished my teaching career. A writer has to have something to write about. So, teaching came first.

Writing novels was always the ultimate goal, however. I am a story-teller. The story itself is in the very center of my heart.

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Filed under autobiography, cartoony Paffooney, humor, Iowa, kids, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, surrealism, teaching, telling lies, writing

January 27, 2019 · 6:01 pm

Impending Darkness

I recently learned from the eye doctor that I may be at the doorstep of glaucoma, a disease that darkened my grandmother Beyer’s vision and connection to the light.

I am doing some serious editing now on my completed manuscript, Sing Sad Songs. There is serious foreshadowing going on in this novel. I think I mentioned once or twice before that I only rarely write a comic young adult novel without having some important character dying at the end. Death and dying and going blind are all on my mind.

News on the global warming front is increasingly bleak. Temperatures are rising faster than predicted. The date cited for the end of life on Earth is now 2030 (possibly within the scope of my lifetime if I get luckier than I have been on past health issues). The outlook is bleak and getting bleaker. Soon there has to be an absolutely miraculous technological or cultural revolution to help the optimists prove themselves right, a thing that they are totally not good at.

The government seems increasingly incapable of helping with anything, even though some of us are paying increasingly large tax bills that we can’t afford. (I do realize some of you who are not on a fixed income actually got a small benefit from Republican tax cuts. Did that solve your financial problems?) It increasingly looks like the corrupt clown show currently in charge is blowing themselves up. We stand to get a whole new government soon that is marginally better at best. So, we are, as a society, marching forward into the darkness with neo-fascist, goose-stepping zeal.

I am not saying that I have no hope. My grandmother got help and never went completely blind. There are breakthroughs happening all the time in science and sociology. But the darkness in my personal future is growing ever closer. And I have less and less control over its advance.

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Filed under angry rant, autobiography, battling depression, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney

January 25, 2019 · 1:20 am

The Bottle Imp Implementation

I gave you a list of places where my ideas for fiction come from, and in the end, I failed to explain the thing about the bottle imp. Yes, I do get ideas from the bottle imp. He’s an angry blue boggart with limited spell powers. But he’s also more than 700 years old and has only been trapped in the bottle since 1805. So, he has about 500 years of magical life experience to draw from and answer my idea questions. Admittedly it would be more helpful if he were a smarter imp. His name is Bruce, and his IQ in human terms would only be about 75. But, then, I don’t have to worry about misfired magic. If I asked him to, “Make me a hamburger,” he wouldn’t immediately change me into a fried, ground-beef patty because he is not smart enough to do that high of a level of magic spell.

But he is just barely intelligent enough to tell me a truthful answer if I asked him a question like, “What would happen if I put an alligator’s egg in a robin’s nest as a joke, and the robin family decided it was their own weird-looking egg and then tried to hatch it?” The answer would be truthful according to his vast knowledge of swamp pranks. And it would also be funny because he’s too dumb to know better. In fact, he told me about a mother robin who worked so diligently at hatching an alligator egg that a baby alligator was hatched. She convinced it that it was actually a bird. And when it came time for the baby birds to learn to fly, the baby alligator couldn’t do it… until she talked it into flapping madly with all four legs. Then, a mother’s love and faith in her child got an alligator airborne.

Yeah, that hasn’t proved to be a very useful story idea. I put it into a story I was writing during my seven years in high school, and then lost the manuscript. (I was a teacher, not a hard-to-graduate student.) But it was proof that you can get your writing ideas from a bottle imp.

So, if you decide to use bottle imps as an idea source for fiction, the next step is to find and acquire the right sort of bottle imp. I got mine from Smellbone, the rat-faced necromancer. I bought it for an American quarter and three Canadian loonies more than a dozen years ago. I found it at his Arcana and Horse-Radish Burger Emporium in Montreal. But I am not sure how that information helps you. Smellbone died in a firey magical-transformation accident involving an angry Wall-Street financier and a dill pickle. The whole Emporium went to cinders in an hour.

If you are going to try to capture the bottle imp yourself, which I strongly do not recommend, you are going to need a magical spell-resistant butterfly net, a solid glass jar, bottle, or brass urn. A garlic-soaked cork to fit the bottle. A spell scroll ready to cast containing at least one fairy-shrink spell. And an extremely limited amount of time to actually think about what you are doing.

Now I have told you how I get writing ideas from a bottle imp. Aren’t you glad I did not include this idea in the post about where ideas come from? After all, I am a fiction writer. I get my jollies from telling lies in story form. And bottle imps, especially angry blue bottle imps named Bruce, or Charlie, or Bill, are more trouble than they are worth. They can curse you with magical spells of infinite silliness and undercut your serious nature for a lifetime.

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January 22, 2019 · 4:29 pm

When the Captain Came Calling… Canto 3

Canto Three –Discovery Doesn’t Happen Without Risk

Leaving the Ghost House, Valerie waited until Conrad Doble had left.  She didn’t like old King Leer looking at her.  She would’ve been happier if Pidney had stayed around a bit longer.  Not only could he protect her, but she really liked looking at Pidney’s broad shoulders and cute behind.  But Pidney left when Mary left.   She didn’t have to worry for too long though about being alone with Conrad.  He left shortly after Pid and Mary.  Danny Murphy and Ray Zeffer were both still there.

“You wouldn’t mind if we walked you home, huh, Val?” asked Danny.

She looked out the cellar doorway where Conrad had just disappeared.  “It would be kinda good to have two guys around when I have to go back home and that creepazoid is around somewhere.”

“We promised Pidney a long time ago that we would look out for you,” said Ray.

“I don’t really know you very well, Ray.  Why do you wanna help me?”

“We are like second cousins or something,” said Ray.  “Grandma says there are connections between the Zeffers and the Clarkes.  Back a couple of generations maybe.”

“Besides,” said Danny, “You may only be ten years old, but you are so beautiful.  We’d do anything for you just because of that.”

“That’s kinda sexist, ain’t it? You know my mom and I are both feminists, right?”

“Maybe,” said Ray, shoving Danny for having been so stupid.  “But it is entirely true.”

She looked at him then… really studied him for a moment.  Ray Zeffer, tall and thin, was nice to look at too.  He had big brown eyes like a deer…  Bambi’s eyes.  Those eyes could look soulfully through you like x-ray eyes.  He could see Valerie’s heart inside her ribcage.  She shivered ever so slightly because of those big Bambi eyes.  But those eyes were sad.  Something about the way those eyes looked at you told you that something deeply sad and soul-searing had touched Ray. She was fairly sure his mother hadn’t been killed by hunters though.

“Let’s go then.  If you walk me to the north edge of town, that will be good enough.”

“You skated in all the way from the farm?” asked Danny.

“Walked to town,” she answered.  “You can’t use the board on the gravel roads.  It is only two miles.”

“That’s still a long way,” said Ray.  “But if you don’t mind, we’ll walk you all the way home.”

“I don’t mind.  You are both very sweet to do it.”

                                                              *****
The walk along the gravel roads had been pleasant.  The rocks and sand crunched under your sneakers in a way that was reassuring.  Your feet were firmly on the earth when you walked on the gravel.  No danger of floating away into some dream world.   And the sound the gravel made could warn you of oncoming cars both ahead of you, and behind.  Stalking King Leers too.  They couldn’t sneak up on you without being heard.

“That farm place there is where I live with Daddy and Momma,” said Valerie.  She looked at Ray.

“We know where you live,” said Danny.  “We all three have lived in this town all our lives.”

“Oh, yeah, I know that,” said Val sheepishly.  She didn’t want to be awkward in front of Ray.

“It’s a nice farm,” said Ray.  “Your dad must work hard with so many acres to till.”

“Yeah, he’s pretty busy in the spring, summer, and fall.  He should be in the fields now picking corn, unless he’s finished all the corn that survived the hail in August.”

“I’d be in the fields now, too,” said Ray sadly, “except my dad passed away two years ago.  We just rent our land out now, Mom and me.”

Val knew about Ray’s father.  He had passed away in the Summer of ’82 from a heart attack while driving his tractor in a field down by Dows, Iowa.  Maybe that’s why Ray looked so sad all the time.

“Do you miss it?” asked Danny.  “The field work, I mean?”

“Not really.  Being a farmer is a hard job.  It’s like you are never done working.”

“Danny wouldn’t know,” said Valerie with a mocking grin.  “His dad works in an office in Belle City.  He counts beans or something.”

“He’s an accountant,” said Danny frowning fiercely.  “Bean-counter is a nick-name for an accountant.  He doesn’t actually count beans!”

“What does he really count, then?” asked Ray.

“Payrolls and prices and ledgers and stuff… I think,” said Danny.  “But I have done field work!  You know I walked beans the past two summers, Val!  You walked ‘em too!”

“Ack!  I hate walking up and down the rows with a hoe, pulling button weeds and chopping rogue corn!” said Ray.

“I like it,” said Valerie laughing.  “I pretend some of the weeds are people I don’t like or who have made fun of me.  I grab ‘em by the throat and yank their little fat heads off, or I chop them in two with the hoe.  Besides, walking beans is how I got to see Danny naked last summer.”

Danny was seriously blushing now.  If Val hadn’t killed him with embarrassment before, this was sure to do the job now.

“Tell me about it,” said Ray with a chuckle.

Danny was hesitant, but certainly didn’t want Valerie to tell it.  “Well, er…  I made a bet with my cousin from Clarion about who could clear out the thistle patch in his row faster.   The loser had to do the next two rows stark naked, with the winner holding on to the clothes.  I didn’t know anybody could chop thistles that fast.”

“After two rows in the sun with that white skin of his,” said Valerie, “he was red all over… just like a cherry… even in places a person should never be sunburned.”

All three of them laughed about it and Danny didn’t even die of embarrassment.  Almost, but not quite.

“We’re here,” said Val at last.  “Thank you for walking me home.  You are both gentlemen, and very gallant.”

“What does gallant mean?” asked Danny.

“Like a white knight,” said Ray, “protecting the princess from evil.”

“Are we white knights?” asked Danny, looking directly at Val.

“One white knight and one cherry red jester, I think.” 

Danny grinned again.  Ray laughed.  It was good to hear Ray laugh.  Some people simply need to laugh more.                                                                  

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January 20, 2019 · 7:27 pm

Harvey Comic Books


“Joker”, a harlequin jack-in-the-box logo for Harvey

When I was a kid old enough to begin to see and interact with the real world in the tragic and magical 1960s, the first comic books available to me, long before my parents would allow me to pick up and buy Spiderman and Batman and (shudder) comics with monsters in them, were the kid-friendly comics of the Harvey Brothers.

Now, you have to understand that Harvey Comics had been around since the 1940s and made their money on characters licensed first from the Brookwood Publications company that Alfred Harvey bought out in 1941 to provide the building, equipment, and publishing personnel to start producing comic books.

Robert B. Harvey and Leon Harvey joined the company to help produce titles they now owned the rights too like Black Cat, the Shield, Shock Gibson, and Captain Freedom.

…………………………………………Of course, most of those characters didn’t last very long. Black Cat was the only title still being published by Harvey in the 1950s.

They would go on to license characters from Famous Studios, the animated cartoon works of Max Fleischer and his brother Dave. That’s when the kid- friendly, parent-approved comic books of Fleischer creations like Casper the Friendly Ghost opened up the world of comic books to seven-year-old Mickey circa 1963.

In spite of this cover art, Casper rarely wore clothing.

Now, it is probably obvious that there are many ways that Harvey Comics influenced me as a storyteller later in life. It goes without saying that my dedication to childish humor in stories derives from this comic-book source. The cuteness of characters is another necessity of comic storytelling gleaned from these ripe fields of baby faces. And stories advanced by magical means and absurd sidetracks also come from here. But did you ever notice that Casper and the other ghosts all perform in the nude? Yes, I think my childhood longing to be a nudist began with Casper’s naked adventures. But unlike Casper, my urges along those lines were suppressed and repressed by parents and society as a whole. So watching Casper and Spooky and Pearl (Spooky’s goilfriend) romp naked through comic book hijinks were a sublimated substitution for that childhood desire. (Sure, none of them had genitals, but it wasn’t about that.)

…………………………………………….Of course, there were many other Harvey characters to enjoy that actually did wear clothes. I was particularly fond of Hot Stuff because he made such an art out of burning things and being a bad kid and roasting the backsides of fools and hypocrites with his trident. And he only ever wore a fireproof diaper, so he was almost a nudist too.

There were many other characters licensed by Harvey as well, including Felix the Cat, Little Audrey, Baby Huey, and the characters from Walter Lance Studios like Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, and Chilly Willy.

Dell would later take over the comic book rights to Walter Lantz Studios creations.

So, now you know the true story of how my innocent childhood was warped and woven and corrupted by the characters of Harvey Comics.

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January 19, 2019 · 5:11 pm

Hidden Kingdom (Chapter 2-adding page 9)

To see the complete Chapter 1, use the following link;https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2018/11/24/hidden-kingdom-chapter-1-complete/

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January 15, 2019 · 5:04 pm

When the Captain Came Calling… Canto 2

Canto Two – Bait Worth Biting On

Describing the feeling of entering the Ghost House for the first time would prove quite difficult for Valerie when she tried to do it later on in Miss Bierstadt’s class for an English essay assignment.  But at the moment she crawled through the Tunnel of Doom, she would’ve described it as a feeling in her belly like eating a bowl of iced earthworms and trying to find a place to throw up in a jungle full of man-eating plants that smelled an awful lot like marigolds or something.  It was that kind of combination of anticipation, bad smells, icky things to see and touch, and the sensory deprivation of entering a candle-lit darkness from the bright September world outside.

“Welcome, Miss Valerie Clarke,” said freshman football hero and huge Polish hunk Pidney Breslow.  Valerie was deeply in love with the square-shouldered giant, and sincerely hoped he would be the leader of this Pirate club.

“Hello,” she said, almost timidly.

“You are just in time for the first official meeting of the reforming Norwall Pirates’ Club,” said Mary Philips brightly.   Mary had extended the official invitation to Valerie to come here, although Val didn’t really know why.  Mary had said that she didn’t want to be the only girl in the club, but why would a girl like Mary want to be in a boys’ club?  She had a bad feeling that the high school freshman girl also had her cap set for winning Pidney as a boyfriend.  But, plain-looking as Mary was, Val was only mildly concerned.

A quick look around as Danny Murphy crawled in after her revealed the other boys in attendance at the secret meeting.  Ray Zeffer, another high school freshman was there.  He was kinda handsome in a way, too, but he was always so sad-looking with those big puppy-dog brown eyes of his.  He had a neatly combed mess of jet black hair too, which was also attractive.  Val could easily learn to like this club.

The other boy, a high school junior, was kinda creepy.  His name was Conrad Doble.  He was the only one at the meeting who had been a member of the original Norwall Pirates.  He was tall and thin, with lank blond hair that hadn’t had a haircut in too long.  He had a distinct problem with facial Acne.  And he insisted on leering at Valerie, like he wanted to take a bite or two and eat her up.  For the first time Val understood why he had the semi-Shakespearian nickname of King Leer.

“You know that re-forming the Pirates is a sucky idea, right?” said Doble, leering at Mary Philips for the moment.   “There’s no way to go back to those things.  Milt Morgan had all the ideas and told us what to do.  Brent Clarke was the leader and made the ideas happen.  How are we gonna fight werewolves or undead Chinese wizards without them?”

“You know that those adventures were mostly lies and fairy tales,” Mary said.

“Still, who will be the wizard?  And who will be the leader?”  Doble glared at Mary accusingly.  “I actually saw the werewolf!”

The two older boys, Ray and Pidney looked at each other sheepishly.

“Re-forming the Pirates was my idea,” said Mary.  “I think I should be the leader.”

“A girl as leader?” asked Doble.  “We only used to let girls in for sex parties.”

“Be careful what you say to Mary, Goon,” said Pidney.

“Or what?  You’ll beat me up with your football muscles?”

“No,” said Ray.  “The two of us will beat the crap out of you.”  The fire flashing in Ray Zeffer’s eyes was even more intimidating than Pidney’s football muscles, and Pidney’s football muscles were seriously huge.

“Yeah, well…  I guess there might be benefits to having girls in the Pirates,” grumbled Doble menacingly.

“So, it’s settled.  The Norwall Pirates exist once more,” said Mary with a sparkly smile.  “I will be the leader and Pidney will be second in command.”

“Who is the wizard?” growled Doble.  “Milt is the hard one to replace.”

“I get that you always thought of Milt Morgan as Merlin and Brent Clarke as his King Arthur,” said Mary, “but do we really need a wizard?”

“Yeah, I think we do,” insisted Doble.

“You know we don’t have to let you be a Pirate this time,” warned Pidney.

“I’m the only real Norwall Pirate here,” said Doble imperially.  “You have to have my permission to even do this.”

“It’s all right,” said Mary.  “What is it you think we need a wizard for?”

Conrad Doble stood up to his full height and lightly bonked his head on a cellar rafter.  After he rubbed his somewhat flattened head of hair, he went over to a nearby cabinet, and removed the right hand door which basically fell out when you touched it.  He reached in and brought out a large peanut-butter jar filled with formaldehyde.  Floating in it was the severed head of a huge black cat, its dead eyes popped and staring.  He placed that on the crate in front of the old couch.

“Gack!  What’s that?” asked Pidney.

“The secret mystical symbol of the Pirate leader,” said Mary.

“Smart girl,” said Conrad Doble.  “If you know that, then surely you know what a wizard is for.”

“I’m guessing the keeper of secrets,” said Mary.

“The teller of stories!” Valerie blurted out.

“Yes!” said Doble.  “Both of those things.  But story-teller most of all.  That’s what Milt used to do.  He told us stories and made us believe in stuff.”

“So, who here is a story-teller?” asked Ray Zeffer.

“Tell us the story of your Uncle Noah,” Pidney said to Mary.

“He is NOT my uncle,” said Mary.  “He’s just Dad’s friend.  I used to call him uncle when I was little.”

“But that’s the idea, isn’t it?” asked Pidney.  “That story you were telling me about your dad’s friend on the freighter in the South Seas?  You could tell us that.”

“Maybe.  You have to give me time to pull it all together.  I think we need to leave that position open for the moment, to give others here a chance to tell a story of their own.”  Mary glared in Conrad’s direction for a change.

“Okay,” said Doble.  “It’s a deal.”

“Who will be in the club?” asked Pidney.

“I invited everyone here to be a Pirate,” said Mary.  “I think all of us need to be here.  The Norwall Pirates used to be a group of friends that supported each other and helped each other through hard times.  That’s what we all need again.  Especially Ray.”

Ray Zeffer blushed and looked off into the darkness of the far corner of the cellar.  Valerie wondered why.  She decided she would find out… soon.

“Why didn’t you invite Billy Martin?” asked Danny Murphy.  “He needs to be a Pirate too.”

“You are right,” said Mary with a smile.  “But I didn’t know where to find him or how to get the message to him.  Inviting him can be our first club project.”

“Club project?   You make it sound all girly!” complained Doble.

“Adventure, then.”

“Yeah, better.”

So it was decided.  Valerie Clarke was now the second girl ever to be a Norwall Pirate.  She smiled to herself, but when she caught Doble looking at her again, she changed the smile for a frown.                                                                              

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January 13, 2019 · 6:06 pm

The W.I.P.

Deaf-mute Terry Houston, sock-puppet Zearlop Zebra, and fool Murray Dawes

I have begun work on novel #10 in my Hometown Series about the imaginary little Iowa town where I grew up. This novel is called Fools and Their Toys.  It is basically a novel about how human beans communicate, mind to mind, heart to heart, and mouth to ear.

Fool Harker Dawes, Murray’s uncle

Now, I should tell you, calling them “human beans” in the previous paragraph was not a spelling mistake. It was the kind of pun that fools like Mickey often employ. And I don’t consider the word “fool” to be an insult. After all, the fool in a Shakespeare play often says the thing that sounds the wisest in the play. And all the world is a stage, and all the people merely players. But I do acknowledge that fools can actually be stupid, too. Their whole purpose is to make you laugh.

Probably the most foolish thing about this novel about fools and foolishness is that the narrator is a zebra sock puppet that the ventriloquist protagonist uses to be able to talk and communicate. Murray Dawes has a condition that makes people think he is slow of mind because he is unable to create speech in his own mouth. He is actually quite brilliant. But that doesn’t come out until he finally has the puppet to do the talking for him. Zearlop, then, is the narrator who puts the entire book in his own words even though he has brains made of wadded newspaper and cotton stuffing.

I have long worried that this particular book would be hard to write. But just like the last three novels it is now flowing out of my word processor as if it is writing itself. I do hope I can hang on to life long enough to make it real.

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January 11, 2019 · 5:17 pm

Doing Nothing

Yes, the retaining wall is leaning over the sidewalk and needs repair.

Being retired is a total pain in the Biblical word for donkey. I thought I would be challenged with nothing to do and probably die from lack of challenge as so many do who find their identity in their profession. I was a public school teacher. I loved being a public school teacher. I lived for the challenge of working with kids, especially trying to teach them to write well. And then my health began to betray me, and I was forced to retire.

In this country, loss of a job that defines who you are makes you basically worthless. Republicans will tell you that you go from being a “maker” into being a “taker”, and takers are basically parasites.

The wall began separating from the turf as it leaned, so we had to dig a trench to begin taking down the bricks one by one and re-staking them.

So, now I am a parasite, a blight on society, a “taker”. Decent hard-working people shouldn’t have to put up with a burden on society like me.

“If you don’t work, you shouldn’t be allowed to eat,” they self-righteously tell me.

“So, if I’m too ill to stand in front of a class all day, I should starve to death?”

“No, of course not! Don’t dramatize! You just need to do something else.”

Not having the money to buy expensive equipment, I had to improvise and do it myself.

So, I haven’t just sat back and enjoyed my pension which I worked 31 years to get. I have done things. I rebuilt the siding on the back wall of the house. I repaired all the cracks in the pool twice (once getting it back into shape for swimming, and then fixed only to be forced by the city to remove the pool because I couldn’t spend $9,000+ to bring the 1970 electrical system up to code.) I am now re-setting the bricks in the retaining wall.

I also took up driving for Uber to earn extra money. I needed extra money because hospitalizations cost me so much money I had to take out a bankruptcy which I will be paying off for the next five years while supervised by a State-appointed executor. And then a lovely Texas motorist bashed my car in the driver’s-side door costing me car-repair money (because insurance can’t be expected to pay everything) and leaving me unable to get well enough to return to driving for at least five months (up to the present day).

Doing masonry work takes some organization and some heavy lifting.

I have at no point had money enough to go on vacations or do the recreational activities that other retired seniors get to do (at least the rich white ones with lots of investment money and property). I haven’t been well enough even to be a substitute teacher (which I loved doing back in 2006-2007 when I was well enough and between teaching jobs). So what can I do with all my “free time”? Besides deal with aches and illness without the medicine I can’t afford, I mean?

Work has run into winter time when things get rather cold and wet.

Well, I did start out in life with a passion for writing and drawing. I am living proof you can’t even make pocket change for indulging those passions unless you’re as lucky as former teacher Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes. But I have the time and the incurable obsession.

We began flattening out the foundation row of bricks just as winter rains began to perpetually fill the trench with water.

I began the most creative and productive period of my life by writing eight YA novels. I have two more well into the writing of the first draft. I also re-started work on my graphic novel which takes lots of time when you have arthritic hands to draw with. And I have been blogging practically every day.

So, since I retired I have basically been doing nothing. Well, nothing for the greater good and advancing the fortunes of mankind as a whole as my Republican friends who criticize me for being a “taker” on the dole apparently do with their retirements.

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