Category Archives: humor

January 5, 2015 · 2:25 am

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.

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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.

Leap of FaithThis closing Paffooney from yesterday is entitled “The Leap of Faith”.  I’m not sure why that is important to know, but it is.

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January 3, 2015 · 5:17 pm

An Overdose of Cheerios

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I was trying to think what I would post today, and coming up blank.  I have a pathological need to keep posting here, especially since my brain is currently switched to editing mode for my novel The Magical Miss Morgan.  One can’t keep a sacred oath to write every day if there is no writing going on other than editing (which doesn’t count because no new creative thoughts are being generated and the fertile spore-producing areas of my mental storage shed may grow sterile for want of fresh garbage being piled there).  So I went looking through my file of photo Paffoonies to find something I haven’t already inflicted on potential readers to the point of making them gag and doing something sensible like shutting off their computer for a while.  Unfortunately all I found was this potential gag-inducing library photo of the time the Mighty Thor got drunk on overripe Cheerios and milk and decided to commit cave-man love on beautiful topless mermaid Barbie.  (I know… topless and in the possession of a fifty-eight-year-old man… kinda creepy… but honest, I am intending to make a shell bra with real sea shells and just haven’t gotten around to it yet, though I have the shells selected and the material cut.  My sewing machine is broken.  Yeah, that’s my story… and I’m sticking to it).  (Goodness!  That last parenthetic expression is the fifteenth longest one I have ever written!)

The picture was taken moments before the hammer came down to bonk her lightly on the brain.  Fortunately, this is Barbie we are talking about, and the excess air inside her plastic head probably saved her from fatal brain damage.  She was one of a half dozen naked Barbie dolls I rescued from Goodwill.  She is grateful for any attention she gets nowadays and responded to Thor’s drunken love tap by falling madly in love with him.  She chased the god of thunder all around the library that day to give him a big, fat mermaid smooch on the lips (or is that “big, fat, mermaid smooch on the lips”?  …because she’s not a fat mermaid).  She would have caught him too, but the mermaid fin-dress that I also found in a resale bargain store caused her to have to hop, and my messy library has so many un-filed books on the floor that she kept tripping and falling flat on her… face (yes, the face would’ve obviously hit the floor first, right?).

A week later I caught him obviously thinking about doing it again.

She likes to sunbathe in front of the Cheerios box that holds up one of the shelves on a nearby book case where the nails are coming loose.  (I have fixed it since the picture was taken and used the Cheerios box full of sand to hold up something else entirely.)
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I bought a mind-reading app for my digital camera and applied it to this photo because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he might be thinking about doing it again.  I threw the moldy old discarded bowl of Cheerios away because… well, you know that spoiled milk smell, right?  So, it couldn’t be that again.  Anyway, here’s the processed picture because this is the end of this daily post.  I have passed 550 words already.

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January 2, 2015 · 4:19 pm

A New Toy for Christmas

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I am almost sixty years old.  My parents are still alive and both in their eighties.  So today I spent some of the money in my Christmas gift from Mom and Dad on a toy.  I bought an action figure (don’t call it a doll even though it is) of Ezra Bridger, a Jedi Padawan from Disney’s “Star Wars Rebels”.   Now, you may have been told (especially if you are from my generation) that big boys don’t play with toys… but that is total hogwash, propagated by people who are intent on sucking all the joy out of life… but not wives.  No, I never said wives.

If you haven’t followed this particular line of idiocy in my goofy little blog, I confess to being a doll collector.  I collect twelve-inch action figures and dolls.  My wife helps me with the Barbie collection.  I have Star Wars figures, Captain Action figures, movie figures, monster figures, super hero figures, and so on and so on into a twelve-inch infinity.  I will be showing you more of the insanity of my collection in upcoming posts so that you can marvel at a man who plays with toys on into his second childhood.

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December 31, 2014 · 6:03 pm

Watch Me Pull a Rabbit Out of My Hat!

20141231_144345bflyySometimes I don’t believe in the magic I believe in… Er, well, it is something like that.  I mean, things happen in life that you never imagine could be possible.  Some things are unbelievably bad, and others are unbelievably good.  For instance, the Cardinals lost their last two football games.  They had an amazing year with eleven wins and a spot in the playoffs, but the @#&$$!!! St. Louis Rams broke their first AND their second string quarterbacks in that last win they won.  No more wins for this year barring a playoff miracle.  And I had been developing a heart problem since we went to San Diego in October to see my son graduate from Marine boot camp.  I have been waking up every night with heartbeat arrhythmia… at least, that’s what I thought it was, and what the doctor suspected it was… but it wasn’t.  I went in yesterday to get the bad news from the cardiologist, and he showed me test results that proved my heart is totally healthy and beating normally.  Apparently I was being fooled by muscle spasms in my chest caused by arthritis in my rib-cage.   Don’t that beat all?   Bullwinkle shows us there is nothing up his sleeve, reaches in into the magic hat expecting to pull out a lion, and we get a little white rabbit.

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December 26, 2014 · 4:07 pm

Toy Tiger

Tyger!  Tyger! Burning bright!

I see thee holy in the night,

This for that, and that for this,

Shoot the gun,

And never miss!

A sillier poem there will never be,

And Tyger!  Tyger!  this poem’s for thee.

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The first stuffed toy I ever owned was a tiger.  It was almost as big as me the first time I remember it.  I got it from Mom and Dad sometime before I started remembering things in my life.

When my oldest son was born I bought him a stuffed toy tiger.  It was bigger than he was at the start.  I don’t know why, but now that my son is a Marine in dress blues, looking spiffy and military trained… It just seemed important to remember a toy tiger.

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December 26, 2014 · 4:05 pm

School Is Out For Miss Morgan

Cool School Blue

I have done it.  I wrote the final scenes in my story of the school teacher who loves to teach and runs afoul of fairies fighting a war of good versus evil.  The epilogue put the cherry on top last night, so I actually finished this book on Christmas Day 2014.  I have great plans for this book.  It is the best thing I have ever written.  I based the lessons presented and the teacher experiences on my own teaching career.  I transformed myself into the viewpoint character, Miss Morgan, though I did not actually have the sex change operation.  The fairies are all based on real fairies I have known… as are the students in Miss Morgan’s classes… based on real students, I mean.  The evil principals, teachers, and parents in the story are totally fictional.  Yes, I have to keep telling myself that to prevent nightmares.  I don’t know about the goblins.  It’s hard to get to know critters you are spending your life stepping on and wiping out.  I hope a few people read this book one day.  I think it is one of the greatest pieces of literature ever to come out of a Midwesterner who moved to Texas and became a school teacher for 31 years before losing his mind, wigging out, and believing he could become a published author writing great pieces of literature.

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December 22, 2014 · 4:34 am

How to Rip Your Own Heart Out in Three Easy Steps

Okay, I do admit that the title is entirely misleading and wholly inaccurate, but it got you wondering…  Didn’t it?  I have apparently developed tachycardia, a condition where the heart races and beats like a jackhammer plugged into a nuclear reactor.  It is not fatal in itself, though it may lead to heart attack or stroke which are definitely in the fatal category.  Yesterday I did two things about that little heart condition, one which hopefully helped, and another which definitely hurt.  So, let me tell you a fairy tale.

Magnolia No kidding.  It is a fairy tale about novel writing, feeling like a murderer, and cardiologists.

Step one… I went to the cardiologist in Plano, Texas.  I have had a heart monitor taped to my chest for three weeks.  I have to push the record button three or four times every night.  The tachycardia is a night-stalker, hitting me while I’m asleep.  Then it shakes me awake, makes me sweat and fret and try to decide if I need to go to the emergency room or not.  I lie awake worrying just long enough that when I awake in the morning I am a sleepless, colorless zombie that feels the need to stay in bed all day, but can’t for fear the heart problem will attack again at any moment.  The heart monitor itself likes to complain and make a nasty beeping noise to irritate my sleep-deprived brain, and the places where the electrodes are taped to my chest are so itchy from three weeks of sticky plastic thingies stuck to them that I want to claw my own skin off.

At the cardiologists office, I had a sonogram done.  They used sound waves to map out what my beating heart looked like and how the blood was flowing through it in daylight.  The objective was to make certain that there were no holes or lumps or discarded candy wrappers in there that would require surgery.  So I got probed with a hot sonogram beeper offset with cold contact gel, and wouldn’t you know it… I didn’t even get to take the heart monitor off for the procedure.  No rest for wicked, itchy chests.  But on the up side, I did not at any point notice the technician shaking her head sadly or calling for an ambulance.  There were no immediate negative results to the testing.  So now I get to fight tachycardia some more without knowing anything more about my condition until the doctor explains on December 30th.

Step Two…  I am using my down time to continue writing my NaNoWriMo novel, The Magical Miss Morgan, which I didn’t finish in November.  It is a story about a sixth grade English teacher based on personal experience, when I taught sixth graders myself and was a woman… wait, that can’t be right.  Is it possible that tachycardia effects the brain after a while?  The novel has a number of characters who are fairies.  Willowleaf(I did say this was based on real life experiences, didn’t I?)  The fairies get involved with an irate parent, trying to help the teacher who has befriended them, and I am at the critical part of the plot where a crisis point is reached and a murder is about to take place.  (The usual for parent-teacher conferences.)  Anyway the conflict comes to a boil, and though the murder is prevented, a fairy is killed in the prevention of it.  And it isn’t just any fairy.  It is my favorite among all the foofy little buggers.  I wrote that part on Monday and edit it into permanence yesterday.

Step Three…  I spent half an hour crying my eyes out.  I know it is not normal to be so affected by the unexpected death of a beloved character, but I can blame it on the tachycardia.  It kept me awake so much, and I am such a sleep-deprived zombie-writer that it is possible that I dreamed the whole thing.  I may discover when I reread it for a fourth time that the fairy character didn’t die after all.  Except… no, wait… that’s not what it says.  I need to finish this up now so that I can go on another half-hour crying jag.  I have no one to blame except myself.  And I can’t even write the character back to life (though I may try) because the scene is just too good the way it is.  Oh, well… hopefully soon the cardiologist can give me a magic pill to make everything all better.

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December 20, 2014 · 7:20 pm

Bird is the Word

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Birds are always talking,

And birds are always squawking,

And they are using bird-words,

These are the words I heard.

Twitter-pated – this word comes from the owl in Bambi and means not being able to think straight because you’re in love.

Aviary – is a great big bird house, big enough to fly around in

Feather-dusted – to you and me it means clean, to a bird it means the feathers are dirty

Bird-brained – don’t be insulted if a bird calls you this.  It is a compliment.

Fume-fluttered – you gotta fly and get away from that bad smell.

Wing-walking –  it’s how you get from here to there if you’re a bird… Duh!

Wakka wakka – it’s those dang ducks again, always telling jokes!

Egg-zactly – as precise and perfect as an egg.

Coo-coo-karoo – that stupid rooster wants us to get up again at daybreak.  It’s like a bird can never sleep in!

Clucker butter – Can you believe that KFC place?  Butter on improperly cremated dead chickens (ah, well, they were only chickens after all).

Now that you have less than one per cent of the bird vocabulary, please don’t try to tell me what they are saying.  I really don’t want to know!

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December 20, 2014 · 4:30 pm

For the Birds

Redbirds

If you have looked carefully at my blog and tried to make sense of it, you have probably noticed that sense is hard to make.  It certainly makes no cents.  Though, I am told by my writer and publisher friends that a blog is critical to marketing books, I really and truly have not figured out how.  I am guessing here, but successful authors must do what they love in their blogs and hope that leads people to think seriously about buying a book with their name on it.  But will people ever want the frabjous daylight that makes them say “caloo calay!” from my burbling books filled with nonsense and purple paisley prose?

Maybe I need to clarify what I write about.  Hmm, how do I do that?  I end up with such a plethora of scattered categories… err cattered scattergories… err, no… right the first time, that no one can make a mental framework that accurately describes my work… including me.  But I have to try… even if it kills me… but if it wants to kill me, I already have six incurable diseases (maybe seven) and am a cancer survivor, so it will have to take a number and get in line.

The bird-word post I did yesterday is what I call humor.  It is pun-ish if not punny, but possibly pun-ishable.  I like word play and word pictures and rhymes and alliteration, all the stuff that my serious writer friends warn me against.  Mark Twain, whom I actually deeply respect, says “When considering the adjective, cut it out!”  But I find myself unable to do that.  I have to spread the adjectives on two or three layers thick like butter, jam, and peanut butter.  I never use one word for something when I can use seven.  So part of the style that is mine is excessively goopy phraseology.  I guess I write like I talk and, since it’s humor, I actively try to talk funny.

What else can I say is characteristic of what I do?  Well I was a teacher for three hundred and ten years (possibly divisible by ten).  That may have impacted the way I write and what I write about.  I am pigeon-holed in the Young Adult novel genre because I write mainly about school age, particularly junior-high-aged, kids… Their problems with corresponding creative solutions, and the kind of things that make them laugh (there’s a lot of pigeons in that hole!).  Education issues are important to me.  That is probably the key reason that the novel I am working on today, The Magical Miss Morgan, is about a classroom teacher.  I hope that doesn’t limit me to an entirely kid-audience, because adults have the book-buying money, and not every adult gives in to a kid whining about wanting to buy a book (because most kids don’t and there are adults who don’t have kids).  (Besides, says another aside, kids is really little goats who eat books before they read them).

Finally, I am a student of art.  I search for it, chew on it, digest it, rearrange it in my heart and guts, and spit it back out with colored pencils (Dang!  I must be a kid too, at least at heart).  In my blog I have written about and shared with you Norman Rockwell, Paul Detlafsen, Thomas Kinkade, Maxfield Parrish, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Frederick Remington.  I know of a few more like George Herriman, Cliff Sterrit, and E.C, Segar that I am compelled to write about too.  Oh, and N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Milt Caniff.  Uh-oh, better stop before another list comes on.  So, in conclusion, this whole mess will never really be concluded and since it’s convoluted, it will get all mangled up and end up back where it began.  I have tried to make sense out of everything, but instead I’ve just made soup… or if I take out the broth… stew!

Blue birds

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December 19, 2014 · 9:22 pm

The Truest of Magicks

Okay, life is like this; you are born, a lot of dumb stuff happens that you are mostly not in control of, you suffer a little bit, you are happy a little bit, and then you die.   That is a pretty gloomy prospect, and most of us spend our entire lives obsessing over it, examining it with microscopes, doctoring it with needles and potions and chainsaws, trying to make it last a little longer, wailing and complaining about our sorry allotment, and wasting what little time we have.  So what secret exists that could ever make a difference?  Could ever open up our eyes… even just a tiny bit?

Zoric

The secret, as far as I can tell (and I am certainly one of the dumber and more random among you because I am cursed with insight and wisdom won through suffering and making huge mistakes), is reading the right books.

Eli Tragedy

I am not alone in this sort of thinking.  There are those who believe that if you gather the best books together into a personal library and read them, they add experiences and knowledge to your life that you would not otherwise have.  (Of course, one must acknowledge, especially if you read fiction, that most books are filled with lies and misinformation, and some, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus leaps to mind, might leave you stupider than you were when you started.)  It deepens, broadens, and intensely colors the experience of life.

Skorpio

People who read books a lot… really read them, and re-read them, and collect them, and study them, and think about and write about them… are called wizards.  Wizards are wise men.  It is what the word means.  Being one does not make you better than anyone else.  In fact, wizards are generally weaker than normal men.  It comes from all that ruining of eyes and fuddling up brains with too much thinking.  You don’t want a wizard to back you up in a fist fight.  You will certainly lose.  And you don’t want a wizard to tell you how live your life.  They are not good role models.  But if a wizard tells a story, you should listen.  Because if you really listen, and the wizard is really wise, you can expand the borders of your life, and push on nearer to immortality.

Ice Alchemist

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