Some days I feel loony… April first comes to mind
And I can be quite cartoony… It really helps to unwind
So I’ll make some Paffooney… and draw it while blind
And grow really prunie… old wrinkles unwind
And magic up some moony… to leave all worry behind.
April Fools! from an old fool.
Filed under foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, magic, Paffooney, poetry, Uncategorized
I have long known that reading good books is the primary path to being a wizard. There are many, many things you can learn from the magic contained in fiction books, but now there is also research that proves books can improve your empathetic skills. Here is the article I found to suggest it is so;
If you don’t feel energetic enough to actually go there and read that, let me summarize a bit. When you read a good fiction story, you get to live for a while in another person’s skin… see the world through someone else’s eyes… and if it is intelligent, realistic, and complex enough, it rewires a bit of the part of your brain that tries to understand and make sense of perspectives that are new to you, not merely habits that you follow down muddy, well-worn paths on auto-pilot. You get to practice understanding other people. And the more you practice this with well-written, insightful material, the more empathetic you will become. The article notes significantly that children reading J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series develop skill at compassion. I can personally testify that as a middle school teacher, I saw that very thing happening as students in my nerd classes not only became more sensitive towards the gifted weirdos in their class because of Harry, but also became more understanding of the special education students, and other often-bullied minorities. Harry Potter books are literally magic books.
Here are some other notable books and their magical powers;
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is taught in numerous middle schools and high schools across the country because teachers have instinctively realized how much it does to solve problems of racial and cultural tension in the school environment. It tackles the unfairness of racism, the effects of extreme poverty, the possible side effects of too much religion, and it illustrates everything through the voice of a very intelligent young girl. Learning hard lessons becomes practically painless.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is narrated by the angel of death. It is set in Nazi Germany in the war years. The central character is the daughter of a man arrested and executed as a communist. She is forced to live with German foster parents who turn out to be very loving individuals, though they are enduring difficulties of their own. They not only love and nurture her, they take in a young Jewish man who is fleeing the Gestapo and the work camps. In the face of the constant threat of death, the main character learns to read both books and people, to care about others, and face the deaths of those she loves without fear. This book makes beauty out of human ugliness and war, and love out of fear and death. Very powerful magic, in my humble opinion.
So what am I saying in this Paffoonied post of books and magic? Only this. There is magic power to be gained from reading fiction books, especially well-written fiction books. Try it for yourself. You may accidentally turn yourself into a frog… or a little girl from Maycomb, Georgia in the 1930’s… but it will turn out to be very good magic. Go ahead, try it. I dare you.
Filed under book reports, humor, magic, Paffooney
I have decided that since I have a tendency to write science fiction and fantasy, with a special emphasis on the fantasy part, I should actually be able to do magic. It doesn’t take a lot of self-examination to see that it is so.
Teacher Magic
As a teacher I know several powerful magic spells. I have the power to put teenagers into a deep and restful sleep. All I have to do is start a lesson focus and heads drop to desks and snore-music fills the part of the room that my blah-blah doesn’t. I also have a powerful ability to make teenagers hate things. All I have to do is testify with my best honest-to-goodness face that something is good for them, and they will thoroughly hate it. Protein at breakfast is good for you? Gotta hate that. Independent reading of books is good for you? I have just made the entire school library radioactive by saying it. Think what good a teacher could do if the principal would only let them say, “Illegal drugs are good for you!” or, “You should join a street gang, it would be good for you!” or even, “Racial prejudice is a good thing for our white society!” (I know I would never actually feel good about saying those things, and I could never make the proper honest-to-goodness face, but that last thing was actually tried by a teacher I once worked with… he said it because he believed it… and even the white kids were instantly up in arms and got that teacher fired. Come to think of it, that was the only lesson he ever taught that I actually approved of.) An even more powerful teacher magic is to forbid things. Anything forbidden by a teacher or a teacher’s rules is the only thing they want to do. I was able to get kids to read more by forbidding them to read library books during lessons. I found it strengthened the urge to occasionally catch them doing it and lecture them about how they will end up unable to flip burgers at McDonald’s because they will let interesting and complicated stuff get in the way of mindlessly doing repetitive tasks.
Traffic Magic
I have an amazing magical power over stoplights. I can unfailingly turn them bright red just by approaching them, no matter what color they were five and a half seconds before. If I am in a hurry, I have the power to make that red light last for more than the three minutes that is supposed to be the maximum for the cycle.
I can also make old people (of course I mean other old people) drive slower in the fast lane by driving behind them. I can make young guys in Bubba trucks zoom in front of me and nearly kill me simply by having a few inches of space between my front bumper and the rear end of the car I’m following. I don’t know how they fit those big old Chevys and Ford Broncos and Dodge Rams in those little spaces which are less than half as long as their vehicles, and do it while using one hand to give me the finger out their window. I suppose they have fold-able bones like a rat so they can squeeze through tight places.
Laughing Magic
I suppose the magical power I am proudest of is my ability to magically make people laugh at me. (Yes, they always say they are laughing with me, not at me… but we all know how humor really works. We laugh because we are really happy that it didn’t happen to us!) I am able to put on the clown nose and people automatically laugh almost as hard as they laugh at me without the clown nose. I am able to say things in weird words that stimulate your brain to shout silently in your head, “That jest ain’t right!”, and you automatically think, “Funny!” So, with all this magical power, I have concluded… I am a wizard!
Filed under humor, magic, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized
Of late I have encountered many roadblocks on the road to creativity. Illness gets in the way. It is hard to think when I have too much arthritis pain. I have a hard time composing anything on days like yesterday when my blood sugar is out of whack. I haven’t been chased by car-driving crocodiles in red fright-wigs and green race cars. At least, not while I was awake. I am trying to follow a writing schedule that has me editing a novel for a contest in April, writing two other novels simultaneously, a set of short stories, and this daily blog that I am trying to average 500 words per day in every day (and succeeding now for roughly 41 straight days) (some days I write less words, but some days I go way over the stated limit). I end up squeezing the toothpaste tube of new ideas from both ends until the big wad in the middle finally bursts and gets white gobbets of creative-idea paste on everything in the room. I will admit that I mangle a metaphor or two, and give meaning to random blobs of description merely for the sake of adding more words. And what is this bit about, then? Clearly I am thinking about how I think and it is not a pretty sight. Sometimes my children bounce out of the rumble seat towards the river of man-eating fish, and I have to depend on the odd three-eyed alien tootling along in a space-doughnut to catch him or her in the nick of time. But sometimes, too, I am the rabbit, calmly watching from the sidelines hoping not to get run over but too fascinated to look away from the slap-dash slap-stick chase scene that is my actual life. This particular bit of tooth-paste squeezing is known as free writing, where I just keep stringing words and phrases together for as long as I can keep my aching fingers from falling off. I make corrections as I go, but there is no outline here, no discernible pattern, and very little logical coherence. Like the picture Paffooney, once it gets started, it just goes. And goes and goes. I have bounced over broken bridges and landed squarely on the pavement on the other side more than once of late. I paid the tax on the house and managed to remain a homeowner for another year. I fought off numerous bill-collecting crocodiles set on me by credit-card banks who are after me to pay off mountains of accumulated debt and interest after my multiple career-ending illnesses. I have lawyers helping me with debt reduction, the step before bankruptcy, which is also probably the step before stepping off the ledge at the top of the Chrysler Building. I continue to draw stuff that makes little or no visual sense, and post them here to further delight, dazzle and delude you. And, of course, I have the audacity to label this word free-for-all as humor… but I have reached five hundred and five words.
Sometimes 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.
Catch a Falling Star 