Category Archives: Paffooney
Art Day at the End of the World
Filed under artwork, humor, illustrations, Paffooney
Taking the Path Ahead of Me
From where I now stand, looking towards the future, I can clearly see I do not have very many more steps on my personal path forward. Good thing. My legs are almost ready to give out. I walk with a cane.
More importantly, as a school teacher, the only classes I will be able to teach are the fictional ones in my books. In fact, if my work in progress is the last one I will be able to finish (hopefully), then the dojo pictured above is the last one. At the moment they are learning social justice lessons fighting sentient vegetables on the planet Cornucopea.
There are many things I can take solace in as I near the end of the road. I outlasted the Trump Administration. (At least, technically, because I am still alive today in spite of feeling ill, while Trump’s run has officially reached its end with the electoral college acceptance ceremony in spite of the insurrection.)
There are many, many former students that still fondly remember the year or two (in some cases three) that they spent in my class.
Mai Ling in the picture with the Japanese Castle is an example. Even though the telekinetic ninja girl from the planet Gaijin is entirely fictional, I base all of her dialogue and reactions on a very quiet but extremely effective girl that I taught for two straight years in the seventh and eighth grades. She listened, learned, and then solved any problem I put in front of her. The last I knew she was thriving in a junior college in Laredo, planning on a nursing career. She will have succeeded by now, and would have even if I had never met her. But she told me she liked my class.
I can be grateful too that I have lived long enough to write most of the stories I really wanted to write. Sure, there are nudists in some of my stories, but there are nudists in real life, and in my personal past as well. Maybe they turn off some people that would like my books better without them. But I have some pretty good stories with no nudists in them too. And the nudists I know are some pretty good people. So, I have a right to be grateful for them. My stories, I mean. Though I am grateful for nudists too. I tend to write like I’m baring my soul. And I am proud of my naked truths.
Whatever the near future holds in store, I feel ready. I got my $600 relief check. 2020 taxes will probably cost more than that this year, but I actually have some money to hopefully pay for them. I am ill today. But that’s more often the case than not now. I deserve to rest a bit, grow stronger, and get on with whatever’s left to me.
AeroQuest 4… Canto 122
Canto 122 – The Hidden Powers of the Avenger
In the central courtyard of the Palace of a Thousand Years, the Avenger made its reappearance atop a young, completely nude boy. He ran into the courtyard full throttle, and suddenly pulling up in front of the animal handler, six of his young apprentices, and six mardenschmauz six-legged riding beasts. The Avenger then hit them with a mind-blast, proving that whoever was under the helmet was a powerful telepath. He did not, however, kill them. He merely put all seven people and six hexipedal riding beasts into a deep and restful involuntary slumber.
Of course, it was obvious that it wasn’t Alec under the helmet. Alec was especially aware that it wasn’t him, as he rushed to the scene of the attack knowing it had to be stopped, and most likely only by another telepath.
Besides Alec knowing that he wasn’t the telepath in the Avenger helmet, he knew it wasn’t Sara or Junir, because the naked body wasn’t a girl, and it definitely wasn’t blue. Besides, he was beginning to know and befriend the only Space Nudist among the students of the White Spider, and he now recognized Hassan Parker’s skinny butt and tiny penis.
Alec’s own telepathy was at least strong enough to protect him from any attack against him that naked Hassan could muster, in spite of Hassan’s telepathic superiority.
“Halt, Hassan! You must take that evil helmet off. You don’t want to hurt anyone.” Alec stood in Hassan’s way.
“I do not know this Hassan you speak of. I am the mighty Avenger! I have returned because of the foul crimes of Shen Ming. The wronged ones must be avenged!”
Others gathered around the scene of the Avenger’s sleep attack. Taffy King and Mai Ling arrived from across the courtyard. Jadalaqstbr teleported to Alec’s side and slipped her soft hand into his. And Shen Ming-sensei hustled across the green, lifting the skirts of his orange ceremonial robe with both hands.
“Bow before me, infidels! Or be destroyed in the name of Shen Ming!”
“I did not ask for any destruction in my name,” muttered Shen Ming, low enough that Alec almost didn’t hear him say it.
“So, Shen-sensei, the Avenger has now become Hassan?” Alec asked.
“Of course! Why didn’t I remember? It’s the stupid helmet!” Shen Ming said with a chuckle.
“You mean, it’s controlling his mind?” Alec asked.
“Undoubtedly. It is what it was designed for.”
Alec looked at Taffy and Mai Ling, both of whom had fearsome Psionic powers of telekinesis and no telepathic mind shields. If Hassan took over their minds… Oy! Everyone could die a horrible death.
Not willing to take chances, Alec ran towards Hassan the Avenger and forcefully applied his best roundhouse kick to the side of Hassan’s head, then reversed direction and kicked him in the midsection with the other leg. The helmet, once dislodged, flew through the air and landed in the grass more than two meters away from anyone.
Hassan was lying on the ground, still as death.
His heart in his throat, Alec leapt to Hassan’s aide. His own telepathy was healing-centered, and though Fangwoman of the Black Spiders had only taught Alec how to use it to inflict pain, he knew only too well that it could be reversed the way Sara Smith did it to heal instead of harm.
The green healing energy radiated from Alec’s hands. He poured his power into Hassan’s potentially damaged skull.
Slowly, Hassan opened his eyes again and came back to life.
“Alec, you freed me! That evil helmet takes over your mind. No matter how hard I fought it, it made me do things I did not want to do.”
“You have always been nice to me and helped me, even when I was horrible to you,” Alec admitted. “I couldn’t just let the Avenger thing do harm to my only male friend.”
“Alec, you have definitely changed,” said Taffy King, smiling at him.
“Yeah, maybe so… But please don’t tell Phoenix. I don’t want him to lose respect for me.”
“Oh, no worries there,” Taffy said about their old Black Spider classmate, “He doesn’t respect you, and probably never will.”
“Well, good then…” Alec muttered, though the disappointment from realizing the truth of that stung him deeply.
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction
Saturday Art Day in 2021
Today’s post is full of portraits of imaginary people. Some of these are based on real people who posed for them or I had a photo of. Others, even if they are based on characters who were once real people I knew, are entirely made up out of my head.
Filed under artwork, characters, humor, illustrations, Paffooney
Doing Diddly-Squoot
Yes…
It means I am doing nothing.
And I am working really hard at it.
I do have a work in progress.
I have added to it once in the last week.
I think the expression, Iowegian as it is, comes from the expression “doing squat” which means “doing nothing at all” combined with “diddling around”, the non-sexual meaning of which is “dithering or only working in an ineffective way.”
I humbly confess that I am not that great of a researcher when it comes to linguistic facts and word origins.
I am much better at making things up and creating my own portmanteau words.
But I do have a very good ear for how people actually talk. Especially when it comes to Iowegian, Texican, Spanglish, and Educational Jargon-Gibberish. Counting English and Tourist-German, I speak six languages.
I also humbly confess that I make big mistakes. I have been working hard for a week on editing published books because of how an overreaction to one small inappropriate detail nearly destroyed one of my best books and now I have to deal with the impression some readers have that I write inappropriate stuff all the time.
Yes, I definitely erred…
I also realized I assume everybody accepts nudity as easily as I do.
They definitely don’t.
But naked is funny. And that is not a point about my writing that I am willing to concede.
Doing diddly-squoot can also result in really weird stuff like this Christmas-card composite of my artwork and Vincent Price’s 1967 Christmas tree.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, foolishness, forgiveness, humor, nudes, Paffooney, pen and ink, self portrait
To Laugh… or Cry
I have claimed that I am a humorist and all my novels are comic novels, to some degree at least. But it is often pointed out to me that I write about things that make people cry. And I freely admit that I most certainly do.
But if you think about it carefully, analytically, or even emotionally, you have to admit, even a book like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has some weep-worthy moments in it. I have read the book more than once myself, and I never get past the scene where Huck looks down at the body of his young friend Buck Grangerford, killed in the Shepherdson/Grangerford feud about something nobody living even remembers, without shedding gushers and gushers of heart-busting tears.
And in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, as much as I laugh and guffaw at the antics of quiet Mr. Dick and his kite, or the much deserved downfall of villainous Uriah Heep, it is the drowning of Little Emily on the boat with David’s school friend and idol Steerforth that leaves me surrounded by puddles… nay, lakes… that I have wept.
And I think that I may justify the sad parts in so many of my weary works with the fact that I am merely providing the necessary counterpoints to my merry-making and mirth.
There has to be that necessary balance, that well-rounded-ness, to a story that makes it feel truly complete. And, of course, we know that even in a horror novel by Stephen King, you find humor used as a balance point to lighten the moments just before the monster delivers its liver-shaking, earth-tilting scare.
Snow Babies, among my published books, is a good example. It is a story that celebrates how a small Iowa town comes together to survive a deadly December blizzard. And while it tells funny stories of kooky characters battling the elements, and both surviving the blizzard and ’84 Reagan/Mondale political debates, as well as putting up Christmas trees, it is still also about death and loss of loved ones, finding and losing love, and just what sort of self-sacrifice or other accidental happening truly makes someone a hero. Or a bus driver… this book has more than one bus driver in it.
So, I think, in the end, that I have made a cogent case for the notion that in order to be a humorist, you have to manipulate many emotions, not just mirth, but sadness also. As well as fear, bitter irony, and pain. And that may well also be the underlying reason that comedy is harder to write than tragedy.
AeroQuest 4… Canto 120
Canto 120 – Space-Walk
Junior Aero found the antique vacc suits somewhat clunky and uncomfortable compared to what the Aero Brothers had available on the Leaping Shadowcat. Not that he’d had one on more than once, briefly. But they had rigid sections in the thighs and upper arms that restricted fluid movements and joints that didn’t allow flexibility. And there was no intelligence at all ln the helmets or in the systems circuitry. It was like wearing the stupid Nebulon Danjer suits, one-piece protective organisms that Nebulons wore in space. But even though levels of stupidness were the same, the current space-wear had none of the fluid movements that the totally stupid Danjer-critters allowed.
Ged was the one taking the lead. He held the hand-rocket that moved them all through weightlessness in space. All four students were tethered behind him.
Billy Iowa was tethered directly behind Ged. Sarah was attached to his suit from behind him. Junior had fastened his tether cord to the metal loop on the lower back of her suit. And Gyro brought up the rear. After the boobie-spotting plan hatched in the little blue guy’s evil little brain, Junior felt it was right to put him as the rear end of the line. For a Nebulon, Gyro could be a real little rear end.
Stars filled the universe outside the airlock, nothing but perfect silence besides.
The alien “seed-pod ship” was lit by Gaijin’s yellow star and Junior noticed how flower-like it really seemed to be. Could it be just some sort of wandering interstellar organism? Junior really didn’t know. Still, it was no more deadly than anything else they had faced on Gaijin. Even stiller still, it was certainly no less deadly either.
Ged signaled the start of the journey across open, airless space with the first blast from the hand rocket. The line jerked each student forward in turn.
Sara turned and signaled that everything was okay. Junior gave the “OK” sign back.
As they neared the big blossom-looking appendage, the scanner pad that Ged was holding identified the structure as an airlock.
As Ged drew near enough, prehensile tentacles of some sort reached up to take hold of him.
“Ged Aero-sensei, do we run for it?” Billy asked over the comm system.
“Let’s allow it to perform its apparent function,” their master answered.
Junior then watched in horror as the tendrils latched onto Ged’s suit and pulled him inside. It looked for all the universe like the thing had eaten him.
“Ooh! I don’t know about this!” said Billy, alarmed as the thing slowly consumed him next.
“Does it hurt, Billy?” asked Gyro.
No sound, of course, came back in reply.
“Sara, can you pull them out again?” Junior pleaded.
Sara didn’t answer as the blossom-thing swallowed her next.
Then it was Junior’s turn.
“Shneejara sohk nahl, Junior-san,” saluted Gyro as the thing grabbed Junior by the feet. That meant in Nebulonin, of course, “It has been an honor adventuring with you, Junior-san.” Then, the moving, living tendrils were all over him. He could feel them pulling at his suit, twisting, turning, and then, horrifically, popping his helmet off. Slime covered his head and slid down into his suit. All he could see was a faint reddish glow through the tendrils’ translucent flesh. He sincerely hoped the slime was not digestive juices.
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction
Kitchen Table Talking
Some of the best things that go through my stupid old head come from breakfast and dinner conversations that take place around the family table during family meals. I get ideas for topics, scenes, jokes, and notions for use in my fiction writing or in my nonfiction blog by chewing the mental fat with my kids. My daughter likes to talk about artwork, how to paint, how to compose a picture, and how to put it into the form of a picture book for children that she intends to write about mushrooms growing under the kid’s bed when the kid puts off the cleaning under the bed for too long.
This morning they made the mistake of asking me about my connections to literary nudists on Twitter. I added details about the first nudists I ever met in Austin, Texas in the 1980s. I told them about visiting an old girl friend in the Clothing-optional Apartments in Austin where she often stayed with her sister and her sister’s husband who lived there. I told them about how, being a visitor, I was given the option of being there with all my clothes on. I told them about making friends with nudists there that I stayed in contact with by mail. And this was an opportunity to talk about such things without totally mortifying them like I did the last time I talked about that particular subject at a Mexican restaurant where people we didn’t know could hear.
My number two son, the jailor for Dallas County, gets the chance to tell us his stories about being in jail (being a guard of course, not an inmate.) When his mother is not present he gets to share some of the profoundly blue-colored vocabulary he is learning from work at his new institution for the incarceration of serious criminals and mentally ill people. We get to discuss guns and gun culture, as long as we are careful to never criticize my son’s newfound conservative values, deeply held and violently defended in the manner of most conservatives.
And, of course, the dog is always there to look at the table with beg-eyes, because she can smell the meat that was cooked and usually consumed before she’s allowed to get near enough to snoop and see the tabletop. She has to settle for head scratching, tummy pats, and and smacks on the ear when she tries to jump into laps where she is not actually wanted.
Table talk is critical time for connecting with family, something that is far too rare in today’s world. And we make a conscious effort to keep it going because we are awake to its basic value.
Filed under family, family dog, humor, Paffooney
Catch a Falling Star 
What the Lord Hath Given…
You know how that Bible lesson goes, right? What He hath given, He can also take away. And the Bible doesn’t suggest He ever owes us any explanation. God is subject to capricious whims, apparently.
This is part of the reason why I often have doubts about the fairness of most religions. How do you worship that which is cold, uncaring, and capricious? And yet, to say there is no God above… or below… is anathema to the way I was raised and the fundamental structures of my moral and inner self.
If there is no God, then why is there any life at all? Life is complex and intricately ordered. How can that be if the universe is random and mindless? Physics already says all order is headed for eventual chaos. Our chance to control the climate crisis and save the planet is now down to seven more years. If we don’t get our act together before 2027, we are doomed. What is the need for order at all? Why do you need to have a counterpoint to chaos if there is no underlying point to the whole process?
Philosophical questions like this are why what I really am is a pure and simple agnostic. I am open to all possible answers. But I have no scale to weigh any of it.
One way that the Lord is taking things away right now is through the capitalist system worshipped by wealthy and greedy men. Especially the Septuagenarian Mutant Turtle currently in charge of the Senate. He and his billionaire mutant overlords don’t want to raise the national debt to help ordinary people through the Covid crisis and the economic chaos it caused, even though they were fine with ballooning the debt in 2017 to give tax breaks to billionaires and corporations while actually raising taxes on pensioners like me.
My house is falling apart. I can raise no extra income because of the pandemic. And the bank is making noises about balloon payments and raising the specter of homelessness for the four of us.
And, of course, the biggest thing God may soon take away is my very life. I am having problems with high blood pressure, fainting spells, and numerous symptoms that could easily be interpreted as the onset of Parkinson’s, the disease that took my father’s life. Of course, going into the clinic to find out for sure could financially sink me, as well as infect me with Covid and kill me even though I previously survived my son’s experience with the disease without becoming infected.
This January and February are expected to be the worst part of t the pandemic that we have yet experienced.
But this little exercise in philosophical whining and complaining will, in the long run, do nobody any good. I don’t blame a God for my troubles because of the atheist in me. I know difficult times lay ahead for everybody, not just me. And just as Muckman, the superhero, turns his unfortunate condition of nearly-deadly body odor into his super-power for fighting evil guys, I need to turn my misfortunes into something good.
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Filed under angry rant, artwork, commentary, grumpiness, humor, illness, Paffooney
Tagged as complaints about Covid