Category Archives: Paffooney

November 11, 2020 · 9:12 pm

Grifters, Politicians, and other Cannibals

Yesterday my daughter was attacked by online scammers through her account that she uses to sell her precious paintings. I am still kicking myself for not seeing through it from well before the money was lost.

The evil grifter contacted her about buying her painting for $20.00. That’s a mere twenty, well below what it is actually worth when you add up the canvas, the paint used, and the time she spent on it. Let alone the worth of her talent and original ideas. He said he wanted to buy it, add gift cards to it, and have her send it directly from our house to his girlfriend’s house. This meant that gift cards were to be purchased by my daughter, put into the package and mailed. When I heard that he was sending $330.00 dollars to her by PayPal, I thought initially she was getting the real value of her work. But I had a headache and didn’t fully understand when she explained the PayPal contract she had. PayPal supposedly was going to hold the money while she purchased the cards, and then would release it to her to reimburse her. But she used all $200 in her account to buy two of the three cards he wanted, and PayPal was supposedly refusing to release any of the money until she proved that the three cards were activated. So, I contributed $100 to bail her out and get the last card. I should have been way smarter than that! In proving that the cards were activated to PayPal, she was actually giving him all the numbers he needed to own the cards and spend the money at his leisure. The PayPal link he emailed her was a fake. He got what he wanted and then some. Fortunately he didn’t get the painting.

I told you recently that I am getting dumber with age. I got scammed myself for $3000 dollars in 2007 when I was told I had won a $50000 prize from Publisher’s Clearing House from a contest my father had entered me in. I was given a real check for $3,000. I am gullible when it comes to trusting people I haven’t really even met. The scammer reclaimed most of my bank account money before the bank discovered the check was a fake. Never mind that my father ordered magazines to enter in those contests on more than one occasion. I was liable for the money that got sent to Canada for fake reasons.

The real problem is, it seems, that in the modern world, if you are not a meat-eating predator or a meat-eating scavenger, you are considered meat.

People who are rich and don’t actually need to squeeze me down to where there’s nothing left but bone and gristle are constantly treating me like a farm animal to be harvested. Bankers are pirates. Bank-o Merricka taught me that when they sued me rather than allowing me to do a debt-reduction program. Politicians like the evil Trumpinator are cannibals. I found that out when in 2017 his, “Big, beautiful tax cut” saved most of the people I knew $50 on their taxes, while I owed an additional $1,600 dollars because the December tax cut was retroactive for the whole year, and it required more in withholding from worthless, “taker” pensioners like me.

I grew up in a world where most of the people I knew were basically honest and hard-working. Now I live in a world where, to be successful, you must eat red meat. And I get to be the meat. That’s a good enough complaint to actually feel like I got it off my chest for a change.

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November 10, 2020 · 4:14 pm

AeroQuest 4… Canto 115

Canto 115 – Archery Practice

The students of Ged Aero Sensei were seated on the grass in the courtyard of the Palace of 1,000 Years in a large semicircle.  In the middle of the circle stood the archery sensei, Jai Chang, dressed in teal-blue Iga-shozoku ninja armor.  He had his elegant handmade bow with an arrow already nocked.

“Okay, bone-headed ones, this is the first thing to know when shooting a bow.  You must aim with the dominant eye.  To find your dominant eye, look at the target with both eyes open.  Point your pointer-finger at the bullseye.  Then close the right eye.  Open the right eye and close the left.  One eye will move your finger off the target without having moved it at all.  The other eye will leave the pointer finger aimed true to the center of the bullseye.  This is your dominant eye.  Your aiming eye.”

“Show us how it is done, sensei,” said Phoenix, seeming somewhat bored with it all.

Jai Chang frowned at the insolent red-haired boy.  Then he aimed his bow at the target 300 yards across the courtyard.  He let fly an arrow which arced straight into the center of the bullseye.  Three of the students gasped audibly in a way that sounded as if they were impressed.  Phoenix, Alec Songh, and Mai Ling all yawned as if they were bored beyond words.

“All right, insolent children.  Who among you can do better?”

Phoenix stood and walked over to the bow master.  He was lightly dressed, wearing only a loin-cover and tabi boots.  He took the yumi to ya, the bow and arrow, from the master’s hand, nocked another arrow, and in a single smooth motion, lifted the bow and shot, almost without looking.  The arrow plunged into the center of the bullseye so tight up against the previous arrow, one had to look carefully to see that there was more than one arrow dead center in the target.

Jai Chang frowned.

Phoenix handed the bow to Alec who immediately got off the third arrow, landing within the bullseye circle less than an inch away from the other two arrows.

Alec tried to hand the bow to Mai Ling, but she took only a single arrow out of his hands.  Then she stood with the arrow in her left hand and her back to the target.  She threw the arrow back over the top of her head and spiraled into the center of the target, splitting the shaft of Jai Chang’s first arrow.

“I suppose it is pointless to tell you that it is wrong to use your stupid little mind powers to do this task.  The purpose is to learn precision, skill and discipline.  Not to use Psion witchcraft to take the easy road.”

Phoenix glared at the bowmaster.

“I learned the way of the bow from Bone Daddy in the Black Spider Palace.  Hundreds of hours of practicing with a painful slap across the face for every miss as the only reward.  Alec had to endure the same.  And as for Mai Ling, her skills are incredible and made all the more amazing by the practice she has been doing with me late into the evenings.  We do this while everyone else is doing their Tai Chi, meditation, and prayers.  Some things give greater focus to the spirit force than mere words and empty sayings.”

“Well, then, bow master, perhaps you would like to be in charge of the archery lessons.  You have to learn them.  It is a part of Shen Ming’s program of study for all students in the Palace.”

“Yes, happily,” said Phoenix with a voice that sounded more like sarcasm than obedience.

“Ah, I do not like what I am hearing,” said Shen Ming, the frail old man seeming to appear out of nowhere at the edge of the green.  “There is no honor and respect in the voices of either the master or the student.  This is not the way of the White Spider.”

“Apologies, Shen-sensei.  But honor and respect have to be earned, don’t they?”

“Yes, and granted when a fine display of skill earns it.  And, young master Phoenix, one must always show respect to a dedicated teacher whose very existence has earned it.  Is that not so?”

Phoenix and Jai Chang both nodded agreement with eyes to the ground.

“But I would like to see the three young bullseyes help Chang-sensei to teach this class.  Teaching others teaches the self more thoroughly, and this is an impressive set of skills to share with students and classmates alike.”

“Yes, Shen-sensei,” said all the students together.

“And now, Jai Chang-sama, I would speak with you further.  Attend me in my office.  We have much to discuss.”

“Yes, Shen-sensei.”

As the old man who had a spotty face that looked eerily like the face of Alfred E. Neuman on the cover of Mad Magazine, walked away from the students, Shen Ming’s smile grew even broader and his eyes actually began to twinkle.

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November 9, 2020 · 9:51 pm

The First Year as a Teacher

My proudest achievement of my thirty-one year years as a public school teacher was the fact that I survived my whole first year. That doesn’t sound like much to you unless you are a teacher. But it sounds even more amazing if you knew what South Texas junior high schools were like in 1981. I mean, my school, Frank Newman Junior High had practically been destroyed the year before I started teaching there by the seventh graders I would be teaching as eighth graders.

You see some of my favorites in the painting I did during my third year as a teacher. From front to back they are Dottie, Teresa, Ruben, Fabian, and Javier. Of course, in these essays about being a teacher, I usually don’t use real names to protect the privacy of my former students, both the innocent and the guilty. So, I leave it to you to decide whether, even though I love these kids, those aren’t probably their real names. Unless… they are.

But not all Texas eighth graders are loveable people. In fact, they are hard on first-year rookie teachers. Especially the ones with a Midwestern faith that they can step in and change the world with their idealistically pure and golden teaching methods. Those teachers they will try to eat alive.

I followed the seventh grade English teacher in the same classroom with the same kids. They made her scream daily, had classroom fist fights weekly, exploded firecrackers under her chair twice during the year, and made her run away to the San Antonio airport and leave teaching behind forever. As ninth graders, they made their English I teacher leave teaching forever even though she was a three-year veteran. And believe me, they tried to do the same to me.

I foiled them constantly by being an on-your-feet-all-day teacher rather than a sit-behind-the-desk-and-yell teacher like my predecessor. After I had a chance to sit during planning period, I always had to clean thumbtacks, tape, and smeared chocolate bars off the seat of my little wooden teacher chair. Paper airplanes were the least gross things that flew through the air. Boogers, spit-wads, spit-wet pieces of chalk, and brown things you had to hope were chewed chocolate flew constantly whenever you had your back turned to them. And if there was only one kid behind you and you turned on him and asked pointedly, “Who threw that?” The kid, of course, saw nothing, has no idea, you can torture him, and he still won’t know anything because you are a lousy teacher and didn’t make him learn anything.

And lessons were mostly about talking over the malevolent tongue-wigglers. They didn’t listen. Not even to each other. One kid would be talking about monster trucks that shoot fire out of their exhaust pipes while the kid next to him was talking at the same time about whether Flipper is properly called a dolphin or a porpoise, or like his older brother says, “a giant penis-fish.” And the girls behind them are actually hearing each other, but only because they are speculating which boy in the classroom has the cutest butt.

I broke up three fights by myself that year, one of which I got slugged in the back of the head by the aggressor during, teaching me to always get between them facing the aggressor and never being wrong about who the aggressor is.

They don’t let you do much teaching at all your first year. They force you to practice discipline by keeping them all seated at the same time with their books open in front of them. “I don’t do literature,” Ernie Lozano told me. Well, to be accurate, none of them actually did literature that year. But they taught me to survive long enough to learn how to actually teach them something.

On the last day of school that year we gave them all extended time on the playground, using the outdoor basketball court to keep them occupied for long enough for a terrible school year to finally run its course. They didn’t set the school on fire that year. They didn’t break into the office that year and steal all the cash. We did well enough at keeping them under control that year that I got rehired and our principal got promoted to high school principal. I had a decision to make that year. Would I keep teaching? Or find another job? Sixty percent of all first-year teachers in Texas in 1982 quit teaching. I only earned $11,000 that year. Did I really want to continue down that dark path for another school year?

Ruben walked up to stand beside me and watch the bigger eighth graders foul each other on the basketball court. “You know, Mr. Beyer, you were my favorite teacher this year.”

“Thank you, Ruben. I needed to hear that.” I bit my lip to keep from crying.

That was when I made the decision. I stuck it out in that same school and district for the next 23 years. I became the head of the Cotulla Middle School English Department. I moved to the Dallas area for family reasons in 2004, but I would teach for eight more years in two more districts and in three more schools. But all of that is Ruben’s fault. Because that was the most important thing anyone ever said to me as a teacher. And I did hear it more than once. But he was the first.

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November 3, 2020 · 3:31 pm

AeroQuest 4… Canto 114

Canto 114 – Desperate Men, Desperate Measures

Several system-defense boats, the so-called Atmospheric Police Force of the planet Coventry rose to surround the wrecked but recovering hulk of the First Half Century.

“Enemy craft!  Stand down with your weapons.  Prepare to be boarded by the Coventry Air Guard.”

Dana Cole turned to her beleaguered crew.  “Any chance we can escape or fight our way out of this?”

“Not without using that… that THING!” said a horrified junior officer whom she didn’t know.

“Yeah, that is definitely out of the question.”  She turned to the reanimated thing that was now her beloved Trav.  “We have to surrender now, lover.  I expect we will be facing trial.”

“Ah, a primitive justice system.  That sort of illogical display will prove most enlightening in these times of our intellectual progeny.”

“I’m not talking to the mind of Trav Dalgoda am I?”

“Decidedly not.  Tyrrix ManSel wishes to observe for the next decade or so.”  The dead eyes were lit from behind with a yellow luminescence.

“Yep, that can’t be good.”

“There is a possibility of incarceration and even execution, isn’t there,” said Tyrrix with Trav’s mouth.

“Yes.  If they don’t kill us as soon as they come aboard.”

“Well, if my database on the Xandar future is accurate, our ride should be showing up at any moment.”

“Our ride?”

Outside the viewport, two Blackhawk Corsairs, both in rather battle-worn condition popped out of jump space.

“We need the Coventry forces to back off for now.  By proxy orders of the White Duke.”  Dana easily recognized the voice of Razor Conn.

Through the viewport, the crew could see the system defense forces backing down.

One of the Blackhawks sent a half dozen air rafts out through its blast-blackened docking bay towards the First Half Century.

In moments, the leader of the Blackhawks, Razor Conn, stood on the bridge looking at Dana through mirrored sunglasses.  He was wearing a white, wide-brimmed cowboy hat like so many veterans of the Pan Galactican Border War.

“I take it this incident was mostly the fault of the evil Tesserah thing?” Razor said simply.

“Yes.  It seems to have a mind of its own.  An evil mind.”

“We are going to tell the Coventry government that we have the rogue warriors in custody and we will give this starship to them as compensation.”

“So, you’re not going to hand us over to be executed?”

“No, of course not.  We already know it wasn’t the fault of you or your crew.  Our own ranks are a bit depleted now too, so we will be taking you aboard to work for us.  We will only claim to have executed the war criminals.  Once the emergency is over, any necessary investigations can happen in a few years.  We have more pressing things to worry about now.”

“Oh?  Like what for instance?”

“That evil Ancient thing wants to kill us all.  Maybe the whole universe.  We have to find a more effective way to deal with it than just doing what it tells us to do.”

Dana looked at Trav.  “Are you telling them what to do?”

“Not I,” answered Tyrrix.  “Your friend speaks of the evil inherent in the Tesserah.  It is, after all, an ultimate Ancient doomsday sort of device.”

“Do you know how to get rid of it?” she asked Razor.

“No, but we have to figure something out.  In the meantime, I would ask for everybody’s company aboard Blackhawk One.  We really have a lot of work to do.”

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November 1, 2020 · 6:47 pm

After the Apocalypse

I am starting this post as I often do, with an unplanted seed of an idea that I decide to stick into a fertile place and see what grows. It is a very poor way to plan an essay, but it has yielded a very good essay by the end of it on more than one occasion. Of course, it often ends poorly too.

So, we begin to look down this dark and smelly rabbit hole where strange ideas live because the world ends on Tuesday when Trump gets re-elected with a minority of the actual vote and a majority of the dirty tricks. Because if he gets re-elected, his nightmarish deregulations of everything that needs to be regulated in order for billionaires and corporations not to continue to make profits over destroying people’s lives and the ability to eat the world will make it impossible to undo the damage in time to save the environment from collapse, and us from extinction. And I don’t want to even mention whether or not I think the Trump family deserves to be extinct or not, I am through talking about him or laying blame anywhere.

The fact is, even if Biden wins, he’s not behind implementing the Green New Deal, and his vision of reform will still cause the end of life on Earth.

Remember, I am a pessimist. I always expect the worst to happen. But the worst is BAD. We really should be trying to avoid it, not be stupid enough to deny the problem even exists just because a Senator from Oklahoma can bring a snowball into the Senate Chamber.

And remember too we still have the Covid 19 pandemic to survive as well. If, as it appears to be the case, you can get the illness again a second and third time, each round causing more internal damage if it doesn’t kill you, the virus may well stick around long enough to infect everyone enough times to drive us to extinction. I fully expect to die from the virus before that nightmare is all over. And I realize that some think that, because the virus is killing Texans and Floridians at ever higher rates with each new wave of infections, that that is merely a “good start” towards killing the real problem. But I love a lot of the people in both States. And just because Governor Abbott and Governor DeSantis and Mickey Mouse and Matt McConaughey are all probably part of the problem, it doesn’t mean I would take comfort from having them die of the virus along with me. But don’t ask me about Trump, the monkey-flinger has already declared himself immune for life and completely kissable. Augh!

You have probably realized by this point that this is a bit of bitter black humor from old Mickey. But I don’t want to leave you with a totally hopeless opinion of what I think is ultimately true. I still have hope for the future. The picture above is mostly done in black ink, using up more than one pen in the creation of it. And yet, the real subject is the light. Yes, the light of the lighthouse. The two luminous children. And the full moon. I have hope for the Green New Deal (if Trump doesn’t win.) I believe in the children I have left behind when Covid kills me, both the ones I raised and the ones I taught. And if it all fails in the end, it was still worth doing. Even when Trump wins.

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October 31, 2020 · 7:09 pm

What’s the Real Reason?

What’s the real reason behind the choices I make as an artist? For instance, why didn’t I do this photo of the artwork over again when the wind warped the bottom left corner. That answer is simple. I was taking this picture with natural sunlight. And once the wind started messing up my pictures, it only got worse. This was the first and best of five attempts. And, while it doesn’t show up here, I did several photo-shop manipulations of this picture, including shrinking the girl’s head. The original was done from a couple of models I got consent from when I worked at a daycare center in Iowa City where I went to college. The boy was eight years old in the summer of 1980. The girl was six, but I used a photo of a girl I went to second grade with, so the head was also eight. They represent David Copperfield and Emily, Pegotty’s niece from the Dickens novel. I had to read the book for my Master’s Exam which I took instead of writing a thesis. The picture is about how I saw myself and my world in that timeless novel.

This picture won a blue ribbon in the art competition at the Wright County Fair in 1979. It is a colored-pencil cartoon situation right out of a Jay Ward, Dudley Do-Right cartoon. I used a picture from a Canadian travel ad for the Mountie. The Indian sidekick is a modified version of Little Beaver, Red Ryder’s sidekick. The villain and the girl were basically Snidely Whiplash and Nell from the Dudley Do-Right cartoons, but made to look slightly more realistic… but only very slightly.

Actually, I lied a bit about the blue ribbon. I got the purple Grand Champion ribbon for this picture. I had entered it solely because two years before I saw how easy it would be to win a purple ribbon looking at the pictures that won it, and I wanted to win the purple ribbon. Sorry I lied, but the real reason for this picture is that I wanted to win that ribbon.

This painting, from the 1990s, was an attempt to make sofa art to sell in my sister-in-law’s home décor store. So, the real reason for this painting’s existence is greed. But since I ended up putting so many hours into it that I couldn’t justify selling it for twenty dollars in a store that went out of business because nobody ever shopped there, I got far more value out of it by keeping it and enjoying it myself. It was inspired by numerous paintings of Native Americans done by white people on display in Love’s Travel Stops across Texas in the 1990s.

This picture, “That Night in Saqqara,” is about youth versus age, thinking about death, immortality, and being afraid of any or all of it. The model for the Mummy is Boris Karloff who was so nice to pose for a production still from his movie that I could draw him long after he was actually dead. The boy was a seventh-grader in 1983 who did not actually pose for this without a shirt on or with an actual Ankh life-symbol around his neck. The Pharaoh in the tomb-mural in the background was from National Geographic Magazine, and I think was supposed to be Tutankhamun, but I could be wrong. I am old and I mix up lots of things I once clearly knew. That’s what mummified brains have to be like, apparently.

The reason I had to create this artwork was because I was increasingly falling victim to illness, especially arthritis, and I was constantly thinking about what it would be like to die alone, entombed in a two-bedroom apartment on North Stewart Street in Cotulla, Texas. This was well before I met and married my wife, who is now my wife of 25 years.

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October 28, 2020 · 8:06 pm

Strawberry Fields

This foolish essay about berries that mean love to me is only partly inspired by the Beatles song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” That’s because, of course, their song was only about meditating. In the lyrics they take you to the “Strawberry Fields where nothing is real… but it’s nothing to get hung up about…” They are talking about a blissful place of no worries where we all need to go. And then staying there forever.

This, of course, I could never do. Worrying about the future is tattooed on my behavioral imperatives in the dark part of my stupid old brain. And while I often found that place of no worries, and lingered there for a bit, I found you could never really get anything done if you stayed in that state of strawberry fields forever.

But don’t get me wrong, strawberries are a critical part of every healthy mental diet.

You see, my meditations on strawberries when I was a child of eight, nine, and ten centered on the strawberry patch at Great Grandma Hinckley’s place.

She was, as I incorrectly recall, slightly older than Jesus when I was that age. By that I mean, though she seemed museum-quality ancient to me, I had derived wisdom about life, love, and laughter from her before Sunday School taught me any of those things said in Jesus’s words.

And I was given the task of mowing her lawn in the little plot of land surrounding her little, tiny house in the Northern part of Rowan where I also lived and grew and celebrated Christmas and Halloween and Easter and the 4th of July. And though I was doing it because she was so old, I never even once thought she was too old and frail to do it herself. Grandma Hinckley’s willpower was a force of nature that could even quell tornados… well, I thought so anyway when I was eight. And she gave me a dollar every time I did the lawnmowing.

But there were other things she wanted done, and other things she wanted to teach me. There was the garden out back with the strawberry patch next to it. She wanted me to help with keeping the weeds and the saw grass and the creeping Charlie from overrunning the strawberries and choking them to death. (Creeping Charlie wasn’t an evil neighbor, by the way. He was a little round-leafed weed that grew so profusely that it prevented other plants from getting any sunlight on their own leaves, causing a withering, yellowing death by sunlight deprivation. I took my trowel to them and treated them like murderers. I showed them no mercy.)

And Grandma always reminded me not to be selfish and eat the very berries I was tending in the garden. She taught me that eating green strawberries (which are actually more yellow than green, but you know what I mean) was bad because they could give you a belly ache, a fact that that I proved to myself more than once (because eight-year-olds are stupid and learn slowly.) She also taught me that it is better to wait until you have enough strawberries to make a pie, or better yet, strawberry shortcake with whipped cream. She taught me that delayed gratification was more rewarding in the long run than being greedy in the short run and spoiling everything for everybody.

She always gave me a few of the ripe strawberries every time I helped her with them, even if I had eaten a few in the garden without permission. Strawberries were the fruit of true love. I know this because it says so in the strawberry picture. Even though I probably never figured out what true love really means.

My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was the foundation stone that my mother’s side of the family was built on. She was the rock that held us steadily in place during the thunderstorms, and the matriarch of the entire clan of Hinckleys and Aldriches and Beyers and other cousins by the dozens and grandchildren and great grandchildren and even great great grandchildren. I painted the picture of her in 1980 when she passed away. I gave it to my Grandma Aldrich, her second-eldest daughter. It spent three decades in Grandma’s upstairs closet because looking at it made Grandma too sad to be so long without her. The great grandchild in the picture with her is now a grandmother herself (though no one who has seen this picture knows who it is supposed to be because I painted her solely from memory and got it all wrong.) But Grandma Hinckley taught me what true love means. And true love has everything to do with how you go about taking care of the strawberry patch.

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October 27, 2020 · 2:46 pm

AeroQuest 4… Adagio 20

Adagio 20 – The War Crimes of Trav Dalgoda

One could coherently argue that Trav Dalgoda was history’s most evil murderer.  997,463,756 died in the initial blasts from the Tesserah.  One and a half billion people would end up dead from the incident and the lethal fallout of its aftermath; earthquakes… or rather, coventryquakes, out-of-control fires, landslides, and radiation all caused casualties, both immediate and long term. It is no wonder it took seven Earth years to bring the incident to trial and condemn Dalgoda as an ultimate villain, perfidious skank, odious killer, and all-around really bad guy… officially.

But it must be pointed out, the reincarnated Trav Dalgoda was never punished for the crimes.  Not even a slap on the wrist by a nun using a metal ruler.  Nothing.  

There were a number of reasons for this.  Hard-to-argue reasons that actually made some legal sense.

First of all, Dalgoda was not in possession of his own brain.  It was proven through testimony by talented Psions that the Tesserah itself was a powerful mind-controlling psychic influence, and undoubtedly had control of Goofy Dalgoda’s rather limited intellect and all of his motor control.

Secondly, it was pointed out, in no uncertain terms, that Trav Dalgado had already paid for the crime with his life, having been beheaded by his lover, Dana Cole.

No prosecutor was able to prove that Trav Dalgoda’s head was not legally dead when Dana Cole, together with one of the intelligences left in the Crown of Stars, a device obviously impossible to understand being from a tech level so far above anything fully understood by Imperial or New Star League scientists.

It was also not hard to prove that the reanimated Trav Dalgoda, more Synthezoid or Metalloid than living being, was not the same person who fired the fatal blasts from the starship bearing the evil Ancient device known as the Tesserah.

I have to admit, I myself have often questioned the correctness of the verdict.  Trav’s war crimes could really not be wholly laid at the feet of the evil inherent in the Ancient device itself.  After all, the other Ancient devices that the Aero Brothers and Trav brought to light were not in themselves evil.  The artificial being known as Frieda proved quite beneficial to the New Star League.  The device known as the Hammer of God was used to create cities and starships and space ports that brought the web of interstellar travel to the New Stars.  Certainly, the starship Megadeath proved to be one of the most important starships ever created, and as the creation of the Ancient intelligence known as Frieda, was itself an Ancient artifact of sorts.

I further believe that when the artificially reanimated Trav Dalgoda fathered two children rather dubiously with Dana Cole, who may have used some cloning tricks in the process, those children may have also given an insight into the possible criminality in Trav’s genes.

One-Eyed Jack Dalgoda was a viciously greedy and obnoxious young mountebank, capable of chicanery well beyond the dreams of your average criminal or con man.  And that girl, Daisy Duckling Dalgoda, was one of the most infamous gold-diggers and criminal masterminds I ever encountered… by the age of ten no less.

But I get ahead of myself too far in the story.  I haven’t survived this little history yet at this particular point in the telling of the tale.

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October 26, 2020 · 6:37 pm

Blueberries of Happiness

I know I am mixing metaphors again. It is supposed to be blueBIRDS of happiness. But not only am I starting this essay with a berry theme, I happen to be allergic to blueberries, thus solidly symbolizing my somewhat complicated relationship to the state of being truly happy.

https://chopra.com/articles/8-surprising-benefits-of-blueberries

You see, blueberries are full of antioxidants that are beneficial in so many ways that I really need that it seems absolutely a bitter irony that they make me sick to my stomach and constrict my lungs. I used to love eating blueberry muffins and blueberry pancakes, as well as fresh, cold ripe berries. They are good for my strained urinary tract and my glaucoma-plagued eyes. They help stave off cancer and help circulation to prevent heart disease. They are good for your blood pressure. But I also learned the hard way that they can stop me from breathing, a habit I really don’t wish to give up.

Mike Murphy and his girlfriend, Blueberry Bates

It is, unfortunately, a universal fact that no human life ever ran on one-hundred percent happiness. It is not possible to be a living, breathing, feeling human bean without knowing a little sadness… a little tragedy… a fair share of sorrow. In fact, I think it must be a rule that the happiest people you know have faced some of the hardest things you can imagine. My Great Uncle Harry was never able to talk about his experiences in Normandy during World War II. But I never knew a man who appreciated a good joke and a laugh more. My Grandpa Aldrich, my mother’s father, was probably the happiest man I ever knew, but his childhood was made difficult because of his mother’s dark secret, and how his father handled the truth about his birth. I too am a generally happy person. Did you know I have been in a psychiatric hospital after midnight admitting someone I love to the suicide-prevention ward? And I have had serious discussions on more than one occasion with more than one other person who was seriously discussing self-harm with me. I think there is probably no one in this life who truly appreciates happiness that hasn’t stared at least once into the dark eyes of despair.

It goes a long way towards explaining why I included a picture of Blueberry Bates in this essay. She’s a character in more than one of my novels, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, Magical Miss Morgan, and Kingdoms Under the Earth.

Blueberry blames herself for the death of her mother. She was born a cyanotic, or blue, baby at the same time that her mother went into cardiac arrest during childbirth. The tragedy of her birth broke her father’s relationship to reality. He rejected the little boy who had been born to him because the mother, his beloved wife had died in the process. It fell to Blueberry’s two older sisters to take the baby, care for it, and give it a name.

You’ve probably figured out by now that Blueberry was raised as a girl even though she had a penis because her father would never have accepted the son whose birth killed his wife. He secretly blamed himself because the only reason they had a third child was because he so desperately wanted a son. So, he ended up with three daughters, the youngest one with a terrible secret that she really didn’t understand. And Mr. Bates never really came around to accepting that third daughter either. She was raised by her sisters Becky and Carla, and her Aunt Wilma, her father’s unmarried sister. And it took years of therapy and visits to the specialist in Minnesota who became the expert on gender dysphoria to reach the determination that Blueberry was going to be a girl and would transition when she was old enough. You are probably aware that this is a hard thing to deal with, especially when you don’t have any actual parents to help you deal with it.

But Blueberry is one of the happiest characters I have created in my fiction so far. She loves to draw, especially with colored pencil. She loves her boyfriend, Mike Murphy, to whom she revealed the truth, and in spite of Mike’s struggles with it, he eventually came to accept her not only as a girl, but as a girl he was in love with. That was a choice that didn’t sit well with Mike’s best friend, Tim Kellogg. Tim would have to come to terms with either accepting Blue as a girl, or losing his best friend. And that took more than one novel to decide.

Happiness is like that. The higher your kite flies in the April breeze, the harder it crashes to the ground. And if it is not destroyed in the fall, it longs to fly high again.

Happiness is a blueberry. And I like the taste very much. But I am also allergic to blueberries.

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Filed under autobiography, battling depression, characters, Depression, happiness, health, humor, Paffooney

October 25, 2020 · 7:52 pm

Rememberries

Yes,

I am stupidly planning to do it again. A book of essays like I did before, but now with fewer of my best essays to choose from. So, essays with fewer calories, but also less nutrition. Laughing Blue was a success from the point of view of what I wrote it for. I know people generally don’t read essays for fun.

But I write them for fun. And for better health. Healthy thinking is as necessary as a proper diet.

You see, I am definitely not in good health. I retired from my job as a school teacher six years ago because of poor health. It was a job I truly loved and defined me as a human bean (by which I mean a human being, but with a careful balance of protein and carbohydrates.) Being retired is more restful. But you reach a point where doing nothing leads to sitting and rotting. I find I need the extra vitamin C you get from cooking essays with a lot of berries in them. Specifically rememberries.

Okay, I know that is a rather dumb food pun. But the vitamin C is still there to boost my immune system and make me feel better. Vitamin C for Comedy… Clarity… Creativity… and Cartoons.

So, let’s start with a berry from the 1960s. Let’s start with Moonberries.

I was twelve years old when the Apollo Program landed Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and the LEM Eagle on the Moon at Tranquility Base. I was very much a child of the Space Age. I had a model kit of the Apollo 11 from Revell, all the pieces in white plastic. The tiny struts on the Lunar Expeditionary Module were maddeningly breakable, and even would warp under the dissolving power of Testor’s airplane glue. I spent hours with sticky fingers putting that together in December of 1968 and January of 1969. I was twelve, in the middle of my wonder years, and totally obsessed with the flavor of the whole Moonberry experience.

For several years through Gemini and then Apollo we watched the story unfold on our old black-and-white Motorola television set. All of it narrated by Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra. All of it… space walks, docking maneuvers, orbit reports, a special Christmas message from Apollo 8, splashdowns bringing home heroes like Jim Lovell, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders… the man who had spoken the words;

“For all the people on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.”

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

“And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’: and there was light.

“And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”

And then that late, late night when we all stayed up on July 20, 1969… And we knew they could fail and never come home again… We learned that with Grissom, White, and Chaffee on Apollo 1… That horrible fire… The somber funeral parade on TV that called to mind JFK and what befell him after he started the dream…

But no, we heard those words, “The Eagle has landed.”

And then later, “One small step for man… One giant leap for mankind.”

And then I knew it. For me, real life had finally begun.

I promise, there are more rememberries to come, and some might even be nutritious.

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Filed under autobiography, commentary, healing, health, heroes, humor, metaphor, Paffooney