Category Archives: Paffooney

February 9, 2020 · 10:16 pm

Talking to Nobody

I entered the classroom silently. Death doesn’t have to make any sound when it enters a room, but I remember many times when I entered a classroom in a fully enraged-lion roar. Probably too many times.

This time it was a small lesson to a small class. Little Mickey, ten years old, was sitting there in a front-row desk. He was wearing that stupid purple derby hat that he always wore in his imagination. And he was wearing nothing else besides.

I gave him that old death-eye stare of disapproval. He grinned and shrugged. “Hey, I like to write about nudists, okay? They tell the truth more than most people.”

I simply nodded.

Sitting the next row over, in the front seat also, middle-aged Mickey was slumped in his seat like the cynical, world-weary teacher-thing he actually was. I nodded disapprovingly at him too. “I know, I know,” he said. “My time is running out. I have to get started on my writing plan for real this time. My stories will never get written if I don’t.”

The third seat in the third row contained Old Coot Mickey with his wrinkled clothes, his long Gandalf-hair, and his frizzy author’s beard. He grinned his goofy grin at me and nodded at me cheekily. “I’ve got fourteen novels written and published now. Taint my fault that nobody ever reads ’em. They are mostly good stories, too.”

I rolled my eyes at the dark ceiling.

On the chalkboard I wrote out. Today’s Lesson Is…

“I know! I know!” shouted little Mickey, naked except for his purple hat. “The next novel is A Field Guide to Fauns. It is all about nudists in a nudist camp. I am definitely down with that!”

“Is that really a good idea, though?” asked middle-aged Mickey. “I think I was meant to be a writer of Young Adult novels, like the ones I taught so often in class. I know how those books are structured. I know their themes and development inside and out. I know how to write that stuff.”

“But the little naked guy has it right. You have ta be truthful in novels, even as you tell your danged lies.” Old Coot Mickey made his point by punctuating it with a wrinkled hand thumping on the top of his desk. “You have written novels with characters forcing other characters to make porn films in The Baby Werewolf, and sexual assault of a child in Fools and Their Toys, and lots of naked folks, and betrayal and death… All of that is the kinda stuff kids really want ta read. And them stories don’t glorify that stuff neither. Stories can help fight agin that stuff.”

“Remember, that stuff is hard to write about because I actually went through some of that stuff in my own life. It’s possible for even a fiction book to be just too real for a YA novel.” Middle-aged Mickey had entered fighting mode with his fists on his hips.

“But the underlying truth is why you had to write those stories to begin with. You have truth to tell… But in fiction form,” argued little Mickey.

“And horrible experiences turn into beautiful survival stories and heroes’ journeys with time and thoughtfulness and art,” said Old Coot Mickey.

I agreed with all three of me. I nodded and smiled.

“But you are Death, aren’t you?” asked middle-aged Mickey.

“And you’ve come to take away at least Old Coot Mickey!” declared little Mickey.

“You’ve got me all wrong,” I answered all three of me. “I am not Death. I am Nobody.“

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Filed under autobiography, homely art, horror writing, humor, irony, kids, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

February 7, 2020 · 7:34 pm

Doing Dumb Discipline

Yes, I am writing this post in response to another hard day of substitute teaching. 6th graders! Aaargh!

But the real point of it is that most of the problems I had are due to every teacher’s daily nightmare… discipline management.

This is all that remains of my classroom rules poster from the 1980’s.

Teachers, even substitute teachers, are expected to keep an orderly classroom. But the truth is, no adult human being can make a twelve-to-eighteen-year-old member of the monkey house do anything… or refrain from doing the most harmful thing that occurs to the immature monkey brain.

It is just as Carl Sandburg once suggested in a clever poem. If you tell them not to put beans in their ears, the only thing they will definitely want to do is put beans in their ears.

So, this post is my list of excuse-a-mes for why the classes I taught yesterday all had bean-filled ears.

Excuse number one; 6th graders! Aaargh! Yes, I had four classes to teach, and three of them were made up solely of 6th graders. They are the squirrel monkeys of the middle-school monkey house. Unable to sit still and be quiet on their best days, they were super-stirred and hormone-activated. It is, after all, February, a week before Valentine’s Day, the hormonal-monkey holiday. It was a writing class and they had a writing assignment that they are supposed to be working on for the next week. And the generally accepted rule among monkeys; Do no work for substitute teachers, no matter their educational backgrounds in English and writing.

Excuse number B; To maintain discipline you have to know the kids. Here’s the most pernicious problem that substitute teachers are saddled with. I had never seen over ninety-five percent of these squirrel monkeys before… not in their natural habitat… not even in cages at the zoo. Boy, do the nerd-like teacher-pleasers who are actually classroom comedians and attack-monkeys in disguise really mount up in that particular saddle and ride you for the rest of the monkey-rodeo you thought was going to be a writing class.

Excuse-a-me Three; There are too many monkeys in the monkey house. Especially the Avid class of 30 super-heated seventh and eighth grade warm bodies that I had to teach as a bonus-penalty for being a “good” substitute. AVID is a special program for troubled and at-risk kids where you put them together with a good teacher and treat them like gifted students and set their lovely little monkey-feet on a path to college. Except, this under-funded special program that works spectacularly well in some schools, is basically misused and abused across Texas where practically all kids who are not white or not wealthy are at-risk for one reason or another. I got to walk into a classroom cold with these thirty high-risk monkeys because no other sub had signed up for this particular nightmare job. No lesson plans were available. No attendance sheets were ready. And it was a science lab, so the room was filled with kids who had helped themselves to rulers and yardsticks with which they were conducting sword-fights. The teacher next door who was giving a test found for me a stack of worksheets to give out. I located a class list to use for attendance. And then I proceeded to put them into seats with work to do and threatened several lives and put one overly-aggressive girl in temporary time-out and denied restroom privileges to scores of kids who probably weren’t going to actually explode into showers of pee. And I didn’t keep them quiet, but when the bell finally rang 50 hour-long minutes later, no one had died a horrible death. And they all had their clothes still on. And it appeared that the structural integrity of the classroom was still sound enough for one more class period. And I, of course, had to quickly rush back to the 6th graders for the worst class of the day.

Excuse-a-me Finale; The sub in the room next door was more incompetent than I was on this particular day. That isn’t really an excuse for my poor showing, but it at least made me feel sorry for someone besides myself. Some of his students came to me as their next official class, already charged up for a super-fun murder-the-sub day. Some of the students who came to me had to go to him for their next period and tried to stay in my room instead. Some of his students went for extended tours of the parts of the campus where they knew no assistant principal or security guard would be. There were fights in that class. They were banging on the the walls. They were noisier than my classes. The poor young guy had none of the substitute survival skills that I had, and I was too pressed to help him at all. But he was young and healthy. He had apparently been there for a couple of weeks as he was doing a long-term job for a history teacher who was having a baby. So, he will soon learn that he does not want to become a Texas public school teacher in his future.

So, as a disciplinarian, I was really dumb for a day. I do know how to handle these things correctly, and I will make future posts about the How-to-s of that. But for today, it is enough to say that I survived to teach another day.

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Filed under aliens, foolishness, humor, kids, monsters, Paffooney, teaching

February 5, 2020 · 8:28 pm

Other People’s Children

I was a substitute teacher for seventh graders on Monday. And I experienced a bit of the time-warp sensation that becomes a big part of the lives of old people… especially crazy old coots like me.

My whole-day sub job was definitely happening on the 3rd day of February, 2020. And yet it took me back to 1988, 1996, and 2002 all in the space of three 50-minute periods.

I was visited by three former students from the past. They looked almost the same as I remembered them. They definitely acted exactly the same. And they had exactly the same kind of classroom behavior as they did before. And what was equally confounding, they were all in the seventh grade yet again and in the year 2020, apparently inhabiting new bodies with new names attached and attending school again at Dan F. Long Middle School in Carrollton.

Raul was a feisty comedian-type kid, too lazy to do the actual work, but more than up for a titanic effort at disrupting a class in order to avoid doing the actual work. He was up and out of his seat repeatedly, harassing the resident weird kid to make him bellow, and then blaming everybody in the room except for himself about the paper-wads and mini paper planes that flew when I had my back turned (an old trick from ’88), He got in trouble yet again, though this time it was not me who would be calling his mother to explain the need for some capital punishment at home.

And in that same class, Heather, Cotulla cowboy cheerleader from my seventh grade class in ’96, sat two rows over from Raul. Secretly laughing at everything Raul did, and laughing even harder (though without actually making a sound) at every punishment I gave out.

And two periods later, freckle-faced Pearl from 2002 was sitting in her customary front-row desk, laughing at all of my jokes that the other kids in that Advanced-Placement English Class for seventh graders were not quite sharp enough to understand.

If you teach for long enough, you realize that you are really only teaching the same kids over and over and over again. Names change, the years change, the technology and society around us change, but the kids are always the same. Heck, on Monday, three of them even looked the same.

Teachers are routinely put in charge of other people’s children. As a teacher, you are responsible for the care and well-being of under-developed human beings which you not only have to keep safe and clean and diapered (well, figuratively only, hopefully), but you also have to spoon-feed them whatever curriculum the wealthy, white pettifoggers with no teaching experience (I’m talking about you and your kind, DeVos) have foolishly decided is the proper thing to stuff into their little under-developed brains. And the kids never really change. The names change, but nothing else that is important. The pettifoggers eventually change, but not enough to make any real difference.

So, there you are. You are left with the task of nurturing future people. And everybody criticizes. Except, usually, other teachers. And you have to learn to love other peoples’ children. And, I discovered I still do. I still love even the bad ones, even after I have given up the game and no longer have any class of my own. And I don’t love any of them inappropriately, either. I know better than to touch them, especially the radioactive ones. Unless it is about touching the heart and the mind metaphorically. I know I posted before about hating 7th Graders. But you have to know them better than a substitute gets to know them to hate them. Loving them generically is much better for the soul, and even as a sub, I can still do that.

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Filed under humor, kids, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, teaching

February 4, 2020 · 6:47 pm

AeroQuest 3… Canto 78

Canto 78– Doom Looms (The Goofy Gray Thread)

Now, you probably remember that Trav Dalgoda was sitting up in orbit around the planet Farwind on the ship he now commanded with lots of toys to play with. He had particle beam weapons and ion weapons that could reach the planet from space. You can probably imagine he was in Goof Heaven and everyone else under his command had to be in Nervous Hell.

“Don’t you want to stop playing with those red buttons, Trav?” asked Dana Cole sweetly.

“Oh, I love these weapons. I haven’t played with things like this since that gigantic forest fire on the planet Samothrace. You could see that one burning from space, I’ll tell you what.”

“Still, you know, there are other things to do besides constantly targeting different things that are visible on the planet.”

“Yeah, I know. But… what, for instance?”

“Well… I. uh…”

“You know, you look pretty in that uniform.”

“Thank you, Trav. I’m so glad you finally noticed.”

“Oh, I always notice you. You are one hot hoochie mama!”

Dana frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I really like you. In fact, I think I’m gonna need you with me always. Hey, I can get an unobstructed target lock on the industrial complex at Cyber City! Cool deal!”

Dana nervously undid the jacket buttons of her uniform. She had nothing on underneath, and the full glory of her cleavage and her navel were revealed. Her hands were actually shaking. This seduction might be needed to save lives.

“Notice anything else about my uniform, sailor boy?”

“Yeah, Little Jester, your front came undone. Better button up so that you won’t be out of uniform.”

Dana’s jaw set grimly. Some forms of stupidity are too immense to be believable. Never-the-less, no matter how exaggerated it may seem, there is almost always an example somewhere of every kind of idiot behavior.

“Did you notice how I had your ancient artifact set up on the bridge?” Dana pointed at the evil coffee machine where it was percolating with eerie green lights in the middle of the bridge. The other bridge officers walked around it as if it were a sleeping baby, an excessively evil sleeping baby. Tiptoes were almost not enough.

“Ah, yes, my beautiful Tesserah! I love the way it gleams and smells like napalm in the morning.”

“Maybe you should examine it more closely. It’s been thirty minutes since you looked at it last.”

Trav’s grin was maniacal. He strode over to the pulsing artifact. He put both hands on it. “Ah, has oo missed yer daddy? I wuv oo, yes, I do.”

The behavior made Dana almost sick to her stomach. As he petted the thing and nearly made love to it, she couldn’t help but think this was the worst assignment she had ever drawn from the evil creepers of Expedition One.

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Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction

Tagged as AeroQuest 3, novel

February 3, 2020 · 3:50 am

Something Unexpected

I finished up a final proofread and formatting project on the novel I am re-publishing on Amazon, Magical Miss Morgan.

And, you know what? The story made me cry again. An unbroken record. It is about the fifteenth time I read through it. And every single time, the little three-inch-tall fairy is killed again, and I can’t keep my eyes dry.

He’s not even based on a real person as so many of my characters are. It’s not like it is someone I know and love. It’s a fairy. Not even remotely real. And I’m the one who decided he had to die in the story because because good comedy stories always end with at least one main character dying… Don”t they?

But I can’t help feeling things about the characters in my stories. I don’t love them all. I hate some of them. But, they’re the ones you are supposed to hate. They are villians, bad guys, characters based on real people who hurt me in real life.

It’s not just my stories that make me feel. I have read Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities twice, and both times Sydney Carton made me cry. I read Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop only once. And Little Nell made me cry so hard I could never reread that book. And there’s Simon in The Lord of the Flies, and, of course, the old Yeller dog in Old Yeller by Fred Gipson… I’m a sucker for heroic deaths and tragic losses. They touch and twist my little blue heart.

But I cried for the fifteenth time, and I survived it. I will probably cry again if I read it again. That is what life is like. That is what fiction is for. To make me think and feel and… love.

Magical Miss Morgan will soon be back in print.

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Filed under characters, commentary, humor, novel writing, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as Magical Miss Morgan

February 1, 2020 · 6:28 pm

Making Faces for Art Day

Capturing faces and their varied expressions are a key feature of my art.

I gravitate towards happy and innocent faces. Kid faces… Cartoon faces… goofy faces

Mary Murphy with her kids, Little Sean and Dilsey

Mike Murphy and his girlfriend, Blueberry Bates

Anita Jones and her boyfriend, Edward (Superchicken) Campbell

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Filed under artwork, cartoons, goofiness, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as Saturday Art Day

January 30, 2020 · 7:42 pm

Dear Daddy, Don’t Die!

Two weeks ago I let my car drift too near the curb of the street. I hit a curb-corner at the edge of a driveway and something there punctured the passenger-side tire. It was a financial setback. I had to buy a new tire.

But what it really cost me, was the confidence of all three of my children that I can still take care of myself. They were united in threatening to take away my driver’s license and treat me like an invalid.

It was a bit of an over-reaction to what actually happened. But God has it in for me. The challenges to my continued survival seem to never stop coming. At this writing I have six incurable diseases. Diabetes, hypertension, COPD, arthritis, psoriasis, and an enlarged prostate. On top of that, I am a cancer survivor. Skin cancer, 1983. My father has Parkinson’s and it is severely slowing him down. It is also a disease I am beginning to show symptoms of. God hasn’t killed me yet, but not for a lack of trying.

Personally, I am worried about my own frequent bouts of stupidity more than anything else.

Sure, I have diabetes and not enough income to get insulin thanks to pharmaceutical profiteers (another term for blood-thirsty pirates) But I have learned since 2000 to battle it with proper diet. It has been working. And it still does.

But I can be stupid, too. I hate being left out of restaurant trips to SpringCreek Barbecue or Chili’s. But the temptations to eat myself into a coma is always there right in front of me. My wife always eats food that will kill me and even offers me some. (She is not trying to kill me for my money, though. She knows I am bankrupt. That’s why she has to pay for these little family outings that she invites me to. And there are no huge insurance checks in her future if the mashed potatoes get the better of me.)

Arthritis is hard to live with too. My kids worry that my gas-pedal knee will seize up when I am going 55, or my break-pedal leg will fail to move when I need it to when the inevitable Dallas-area killer grandma is driving beside me in the next lane in her black BMW, thinking seriously about how to kill me and make it look like my fault on the insurance claim. I learned long ago to drive with extreme defensiveness in Texas. But still I can be stupid too. Like when I don’t watch the lane’s squiggles and curves hawkishly like I didn’t do two Sunday nights ago.

So, I have to be less stupid for more of the time. If not… if I die on the road some god-forsaken night, my sons are going to kill me. Even if they have to dig me up again to do it.

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Filed under family, feeling sorry for myself, health, humor, illness, Paffooney, psoriasis

January 29, 2020 · 4:05 pm

99 Luftballons in Our Time

Hast du etwas Zeit für mich
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich
Von 99 Luftballons
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont
Denkst du vielleicht g’rad an mich
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich
Von 99 Luftballons
Und dass so was von so was kommt

The song tells of 99 balloons that are released into the sky above the Berlin Wall and are immediately misinterpreted. Thinking the 99 balloons are UFOs, the air force sends 99 hot-shot pilots who all think they are Captain Kirk. They shoot at the balloons creating fireworks in the sky for the nearby country to see and get nervous about. 99 war ministers start shooting back… leading to 99 years of war.

99 Jahre Krieg
Ließen keinen Platz für Sieger
Kriegsminister gibt’s nicht mehr
Und auch keine Düsenflieger
Heute zieh’ ich meine Runden
Seh’ die Welt in Trümmern liegen
Hab’ ‘nen Luftballon gefunden
Denk’ an dich und lass’ ihn fliegen

Today I was walking among the ruins of the world. I found a balloon and I thought of you and let it fly away.

Such is the nature of this surreal song that it echoes and resonates in the world today just as it did in 1983 when it was first played by the German band Nena. We see things we don’t quite understand. And if we don’t understand it, we try to shoot it. Over-reacting and under-reacting work together to brew up disasters.

You have to be aware of the potential dangers of letting goldfish chew gum and blow bubbles with it.

Maybe we ought to do something positive for a change. We have a criminal president. He apparently can’t be charged with a crime. Republicans are immune to the accusations they always use on Democrats. We have a dying planet with warming and polluted air. Soon we won’t be able to breath if we are not already dead in hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and other global-warming-related disasters. How many more balloons do we have to shoot at or decide not to shoot at? How many more mistakes can we make?

But I like the song. I listen to it, and I forget my mistakes and the troubles they have caused me. Well, at least for the duration of the song.

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Filed under commentary, feeling sorry for myself, music, Paffooney

January 28, 2020 · 7:07 pm

AeroQuest 3… Canto 77

Canto 77– Dome Invasion (The Blood-Red Thread)

The arc-welder burned a gaping hole through the lowest level of the underwater dome on Farwind. Water began gushing in before the trooper had finished cutting the hole.

“Won’t this flood the dome?” Ferrari asked through the metal commo dot attached inside his underwater helmet. “Shouldn’t we be finding another way inside?”

“Don’t worry, Commander,” said a trooper in his yellow and blue battle armor, “We will only flood the ground floor to the level of our waists. We’ve successfully done this operation before.”

“Before? You’ve invaded this dome before?”

“Yes, during the last insurrection. It isn’t our fault the civilian government couldn’t hold out against Brona Tang.”

The trooper’s words inspired absolutely no confidence in any of us. We were in this thing way over our heads, and I don’t mean just because we were at the bottom of the sea.

As water rushed inside the dome, the gaping hole was suddenly big enough for armored men to walk through. This we did, single file. The Commander led the way, followed by Duke Ferrari, Ham Aero, six troopers, and then me. The rest of the troops were guarding the rear.

Inside the dome, water was gushing like a series of water-park fountains splashing amok. It looked to me like the water really could rush in and fill the entire dome.

The Commander took off the helmet he wore and pitched it aside. “Tac-Officer! Give me a readout on the enemy positions. Do they have a scan-lock on us yet?”

The man in the suit with all the wires and antennas took off his helmet and began studying a monitor that popped out of his armored chest-plate.

Ferrari stepped forward to consult. “Commander, I think we should find the control room and try to capture this place from its top.”

“You are not a military man. Leave this to us,” snapped the Commander.

“Uh, sir…” The Tac-Officer was pale. “We have a problem.”

The Commander frowned at him. He opened his mouth to say something cruel in the way commanding officers usually do when they hear things they don’t like. Suddenly, we heard ominous sounds all around us. Guns were being cocked and plasma weapons began to hum. Above us, a ring of troopers in black combat armor stood up, training at least a hundred different weapons on our exposed position.

“Does this seem bad to you?” I asked Ham.

Ham had just taken off his diving helmet and now he smiled at the deadly arsenal arrayed against us. “This comes under the general heading of not good, yes.” I noticed he was strikingly handsome when he smiled.

“You gentlemen must surrender immediately,” said one of the black figures surrounding us. “We have orders to kill you all and leave no member of your group alive.”

“It is troublesome how the military mind usually works,” I said. “I suppose this is the end for me.”

“Yes…” said Ham, no longer smiling. “This is not good at all!”

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Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction, self portrait

Tagged as AeroQuest 3

January 25, 2020 · 8:13 pm