I am not well again after a couple of weeks of rain and cold working on my arthritis. So I am going to merely post a few past Paffoonies to make up today’s post. If you would like to see what Paffoonies are all about, then go to Google picture search “Beyer Paffooney”. It will basically give you a Mickian art gallery, peppered with other pictures that I used in posts that aren’t actually Paffoonies (but the algorithm doesn’t know that).
Filed under artwork, Paffooney, Uncategorized
Canto 15 – Beautiful Fur Bikini
Ham and the blue Princess rode into Bedrock proper on the back of their velociraptor. Ged not only looked exactly like the dinosaur, he moved and sounded just as it would. The illusion was perfect.
Bedrock was teeming with unusual activity. Everywhere young people were engaged in buying and trading all sorts of goods, most of which were animals, and all of those were reptiles. Young ladies of fashion were buying bright-colored snakes to drape around their necks. Little monkey-like lizards called Compies were being sold as pets and as remote holo-television controls. People were buying fake plasticized furs of all colors for purposes of all sorts.
“Hello, citizen,” said an apparent policeman in a blue fur with gold insignias. “Isn’t that Dino6476 you’re riding? Where’s Fred3576?”
“Oh, he’s my cousin,” lied Ham quickly. “He loaned me Dino2466 for the day.”
“Oh?” said the officer suspiciously. “That foul-tempered beast always used to eat anyone who tried to ride him but Freddie!”
“Oh, ha-ha,” Ham laughed nervously, “I have a way with animals.”
“…And how about the girl Smurf and the blue brat? You know it’s against the law to bring them into this part of town. They have their own ghetto to live in!”
“Oh! Is that so? I don’t think I like that small-minded attitude.” Ham bristled. He wasn’t in love with the Princess or anything, but he wasn’t going to stand for that sort of rot.
The policeman drew out a large, silly-looking rock caster and aimed it at Ham.
“What! Is that supposed to scare me?”
Suddenly Ham heard a girl’s voice in his head. <“You are very brave, but don’t force the race issue here. I will help you find the ones you seek. I saw Trav Dalgoda, and there’s one I know who will be a far greater help to you than Goofy!”>
“Who are you?” Ham asked of the air around him.
“My name is Cary Granite,” said the policeman, “And you are under arrest!”
Suddenly a beautiful young girl, maybe sixteen years of age, came out of the crowd and approached Officer Granite.
“Don’t shoot!” she cried. Ham noticed how pretty she was in her leopard-skin bikini. “He really is Freddie’s cousin. I can vouch for him. The Smurf girl is his slave, and he forgot about the law in this part of town.”
The officer smiled and nodded. “Of course, Tara, whatever you say.”
The officer put away his hand-held catapult and wandered off as if he’d forgotten all about it already.
“Thanks, Tara,” said Ham. “Why did you lie for me? And how did you know about Goofy?”
The pretty young brunette with barely any clothes on smiled up at the handsome young man with barely any clothes on riding on the back of a carnivore.
“I’m a telepath, Ham. My name is Tara Salongi, and I’m a Psion like your brother Ged.” She nodded toward the velociraptor with the unusually intelligent gaze.
Ham’s mouth dropped open.
“Come with me. I can introduce you to the Psion Master of Don’t Go Here. He’s been waiting for you four to show up for five years. He can teach Ged how to use his power. He can even help the little boy.” She pointed at the naked blue child riding in between Ham and the Princess.
“I don’t understand. How did you know all about us?”
“Master Tkriashav is Clairvoyant. He can look into the future!”
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
Last night I spent a couple of hours avoiding washing the dishes that piled up in the sink for the weekend by submitting my rough draft novel Recipes for Gingerbread Children to the Inkitt free novel contest. I am pretty sure that was a stupid thing to do. I created the above cover to complete the submission. I had previously decided by researching Inkitt that it was probably a bad idea to go for this kind of publishing scheme. I cannot afford another vanity press price. I can only manage free publishing opportunities. I am probably better off publishing through KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing).
The novel is not entirely a stand-alone. It is the companion story to The Baby Werewolf whose climax I am working on last week and this week. It wouldn’t exist at all if it weren’t a pile of irresistible weird stuff left over from the creation of The Baby Werewolf and Superchicken. It is full of fairy tales, “real” fairies created by fairy tales, Nazis, teenage nudist girls, and a sweet old German lady who managed to survive the holocaust.
The contest will only have four winners this month, and I did not submit it until four days before the end of the month. Snowball’s chance in H-E-double-hockey-sticks, right? I cannot afford to pay them to publish it. So if it doesn’t win, I tell them no.
I mistakenly believe I am a good writer and story-teller. But that may be a totally delusional belief. I am not any good at the publishing and promoting game. I am forced to trust to luck, and am probably the unluckiest goober who ever lived.
And while I was tackling the crisis point of my horror novel last week, my Republican friends and family, rabid Trump supporters all, were on my case in social media about why I, as a former teacher, wasn’t completely on their side about making teachers with guns a line of defense against future school shootings. I have to be careful what I say and support, because a single wrong word can blow up my friends on Facebook with an incendiary display of name-calling, Fox News facts (which are pretty far removed from true facts), accusations, recriminations, and crying about my stupidity. And through it all, I am not totally convinced that the stupidity is all on my side of the word war.
So, we shall wait and see. I did a stupid thing. I said some stupid stuff. I have risked a lot on the current direction of the wind. And soon I will know if my stupidity has scuttled me, and I come crashing down in my sailboat to bottom of the sea… or if I am somehow right, and allowed, for now, to sail onward.
Canto 14 – Sorcerer 3
Trav thought this Dana Cole girl was hot stuff. She seemed to like him. She talked nice to him. She made him feel at home in Slaghoople Manor. She looked really sexy in a fake fur bikini.
“So,” she said, “your name is Trav Dalgoda and you seek the fabled Hammer of God. Why do you seek it here?”
Trav slouched back comfortably on the synthetic rock sofa. “My friend Frieda told me it was here.”
“Who is this Frieda?”
“Oh, she was my invisible friend in third grade at school on the planet Questor. No one else could see her, but she was always nice to me.”
Dana took his hand and slipped an electronic ring on his finger.
“What’s this, then?”
“That is a little something to help me get to know you,” she said. “Now, you say this friend was invisible? Did others think you were crazy?”
“Well, yes. Actually, I sometimes thought I was crazy myself. It’s hard to believe anyone as handsome as me could be as truly wonderful as I tend to be.”
“He speaks truthfully,” said a tiny voice from the ring on Trav’s finger. “At least he believes it is so.”
“How interesting,” said Dana. “I know a man named Count Appleby that you must meet some day.”
“Is he wonderful too?”
“Oh, yes. He believes he’s the reincarnation of Napoleon.”
“Who would that be?”
“Didn’t you study ancient history back on the planet Questor?”
“Oh! Well, I… You know, sometimes there isn’t enough time for study when you’re growing up to become one of the most important men in the Milky Way!”
“He is now untruthful,” said the ring.
“Well, isn’t that something!” marveled Trav, ogling the talking ring.
“Here comes the boss,” said Dana in a purr of dark intent.
“Oh, good!” said Trav.
Rocko Slaghoople was a balding, but massively-muscled cave man who looked quite dangerous. His brutish face had but one thick eyebrow across his beady-eyed visage. His powerful arms looked like they were dragging on the floor. His arms seemed even longer than his legs.
Traveling next to Rocko on metal legs came a white-robed Synthezoid, or artificial man. His soulless white eyes had no pupils and his head came to a point like some kind of conehead.
“Hello, boss,” said Dana Cole.
“Hello, my beauty,” answered the Synthezoid.
“Hello, Mr. Rocko,” said Trav. “I understand that you might know something about the Hammer of God.”
“Whu…?” grunted Slaghoople.
“The Hammer of God! The Ancient artifact! Everyone says you’re the man to see about such things.” Trav’s voice cracked with sudden desperation.
Rocko looked stupidly at the Synthezoid.
“Yes,” said the artificial man, “and my intel claims that you know something about the Crown of Stars. Weren’t you with the infamous Tron Blastarr when he stole it?”
“Well, I…”
“I am even told that you came away with the item.”
“Who… who are you?”
“I am called Sorcerer 3, and I am your new partner in this little quest.”
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
Yes, this post is a self-examination. Not the kind you see Donald Trump enacting every weekend, where he says any crappy thing that occurs to his craptastical very good brain to cover what he doesn’t want us to believe about the truth on Twitter, basically for the purpose of continuing to say he is great and we are poop. I do not like myself the way Trump likes himself. I am an old bag of gas that is in pain most of the time, in poor health, and the subject of endless persecution from Bank of America and other money-grubbing machines that are convinced any money I might accidentally have really belongs to them. But this is not a complain-about-crap fest either.
This is a self-examination that attempts to honestly examine where I am in my quest for wisdom and my affliction with being a writer.
If I am being honest about the type of writer I really am, I guess I am most like the Weird Recluse in the bottom corner. I can’t claim to be as good as Kafka or Dickinson, but I am definitely better than some of the crap that gets published and marketed as young adult literature. The business of publishing is more interested in how many books they can sell, rather than literary merit or good writing. Some of the crap that is out there and being made into bad movies (which I have not seen because I don’t go to movies that don’t pass the fiction-source smell test) is actually a form of brain poison that will mold young people into sexual predators and professional poop makers. And people will take poison happily if it has been deviously marketed well. So far, in the money test, I have made only $16.43 dollars as an author (plus whatever I have made from I-Universe that doesn’t cut a check until it reaches at least $25 dollars). Nobody is buying my books because nobody has read them. I have sold a few copies to friends and relatives. Some of those books are just sitting on a shelf somewhere unread. I have a couple of 5-star reviews on Amazon, and that is it. I will die in the near future not having known any measurable success from my books at all.
I have entered novels in writing contests and done well enough to make it into the final round of judging twice. I have not, however, made a big enough splash that anyone really noticed. I have paid reviewers to review my books online. One of those charged me money, and then reviewed a book with the same title by a different author, a book which was nothing like my book, and then, when forced to correct their error, only read the blurb on the back of the book to write the oopsie-I-goofed-last-time review. They were not worth the money I paid them, money that Bank of America could’ve sued me for instead.
The only thing I have done successfully as a writer is, I think, this goofy blog. By writing every day, I have managed to give myself considerable practice at connecting with readers. I have practiced writing humor and written some laughable stuff. I have plumbed my soul for new writing ideas, and found a creative artesian well bubbling up with new ideas daily. I can regularly manufacture inspiration. I am never truly without an idea to write about. Even when I write a post about not having an idea to write about, I am lying. Of course, I am a fiction writer, so telling lies is what I do best. I am also a humorist, so that means I can also tell the truth when I have to, because the best humor is the kind where you surprise the reader with a thing that is weirdly true. Like just now.
So, somewhere ages and ages hence, I hope there will be a trove of old books in a cellar somewhere that will include one of mine. And some future kid will pick it up, read it, and laugh. The golden quality of that laughter is the only treasure I have really been searching for. It is the reason I write. It is the reason I continue to be Mickey.
Since I wrote this blog post originally, I have added a few books published on Amazon. You can find information about this random noveliciousness here at this page in my blog. Click on this linkie thingie here.
In order to understand this story, you have to have a little bit of background first… a solid sense of context, in order to avoid anyone feeling that I might be ridiculing someone in an unfair or unloving way. So here’s a bit of context. I was a teacher for 31 years. I was considered a good teacher, in fact, a master teacher by something like 28 different principals and assistant principals, while only 3 felt like I was an incompetent mess, and two of those were eventually fired themselves. I only got fired once. So it can be safely assumed I know what incompetence in teaching is and can reliably identify it in others. Further, incompetence in teaching does not make you a bad person. Far too many people who believe they could be a good teacher have traits that would torpedo their own boat if they actually set sail on the sea of education. So, even though Grandma Frozenfield was a horrible teacher, she was actually a very nice and caring person, and makes a wonderful character for stories that lovingly make fun of bad teaching. And I should remind you, I don’t use real names when talking about people from my past so that their privacy is not violated by whatever my artist’s eye might reveal about them. The portrait I added to this post does not even look like her.
Grandma Frozenfield was a mid-year emergency hire who filled the position of 8th grade math teacher during my first year of teaching. She was already sixty-eight years old when she came to Cotulla, Texas, and she had five years of previous teaching experience in schools up north. How she survived five years in schools more competently run than Texas schools in the 80’s, I will never be able to figure out. She was able to hang on in our school for several years only because we were desperately strapped for warm bodies to teach Math classes in Texas junior high schools. Only idiots and coaches ever took on the job willingly.
Grandma Frozenfield had seventeen dogs and ninety-nine cats at home. That right there tells you something about which stereotype she easily fits into. But she was also a woman of great mystery. Her father had been a famous college professor in Minnesota. She had inherited a number of very valuable books from him, and kept them in random boxes stacked in dusty corners of the old run-down house she bought in town. She was actually quite bright, and though she would have spells of foggy thinking and confusion, she could capably discuss mathematics and physics and other sciences with me. She had a daughter who showed up during her third year of teaching at our school, and the daughter had a cute little son of about seven years old. Neither she nor her daughter had ever been married. In fact, rumor had it the daughter was telling people she was adopted. And her daughter and grandson disappeared from her life about four years after they started living with Grandma.
But the old lady was a spectacularly bad teacher. As bright as she was, she could never talk to kids or relate to kids in ways that kids could understand. She seemed to sincerely hate kids, calling them bad names in the classroom and telling them in detail how they would one day die in prison (a prediction that unfortunately came true for a couple of them). She would come into the teacher’s workroom after class plastered with spitballs on her back and in her hair.
A couple of the sweeter and more pro-active girls in her classes tried to protect her a bit from vandals and explained lessons to others in class to mitigate the chaos a bit.
She did not engage with students. Other than a few of the sweeter girls, she did not talk to them about anything but math. They didn’t understand her, and so they didn’t like her. She did not know how to monitor a classroom, so the infidels were on a rampage all the time in her room. It would definitely have felt like being in Hell to be her, teaching in that classroom. Why she ever wanted to be a teacher, she never said. I know it was in her family history. I know she was a caring, lovely individual. But when she died of throat cancer at 77 it was a lonely and sad thing. She had been forced to teach until two years before the end because of medical bills. She was never happy as a teacher that I observed. But she never missed a day without good reason, either. Good people don’t necessarily make good teachers. But she taught me things far beyond the 8th grade math she tried and failed to teach to students. I don’t think of her often. But I do think of her. She and her 17 dogs and 99 cats are all gone now. But not forgotten.
Canto 13 – Dino-Man
Fred 3576 was tied to one side of the tree, his girlfriend Wilma456 was trussed to the other side. Their pet, Dino6476 was laid out dead and ready for skinning, much too dangerous to try to keep as a live captive. The two cave youths looked at Ged with large, fearful eyes.
“I can’t wear that!” moaned Ham, looking at the fur loincloth young Fred was wearing.
The Nebulon Princess grinned at Ham. It began to dawn on all of them that she now understood the words being spoken around her. Ham blushed.
“We have to find that clown of yours before he can do some real damage. Unless you think you can do the riding beast, you are going to have to use what that boy is wearing as your disguise.”
“Ged? What are you going to do about the riding beast?” Ham seemed nervous about the grim determination he obviously saw on Ged’s face. Ged could tell just by looking that what came next was going to traumatize Hamfast Aero.
“I’m going to skin and eat this thing.”
Ged’s environment suit was laid aside. Ged sat down next to the dead raptor with his lectroknife. The blade shimmered with barely controlled energy. He slit the beast open from throat to groin. He quickly peeled back the hide, and then spent about half an hour stretching and preserving the hide on the gray ironwood frame he made from tree branches. The meat he carved off was eaten raw with special cat teeth he grew in order to eat the meat. Then he began to analyze and absorb. Complex DNA patterns formed in his inner eye. He had never gone further than imagining this process before, yet he knew he could achieve it. He ate more as he began to change. The skin of his face split at the nose ridge and fell away to reveal scales. The bones of his face began to elongate into raptor form. The more he changed, the more he felt the need to eat. As his own previous flesh sloughed off, he had to replenish his own mass with the flesh of the raptor. After another twenty minutes, Ged Aero had become a dinosaur, a Dionysian velociraptor.
Just as Ged had imagined, Ham was nearly in shock over the transformation. He’d seen Ged grow scales here and there, and change color a few times. He’d even seen the fangs grow in once or twice. But this was the first time Ged had let anyone else witness how completely his ability allowed him to change form. He knew it was disgusting and awful to watch, but he felt the time had come to reveal what he could truly do.
“Ged? How did you…?”
“Truly amazin’ Bucko!” Sinbadh gasped.
The Princess took Ham in hand and made sure he followed through with the plan. She stripped the captured Fred of his Bam-Bam shorts and then undressed Ham, before putting the caveman disguise on him. Ham was too far gone to protest or be embarrassed.
“Thaank you, Princesssss,” said the velociraptor that was Ged Aero. “You and Sssinbadh ssstay and guard the prisonerssss.”
The Princess firmly shook her head no. She stripped the girl of her Raquel Welch 1,000,000 B.C. bikini and put it on. Her small son she stripped naked. “We go,” was all she said.
Ham mounted on Ged’s saurian back and the Princess got up behind him. The little blue boy was wedged safely in between them.
“What is to become of us?” cried young Fred3576. “You killed our Dino. You can’t just leave us here in the wild naked and tied up!”
“No harm will come to you,” hissed Ged. “Sssinbadh will ssstay and guard you.”
“Blimey! Ya kin count on me, Cap’n. As long as ye don’t eat me. I am yer faithful dog! Space dog, that is!”
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
I am sometimes forgetful. You shouldn’t go for a walk on a country highway if you forgot to put on any clothes.
Cold weather makes my joints creaky and my bones ache. My head gets fuzzy, and it makes it hard to think when my blood sugar gets low. (By fuzzy, I mean on the inside like interference in your TV picture, not fuzzy on the outside. I am fuzzy on the outside because I had to give up haircuts due to psoriasis on my scalp.)
Yes, as we get older, we get crummier and crummier. I am literally crumbling now as psoriasis flakes my skin off all over.
And as we get older… and poorer… and dumber… we have to learn how to do things to get happier. My health problems lead easily to depression. Not just a little generic sad, but deep down at the bottom of a deep, dark black pit of gloomy depression. So, I have to take matters into my own hands. Yes, I act a little goofy on purpose. I draw a funny picture. Laughter produces serotonin in the brain, the chemical that is missing when you fall into debilitating depression. Scraggles is the result of major dark back in the early 80’s. I also go to Walmart and buy chocolate. Eating chocolate produces serotonin in the brain too. I ate a whole 98-cent box of M&M’s this morning. (Of course, as a diabetic, they had to be peanut M&M’s because peanuts have niacin in them at levels that boost your body’s insulin towards working more efficiently. M&M’s make me happy.
Of course, I am not out of the woods yet. The mood of your family impacts your own mood. My children have been ill for most of January and all of February so far. And that puts them in varied states of depression and needing chocolate. It is a good thing that Valentine’s Day is near and Walmart is over-stocked. And it helps that it’s cheap.
I am old. Being old is not easy. Being ill is worse. It really is heck. But I don’t give up. I don’t surrender. I have fought back for too many years to give up now.
Filed under angry rant, battling depression, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, humor, insight, Paffooney, self pity
I spent a good deal of my time as a game master for the Star Wars role-playing game in creating alien characters that fit the movies, the books I read in the Star Wars series, and the game materials. In this post, I will give you a mini-gallery of the aliens I drew for the game.
Chee Mobok was a space trader who had a problem with his own ego. He believed that he was a genius at language and could speak any language he had heard a handful of words from.
The Galactic Common speakers were always laughing at the things he said.
Huttese speakers like Jabba the Hutt were always trying to kill him for say precisely the wrong thing.
Hethiss was the Jedi Master when my son’s Jedi character was still a padawan learner.
He was wise, but unable to keep his student from doing things in violent ways when a diplomatic solution was called for.
Merv was a potential terrorist and a suspect in a series of murders on a water planet. He was, however, the good badguy character. You know, the villain who has a heart of gold and whose actions redeem him in the end… As opposed to a bad goodguy who seems to be a hero and ends up betraying everyone.
Fisonna was a street kid from the same planet and same race as Hethiss the Jedi master. He had the potential to become a padawan learner. But he also used his Force skills to pull pranks on serious adults.
Odo-Ki was a Gotal with the ultra-sensitive cones on his head. He had a limited ability to see behind walls and predict the near future.
Nadin Paal was an actual pirate and terrorist with no redeeming qualities at all. The best thing about him was, that when the time came, he blew up really nicely. A colorful fireball.
Kehlor was a Herglic, one of the whale people who required specially built extra-large space ships and accommodations. He was also a gifted pilot. You can see that he wears the uniform of the Trade Authority.
And finally, Klis Joo was a Duro and a Jedi, a gray alien with considerable Force powers.
There were many more drawings like this as well. But these are some of the best ones.
Filed under aliens, Dungeons and Dragons, humor, Paffooney
Catch a Falling Star 
Cranky Old Coots Complain and Don’t Care
Yes, I am a coot. I became a coot in 2014 when I retired. I have the hair in the ears to prove it. I sometimes forget to wear pants. The dog is learning to hide from me on days when my arthritis makes me cranky.
So I am a practicer of the ancient art of being a cranky old coot. I have opinions. I share them with others foolishly. And I am summarily told to, “Shut up, you danged old coot!” And, of course, I don’t shut up because that would be a violation of number five in the by-laws of cootism. Obnoxiousness is our only reason for still being alive.
Lately, my group of coots on Facebook (who call themselves a “pack” like wolves, but, in truth, a group of coots is called an “idiocy”) are talking about politics… very loudly salted with firmly held opinions, beliefs, and bad words in several languages. I mean, it’s texting each other on memes we disagree about, but we do it LOUDLY, like that, in all caps. We also do it in such an infuriating manner because, if no one ever bothers to tell us to “Shut the hell up!” we will begin to suspect we have actually died and gone to purgatory where we are still being obnoxious, but nobody knows we are doing it. That is rubbing coot fur in the wrong direction.
The radical right (otherwise known as coot paradise) have been cooting up a storm about school shootings and gun control of late. They have more or less turned their ire on me because, knowing I was a school teacher, they have seized on the Coot in Chief’s notion of arming teachers to protect schools. Obviously a majority of old coots agree that requiring a few “volunteer” teachers to conceal carry and learn how to handle a school shooter crisis situation with a gun instead of the way teachers are actually trained and practiced on handling such a situation, is the only economical way to defend schools from crazed lunatics with assault weapons. Of course, it is definitely more economical than hiring full time police officers to handle security because “volunteer” teachers does not mean that they are necessarily willing to do it, but rather that they are doing it without pay. And of course they shout at me things like, “Why don’t you just admit that you are too scared and unpatriotic to carry a gun as a teacher, and cowardly allow some female teacher with a big pistol to step in and do the job for you?” That is a very coot thing to say, and is hard to adequately counter, because if you try to argue using logic other than coot-logic, like the notion that since a majority of teachers in this country are female, you are asking women who are fierce enough to do the job (and I have known more than a few who would take it on no matter how hopeless their prospects) to take a handgun that the principal bought at Walmart with money from the Coke machine in the hall and face down a suicidal maniac with an assault rifle, you will not even be heard over the cacophony of coot braying and chest-thumping, let alone be understood.
And, for some reason, coots love Trump. Maybe because they feel he is truly one of them. He is older than dirt. He has an epicly bad comb-over to hide his bald spot. He says bad words very loudly in front of women, children, and everybody. He says, “Believe me,” a lot, especially when telling lies. And he’s not afraid to fart in public and blame it on the dog. I admit to insulting Trump in front of them only because I like to see coot faces fold up in extra wrinkles, and coot heads turn various shades of angry red and apoplectic purple.
So, yes. I am a coot. Not proud to be one… that I can remember, but a coot never-the-less.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, goofy thoughts, grumpiness, gun control, humor, Liberal ideas, oldies, Paffooney, teaching
Tagged as coots, gun control and coots, obnoxious coots, old coots