Category Archives: Paffooney

April 1, 2017 · 3:45 pm

Mickey Notes

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This is the purple-furred Mickey Icon done Don Martin-style.

If you are one of those readers who has taken to regularly reading Mickey posts on Catch a Falling Star ( a habit that is probably bad for you, but certainly not fatal), there are some things and random recent developments that you should probably be made aware of.

  • Mickey recently finished a rough-draft novel.  After giving birth to a massive 12-month-long-gestating thought artifact like that, there is bound to be some necessary recovery time involved.  He may be difficult to understand for a while as he puts the pieces of his psyche back together again.  Using mental duct tape for such things takes time and patience.
  • The novel is called Recipes for Gingerbread Children.  If that arouses curiosity in you (a condition that I also hope is not fatal… You are not a cat, are you?), there are instances of rants and delusional spoutings about this story to be found in recent posts on this blog.  Unfortunately, it will not be published immediately.  You will have to wait to actually read it until I or my heirs eventually get it published… by whatever means necessary (though I have my doubts about the plan involving kidnapped alien slaves and mimeograph machines.)
  • The novel I do have nearing publication is Magical Miss Morgan.  I recently submitted approval for final edits to my project manager for Page Publishing.  Since I am investing my own money in this publication project, I am expecting that it will get published before 2017 is done.  I will continue to relentlessly plug the thing here.
  • Page Publishing is a less expensive and less professional publisher than I-Universe that did Catch a Falling Star for me.  If you are reading this for ideas about pursuing publication yourself, I would recommend the more expensive publisher first, due to the quality of their professional editors, though I intend to continue publishing my books with less expensive self-publishing options like Amazon from here on.  As I finish the publishing process I am now involved in, I promise to complain about publishers and throw Mark-Twain-like insult fits in future blog posts.  No one should have to repeat the egregious mistakes that Mickey has made.
  • Catch a Falling Star, the blog, will continue to be a blog about my artwork, my story-telling, my teacher memories, and my generally confusing and bombastic opinions about life, the universe, and everything… including pies.  Mmm!  Pies are good.  You might even want to look at my essay on Gooseberry Pie.

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In case you were not aware of it, this purple mouse-man is Mickey, and Mickey is the writer-spirit within me.  Mickey is not actually me.  You know how Mark Twain is not really a real person?  The real person was Samuel Langhorn Clemens.  Mickey is not a really real person either.  Michael Beyer, cartoonist, writer, and former middle school teacher is the real person… if any former middle school teacher can ever be considered a real person.

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March 29, 2017 · 2:38 pm

Illustrating in Novel Ways

I have just finished a novel project that I worked on for a year, from Spring of 2016 to Spring of 2017.  And part of my personal project procedure involves using drawings to help me visualize the characters in the story and begin to view them as real people, even when they most certainly aren’t real.  I even have this derfy Mickian idea that Paffoonies (those picture ideas that are inseparably fused to words) are essential to Mickian fiction.  (Mickian fiction= another frighteningly goofy idea that needs to go unexplained.)

Gingerbread Children

The book, Recipes for Gingerbread Children is about an old woman, a German immigrant and Holocaust survivor, who comes to a small Iowa town with a gift for story-telling and a gift for baking things, especially gingerbread cookies.

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Grandma Gretel Stein, seen in the Paffooney on the left, is the main character of the story.  She tells stories, mostly fairy tales, that have lessons about being true and faithful even in the face of great evil.  The fairy in her hand is General Tuffaney Swift, an immortal Storybook fairy who leads the army of the local fairy kingdom called Tellosia.    Gretel believes he is real  Honestly, she gets so into story-telling that her fairy friends seem absolutely real to her.  And who is to say that there aren’t little magical people living in a hidden kingdom among the cornfields in Iowa?  Gretel convinced me that they were real.  She even has a hand in making new fairies by the baking of gingerbread.  She gets a magical recipe from the fairy Erlking, a wise and magical being, and uses it to create living gingerbread boys and gingerbread girls.

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The gingerbread girl on the right is Anneliese, named after Gretel’s own daughter and decorated with frosting, food coloring, and gumdrops by the favorite story listener who constantly listens to Gretel’s stories and helps bake Gretel’s gingerbread, Sherry Cobble.

Sherry is a beautiful young eighth grade girl who reminds Gretel of her long-lost daughter.  Sherry has a twin sister named Shelly and they are identical twins, but Sherry not only looks like Anneliese once did, she acts like her with the same confidence and enthusiasm for life that Anneliese once had before the war.

Sherry and Shelly are both part of the Cobble family, who have a reputation locally as wacky-pants loonies because they believe firmly in being nudists and engaging in nature completely naked while not actually wearing any wacky pants.  I haven’t done any actual pictures of Sherry  in the nude, but if you look carefully at the first picture of her above and see clothing, then you are seeing things that are not there.  Yep, the girl bakes and decorates gingerbread men in the buff, wearing her pale pink birthday suit, even when the weather outside in Iowa makes that nonsensical.

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So by now you can probably draw several conclusions about me as both a novelist and an illustrator.  #1, There is definitely something a little bit off about me.  #2, I haven’t said anything yet about this book having dead Nazis and a werewolf in it, even though I rarely talk about this book without throwing those things in somewhere.  #3, Number 2 is actually taken care of in a backhanded way if you are reading this whole list carefully.  #4,  This story is probably about things that really aren’t just gingerbread recipes.  #5, You should congratulate yourself if you read this far in this post.  You have unusual amounts of patience and curiosity, and an extremely high tolerance for levels of goofy that put actual Goofy to shame.

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March 27, 2017 · 10:17 pm

Stardusters… Canto 40

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Canto Forty – In the Bio-Dome Command Center

Davalon and Tanith found themselves naked and alone in the command center, looking at monitors and trying to figure out what was actually going on in the Bio-Dome.

“Do you think we can really trust Sizzahl, Dav?” Tanith asked.  Her large and beautiful eyes looked into the heart of Davalon, Son of Xiar… at least he felt that they did.

“I wonder…  She is not hiding the fact that she plans on exploiting us for her own reasons.  In fact, she has exploited us in bringing us here with those plants she tried to rescue.”

“That’s true.”  Those amazing eyes turned downward towards the floor.  “I was wondering after Brekka was almost eaten by that alien plant why she didn’t tell us that it was there… you know, warn Brekka and the others away from the flower garden?”

“Yeah, I was wondering that too.  She doesn’t seem to care very much if we live or die.”

The two Telleron tadpoles looked at the monitors.  The black-and-white picture screens showed no movement except that of the Morrells and Sizzahl in the cloning facility and the others in the crew quarters.  Everywhere throughout the facility the plants and the animals of the Bio-Dome lay mostly brown and dead.  Only the lone zhar-doe continued to wander and look for food as if it were still trying to survive.

“Do you think this planet deserves to be dying like it is?” Davalon asked.

Tanith looked him directly in the eyes.  “Planets never deserve anything that happens to them.  Comets strike the surface… species go extinct… all life comes to an end… none of that happens because a planet did something wrong.”

“What about the Galtorrian people?”

“I actually like Sizzahl.  She’s so smart and she works so hard… But these lizard people… ugh!”

“They’ve poisoned the whole biosphere.  They eat each other… like our people used to do… and they don’t even have to.  They don’t need to recycle protein and flesh in order to maintain their population and food supply.”

Tanith nodded her agreement.  “These Galtorrian lizard people are creatures from a nightmare.”

“Yeah,” said Davalon.  He realized how much he and Tanith always agreed on things.  She was more than his nest-mate.  She was his friend, his best friend.  If he was ever going to be old enough to be allowed to breed offspring, a rare privilege for space-faring Tellerons, he would want to do it with Tanith.  He actually felt he understood the love between Alden and Gracie when he looked at Tanith.  Davalon loved Tanith.

“What do we do next?”  Tanith looked to Dav for leadership.  He really wasn’t sure what the best course of action was.  They were committed to the present course of action.  Their space ship was wrecked and quite some distance from the Bio-Dome.  If they were to have any hope of living through this adventure, they had to find some way to make this place livable, at least until Xiar’s rescue party found them.  Would Xiar send a rescue party?  Dav didn’t know.

“We have to help Sizzahl for now.  We don’t have any other choices.  At least, not yet.”

“Davalon, I would die to protect you and keep you from harm.”

“I feel the same way about you.”

“But you feel that way about all the tadpoles.  You’re a hero.  But I mean just you.  You are the one Telleron that I couldn’t live without.”

Davalon looked at beautiful, naked, green Tanith standing there in front of him, not only without a single stitch of clothing on her, but more personally naked than he had ever seen her before.  Her soul was bare.  “And I repeat… I feel the same way about you.  You are that one Telleron for me.”

She put both her arms around his neck and hugged him breathless.  She was crying softly.  And all he could think to do was hug her in return.

*****

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March 27, 2017 · 11:08 am

The Hardest Part to Write

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I finished a novel rough draft today.  But the end is not the hardest part to write.  Well, this one was, but not because it was the end of the story.  It was the part where a character you have carefully crafted over time, and really learned to love, has to die because that is simply how the story goes.  It was not a sad death, or an unresolved death, as such.  It was a fulfilled life of meaning and magic that simply came to its ending point.  My own real-life story may come to an end sometime in near the future too, and I can only hope it is half as much a satisfying completion as this one was.  And yet, my heart is sore from having written it.

The novel is called Recipes for Gingerbread Children.  It is a story of a little old lady.  She is alone in the world, except for the people in the little Iowa town where she is now living, especially the middle school age people who gather at her house to eat her gingerbread cookies and listen to her German fairy tales.  She was also a concentration camp survivor, so this story has Nazis in it.  Don’t worry though.  They are dead Nazis.  And there is a werewolf in it.  But only a baby werewolf.  Oh, and there are two twin teenage girls who are practicing nudists in it.  But you probably aren’t worried about them.  There are also fairies in it.  She tells fairy stories, after all.  And the whole book is more or less a collection of fairy stories.  And there is a lot of magical gingerbread cookies.

But I had to write the “character dies” part that I knew was coming for about six months.  It is the part that will make or break the story.  It is the part I will most need to polish and rewrite.  But the fact remains, the story ends with a death.  So there is that.  Life with gingerbread in it is also life that eventually comes to an end.

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And that part of the story is always really, really hard to write.

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March 21, 2017 · 11:04 am

Stardusters… Canto 39

galtorr-primex-1

Canto Thirty-Nine – The Bio-Dome’s Crew Quarters

Since Brekka had nearly gotten killed by a maniac sentient flower with hidden teeth, Brekka, Menolly, and George Jetson had not been apart by more than a few feet.  In fact, George and Menolly had spent an uncomfortably long time attached at the lips.

George finally pulled away from Menolly’s mouth to breathe.

“Oh, Brekka,” gasped Menolly, “we are so glad you didn’t die.  Life would never be the same again if I didn’t have you to dance with.”

Brekka crossed her arms and frowned at Menolly.  “What exactly are you and George doing exchanging spit like that?  I thought the two of you were never going to talk to me again.”

“You remember the kissing thing from Earther television?” asked George.

“Yes…” said Brekka cautiously, “like when Gilligan kissed Mary Ann that time to convince the surfer guy that they were boyfriend and girlfriend so he would surf back to Hawaii?  And she said he had skinny lips?”

“Um… yeah… that works,” said George.  “We discovered it makes you feel really, really good to kiss somebody like that.  Want to try it?”

Brekka pursed her lips for a moment and mulled it over.  “Okay.”

Without warning, she leaned over and kissed Menolly right on the mouth.  She tried to make it last like she had seen Menolly do with George… but… it was kinda yucky.

“I don’t really see what’s so great about it.”

“I dunno,” said Menolly.  “I thought it was kinda good.  Brekka is almost as good a kisser as George.”

“But,” said George, “maybe you would consider making some Telleron tadpole eggs with me… huh, Menolly?”

“Oh, you stupid-head…” said Brekka.  “We three are nest-mates.  That means we have the same mother and father… probably.  You know what in-breeding is?”

“We were programmed with that information in the egg, Brekka,” said Menolly.

“Well, you know… it might be the thing that makes Tellerons so stupid and incompetent… in spite of all the knowledge and skills programmed into us while we are in the egg.”

“Yeah,” said George, “you’re probably right.  But when I kissed Menolly that first time, it made me feel so strange in my stomach.  Isn’t it possible the feelings of the stomach are more powerful than the thoughts in the head?”

“I think in that episode of Gilligan’s Island it was the heart that love came from, not the stomach,” said Menolly.

“Well, my heart seems to be in my stomach,” said George, “really low down, too.  And it’s telling me to make tadpoles with the two of you.  We almost lost Brekka to that plant thing.  I don’t want to waste any more time.”

“You know that we are still too young for egg-laying, George,” said Brekka.  “Our ovipositors are not fully formed yet.”

“Yeah… but we could practice…”

Brekka was furious.  Why were male tadpoles so… so…?  Yeah, that.

*****

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March 17, 2017 · 3:40 pm

Being a Teacher at Heart

Being a teacher at heart… I want to recommend that career…even though I know full well it is a super-hard crappy job of glorified baby-sitting that pays in literal peanuts and nobody in their  right minds recommends it to smart young up-and-comers as a glamorous choice… and it is only getting worse under a new anti-education administration.

Being a teacher at heart… I can’t help remembering how it all started for me.  The last thing in the world I imagined myself being when I was in high school was a teacher.  I wanted to be a cartoonist or a comic book artist.  I wanted to write best-selling science fiction novels and maybe direct a movie.  You know, the kind of thing millionaires line up to bestow on college grads with a degree in English  and a transcript filled with mostly A’s in my art classes.

But after my remedial master’s degree gave me a provisional teaching certificate, and my one and only interview for an illustrator’s job resulted in compliments on my portfolio and best wishes for my teaching career, I headed to Texas, one of only two states actually hiring teachers in 1981.  (The other was Florida, which it turns out it was a very lucky thing my family had already moved to Texas to help me make that decision.  Have you seen the education news coming out of Florida?  I now know where Satan gets his mail.)

Turns out the only job available in 1981 was all the way South on Interstate 35 in Cotulla, Texas.  I was there to teach English to 8th graders.  Mostly Spanish-speaking 8th graders.  And the previous year the 7th grade English teacher had run out of the classroom screaming after the little darlings exploded firecrackers under her chair and put scorpions in her coffee cup.  I was given her classroom and the same students that forced her to re-think her career choice.  El Loco Gongie, El Loco Martin, Talan, El Mouse, El Boy, El Goofy (whose one and only talent was to turn his whole head purple at will), La Chula Melinda, and the Lozano Twins  were the nicknames I had to learn because practically everyone was named Jose Garcia… even the girls.  Talan and El Mouse were the first ones to threaten my life.  They picked up a fence post on the way to lunch (we had to walk four blocks to the elementary school to get lunch because the junior high building had no cafeteria).  Talan said something threatening in Spanish that I didn’t understand and added the name “Gringo Loco” menacingly to whatever he said, and El Mouse pantomimed using the metal fence post as a sword to cut me in two.  All this because I was trying to get them to keep up with the rest of the class on our little hike in the 100 degree heat.  (I think I knew then why Satan moved to Florida.)  Fortunately they must’ve decided that murdering me wasn’t worth the hours of detention they would have to spend, and dropped the post.  Class was definitely disrupted when handsome El Boy and La Chula decided to break up, or rather, El Boy decided he like brown-eyed Alexandra better after she got blue-eyed contact lenses that made her eyes look yellow-green.  Girl fights are harder to break up than boy fights because girls fight to the death over matters of the heart, and they really don’t care who dies once the fight is started.

Now you may think my account of my first horrible year as a teacher must be exaggerated and expanded with lies because you know I am a humorist and that I went on to teach for many more years.  But I swear, only the names have been changed.  The nicknames and the incidents all are real.  (Yes, he really could contort his face in a way that turned his entire head purple.  It was freaky and made the girls scream.)    As I reached the spring of the year that year and had to decide whether or not to sign my contract for the next year, I really was planning to get out of teaching all together.  But I was standing on the playground one day that spring glaring at the vatos locos to prevent fights from breaking out again when Ruben came up to stand beside me and talk to me.  Ruben was one of the brightest and physically smallest of all my kids that year.  But he had such a charm about him that the bullies left him alone (except for the time he got in trouble for forging El Boy’s mother’s signature on a failing report card).  He said to me, “I want you to know, you are my favorite teacher.  I learned a lot from you this year.”  I had to bite my lower lip to keep from crying right there and then.  It was the moment when I decided I had to be a teacher.  They were not going to make me run away in defeat.  I was going to work at it until I knew how to do it right.  For Ruben.  And for all the other boys and girls like Ruben who liked me as a teacher… and laughed at my jokes… even the really corny ones… and needed me.  That made all the hard stuff worth it.

Being a teacher at heart… I recognize now that there was never anything else I was going to be.  It was what God chose me to be.  And my only regret about my choice is that I had to retire and can’t do it any more for health reasons.  I still miss it.

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March 16, 2017 · 3:17 pm

The Lyrical Imperative

Creativity

I am always amazed by the fact that things which are inherently silent in nature make music in your mind.  Writing is like that for me.  Drawing is like that.  And so is photography.  That is an actual musical score from Chopin in the background.  My son recognized it from a book of piano pieces I bought for him because he reads music and can turn those squiggle-bugs on the fence into the right plinkety-plunks on a keyboard.  But there is more music in that picture besides.  The nude young girl at the keyboard softly rendered in velvety colored pencil tones is also musical in nature, for more than just the fact of fingers on a silent colored pencil keyboard.  The lyrical loops of black and yellow in the wings of the tiger swallowtail butterfly also make music in my head, sprightly piano music like Chopin’s, or possibly Vivaldi’s violins.

Did you listen to the music?  I don’t mean Vivaldi’s, although if you haven’t heard it, you certainly should.  I mean the music in the words.  The music has to be there for me for the writing to be good.  That’s why I consider Ray Bradbury and Walt Whitman to be masters and Stephenie Meyer and E. L. James to be unreadable hacks.  The beat and the flow of the words need to be patterned and patient and wily.   Do you not hear it in that last sentence? The alliteration of the first two adjectives set off by the counterpoint of the stressed-unstressed beats of the third?  How can I explain this?

Iambic pentameter is the true genius of Shakespeare’s plays.  What the heck is iambic pentameter, you ask?  Well, I realize you have probably never needed to teach poetry to seventh graders, a truly impossible but infinitely rewarding task.  So let me tell you.  Units of stress called iambs consist of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.  So naturally, if iambs are put into pentameter, then there must be five of them in a line of iambic pentameter poetry.  It is a simple, rhythmic way to say something profound and interesting.  The classic example is the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18;

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Translating that into X’s and O’s where X=stressed and O=unstressed;

O X O X O X O X O X

It’s simple, five oxes, all in a line.  Except that last one about oxes is actually O X O X X O O O O X, a less simple pattern, yet still organized on the beat.  Two iambs, a dactyl and an anapest.  Okay, now I am talking like a poetry geek, and I have to stop it before I hurt someone.

The whole point is, words should be musical, even when they are not the words to a song.  And now I must close on the verge of starting a ten-thousand word thesis.  I shall shut up now.  Here endeth the lesson.

 

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March 14, 2017 · 2:44 pm

Stardusters… Canto 38

galtorr-primex-1

Canto Thirty-Eight – The Bio Dome Cloning Facility

Alden tenderly rubbed Gracie’s naked back and shoulders.  He loved his wife desperately and wanted to make love to her again… but she inhabited a child’s body and that just felt wrong.  Of Course, he was living in a child’s body as well, his physical age reduced to childhood by the de-evolution machine that Commander Biznap maintained in his space ship (along with at least a hundred other machines on Telleron space ships or aboard Xiar’s mother ship).  They were both physically children again, though their minds were filled with a combined seventy-eight years of life experience, something no actual children had.  Gracie purred like a kitten and grinned at Alden with her ten-year-old’s face.  What a strange life they now had together.

“Will you allow me to take skin and tissue samples for DNA?” asked Sizzahl, also naked, but not so noticeably because she was covered in skin that looked like a soft version of alligator-skin.

“You can only take them from me?” asked Alden.

“I can’t use Gracie’s DNA.  She is now a simuloid, made of artificial flesh.  Her DNA bears highly technical artificial helixes that don’t smoothly mesh will real DNA.  Besides, you both claim to want offspring of your own… and this is the only way you will ever do that.”

“What?” said Gracie.  “We can’t grow up and make babies of our own?  The natural way, I mean?”  Gracie looked shocked and shaken.

“I thought you knew.  The child-sized simuloid you used to stay alive was only ever programmed to be child-sized.  Its tissue regenerates like a child’s. So now that the termination program is removed from your artificial system, you are effectively immortal… but will always be child-sized.”

It was Alden’s turn to be shaken.  “We will never grow up?”

“Well, you can, if you choose.  But you can also keep using the Telleron machine to stay the same size as your wife.  That probably will make you immortal too.”

Sizzahl’s yellow lizard-eyes with the snake-like pupils were dead serious.  No way was Sizzahl joking… not that Alden had ever even seen her laugh.

“But what if we don’t want to be children forever?” asked Alden.

“As long as you don’t get killed on this horrible planet,” said Sizzahl, “you will have to choose to die and terminate yourselves.  You will not die of old age.  At least, Gracie won’t, and you don’t have to age either if you don’t want to.  The Tellerons’ technology allows that.”

It was a lot to take in all at once.  Children forever?  Alden couldn’t get his mind around such a thing.  Did he want to live forever if he had to do it in a child-sized body?

“Tell me more about these babies you plan to make,” said Gracie.

“I was going to use the cloning vats that I have used for animals to make two sets of five, one set male and the other one female.  I will accelerate their growth to a teachable age, because I will need them to work for me as soon as they possibly can.”

“And Alden and I could be their parents?” asked Gracie.

“Well… genetically they would be surrogate children, owing their genetic heritage half to me and half to Alden.  They would be Galtorrian/human fusions.  But you would certainly be welcome to think of them as your own.  Alden is technically their father.”

Gracie draped her arm around Alden’s naked shoulders.  “I want to be their mother, Alden.  We will have ten kids.  That’s as many as anyone on my side of the family ever had.”

“Do we really want to bring babies into a horrible world like this?”  Alden was horrified at the thought.

“Yes, we certainly do.  You have to admit, repopulating this dying world is a noble reason to have so many kids.  And you know how much we would both love them.”

“But we are doomed to stay child-sized, Gracie.  We would be midget parents.  And, Sizzahl?  Would they look like lizard-people or humans?”

“I don’t really know, of course, but I like to think they would look more like humans… maybe with scales or a tail.”

Alden shook his head sadly.  He could not do this.

“Will you let me scrape the skin on your arm, Alden?” asked Sizzahl, “and swab the inside of your mouth with a special cloth?”

“Of course he will!” said beautiful, child-like Gracie with adult certainty.

Alden nodded agreement and held out his bare arm.  Women always decided these things anyway… didn’t they?

*****

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March 10, 2017 · 12:05 pm

The Be-Bop Beat of Mickey’s Brain

Truthfully, when I look back at the string of posts in the picket fence of this daily blog, I fail to see the overall map of it in any semblance of pattern or order.  Honestly, I did not set out to be purposefully wacky.

I did, however, set out to be purposefully surreal.  I mean it, I consciously put bizarrely dissimilar things together in an attempt to find parallels and connections  in unlike things because, not only is it funny and surprising, but is a comic act that serves to keep the mind nimble and never numb.  I do think quite a lot.  And I try to see connections between things where others wouldn’t.  For instance, the Coppertone girl with her bare butt and Bullwinkle with his unicycle are both being threatened in a way that is both comic, and taking advantage of their inherent image of innocence.  Neither will lose anything by it.  The girl stands to brown her pale white behind in the sun, while Bullwinkle will probably land on his head and it will make a decent cushion to preserve him because of it’s empty and rubbery qualities.

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Pie makes everything better.  MMMM!  Pie!

I must also admit to a bit of the old telling of stretchers, the misrepresentation of the truth, the loquacious layer-onner of lies.  Not Trumpian lies that land on you like elephants dropped like bombs out of B-52’s.  Instead, fictions that entertain and elucidate.  It is the most likely reason I keep saying connecting words and phrases like “truthfully” and “honestly” and “I mean it”.  Those are words that liars love.

Yes fiction writers like me tell little white lies.

I have now published my novel Recipes for Gingerbread Children.  It is a novel based on real people I have known and loved and listened to.  It is about an old German woman, a survivor of WWII concentration camps, who loves to tell stories to children and bake gingerbread cookies, especially gingerbread men.  It features a pair of teenage nudist girls who believe in going completely naked whenever you are indoors, even if you are in someone else’s house.  It features Nazis, both in flashback and ghostly forms.  It also features fairies from the Hidden Kingdom of Tellosia, a fairy kingdom filled with little three-inch tall magical people living under our very noses.  And it has a werewolf in it, though admittedly a very young one.  It is a comedy with its requisite sad parts, and it is definitely an example of surrealism.  It is also full of lies… err, I mean fiction.

But the real purpose of this supposedly be-bop brain fart in blog-post form is not so much to explain my blog (because how do you explain a blog that goes from Flashbacks and Foobah to telling about Madman Trump to Another novel part… #37 to Centaurs to a book and movie review, to this eccentric and eclectic thing, which probably exists more to make alliteration jokes than anything else in the most musical beat I can bang out?) but to prove that I do often think about thinking and how things fit together and what it all means… and how to write a run-on sentence that adds to the effect rather than simply annoys.  And, yeah, I’m doing that.  And it feels like a good thing to do.

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March 8, 2017 · 4:15 pm

The Centaur

Mythos

The centaur… Kentaur, Κένταυρος, Centaurus, Sagittary… human from the waist up,horse body from the waist down… I hate to break it to you, but the damned things are only imaginary.  There are no real ones anywhere.  Not even in Thessaly.    The half-horse children of Ixion and Nephele are totally made up by goofy story-tellers in the distant past.

And yet, what they actually represent in poems, plays, stories, and myths is a very real part of what it means to be human and what it means to be alive.

There are many centaurs in literature, going all the way back to the Greeks.  But my favorite depictions of the man-horses of literature occur in what are basically children’s books.  In the Chronicles of Narnia C. S. Lewis portrays centaurs as wise and noble, gifted at star-gazing, prophecy, healing,and warfare.  Aslan the Lion, the Christ-figure of the tales, relies on their steadfast faithfulness in his battles against evil and the White Witch.  In the Harry Potter books of J.K. Rowling, the centaurs live in the Forbidden Forest just outside of the Hogwarts grounds, always in hiding from the human world and shy, at least until Firenze comes Chiron-like to join the faculty, aid in the teaching of magic, and help in the struggle against the evil of Voldemort.  In the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, Chiron himself of Greek myth teaches the young heroes, though the rest of the centaurs you meet in the stories are very Dionysian and basically a bunch of drunken party boys… err… party horses… err… horseboys.

So essentially the centaur has a dual nature.  On the one hand they are cultured and learned and wise.  On the other hand, they are directly connected to the earth and the natural world, liking the sensual half of the human experience.  And it might be important to note… centaurs never wear pants… in fact, could never wear pants.

Centaur1

In Greek mythology, the Centauromachy, or war between the centaurs and the Lapiths, represents a central struggle in the human psyche.  The centaurs are pictured as being as wild as untamed horses.  They are sensual and willful and try to disrupt the wedding of Hippodamia to Pirithous, King of Lapithae by kidnapping Hippodamia and all the other Lapith women and girls.  It turns out badly for the centaurs because they represent unbridled sensuality without rules while the Lapiths (who are directly related to the centaurs as cousins) represent rules and rationality.  We all know how that is expected to play out in human society… so of course that is what happens in the myth.  The rational always rules in the end.

Disney centaur 2

So I identify strongly with the idea of the centaur.  The rational man-part guiding the sensual horse-part.  The whole teacher-y Chiron thing…  and getting to walk around naked… on four legs.  The centaur is a thing to draw and a thing to tell stories with and a thing to invade your dreams.  Part man, part horse, and totally unreal.

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