Category Archives: Paffooney

March 2, 2016 · 4:31 pm

Internet Lies About Mickey

Mickey

The truth is sometimes Mickey tells lies.  For instance, the title of this post is intended to lure you in with expectations of a juicy something that doesn’t actually exist.  There is no controversy on the internet over this particular Mickey.  He hasn’t done a very good job of keeping it secret that he tells a lot of lies.  In fact, most of the most embarrassing and terrible secret things that he had been keeping secret for going on sixty years are now published in this blog.  Talk about a life being an open book!

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Of course, being a lover of internet conspiracies and ufo’s and junk, there is always that other Mickey to talk about.  Yes, Disney has generated its share of conspiracy theories.

Everyone on the internet knows, for instance, that when Walt Disney died, he had his body frozen cryogenically  so that he could be re-animated once a cure for his lung cancer was found.  Of course, Snopes.com already did the investigation on it and brought out the fact that not only was Disney cremated with full documentation of the process, the first cryogenic freezing of a human being didn’t occur until a year after his death.  This lie about Mickey’s dad, then is easily debunked.  See, the internet lies about Mickey!

Of course, the notion that Disney was a racist and a Nazi and worked with the CIA are much harder to disprove.

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A character from the original version of Fantasia that doesn’t help Mickey’s image.

Most heads of super-wealthy corporations are by nature fascists.  The dictatorial style and oppressive oligarchic command structures of fascism organically grew out of business practices.  Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan were also Nazis.  And, of course, no one believes me when I start in on the Disney/alien connection.  After all, what’s with alien beings in Escape from Witch Mountain, Lilo and Stitch, and even Chicken Little?  I may have some more conspiracy-theory investigating to do.

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So, let me assure you that lies about Mickey are actually lies.  The thing about Mickey’s dream in the 1960’s of seeing Annette Funicello naked is a lie… er, probably.  The notion that Mickey trained himself to be a cartoonist by copying Disney characters like Carl Barks’ ducks are… err… um… lies… maybe.  Well, anyway, the point is… don’t spread lies on the internet about Mickey.  That’s my job.

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Filed under cartoons, conspiracy theory, Disney, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

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February 29, 2016 · 4:25 pm

Secrets in the Vault

The award that was given to me yesterday was not so much this blog as it was for my little vault.  I opened a can of worms a while back when I created a second blog on WordPress more or less by accident.  I wasn’t really interested so much in giving myself more writing tasks to do, rather, I decided I would use this other blog to store whole stories, poems, and cartoons.  I really haven’t figured out how to link this blog to that one, or that one to this… and since WordPress “improved” everything by changing all the controls, I really don’t know how to properly link something or put a URL into this prose, but here is the web address for that blog;

https://authormbeyer.wordpress.com/2015/06/

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It is a place where I have posted more complete works that, though mostly still unfinished, will take a little bit longer to look at and read.  I know that my daily 500 words on this goofy blog is too much for most internet readers, and these things take way more time to read than is good for you.  But some readers of this blog have recently discovered that the thing exists, and I have had a sudden burst of interest.  I gained five followers to the vault yesterday.  I think I have six total.  I don’t post there often enough to generate traffic, but I do keep stuff there that certain of my followers here are likely to enjoy if they are foolish enough to buy into this whole artwork and wordswork nonsense that I constantly do.  So, there it is… a little bit more of me than you were probably ready for.

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February 26, 2016 · 4:45 pm

The Oubliette

Every Dungeons and Dragons player, especially game masters, know about the oubliette.  In the foundations of towers in the castles of the French you often find a windowless room with the only entrance in the ceiling.  It is a dark hole where you throw captives you want to simply forget.  In fact, the name comes from the word in Middle French, “oublier” which translates to “forget”.  Now, of course, as a former school teacher, I know about oubliettes.  I have been in one more than once.  I have tossed bad kids in there more than once.  But the thing I had to learn about “forget holes” is that there is always a way out.

Eli Tragedy

I had a principal who decided I had betrayed him because he overheard me talking sympathetically to a teacher he had been berating for asking that he discipline students she sent to him for disruptive behavior.  He overheard me saying that he would be more understanding if he tried to manage a class himself once in a while.  For my indiscretion he took away my gifted class and gave me in its place a class composed entirely of students who had been repeatedly sent to him by teachers for being disruptive and unmanageable.  It was a class from hell.  Really… from hell… Satan’s stepson was the first student he put in that class.  I was told I would have to discipline them entirely without help from him.  But as tough as it is teaching twenty dysfunctional learners at once with no outside help, it was do-able.  In fact, I liked some of the kids in that class.  (Hated some too, though, because you can’t always like every kid no matter how crappy they act.)  I didn’t manage to teach them much English.  They all spoke Skuggboy fluently the whole time.  But I did endure.  In fact, when that principal was suddenly jobless two-thirds of the way through the year and replaced by a new principal, I got a chance to get some back.  She overhead Satan’s stepson doing his comic stand-up routine in response to my specific directions and came in to remind him who was in charge in the classroom and who deserved respect.  That reminder lasted for a good fifteen minutes and was a prelude to a parent-principal conference that same afternoon.  I saw his evil smile turned upside down for the first time that school year.

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Whenever I put a student in the oubliette (asked them to stand outside the classroom door until I could talk to them about their bad behavior) I never left them there more than five minutes.  I would quickly give the class the directions they needed to continue on their own, and then I would go out to execute the prisoner.  It usually was an explanation of how I wanted them to behave, and then giving them a choice, whether they wanted to go back in and do the right thing, or they wanted to visit the office with a written explanation by me of exactly what they did wrong.  Even though nothing would probably happen to them in the office, they rarely chose that option.

So, there is always a way out… but there are many forms of the oubliette, and no one is immune to being sent there.

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February 25, 2016 · 4:43 pm

Left is Right

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The finished portrait of Marla

With numerous health problems, I have difficulty with sleeping every night.  One of the worst problems I have is nocturnal acid reflux.  It makes me wake up in the middle of night with fire in my throat, like some sort of dyspeptic acid-spitting dragon.  I have to vault out of bed, arthritis and all, and go toss the contents of my stomach into the toilet.  Sorry to be so gross, but it is important to this theme to get a sense of just how bad it is to be on the wrong side.  What do I mean by that?  Well, I learned from a doctor recently that which side you lie on to sleep makes a big difference.  If you sleep on your right side at night, your stomach is oriented in a way that the top opening angles down towards the esophagus.  This leads to an unfortunate ooze of stomach acid that sets off the reflux crisis.  If, however, you sleep on your left side, the stomach is angled in a manner that allows gravity to work for you instead of against you.  I have been intentionally lying on my left side every night for a month.  It works.  No acid reflux.  Until last night.  But when I woke up gagging, I had unconsciously rolled onto my right side.  So it has become obvious to me,  the left side is the right side.

 

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The latest additions to my collection, January & February

Life has to be in balance.  But, unfortunately, it constantly shifts back and forth, up and down, and all around.  Keeping life in balance is a juggling act that may involve lying only on your left side while you sleep.

I worry too about the balance affecting the world as a whole right now.  We are very deeply mired in a time when political right and left are out of balance and have been for too long.  In politics, the right is the conservative belief that things should remain the same.  Since the Reagan administration, that has meant deregulating in the name of profits, free market capitalism, and letting Wall Street profit-makers do anything and everything they want to do to make higher profits.  The left is in favor of change.  When I was a kid, I can remember the left being a very bad thing.  They wanted communist-style revolution.  They robbed banks and blew things up.  But most of those leftists are now dead.  They still exist, but the far right is just as dangerous, the KKK, the militias, and they are far more numerous in this day and age.  The leftist agenda now is more what used to be the moderate position.  Senator Elizabeth Warren and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders want to re-regulate the Wall Street trends that caused the economic meltdown in 2008.   They want to promote progressive tax systems that move the money out of corporate profit-funnels and back into the hands of the middle class, and the institutions that benefit them.  There is a need to shift to the left.  There is need to restore balance.  Once again I think it is proper to say, the left side is the right side.

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Here is some of that leftist thinking from the socialist Public Television initiative.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, philosophy, politics, self pity

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February 24, 2016 · 4:29 pm

Talking to Girls

Communicating with a wife is complicated.  In fact, I couldn’t do the whole writer-think thing about that topic without writing a book.  But I can successfully ruminate for about 500 words on the that awkward first encounter, the first time I ever was embarrassed in front of a non-sister girl.

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In grade school I met my first crush in kindergarten.  Alicia Stewart was a honey-sweet little brown-haired girl with a bow in her hair.  I was a boy.  I was not allowed to like girls.  Hating them was the only thing that made sense to my friends and I.  But, secretly, I didn’t hate Alicia.  In fact, if I was ever to be doomed to be married when I grew up, I would’ve only accepted that horrible fate if it was with her.  And in my small town school I saw her practically every school day.  In fact, in Miss Malkin’s music class on Tuesdays and Thursdays I sat right next to her in Miss Malkin’s seating chart for six years.

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In Miss Malkin’s music class we always did musical stuff like listening to classical records, singing songs for the yearly musical review concert (we did the songs from the musical The Music Man one year… you don’t get more musicky than that), and we did square dancing.  Yeah, you heard that right.  Square dancing.  You had to have a girl for a partner.  And one year, Miss Malkin decided it would be cute to have the boys ask the girls to be their partners.  Now, as boys… in top secret boy-conversations, we had generally agreed that if such a problem would ever occur, Alicia Stewart was the only acceptable choice.  We all hated girls.  But we all were secretly in love with Alicia.  She was girl-hating-boy approved.  When I was twelve, there was another girl that was making me uncomfortable too.  Marla Carter was nine when I was twelve.  She had big brown eyes and dimples.  Her face was somehow heart-shaped, and only Alicia could make my palms sweat any worse than she did.  But in top secret boy-conversations it was ruled that she was a booger-eating little girl and totally toxic.  Well, I didn’t totally agree, but I was still subject to all girl-hating directives.

“Okay,” Miss Malkin said, “the boys will now pick their partners… one at a time in alphabetical order.”

My last name began with the letter “B”, but my best friend Mark had a last name starting with “A”.

“I pick Alicia,” Mark said.

My heart sank.  I had my pick of any girl besides Alicia.  Marla was standing about four feet away from me, her hands folded together behind her back, looking at me with those puppy-dog eyes.  My throat was too dry to speak.

“Um, ah… I can’t pick anyone…” I croaked.  “You pick it, I will dance with it.”

“Now, don’t be like that, Michael.  Get on with it!” Miss Malkin commanded.  Everyone loved the music teacher, and so everyone obeyed her.  I had to submit.

I looked at Marla, dug my toe into the floorboards, and said, “I choose my cousin Diane.”

Talking to girls has always been a matter of embarrassment.  The words are always awkward and shaped not by my brain, but by my bowels.  This fact has always been a hindrance to my dealings with the female species, but it has been an unending source of potential for writing  humor.

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February 21, 2016 · 5:17 pm

Truthfully…

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Truthfully… I rarely ever tell the truth.  I am a retired school teacher who now spends a majority of the time left to me on writing fiction and drawing colored-pencil pictures.  Truth is not an asset for that kind of fantastical foolishness.  But that doesn’t mean that the truth is irrelevant.  In fact, after the last round of politics as usual (if 2016 even remotely qualifies for that) it is more important than ever to divine the trends and consequences for who we are about to elect.

If you look at the events in Flint, Michigan… the world becomes a scarier place.  What are the actual consequences of having Republicans in charge?  Because of cost-cutting measures by Governor Rick Snyder’s spend-less-on-the-people so we can give-more-tax-breaks-and-wealth-to-the-wealthy initiatives, the water system of Flint, Michigan has been neglected to the point of poisoning everyone who is poor enough to have to drink city water.  Reptile-man Snyder reassures people with a Republican grin that shows his fangs.  Then he lies, first about the water being safe to give to your children, then that he will do everything in his power to fix the problem… as long as it doesn’t cost actual money.  And the truth is every city in America is under the same threat.  Texas is a Republican-controlled paradise for billionaires. You can taste the taint in the Texas frogwater that comes out of the tap.  Plus, we have all kinds of fracking going on underground, pumping toxic stuff into the ground to pump shale oil out.  North of here in Oklahoma, the fracking has caused powerful earthquakes.  We have felt lesser shakes here in the Dallas metroplex.  The animals are so mad for meat in their feeding frenzy that even the ground under us is not safe from their appetites.

Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.

After the Iowa Caucus it became very possible that the Republican nomination could end up in the claws of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.  This shape-changing lizard man is the popular choice among the rabid evangelicals.  He is supposedly the most conservative and the most Christian of the Republican candidates.  But if you type into Google the phrase “Is Ted Cruz…” you get a result that says “the Zodiac Killer?”  Of course, he was not born at a time that allows him to be the actual mysterious serial killer who was never caught.  But people are searching this question for a reason.  According to the New York Times, in 1997 a young man named Michael Wayne Haley was convicted of stealing a calculator from Walmart.  The crime carried a maximum two year sentence.  Texas, the loving State that it is, mistakenly gave him 16 years.  When Haley tried to get the courts to fix the mistake, Ted Cruz was Solicitor General for Texas.  He took the case all the way to the Supreme Court to try to force Haley to serve the entire sixteen years.  The Supreme court ruled that Haley should be released for time served after serving six years of a maximum two year sentence.  The man has no compassion, no mercy, no Christian love in his reptile heart.  It is entirely possible that he could become President of the United States.  I confess, ttuthfully…, I am deeply afraid of that happening.  He is the Zodiac Killer.

So, I have run out of truth for today.  Telling the truth is hard to do.  Especially for a practiced liar like me.  But I promise you I will tell more truth in the days that are left to me.  Truth is important.  And the thing about writing fiction, especially humorous fiction, is the point of telling all those lies is to ultimately get at the truth.

 

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February 17, 2016 · 4:07 pm

A Simple Matter of Recovery

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Ah, my poor little Ford Fiesta has been declared dead by the insurance company.  Soon I will have to give up the chibi clown car I have been driving and buy something new.  Can I get a used car for the money they will give me for the accident?  I was counting on not having a car payment every month after June of this year.  Ah, but it means a new member of the family to replace the loved one I have lost.

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The ghost dog continues to haunt me in the night.  Last night, outside my bedroom door, I heard a whining and whimpering again.  I checked (had to make a nocturnal potty-stop anyway) and it was not our family dog.  The downstairs family room door was closed to her and she sleeps in the other end of the house in my son’s room.  So, either it was the ghost dog whom I totally don’t believe in, or I was dreaming that part (do I really have dreams as weird as that?), or maybe I am going insane… the most probable explanation.

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I am still working in dedicated fashion on my hometown novels.  I have added to the rewrite of When the Captain Came Calling and I have started a new novel project I am calling Recipes for Gingerbread Children.  It is a novel about the old German lady who inhabited our little town in the 1960’s and 70’s.  She was a Holocaust survivor with a tattoo on her forearm.  Mother still can’t talk about her without mentioning what a terrible life she must’ve had, yet she was one of the most sunshiny people I have ever known.  It is a new idea that excites me, like the one that became Magical Miss Morgan.

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I am also still desperately trying to overcome illness without doctor’s visits or medication.  A lot can be done with careful monitoring of diet and blood-sugar levels.  I owe my life to over-the-counter Mucinex and Vicks Vaporub.  My son is also suffering at present, and I have to talk to professionals about it today, because I will not risk his health to protect my empty pocketbook.

So challenges remain challenging and I keep moving forward and upward.  What more can be done?  I have in the past couple of months not only faced several different difficulties, but I have reached new levels of success with this blog, much of it by writing a lot in ways that are full of self-medicating thoughts with healing words and ideas.  People seem to like that.  My average daily views is up above thirty.  I am nearing 800 followers.  I may not have writing income, but I do seem to have a personal brand that others respond to.  So, if you have read all the way through this recycled oatmeal post with nothing but old pictures in it, please be reassured… oatmeal is good for you… and for me.

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February 16, 2016 · 4:45 pm

Mapping the Stories

Norwall map

By golly, I finished it.  It may not look like it, but this map of a place that really only exists in my memory and imagination took a lot of work.  I surveyed the town and made a set of rough map sketches back in 1994.  Some of the places on this map don’t exist any more, while a few never existed at all in any real sense.  I finished drawing it out in pen and ink yesterday, February 15th, 2016.

This map is Norwall, Iowa, population 275 (If you count the squirrels… and we had a lot of squirrels in this town… in more ways than one).  The map is attributed to Bill Stuyvessant, known to the locals as “Cherries Bill” because he loved cherries more than any other fruit and it was the exact same color of red he had on both his cheeks and nose.  For the last decade of his life, the 1960’s, he lived alone.  His wife died in 1958.  His only son, Christian, died near Bastogne in December of 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge.  He lived alone with a house full of stacks of old newspapers.    It is believed by many that he was a sorcerer and knew practically everything.  Some even said he was God.  The map probably had to originate with him because it shows the locations of key settlements in the Faery Kingdom of Tellosia, which of course is known only to practicers of magic and those with vivid imaginations.

Norwall is the setting for my hometown novels series.  They are not exactly science fiction and not exactly fantasy, but have heavy doses of both.  They are actually about real life as it can be warped by imagination and dreaming.  You can make the argument that they are surrealism.  The four pictured above are completed novels, except for When the Captain Came Calling on the right.  It is undergoing a complete rewrite and is only about 50% complete.  I have one published novel in this series through I-Universe, an imprint of Penguin Books.

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I also have a number of novel projects in the planning and rough-draft stages that are also set in this little imaginary Iowa town.  I am continuing to write and expand it all as time continues relentlessly forward.

Francois

 

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Filed under humor, maps, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, surrealism

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February 15, 2016 · 5:36 pm

Down and Blue

Life for me has always been a struggle with poor health and depression, ill fortune and difficult circumstances.  I have always been a “make lemonade” sort of life-gives-you-lemons problem-solver, but the more I make lemonade, the more my sorry old puss gets puckered.  I am having chest pains and breathing problems again.  I don’t have money for doctor’s visit co-pays and medication.  My car is in the shop with more than $6,000 dollars worth of damages, hit by a passing motorist going too fast while it was parked outside my house.  Insurance is probably not going to pay that much to fix a five-year-old car.  My family in Iowa have recently been buried under huge snowdrifts.  And the grim reaper has been knocking on my bedroom door asking if I want to play a game of chess.

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But I will tag this post as humor.  Because, ironically, humor is not always funny.  Sometimes it has the sour puckering effect of lemonade with too little sugar in the mix.  When you have worked hard all your life for very little reward, it’s hard to appreciate the tiny amounts of sugar you have been allotted.  I see myself ending much the way Mother Mendocino ended, except the community will not even hear about my passing.

My Jester

The more I sing songs, and rattle the boards, and try to make my puppets dance, the more arthritis crabs up my fingers and makes me ache.  Sometimes happy simply comes hard.  But self-pity is easy.  And I am a pratfall clown most of the time.  I use my injuries to make others laugh.  And there is still magic to be found here and there in my art.  Today’s paffoonies were all culled from my Postable Paffooney file.  They are all old artworks of which I am pathetically proud.

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Pathos is a part of humor too, you know.  You tell a story about someone whose been on a lonely journey, and he finally gets to come home to the ones he loves, and you smile at the end of that.  If you laughed at the clown for falling down, you smiled too when he got up again.  After all, he wasn’t hurt.  In many ways we are all made of spoof and rubber, and while the bullets don’t bounce off, we are more like Superman than we think.  There is definitely wisdom buried somewhere in this pile of old quilts I am calling an essay today.  I just wish I had the words to make it clearer than I do in this poor excuse for a paragraph.

Cool School Blue

My sister reads posts like this and tells me they are too depressing, that I need to write happier stuff.  But don’t worry the way she does.  I do spend a lot of time writing about the low spots.  But I would like to point out that most of the time I am climbing out of holes.  So I may start the essay in a very low place, but the direction I am going is always up.

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Now I have said my 500 words for today, and while I still need bed-rest… there is no doubt the sun will come up again.

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February 13, 2016 · 5:46 pm

Mother Mendocino

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I am about to lay on you a story full of humor, lies, and distortion… but I wanted to warn you first.  This is real-life story about someone near and dear to my heart.  You can laugh all you want… but please don’t think ill of Mother Mendocino.

She was a Science Teacher.  Appropriately enough she taught seventh grade Life Science.  And she taught students about life and love in ways that no other teacher was ever able to do.

I met Endira Mendocino the very first year I taught in the little South Texas town of Cotulla.  They hired me to teach eighth grade English.  And from the first time I saw her until the very last time twenty years later, she always looked exactly the same, like a plump little Wish-nik Troll Doll with frizzy hair.  The picture I drew from memory clearly looks more like Al Franken, the Senator from Minnesota than it really looks like her  To draw her accurately from a photo would be more like an insult than a portrait.  20160213_110859

Her great beauty was entirely on the inside.  And I, of course, am not the only person who was ever made privy to this wonderful secret.  She was a teacher who cared passionately about kids.  She had been a Catholic nun before she became a teacher.  And she brought the Bible teaching of the rod of discipline to her students.  But not the rod of whacking.  She was not one of those Catholic school nuns who whacked your knuckles with a wooden ruler for every perceived sin.  Rather, she used the rod of discipline as it was meant to be used by the Bible writers who wrote about it.  The rod was used to sight along straight lines for laying brick building foundations.  It was used as a line of sight for making paths straight, not for whacking feet at every misstep.  And this is how she taught students.  She modeled good behaviors for them, how to speak respectfully to your elders, how to meet anger with calm and reason, how to think through a problem and sort out solutions to find the best one.  She did as a matter of course on a daily basis things it took me years of trial and error to figure out how to do in a classroom.

Kids would do anything she ever asked of them.  And they didn’t do it out of fear. Oh, she did embarrass them frequently.  If a boy in her class became extra-wiggly and acted out at all, she would make him hold her hand for a few a minutes, and she would refer to him as her “boyfriend” when she reminded the class how you properly go about listening and learning.  But those few minutes of red-faced humiliation imprinted on the wiggler’s young psyche that problems are best confronted not with anger and punishment, but with love.

She never married.  She never had a romantic relationship that any of us ever knew about.  But she definitely had family.  We were all her family.  Her students and fellow teachers all loved her and treated her like a loving mother, hence the nickname “Mother Mendocino”.  And when her diabetes and kidney problems proved too much for the miracles of modern medicine and dialysis, she took an early retirement and quietly passed away.   The whole town mourned her.  But she is not gone.  She lives in all of us.  The lessons she taught were paid forward by all of us who knew her.  And so I offer that little bit of her here and now to you.

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