Category Archives: Paffooney

November 23, 2015 · 8:45 pm

Juggling Girlfriends (a horror story)

I do not know if you know this about me or not (I’m guessing you probably don’t because most people in the world couldn’t care less about my personal life) but I once had two girlfriends at the same time.

The Chase

It is the kind of thing that Tony Curtis can make look cool.  But Mickey can’t.  You see, the whole nasty, sordid matter happened completely by accident, and I did not do any of the terrible things I did… well, intentionally.

To understand how this all happened, you have to understand that I was about as awkward a hobbledehoy (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hobbledehoy) as it is possible to find in a modern world no longer considered Victorian in nature.  I had been molested as a child, and had my share of issues.  I made the character of Sheldon Cooper on Big Bang Theory look like Don Juan by comparison.

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I truthfully did not understand why young women would be interested in befriending me.  I had a pronounced tendency to address my need for female companionship that was not of the sister-variety by chasing after women I knew for certainly would only respond by running away from me screaming bloody murder.  There are mutant women out there so mousey that you can’t even look at them without making them flee.  That was the type I set my sights on.  I needed to try… but I also needed not to succeed.

Ysandra was definitely not in that category when I first laid eyes upon her.  She was working at our school as an instructional aid, mostly helping translate Spanish into English and vice versa for the ESL students who didn’t understand more than ten or twelve words in the language I was hired to teach them.  For three years she was in and out of my classroom, translating and helping, and making my life generally easier, though she was in the other English teachers’ classrooms more than mine.  I don’t know why I automatically assumed that if I worked up the courage to actually ask her to go on a date with me, she would run away in terror.  But I could not have asked her that question without assuming it would be exactly like that.  I was not courageous in the face of success.  I had been on three dates before that point in my life, and they all proceeded from the fact the woman involved was afraid to commit to anything more than letting me pay for her movie ticket and sitting two seats away from me with an empty seat between in the movie theater.  I would not have been able to handle it otherwise.  But Ysandra, it turned out, was not like that.  She was an aggressive Hispanic woman with an agenda.  Divorced once already, and determined never to let a man make her do anything she didn’t want to do ever again.  But there were things she wanted to do that would make me nauseous and even faint.

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At the same time as Ysandra’s terrifying acceptance of me, I was busy mentoring the first-year Reading teacher across the hall.  Abigail MacNutly was a robust blond girl from Wisconsin who had gotten her first teaching job in deep South Texas, and was in for the same kind of slam-a-frying-pan-in-your-face sort of culture shock I had experienced three years before.  I discovered, to my chagrin, that this out-going, vivacious, and enthusiastic young lady not only had a lot in common with me and needed to rely on me to make her way in the world of teaching, but she also lived in the apartment next door to me.  And she had no compunction whatsoever about knocking on my door late at night and asking to borrow something for her apartment with no furniture in it, and then inviting herself to watch TV with me in my apartment.  You know what all the old ladies in the neighborhood that watched both of us constantly would say about that!  And when I tried to tell her that I was not comfortable with that arrangement, she would use her thousand watt smile on me and convince me that I was too nutty to be believed.  She even told me that her grandmother (whom I met when she moved into the apartment next door) had told her she needed to marry me so that she could settle down enough to make her life work out better than her mother’s had.

So, here is the set up for a horror story of monstrous proportions.  I was a child-man with serious issues about the concept of intimacy.  I suddenly, within the space of a week at the beginning of a new school year (1984-85) had acquired two girlfriends.  One I had thought I was chasing, and one who was obviously chasing me.  It has the makings of a long and totally unbelievable tale that I not only can’t complete in only one post, but can’t possible get away with not telling.  So be warned…

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November 22, 2015 · 8:09 pm

Just In Case You Haven’t Seen It…

My sisters and I as kids loved old movie musicals with dancing in them probably as much as any genre.  This video making the rounds on Facebook is something I have seen posted and re-posted and have personally watched at least five times already.  I have shared it twice on Facebook, and it continually gets re-shared, especially by friends my age or older.  Why does something like this go viral?  Well, Bruno Mars is a popular young Michael Jackson clone with an amazing musicality that appeals to all ages.  And the video is beautifully edited so that all the dancers from old movie musicals are actually in sync and appear to be dancing to the beat.  But the game-breaker for me is the fact that the dancers are all the old stars that used to fascinate me with their dance moves on PBS back in the 1970’s when old movie musicals got played on Friday, Saturday, and sometimes Sunday evenings.  I recognize Fred Astair, Gene Kelly, Buddy Ebsen, Donald O’Connor, Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, Cyd Charisse, Mickey Rooney, Groucho Marx, the Ritz Brothers, and many more from the movies I loved like Anchors Away, Singing in the Rain, New York New York, and so many others I can’t even begin to name them all.  This mash-up brings back a whole lost world for me and gives me joy.  It connects the past with the energy of the present.  It gives me something to long for, to sigh for, and to fondly recall.  I want to see all those movies again.  But it wouldn’t be the same without my sisters there.

Blue Dawn

One has to wonder if all the time we spent on entertainment during our lifetime was a lost cause or not.  I have a rich tapestry of memories of other people’s lives, gained through movies, television, and books.  But has that enhanced my life?  Or has it taken away from my life’s work?  I know work puts food on the table and makes continued life possible.  But it also has to define the value of our lives.  I have never, though, lived a moment as a teacher when something I learned from movies or a book has actually interfered with delivering instruction.  And I can name innumerable times, looking back, when being able to recall entertainment experiences led to a unique teachable moment.  Those things can actually be the most important things we teach.  And what an entertainer in any medium manages to communicate to me validates their life’s work.

This flash mob concert makes me weep for joy every time I watch it.  It makes me realize what marvelous fulfillment there is in the act of committing a work of art.  How must poor demented and deaf Beethoven be soaring in spirit to have his work take so many people by surprise like this?  It gives me chills to think about that kind of immortality even though the composer is long since dead.  He is still giving astonishing gifts to little girls who put a coin in a hat.

You don’t even have to be Beethoven-levels of famous to create moments that will live forever in the memory of the universe.  I have watched this video of street performers across the world so many times I have it memorized and can sing along.  I have shared this video so many times that I expect others to tell me, “Just stop it already!”  But they never do.  We learn the value of art by being an audience… by being consumers of art.  And it gives me hope as well for my own artistic endeavors.  Making money is not the point.  Sharing my work with others… even long after my own personal time on earth is up… is the precious thing.  I am reminded of the culmination of the long and glorious career of Charlie Chaplin.  And the movie clip that gets circulated so often now after another tragedy like the one in Paris.  I dare you to listen to this speech and not be moved… to hear it out and not learn something important.

Thank you for letting me waste your time today.  I intended to commit no further evil in the world today, than to let you share a few of the things that everybody seems to be finding beautiful and worth the effort of sharing.

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November 21, 2015 · 8:48 pm

Fictional Family Portrait

the Clarkes

Here is a portrait of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, Kyle Clarke.  They are important characters in the novel I am working on now, When the Captain Came Calling.  Valerie is also a main character in Snow Babies.  Here is what the double portrait looks like with a farmhouse background.

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A picture like this might prove useful in a number of ways.  For today it makes a good post when I don’t need to write so many words.

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November 19, 2015 · 8:21 pm

Peach Pie

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In the 1960’s back in Iowa, family reunions started happening around this time of year.  We would make long treks to distant parts like Spencer, Iowa or Coralville, Iowa to meet with cousins by the dozens, with Great Aunts and their great families… people we looked somewhat like and were actually related to, but usually didn’t see more than twice in any given year.  And there were some who lived in far off Cleveland, Ohio that you only saw twice in the entire decade.  And it isn’t real easy to play with the kids you are related to but don’t see every day.  Squabbles happen more often than not.  What was the solution to that kind of warfare?  According to Great Aunt Marie, the solution was a nice piece of peach pie.  The offending cousin and I would each get a slice of the solution to eat side by side.  Aunt Marie always had peach pie for family gatherings.  She learned to make them exquisitely when they lived in Texas in the 1940’s.

Now that I live in Texas myself, and the governor of Texas, the heir to Emperor Rick Perry, the estimable Republican Prince Gregg Abbott, has declared that we can’t risk letting Syrian refugees into our State because, out of the thousands seeking refuge from violence and murder, one or two might be terrorists, I am reminded of the way Aunt Marie taught peace with a piece of peach pie.  The alliteration was glorious, and the sweetness lingered long after you had eaten your share.  Why can’t we offer the Syrians a little peach pie?

The Syrians (actually less than one percent of them, ISIS is not a majority of Syrians or Muslims either one) hate Texans for the same reason they hate the French in Paris.  We are dropping bombs on their homes.  Texans went out of their way to insult the Prophet Mohammed by hosting a hate cartoon contest and exhibition in Garland, at the event center next door to the high school where I used to teach.  You have to expect squabbles from people you treat like that.  And I am not saying that we don’t need to fear folks like the two terrorists who died in a shootout with Garland police as they tried to attack the insult-the-prophet event with guns.  But those two guys were not from Syria.  They came from Arizona.  By rights, we should have Governor Abbott refusing to allow refugees of any kind from Arizona to enter our State.  Especially since he is a vocal advocate of their right to openly carry firearms even into restaurants.

I want to give a piece of peach pie to each of the little refugee kids with big, brown, terror-filled eyes.  They haunt my dreams.  Their only desire is to escape the people trying to kill them and blowing up their homes.  Peach pie makes it better.  Aunt Marie is in heaven now, but if you could ask her, she’d tell you, “You should teach to each peace with a piece of peach pie.”

 

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November 18, 2015 · 8:40 pm

Wally

Wally

I spent some considerable time working on the Naked Hearts trilogy in my blog, writing about nothing but girl students who fell in love with me.  That was a sort of Narcissistic writing experience that convinced me that I was somehow worthy of the love those young ladies felt in their little pink hearts.  I was not.  At least, not more deeply than the teacher-student level… the appreciation level.  Because there is love and then there is LOVE.  I have never really felt any sort of desire for a student.  Dread, yes, desire, no.  It is not only something illegal, but it is really downright icky.  The students that fill your classroom are all incomplete works of art.  The paint is not dry and can easily be smeared.  I am never the artist involved, so it is not my place to ever touch the oil paint of their lives, not even with skilled touches of the paintbrush.  But the one time I really regretted not having the ability to do touch-ups and help others to see what I can clearly see in a brilliant work of monkey-house art, it was with an incomplete little oil painting known as Wally.

Wally Nardling was a bright, talented, and gloriously goofy young boy with a zest for life that nothing, it seemed, could kill.  My Paffooney portrait above not only looks like him, it looks exactly like him.  And that is not because I am a gifted portrait artist.  I am not.  I am a cartoonist.  But Wally was a living, breathing cartoon character with a cartoon personality to go with it.  It was a golly-gee personality like he was the boy Sherman from Jay Ward’s Mr. Peabody and Sherman time-travelling cartoons.  He was always ready to try any new thing and experience any creative idea, without ever for a moment stopping to consider consequences, or thinking about how others might see him or think about him.  He was good at drawing Japanese manga-style cartoon people.  He drew in colored pencil just like me, cartooning all over his notebook and folder and, sometimes, even the margins of his homework.  He was very creative, and had numerous off-the-wall ideas that made other students cringe as he explained them to the class.  He was very proud of his accomplishments as a reader, and bragged about the books he had read, including every book of the Harry Potter series (which actually was three books shy of being finished at the time).  Other students, especially some of the non-reading Hispanic students, hated everything about him.  After all, his father, Dr. Nardling was the absent-minded professor type of teacher who taught them in fifth grade, and he could be downright mean to kids who tried to get away with monkey-nonsense in his classroom.  And his mother was a medical doctor from Mexico, but Wally had not learned any Spanish at all in his brief time on Earth.  He was the butt of every poo-poo joke the vatos could pool their limited monkey brains to think up.  Other boys, especially the vatos, were cruel to him at every opportunity.  (Vatos, if you are not aware, are the semi-criminal cool guys of Latino culture who lurk in the boys’ bathrooms with gold chains around their necks and the faint smell of mota, which they may have recently been smoking on their clothes.)

Well, his seventh grade year, in my Gifted and Talented Class, we got involved in the Odyssey of the Mind creativity contests. I intended to put a link here, but WordPress is giving me trouble, so here is the web address;  http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/

Wally was a natural.  We put together teams to handle different problems that the contest offered.  Wally always got chosen last for teams in real life, but nerd class was different.  The other two boys, H. G. Ruff and Jack Penny immediately recruited Wally for their team.  They chose the project where you had to design and build a balsa-wood structure to hold up as much weight as possible while you present a creative narration of the unfolding event.  H.G. and Jack cooked up the two-headed narrator idea, sewed the costume where they could both get into the same shirt and pair of pants to provide the two wise-cracking heads.  They left it entirely up to Wally to design the structure.  This he did brilliantly, a cone of balsa bits with numerous cross beams to hold up weight, and super-glue to hold it all together.

We went all the way to Del Rio for the regional contest.  The performance was supposed to build suspense  as the team (basically meaning Wally) piled up increasingly heavy weights on the structure, trying not to crush it.  The other competing teams went ahead of us, the first one crushing their rig almost immediately, and having to hope their song-and-dance routine would fill out the rest of the time limit.  The team that had the best reputation managed to pile on only two pounds ten ounces before their structure collapsed.  That was a full eight pounds less than they supposedly had piled on in practice.  We started our performance with H.G. and Jack already gloating over the win.

The two headed narrator cracked some of the best jokes H.G. had ever written.  (I had nixed all of the jokes Jack contributed.  He was a master of scatological humor, and we knew ahead of time that event judges were all female.)  Wally had two pounds already balanced on the structure.  And then, his enthusiasm failed him.  Instead of adding the five-ounce weights the way the other team had, he tried to put on a whole pound more with one weight.  Over-confidence killed it.  The balsa wood cracked and gave out.  H.G. forgot two thirds of his remaining lines, and we ended up short of the minimum time limit, too.  We lost by ten ounces, which when translated into the complex scoring system, meant we narrowly lost over all.  Second place and no trip to the State tournament.

The other boys blamed Wally for the loss, though they hadn’t really pulled off their part either.  The worst part was that Wally blamed himself.

“It’s my darn fault, Mr. B,” he told me with tears in his eyes.

“You got us this far, Wally.  You did a good job.  You built the actual structure.”

“Jack and H.G. are gonna keep on calling me Wally Weasley and making fun of me in front of the girls.”

“In many ways, you are more like Harry Potter,” I said.  “You have more magical ability in you than they will ever have.  You just have to keep believing in yourself.”

He grinned at me with that goofy grin of his.  “I know.  One day I will be able to turn H.G. into a frog.”

If I ever did anything to teach that boy something he didn’t already know, I don’t know what it could be.  One day he will create a cure for cancer, or explore the surface of Mars, and I will have not had any sort of hand in it in any way.  He was a diamond in the rough, and I simply wasn’t capable of polishing a diamond like that.

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November 17, 2015 · 2:31 am

Snow

Denny&Tommy1

My life always seems to come down to snow.  It is a theme that runs through my little teacher-life, my little story-teller-life.  Did you know that I was born during a blizzard?  Mason City, Iowa was snowed in during the November blizzard of 1956 when I was born, on this date in the wee hours of the early morning.  Some of my most vivid memories happened in the snow. Val in snow

There was that night when I was eleven and snow was falling heavily as choir practice at the Methodist Church came to an end.  The walk home was more difficult than I had anticipated when I started out.  The entire front of me was plastered with snow as I leaned into the wind and trudged like some kind of plodding living snowman.  I got as far as the Library on Main Street when Mrs. Stewart and Mrs. Kellogg called me into the library to thaw out.  They called Mom and Dad to come the three blocks from home and pick me up.  But Alicia Stewart was there.  The most beautiful girl in all of Rowan, as far as my young heart was concerned.  She sat in the row across from me at school.  I am fairly certain that my Math grades were so poor mainly from the time I wasted watching her sharpen her pencils and turning the pages in her textbook.  I had my Russian snow hat on that night and the ear flaps were pulled down.  I had the little bill on the front of the cap pulled down to shield my eyes, and it was caked and dripping with snow as I entered the library.

I pounded off some of the caked snow and said, “Gee, I think it might be snowing outside.”

Everyone laughed.

Alicia pulled up the bill of my cap and looked me right in the eye.  “Michael, you are so funny,” she said.  That smile she gave me that snowy night warmed my heart, and drove the cold out of even my frozen toes.  I still keep the memory of that smile in my heart to this very day, in a drawer where nobody can find it, and I haven’t really ever told anybody about it until here and now.

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And snow keeps coming back to find me, even now that I live in Texas where snow is much more of a rare thing.  On February 14th, 2003 in Dallas we woke up to another heavy snow flurry.

The people I love most in the world were enthralled.  My wife squealed like a little girl.  She is from the Philippines and she told me she had never really seen the snow falling before that day.  My three kids were awake and romping in the snow almost from first light.  The gently falling snow was beautiful, though it was a bit damp and clumpy, falling like goose feathers from a pillow fight, and easily forming into snowballs.  We built snow men in front of Tatang and Inang’s house (Filipino for grandpa and grandma).  Dorin, Henry, and Cousin Sally were throwing snowballs and random handfuls of snow at me and each other for most of the morning.  The Princess, barely walking and talking at that stage of her young life, ate snow and played in it until her bare hands were red and hurting.  She threw a crying fit when we had to force her into the house to warm up her hands.  Even pain couldn’t make her want to leave the snow behind.  I never loved snow that much until I got to see it through their eyes.

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I truly believe that one day in the near future the snow will come for me again.  I will probably not be living in a place where snow is frequent, so it may not even be real snow.  But it will come for me to take me away the same as it brought me to this life.  Not real snow, but that obscuring snow that falls as your field of vision fills up with whiteness and purity and fades away.  Being in poor health for several years now, I know that sort of snow all too well.  I know it will be coming again.  The magic of life comes and goes in the clear, cold beauty of snow.  And all the warm tangles and troubles of life will be smoothed out under a blanket of pure, white, and cleansing snow.

 

Write me an epitaph that includes the snow;

He was born in a blizzard,

And he knew the secret of snow.

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November 16, 2015 · 2:35 pm

When Teachers Write About Students

Dion City JH

As a writer of fiction, my characters have to come from somewhere.   A writer always writes best when he writes what he knows.  So, I am in a unique position for writing the stories that my body and soul ache to push out into the wide, wide world.  Most of my characters have to be little people… students, kids, and other denizens of the monkey house where I spent the majority of my real life.  (It helps to be told that the monkey house I refer to is a composite of all the middle schools I ever taught in.)  Of course, the students I taught were, over time, dancing in front of me metaphorically naked most of their days in my classes.  They told me everything about themselves in both conversations and their writing.  I know even their most embarrassing secrets.  Their identities have to be protected (not because they were innocent, Joe Friday, they were certainly never that, but because they have a sacred right to privacy).  So I rename them in my writing with fake names.  I take some of the incidents and eccentricities of their lives and splice them together with those of other kids.  And I transport them to imaginary worlds.  Some of my former students, reading my novels and other writing, actually don’t recognize themselves.  The picture above from the planet Dionysus in the 36th Century contains three of my former students.  Do you suppose they will recognize themselves if the story ever gets told?  The sauroid boy, a native Dion from the jungle world in the story, is modeled after Sparky, a boy I taught in my fourth year of teaching.  His real name was not Clay Snarkley, but that’s how I refer to him in my writing (when I talk about the real boy, not the alien dinosaur-child).  Sparky was one of those kids who lives his entire life on center stage.  He was the class clown who was always making a wisecrack any time the lesson involved a question that I asked students to answer.  And his wisecracks were actually funny.  He didn’t read well, but he was highly intelligent and creative.  He’s the one who fed re-fried beans to his three best friends before school and organized the Great Fart-Gas Attack in the middle of Sustained Silent Reading Time.  (That terroristic attack failed, of course, because with my lifetime of clogged sinuses, I had no sense of smell to offend.  I was perfectly comfortable.  It was the girls in class that were so enraged that Sparky narrowly escaped having a serious behind-ectomy and being the subject of ritual sacrificial revenge after school…with knives and fingernails.)  Sparky was one of my favorite students… of course, you probably know by now they were all my favorites, and he not only makes a good sauroid-alien, but he is a character in my on-going series of home-town novels, where he has to be transformed into an Iowa boy rather than a Texan.  It all means then, that I am writing humorous fiction for middle-school kids that is full of real people, people who are mostly still walking around out there living their real lives.  And if I draw them and write about them and use the details of their lives in my stories, they don’t have to be embarrassed by any of it.  As an artist, I transform the world as I perceive it through my artifice.  Their monkey-house secrets are safe. 20150807_135157

 

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November 14, 2015 · 2:48 pm

The Notion That Pictures Are Stories

jungle girl 2

There are things that you have in your pointy little head sometimes that can’t be said in words.  They are like the sparks of truth you find in dreams… they make no sense at all if you take them out of the theater that plays in your head and shine the light of actual day upon them.  They only have meaning inside your mind, where it is dark and safe and ideas percolate, breed, and become dangerous.  There is enough magic in dreams to solve the world’s problems.  And yet, if try to take it out into the real world to use it, it evaporates and becomes a pointless silly pile of goofiness.

Case in point, in dreams it is marvelously wonderful to be naked in the jungle.  Nothing between you and the raw nature around you.  It works in dreams.  It works when you read Rudyard Kipling’s The First Jungle Book.  But in real life, the sun will burn you, the rats will chew your bare toes, and the mosquitoes will drink all your blood.

Leap of Faith

What viewed from the outside is irrational and unfathomable, makes perfect sense from the inside looking out.  What do these words even mean?  You must be asleep to really know.  I speak of that inner knowing… that faith that resides deep down inside of all of us that we do have answers to the most terrifying questions of life.  That sense that if you make the leap of faith, you will not fall… you will fly instead.

Blue Faun22

Case in point, people are not literally blue.  But when you sleep, perchance to dream, it can seem the whole world is blue, and not just merely literally you.  Blue skin, blue heart, blue eyes…  It hurts to be alive.  But if you are hurting, you have to believe you really are alive.  The pain brings clarity, certainty… it is why you pinch yourself to wake yourself up from dreams.

I know this all sounds witless, rambling, and goofy, but that is the general point.  The truth, if the truth exists, is found in rambling, witless and goofy.

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November 13, 2015 · 2:42 pm

Progress Report

Friday the Thirteenth is probably a strange choice as a day to update you all (the non-Texican version of y’all) on how I am doing as a writer.  As a teacher, I would never give tests or graded assignments on Friday of Friggatriskaidekaphobia-fame because too many kids would bomb it just because the the stupid superstition still persists in our society.  But I am decidedly science-minded.  I know with absolute certainty that I am bound to fail more than I succeed, and one day in the very near future I will curl up my metaphorical toes and go metaphorically bye-bye.  So I might as well be perfectly honest about where I stand at present.

Skye lodge

As a parent, I have to to be better than all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.  I have dealt with bipolar disorder, social anxiety disorder, and severe depression in both my work as a teacher and as a parent of three.  I have to be good at putting Humpty together again.  For the time being, the eggs are all now puzzled back together.

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As a story-teller, my novel Snow Babies has now been completed and edited.  The publisher is now in the process of turning the thing into an actual book.  Not much more is standing in the way of me being the author of three published novels (and potentially two of them that are actually good).

As a blogger, I now have only 48 more days to go to reach my goal of posting every single day of 2015.  I have actually become a better writer by doing this, and these blogs are now a rich source of material for future projects, should I be lucky enough to survive for a while longer and do them.

My NaNoWriMo novel, When the Captain Came Calling, now stands at 17,000 words with 17 days left to reach the 50,000.  (Hey, I know it is not possible to actually get that far, but the competition is driving my progress forward after spinning my wheels through September and October.)

The painting above (Story-Teller of Skye Lodge) is making progress too, though you can see there is still a long way to go to complete it, especially once I layer in all the intricate designs in the dream-tale background.

So, that is my current report card.  I’m not clearly acing it, but I am also not failing.

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November 12, 2015 · 3:03 pm

Surrealist Eyes

The moral of the story; never challenge Cowboy Flash Crumpwell to a rubber gun duel.

The moral of the story; never challenge Cowboy Flash Crumpwell to a rubber gun duel.

He was the marshal in charge at Crumpwell’s Wild West Dude Ranch and Rabbit Farm.  It was his duty to create order and peace on a lawless frontier… and keep the fur-bearing bunnies happy, and making more rabbit fur.  So, when Pistoleer Pete Pistachio-Mustachio came to town, it was totally up to Marshal Flash Crumpwell to put an end to his terrible reign of Pistachio-ness.

They faced off on either end of Main Street.  Their spurs clanked and jangled as they started their bowlegged walks towards destiny and each other.

Then the guns came out.

The triggers were squeezed.

The barrels began to wiggle and elongate like elastic melting on a hot stove.  Up and down and all around dueling rubber guns dipped and danced and maneuvered through two dimensional space, until finally… Flash’s gun found a target in Pete’s ear.

“I should’ve known better than to hide a target in my ear!” Pete said as he surrendered.  “I just didn’t think any fool with a rubber gun would ever look there.”

sur·re·al·ism
səˈrēəˌlizəm/
noun
  1. a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

The horrible truth is, I have always been a surrealist.  My unconscious mind is constantly bombarding my life and work with irrational images.  And my ultimate source of creativity comes from a simple assumption.  “I can make sense out of the irrational things in my dreams and the movies constantly playing in my mind’s eye.”  Of course, that assumption is total hoo-haw.  People really can’t make sense out of nonsense.  But I am the idiot that always swims upstream.  I tend to try impossible things that can’t possibly be possible, and I end up pretending I can do them.  I am not the only one who has ever done this silly, stupid thing.  Notice what the auteur has to say about Chuck Jones, a cartoonist and fellow Surrealist;

So here is my conclusion; If you have ever wondered, “Why am I drawn to reading the meandering nonsense of this daft bugger?  And why does he do all this irrational and random stuff?”… It is because I am desperately infected with the affliction of surrealism.  Take pity on me.  Laugh at my kooky quirks.

MickeyX22

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