When last I was cartooning about Fantastica, I had fallen into a dream about pirates and had been taken prisoner…
On that cliffhanger note… To be continued…
Category Archives: Paffooney
Have No Fear, Mickey is Here
I have recently had more run-ins with my old nemesis… Fear. He is a vicious animal that makes my heart race and muddles my thinking (which is ironically very hard to do considering the muddlesome nature of my brain to begin with.)
I posted a political post a couple of days ago suggesting you should shoot yourself in the foot. Fear tells me he likes shooting. He is a card-carrying member of the NRA. Second Amendment rights are more important to him than the First Amendment, the Fourth, the Sixth, and definitely the 15th. He agrees with Donald Trump about Mexicans. We have to seal the border, and if they come across to commit crimes, steal our stuff, and mess up our lovely whitebread world, we oughtta be able to shoot them. Fear likes conservatives in politics. He knows they don’t really mean it when they ask us to give up stuff and give them more money in return for protecting us from all those scary “other people”, but he likes the notion of guns and military to “protect us”. Those “other people”, they are scary. and icky, and awful. We hate them. Let’s kill them. Fear really does say this to me, and I am fairly sure that he says it to other people too. But I have decided I don’t really want to listen.
In fact, I want to stand up to him. I am tired of listening to people whom I care about repeat fear-fueled talking points from Fox News about why white cops who killed black youths without giving them their right to a trial… especially un-armed black youths… were probably justified and were rightfully afraid for their own gun-fortified life. I was mortified when the white cop in McKinney, Texas threw the black girl in the bikini to the ground and put a knee on her back. That was a girl like so many of the ones I have taught in Texas. Sure, she may have said bad words to him… because she was afraid. But she had more reason to be afraid than he did. So, I need to use Mickian magical powers to punch Fear in the nose. This monster will not beat me, even though I am naked and unarmed. I am not afraid.
And here’s the reason why… I love people. I don’t hate them. I don’t fear them. I particularly love some of the people that friends and relatives routinely tell me that they fear. I have had black, Hispanic, and Muslim students that I would die to protect without hesitation. When I stood between a Hispanic boy with a sharp metal throwing star with which he intended to commit a murder, and the boy inside my classroom he was threatening, I was ready to die. He was not entering my classroom while I lived to block the doorway. Fortunately for my stupid, brave self, an even braver History teacher prevented him from getting to me and got him to drop the weapon and run away. Later that day I cried several gallons of tears and thanked God I did not wet my pants on the spot, but that is not the only time in my teaching career that I stepped between two combatants in order to protect them both and end the fight. The secret to those victories was never having a gun or weapon to fight back with. All I had to do to win the battle was overcome Fear… to beat him down and not let him be a factor. You can always talk your way out of any terrible situation. If the person you are talking to knows you are not showing fear, and you bother to tell him or her that you care about not letting them get hurt, even by their own actions… even the most wicked-hearted people are still people and still have a heart. If they don’t, a gun isn’t going to save you anyway. It would’ve helped Ninja-star-boy to have someone supply him with a gun. So I say this without fear. “Fear, you do not have a say in my life! I do not give you any power over my faith, my politics, my daily life, or my loves.”
Now, I am not made of bricks or steel, and I am definitely not bullet-proof. But I am not afraid to say, I am a liberal in my politics. I believe in helping people, not hurting them in the name of Fear. And so, if you Klansmen and white supremacists are offended by that fact and believe you need to punish me for my commie-liberal-sinner crimes, I am ready to tell you that I respect you as a human being, and disrespect every hurtful thing you stand for. I will gladly give you your Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights, and do everything in my power to prevent you from exercising your Second Amendment rights on my poor little (Biblical-word-for-Donkey used as a euphemism).
Oh, and I am not about to tell you where I live. I may be stupid and brave, but nobody is that stupid.
The 40-Year Class Reunion
This Goodwill rescue Barbie is stamped 1966, but an irate collector once pointed out to me that is no indication of when this doll was actually made and sold.
One of the main reasons that I went to Iowa this Summer at the time that I did was because the Belmond High School Class of 1975 was having a reunion dinner for the 40th anniversary of the high school getting rid of all of our dumb behinds all at once, an entire class full of mooks and monkey-heads and minions. I desperately wanted to see them again… for possibly the last time in our lives. It has been 40 years. Seven of us are gone (more than 10% of a small, rural Iowegian high school class). And now I want to tell stories about them and relentlessly make fun of them… though I will change the names to protect the innocent… and the ones I like… which is all of them.
We had the hootenanny at the Belmond Country-Club and Golf Course (and no, we were not eating golf balls… the most favorite of all Belmond restaurants had been destroyed by a tornado not long ago, and is now re-opened at the Country-Club grounds). I was really hoping to see my best friend there, Dr. Bilbo Bonaduce… the mook in the lobster shirt in high school that always got my jokes in Mr. Salcomb’s English classes, but never laughed… because he always needed to top them. (That goof-ball was willing to say out loud in front of everyone the kind of jokes I could only whisper to him behind my hand… needless to say, I only basked in the laughs second-hand.) Unfortunately, he was not there. He suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and may not even still be among the living. It has been a decade since I last saw or heard from him. Gee, this part of the story is not nearly as funny and uplifting as I had planned. But, then, time and fortune are not universally kind.
I did get to see the boy I fell in love with in Junior High. Now, that is not exactly what it sounds like. Neither of us were ever gay, and both have children by the one and only wives that we each married. I loved him because he was magical. He relied on my big brain to help him in Math and History, and I relied on him as we played together, side by side, in football, basketball, and track. As a teammate, he always made me better at what I was doing. I tackled harder and shot the ball more accurately and ran faster because he was always there encouraging me. I was actually the better athlete of the two of us (in my unbiased opinion), but he lettered in three sports when I did not letter in any. He dated the girl I had the hugest crush of my life upon… for a while… and got all the glory. But I shared in it because he was my friend and the “shiny” rubbed off on me. He grew up to be the only farmer in our class who is still actually farming. Still living the life we once knew. God, Roger, I never envied you more, and I love you still.
This is a picture of Brent Clarke, not Roger Williams. Character and inspiration? Maybe.
I spent the most time talking to three people I had not talked to much in 40 years… Rachel McMichaels was one of the organizers of the dinner. She was the brainiest girl in our class and the Valedictorian in high school. The scuttlebutt was that if I courted and married Rachel, all our children would have frizzy white hair and mustaches like Albert Einstein. She was as warm and caring as ever. She asked all about my family and told me one or two things about hers. There was never a flicker of romance between us in high school… probably because of all the teasing… but I do realize what a good thing was always there to be missed out on entirely.
Daniel Mastermill was there too. We sat beside each other in the front row of the infamous Miss Rubelmacher’s seventh-grade Science class. The terrifying Miss R sat us there together in her seating chart because of size. Daniel, in seventh grade, was even shorter and scrawnier than I was. At the reunion, he was telling me the story (which I had never heard before) of his family’s buried treasure. It seems that his parents buried a treasure on their family farm, and told the children that it was there, but never gave them a treasure map, or told them what was in the treasure. The old folks apparently died without telling where it was buried, and the children spent weeks digging up everything they dared to dig up looking for it before the farm was sold. The treasure is apparently still there.
And I sat next to Reggie Simmery all during the meal. Everybody talks to Reggie. He was the class clown. We were sitting across the table from Angela Oberkfell, the classmate who was also the Junior High School Principal’s daughter, and listened to a recounting of several times Reg was subjected to paddlings, stern lectures, and even a couple of suspensions. Reggie could never resist the temptation to say or do the most ridiculous, stupid, and pointless things his little peanut-butter-powered brain could think of. And he always laughed about everything, even when Angela’s dad whacked him on the behind with a board of education.
The reunion was a disappointment because I didn’t see all the people I wanted to see. Even the girl I had the greatest crush of my life upon was not there. (Clever of her to avoid me.) But I saw people I needed to see, and felt the things I needed to feel, about a time and place so long ago now, and my heart is full… re-filled to the brim.
Filed under high school, humor, Paffooney
Why You Should Shoot Yourself in the Foot Rather Than Vote for Donald Trump
I confess. I am subject to the annoying liberal belief that if I check my facts and make properly reasonable arguments, I can save the world from all the political idiots and partisan clowns that are filling the American scene with horse poop. Of course, I just got back home to Texas from a week-long visit to Iowa, and in both places there are people that I respect and love that feel that everything conservatives and even Tea Party Republicans say on Fox News makes sense. How deluded can you be? It almost makes a loony liberal communist anti-Christ like me start using the other word for poop.
The problem, I believe, lies in the -ists and the -isms. For example, racists and racism or anti-Zionists and anti-Zionism (words that I believe Hitler chose to describe how he felt about ants who were from Zion… or something) are -ists and -isms. The kind of -ists and -isms that makes people from Iowa argue that the Confederate flag represents culture not hatred, even though that particular flag killed a large number of Iowans in the “Hornet’s Nest” at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 in Missouri. Iowa was on the Union side. That war, by the way, was a war of rebellion by the South who wanted to be a separate nation so they could keep buying and selling people like they were pet hamsters and working them like they were mules. (See what I mean… loony liberals let facts get in the way of all the really cool ideas?)
My children and I had a discussion of -ists and -isms at the Burger King today, because the Princess didn’t want to sit next to her brother, because… well, brothers are stinky and bother you and she would just end up being unfairly in trouble for pouring her medium soft drink over his head. We talked about how people are prone to let prejudices control their behavior instead of using civil, loving, Christian values. The Princess was being a seat-ist and subject to seat-ism. And then we noted that if she hopped from seat to seat, she would be a repeat-ist seat-ist. And if she took a real disliking to the seat, she might turn into a seat-ist beat-ist. And if she obsessively tried to clean the seat of big-brother cooties, she was being a neat-ist seat-ist. And we got a good laugh at the expense of seat-ists everywhere.
animal.kukuchew.com
And taking Donald Trump seriously as a presidential candidate this last week is the same stupid thing. The man opened his mouth during his announcement speech and proceeded to spew horse poop about Mexicans being rapists and drug-dealers and other criminals coming across our borders to take our stuff and rape our women and do all kinds of evil horse poop… because he was reading from a carefully researched speech foot-noted with crime statistics… or possibly because The Donald would never just speak boat-loads of horse poop hatefully off the top of his head. (Notice I resisted the temptation to use the other word for poop three whole times! I am a slave to political correctness and need to be called out for it.)
I learned a few things about immigration over the last decade of being an ESL teacher (English for non-English speakers). If you come from a properly white-skinned country like, say, Finland, you have a relatively easy time immigrating to the U.S. If you come from a brown or black country, you face a barb-wire-shrouded mine field in the form of a legal immigration process, and once you make it legally to this country, any little slip-up or typo… even those you don’t make yourself… can get you re-classified as illegal and deported. Parents are deported away from their children. Children get deported even though they were born in this country and speak only English. My own Filipino wife is still not a citizen after twenty years of marriage. And most of those “illegal immigrants” that so disturb The Donald (and Ted Cruz, and Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry. and the rest of the Republican Clown Alley) do important jobs that employers have a hard time filling otherwise. If they are actually illegal, they pay into the system in the form of income tax and are unable to claim any benefits because they risk discovery and deportation. Thinking these hard-working, under-loved people are all criminals is horse poop.
But enough with the horse-poop discussion. I hate when my posts end up full of poop. Donald Trump is the worst kind of -ist and full of the most terrible kinds of -isms. If you shoot yourself in the foot, it will heal, at most, in a couple of months. If you vote for Donald Trump, you may end up having to live in a horse-poop factory for four years. Do you really like man-made horse poop? It is a lot more toxic than the organic stuff. (Dang! Even loony-liberal political correctness doesn’t keep the danged poop from piling up!)
One True Thing
Sometimes I wonder why I write and what purpose it serves. And the fact that it is impossible to know the answer to things like that doesn’t even slow me down. The speculation-and-imagination machine chugs on, churning out all sorts of clever platitudes and sophomoric sayings that the editorial glands in my brain sometimes make me choke on. Purple paisley prose rolls out of my pen and curls and swirls across the page being more about the silly sounds and internal rhymes and alliterations than about the actual ideas. And I enjoy the process far more than you do.
Making connections is probably the most important process of the whole endeavor. Having returned home to Iowa for a week in July, I can testify that connecting your childhood to your recent past and your promising present is essential to determining both who you are and who you are supposed to be. The boy I was in the 60’s and 70’s is a key to understanding why I write what I do. I was smarter than a kid is supposed to be. A nerd is a target for verbal and physical abuse based on a shared feeling among those not as cerebral that it is somehow unfair to be smarter than ordinary folks. I learned to defend myself with wit and superior planning. I found it is possible to create an indispensable role for myself in practically any situation. I learned to be a good listener. I absorbed all the fascinating little nuances of personality and possibility that other people unintentionally exude. I learned to organize and prioritize and use all the other ize-es that help you structure reality to your liking. And I learned that it is possible, as a teacher, to pass the secrets of life and love and laughter on to others. Here is one true thing… The point of learning anything is to pass it on to others.
If you get nothing else at all out of this silly, meandering post of purple paisley prose, I hope it is that previous sentence. I delude myself into believing that all the experiences I have had and all the things I have learned can be wrapped up into pretty packages and given as gifts to coming generations. I strive to write with quality and make the ideas engaging and powerful. I am always experimenting with style. For example, this post is based on free-writing and associative thinking. I intended to create a “boneless” structure of gelatinous prose centered around one true thing. And I intentionally wrote it to resemble a blobby pile of mud in which the reader must dig for that nugget of gold. And I think I have succeeded in making it thoroughly muddy with random big words, loose connections that risk bursting the paragraph’s seams, and word eddies that could potentially explode the flow. If you have waded this far through the mess, then let me reward you with one more pointless Paffooney, re-posted like a pirate.
Holiday Place Holders
I am quite serious about posting every day this year. But not every day is given the opportunity to be a writing day. The fact is, some days things like holidays and family come first and you cannot always live the entire day in your own stupid head. So this post is a cheat, a fake, a place-holder that gets words published on WordPress merely for the sake of getting words published on WordPress. Believe me, I understand if you don’t bother with this quickly-written and poorly edited drivel. It is only about a hundred words in any case. Not worth the time beyond its ability to plug the hole with chewing gum.
Filed under Paffooney
The Politics of Clowns
It is almost not fair to make fun of presidential candidates. They are making it so easy. If you can’t take anything but cheap shots at certain folks, then what value is in your words? Still, it is a temptation hard to resist.
So, I have spared no expense in hiring a couple of KlownTown’s finest to watch my every word, and keep me honest.
It is almost impossible to find a picture of Donald Trump on a good hair day.
1. Candidate Hair– The field of candidates on both sides of the divide is filled with marvelous examples of clown hair. I am left wondering how they achieve such effects. Assuming Rand Paul is not wearing a bad toupee, how does he get his hair to look like a squirrel who fell into a vat of yellow wood-stain shellac and then crawled out and died on his head? I think his father proved before him that too much Libertarian political purity has a profoundly pickling effect upon your head, and leads to making what hair you have growing out funny. Donald Trump obviously takes his hair off every morning and steam presses it on wrought-iron ironing boards in a thoroughly Republican flat-tax flattening sort of arm motion. It’s too bad he is in the habit of taking his hair off at the neck, because the ritual flattening is having a bad effect on the “maybe-I-shouldn’t-say-that-out-loud” centers in his brain. The Democrats are not immune to the clown-hair scourge either Bernie Sanders obviously uses my grandfather’s bald-guy low-maintenance approach to hair-styling. Step out of the shower, rub a towel across the top of your head, and you are ready to roll with that straight-talking brand of no-nonsense socialism that you can get by with because everyone is looking at how the towel Bozo-ed up your hair and distracts them from listening to your actual words. (Okay, the Klown Kops caught me. Bozo is not a legal verb.)
I bet you didn’t know that Ted Cruz went to Ringling Bros. Clown College for two years.
2. Candidate Words– Yes, the greater part of the clown-offences committed by candidates have to do with words. Some, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have a marvelous glibness that defies understanding. Cruz can go on talk shows and talk with two different tongues at the same moment. He is smart and Ivy-League-educated, but when he denies climate change he says he is not a scientist (which absolves him of using scientific reasoning in his arguments) but he says the science is not yet settled (which he routinely backs up with facts and statistics that are not true). Here is a noble statesman who is of Cuban descent and speaks no Spanish. He was born in Canada but renounced his Canadian citizenship so it wouldn’t interfere with his presidential aspirations. So, where the heck is he from, and why did we elect him in Texas? Even Republican Senator John McCain calls him a “wacko bird” for his combative Me-against-the-world political maneuverings. Who would possibly make a better president? At least, he is certainly capable of keeping the cartoonists and satirists happy. (The KlownTown Kops are reminding me that I have already passed 500 words and too much politics on the internet is a very bad thing… so maybe I must leave the rest of this topic for another day.)
Taking the Road Home
I was once offered a hundred dollars for this oil painting of State Highway 3 in Iowa. The art collector who offered it was a fellow teacher at the time. He didn’t really know much about painting. He collected wooden Santos, or carved saints from Mexico, and he had bought wooden carousel horses before. He was very knowledgeable about wooden sculpture from Mexico, but kind of a dithering old fool who was actually going blind at the time from cataracts when it came to other kinds of art. He wanted to encourage me as an artist, although he couldn’t really see the painting very well. I loved the old guy, but blind guys shouldn’t really be teachers (unless they have Daredevil level hearing skills), and they definitely shouldn’t try to evaluate art that they can’t see by touching. I was flattered, but also very happy I held on to the painting instead of selling it.
You see, this is literally the road home. Traveling west on Highway Three, you only have to go a couple more miles down this road to reach the little town where I grew up, Rowan, Iowa. And I am going home this week. My parents live on what used to be the Raymond Aldrich farm. Up ahead in the painting you turn right on the gravel road north to reach the connecting gravel room that takes you to Grandpa and Grandma’s farm house, where my parents, in their 80’s now live. In many ways it is a journey into the past. I have a class reunion of the Belmond High School Class of 1975 on July 3rd. I get to revisit the town where I grew up and the family farm which always used to be the center of my world even though we lived in a different house in the town of Rowan. My whole family of 5 is going along. My sisters and their families will also be there. It is worth the 700-plus mile trip, which we are doing today. Soon, the picture becomes reality. I thank my lucky stars I never sold it.
Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney
Writing in My Head
Okay, I am justifying and vilifying today because yesterday I didn’t write 500 words… the first time in 2015… not in my blog, not in my novels, not even counting text messages. I had extenuating circumstances. I went to a movie, Disney’s Inside Out which made me laugh and made me cry like any good Disney/Pixar movie always does. Then I got a message that one of my children went into the hospital in Florida. And I have been down and out with a bad back, so I missed the Florida trip all together… (the child is fine, by the way, thanks for asking that in your head while reading this). But all of that stuff and nonsense is really just an excuse for a dastardly act of cowardice. I didn’t write a full 500 words. How dare I? This writing thing has now become my sacred mission from God. After all, I retired from the first sacred mission because poor health was God’s way of telling me, “MICKEY, IT IS TIME TO BE A WRITER.” Really! He talks to me in all capital letters just like that.
And you have probably noticed already that I am doing stream-of-consciousness writing for today’s post, a useful form of pre-writing that is known for producing lots of garbage to go along with the gemstones-in-the-rough. My mind is still boiling with emotional turmoil and upset and less-than-critical thinking… The reasons for that are understandable… I am guessing. … But I think the point is (if points are possible in this no-win game I am playing, and losing, called Old Age) that I am never really not writing. I have two novels in rough drafting at the same time. Both When the Captain Came Calling and Stardusters and Space Lizards are both on my task bar at this very moment. I add new inspirations for the next canto every time a new light bulb clicks on over my little furry head.
So the ideas are already there for several pieces of writing that I simply have to sit down and knock out on the keyboard. Potentially I have way more than a mere 500 words waiting to blossom and unfold like flowers into paragraphs of purple paisley prose. (Since this is as close as a writer can come to showing how he actually thinks, I guess I have also answered a question that many who try to read my writing have been wondering about… I really do think in loopty-loops with streamers attached and a knot in the tail.) Writing is not something I can ever be accused of not doing because writing and thinking are the same thing… the only difference between the 500 per day and the leventie-leven trillion in my head is your access to it in a form that is written down and edited (well, at least re-read for typos… I kinda like leaving the stuff and nonsense… and moldy bananas… in the final product because I can pass that particular form of goofiness off as humor). (And, yes, it just helped me pass 500 for today.)
Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Another Dadgum Post About Pirates
This one isn’t about Bank of America or Aetna… specifically. It is just me adding to my cartoon vault and the story of the pirates in Fantastica.
This is the second panel of the story that can be found at The Pirate Vault
And panels three and four are all I have gotten done on this comic so far.
This nonsense will all be continued in upcoming days, and the whole thing is in my cartoon vault.
