Category Archives: Paffooney

February 21, 2015 · 1:53 am

Teachers Aren’t People… (Apparently)

If insurance companies are people in the same way the Supreme Court says that corporations are people, then they are pirates. Not Robin Hoods of the Sea sort of pirates who take from the rich and give to the poor. No, we are talking about the kind of pirate that latches on to the people too powerless to resist their boarding actions and wrings every last penny out of their rudely squeezed and and drained souls. That kind of pirate.

The reason for the rant is not something I can fully discuss here. I am in need of a mental health professional for a member of my family. Of course, if you have read this blog, you probably have already assumed I am talking about me. Having been a middle school English teacher the suspicion that I have let all the doves out of the loft is a pretty safe assumption. Still, one would assume that a retired teacher with health insurance should be able to get whatever professional help he needs. Not according to the company reps who are happy to take my monthly premium. Previous Psychiatrist, Dr. Good, was one of the best in the city. He understood the problem better than any other doctor we encountered, including the emergency room doctor and the behavioral hospital doctor. But our lovely education-friendly State of Texas has to cut back spending on education. Teachers make too much money and have too many expensive benefits. And besides, tests clearly show that we are not doing our jobs right. (This part is true and not merely sarcasm… of course, the tests get harder every year to prove we are doing worse by lower scores). So, Statewide we have gone to cheaper health insurance. Dr. Good doesn’t deal with the cheap-o company. You can’t blame him. They don’t pay actual money for health care because that cuts too far into profits. So, no more Dr. Good. And we haven’t yet found a doctor to replace him. Worse yet, we have been working with a therapist who is more patient and kind than we probably deserve. He has been billing us only the co-pay and negotiating with cheap-o for the rest of his fee. The previous insurance gladly paid for his services as he helped prevent needless trips to the hospital and helped us accomplish minor miracles. Cheap-o told him that even though he’s listed in-network, he isn’t really in-network and they don’t intend to pay him for the last four months. Damn. I hate pirates. They don’t treat you like a people…. more like a milk cow or something.

So, with extensive stressors in my life, and poor health getting worse, a little depression to boot… it’s gonna be all right. God and the devil will work something out. Since I’m still alive, I can safely say, life is good.

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Filed under Paffooney, rants, satire

Tagged as colored marker, complaint department, humor, paffooney, rants, satire

February 19, 2015 · 2:06 pm

People All Have Worth

I know that you are probably immediately listing all the reasons that my title is totally wacky monkey-thinking in your head. And if you want to lay into me in the comments, you are more than welcome. But the reality is that teachers have to develop the mindset that all kids can learn and all people have value… no matter what. That can be hard to accept when you factor in how corrupted, warped, and badly-taught so many people have turned out to be. It honestly seems, sometimes, that when faced with the facts of how people act… being violent, or greedy, self-centered, thoughtless, un-caring, and willfully stupid… that they really don’t even have value to others if you kill them, let them rot, and try to use them as fertilizer. The plants you fertilize with that stuff will come up deformed.

But the Doctor I have pictured here, the Second Doctor played by Patrick Troughton always seemed to find Earth people delightful. Alien people too, for that matter, unless they were soulless mobile hate receptacles in robotic trash cans like the Daleks, or mindless machines powered by stolen human brains like the Cybermen. There is, indeed, music in every soul, even if some of it is a little bit discordant and awkward. And people are not born evil. The classic study done on Brazilian street kids showed that even with no resources to share and living empty, hopeless lives, the children helped one another, comforted one another, and refused to exploit one another. As a teacher you get to know every type that there is. And there are stupid kids (deprived of essential resources necessary to learning), and evil kids (lashing out at others for the pain inflicted upon them), and needy kids (who can never get enough of anything you might offer and always demand more, MORE, MORE!) Sometimes they drive you insane and make you want to resign and leave the country to go count penguins in Antarctica. But the Doctor is right. No matter what has been done to them, if you get to know them, and treat them as individual people rather than as problems… they are delightful!

So let me show you a few old drawings of people.

Cute people like Andrew here.

Or possibly stupid and goofy people who never get things right.

Or long-dead people who made their contributions long ago, and sacrificed everything to make our lives different… if not better.

Or young people who live and learn and hopefully love…

And try really hard at whatever they do… whether they have talent or not.

And hope and dream and play and laugh…

And sometimes hate… (but hopefully not too much)…

And can probably tell that I really like to draw people…

Because God made them all for a reason…

even if we will never find out what that reason is.

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Filed under art my Grandpa loved, humor, Paffooney, philosophy

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, humor, irony, love, Paffoonies, philosophy, teaching, wish-upon-a-starring

February 18, 2015 · 1:02 pm

On a Frosty Morning

Yes, there was frost on the ground in the Dallas suburbs today. A bit of fog too. And I mean that both literally and figuratively, in a very Robert Frost-ian sort of way. The air was clean and cold and crisp for a change. I could see, hear, breathe, and think well for a change in this gawd-awful city of death and decay. It was poetically, virtually, and monumentally a moment of clarity… such clarity that only three adjectives could possibly be enough to provide the complex understanding of my Robert Frost moment.

My typical apology for living, and for writing this, and for making you read it comes in the second paragraph today. You have to forgive me for being so much of an English teacher. Do you know who Robert Frost is? Frost is a great american poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times in the 20th Century. Does that really tell you who Frost is? Of course not. Only this does;

The Road Not Taken

a poem by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,,
And that has made all the difference.

Yes, like Robert Frost, I took the road less traveled by in life. Having a gift for creative writing, drawing cartoons, and generally being seriously silly and obtuse (and claiming that meant I was funny), I chose to not be a novelist and cartoonist when I was young. I chose to be a school teacher. Of course, if you pin me down and ask me, requiring me to answer before you let me up, and threatening to spit on my nose if I don’t answer, I will tell you that God really decided I needed to be a teacher. After all, I developed arthritis that effected how often and how long I could spend drawing. I had the usual novelist’s problem of a keen awareness of how to write, and no real life experiences to write about. But even though it was a holy mission from God, it was my own decision to become a teacher.

And look what I got from it. This is a picture of Freddy. I started this picture in 1986, drawing the portrait from a photo and from real life. Freddy was a vato loco from Cotulla. He is the sort of kid that teachers dread. He is the kind that if you let him sit in the back of the room, he will shoot spit-wads into the girls’ hair… but if you put him up front, he is constantly putting on a show, a stand-up-sit-down-again comedy routine for the entire classroom. And I had the honor of being his favorite teacher both in his seventh and eighth grade years. He made me laugh almost as much as he was laughing at me. He claimed he was a Mexican even though he was born in the U.S. and has always lived in the U.S. and if he goes to Mexico, they won’t understand his Texican version of Spanish without an interpreter. (Now, you probably already know that I never use real names of people I write about in order to protect the innocent… or in Freddy’s case the only-mildly-guilty. But I haven’t actually revealed his name in this post. Alfredo Giovanni is such a common name in Texas that you will never be able to find him through research. And Alfredo Giovanni is a name I made up anyway.) By the time I actually put the color on this picture, Freddy will no longer look even remotely like this. He’s in his late forties and Hispanic. He probably weighs at least ten times what his tiny self did back in 1986. But I was honored to know him and teach him, even though I have more than a few gray hairs on my head that he specifically caused.

And that brings me to my final movement in this classical opus. Here is the difference I have made by choosing the path I chose. Now that poor health has forced me to retire from teaching, and I have a limited time left to me to pick up the novelist/cartoonist thing again, I have done so with passion and insight that I would not otherwise have had. I have crafted a novel in The Magical Miss Morgan based entirely on my experiences as a classroom teacher. It is the best thing I have ever written in my life. And one of the main characters, the rapscallion leader of the Pirates’ Club, Timothy Kellogg… is Freddy in fictional form. Oh, it is true that the character is the son of a high school English teacher in my story, and he does have a lot in common with my own oldest son… but he is actually Freddy. The things he does and says (translated from Texican into Iowegian) and thinks and feels, are all Freddy. And how do I know what Freddy thinks and feels? Come on! I was Freddy’s favorite teacher. There is no way I would still be alive and sane unless I could read minds.

Two roads diverge on a frosty morning pathway in the park… One over the bridge into an entirely different life that I didn’t choose… and one that leads straight on into the new dawn… whatever the consequences of following it.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, philosophy, teaching

Tagged as colored pencil, humor, Paffoonies, pen and ink, philosphy, photo Paffooney, poetry, Robert Frost, teaching

February 17, 2015 · 2:00 pm

Architecture for Clowns

Try not to be upset with me for drawing a naked lady. You see, she is not really a lady, she is a caryatid, a stone pillar for holding up a building. Besides, I have been recently very ill, and drawing naked ladies makes me happy, even though it is a sin and means I will probably burn in hell. I am a hopeless sinner in this regard. I got kicked off Pinterest for liking an oil painting of a naked lady. I think it was a painting by William Adolphe Bouguereau. How could I be so terrible? You should check out my post about his sinful, horrible paintings so you can see how terrible I am for yourself. (Bouguereau) Of course, This post is not about naked ladies at all, so why am I fuming and ranting and telling all my darkest secrets about that?

This post is about architecture, about giving structure to things, about holding things together and holding things up. Is it clever that I drew this picture of an ornate pillar and placed it in this post so it looks like it is standing on later paragraphs and holding up the introduction? I find weird surrealist things like that help me write stuff that makes a few people laugh. It helps me because I can focus on nonsensical side-stuff like that (mixed up with obscure puns and alliterations like “pillar” and “placed” that, when cooked together with goofy rhythms in over-long sentences end up sounding funnier than they really are), and then I can say stuff that is actually funny because I don’t realize how wrong, or weird, or silly some of these words I am futzing it all up with truly are. (And I am amazed that the Pinterest police haven’t come and kicked me off WordPress for using a word like “futzing”, even though they don’t know what it means. Heck, even the spell-checker didn’t object to the word!)

But someone like me who is trying to be funny needs structure more than anyone else you can think of. Why? Because the sad-clown-crying-on-the-inside is so very true. The dark dips of depression… pain, illness, and more pain… family stress from others in my family who also suffer… That’s what makes the laughing so very necessary. You need the lighter stuff to fill up the room (somewhat like a really big fart) because you depend on the sheer buoyancy of it to lift the entire house up and keep it from sinking to the very center of the earth. (And the stink of it can also help keep you awake when otherwise you might never get out of bed again)… (But please don’t light any matches around my house.)

So, in conclusion, this stuff I write does have basic structures, basic rules. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a theme, a point that needs to be made, And then it needs to end with some kind of a kicker line or punch line… because when that finally hits me square in the face (like a pie thrown by a pie-whacker clown), it helps me remember… I am still alive, and I can still laugh about it.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, surrealism

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, drawing, goofiness, humor, kicked off Pinterest because of oil-painted boobies, on purple paper, paffooney, surrealism

February 16, 2015 · 1:26 pm

Feeling Blue

I am still quite ill, but I think I have turned a corner and am getting better. The wise thing to do would be to go to the doctor so he can tell me again that this is something I just have to suffer through. I am to the point money-wise, though, that I can’t really afford a couple of hours in waiting room followed by a few minutes of medical amazement that I keep suffering from things no expensive medicine can cure… or even alleviate. The deductible drains my bank account.

So I continue to hurt and rest and try to heal… always knowing that with my six incurable diseases, the present virus could easily be the final one. I was too sick yesterday to drive myself to the emergency room. I feel better, but still far from well today. I am going to get better through willpower… or the problem will be solved once and for all. Still, as I near the edge of the dark forest, and begin to see light through the trees… I am hopeful that I will get to play in the sunshine again.

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Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, illness, paffooney

February 13, 2015 · 12:24 pm

Friday the Thirteenth Family Breakfast

Some days you realize from the very start you need to dig a foxhole and hunker down for a shirt-storm with only one “r” in it. Today was like that by breakfast time. Yes, that was the start of it… breakfast… and I didn’t even talk about religion or politics… no, not even once.

I pulled myself up out of bed in spite of an extremely upset stomach (I must’ve gotten up in the night, sleepwalking, and gargled carbolic acid or something). My head was clogged and full of cotton, making thinking a rather foggy prospect. But I remembered what the Princess had asked for at breakfast. Yesterday’s scrambled eggs had been a source of trouble… and a source of extra poop-fuel for the dog’s amazingly active poop-factory. The Princess had complained that the eggs yesterday were too squidgy to eat. They apparently were under-cooked because we were all running late yesterday and I had tried to feed her Frosted Flakes instead of eggs, for which I rapidly got tongue-whipped and had to start the breakfast short-order cycle all over again. So today I remembered that yesterday she had given me license to burn them today. Black eggs and ham… so to speak. I even remembered that Henry, the middle child, prefers sausage for breakfast. Number one son is being fed by the Marine Corps, so that saves on half the contents of the entire refrigerator. So I juggled the cookware and made both sausage and scrambled eggs without making the eggs too squidgy… they were only slightly dark brown on one side… in only one frying pan. I even got breakfast on the table ahead of schedule.

But that’s when the fun started. I had only stepped on the dog once during cooking (she insists on being no further than nose-touching-feet distance from me when I cook, and getting stepped on increases her chances of food being dropped, and she firmly believes that if she only eats enough people food, she will become a people too and be able to work the refrigerator and the can-opener for herself). But the dog had the Jimmy Dean Sausage wrapper on the floor at the top of the stairs and was busy licking the smell and all the color off it. As I was going back and forth to bedrooms to awaken the eaters for school, I managed to trip over her with both feet. I didn’t actually hit the floor, or fall down the stairs, but I got a wooden sliver in the palm of my right hand from the wooden railing on the stairs. It hurt. And I didn’t have time to get it out until after kiddoes were delivered to the proper school (each one in a different school, of course). So, grinning through the pain, it was onward through breakfast. I ate my Raisin Bran. The Princess did not eat the eggs… they were not squidgy this time, but she just wasn’t hungry. She said she had the heebie jeebies from it being Friday the Thirteenth and had lost her appetite. I asked her if I couldn’t just take a BB gun and kill the heebie jeebies with BB’s. She had to top that, of course, so she vowed that I could not kill heebie jeebies with BB’s but if there was a Chibi baby in the house, I could kill the Chibi baby with BB’s. (She is into Japanese anime and Chibi is a word that here means one of those annoying little deformed dwarf characters from an anime episode that signals a sense of mischievous menace in the goofy anime character-thingy). Whatever. No more eggs were going into the dog’s poop mill. I covered them in cellophane and put them back in the fridge.

And my son ate his sausage and promptly returned to bed. He was too ill to go to school… but he is at that precious precocious age where the teenager will put off dying until after the sausage has all been eaten. So besides hand surgery, a call to the attendance office of the high school was also on my to-do list. I packed the Princess in the old Ford pony and galloped off with her to the middle school and returned home just in time to deal with ducks in the road. Yes, I said ducks! Every year, at about this time, the same pair of migrating mallards come nosing around our defunct and mostly-water-less cracked swimming pool. They have chosen our defunct pool as safe place to build a nest (even though grandpa is from the Philippines where they have a dish called balut, made of nearly-hatched duck embryos. Grandpa loves his balut.) But these mental-midget ducks were now lounging on the actual street. And Southern Oaks is a busy street during rush hour. The cars were zooming past at above-the-speed-limit speeds, only inches from the stupid male mallard’s stupid green head. I honked the horn. I parked. I got out of the car and walked over to see what was wrong with the stupid duck that wouldn’t take wing even when I honked. He has no self-preservation skills. (Why is it always the male animal?) I shouted. I waved my hands. I ran at him and stamped my foot. Still nothing. Then… my ill stomach gurgled. That scared him and made him fly away. A future duck-shaped road pizza, that one!

So, I finally had time to be sick and go back to bed. But, of course, it is still Friday the Thirteenth, and I have not dug a foxhole yet.

Today’s Paffooney Cartooney is Mandy Panda and her son Henry… You guessed it, actually my wife and middle son in cartoon form. Pandas from the Pandalore Islands because my wife is from the Philippines but has Chinese eyes. My wife had already left for her teaching job at the point where most of today’s joy took place.

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Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as bad luck, breakfast topics, colored pencil, Friday the 13th, humor, humor with ducks, paffooney, satire

February 10, 2015 · 12:57 pm

Banned Breakfast-Table Talking

At Mother’s breakfast table we were always encouraged to talk about stuff. That was a given. It was how families operated in the 60’s and 70’s. Mom and Dad not only listened to the mindless drivel coming out of the childish mouths of me, my two sisters, and my stinky little brother, but they also tended to hold forth about things they wished to teach us. We learned Methodist-Church-flavored Christianity and Eisenhower-Republican values. Ike had been president when I was born and got most of the credit for the post-war boom in the economy. We were middle-class people with solid middle-class values.

And then I had the bad sense to grow up and start thinking for myself. Nixon had let me down big-time when I was in high school. I had defended him against my McGovern-leaning loony liberal friends. My best friend was a preacher’s kid, a Methodist preacher’s kid. His father actually believed in progressive nonsense about sex-education for children and helping to feed the poor. And then Nixon turned out to be a liar, a coverer-upper, a cheat, and a bad-word-user. I suspect, though my Dad never admitted it, that he may have voted for Carter over Ford. It was my first time voting, and it actually felt good to use my vote to strike back at the party that betrayed my trust.

Religion, too. In the late seventies a man named Carl Sagan put on a TV show called Cosmos. The man bedazzled my father and I with Science. He taught us that every molecule of us was composed of atoms that could only have been forged in the cosmic furnaces in the centers of stars. He showed us how spectroscopy of the stars could show us what they were made of. He showed us the meaning of Einstein’s special Theory of Relativity. He pulled the universe together for us in a way that could not be undone. And he did it without calling upon the name and blessings of God. But he pointed out that we are connected to everything in the universe and everything is connected to us. To me, that seemed to define God. My religion was changing from Christianity to Saganism. Of course, Mom heard that as “paganism”. Breakfast table talking changed into early morning arguments. We didn’t exactly throw chairs at each other, but some pretty heated and pretty large ideas went flying through the air. Religion and politics became the banned topics at the breakfast table.

So that brings me to the Paffooney points for today. This blog has turned into a place where a disobedient son, a horrible sort of “free-thinker” type of radical hippie pinko goofball, can talk about the loony-liberal progressive ideas that have taken over his good-little Eisenhower-Republican little-boy mind. I spent the last post talking existentially about my religious beliefs. My conservative, old-fashioned friends and family call me an atheist now, but I truly believe in God. It’s just, I recognize the factors behind Christian myths. I bow to the wisdom of Scientists like Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking… as well as hippie psychologists like Alan Watts… and literary heroes like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S, Lewis.

I am proud to be an Iowegian (a Mickian word for being from Iowa), yet my birth-State produces gawd-awful Tea Party politicians like Steve King and Joni Ernst. The stuff that comes out of their mouths doesn’t even make good fertilizer. But they are comedy gold. Will Rogers would have pointed out that the jokes will write themselves. All the humorist would have to do is consult the front page of the newspaper. I also live in Texas where the debate over secession from the United States still goes on with new Governor Greg Abbott, a man who is a Rick Perry clone, except that he hasn’t bothered to put on glasses as much to make him smarter. And Texans are looking forward to the next Republican president in 2016. Both Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are running. That doubles Texas’ chances, right? With Global Warming not being accepted as a real thing, the need for giving all our money to the Koch brothers and the Walton family being recognized by both parties in Congress, and looming war with foreign nations that have the bad sense to be “Muslim in nature”, the future looks kinda bleak. But it is a great time to be a humorist, and I am guessing I won’t be doing very much talking at the breakfast table for a while.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, politics, religion

Tagged as goofiness, humor, paffooney, philosophy, politics, religion, satire

February 9, 2015 · 1:21 pm

Wisdom from the Outsider

There is so much left to be said before my time runs out. Wisdom, whether hard won or acquired entirely through wit, bears a certain responsibility in the possession of it. We are duty-bound as wizards, the masters of wisdom, to pass it on.

Now, you certainly have every right to protest that I am not wise and I have no wisdom. You are certainly right to point out that I am a doddering old fool that sits around the house all day in the midst of his poor-health-enforced retirement doing little beyond writing silly stories and drawing pictures of mostly naked cartoon girls. I get that. But the beginning of wisdom is the realization of how big everything is and how little I really know about anything.

Take for instance the question of where we came from and what our purpose is? (And the question of why I put a question mark on that when it really wasn’t a question.)

I originally believed in the God of the Christians and in the promises of Jesus… everlasting life and an eternity of sitting on a cloud with a harp and… Okay, it didn’t take me long to see the logical holes in that line of reasoning. So much of that is fear of death and the need to believe that I am the center of all things, the most important person in existence. The truth is I am only a tiny part of a nearly-infinitely-large universe. And the universe is conscious… self aware. How do I know this? Because I am conscious and self-aware. I am an infinitely tiny piece of the whole… but there are untold trillions of others just like me. And when I die… when this body ceases to function, as it already has a great deal of trouble doing, the parts that make up the individual creature and thought patterns I identify as me will be scattered to the far corners of everywhere to be gathered up once again and be something new. All of mankind passes away. Human beings and the planet Earth will one day be no more. But that is not what matters. There is so much more beyond the boundaries of what my limited eyesight can behold, and what my limited mind can comprehend. I am made of star-stuff (just ask Neal DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan), and I am a part of the universe as a whole. I am in no hurry to die. Life is worth fighting through the pain for… but I do not fear death. Like birth, it is only a stop along the way in a journey that, as far as I can tell, never ends.

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Filed under Paffooney, philosophy, wisdom

Tagged as drawings, goofiness, Paffoonies, philosphy, wisdom

February 8, 2015 · 3:31 pm

Wild Rides in My Own Head

Of late I have encountered many roadblocks on the road to creativity. Illness gets in the way. It is hard to think when I have too much arthritis pain. I have a hard time composing anything on days like yesterday when my blood sugar is out of whack. I haven’t been chased by car-driving crocodiles in red fright-wigs and green race cars. At least, not while I was awake. I am trying to follow a writing schedule that has me editing a novel for a contest in April, writing two other novels simultaneously, a set of short stories, and this daily blog that I am trying to average 500 words per day in every day (and succeeding now for roughly 41 straight days) (some days I write less words, but some days I go way over the stated limit). I end up squeezing the toothpaste tube of new ideas from both ends until the big wad in the middle finally bursts and gets white gobbets of creative-idea paste on everything in the room. I will admit that I mangle a metaphor or two, and give meaning to random blobs of description merely for the sake of adding more words. And what is this bit about, then? Clearly I am thinking about how I think and it is not a pretty sight. Sometimes my children bounce out of the rumble seat towards the river of man-eating fish, and I have to depend on the odd three-eyed alien tootling along in a space-doughnut to catch him or her in the nick of time. But sometimes, too, I am the rabbit, calmly watching from the sidelines hoping not to get run over but too fascinated to look away from the slap-dash slap-stick chase scene that is my actual life. This particular bit of tooth-paste squeezing is known as free writing, where I just keep stringing words and phrases together for as long as I can keep my aching fingers from falling off. I make corrections as I go, but there is no outline here, no discernible pattern, and very little logical coherence. Like the picture Paffooney, once it gets started, it just goes. And goes and goes. I have bounced over broken bridges and landed squarely on the pavement on the other side more than once of late. I paid the tax on the house and managed to remain a homeowner for another year. I fought off numerous bill-collecting crocodiles set on me by credit-card banks who are after me to pay off mountains of accumulated debt and interest after my multiple career-ending illnesses. I have lawyers helping me with debt reduction, the step before bankruptcy, which is also probably the step before stepping off the ledge at the top of the Chrysler Building. I continue to draw stuff that makes little or no visual sense, and post them here to further delight, dazzle and delude you. And, of course, I have the audacity to label this word free-for-all as humor… but I have reached five hundred and five words.