Category Archives: Paffooney

May 25, 2015 · 2:11 pm

Memorial Day Blues

What do you suppose it means that I am ill and confined to bed on Decoration Day?  You know, the holiday we now call Memorial Day?  I used to feel very patriotic.  I believed in singing the anthem and saying the pledge.  I joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses for a while because my wife is a true believer… and they tell me those things are un-Christian.  And now that I can no longer claim to be in that religion any more… because I really don’t believe…   Not that I don’t believe in God.   I have evidence in my own life (they say that if you talk to God you are normal, but if He answers, you are either a prophet or a lunatic… and I am definitely no prophet).  But I don’t believe in their God who calls the science of evolution a lie, and forbids blood transfusions that might save your life, and believes you will be denied eternal life if you don’t worship him in the correct manner… using the correct words.   They don’t believe you can be one of the saved and also be a member of the armed services… and my eldest son is now serving in the Marine Corps.

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Decoration Day was made a holiday in the 1860’s as a day to honor those Americans who had died in the service of their country.  Not honoring all soldiers, mind you, honoring the soldiers who died.  Over 600,000 of them died in the Civil War on both sides, and all of them were Americans.  Honoring the dead became a way of life back then, a very prominent part of the culture.  It was a holiday for putting flowers on graves.  I don’t think it was a holiday meant to make us happy like Christmas, or thankful like Thanksgiving.  I think it is supposed to help you remember… it is supposed to make you sad.

I lost a great uncle, my Grandma Beyer’s brother, in the Navy in WWII, although it was a training accident in a gun turret, not in battle… no purple heart.  My mother lost a cousin in the Viet Nam conflict.  Tommy Hinckley was a pilot who crashed and was lost.  So I have reason enough already to be thinking about war and death without even mentioning my son. What other conclusion can I reach?  War is a terrible, horrible thing.  This holiday is not about war.  But it is about soldiers.  I hate war.  But I love and respect soldiers.  And I hate all war… even wars like WWII that had to be fought to prevent great evil.  And I love all soldiers, even the ones we call our enemies, because they have made the choice to die to protect the things they believe in and the people they love.  And it is a noble sacrifice even when it is made for the wrong reasons and serves stupid ends.  And some of the soldiers, most of them, don’t die.  They live to tell the story.  And that is a story we need to hear.

But I am blue today.  Not because I am feeling ill, which is a constant part of my life…  but because soldiers die.  Today is the day we are supposed to think about that… honor that sacrifice… and remember.  And maybe we are supposed to be sad.

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May 24, 2015 · 4:06 pm

Notes from the 70’s; the Master Plan

I have wanted to be a writer and cartoonist from childhood onward.  I didn’t really begin in earnest until the last few years of my teaching career with retirement looming directly ahead.  Now I have made the leap off the cliff.  I retired a year ago.  I did everything short of bankruptcy to put my accounts in order, and transformed myself into a starving artist.  I have a full retirement from Texas, subject to a grandfather clause (no relation to the Santa Clause) that allows me to receive enough money to live on for the rest of my life (thanks to the trick of being a teacher back before George W. Bush and Rick Perry came along to pillage Texas education and reduce what they pay those lazy, lousy teachers for their lifetimes of service).  Of course, I must try to limit my expenditures as much as possible, because… well, it is a teacher’s pension.

Norwall

But my plan from the 70’s, begun in high school and carried out through college and my teaching career has allowed me to stay on track to create something massive and complex.  My story ideas have been collected over time and are all based on a very simple rule… “Everything is connected.”  Every story I now labor to put into prose mentions other stories and has story fishhooks in it to catch readers and pull them into something else.  Most of my work is set in farm-town Iowa in the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s.  I made them all a part of the 20th Century on purpose because the personalities the characters are all based on were a part of my life then.  Certain elements run through all the stories.  Let me explain a few.

1.  Some characters appear in many stories (sometimes as a main character, and more often as a supporting character.  The French boy who sings karaoke beautifully and makes his cousin’s bar business a success by entertaining people there appears in two stories that happen at about the same time.  Both of those stories are still waiting to be written.  Tim Kellogg appears in my stories from the time he is but a twinkle in his parents’ eyes until he becomes the leader of the infamous boys’ gang of liars called the Norwall Pirates.

Crooner

giant bat2.  Most of the stories are centered around members of the Norwall Pirates.  They are a group of small town boys dedicated to adventure, telling lies, and seeing girls naked.  Much of the magic, science fiction, fantasy elements, and just plain hallucinations in my stories are the fault of boys who tell stories and lies so well that sometimes they believe them themselves.

3.  Character arcs that begin in one book will often continue in another.  Sometimes I go back in time and explain something that happened much earlier.  The Pirate’s club first appears in my novel Catch a Falling Star set in 1990.  The origin of the club is told about in Superchicken, a novel I have blogged about, but not yet published.  That story happens in 1974.  Valerie Clarke is introduced in the novel PDMI Publishing LLC is currently working on, Snow Babies,  which takes place in Winter of 1984.  She is the leader of the Pirates in the finished, but not yet submitted novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  That story spans 1988 to 1991.

peterlie

4. Much of my nuttiness was originally created in the 1970’s.  Even though the stories were given a setting much later, all the illustrated Paffoonies I have dropped into this post were drawn in 1977 and 1978.  I keep these cartoon character model sheets in one of my magical tomes, the Norwall Book, a loose-leaf binder full of drawings and junk carefully preserved in plastic page-protector sheets.

So, this is all the proof that my leap off that cliff into retirement will either make a very big splash or hit the rocks very hard.  It will be very something.  And I hope to live to see it… especially to get all of the stories I can possibly finish written and published… with a ghost of a hope that my own drawings, cartoons, and illustrations will count for something.  So, now my plan is revealed.  Let the enemies plan their counter-moves, and may the devil not move the water at the bottom of the cliff.

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May 22, 2015 · 11:27 am

Visiting Tellosia

In the novel I recently entered in the Chanticleer Reviews YA Novel-Writing contest, I used the fairy kingdom of Tellosia to be the land of the little people integrated into hometown Iowa.   As part of my cartoon stories page, I intend to take up the tale of The Hidden Kingdom once again and expand and complete it.  I will post it as a web comic on Word Press.  I know I can’t make money giving it away for free… but I hope to have my stories and cartoons read a little bit more through the buzz I hope this generates.  And perhaps Petit Zam can come up with some fairy magic that will help… so I can cast a spell on you.

Here is installment one of The Hidden Kingdom;

HK1

HKx2 HKx3 HKx4 HKx5 HKx6

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May 20, 2015 · 2:39 pm

Paffooney Stories and Toony Cartoons

My House1 My house2 my house3 My House4Here is a page for collected stories that I mean to build on and expand.  It is my intention to file cartoons here and edit them and add more pages via posts.  So for a first attempt let me use an old cartoon that was rejected once by Heavy Metal magazine in the early 1980’s and rejected a second time by a cartoon magazine that no longer exists and I can’t even remember the name of…  I am thinking they had very poor taste in cartoon art anyway.

Now, of course, this a finished four-page one-shot.  It was intended for a magazine that sought this kind of full-color art and had an over-all science fiction and horror fantasy theme.  I was too light and colorful with this short for their needs.  Disney characters on the PJ’s might have been a legal problem too.  So I am left with an unsaleable example of my best colored-pencil art, done when I was still pretty much a clueless kid and not yet a teacher.  It was worth doing, but will never make me a single dime.

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May 16, 2015 · 1:58 pm

Teacher-Wise

So, does this title have more than one meaning?  Of course it does.  This post is about being a teacher and having wisdom.  And I know you will immediately think, “You dumb guy!  I know teachers who aren’t wise at all!  Some teachers are stupid!”

namaste_out_of_control_cover

You are especially saying that if you are a student.

You are not wrong, either.  Some teachers have no business being teachers.  It is especially difficult to find good science and math teachers.  After all, those who are good at math and science can make so much more money in the private sector, that they would have to be born to be a teacher… and realize it, to go into teaching.  There are very good science and math teachers out there, but many of them are wilting under the weight of a difficult job being made constantly harder by social pressures like truly dumb people who say things like, “You can’t solve our education problem by throwing money at it!”  I guarantee no one has ever thrown money at the problem.  If teachers were paid what they were worth so that we could retain good, competent teachers, you would see education make an amazing amount of progress in a very short time.  What Wall Street firm fails to pay their star players what they are worth?  Do bankers and lawyers get punished for doing a good job by asking them to produce more with fewer resources for less pay?  Those folks in finance and law always pay the price for the best because that always produces the best result.  If you want schools to routinely produce critical thinkers and problem-solvers, why would you complain that we are spending too much money per kid?  Of course, there are those with the money and the power (especially in Texas) who really don’t want more students coming out of schools with the ability to think and decide for themselves.   Smart people are harder to control and make a profit from. (Out of Control is a book they don’t want you to read.)

class Miss M2

So now I have totally proved the point that smart people who are looking out for their own interests should never go into teaching.  Still, among the unwashed, unloved, and incompetent that do make the mistake of going into teaching, there is still a great deal of learning and gaining of wisdom going on.  After all, if a fool like me can become a good teacher, anybody can do it.  You just have to learn a few bits of wisdom the hard way that have very little to do with what we call “common sense”.

As Dr. Tsabary points out in the book I plastered on the front of this post, discipline is not what you think.  We all remember that teacher we had that nobody listened to.  She was always yelling at us.  She made threats.  She punished us.  And even the good kids in class would shoot spitwads at the back of her head.  Why did we not respect and learn from this teacher?  Because she never learned these profound truths.

1.  Kids are people.  They want to be treated with respect and even love.  Their ideas matter as much, if not more than the teacher’s ideas.  Good teachers will;

a. Get to know every kid in their class as a human being, knowing what they believe in, what they care about, where they come from, and who they think they are.

b. Ask them questions.  They will never have an original idea if you do not make them think.  They have insights and creativity and strengths as well as weaknesses, bad behavior, and wrong ideas.  You have to emphasize the former and minimize the latter.

c.  Laughing and talking in the classroom is evidence of learning.  Quietly filling out worksheets is evidence of ignorance, and most likely the ignorance of the teacher.

2.  Tests don’t matter.  This is always true for these reasons;

a.  Tests are a comparison, and nothing is gained by comparing kids.  Comparing the scores of my bilingual kids in South Texas with upper class rich kids in Chicago and college-bound kids in Tokyo has no value.  Their lives are completely different and so are their needs.  If we don’t score as well on the tests as the kids in Tokyo, what difference will that make to what time the train arrives in the station in Paris?  (Especially if Pierre has chosen the bullet train that goes south at a rate of 200 miles per hour.  No trains in Texas go that fast without crashing and blowing up.)

b.  If I spend time in class teaching students how to read and making them practice reading critically, they will do just as well as the kids who drilled extensively from specially made State materials preparing for the test on the reading and vocabulary portions.  The only way that outcome changes is by cheating and giving them the actual test questions before the test.  (I should point out that teachers caught doing this last thing are shot in Texas and buried in a box full of rattlesnakes.  Dang old teachers, anyhow!)

I know I started this little post by convincing you that I am not wise, and very probably mentally unbalanced.  And now that I have made my arguments, you know for sure.  But over time, there is wisdom to be learned from being a teacher.  You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true.  (I don’t know how many times I used that phrase out loud in a classroom over 31 years, but I am guessing you couldn’t count them on fingers even if you used the hands of every kid I ever had as a student.)

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May 15, 2015 · 11:06 am

Crummy Times

I am down and out again.  The rain keeps coming down in Texas, when the wind isn’t trying to blow us away…  And the pollen is higher than ever, with a really high mold count (to which I am very allergic).  I am not the only member of my family suffering right now, and I just finished compiling fifty dollars worth of paperwork for my health insurance company because there are claims they don’t want to pay for.  I am not an insurance-scammer.  I really have been ill.  I really have avoided expensive medication and referrals to specialists because I can’t pay for them.  The pirates are actually the ones who have collected all the insurance premiums and then don’t intend to pay anything out.  Sure, we are talking about pre-existing conditions, but the law says they can’t hold that against me any more.  I could take them to court, but lawyers cost money too, and WHAT PART OF BROKE DON”T THEY UNDERSTAND?  

This post is a place-holder.  I have been religiously posting every day in 2015 and this post answers that particular quest today.  But don’t worry yourself, Ol’ Black Timothy (the pirate pictured below in red, beside his best friend Scruffy Bill, who has two wooden legs, two wooden arms, and a wooden head)!  I promise you, I will get to the humorous post where I skewer the evil buccaneers at (I won’t disclose the name, but it rhymes with Aetna in the way that orange rhymes with orange) and the evil swashbuckling freebooters of (rhymes with Bank of America…and possibly Providian).  But for right now my head is hurting, I cannot breath, and I have a sick child to take care of at the same time.  (How’s that for typing with one hand and fighting with a saber in the other?)

Black Tim

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May 14, 2015 · 12:10 pm

Wide-Eyed Wonder

bad dayThere is no doubt about it, being a writer is like getting naked in public.  It never used to really sink in before I published books, and when no one read my writing or listened to me when I talked.  Suddenly, I am being read… and even… frighteningly, being believed.Creativity

I now have 678 followers, a number of whom actually read and comment on my posts.  I do my best to entertain and make them laugh, but it is the nature of real writing that the contents of my life as a whole spill out for all to see.  I try to keep private things private, but it is becoming more and more obvious that I need a much bigger purple teddy bear.  Readers of my blog know that I was a public school teacher for thirty-one years.  They also know that I did not want to leave that job, but I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor, and my health let me down.  They may also know that I was the victim of a sexual predator when I was a child and recovery has taken a lifetime… in fact, it is still going on.  They may know that my family life has become difficult because health issues affect an entire family, especially when the costs of care are turned into gigantic scary monsters by an increasingly greedy and corrupt health-care industry (not doctors and nurses. mind you, but the higher-ups who really make all the money off drugs, tech, and insurance.)   There are no longer skeletons in my closet.  All my darkest secrets become fuel for writing and bubble out of my cauldron, transforming into butterflies, who may have started as worms, but have worked themselves into filigreed winged creatures that flit about in the sunlight.  I turned one of my most horrible experiences into a post for https://www.facebook.com/groups/1000Speak/.  It was the story of Ruben Vela, and it was about my inability to prevent a tragedy.  Here is the link; When Compassion Fails.  Gobs of sobs from readers in the comment section.  I usually try to make them laugh… but crying is a part of the reading game too.

And where are the Trolls?  I see them on the internet everywhere.  I know other bloggers who have cut off comments because of Trolls.  They don’t seem to come around me with their leg-breaking, gut-busting insults and four-letter-wordy mayhem.  Do I not deserve that as much as anybody else?  But I know better than to actually wish for what I don’t really want.  It is okay, Trolls, if you decide you’d rather apply the soul-crushing efforts elsewhere.

The point is, while I have always wanted to be a writer and have some experience with naturists and nudists, I have never before now had to come to terms with dancing naked in the sunlight in front of God and everybody… but continuing to write means dealing with it now.

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May 13, 2015 · 11:57 am

Animal Town and Clowns

There is a place in the cartoon part of my brain where the dream-stories of Fantastica take place.  I am trying to get my goofiness all lined up to produce a more finished cartoon saga using all the goof-gas and whooey that I have stored up in that squirrel-den I call my mind.  I prepared a setting already… a single set that already showed you what Animal Town looks like, where all the people are anthropomorphized animals.  Here it is again to refresh your memory.

Animal Town

Animal Town is just one place in the larger Toon World of my silly imaginings.  There are many more.  I intend to draw these toons in what I call “Clown Noir”… that is, the drawings will be in pen and ink, filmed in black and white and red… especially red for noses.  Got the idea?  I hope I haven’t spoiled the joke already.  Spoiled jokes are kinda like spoiled milk; they make you want to put a clothespin on your nose (and that kinda hurts, so it becomes harder to laugh.)

I also wanted to introduce a few of the denizens of Fantastica.  (That’s denizens, not Dennis’ sons, because I used to think all the people that lived in one place somehow became the children of Dennis, but then Dennis told me that just ain’t so!)

Rugs

Rugs Rabbity is a class of cartoon character I like to call a hero.   I know what it looks like.  I probably did steal the character from Warner Brothers, but filtered through my dreams Rugs becomes something else other than pure Bugs.  He is, after all, a parody of a parody, and when that turns all parrot-y then we are looking at un-punny puns.  Makes you want to put another clothespin on your nose, doesn’t it?”

Mick n Beady

And here are two more parrots that I hope you will recognize and copyright lawyers will not.  They are much more insane and destructive than their counterparts from Mr. Prizney.

But cartoon dreams are not all animalized, and not all borrowed from elsewhere.  I am capable of making up my own characters too that don’t satirize and plagiarize and turn me into a toon-thief.  If you visit Crumpwell’s Wild West Ranch, there are one-of-a-kind characters that you might meet there too.

Flash

Flash Crumpwell is a hero character also.  But unlike Rugs, he is a little dim in the light-bulb-lighting department.

Handsome Harry has always got his face covered somehow, because, after all, if you are so good-looking that women always faint at your feet and men always shoot you on sight, life can become a little too interesting.  All in all, as a villain, he would rather just blow stuff up!

Davy

Princess Doe-Eyes is the real ruler of the Bignose Tribe, because, after all, she has a tiny nose, and her father is chief because his nose is the biggest in the tribe, but he can’t really see over it or around it… and when you’re in charge, that can kinda get in the way.  Davy Crickett is an Indian fighter from the old days, but he cannot bring himself to fight with the Princess or her Bignose Tribe.  He much prefers to play with her.

And we must certainly not forget the clowns.  Here are a couple of Clown villains (as if we need more reasons to be afraid of clowns!)

Messmaster

The Messmaster is a Clown who loves a good pie fight.  He will whirl and hurl and get you in the face with a strawberry or blueberry or Ray Bradbury pie (those Sci-Fi pies can get particularly messy and smelly… Clothespin number three… and it is getting hard to breathe.)

Badnose

Badnose is an even more evil Clown bad-guy.  I can’t begin to explain why his nose is so bad.

Lastly, let me share a scene with you from the rough draft of The Clown Town Caper, a detective story starring Detective Squiggy and Little Mickey (my dream-self).

Queen

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May 11, 2015 · 2:46 pm

Monday With The Daughter

Princess

Mondays are usually blue and difficult days.  It is hard to get out of bed.  And if they are hard for me, a retired old graybeard with few responsibilities beyond getting the kids out of bed and cooking breakfast and walking the dog and waking the kids up again and keeping the dog from eating the breakfast on the table and waking the kids up again and getting them out of bed for real and …  well, they must be harder for kids, right?

So, I had the dog walked and breakfast served and the table cleared and we were getting ready to go to school and drop off beloved daughter at her middle school.

“I had a bad dream last night,” said the Princess.  “A zombie was chasing me in a Minecraft landscape.”

“Ooh, sounds terrible.  Were you by any chance playing computer games way too late last night?  Maybe Minecraft?”

“Dad!  It was a terrible nightmare.  It made me lose sleep!”

“Did I ever tell you about my duck dream?”

“Aw, Dad!  This was a scary dream, not funny.”

“Well, you know, sometimes you can have a dream and take control of it.  It is called a lucid dream.  If you just realize that you are dreaming, you can direct what happens.  You can make a sword appear in your hand and cut the zombies’ heads off.”

“What happens when that doesn’t stop the zombie’s body from chasing you?”

“Well… look at the time.  We are going to be late for school.”

“Oh, uh… I don’t have any money left in my lunch account at school.”

“You couldn’t have told me this Friday after school?  I don’t have any money on me.  We need to hurry and stop by the ATM at the bank on the way to school.”

So, we hurried to the bank.  I handed her the twenty dollar bill.

“Um, Dad…  I forgot my school I.D. at home.”

“Ah, yes… Monday.”

Clarkes

She made it to school at least five minutes before the late bell with money for lunch and her I.D. on so that she wouldn’t forget during the day who she actually was…  well, if she did, she could at least remind herself with the I.D .  Whether the zombie apocalypse happens and her dream comes true and my advice about nightmares actually saves her… I have my doubts.   But with daughters, there is always hope.  You hope that if you continue to feed them and get them to school on time, and talk about their fears, and address their numerous shortcomings with humor and understanding, they will turn out all right.  And maybe, just maybe, they will pick a reasonably good nursing home to stick you in when you get so old and forgetful that you are too goofy to wear pants in public.

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May 10, 2015 · 1:24 pm

Cloudscapes

Cloudscapes

Once upon a time, the English poet and, I would argue, cartoonist, William Blake once said, “You look at the sky and see clouds, while I see the assembled heavenly host!”  This is why my literature class in college about the Romantic Poets of his day made him out to be a certifiable nutcase who probably belonged in in a mental institution.  (And back then, in the 1800’s, the sanitarium was a place where inconveniently crazy people went to die.)

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Look at a couple of my cloudscapes.  Do you see angels?

Cloudscapes (a poem)

Blue and white and filled with light…

The cloudscape burns with angels…

And wholly bought with grace unsought…

I long to fly with angels…

Are they really there in the cloud-filled air?

I see them there, they’re angels!

So, there you have it.  I’m a loon.  I don’t even have the excuse of being a Romantic Poet and well-known for my poetry as a defense against the loony bin.  But as the matter stands, I am fully willing to accept the consequences.  Creativity has its price.  And, while you may not agree that I am somewhat creative, I am swimming in a vast ocean of perceived revelations that enriches me and fulfills me at the very same moment that it drains all the energy from my soul.  If that is not what it means to see angels… then I do not know anything of use to anyone but me.

The word “angel” (according to Wikipedia, the source of all true knowledge) comes to English via Late Latin and the word “angelus” which the Romans stole from the Greek  ἄγγελος ángelos,  The ángelos is the default Septuagint’s translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal’ākh denoting simply “messenger” without specifying its nature.  (Notice, I am giving full credit to Wikipedia because it is far more all-knowing than I.)

I have many atheistic and agnostic notions in my ultimate belief systems, but still, I claim to be a Christian and believe in God Jehovah… within limits.  I still communicate with God on a daily basis, and while I don’t publicly pray anymore (a notion promoted by the Biblical Jesus) I find answers to my questions and solutions to my problems from the observable universe around me.. the messengers of God.  So, now that I have fully rationalized being crazy as a loon, I am going to tell you where that craziness is taking me.  I started a new Paffooney for one of the books I am working on.  Here is the pencil sketch;

pencil sketch

This will be a picture of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, the farmer Kyle Clarke.  In my fiction, Kyle loses his farm to the bank (in the Family Farm Crisis of the 1980’s) and believing himself incapable of any longer supporting his family, kills himself.  But the thing is, the love of his daughter transcends death for Kyle.  She is able to reconnect with him time and again because the angels work for her as well as for Kyle.  I may be loony and ill in real life, facing the Angel of Death myself, but I am not done doing God’s work… not yet… not for a long time to come.

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