Category Archives: Paffooney

April 2, 2015 · 12:14 pm

Doing the Devil’s Dance

We live in world that is profoundly unkind to non-conformity, weirdness, or even basic differences. How do you explain to a child that his school doesn’t want him there any more because his uniqueness is too much of a bother, a pain to deal with, an issue too complicated for a school administrator to get their little gray minds around? I can’t tell you the details of what we are going through right now. Too many privacy and legal issues get in the way of complete candor. But Texas school systems do not handle issues of exceptionality well. They are designed to crush originality and individual differences and grind out a workforce that will be compliant, that won’t complain when they are underpaid or mistreated, that will all be alike in many important ways. They would also like to turn out students who vote Republican, but it is all right if they turn out to be the type of citizen who won’t or can’t vote. Your life can be turned upside down over minor infractions. It is a law that Texas students must be in attendance over 90% of the time. If not, they are going to hound you, fine you, take you to court and even jail you. Because students must all fit into the same mold. No square pegs allowed. They do make exceptions for health problems… but only the right kind of health problems. Stomach cancer. okay, panic disorder, not okay… There are laws in place to protect those of us with special handicaps… but this is the de-regulation State. The city of West, Texas blew up in a fireball because too many regulations means lower profit margins. Of course, they don’t hesitate to apply regulations against me and mine. That is another matter (and the profits flow the opposite direction, offender to State).

So, what will I do now? I will do the best I can. I complained about it here to the best of my ability. The child even remarked that one day he will be wiser and more experienced than others because he went through this. There are other means of education, even if I have to do it all myself. And I can take the frustrations and turn them into future funny fables that will ring true, because they are.

Filed under autobiography, Paffooney

Tagged as angry rants, autobiography, education, paffooney, pen and ink, self pity, Texas politics

March 29, 2015 · 1:34 pm

Art Self-Edited

I have been working at illustration and drawing for the majority of my life, but it took computer technology and digital photography to allow me to maximize the use of my abilities. Let me go through a couple of case in points.

The Red-Haired Girl picture is a good example of what I can do. I originally drew the picture to illustrate a Charlie Brown poem. Here is the poem if you don’t remember it. (A convenient excuse to re-post something and fill this post with words already written.)

Little Red-Haired Girl

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

That little red-haired girl, so cute, so nice

You only looked and looked from afar

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

You could’ve held her hand

You could’ve walked her home from school

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

She never got your Valentine

At least, you forgot to sign your name

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

No hope of marriage now, nor children for old age

Happily ever after has now long gone

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

Now every love poem is a sad poem

And the world is blue and down

You never told her that you loved her…

You never told her that you loved her…

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown.

You may not see what I did without looking at the two pictures very closely. The better, more brightly-lit photo is not the answer. I originally created the Red-Haired Girl as a Charley-Brown-y creation complete with a bigger than natural head, a Charley-Brown head.

I have ulterior motives for my evil cartoon manipulations. I like this image I have created very much, in fact, one might say that I have fallen in love with it just a bit… Pygmalion-like. I wanted to use the image to illustrate Anita Jones, a character from my book Superchicken. Anita is the fictional re-imagining of a girl that I had a deep and abiding crush on (possibly still existing today, though she is now a grandmother in real life.) She is literally my little red-haired girl. So what did I do? Look closely. I lovingly shrank her head. Yes, like the headhunters of old, I used the paint program on my computer to shrink it, re-attach it, and make it more human-like. Realistic proportions, though only a very slight change by actual percentages, make a realistic difference in how real the viewer perceives her to be.

I know you probably think I am full of goofy-gas to make such claims. If you don’t see the difference in the first example, perhaps you will see it here. Compare these two David Copperfield pictures carefully. Look at Little Emily’s head.

You don’t have to believe me, but it does make a difference.

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Filed under art editing, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, drawing, humor, old love, picture editing, poem

March 28, 2015 · 3:20 pm

Picture Tricks

I have discovered things about being an artist by blogging. I have discovered things by learning from other artists. I have also discovered things by trial and error. I have also discovered things by random acts of God. So let me share some of the ill-gotten picture secrets that I have added to my vast bag of useless incunabula-juice squeezed out with my arcane-secret juicer and internet blogger good luck.

#1. Save everything arty… as you see above, I have three different pictures of my Catch a Falling Star character Dorin Dobbs, all made from the same pen and ink line drawing. All the color is digital paint from my computer’s own paint program. Simple and cheap to do. Save functions multiply the pretty.

#2. Splice stuff together and make new stuff… I have the cheapest possible photo-shop program, but using its entire $7 value every time I paste with it, I am able to create new art out of old.

New art out of old;

#3. Weave things together to create unity… My art is not for its own sake. I am not Picasso or Van Gogh. My art is very much tied to the stories I tell as a writer of Young Adult novels. (Snow Babies is awaiting its turn with the editors of PDMI LLC Publishers.)

#4. Promote the art and writing of others… I have spent a ridiculous amount of internet time stalking artists like Loish and sharing their work on my blog. Writers too. I do my little book reports in order to connect the reading and the literary influences I have completed (or stolen from) and show where much of my own style and je nais se quois comes from. If the artist or writer is still living and notices what I have done, they will often return the favor (hopefully, if they don’t find my work to be an offense against the gods of art). If they can’t return the favor (because they are quite dead or thoroughly disgusted by me), I have at least associated my work with theirs in the minds of my readers,

#5. It’s all about digital photography… In order to share my colored-pencil menagerie of live Paffoonies on the internet, I have to get better at photography. I have taken far more photos of drawings in the last two years than I have drawn drawings. That has not been a life-long way of things. I love color, and poor photography skills turn out various shades of gray. Sunlight? Incandescent? Fluorescent? I haven’t discovered that secret yet, but it will never be uncovered if I don;t keep trying.

#5. Find connections that help pull your work together in one big, messy bundle… Facebook, WordPress, and Deviant-Art are all better forums if you can connect them. I did this by labeling everything Mickey with a meaningless made-up word that no one else in their right mind would use. The word is Paffooney.

A picture search on Google using the words “Beyer Paffooney” gives you an almost complete gallery of my artwork and nonsense. Googling the word itself yields a link to a plethora of my old blogs. Do you not know what plethora means? Try it and you will learn that very good word.

Filed under artwork, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, drawings, goofiness, humor, marketing tricks, novel writing, paffooney, sharing artwork

March 27, 2015 · 1:54 pm

Finding Answers with the Right Questions

Yesterday I burbled purple paisley prose all over the page and, in trying to answer the question “Why do I Blog?”, only managed to come up with a lame sort of “I don’t know.” but I also referenced Douglas Adams’ answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything which turned out to be 42. You see, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy we learn that the Earth is nothing but an alien-designed supercomputer run by highly intelligent mice to find the actual question that goes with that ultimate answer. Unfortunately, after the planet Earth is destroyed by Vogons to make way for an interstellar bypass, the question is put on hold. That’s really what I did yesterday. I put the question on hold.

But today, feeling ill and a little blue, I decided to percolate the old teapot of wisdom one more time to see if I could find an answer in the tea leaves. I am not a well sort of individual. As I have posted before, I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor since 1983. Every day I wake up to a new dawn is a bit of a miracle. But the sand is running out of the hourglass. There are things I have to put right, and blogging is a way to do that.

In this photo Paffooney I am sharing one of my recent miracle sunrises. 6:55 looking East from the Greenbelt in the middle of Carrollton, Texas. The dog exercises me every morning in order to keep me alive on the off chance that I will drop some bacon on the floor one morning in the near future. She also uses me to bag up poop so she can stay out of trouble with the city.

Every morning is like that now. I am retired. That is a less-painful way of saying “waiting to drop dead”. I spend a good portion of my day now alone and able to write and think and not do very much else. So what I write and think has to be the real work that I am doing now to justify the amount of food I eat and air I breathe (and bacon I drop as the dog has just reminded me.) I have recently finished two novels. I have a novel waiting to be published, with a contract and everything at a small, but very real publisher. I have two books already in the marketplace, Catch a Falling Star and Aeroquest. You can find them and ignore them on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com just like everyone else has been doing. The books are what I am technically blogging about. I am blogging by command of I-Universe publishing. But that’s not really why I am doing it. There is so much more to it than that.

Here’s the realist’s assessment of my writing… it has become a very expensive and time-consuming hobby that eats up my remaining days like a ravenous wolf. At the rate I am going, I will not live to see the day when my writing finds wide-spread acceptance. I have the word of professional editors and other writers that my work is very well-written, and there was a time in my life when I might’ve made a decent living at it like Terry Brooks or R. A. Salvatore. There was a time when good books found a publisher. Now, there is the little problem of a world teeming with books all clamoring for notice of their own. I am generally ignored by the masses. The local library didn’t even put the gift copy of my book, paid for with my own money, on their shelves. They didn’t give it back, either. My time is not yet, and my audience is probably made up of people not born yet. Maybe they simply don’t exist.

But all those mulched-up and melancholy things I have said about my writing amount to nothing in the face of the question, “why are you still bothering to blog?” Truthfully, in the past few months I have made myself laugh and made myself cry by writing and telling stories… by mangling metaphors and propagating purple paisley prose… by blogging. And I really don’t care if no one ever reads my blog full of blather and allusive alliterations. They exist. They are real. And I have offered them to the world. Why do I blog? I still don’t have any idea.

These are the very first flowers that bloomed in our neighborhood this year that didn’t die a horrible death by freezing. Sure, they are only common dandelions and many think of them as weeds… but they are also proof that for now the sun continues to shine and possibilities continue to bloom.

Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, blogging, dog-walking, foolishness, humor, novel writing, Paffoonies, philosophy, photo Paffooney

March 26, 2015 · 12:18 pm

The Meaning of 42

I get goofy ideas for blog posts when I am reading other blog posts, when I am reading books, and when I am letting television suck the smart out of my brain cells. I was first inspired by reading this blog post from In My Cluttered Attic. He was talking about why he chooses to blog in the face of a plethora of common-sense reasons not to. “Good idea for my own blog post!” said the insane voice that inhabits the dark space behind my mind’s own creative filing cabinet #42 in the second dungeon under my memory. I immediately filed the idea away in that cabinet because the cabinet was close at the time and I might never find it again later. Then I leaped to a post by The Off Key of Life in which I found a beautiful song beautifully sung that made me trip over another file cabinet that was behind the mechanical letter-sorting machine on the stairway landing to the sub-basement of the second dungeon.

Some old memories spilled out on the stone steps because I used to sing that song to my three babies when I rocked them to sleep twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, and thirteen years ago. That song, and “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Disney’s Pinocchio. Both of those songs are about one day finding the key to happiness… or possibly the key to understanding… but definitely about the search for the key. I always believed that those songs would give my children sweet dreams… and I prayed that the songs would never become the source of nightmares.

And then I was watching Hulu, an episode of Arrow in which Oliver Queen must decide on the reason why he was doing the whole superhero-vigilante thing and risking his life constantly. Unfortunately I didn’t find the file box that has superheroes in it that I was looking for in hallway leading to Area 51 in the upper dungeon. But I knew the topic was going to be “Why I Blog”. That settled, I began to write and paste in all sorts of random stuff.

“What is the meaning of 42?” you ask? How clever of you to ask that! In Douglas Adams’ seminal series of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books

42 is revealed to be the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Practically everything that he adds to that epic trilogy of five-or-so books is basically random. And yet, it is not. He is telling us about the apparent randomness of Life, the Universe, and Everything while carefully explaining how all this random madness that is Everything actually fits together in a very random-mad way. There is a certain asymmetrical symmetry about it all that has a certain contradictory sort of beauty, if you get what I mean. (A certain ugly beauty if you don’t get what I mean.)

So why do I blog? Good question. I don’t really have an answer to it. I blog because my first publisher told me I had to do it to promote my book, Catch a Falling Star. My book has netted me $28 so far, as long as I am not fool enough to start subtracting all the money I have spent trying to advertise and promote my book. I’m not fool enough. I stay out of that corridor in the maze of my complicated little mind. I blog because I can share all the private drawings and poems and insane nonsense that fills the filing cabinets in my mind without paying a hefty psychiatrist’s fee. Your underwear drawer needs to be aired out once in a while even if you do remember to wash your underwear. And it is liberating to walk around figuratively naked in front of an audience that potentially includes little old church ladies, God, and everybody. I blog because writing is something that I do, have always done, and will continue to do until they put my smelly corpse in a pine box and bury it under the garbage pile out back. All that scribbling has to count for something sometime. And maybe that sometime is now. If you are one of those poor souls suffering from Serial-Mickey’s-Blog-Reading Disorder (a condition the CDC has taken to labeling SMBRD… not to be confused with small-bird flu), and you actually read the posts and look at all the random junk piled into those mad paragraphs, you may just accidentally stumble across that key we have all been searching for for eons… and unlike the majority of the world, you will be giggling insanely for a reason!

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, writing

Tagged as 42, blogging, Douglas Adams, humor, novel writing, philosophy, photo Paffooney, Why I blog

March 24, 2015 · 11:04 pm

Another Self-Promotional Announcement from Mickey

I’m not bragging. I know it is not that much. But it’s more than twice what I had at the start of 2014.

Filed under announcement, Paffooney

Tagged as announcement, Catch a Falling Star, colored pencil, paffooney

March 24, 2015 · 11:57 am

More Powerful than a Locomotive

There is an old saying… “What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.”

I have an addendum to add… “If what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, then I must be Superman!”

Lying here now in pain after having surgery this morning, that is exactly what I have been telling myself. No more Kryptonite today, thank you.

I may have mentioned before on this blog that I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor since 1983. (If I haven’t mentioned it before, then it was only because I mistook complaining loudly and relentlessly about it for mentioning.) I have arthritis, diabetes, COPD, hypertension, psoriasis, and benign prostatic hyperplasia. Two of those diseases ganged up on me recently. I had a sebaceous cyst on my lower back that had gotten infected because psoriasis had flaked skin off the top of it until there was an ulcerated infected hole there and it caused me enough pain to prevent sleeping. (I know you didn’t really want to know about that… but. then, neither did I).

I got the thing surgically excised (whacked off with scalpel and scissors) and had the hole sewn back together with a few butterfly Band Aids slapped on the top. I had been given a topical anesthetic that deadened the nerves while I was being carved up, but wears off shortly after and then all the pain that has been saved up comes rushing back to fill the void. The doctor said I could take aspirin, but I have a big bottle of Aleve next to the bed for arthritis, and my body is so used to the medicine that I might just as easily have taken a sugar pill for the same effect. (Of course then my diabetes would come knocking on my brain.) So, I am in pain.

But less than an hour after surgery, I had to go in to the counselor’s office at school and discuss for 45 minutes the life-and-death future consequences of the schooling of one of three kids. It is no kind of chicken barbecue or country fair to have to explain to a school official everything you have been doing to solve the life-or-death problem for the kiddo while pain medication is wearing off and anesthetic is wearing off and patience is wearing off and mental acuity is disappearing faster than a rabbit-man can teach irony to middle-schoolers…. wait, what? Perhaps I should rest now and let the medicine do its work.

Naw, can’t do that. I’m Superman.

But, wait… wasn’t I Popeye just yesterday? Who the heck am I really? A goofy old writer-guy, most likely.

Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as cartoon, cartoon hero, dealing with illness, handling pain, humor, Kryptonite, paffooney, pen and ink, Superman, surgery

March 23, 2015 · 12:05 pm

Talk Like Popeye

I have long identified with Popeye. Let me review that notion by re-posting a bit of an old post in which I explain while talking like Popeye;

I am Popeye, I sez, because I just am… Yeah, that’s right, I yam what I yam.

First of all, I looks like Popeye. I has that cleft in me chin, very little hair left on me ol’ head, and I gots the same squinky eye (what squinky eye?). I has had that same squinky eye since I wuz a teenager and got kicked in the eye doin’ sandlot football (bettern’ sandlot high divin’, fer sure!). I also has them same bulgy arms, the ones that bulge in the forearm and is incredibobble thin on the upper arms.

Second of all, I has Popeye Spinach-strength. I look weak and scrawny, but I is a lot tuffer than I looks. I go into classrooms full of wild, crazed middle schoolers, and grabs their attention, tells ’em what’s what, and makes ’em woik. (Woik is a voib, and that means I is woikin’ when I makes ’em do it.) I kin stands ridicule and kids what will remarks on the hair in me ears and me squinky eye. I tells ’em that the scar on me face was did by a bloke with a knife (which it were, cause I had skin cancer and the doctor used a knife to get it off). I has taken all kinds of nasty punches from life (diabetes, blood-pressure problems, prostatitis, arthritis) and I still keeps comin’ back fer more. In fact, I can winds up me arm and give that ol’ Devil a good Twisker Sock right in the kisser.

Third of all, I has a typical Popeye Sweet Patootie. My Island Girl Wife is like Olive Oyl in very many ways. She is always tellin’ me what to do. She compares me to ol’ Bluto. She panics and flails her arms when there’s a crisis. And she expects me to always save the day and never says “thank you” after.

So, I mean it when I sez “I am Popeye”. I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!

See? I kin talk like Popeye because in many ways I AM him… He of the mangled-mouth vocabubobulary created by Elzie Crisler Segar on January 17th, 1929 for his comic strip Thimble Theater for King Features Syndicate. He doesn’t talk right because his brain is so full of goodness and spinach that he has no room left for spelling and pronunskiation. Ak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak…. Popeye is just a simple sailor, and has been for 94 years. He expresses himself horribly, but only in the very best of ways. So when I mangle a word on purpose… or by happy accident… it is just me honoring that old one-eyed sailor. It is not me just being a stupid addle-pated blarney goon who don’t knows how to talk right.

Comic strip from comicskingdom.com

Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as adventure, cartoons, goofiness, humor, language tricks, lies, paffooney, talk like popeye

March 18, 2015 · 11:41 am

Dreary Days and Darklords

Al Capp was a genius. And he knows precisely how it goes. And no one describes it better. Storm clouds float directly over my little square head (I am a Midwestern German-American, and they all have cubes for heads… both literally and figuratively.) Anywhere I wander, disaster surely follows. The last few days have been an absolute and unrelenting disaster. And I can’t tell you all the details because it would compromise other people’s privacy. But I can say that no lightning stings worse than the lightning bolts thrown by aggressively profit-conscious health insurance companies. I will not name the hated company here because they will surely raise my premiums, but I hate them with a hatred more hateful than red-hot iron-grate-hate. I went to a doctor’s office yesterday, a doctor I was seeing for the first time because the new insurance company handling retired Teachers in Texas didn’t like the old doctor. The old doctor was too good and got paid too well for insurance to approve him. So I asked them to recommend a new doctor, a specialist of the right brand to replace the old doctor. They gave me a name and I made the appointment. I was told this new doctor was in-network. I got there and started filling out a small hill of paperwork that required all my personal numerology and the atomic number of several specific elements… and my shoe size. (And this was not a foot doctor.) As I was littering the doctor’s office with filled crossword puzzles of numbers, hard-to-spell drug names, and private information, I was called up to the receptionist’s desk and informed that the insurance company said that while the doctor was in-network, she was not in-plan. The specific plan I bought (chosen from a list of one) only uses doctors associated with Baylor Hospital in Carrollton… and this new doctor was associated with Methodist Hospital in Plano. I could only see this new doctor if I paid 100% of the fee. Being an independently wealthy retired school teacher on a fixed income, I had to decline that honor. This of course is not the only hyoomillagration (Popeye’s word for it, not mine… another explanation that requires another post and another day) that the last few days would bring. Having half a year’s salary as a working school teacher and half a year’s salary as a doddering retired person fully capable only of puttering and nuttering, the income tax situation tipped heavily in the government’s favor.. I had to pay almost $2000 dollars on the taxes that I filed through Turbotax on Monday. I was proud of getting the taxes done early, but saddened at the sudden deflation of my savings account to the condition of totally-flattened-balloon-hood. Worse yet, Turbotax sends bills under the name INTUIT, which I didn’t recognize on my bank statement. It took the Wells Fargo fraud expert all of ten seconds to figure out the mistake I made, which was two minutes and ten seconds after the previous banker I had talked to irreversibly closed my bank account and issued a new bank card and account number which will take two weeks to come in the mail. Now I couldn’t pay that doctor even if I wanted to. And there were other things biting my bum as well. The electronic car key is out of battery juice and I must now unlock it by hand. The dog is currently on another in a long line of poop-and-pee-in-the-house-sprees. I have a benign growth on my back that the other doctor I actually got to see this week says needs to come off by next week. It is hurting constantly and keeps me from sleeping. I am Joe Btfsplk this week for no reason that I know of and mad wizards are persecuting me relentlessly.

Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as Al Capp, autobiography, cartoons, humor, paffooney, pen and ink, rant, unlucky days

March 17, 2015 · 6:34 pm

François

What I am endlessly burbling about today in purple paisley prose is a raw novel idea. I have not started to cook it, bake it, or even burn it at all yet. It is not ready for the writing oven. It is still that mass of daydreams, nonsense, and foofy-foofram that we former English teachers like to call Pre-Writing. (Note the capitol letters… teachers make this goop high on the writing-process, lies-the-teacher-has-to-tell list, because, otherwise students will glop out some words on paper and call it a final draft without even re-reading or thinking about the dang thing.) (Note too the use of the parenthetic expression that breaks up and uglifies the paragraph and identifies this writing as less-than-serious purple paisley prose.) This goofy post is obviously, then, not only about Pre-Writing, that’s exactly what it is… gloppy, sloppy word mash that I hope to one day boil into something stunningly beautiful.

So here’s what I actually have. I have a character. His name is François Martin (not pronounced the Iowegian way, Frank-oyce Mahr-tinn, but the French way, Fran-swah Mahr-tah… because the character is actually from France… duh!) (I will have to post an explanation of Iowegian and the foreign language the people of Iowa actually speak another day.) François is a recently orphaned young boy whose father, Rejean, was a masterful and loving parent who made the mistake of relying on relatives to take care of his children in the case of something bad happening to him and his wife. Car accidents are bad and tend to happen too fast to correct this sort of mistake. François Is sent to live with the family of his father’s American half-brothers and half-sister in Norwall, Iowa. Here’s where the trouble starts. Victor Martin, the eldest brother, is the only one of the three who even has a job. He owns and operates a seedy Midwestern bar in the middle of the tiny town and is universally disliked and berated by local church ladies (the heart and soul of any Midwestern town in the 1980’s. The other uncle and the aunt are even worse. They are lazy, detestable, foul-mouthed… and those are their good points. The other uncle, Richard, has a son named Billy dropped off one day by the hated ex-wife and made to live in the basement of the old house they bought when Ona White’s relatives actually decided to sell her house after her untimely death by werewolf. Okay, you see by now that this is a tragic story full of emotional heart-ache and pain… and bursting with humorous potential.

This nebulous family drama idea has a name. Originally I called it Little Boy Crooner because François can paint his face with sad-clown paint and sing karaoke like an angel… an angel who can potentially save his horrible half-uncle’s business and horrible-er family. I have re-titled it Sing Sad Songs… with Clowns because I added to this novel-notion the idea that François also loses himself in dreams and finds his way to H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands via the magic ways of the three clowns from the Dreamlands, Mr. Disney, Mr. Dickens, and Mr. Shakespeare. What a mess of an idea! but I am betting that if I live long enough to get to it, it will be among the best things I have ever written.

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, drawings, dreaming, Dreamlands, humor, novel writing, Paffoonies, Pre-Writing