Category Archives: Paffooney

July 15, 2023 · 1:09 am

Saturday Is Art Day… Again

I draw things as illustrations to stories. Take, for example, the protagonist and hero of Catch a Falling Star.

Dorin Dobbs is boy from Iowa. That tells you some terrible things about him right there.

He was ten in 1990.

He hated girls.

He met some pretty green-skinned girls from outer space, amphibianoid frog-girls with fins on their heads. He danced with them to Mickey Mouse Club music while he was their prisoner on a sectet base on the planet Mars. They were dancing naked in the nutrient bath that all Telleron tadpoles use daily.

Brekka and Menolly are two of the Telleron frog girls with fins on their heads. They love Earth music in the 1990’s. They are background characters in Catch a Falling Star. They are main characters in the book Stardusters and Space Lizards, where they help Davalon and Tanith to conquer the dying planet of Galtorr Prime after the Telleron invasion of Earth failed in the previous book.

Tanith and Davalon (the Telleron boy in front)
Sizzahl of Galtorr Prime, Ecologist and Lizard Girl

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”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

Galtorr Prime is undergoing drastic climate change and environmental collapse and ends up being saved by superior Telleron technology and the lizard-girl heroine, Sizzahl, who has a plan for fixing the atmosphere and saving fundamental eco-systems. Of course, this is all science fiction-y stuff based entirely on fantasy and imagination and has nothing to do with the real world we now live in.

Millis, transformed from pet rabbit to near-human

Of course, not all characters I illustrate are people or aliens.

Millis, Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit, is an ordinary albino bunny who eats a piece of alien technology that evolves him into a talking, walking-on-two-legs, near-human form.

He becomes the chef (who cooks only vegetable dishes) for Norwall, Iowa’s own mad scientist, Orben Wallace, in the book The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.

Orben Wallace, and his favorite bicycle, The Happiness Machine

I think I have now given out far more spoilers for stories than I have any right to do. But the thing about character illustrations is that your get to know the characters at a glance. And to know them is to love them.

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July 13, 2023 · 1:17 am

How to Talk to Real People

While visiting in Iowa, I ran into an old high school friend at a local eatery. I remember how in high school and junior high, I played basketball on the same team with him, I listened to his exaggerations about a probably non-existent sex life, and helped him on one or two occasions to get answers on Math homework (even then the teacher in me wouldn’t let me just give him the answers, I always made him work out the answers step by step).

Now he is a judgmental and basically crabby old coot. He is a Trump supporter, hater of immigrants who take American jobs, and an unpleasant arguer of politics. And the sorest point about his intractable coot-i-ness is the fact that, as a classmate, he is the same age as me and I am, therefore, just as intractably coot-y as he is.

So, how exactly do you talk to a mean old coot?

Well, you have to begin by realizing that it is not like the dialogue in a novel or TV show. This is a real person I was talking to. So, I had to proceed by accepting that he thinks I am an idiot and anything I say and think is wrong. Not merely wrong, but “That’s un-American and will lead to a communist takeover of our beloved country!” sort of wrong. I can then laugh off numerous Neo-Nazi assertions by him, make snarky comments about his praises for the criminal president, and generally get along with him like old friends almost always do. I play my part just as furiously as he plays his, and we both enjoy the heck out of it.

We are both of us crazy old coots, likely to say just about anything to get the other one’s goat. Getting goats is apparently vital to the conversations of real people. But we have more in common than we have as differences. We don’t keep score in our world-shaking debates, nor do we count how many goats we get. And that is how you talk to real people.

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July 12, 2023 · 12:48 am

Being Prosaic

Untitled

I admit it.  I am prosaic.  I think in sentences.  I speak in paragraphs.  I write in 5-paragraph essays.  I should stop with the repetition of forms and the parallel structures, because that could easily be seen as poetic and defeat my argument in this post.  I write prose.  Simple.  Direct.  Declarative.  But those last three are sentence fragments.  Does that fit the model of prose?  How about asking a question in the middle of a paragraph full of statements?  Is that all simple enough to be truly prosaic?

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Prose is focused on the everyday tasks of writing.  It seems like the world thinks that the mechanical delivery of information in words and sentences should be boring, should be functional, should be simple and easy to understand.

I don’t mean to be pulling your reader’s mind in two directions at once, however.  I need to stop confusing you with my onslaught of sentences full of contradictory and complex ideas.  I should be more clear, more direct, and more to the point.

So here is my thesis, finally clearly stated; The magic of writing prose, it turns out, makes you the opposite of prosaic.

20160705_214055Ah, irony again!  It ends up being anything but simple.  You can write in simple, adjective-and-adverb-free sentences as Hemingway did, and still manage to convey deeply complicated and thoughtful ideas.  One might even suggest that you can create poetic ideas in mere prose, dripping with layers of emotion, conflict, theme, and deeper implied meaning.  You can also write prose in the intensely descriptive and convoluted style of a Charles Dickens with many complex sentences and pages-long paragraphs of detail, using comic juxtapositions of things, artfully revealing character development, and idiosyncratic dialogue all for comedic effect.  Prose is a powerful and infinitely variable tool for creating meaning in words.  Even when it is in the form of Mickian purple paisley prose that employs extra-wiggly sentence structure, pretzel-twisted ideas, and hyperbolically big words.

Simply stated; I am a writer of prose.  I am too dumb about what makes something poetry to really write anything but prose.  But I do know how to make a word-pile like this one that might just accidentally make you think a little more deeply about your writing… that is, if you didn’t give up on reading this three paragraphs ago.  I find it useful to examine in writing how I go about writing and what I can do with it.  I try to push the boundaries in directions they haven’t been pushed before.  And hopefully, I learn something from every new essay I write.  What I learned here is that I am prosaic.  And that is not always a bad thing.

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July 10, 2023 · 1:05 am

Imaginary Friends

Toccata and Fugue

When you know someone has an imaginary friend, something like Elwood’s six-foot invisible rabbit called Harvey, don’t you immediately think that person is crazy?  I do.  But I have imaginary people as friends. I think most writers do.  So am I crazy?  Probably. But hopefully it is a good kind of crazy.

It began with imaginary friends from books.  The Cat in the Hat was my friend.  Jim Hawkins was my friend, as was Mowgli and all the members of the Swiss Family Robinson.  They entered my dreams and my daydreams.  I told them my troubles the same way I listened to theirs through their stories.

I began to have imaginary friends that came from my own imagination too.

galtorr-primexvx

I used to tell my mere human friends about my friend Davalon from outer space.  I told them that he was real and secretly visited me at night to talk about being able to learn about humans on earth by walking around invisibly and watching them.  I got so involved with these stories that my sixth grade class began saying, “Michael is from Mars.”

Island Girl2z

When I was a teenager, I began having conversations with a faun.  His name was Radasha.  He was a creature from Greek Myth, a sensual Dionysian creature who, in his child body, was both younger than me and way older than me.  I didn’t realize until much later in life that he was the result of my repressed memories of a childhood sexual assault that I was the victim of.  I could talk to him about my fear of nakedness.  I could tell him about my blossoming interests in naked girls and their bodies.  I could talk to him about all the things I was somehow too terrified to talk to my male friends about, even though none of them had the same reluctance to discuss sex.  Ra was imaginary.  But he helped me heal.

Then the story-telling seriously began.  I used Davalon as one of the main characters in my novel Catch a Falling Star.  I created Torrie Brownfield, the baby werewolf to express the feelings I had as a boy about being a monster and secretly terrible and deformed.  Torrie is a normal boy with a condition called hypertrichosis.  I am working on The Baby Werewolf now.  And then there’s lovely Valerie Clarke.  She is the main character of Snow Babies which is a finished novel, edited and proofread and ready to publish.  It is I book I will have to find another way to publish since the recent death of PDMI Publishing.  She is not a me-character, based on my own thoughts and feelings.  She is based on former classmates and students who told me things that express the sadness and isolation of growing up female.  So she is even more imaginary than my other characters.

They become real people to me.  They have their own point of view. They talk to me and I learn things from them.  But they are imaginary.  So am I crazy?   Yes… as a loon.  And happy as Elwood P. Dowd to be that way.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, being alone, characters, commentary, humor, imagination, insight, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

July 9, 2023 · 1:27 am

Polyticks

political insanity

People are people, no matter how wrong…

And it isn’t a good thing to argue too long.

My friend is a “Can” from the Republic of Cans,

Who says all the poor people are just bad hu-mans.

And he really believes it, even though he’s not dumb,

‘Cuz he thinks climbing ladders using one of his thumbs,

Is how all people manage to be worthy and good,

And lazy bad people choose to fail like soft wood.

And though he’s not seen that old ladder of mine,

Or the ladders of people with one rung in nine,

He’s thoroughly convinced that all ladders are fair,

And it’s all their own fault if they fall through the air.

Yes, people are people, no matter how wrong…

And it isn’t a good thing to argue so long.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee member Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asserts an objection to Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a Democratic sponsor of the long-stalled Keystone XL pipeline bill, as the committee met to advance the controversial project, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2015, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Sanders, who sits with the Democrats, wanted an amendment to put Congress on the record about their beliefs on climates change and whether they agree with the international scientific community that climate change is real or not. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

I have a good friend who’ll do Demos of Crats,

And screech about equity like an army of cats.

He thinks we should pay for all college and school,

And use our tax money as a leveling tool.

He thinks we can make the rich pay for our dreams

And make life all breakfast of sugars and creams.

And maybe he can and maybe he can’t…

Make sense of the subject of his long, drawn-out rant,

But they’ll never pay it and he will get Berned,

Because they never part with what they think they have earned.

But, people are people, no matter how wrong…

And it isn’t a good thing to argue so long.

In conclusion I think the thinks that I think

Are carefully measured and really don’t stink,

But don’t take good thinking to toss in dump,

Or sooner or later… it’s President Trump!

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July 8, 2023 · 1:27 am

Magnificent Maisey on the Mound

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Okay, I am taking over this danged silly old blog today to talk about something important!  Baseball!!!  Yeah, and even more important, I wanna talk about how girls can be good at baseball.

My name is Maisey Moira Morgan.  I am a left-handed pitcher for the Carrollton Cardinals.  That’s a boys’ Little League team, in case ya didn’t know.  I ain’t the only girl in boys’ Little League, but I am the only girl on the Cardinals’ team.  The only girl pitcher.  The only WINNING girl pitcher.  I woulda been an undefeated winning girl pitcher if Tyree Suggs hadn’t dropped that fly ball in the bottom of the ninth inning out in right field two weeks ago.  I ended my season at 3 wins and 1 loss.

You see, the thing is, I know the secret to striking out boys at the plate.  First of all, I am a left-handed pitcher.  Those danged boys are all used to seeing the ball flung at ’em from the right side.  Ninety-nine and two-tenths per cent of all pitchers in our league are right-handed.  So are most of the batters.  So that futzes them up right there.  And on top of that, Uncle Milt taught me to throw a knuckle-ball two years ago.  That is one amazingly hard pitch to hit square if you do it right.  You curl your fingers on the ball and give a little sorta push-out with your fingertips as you let it go.  And you try really hard to make the ball not spin as you push it towards the batter.  It can do amazing things after it leaves my hand.  Uncle Milt swears that he saw one of my pitches double-dip and then corkscrew as it went across the plate low in the strike zone.  A mere boy can’t really get a good swing at a pitch if it flutters around like a crazy bug with butterfly wings.

But that ain’t even the real secret to my baseball success.  You see, them danged boys all think they can step up to the plate and put their bat on any ball thrown at ’em by a mere girl.  They are not afraid of me, even the third time they get up to bat after striking out twice before.  My uniform is not exactly sexy, but all I really have to do is wiggle my behind a little and smile at them, and they don’t even seem to be thinking about hitting the ball any more.  I get an even bigger smile on my sweet little face when strike three flutters past ’em.  I always take ’em by surprise.

I expect to be the first woman pitcher in the major leagues one day.  Remember my name.  Maisey Moira Morgan.  Future Hall of Famer.

(Disclaimer; Maisey might actually have a hard time claiming her place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, not because the major leagues don’t have any women in them, but because she is an entirely fictional human being, only existing in Mickey’s stupid little head.)

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July 4, 2023 · 3:02 am

Have No Fear, Mickey is Here

Beauty and Beast

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.

superchick2Superman 2In 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.

minotaur

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.

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July 4, 2023 · 2:53 am

“That Night in Saqqara I Was Taken By Surprise”

That Night in Saqqara 1

Life is never quite like the way it is in your head.  Things you don’t believe are true will constantly surprise you with the reality they belt you over the head with at the most inopportune of times.

Today’s colored-pencil Paffooney masterpiece is a case in point.  I never believed it was possible to take this good of a picture of it.  It is a horror movie to try to light this picture so I can snap it with a camera and get a result with no fades or reflected glare.  It was created in 1992, when I was really at the height of my colored-pencil cartoonist super-powers.  The subtle lighting is so much better than I can convey with the arthritic turkey-claw hands I now use for such artwork.  Torchlight in a pyramid is a hard thing to convey.  And over time, this picture’s colored-pencil patina has become glossy and difficult to photograph without glare.  It has subtle waves in the paper that photograph as shadowy valleys and reveal the two-dimensionality of the piece.  You can still see them if you look closely.  But it is far better than any previous photo.  Go back and check my archives if you don’t believe me… or you wish to be bored to death with old posts that you have somehow managed to dodge before now.

But like Tanis in the Tomb, things always turn out to be surprisingly different in their reality than they were in your little mind’s eye when you went into that dark hole in the ground.

We were discussing this at lunch, my kids and I.  We were talking about how Sims 3 portrays reality and how really surprising it can be when you realize that the game has got it right.  When I walked all the way to the bottom of the stairs this morning before realizing that I had forgotten my shoes upstairs, I had to turn around and go all the way back upstairs.  This, I am told, is exactly how it works in Sims 3.  A character in the game cannot turn around on the stairs.  If you change your mind half way down, the character. or avatar I think they like to call them, must go all the way to the bottom to turn around and go back up.  So obviously this morning, God was playing Sims 3 and using me as an avatar.

Now, I don’t really like to believe God plays video games with reality… but my son Henry brought up the Rolling Stones as proof.  It is common knowledge that Keith Richards is an un-dead creature, having so completely altered the bio-chemical make-up of his entire body with drugs that he died in 1988 and still goes on tour because his brain has not yet fully registered the fact that he is dead.  My son pointed out that in Sims 3 you can make your avatar all gray or green and zombie-looking and then play the game with your avatar walking around and doing all sorts of stuff without realizing he or she is dead.  So, not only Keith Richards, but the entirety of the Rolling Stones who are all skeletal old druggies who should’ve passed half a century ago, goes to prove that God is playing Sims 3 with the universe.  My gasted is totally flabbered!  And I hope this glimpse into the unholy truth has not ruined your day.

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July 3, 2023 · 2:05 am

How to Be a Farm Boy Without Really Trying (or Wanting To)

Farmgirl is adapted from a picture borrowed from the Belmond Area Arts Council.

Farmgirl is adapted from a picture borrowed from the Belmond Area Arts Council.

I was born in Mason City, Iowa (the original River City of Meredith Wilson’s Broadway musical, the Music Man).  But my parents didn’t hold with no big-city Ioway sort of life, so we eventually moved to my mother’s home town, Rowan, Iowa.  It was roughly about 275 people (if you count the squirrels… which a lot of the townsfolk were… qualified squirrels).  My two maternal uncles and my grand parents were busy maintaining the family farm there, and though I lived in town because Dad was an accountant for a seed corn company instead of the farmer he grew up as… I got more than my fair share of farming-type opportunity.  You know the stuff… shoveling pig poo… cow poo too…   I got to help feed the chickens (and get chased by roosters, and get pecked by hens when we checked their nests for eggs, and watch the rooster rodeos as revenge for all the chasings… because roosters don’t lay eggs and the only thing they are really good for in an egg farming setting is lopping their heads off, and watching them flop around like rodeo bulls with no heads for fifteen minutes until they finally figured out they were dead, then plucking ’em and watching Grandma Aldrich cook ’em).  I got to drive a tractor, although they didn’t trust me to do more than the simplest of tractor-driving jobs like pulling the hay rake.  I got to shovel chicken poo out of the hen house and out of the brooder house.  (Notice how a lot of the world of the lowly farm boy centers somehow on poo?)  It was a rustic rural life reminiscent of Norman Rockwell… although he depicted mostly town life and not as much of the fields and animal pens (and poo) that are central to Iowegian farm culture.

Brent Clarke is a me character in my stories... but also one of my farm boy friends.

Brent Clarke is a me character in my stories… but also one of my farm boy friends.

Growing up a farm boy has a few advantages to go along with the many drawbacks.  First off, you learn young where babies come from.  Piglets and calves and puppies and kittens are not born in secret.  And it doesn’t take much spying out on farm life to learn how those baby animals are made either.  There is ample opportunity to learn what you are not supposed to learn at a young age from farm girls too… but we were gentlemen… and extremely embarrassed by the fact that baby people are made in the same grisly, awful way that baby animals are out in the barn.

You also learn to be somewhat self-sufficient.  I learned how to tend a garden.  I learned how to fix a flat.  I learned how to repair a roof and build a rabbit pen.  Hammer, pliers, screwdriver, saw… I learned to use them all and make stuff.  Crude stuff, sure… smashed-finger-with-hammer-stuff too.  I made a bookshelf in shop class that had a bit of Michael blood built into it.  But I learned things that boys should know, and really don’t any more.

So, I guess I am claiming that because I am an Iowa boy… a farm boy… and despite my many short-comings and short-changings my life has been good and worthwhile… being a farm boy is good.  And one of the greatest shames of the modern world is this… there just aren’t many farm boys any more.

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July 2, 2023 · 1:03 am

Lazy Sunday with Disney

Mickey

So, today I am lazy…  I chose this old picture to re-post and bore you with for today’s Paffooney because I intend to take my kids to see Tomorrowland at the dollar movie theater in Plano.  (For those radical rednecks following my blog in order to get the necessary logistical information to assassinate me for the dual crimes of talking negatively about the Confederate flag and being a liberal, how do you know I didn’t change the name of the theater to protect the innocent the way I do with people?  And now might not be the best time to be exercising your open carry rights in a local movie theater either.) I have already seen the movie, and even reviewed it for my blog (Tomorrowland Review), but I wanted my kids to see it because I love it.  And they were in Florida vacationing on the beaches when I went to it.  I am passionate about sharing Disney movies I love with the people I love.  And while I am not passionate about giving more money to the Evil Corporate Empire headed by a famous talking mouse, I am still devoted to the original Fantasy Kingdom of Uncle Walt himself.  Sundays were always the day that we would make the 50 mile trek to Mason City to eat dinner with Grandma Beyer and watch The Wonderful World of Disney at 6:00 on her color TV.  That was a major thing in the 1960’s when there were no computer games or internet… no I-phones or Androids… just our imaginations and the fuel from Disney broadcasts “in living color” on NBC.

I have always had a full-color imagination, but Disney fueled so many of my childhood games and dreams and drawings that I can’t even begin to give it a proper acknowledgement.  So I posted a Disney episode here so that you can see what I am talking about in a full-color way… even though I know that Disney Corporation will soon be pulling this video from YouTube because they are as jealous of their intellectual property rights as Scrooge McDuck is jealous of his very first dime.  You may not know this, but Disney sued schools who used their copyrighted characters to decorate classrooms for learning, and sued teachers for using Disney films on movie day in the classroom.  They love every dime they can make with their products with an all-consuming, suffocating love.  Sharing is not a lesson you learn from modern Disney.

But that movie we are going to see is full of hope for the future in the face of all the greed, corruption, and disjointedness of the present.  Black and white days may well be straight ahead, but for this particular Sunday I am making the lazy choice of Disney and bright color.

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