Category Archives: Paffooney
Off-Beat Self-Portraits
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, Paffooney, self portrait
Stories with Gingerbread
Yes, this post is a shameless promotion. But this is a good book that not enough people are reading to truly appreciate that fact. When I was a boy in the 1960’s, there really was an old German lady who lived in a small tar-papered house, all ginger-brown in color, which we all called the Gingerbread House. She really did love to give out sweets and cookies and popcorn balls to the kids in our town. And she really did love to talk to people and tell them little stories.
Her name, in real life, was Marie Jacobson. She was, in fact, a survivor of the holocaust. She had a tattoo on her right forearm that I saw only one time. Our parents told us what the tattoo meant. But there were no details ever added to the story. Mrs. Jacobson doted on the local children. She regularly gave me chocolate bars just because I held the door for her after church. But she was apparently unwilling to ever talk about World War II and Germany. We were told never to press for answers. There was, however, a rumor that she lost her family in one of the camps. And I have always been the kind that fills in the details with fiction when the truth is out of reach.
I based the character of Grandma Gretel on Mrs. Jacobson. But the facts about her secret life are, of course, from my imagination, not from the truth about Mrs. Jacobson’s real life.
Marie Jacobson cooked gingerbread cookies. I know because I ate some. But she didn’t talk to fairies or use magic spells in cooking. I know because the fairies from the Hidden Kingdom in Rowan disavowed ever talking to any slow one but me. She wasn’t Jewish, since she went to our Methodist Church. She wasn’t a nudist, either. But neither were my twin cousins who the Cobble Sisters, the nude girls in the story, are fifty percent based on. A lot of details about the kids in my book come from the lives of my students in Texas. The blond nudist twins were in my class in the early eighties. And they were only part-time nudists who talked about it more than lived it.
But the story itself is not about nudists, or Nazis, or gingerbread children coming to life through magic. The story is about how telling stories can help us to allay our fears. Telling stories can help us cope with and make meaning out of the most terrible things that have happened to us in life. And it is also a way to connect with the hearts of other people and help them to see us for who we really are. And that was the whole reason for writing this book.
Filed under autobiography, fairies, gingerbread, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Day After Day
Posting every day keeps the imaginary writing muscles toned and renews my basic energy levels. But it also becomes a chore on certain days. Like today. The weather has got me down with arthritis woes. Typing like this is it not as easy as it should be. And when I have to labor at it to make the paragraphs flow, sometimes I just turn it all into rambling babbling. I spin my mental wheels and get nowhere.
I can use this post to tell you, however, that I have now started a new work-in-progress. I have already pounded out the first four thousand words of The Wizard in His Keep.
This is the final story in the arc of the character Milt Morgan. This story has been gestating in my brain since 1995. Though, if I am honest, it began with fantasies I had back in fifth grade. The main character, Milt Morgan, is half me and half the other Mike from our gang back in Rowan in the 1960’s. Back when Mike and Michael were sometimes good friends and sometimes the brains behind evil plans and terrible tricks. He supplied the devious know-how, and I provided the creative spark that lit the schemes on fire.
But this story is advanced to the computer age.
In 1996, Milt Morgan was a 34-year-old video game designer living a double life in a high-tech, state-of-the-art computer lab. It is then that he mysteriously kidnaps the three children of his child-hood friend’s sister and takes them away to a magical world that only two people in the entire world have the keys to. Milt is the Wizard. The other Key-Master is Daniel Quilp, the Necromancer. A battle for the soul of the world must take place, and Daisy, Johnny, and Mortie Brown are a part of it.
Anyway, the words are beginning to pile up again. And again I have made something out of nothing.
The book I am talking about in this 3-year-old post is now available on Amazon.
Filed under humor, magic, new projects, novel, novel plans, novel writing, Paffooney
Art Unseen in a While
WordPress has put in a new feature for finding old photos from Posts Past.
This allows me to pull from past years much more easily than the scroll-down feature I have been using. Thus, art from 2017.
This has been a look back at pictures posted in 2017, starting in December, and going back in time to January. There is at least one picture from every month.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, old art, Paffooney
Shorthand Cartooning
I drew this picture back in my college days, the middle 1970’s. If you look at it closely, you will see my shorthand in action. The rose on the trellis is one. I have drawn a thousand roses since I did this one. It is the formalized set of lines, colors, and shading that I always put together whenever the thing I mean is “a ro se.”
You can see it in the orange bricks of the goldfish pond. Compare those to the gray foundation bricks. The same shorthand patterns. The brick grid in the background as well.
The shadow patterns of wrinkles in the boy’s clothing are also shorthand I almost always do when drawing from my imagination. The faces in profile, too.
There is a language here spoken silently in colored pencil. Complex ideas pictured in a simple colored-pencil picture-language.
I Love to Laugh
It began in childhood with the Red Skelton Show. Every Wednesday night it was a refuge for me. And refuge was a critical idea for me. I was a child hiding a terrible secret from the entire world. At times I hated myself. Twice as a teen I came very close to choosing suicide over life. The person I most needed to hide from was myself. And humor helped. Red Skelton’s gentle humor helped me to not only escape from myself for a while, it taught me to laugh at my own foibles and not take things quite so seriously.
media.npr.org
In my college years I discovered humor in written form. Mark Twain swiftly earned my utter devotion as I read not only Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but Roughing It, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Mysterious Stranger, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain. You know, there are a large number of things in Mark Twain’s humorous books that make you cry, that make you angry, and make you think deep thoughts. I basically discovered that humor is a way that smart people choose to think of things which helps to keep you sane and basically un-suicided.
A beautiful portrait by artist Emily Stepp
It is obvious that some people become very skilled at humor because they have used it all their lives to fight the darkness . Robin Williams is only few years older than I am. In many ways his life has paralleled my own (obviously minus the wealth and fame in my case… but what would’ve happened if Robin had become a school teacher?) I have depended on Robin Williams’ movies to keep me going, giving me insights in how to talk to kids, how to be a parent, and how to empathize with others. Of course, I haven’t yet taken some of his movie advice. I never put on a mask and a dress to deceive my own children. But only time will tell.
I obsess about humor and how you create it. I gorge on things like the works of Dave Barry. Do you know who he is? Florida newspaper columnist who writes books about everyday life and the fools who live it? I have to do a post on Dave Barry, because he makes me laugh so hard that milk shoots out of my nose, sometimes when I am not even drinking milk… believe me, I don’t know how that works either.
A bust of Herman Munster
Doofy Fuddbugg here is an example of what a “Nolt” is.
I love to laugh. It makes the world right again. I have laughed an awful lot for almost an entire lifetime now. I treasure all the funny people I have known. And I need to continue to try to make people laugh up until the very end. Because the world is too often not a funny place. It can be full of badness and sadness and suffering. And as Mark Twain so aptly pointed out, “Against the assault of laughter… nothing can stand.”
Total Picture Time
Now, that’s a picture done right, Ruben. Good job!
Practical Magic
Wizards do magical spells. It kinda goes without saying. But to do magical spells, you have to know how the magic works… and why.
The secret is in knowing what the word “magic” actually means. It is not supernatural power, nor the creation of something out of nothing. It is entirely the act of uncovering and understanding the underlying truth, the actual science that most people don’t yet comprehend that underpins the thing you are trying to accomplish. Jonas Salk was a wizard. His polio vaccine was a successful magical potion. But magic can be evil too. Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer were wizards. And the atom bomb was an act of necromantic evil.
So, being a wizard, I have learned lessons over a lifetime that uncovered for me the secrets of practical interpersonal magic. Being a teacher has taught me far more than I taught to others.
So let me share with you some of my hard-won practical magic.
In a room full of rowdy children, most of whom are not minding any of the teacher’s directions, you can get their attention easily by shouting, “What the poop is going on here?” with the biggest evil grin on your face that you can manage. They will immediately quiet down like magic and look at you. Some will be wondering if their teacher is having a fatal stroke. Some will be wondering what punishments their behavior has earned as indicated by your evil grin (and here it should be noted, their little imaginations will cook up something much worse and much scarier than anything you could’ve thought of to unwisely threaten them with. A few will begin recording you with their cell phone cameras in hopes of future behavior they can post online and get you fired with. And the rest will laugh at the word “poop” and forget why they were acting out. At that point, with their full attention, you can ask them to sit down and look at page 32, and, not knowing what else to do, they will probably do it.
Here are some other rules of practical magic that apply to the wizarding arts of being a public school teacher;
- Violence is never the answer. Change their actions and reactions by making them laugh, making them cry, or making them think about something else entirely. The last thing you would ever want to do is hit them, even if they hit you first.
- Anything they can be forced to repeat eight times in eight different ways is something that will be fixed in their memory for more than just the duration of a class period. It moves things into their long-term memory, and that is itself a very magical thing.
- Students laugh when you surprise them or present them with the absurd. Tell them they should imagine themselves as pigeons who have to act out Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. What costumes will they wear, and why? What stage directions are necessary to add to the play that are unique to pigeons, and how will they word them? How does pigeon Mercutio go about his death soliloquy when stabbed by pigeon Tibault? Will he have to say, “Look for me tomorrow and you will find me a very grave pigeon?” By the end of the lesson they will have learned more about this play they are supposed to learn about as ninth graders than they ever would have otherwise.
Being able to do any of those things is actually a manifestation of magical power, and only producible by a wizard. The simple fact is, every good teacher is a wizard.
Talking to Girls
Communicating with a wife is complicated. In fact, I couldn’t do the whole writer-think thing about that topic without writing a book. But I can successfully ruminate for about 500 words on the that awkward first encounter, the first time I ever was embarrassed in front of a non-sister girl.
In grade school I met my first crush in kindergarten. Alicia Stewart was a honey-sweet little brown-haired girl with a bow in her hair. I was a boy. I was not allowed to like girls. Hating them was the only thing that made sense to my friends and I. But, secretly, I didn’t hate Alicia. In fact, if I was ever to be doomed to be married when I grew up, I would’ve only accepted that horrible fate if it was with her. And in my small town school I saw her practically every school day. In fact, in Miss Malkin’s music class on Tuesdays and Thursdays I sat right next to her in Miss Malkin’s seating chart for six years.
In Miss Malkin’s music class we always did musical stuff like listening to classical records, singing songs for the yearly musical review concert (we did the songs from the musical The Music Man one year… you don’t get more musicky than that), and we did square dancing. Yeah, you heard that right. Square dancing. You had to have a girl for a partner. And one year, Miss Malkin decided it would be cute to have the boys ask the girls to be their partners. Now, as boys… in top secret boy-conversations, we had generally agreed that if such a problem would ever occur, Alicia Stewart was the only acceptable choice. We all hated girls. But we all were secretly in love with Alicia. She was girl-hating-boy approved. When I was twelve, there was another girl that was making me uncomfortable too. Marla Carter was nine when I was twelve. She had big brown eyes and dimples. Her face was somehow heart-shaped, and only Alicia could make my palms sweat any worse than she did. But in top secret boy-conversations it was ruled that she was a booger-eating little girl and totally toxic. Well, I didn’t totally agree, but I was still subject to all girl-hating directives.
“Okay,” Miss Malkin said, “the boys will now pick their partners… one at a time in alphabetical order.”
My last name began with the letter “B”, but my best friend Mark had a last name starting with “A”.
“I pick Alicia,” Mark said.
My heart sank. I had my pick of any girl besides Alicia. Marla was standing about four feet away from me, her hands folded together behind her back, looking at me with those puppy-dog eyes. My throat was too dry to speak.
“Um, ah… I can’t pick anyone…” I croaked. “You pick it, I will dance with it.”
“Now, don’t be like that, Michael. Get on with it!” Miss Malkin commanded. Everyone loved the music teacher, and so everyone obeyed her. I had to submit.
I looked at Marla, dug my toe into the floorboards, and said, “I choose my cousin Diane.”
Talking to girls has always been a matter of embarrassment. The words are always awkward and shaped not by my brain, but by my bowels. This fact has always been a hindrance to my dealings with the female species, but it has been an unending source of potential for writing humor.
Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink, Uncategorized
