Category Archives: pen and ink

July 7, 2023 · 1:29 am

Doodle-Bop!

Sometimes the only thing you really want out of life is just to get by. You get tired of always having to climb the danged highest mountain. You get tired of trying to swim the danged deepest sea.

16750_102844509741181_100000468961606_71393_6278100_n Sometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!… To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.

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You aim a lot for different, and undeniably original… because no one thinks like you… certainly no one who is real and has a real brain. You are gifted with an “other-ness”, a sing-songy simpering something that makes you want to doodle and do what no man has done before. (Does that sentence exist anywhere else in all of literature? Even if there is some alternate dimension with infinite monkeys typing on infinite typewriters? What’s a typewriter, you say? Danged millennials!)

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I really can’t help it, you know. I was a middle school teacher for 24 years. That sort of thing has mental health consequences. And if you wring the sponges in your stupid old brain hard enough and long enough… doodle-bop! comes out.

Turtle boy’s magic iron of irony!!!

And you have to wonder why some of the stuff that is in your stupid old head is even in there. Why is it that sometimes the words “Argyle socks are filled with rocks” are drifting through the vast empty spaces in the logic centers of your brain? There has to be a reason for everything, doesn’t there?

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I do believe I have made myself chuckle at least a dozen chuck-tacular times in the chuck-a-tational crafting of this cheddar-cheesy post. But it only really counts if I can make you girlishly giggle or guy-like guffaw with my word-munching and cartoony paffoonies.

The terror-filled cartoon car chase that is life as usual.

You may have noticed that everything is black and white, even though it doesn’t have to be. Good versus evil, hot versus cold, everything can be divided up simplistically… but the really profound part of simplicity is vibrating reverberations of complexity that lie just underneath. Words have meaning, even though they are just a bunch of crooked squiggles marked on a page. (Yes, I know… “or typed on a computer screen”. Danged millennials!)

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And so, this is my doodle-bop! Probably not the doodliest or the boppiest doodle-bop! I could have bopped… but there it is. I have made it through another sorta creative post without losing my mind… Honest! I did not lose it. It is merely temporarily misplaced for a moment. It will be back in its proper place tomorrow… probably.

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Filed under blog posting, cartoony Paffooney, goofy thoughts, humor, imagination, irony, mental health, metaphor, Paffooney cartoony, pen and ink, pen and ink paffoonies, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wordplay

Tagged as artwork, goofiness, humor, paffooney, pen and ink

June 17, 2023 · 2:32 am

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.

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Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink, Uncategorized

Tagged as autobiography, boys and girls, girls, humor, paffooney

May 24, 2023 · 12:56 am

Pencil, Pencil, Pen, Pen, Pen…

Yes, students actually eat pencils in class.

My daughter forgot her pencil case in school over the weekend. Now, for normal students, this is no really big deal. But for the Princess, like it is for me as an amateur artist, the pencil case, with her colored pencils and pens in it, is one of the most necessary things for life.

Of course, we did not have an opportunity to go back to school for her pencils and pens. So, panicky, she texted her teacher whereupon the pencil case in question was found and put aside for her until early this morning. She then stole my pens and pencils for the weekend, depriving me and causing me to be the one with the anxiety disorder and heart palpitations.

Of course, pens and pencils were always a critical issue when I was a teacher for 31 years, plus two years as a substitute teacher. Unlike the Princess, students in an English classroom NEVER have a pen or a pencil to write with. I swear, I have seen them gnaw pencils to pieces like a hungry beaver or termite. And they chew on pens to the point that there is a sudden squishy noise in their mouth and they become members of the Black Teeth Club. (Or Blue Teeth Club for the more choosy sort of student.)

A piece of an actual classroom rules poster.

Having students in your class who actually have pencils and pens to learn with is a career-long battle. I tried providing pens for a quarter. I would by cheap bags of pens, ten for two dollars, and sell them to panicky writers and test takers with a quarter (and secretly free to some who really don’t have a quarter). I only used the pen money to buy more cheap pens. But that ran afoul of principals and school rules. A teacher can’t sell things in class without the district accountant giving approval and keeping sales tax records. Yes, the pencil pushers force teachers to give pens, pencils, and paper away for free. I finally settled -on a be-penning process of picking up leftover un-popped pens, half-eaten pencils, and the rare untouched writing instrument apparently lost the very instant the student sat down in his or her desk. These I would issue to moaning pencil-free students until the supply ran out (which it rarely ever did) at no cost to myself.

I also tried telling them repeatedly that they had to have a writing instrument, or they needed to beg, borrow, or steal one. And if they couldn’t do that, I’d tell them, “Well, you could always prick your finger and write in blood.” That was a joke I totally stopped using the instant a student did exactly what I said. A literalist, that one. And it turns out you can’t read an essay that a student writes in actual blood.

But, anyway… My daughter is safely in school now and no longer panicking because she has her precious pencil case back in her possession. And she probably will not ever make that same mistake again. (And she will probably not return my pens and pencils either.)

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Filed under humor, kids, Paffooney, pen and ink, self pity, teaching, Uncategorized

December 23, 2022 · 4:03 am

Doing Diddly-Squoot

Yes…

It means I am doing nothing.

And I am working really hard at it.

I do have a work in progress.

I have added to it once in the last week.

I think the expression, Iowegian as it is, comes from the expression “doing squat” which means “doing nothing at all” combined with “diddling around”, the non-sexual meaning of which is “dithering or only working in an ineffective way.”

I humbly confess that I am not that great of a researcher when it comes to linguistic facts and word origins.

I am much better at making things up and creating my own portmanteau words.

But I do have a very good ear for how people actually talk. Especially when it comes to Iowegian, Texican, Spanglish, and Educational Jargon-Gibberish. Counting English and Tourist-German, I speak six languages.

I also humbly confess that I make big mistakes. I have been working hard for a week on editing published books because of how an overreaction to one small inappropriate detail nearly destroyed one of my best books and now I have to deal with the impression some readers have that I write inappropriate stuff all the time.

Yes, I definitely erred…

I also realized I assume everybody accepts nudity as easily as I do.

They definitely don’t.

But naked is funny. And that is not a point about my writing that I am willing to concede.

Doing diddly-squoot can also result in really weird stuff like this Christmas-card composite of my artwork and Vincent Price’s 1967 Christmas tree.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, foolishness, forgiveness, humor, nudes, Paffooney, pen and ink, self portrait

December 17, 2022 · 4:51 am

Christmas Magic

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Before now I have never talked about my childhood friend Jimmy Crafton. It took a long long time to build up enough courage. Writing this on Christmas Eve 2017 makes it easier. Yes this is a very important re-post.

It is not a terrible story. I can’t think of anybody that fits the idea of a “hero” any more than Jim. I remember him as a pale-faced little boy with a thousand Watt smile full of tiny white teeth. He was two years younger than me. He was in my sister’s class at Rowan Elementary. He was outgoing and funny. And he was a hemophiliac. He had the rare condition of having too little of the essential blood-clotting proteins in the blood that the vast majority of us get to take for granted. Every day for him was a risk of having an ordinary injury like a bruise or scrape cause him to bleed to death. He missed great gobs of school days with injuries and crippling pain and the need to go to the emergency room in Mason City for life-saving blood transfusions. We were told when I was eight that he probably wouldn’t last past his tenth birthday. The teachers all gave us strict rules for playing with him on the playground… what not to do, what to immediately report, and what not to allow him to do. I remember one time he decided to wrestle both Bobby and me at the same time. He had a deep and passionate love for the sport of wrestling, big in the high schools of Iowa. He aggressively took us both down and pinned us both with minimum effort. And you should stop laughing at how wimpy that makes me sound. Remember, I had to play the game by different rules than he did. Bob and I both had to live with the consequences if bad things were to happen.

The miracle of Jim Crafton was that he did not die in childhood due to his genetic medical difficulty. In fact, he grew up, went to college, and became a doctor all because of the gratitude he had towards the doctors and medical professionals who helped him conquer hemophilia in childhood. He got married. And he even had a son. Those were things he accomplished in life that no one believed were possible back in the 1960’s.

But now we get to the part that I can’t write without typing through tears. A hemophiliac relies on regular transfusions of blood to supply the clotting factors that he cannot live without. And there was no effective screening technique for HIV in blood supplies before 1992. Further problems arose from the blood bank practice of mixing blood donations together by blood type. That meant that even clean blood donations were likely to become tainted through mixing. Far too many of the hemophiliacs in America were given infected blood and became AIDS sufferers at a time when a diagnosis of HIV was basically a death sentence. And worse, AIDS sufferers were often isolated and treated like lepers for fear of contracting the disease from ordinary contact with them. You might remember the sad case of Ricky Ray in Florida. He and his two brothers were all hemophiliacs. They all were infected. They were expelled from school. They even had to live in hiding after loving members of their community burned their house down. We were horrible to people who were dying of AIDS.

But I can’t leave this essay on such a sad note. My friend Jimmy was a hero, a doctor, and a dad. He lived a life worth living and worth knowing about. His life was a gift to all of us lesser beings. And this is the time of year for remembering those we have loved and lost. Jim died of AIDS decades ago. But he still lives in my heart and my memory. And if you have read this little story, he lives in you now too. That is a sort of magic, isn’t it? I only wish I had more powerful magic to give.

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Filed under artwork, compassion, heroes, Paffooney, pen and ink, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as hemophilia, love and loss

October 2, 2022 · 5:11 am

Sarcasm, a Super Power of the Future

It has come to my attention that the need for super heroes has reached a critical point in our history. I have been watching television documentaries about Green Arrow and the Flash, and now there is a new one, Supergirl. And I didn’t miss all the media attention when Robert Downey Jr. formed a super team of powerful people and destroyed a European country so thoroughly that I can’t find it on a map anywhere. So, wanting to get in on the action, I decided I needed a super power of my own. And I know what it is. I am not strong. I am not fast. I am not as smart as Robert Downey Jr. who is both Sherlock Holmes and Iron Man. So I have to settle for one of those second tier super powers. Like sarcasm.

Unbeknownst to most who know me, I went away to the far oriental country of Kathman-dooki to study under an ancient master. His name was Aiknowyooare Butwhattami, ancient master of the Shaolin art of Sarcasto Fu. He was the one who taught me to meditate on the foibles of people I don’t like and the pet peeves that drive me to despise them. He taught me that a well-placed sarcastic comment, like a well-thrown dagger, can cut right to the heart.

“You must focus your ire on the words you say, Grassstomper, to give the desired meaning to words that actually mean the opposite of what you mean to mean… in order to be mean,” said the ancient master.

“That makes perfect sense to me,” I said with a leftward eye-roll.

“Excellent, oh bug-headed one, you inflected that just right to hurt me fatally without revealing your witlessly shallow stupidity.”

I smiled at the praise as he wrote a big letter “F” on my report card.

But if I choose to use sarcasm as my super power, I have the unfortunate problem of competing with the super hero known as Sarcasto Man. He has previously seized on this notion that you can defeat super villains by sarcastically shaming them into committing oriental ritual suicide… called Hairy Kurie, or something like that. Or was that ornamental suicide? You know, the kind that decorates the sides of your house with dark reds and crimsons. I think you do it with a sword… or cut your own head off with a butter knife or something weird like that. Anyway, Sarcasto Man has told me that he achieves his super-power effects by holding a very high opinion of himself and talking down to everyone else around him. He was supposed to become part of a super hero team, but failed at the task because his sarcasm caused as many suicides among his teammates as it did amongst his super-villain enemies and their minions. In fact, he could not use the power on minions very well because they are usually too stupid to understand that you actually mean the opposite of what you are saying.

“It was very discouraging after I defeated the Mangling Mingler,” Sarcasto Man told me, “because after he cut his own head off with a butter knife, his minions, the Mingle Men, blamed me for his death and started pelting me with rocks. I got such a bunch of red welts on my buttocks. Fortunately my head is rock-proof.” (Did I forget to mention that using sarcasm as a super power is greatly aided by having a very thick skull?)

I began to despair of ever achieving levels of sarcasm-ness to be in his league. So I started looking for alternatives that were close in content, but different in application. I briefly thought about using irony instead of sarcasm. Tim the Turtle Boy (whom I interviewed as a potential boy sidekick… um, not trying to be gay or anything) demonstrates my irony skill by holding up his magical cast-iron flat iron with which he either creates irony or flattens out the super villain’s clothing wrinkles. Well, maybe I am not all that clear on how one becomes a superhero, and I don’t want to make Robert Downey Jr. mad by trying to become Irony Man and crowding his personal shtick. He might use sarcasm on me and suggest I would make a really great Pun-Man. You know, killing villains with really bad puns and jokes that turn your head inside out. That would be a truly shameful thing.

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Tagged as goofiness, humor, Paffoonies, pen and ink, puns, sarcasm, super heroes

July 27, 2022 · 2:08 am

Other Folks’ Artwork

There are many, many things I appreciate about other people’s artwork. It is not all a matter of envy or a desire to copy what they’ve done, stealing their techniques and insights for myself, though there is some of that. Look at the patterns Hergé uses to portray fish and undersea plants. I have shamelessly copied both. But it is more than just pen-and-ink burglary.

I like to be dazzled. I look for things other artists have done that pluck out sweet-sad melodies on the heartstrings of my of my artistically saturated soul. I look for things like the color blue in the art of Maxfield Parrish.

I love the mesmerizing surrealism of Salvador Dali.

I am fascinated by William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s ability to create photo-realistic and creamy-perfect nudes.

Basil Wolverton’s comic grotesqueries leave me stunned but laughing.

The dramatic lighting effects employed by Greg Hildebrandt slay me with beauty. (Though not literally. I am not bleeding and dying from looking at this picture, merely metaphorically cut to the heart.)

I even study closely movie-poster portraits like Bogart and Bergman in this Casablanca classic poster.

I could show you so many more art pieces that I dearly love to look at. But I will end with a very special artist.

This is the work of my daughter, Mina “the Princess” Beyer. Remember that name. She’s better than I am.

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Filed under artwork, commentary, inspiration, oil painting, old art, pen and ink, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Uncategorized

Tagged as Saturday Art Day

June 4, 2022 · 2:30 pm

Portraits in Pen and Ink

Simple, clean lines and basic, well-defined shapes go together in black and white. They are in the basic nature of being a cartoonist. You translate what you see into line drawings where a few simple lines become a complex and meaningful image.

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My one-legged Batman is an exercise in foreshortening and trying to burst through the two-dimensional confines of the page to grab the viewer. I learned this trick from comic book artist Jim Lee.

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His sidekick is rendered as a static portrait where the computer monitor in front of him lights up Robin’s intense and thoughtful face.

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She was an excellent teacher and former nun… she was a mentor to me, taught me a lot about life and love and great beauty. How do you adequately portray the wisdom and the patience in those highly magnified eyes? I drew from memory only. She never considered herself beautiful. But she was. And it hurts not to be able to capture it correctly.

Not every portrait is literal. Sometimes you exaggerate facial characteristics and behavioral quirks are emphasized to create humor in the portrait.

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When I was first married I did a double portrait of us as a knight and his lady fair. I know, I know… it is so sickeningly sweet that it punches me right in the diabetes. But, hey, it doesn’t really look like me anyway. It is more of a portrait of Porky Pig in glasses and hair.

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There is an art to pen and ink that cuts right to the heart of who you are and who you want to be. Simple lines in black and white… there is no more incisive tool for putting my goofy old mind down on paper.

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Tagged as goofiness, humor, pen and ink, pen and ink philosophy, portraits

May 23, 2022 · 1:59 pm