Category Archives: philosophy

April 7, 2016 · 3:03 pm

Apple Blossoms Return to Texas

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There are certain things that keep me going when my connection to the mortal coil begins to chafe and itch. Apple blossoms are one of those things. The apple blossoms have bloomed in our two Texas apple trees in April of 2016. As I was raking endless live oak leaves out of my yard, making it harder for myself to breathe and continue living because I am allergic to live oak… and most of the rest of Texas to boot, I saw that the apple blossoms had burst forth from their buds. Between coughs and gasps for breathe, it made me smile. I ended the raking of endless live oak leaves after only thirty minutes and one sack of leaves. I am laboring in the face of impending doom, but I am not stupid. I needed to live to rake another day. Otherwise I’ll never get it done.

But apple blossoms are worth the heartache and pain and toil of life. They are not only something to remind me why I keep going. They are a reason for being. So I used my phone camera to take a picture of an open blossom. Then I photo-shopped in a picture of my novel character, Valerie Clarke, the character I created as an amalgam of my lovely daughter and the pretty little girl in my third grade class that I fell madly in love with when I was a little boy. Like most artists, I am quite capable of slapping beautiful things and ideas together haphazardly to make something that is either a huge pile of kitschy crap, or even more beautiful. And like most artists, I am entirely too close to the feelings and memories and realities that make up this work of art to ever know for sure which of the two things it really is. Forgive me if I chose the opposite one that you did. I try not to offend with my Paffoonies. I try not to be a creep or a bore or a Philistine… but those things are not always possible to avoid. But there are apple blossoms, and sunrises, and a number of other things as well that, in the end, balance out the equations quite nicely.

Skyscape

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It is difficult to look at the sky and not feel that the power of Heaven is real. As I approach the halfway point of my sixtieth year, and the darkness of the future draws ever nearer, I am forced to think about what I really believe. Being smarter than the average bear has its drawbacks. I understand why most of the writers I most admire were atheists, and all of the philosophers I have read and found agreement with are decidedly atheist. Science, rationality, and reason all suggest that there is nothing beyond the physical realm. Should that matter? Faith, according to Mark Twain, is fervently believing in your heart what your mind tells you ain’t so. In fact, Hebrews 11:1 says, “Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld.” Even the Bible is saying you have to believe it even though you shouldn’t believe it.

So, will I go to Heaven when I die? For me, the question is meaningless. I look up at the miracle of a blue sky on a partly cloudy day and see the life-giving sun. I am alive… here and now… and nothing else is really relevant. I am a part of the great, vast universe of reality. My existence is real and cannot be unmade… even by God, if He were inclined to do such a thing. I am a small, insignificant part of reality, and I can be gone in the next instant like a puff of smoke in the wind. But I am here and I am alive and I took the Paffooney picture that I used to illustrate this post. And I face whatever comes with a smile on my face. I am alive… and life is good.

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Filed under insight, inspiration, philosophy, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized

Tagged as artwork, belief, clouds, Hebrews 11:1, philosophy, photo Paffooney, skyscapes

March 10, 2016 · 4:16 pm

Spring Break Colored Blue

This week has been Spring Break for our little family. But as Spring Breaks go, this one leaves a lot to be desired. Rain. Thunderstorms and tornadoes did damage to the north of us in The Colony and Frisco, Texas. More rain. Gray skies, flood warnings, tornado watches… the sun is supposed to come out on Sunday, the last day of Spring Break. I want a do-over.

But it is all about the focus. We have done some house cleaning. My son took the water-damaged carpet out of his bedroom with a carpet knife and discovered an old linoleum floor under it, complete with a sincerely ugly 1960’s style pattern. And my daughter and I baked cookies.

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The bedroom with its mustard yellow linoleum with brown snowflakes in the pattern.

The cookies were Halloween candy-corn cookies bought for a sale price at Aldi’s in an after-Christmas sale. (I think I paid less than a dollar for them.) We mixed the two colors of dough up with butter and tried to make cookies with a swirl design as described on the box. It didn’t work. We made spectacular splashes of red and yellow all over the cookies. The cookies looked radioactive as they baked. No wonder they were cheap.

My share of the cookies (limited for the sake of blood sugar stability).

But they were delicious. Probably more because we made them together and laughed about the goofy outcomes. I ate my two cookies (the limit reasonably suited to proper blood sugar levels) with a tall glass of Diet Coke and milk.

So, Spring Break has been a bit of a bummer. But misfortune does not rule our lives unless we let it. Sometimes you have to simply reject the glooms and just be happy.

2 Comments

Filed under humor, inspiration, philosophy, photo paffoonies

Tagged as Be Happy, Bobby McFerrin, fighting depression, humor, rain, Spring Break, tornadoes

March 8, 2016 · 4:41 pm

The Beasts of Armeggedon

Today may very well be the last day on Earth. I laugh when I write that, but it could literally be true. There is an asteroid approaching the earth and it is supposed to pass within 11,000 miles of Earth. That is close enough for a minor math oops to fool us into not panicking about an extinction event. The Dallas Fort-Worth area is being soaked in thunderstorms and potential high winds as I write this in a house that has foundation cracks made worse by a high number of fracking-induced earthquakes the last couple of years. I woke up with chest pains this morning, and I have a family history of heart trouble. (Although the last time I panicked and had the chest pains checked it was apparently arthritis in my rib cage… and the weather does make my arthritis worse.) So, in very many ways, this really could be the last day. And as I reminded everybody yesterday, I am a pessimist in all things.

So, I am girding up in armor as a pessimist always does, preparing for the worst. If I am not going to be here tomorrow, then I need to prepare by counting my blessings today. Number one, I have completed a successful 31-year career as a teacher. I touched over 2,000 lives, made a difference in a lot of them, and screwed up only a handful of them. I taught some kids to read, and I taught a lot of kids to write. I was a good writing teacher. I know how to build a theme and I can teach others to do the same. I have lived a life of service, and though I have not been made money-rich by my efforts, I have wealth greater than Croesus (I know you don’t really know who that is, but I didn’t want that sentiment spoiled by using a name like Trump or the Walmart heirs.)

Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.

Number two, I am a survivor who has seen an amazing amount of history roll past without ever being crushed under its wheels. I was alive for John Kennedy’s Presidency and assassination. I watched Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon. I taught the day the Challenger exploded with the first teacher in space on board. I also taught the day the twin towers fell on 9-11. I have seen how the world was changed, and I, like most people, experienced the changes necessary to adapting to a new world. As a pessimist, I am already planning for life under President Ted Cruz. It will be the worst possible outcome for our nation of the election of 2016. We really should not elect a Reptilian as our leader. But I survived the Ronny Ray-Gun revolution, and eight long years under the Cowboy of Very Little Brain, so if I live to see it, I will adapt. And so will you. We have only rarely ever been truly free and prosperous, but in our minds, no one, no matter how tyrannical, can ever truly deprive us of our freedom.

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So, if these are the last words I ever write, then know that I am at peace with the world. If the big space rock does us all in today, then at least we have to consolation that humankind has had its chance to live and love and laugh, and we didn’t do everything wrong.

The Cowboy Code

When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.

And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.

Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.

So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?

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I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.

Left is Right

The finished portrait of Marla

With numerous health problems, I have difficulty with sleeping every night. One of the worst problems I have is nocturnal acid reflux. It makes me wake up in the middle of night with fire in my throat, like some sort of dyspeptic acid-spitting dragon. I have to vault out of bed, arthritis and all, and go toss the contents of my stomach into the toilet. Sorry to be so gross, but it is important to this theme to get a sense of just how bad it is to be on the wrong side. What do I mean by that? Well, I learned from a doctor recently that which side you lie on to sleep makes a big difference. If you sleep on your right side at night, your stomach is oriented in a way that the top opening angles down towards the esophagus. This leads to an unfortunate ooze of stomach acid that sets off the reflux crisis. If, however, you sleep on your left side, the stomach is angled in a manner that allows gravity to work for you instead of against you. I have been intentionally lying on my left side every night for a month. It works. No acid reflux. Until last night. But when I woke up gagging, I had unconsciously rolled onto my right side. So it has become obvious to me, the left side is the right side.

The latest additions to my collection, January & February

Life has to be in balance. But, unfortunately, it constantly shifts back and forth, up and down, and all around. Keeping life in balance is a juggling act that may involve lying only on your left side while you sleep.

I worry too about the balance affecting the world as a whole right now. We are very deeply mired in a time when political right and left are out of balance and have been for too long. In politics, the right is the conservative belief that things should remain the same. Since the Reagan administration, that has meant deregulating in the name of profits, free market capitalism, and letting Wall Street profit-makers do anything and everything they want to do to make higher profits. The left is in favor of change. When I was a kid, I can remember the left being a very bad thing. They wanted communist-style revolution. They robbed banks and blew things up. But most of those leftists are now dead. They still exist, but the far right is just as dangerous, the KKK, the militias, and they are far more numerous in this day and age. The leftist agenda now is more what used to be the moderate position. Senator Elizabeth Warren and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders want to re-regulate the Wall Street trends that caused the economic meltdown in 2008. They want to promote progressive tax systems that move the money out of corporate profit-funnels and back into the hands of the middle class, and the institutions that benefit them. There is a need to shift to the left. There is need to restore balance. Once again I think it is proper to say, the left side is the right side.

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Here is some of that leftist thinking from the socialist Public Television initiative.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, philosophy, politics, self pity

Tagged as acid reflux, balance, humor, liberal politics, loony liberals, philosophy

February 22, 2016 · 4:36 pm

Life Inside

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There is a certain amount of frustration that comes with age and arthritis and limited ability to move. A good share of the time I am stuck within my bedroom/studio. Bad weather and weather changes, as well as the strains of housework, stiffen my back into immobility. So, I am stuck exploring not the outside world, but the inner world of stories, pictures, and my own imagination.

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Of course, one has to beware of a life lived in imagination and isolation. Some of it can be kinda wicked and dangerous. Okay, maybe not, but definitely in danger of overwhelming goofiness. As you can see, I take a bit of my artwork and use photo-shop to make even goofier arty things. I experiment and stick stuff together just for the heck of it.

I suppose this is probably evidence a good psychiatrist could use to keep me locked up for a while. But I’m kinda stuck anyway in my little room.

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Filed under autobiography, cartoony Paffooney, goofiness, humor, Paffooney Posts, philosophy

Tagged as arthritis, artwork, cartoons, colored pencil, humor, inner life, limitations, limited mobility, pen and ink, studio

February 20, 2016 · 3:42 pm

A Growing Collection of Sunrises

I have been moaning and complaining in this blog for a couple of weeks. I don’t have bad days. I have bad weeks… bad months… bad years. And making fun of my pain, making light of my suffering, is a way of making myself feel better. Making light of serious stuff… it occurs to me that that is what God does every single morning when the sun rises.

My most recent sunrise… 2016

You may be aware if you have read about me making light of my raging hoarding disorder that not only do I collect things that normal people don’t keep massive quantities of, but I also collect photos I have taken of sunrises I have seen. As I woke this morning with an ache in my chest I really should see the doctor about again (I have seen a cardiologist twice in the last five years about the same nagging pain, and the best they can tell me is that it might be an arthritis pain in my lower rib cage) I thought melancholy thoughts again about my personal end of days. One of the reasons I continue to collect sunrises is to celebrate the fact that I am still here, still witnessing God making light of the serious universe. I really think that may be the most important thing in life… to live, and love, and laugh… to experience existence. I am a tiny little creature on one small blue planet in a vast and seemingly never-ending ocean of space and stars. The iron in my blood was forged in the centers of distant stars that were born, grew old and died, and littered the universe with their element-rich guts when they finally exploded in an amazing super-nova of stellar fart-gas that it is possible no living intelligent being ever witnessed. I am insignificant. And the universe will not miss me when I am gone. And it may not even know I was ever here. But I am here to see the sun come up. That is a duty I continue to perform.

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I know it may look like I am endlessly snapping the same picture over and over again. But every day the subtle pinks and purples and blues… the oranges and reds… make a different Jackson Pollack painting of the sky. And I look at it carefully while the dog is impatiently tugging at the end of the leash because she wants to go piddie-paw and poo. It is a beauty to be bathed in… and I apparently have earned one more to add to my collection.

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Filed under foolishness, humor, illness, philosophy, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized

Tagged as humor, mortality, paffooney, photo collections, still living and watching the sky, sunrises

February 15, 2016 · 5:36 pm

Down and Blue

Life for me has always been a struggle with poor health and depression, ill fortune and difficult circumstances. I have always been a “make lemonade” sort of life-gives-you-lemons problem-solver, but the more I make lemonade, the more my sorry old puss gets puckered. I am having chest pains and breathing problems again. I don’t have money for doctor’s visit co-pays and medication. My car is in the shop with more than $6,000 dollars worth of damages, hit by a passing motorist going too fast while it was parked outside my house. Insurance is probably not going to pay that much to fix a five-year-old car. My family in Iowa have recently been buried under huge snowdrifts. And the grim reaper has been knocking on my bedroom door asking if I want to play a game of chess.

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But I will tag this post as humor. Because, ironically, humor is not always funny. Sometimes it has the sour puckering effect of lemonade with too little sugar in the mix. When you have worked hard all your life for very little reward, it’s hard to appreciate the tiny amounts of sugar you have been allotted. I see myself ending much the way Mother Mendocino ended, except the community will not even hear about my passing.

My Jester

The more I sing songs, and rattle the boards, and try to make my puppets dance, the more arthritis crabs up my fingers and makes me ache. Sometimes happy simply comes hard. But self-pity is easy. And I am a pratfall clown most of the time. I use my injuries to make others laugh. And there is still magic to be found here and there in my art. Today’s paffoonies were all culled from my Postable Paffooney file. They are all old artworks of which I am pathetically proud.

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Pathos is a part of humor too, you know. You tell a story about someone whose been on a lonely journey, and he finally gets to come home to the ones he loves, and you smile at the end of that. If you laughed at the clown for falling down, you smiled too when he got up again. After all, he wasn’t hurt. In many ways we are all made of spoof and rubber, and while the bullets don’t bounce off, we are more like Superman than we think. There is definitely wisdom buried somewhere in this pile of old quilts I am calling an essay today. I just wish I had the words to make it clearer than I do in this poor excuse for a paragraph.

Cool School Blue

My sister reads posts like this and tells me they are too depressing, that I need to write happier stuff. But don’t worry the way she does. I do spend a lot of time writing about the low spots. But I would like to point out that most of the time I am climbing out of holes. So I may start the essay in a very low place, but the direction I am going is always up.

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Now I have said my 500 words for today, and while I still need bed-rest… there is no doubt the sun will come up again.

10 Comments

Filed under Depression, healing, health, humor, Paffooney, philosophy, Uncategorized

Tagged as artwork, coping skills, depression, feeling blue, goofiness, humor, illness, metaphors, pathos

February 3, 2016 · 4:03 pm

Gingerbread Recipes for the Future

I have been suffering through bad day after bad day recently. I had a fender bender. My favorite football team got plowed into the turf in the playoffs. I have been suffering a great deal from weather-induced arthritis pain, low blood sugar, and viral infections. And I even reached the download limit on my WordPress account, meaning I will have to pay more money to post new pictures.

But this blog is percolating along at 30 views per day or more. I am being read and exposed to the light more than I ever have in my whole writing life. That doesn’t earn me a penny, in fact, it costs me money, but it has to be a very good thing. I deal with pain and hardship through creativity. I create things to make it better.

When I was a kid, there was a little old German lady that lived in our little town. She had a tattoo on her forearm. She had been in a concentration camp in Poland in the 1940’s. But , living as an Iowan, she was the most cheerful and loving old lady I knew. She gave me chocolate bars for holding the door open for her at the Methodist church. She gave homemade cookies to all the kids constantly. She did not have any children of her own for very sad reasons that no one ever talked about. She loved it when children visited her at her little tar-paper-covered house that we nicknamed “the Gingerbread House”. I vividly remember being there one cold winter night after choir practice when she gave us gingerbread cookies and hot chocolate. She told us on that snowy winter evening, “Gingerbread makes everything better.”

I have to believe that philosophy is essentially correct. My stories are like gingerbread. If I cook them just right, they will have that good ginger taste that soothes all hurts and longings. So, I started putting together a story in honor of her. She is already a character in several of my stories. But I needed one where Grandma Gretel was the main character. And it has to be about baking gingerbread and telling stories. In fact, I think I will bake a little magic into it. The gingerbread men she bakes will actually come to life. And I will put together a theme about overcoming the darkness with a smile and wink and a recipe for gingerbread.

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Filed under 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion, autobiography, battling depression, humor, Paffooney, philosophy, Uncategorized

Tagged as cherished memories, comfort food, compassion, gingerbread, gingerbread house, humor, love of children, novel writing, story-telling

Category Archives: philosophy

Apple Blossoms Return to Texas

Skyscape

Spring Break Colored Blue

The Beasts of Armeggedon

The Cowboy Code

Left is Right

Life Inside

A Growing Collection of Sunrises

Down and Blue

Gingerbread Recipes for the Future

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