Category Archives: photo paffoonies

January 25, 2022 · 2:22 pm

Sanctuary

This is my library, the place where I keep my books. It is also a place for my doll collection and the Dungeons and Dragons game that I’ve been playing with my kids for more than a decade. It is a place to read and think and… oh, yeah, there’s an X-Box also. Well, that’s one way to get the kids to spend time there too.

I do realize what a jumbled mess it is. The shelves are all cheap Walmart kits that I built myself. Some have been damaged over time and travel. I have rebuilt them, restocked them, and rearranged them time and again.

This reading nook is currently being used to display parts of my Captain Action collection. The Captain America costume on the left is my original property from Christmas 1967. The Steve Canyon costume next to it is an E-bay purchase and a rare find from a decade ago. Aquaman is a combination. The mask, trident,conch horn, and swim fins are from my original set from Christmas 1966. The suit itself had to be replaced from E-Bay because I played with it until it was no more than a mass of frayed thread. The gloves come from a innovative toy company called Classic Plastick run by Wes McCue. http://classicplastick.proboards.com/ You may notice cups and junk left by kids in my library. Cheetos wrappers from food that my daughter the Princess loves are often found crammed in between the books.

This alcove is where I store my customized Star Wars’ Twi’leck Barbie which I made myself with acrylic paint, Sculpey plasticine, exacto-knife, and Crazy Glue. It also is where I store my antique book collection, some of which are a hundred years old or more. (I have books from my Grandparents’ libraries as well as some from my own childhood.)

Let me show you the Star Wars shelf. (It is not big enough for all my twelve-inch Star Wars action figures, but… oh, well.

Here is the back side of the shelf. (How did topless Mermaid Barbie get in there?)

I also have a corner for the X-Box and the TV it is attached to. (But Dr. Evil is holding it hostage at this writing.)

And finally, let me bore you with the fact that the small upstairs bedroom that is now the library does not have enough room to contain all my books. The library also fills up the upstairs hall and large portion of my bedroom/studio.

It has been said that my library is as cluttered as my mind is. But don’t you believe it. My inner world makes this manifestation in the outer world look Spartan by comparison.

Leave a comment

Filed under autobiography, doll collecting, Paffooney, photo paffoonies

Tagged as action figures, autobiography, book collecting, books, doll collecting, goofiness, library, library tour, photo Paffooney

January 16, 2022 · 2:43 pm

What You Should Know About Filipino Families

Not everyone pictured in this post is actually a family member by marriage, but my wife has a big family and everyone who is even remotely related to a Filipino family… or even imagines that they are… is family.

I am about as much of a white-guy WASP-type as you can find in Middle America, having grown up in Iowa and teaching for my entire career in Texas. But I know a thing or two… or three about other cultures. I taught in South Texas for 23 years with students who were over 85% Spanish-speaking. And then, in 1995, I married into the Pinoy culture of the Philippine Islands.

Me and my Filipino-American familia… circa 2003.

There are some things I have learned about this other culture that you should probably be aware of.

#1. The United States is being invaded and colonized by the Philippines. They are coming here in waves, getting jobs in education and medicine that not enough of home-grown America are willing to take up. My wife came here with a placement company as a teacher. Three of her group of Filipino teachers landed in our little Cotulla school district. When she got here, she was met by her cousin and her cousin’s family. There was a Filipina woman and her young son in the Valley that also took an interest in helping her get settled in Texas. All of these people… and all of their friends and relatives are still a part of our lives. My wife’s sister and her family lived in California where dozens of cousins also lived. They and my wife’s parents have since moved to Texas, along with two other sisters and their families. You get the idea. They are taking over.

6180_1137185823650_1047484302_30377205_5910729_n

Pictures of photogenic nieces aid my blogging popularity in a rather noticeable way.

16203_810004402380430_7920792609813520717_n

7499_1663348133953699_2177344199468661634_n

17861_1252288587394_1234893830_30687202_F453239_n

#2. As you can see, Filipinos love to take pictures. Above is a picture from class where my niece goes to school back in Floridablanca in the Philippines. People complain about pictures of food on Facebook. My Filipino family puts the Food Network to shame. Sometimes I can’t tell if they are eating another exotic Filipino dish with rice and meat or they’ve been putting firecrackers into fish and exploding them. And the fish eyes are a delicacy. Eeuw! My sisters in Iowa won’t even let me talk about the food at Filipino gatherings. I have to be extremely careful of what I share on Facebook.

1013267_10201161984785458_2113452340_n #3. To know about Filipino culture, you have to understand what Jollibee is all about. Jollibee is the Filipino MacDonald’s. Of course, it is cheaper… and better tasting. There are a few of them around the country here. California has more than Texas. They are like a giant Filipino magnet. You go there to find the Filipino community in any American city. But other people love the food too. You have to sort the Filipinos from the Hispanics and white folks that are not too proud to eat cheap and delicious.

1383526_578968342150705_1648068876_n

Well, those are only about three things that you should probably know about Filipinos and Pinoy culture. I haven’t even gotten into the thing about Matrilineal social orders or the evils of Karaoke addiction… but enough is enough for one day. I have no idea how much trouble I am now in for revealing cultural secrets. It could be a long cold night in the dog house.

6 Comments

Filed under autobiography, family, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as family, Filipinos, humor, invaders, photo Paffooney, Pinoy culture

December 22, 2021 · 6:03 pm

Holiday Happinesses

This holiday season has not been all blues and depression as I have probably been sounding like in this blog this week.

It is true that the still-progressing pandemic has been rather hard and grueling on me and mine. Since it began I have lost both parents, though neither caught the disease itself, and the impacts on funerals and family support of each other has been difficult. I also lost a cousin, two friends from high school, and possibly an uncle on the Beyer side that we haven’t heard from since before it all started (his surviving children and their families don’t have our contact information, and we don’t have theirs.)

But it never pays to only put the dark things on the scale, and ignore the side where happiness goes.

I have had a lot of good gingerbread to eat, and , ooh, boy! Pumpkin pie!

I got to see Spiderman, No Way Home with my kids in the theater. And I got to see the whole Hawkeye series on Disney +.

Both of those stories were epic and made my comic-book-loving heart warm and happy.

I have become a third-part owner of the family farm in Iowa, the farm where my Grandma and Grandpa Aldrich lived when I was a child and spent a considerable part of every Thanksgiving week and every Christmas week there I and my two sisters successfully bought our brother’s share, and the farm will continue to be a part of our family into the future. The older of my two sisters is now living on the place and managing the farm, though a renter actually grows things on the farm.

My mother’s final Christmas gift turned out to be an inheritance large enough to pay off property taxes and finish off my Chapter 13 bankruptcy. I was also able to replace my failing computer and old cell phone.

So, of the three Christmas ghosts, the Ghost of Christmas Future might be the most welcoming ghost of them all.

2 Comments

Filed under autobiography, battling depression, family, farm boy, gingerbread, humor, photo paffoonies

December 17, 2021 · 2:26 pm

The Gingerbread Train

I had been promising my daughter for a while that we would build the gingerbread train. I was looking forward to it as an art project. She was impatient to eat it. So, on December 27th, I was finally feeling well enough to do the deed.

So, we prepared the work space on the kitchen table. We laid out the items that we could use for assembly. I made my daughter promise to stop eating elements of the train before we could actually put it together.

I started decorating the Christmas trees that go into the baggage car. My daughter ate several of the sugar-ball decorations.

The baggage car was assembled first. I call it the baggage car because even though it is in the tender position for a steam train if we called it that, that would mean that the engine burned Christmas trees instead of coal. My daughter snuck a few more decorations as we argued about that.

It was encouraging that the first part came together without looking too incredibly terrible.

My daughter decorated a majority of the engine and only ate a few more of the decorations while doing it. This was no small thing given how much she loves to eat gumdrops.

It ended up looking vaguely like the picture on the box. We had a great deal of fun making it. And the last time I checked, portions of it still were uneaten… something I am confident won’t be the case for much longer.

4 Comments

Filed under artwork, family, homely art, Paffooney, photo paffoonies

December 15, 2021 · 8:31 pm

Gingerbread Houses 2021

Since the holiday tradition of the Beyer family gingerbread house got derailed by the pandemic last year, this year we did two. Team 1 led by my future daughter-in-law took on the gingerbread castle. Team 2, the pre-built gingerbread house was led by my daughter the Princess (and she did all the work.)

Materials were laid out. Decoration bottles and construction frosting was opened. Squeeze bags that had to be filled were filled and the nozzles were opened.

My daughter used her art talent on the house to turn it into the snowman’s house. One snowman accidentally became a pirate.

The castle was built and ready to start decorating like heck to catch up.

The pirate eye patch turned out to be the Venom symbiote.

The snowman named Ron, the home-owner made of icing, was all melty with sadness over the Venom on the roof.

But the Princess focussed on other details, vowing to fix things later.

The other side started to look better.

The castle was trying to catch up. My son’s art skills helped a bit.

Ron was definitely happier about his house. See him smiling? No? Neither do I, actually. But the Princess declared him elated.

Voila! The finished and fixed snowman house. Ron s sitting there happily in his socks and funky tie.

The castle is gloriously done also. That only left demolition and as much gingerbread-eating as we could manage. To be fair, we had two gingerbread domiciles to consume, and only six of us to do the eating, with at least four of us on diets that don’t allow that much sugar all at once.

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, gingerbread, humor, photo paffoonies

December 13, 2021 · 3:02 pm

Finding My Voice

As Big MacIntosh welcomes more little ponies into my insanely large doll collection, I have been reading my published novel Snow Babies. The novel is written in third person viewpoint with a single focus character for each scene. But because the story is about a whole community surviving a blizzard with multiple story lines criss-crossing and converging only to diverge and dance away from each other again, the focus character varies from scene to scene.

Big MacIntosh finds himself to be the leader of a new group of My Little Ponies.

In Canto Two, Valerie Clarke, the central main character of the story, is the focus character. Any and all thoughts suggested by the narrative occur only in Valerie’s pretty little head. Canto Three is focused through the mind of Trailways bus driver Ed Grosland. Canto Four focuses on Sheriff’s Deputy Cliff Baily. And so, on it goes through a multitude of different heads, some heroic, some wise, some idiotic, and some mildly insane. Because it is a comedy about orphans freezing to death, some of the focus characters are even thinking at the reader through frozen brains.

The ponies decide to visit Minnie Mouse’s recycled Barbie Dreamhouse where Olaf the Snowman is the acting butler.

That kind of fractured character focus threatens to turn me schizophrenic. I enjoy thinking like varied characters and changing it up, but the more I write, the more the characters become like me, and the more I become them. How exactly do you manage a humorous narrative voice when you are constantly becoming someone else and morphing the way you talk to fit different people? Especially when some of your characters are stupid people with limited vocabularies and limited understanding?

The ponies are invited to live upstairs with the evil rabbit, Pokemon, and Minions.

I did an entire novel, Superchicken, in third person viewpoint with one focus character, Edward-Andrew Campbell, the Superchicken himself. That is considerably less schizophrenic than the other book. But it is still telling a story in my voice with my penchant for big words, metaphors, and exaggerations.

The novel I am working on in rough draft manuscript form right now, The Baby Werewolf, is done entirely in first person point of view. That is even more of an exercise of losing yourself inside the head of a character who is not you. One of the first person narrators is a girl, and one is a werewolf. So, I have really had to stretch my writing ability to make myself into someone else multiple times.

I assure you, I am working hard to find a proper voice with which to share my personal wit and wisdom with the world. But if the men in white coats come to lock me away in a loony bin somewhere, it won’t be because I am playing a lot with My Little Ponies.

My best novel is free to own in ebook form for today and tomorrow. Buy it now with the link above. The offer is good until the end of the day on 12/14/2021.

Leave a comment

Filed under commentary, goofiness, humor, insight, NOVEL WRITING, photo paffoonies, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor

Tagged as My Little Pony, Snow Babies

December 12, 2021 · 4:16 pm

“Mickey, What’s Wrong With You?”

Yes, I am trying to answer that old question that old girlfriends used to ask me back when they were young and I was young and too stupid to answer honestly. You know, the question always asked right before they tell you, “Why don’t we just be friends and leave it at that.”

After having spent my Christmas money from Mom on an 18-inch giant gorilla action figure of Kong on Skull Island to terrorize all the dolls on the Barbie Shelf after midnight when all the dolls secretly come to life, I feel more prepared than ever before to answer that particular question.

I am not in my second childhood. I am still in my first one. Yes, I reached the ripe old age of 12 and then Peter Pan Syndrome set in bigtime. On the inside, I will always be 12 years old. I still, at 61, play games and play with toys. I never really grew up.

The_mane_six_by_brightrai-d4ha5ye

I am not a Brony, but I am still buying My Little Pony dolls, and can name all six of the main characters. From left to right, Fluttershy, Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Apple Jack, Rainbow Dash, and Twilight Sparkle. And yes, I have watched the cartoon show and like it, but am still not a Brony, okay? There are a lot of things wrong with me, but I am not that bad! My kids, however, are embarrassed to be seen with me when I am shopping for toys at Walmart, Toys-R-Us, or Goodwill.

trainscene

I still play with the HO scale model trains that I have owned and collected since the first year I was actually twelve. I would love to get them running again. The Snowflake Special and the Toonerville Trolley seen in the picture both still ran the last time I tested them four years ago. I still love to paint buildings and HO scale people to live in my little train town. I am still working on a set of townspeople that I bought back in 1994. German villagers circa 1880.

20171213_124720

I have always been fascinated by imaginary places and the people who live in them. Especially imaginary places in the fiction of the past. Places like the castle of Minas Tirith in the realm of Gondor in Middle Earth, and like Pellucidar that David Innes and Abner Perry discovered at the Earth’s Core in their boring machine called “the Prospector”as part of the Pellucidar series created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan novels. So, another thing wrong with me is that I live mostly in the past and entirely in the worlds of my imagination. I have very little to do with the so-called “real world”.

trainfolks

So, to sum up, the things wrong with Mickey are; A. He’s a goofy old child. B. He still plays with toys. C. He likes girly stuff. D. He confuses fantasy with reality. No wonder the girls used to run away screaming. And I haven’t even added the part about Mickey thinking he is a nudist now and walking around the house naked when no one else is home and forced to see the full horror of it.

But maybe you should think on it for a moment more. What if the things that are wrong with Mickey are actually good things? What if he’s found the secret to long life and happiness in spite of a world full of troubles and illnesses and blechy stuff? It could be true…

6 Comments

Filed under action figures, collecting, commentary, doll collecting, goofy thoughts, humor, photo paffoonies, strange and wonderful ideas about life

November 29, 2021 · 12:52 pm

Olfactory Story Telling

My dog Jade

While walking the dog yesterday, we struck up a conversation about writing and being a writer that proved once and for all that DOGS REALLY DON’T KNOW HOW TO WRITE!

She turned around on the end of her leash and looked at me with that woeful you-don’t-feed-me-enough look on her little well-fed face. “You know, I was reading your blog today, and I think I know how to make you a well-known writer and best-selling author.”

“Oh, really?” I said. “Since when do you know anything about being a writer or marketing fiction?”

“Well, you do remember that I wrote a couple of blog posts for you already.”

“True. But I can’t afford to do that again. You type with your tongue and it leaves the keyboard all sticky. I haven’t gotten it truly clean and working properly again since that last time. If you are asking to write another post, you can forget it.”

“Well, sorry about that. But I do think I know how to make your writing more popular with a bigger audience.”.

“Oh? How could you possibly know that?”

“Hey, talking dog here! That has to count for something, doesn’t it? Don’t you think people would be amazed to learn about things from a dog’s perspective?”

15895039_1378412102217918_6555632764506710572_n

“Nobody’s going to believe I have a talking dog. That isn’t something within the realm of what is normal. They are all going to think I am just a crazy old man.”

“Well, you are a crazy old man. I can’t help that. But what if you told stories from a dog’s perspective? You know, things that only a dog could’ve come up with?”

“Oh, like what, for instance?”

Why does the neighbor’s dog always smell like burritos?

“Well, you know that more than half of what a dog perceives about the world she gets through her sense of smell?”

“Okay…”

“Like that spot on the grass over there. Boy dog. Handsome border collie… ate three hotdogs about four days ago. Ooh! He smells perfect!”

“You’re talking about poop smells again, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes. But I can also tell you about the pigeons that were in that live oak tree there yesterday.”

“Oh? What color were they?”

“I don’t know… gray maybe?”

“Bird doo. You are smelling old bird poop! You want me to write about poop more?”

“Well, no… not exactly. But if you could tell your stories through the sense of smell more… that would be unique and different. People would like that a lot because it’s never really been done before.”

“You do understand that I can’t use my laptop to write smells? There are no words I could use that will automatically put smells into the reader’s nose.”

“Well, but if you could invent one…”

“According to you, it would be mostly poop smells anyway. Who wants to sniff that?”

“It would make your blog more popular with dogs.”

“But dogs don’t read!”

“How do you know for sure? You believed me when I said I read your blog today.”

“Well, you certainly got me there. Now, don’t we have some important business to take care of?”

“Yes, but… You see that squirrel over there?”

“Yes, so?”

“So one day soon, I’m gonna eat him!”

spudsmackenzieandbudlightandladies

Leave a comment

Filed under family dog, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, photo paffoonies, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor

Tagged as family dog, humor, new kinds of story telling, poop smells, talking dogs

November 25, 2021 · 5:04 pm

More Fairy Nonsense

Yes, in writing a story about fairies set in Fairyland, I am starting to see fairies everywhere. And I am sorta doing that to myself. Here is yesterday’s art project.

Pen and ink and paper, pasted on cardboard, with colored pencils.

Using Stacy and Ricky, dolls, scissors, glue, all things I already have plenty of.

Stacysparkle

Rickyflutter

They meet and share some Pixie Dust.

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, doll collecting, fairies, goofiness, humor, photo paffoonies

November 18, 2021 · 12:57 pm

Novel Nudists

I have known nudists for a long time, since the 1980’s in fact. I have recently dabbled my toes in the cold waters of being a nudist myself. I did work on pool cracks this past summer while naked. I made one visit to a nudist park and actually got naked in front of strangers who were also naked. It is a certain kind of crazy connection to nature, my self, and the bare selves of others to be a nudist, even if it is for only a few hours. I used to think nudists were crazy people. But I have begun to understand in ways that are hard to understand. And being a novelist, that was bound to creep into the piles of supposedly wise understanding that goes into the creation of novels. I say “supposedly wise” because wisdom is simply the lipstick on the pig of ridiculous human experiences.

The Cobble family appeared first in my novel, Superchicken. It is a semi-autobiographical novel that uses some of my real life experiences and the real life experiences of boys I either grew up with or taught, mixed in with bizarre fantasy adventures that came from my perceptions of life as an adult. So the Cobble family really represent my encounters with nudism and the semi-sane people known as nudists. Particularly important to the story are the Cobble Sisters, twins Sherry and Shelly, who fully embrace the idea of being nudists and try to get other characters to not only approve of the behavior, but share in it. Sherry is the more forward of the two, more willing to be seen naked by the boys in her school and in her little Iowa farm town. Shelly is the quieter of the two, a bit more shy and a lot more focused on the love of one particular boy.

In fact, the Cobble Sisters are based on real life twin blond girls from my recollections of the past. The Cobble farm is out along the Iowa River and just north of Highway Three in Iowa. It is a real place where real twin girls lived when I was a boy. They were blond and pretty and outgoing. But they were not actually nudists. There was another pair of twin blond girls from my first two years of teaching who actually provided the somewhat aggressively sensual personalities of the Cobble Sisters. The real nudists I knew were mostly in Texas.

The sisters appear in more than one of the novels I have written or am in the process of writing. They appear for the second time in the novel Recipes for Gingerbread Children which I finished writing in 2016. They are also a part of the novel I am working on now, The Baby Werewolf. That last is probably the main reason they are on my mind this morning. Writing a humorous horror story about werewolves, nudists, pornographers, and real wolves is a lot more complex and difficult than it sounds. But it is hopefully doable. And my nudist characters are all basically representative of the idea that all honest and straight-forward people are metaphorically naked all the time. That’s the thing about those nudist twins. They don’t hide anything. Not their most private bits, and certainly not what they are thinking at any given time.

So as I continue to struggle with revealing myself as a writer… and possibly as a nudist as well, I will count on the Cobble Sisters to make certain important points about life and love and laughter… and how you can have all three while walking around naked.