Category Archives: photo paffoonies
Cardboard Castle Art
Now is the Winter of Our Discontent…
I am not Richard the Third. But I did do that soliloquy in college for my class in oral interpretation and got an “A” for it. I can channel those who think they have been wronged. I know whereof they speak… forsooth.
If you are not happy with the President’s handling of the pandemic and economic crisis, (and if you are happy, I hope your recent lobotomy is giving you some peace and rest) you are not alone. The Sun of York has not been the right answer.
I am not, however, a dissembler like Richard. I have no plot to remedy the discontent. I can only tell the truth. I will probably die of the virus before this pandemic passes. I honestly do not fear death. I do fear for loved ones who are also at risk. But while I do not welcome death, it will not find me with any sort of burden of regret. I have been an honorable man. I have taught children, and acquitted myself well of the task. I have been a passable husband and father. I have committed serious acts of art… as well as numerous less-than-serious ones. This is not a suicide note. This is simply me declaring myself at peace with the universe.
And this is also me declaring that I once again am unwell. I don’t think it is the virus. I have been extremely careful. But this one stalks more successfully than the H1N1 and various bird flus that I have previously survived. And I always seem to get whatever serious virus is passing around.
Still, it is probably not the Coronavirus that currently has me sick and in bed. No fever. Only chest pain, headaches, and nausea. I also have a variety of other pains, mostly psoriasis in nature, but also some other internal ones. I could be suffering from prostate cancer, heart disease, or mini-strokes brought on by diabetes. My eyes are going bad. And I am not going to any doctors because of the risk of infection in the doctor’s office and the expenses that health insurance expects me to pay for myself. (I hope this pandemic eats all of Aetna’s lunches for the rest of the year.) There are plenty of ways that this current health crisis can do me in. I will endeavor to die at home on my own terms. And I will try to stay alive long enough to vote the bast***s out of office.
I apologize that Mickey wasn’t funny today. Sometimes he needs to complain a little. Even Richard the Third was down and blue in between villainies. And he ended on one really bad day at Bosworth Field.
Filed under angry rant, autobiography, Depression, health, humor, photo paffoonies
Funky Friday Fun
I used to work for a principal who would come on the morning announcements every day to welcome us to school with another anomalous and annoying alliteration. We had numerous Magnificent Mondays, Terrific Tuesdays, and Wonderful Wednesdays. Thursdays were harder. And Friday was usually Fun. See, I think I ironically proved I can do it too, if not better.
It has been my goal to set Friday posts aside as days to either be funny or to tell stories about being a school teacher… or, quite naturally, both at once.
But ironically, Trump and Pence have made it extra difficult not to talk about politics. One has been so blatantly idiotic in his quasi-fourth-grade-intellectual pumpkinheaded blathering. While the other has been robotically ignorant, heartless, and unmindful. Not wearing masks in hospital visits? Recommending injecting cleaning fluid? I can’t even be ironically funny by throwing flat irons and curling irons at them, since those would just bounce off the walls of the house I am confined to.
But, even though the Bughead Boys are making original humorous thinking difficult, there are things that make me happy. I qualified and signed up to be a substitute teacher again if a new school year ever happens. They are pleased enough with my performance to make that a reality for me today. And I do love teaching, though each year of it is increasingly difficult physically. I just have to eat more spinach, keep talkin’ loik Popeye, and try not to die of Coronavirus.
And I have not yet gotten any kind of stimulus check from the gubbermint even though I know people who have. But I am happy that, for this month at least, the State of Texas is not yet bankrupt and ready, with Mitch McConnell’s permission, to cancel all future pension payments.
So, if I can’t be all that funny today, at least I got a chance to complain. And I didn’t even manage to squeeze out any jokes about slave-girls, even though there is a definite slave-girl thing going on in the illustrations today.
Filed under doll collecting, humor, photo paffoonies
The Words Unwinding
Stuck in the house all day with no outside activities to distract me, and limited socialization with the other denizens imprisoned in the house with me is more-or-less the perfect thing for a fiction writer with cancer of the imagination glands.
I have plenty of people to talk to, since , in this situation, imaginary people count too. And there is no end to the things I can talk about since ideas keep welling up in my head, even if many of them are totally silly ideas, and the rest are probably evil.
It helps to have a talking dog. Though my kids would argue that Jade isn’t really talking, that I am, instead, merely interpreting things I think she should be saying as if it were real speech. She does talk an awful lot about different kinds of meat and the moral imperatives of allowing your dog to eat people food. But I think it is only proper to commit to writing those things she says when we’re alone together, because, after all… a possible talking dog?
But imagination is one of those things that sets people… I mean, human people, apart from all other life forms that we know. Imagination makes the man. What would we have made of ourselves and our world if we didn’t have it? Would we have invented the wheel? Fire? Term life insurance? I think not.
I may, in fact, be going a little stir crazy in the old hovel while trying like heck to avoid death by Coronavirus. I am easily as frayed around the edges as any hopeless hobo, with even my beard-trimming growing wildly erratic. Soon I may have to tell the imaginary people who surround me and question everything about me that it is not a beard any more. Rather, it is either a crocheted hippie neck-warmer rather than a beard, or maybe it has become a furred, frilly collar on my shirt like Shakespeare probably wore for the premiere of King Lear.
No, I am not going stir-crazy, or even a little bit insane. I am just letting the words unwind as they fill me up and demand to be unreeled in order to prevent an explosion in the brain.
Filed under being alone, goofiness, humor, photo paffoonies, surrealism
Art Day with Gingerbread
The Coronavirus Isolation has put a lot of new limitations on our lives. But, I happened to have an unused Gingerbread House kit. So, for Art Day, the Princess and I decided to put it all together with supplies we already had on hand. Here, then, is the Beyer Family Gingerbread House 2020.
But, it wasn’t a total disaster. We can use our inherent craftiness to rescue it at least a little bit from total wicked-witch-housiness. Though I am sure Hansel and Gretel would still eat it.
Filed under art my Grandpa loved, artwork, family, gingerbread, homely art, humor, photo paffoonies
Art Day – Book-shelf Town
Filed under artwork, humor, photo paffoonies, playing with toys
GingerBread-o-Palooza 2019
Every Christmas break for the last four years has seen us put together a decorated gingerbread house. It was always a way to spend quality time with my kids and come up with a semi-artistical product that I could take pictures of and then eat. But this year, in addition to the gingerbread house kit purchased at Walmart, my fancy was struck by the gingerbread ninja cookie kit for sale cheaply at Aldi’s.
Because our cook-stove is gradually dying of electrical-baking-cancer, we had to move the cookie baking to my son’s apartment with a brand new oven and range. While gingerbread house kits come pre-baked and assembly-ready, gingerbread ninjas tested my limited cookie-baking skills. And believe me, though the Princess gamely tried to help, we did not bake ninjas like pros.
So, due to our negative levels of baking skill, the cookies came out looking not so much like dangerous ninjas as they did like seriously deformed mutants and bomb-blast victims. And it didn’t help that we could not make the white outliner frosting. It came in powder form and you were supposed to add powdered sugar and water to it. Powdered sugar was the one ingredient totally forgotten. Saving the beauty of artlessly-created cookies was left up to our skills applying cherry and chocolate frosting with butter knives and decorating with colored sugar beads. The cherry frosting made the cookie people into nudists rather than ninjas. And trying to make frowny faces with beads led to gingerbread men looking like they had multi-eyed spider heads instead of angry expressions. The chocolate ninjas turned out to look like forest-fire-blackened wilted Christmas trees. So, I ornamented most of them accordingly.
I had intended to end this article by interviewing one of the surviving chocolate-covered gingerbread ninjas. But when we started talking, he just got angrier and angrier about my lack of cookie-making skills. It started with insults and devolved into threats.
So, I ate him!
Filed under artwork, gingerbread, goofiness, humor, photo paffoonies
Photoshopping Art
As I get older and older and more arthritic, it has been a real boon to me that I can use actual photos in artwork to electronically complete visions of what an artwork should look like even though I no longer have the digital dexterity necessary to execute complex and detailed backgrounds.
Filed under artwork, drawing, photo paffoonies
Everything That’s Wrong
As old Mickey has been watching the Impeachment Inquiry, he began thinking about making a naughty or nice list. Ooh! The naughty side is huge!
I really don’t need to talk about the Impeachment itself. I knew the Pumpkin-head President was guilty before I knew what the crime was. He has routinely done the most horrible thing possible, and everybody wants to see him removed except for those deplorable Tea-Bagger types who are positively giddy about the pain he inflicts on Democrats, liberals, immigrants, school teachers, poor people, and highly intelligent people whom they also hate and want to gleefully continue to punish for the crime of being alive.
So, who was on the naughty list? Without a doubt the Great Trumpkin Pumpkin-head President heads the list. He cheats to win elections and colludes with Russians to do this. Robert Mueller investigated and came up with enough evidence that the Presidentsy-foo was covering things up and interfered with the investigation to the point that he had to be guilty. You don’t obstruct investigations like that if you are innocent.
The naughty list includes toxic leprechaun and budget-buzzard, Mick Mulvaney. He who cuts budgets to the bone to kill Meals on Wheels, starve grannies, and then gives that money to rich guys in massive tax breaks.
It also includes Steven Miller, the nephew of Dracula, who single-handedly sucked all the blood, hopes, and dreams out of DACA kids and other worthy immigrants whom he personally hates and wishes to deport over the protest of everybody else. He also thinks asylum-seekers need to give him their children to put in cages, and then intentionally loses the lists of them and who they belong to.
The naughty list has to include all those who enabled the President to do horrible things to good people, especially government Republicans who didn’t actually resign their positions in disgust and leave the rest to help the Great Orange Face to get away with any and all crimes
The single most important factor in putting these dark elves on the naughty list is Greed. Too many of the naughty-listers care about no one but themselves. It doesn’t matter to them what happens to others, especially others that are different than themselves ( a different color, a different sexual orientation, a different language-speaker, a different way of looking at the world, and often, every difference that makes another person not the same person as them). They are okay with depriving those others of wealth and ease, respect, dignity, and even those things necessary to stay alive.
I even need to include on the naughty list the dreaded Pink-Hat Bandit. That notorious stealer of hot-dogs and random pieces of bread from the fanily dinner table also poops out that food in the house when she is done with it, especially if it is too wet or cold outside to go pee and poo outdoors.
So, who, then, is left to be on the nice list? Well, we nice-listers tend to forgive everybody and try to see only the good in others. Therefore, if left up to us, everybody taken off the nice list eventually goes back on. It is the primary difference between us and them. We, have to do something different than we usually do. At the very least we need to help the old Pumpkinhead into his nice, comfy prison cell for the rest of his life. But since I am no longer desirous of making that whole gosh-darn naughty list, Mickey does not volunteer to be Mickey Claus. He merely liked the hat and bought it at Walmart.
Catch a Falling Star 
Living on a Shoe String
There was an old man who lived in a shoe.
He had so many expenses, he didn’t know what to do.
Of course, I am not complaining.
Even though it’s a tennis shoe and not a cowboy boot.
I have got an ice cream truck outside. Sponsored by Hot Wheels.
And now that I have a substitute teaching job, I almost have more money than bills… well, some months… maybe.
But I still can’t afford ice cream. Or insulin.
But my neighbor lives in a house made of eggshell. And he has cancer. But he gets visits from the Partridge Family in their funky school bus. It is better to live on a shoe-string budget than an eggshell budget. But we all have our troubles. Which Aetna will never willingly pay for.
Except for the rich guy who lives on Mel Gibson Hill. He has no troubles.
He has plenty of money.
And he is the reason the rest of us are poor.
Because he pays for politicians to give him tax breaks on all that money that never trickles down the hill.
But life is good in Toonerville Town.
Unless that shoestring comes undone.
And then it takes lots more hard work to tie it up again.
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Filed under commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, photo paffoonies, satire