Category Archives: photo paffoonies
Dammit, Betsy!
Filed under cartoons, commentary, education, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Liberal ideas, monsters, photo paffoonies, satire
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?”
“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!”
Stop What You’re Doing and Fix It!
The gate leading to the pool was broken.
The pool itself was broken. See all the cracks?
So the city inspector said, “Fix it or else!”
I had some old boards from the fence I took down. And as an Iowa farm boy, I have skills.
So I fixed it. For less than $20 . New hinges and corner brackets, but I used old nails.
Now, to repair the danged pool my own little self.
Trolls, Wish-niks, and Garden Gnomes
(From left to right) My green-haired Wish-nik from 1966, my teacher troll from 1990, Poppy, and the wizard troll from 1992 (with the garden gnome in the background)
Okay, here is some bad news for a guy who suffers from hoarding disorder, especially when it comes to things like dolls and toys that he can play with while he’s supposed to be trying to be a writer in his burned-out sick-bed retirement. They are making a movie about Trolls at Dreamworks… and there are dolls already on sale.
The city is after me to repair the house and yard on the outside, especially the cracked swimming pool that now only seems to hold bug-water for brewing the next generation of West Nile and Zika squeetoes to bite me and immediately die from the toxic chemicals already in my sick old blood. I need to do more than just put mosquito poison in the water. They say I must have the filter operating and it must be clear enough to see the drain in the bottom of the deep end. Pool repair guy says the crack repair is in the neighborhood of $14,000, which is $16,000 more than I have to spend right now. I’m already not buying medicine any more for my six incurable diseases. I’m also not going to the doctor any more because he will just yell at me for not taking medication anymore… even though I actually feel better not having taken the blood pressure medicine for over a year now. So the plan is to clean and repair the pool myself. This apparently will satisfy the trolls at the city inspector’s office, at least until I die from the cold and rain we seem to be getting now.
But those aren’t the trolls I meant to write about today. I am writing about the little troll doll named Poppy that I bought for $5 yesterday at Walmart. She’s the pink one in the middle of my photo-paffooney. The one that’s not a nudist like the rest of my remaining troll collection. (My daughter, the Princess, played with my troll collection of over 20 troll dolls when she was smaller and decided they all needed hair cuts and make-overs that completely altered them and eventually murdered them when she learned to cut and melt plastic.)
A troll corpse from the garage, murdered by make-up and partially eaten by rats.
So, the movie will feature a number of different trolls, the corresponding toys for which are already on sale in places where I will not be able to help myself from collecting the entire goofy little crew. And I do not have any place for them to live. I had to remove a section of Booggloopenstein Castle just to display the old trolls for a photo-paffooney. They will take over the house. And I know I should be out working on the pool instead of plotting where to put more trolls. But I just can’t help it. There is something irresistible about collecting ugly and goofy toys.
FrightFest in the West
One of the results of the loss of the patriarch of my wife’s family is that all the sisters in this country got together to mourn, and all bought season passes for their families to Six Flags Over Texas, the poor man’s Disney World. I, being of sound mind and decrepit body, didn’t get a vote, as I wasn’t there when they bought tickets on this extended-family plan. In fact, marching around a theme park on my arthritic legs and cane trying to breathe Texas air full of all the pollen and pollutants that have been killing me, didn’t seem like such a good thing. Yesterday I finally got talked into going and activating my already-purchased season pass.
My wife and daughter at the burger restaurant
“We will just go to use our food pass,” my wife said. “We can have dinner there at the park and get some use out of all that money I paid.”
That seemed almost reasonable.
“And if we can’t help but get on a ride or two, you can sit on a bench and watch all the weird and stupid people go by.”
Well, that sold it. So we went. We did notice, however, that the line for food was long and getting longer. Some of the people waiting seemed to have been waiting a very long time.
We finally got to the front of the line and got to pick gourmet cheeseburgers and chili fries because I don’t already have enough heart-clogging cholesterol in my system and needed a lot of greasy saturated fat for a high price. Ah, the joys of eating at a theme park. Long lines, rude people, bad food, and everybody’s patient and happy for the most part because they paid big bucks to get there.
And then, after we had our meal, we soon discovered why the theme park was full of skeletons and being pumped full of noxious chemical artificial fog.
Yes, the Snickers Bars were bigger and scarier than ever.
Now, FrightFest and other celebrations of Halloween probably aren’t the best thing for people who have been associated with Jehovah’s Witnesses for twenty years, but it definitely provided a ton of stuff to see as we fled through the Old West section of the park to avoid zombie jump scares and other holiday nonsense.
Giant spiders were everywhere, just like skeletons.
The toxic artificial smog with spooky lighting made it difficult to get a picture of the giant spiders who seemed to be hanging from every tree and possibly explaining the multitude of skeletons. I didn’t get any pictures of zombies who were actually very young-looking employees in red and gray greasepaint. We were too busy avoiding getting a “gotcha!” which seemed to be the sole purpose of the zombies.
But it was still a theme park. We wound our way through the crowd and made our way out. It was a terrible mistake. But we had fun.
Filed under autobiography, family, horror movie, humor, photo paffoonies
Playing with Dolls
I am still battling headaches, bone pain, and illness. But I am getting by with bed rest. And a bit of playing with dolls.
The hoarding disorder that drives my doll collecting took a hit from Walmart, whose clearance sale shelf offered a slew of Monster High dolls for five dollars or less.
I bought the dragon girl, the mouse girl, the gray cat girl, and the robot girl.
Of course if you play with them, that means taking their clothes off and switching their dresses. Just like a little girl.
Hopefully, I will recover soon, and won’t be a ten year old girl when I do.
Filed under collecting, doll collecting, humor, illness, photo paffoonies
Toonerville Trickshots
Today, in view of ill health and brain pain, I will share with you some of the more picture-intensive thinking going on in my sick old artsy-fartsy brain. Less words equals less headache.
The subject today is Toonerville, the little town that once existed on my HO model train layout, and now lives on my bookshelves and even more-so in my imagination. I have a file of photos I made of it intending to composite them into backgrounds and details in photo-shopped cartoons.
Notice how one building from different angles can look like many different places.
And details can be cropped out so that a building can be placed over a background in a composite image.
Thus a lighted model becomes Bill Freen’s house in Toonerville.
And I have many of these buildings to experiment with.
Sometimes this blithering nonsense can actually be quite fun and productive.
Honestly, I built these things from kits or painted and repainted them decades ago… but they are a part of a place that I still live in.
Morning With Grumpy
I have not been having good days lately. Things go wrong constantly. Things that cost money that I don’t have. I’m a writer, after all. I don’t even have a waving acquaintance with money.
Fire ants bit me on Tuesday. My hands and feet are still plagued with painful, itchy bumps. At the same time the city is telling me how the yard has to be done and the trees have to be trimmed and the pool has to be repaired. If I don’t complete the work and get the pool running again, in spite of the fact I don’t have any money, I face a two-thousand dollar fine, which would be cheaper than fixing the pool, but it would recur every month until I got the pool fixed. Well, welcome back to Debt Town. At least I will have a swimming pool again this winter. And the drive this morning to take the Princess to school was an epic battle with high-speed morons in Bubba-trucks. I made a wrong turn downtown in the rat’s maze that the I-35 construction project has created right next to downtown Carrollton. I had to dodge between people in cars that don’t know how to drive, but drive too fast, kids on foot on that have their heads plugged in, so they don’t hear you coming when they step out in front of you without looking because their eyes are fixed on their phones. We got there five minutes before the tardy bell.
Some mornings I just need a chance to complain. Thanks for listening.
Skyscapes of the Cloudy Mind
I admit it. Even though I collect pictures of sunrises to glory in the fact that I still have another day of life in this world, I rarely snap a picture of the cloudless sunrise. It is very possible that this has something to do with what ultimately gives life value and makes it worthwhile to live one more day.
If there is no pattern, no color-changes, no contrast, no variation… then why bother? And this doesn’t only apply to living your life. It applies to taking pictures of the sky too. Solid blue or solid yellow are about as interesting as a minimalist painting. (Have you ever seen the big beige squares and red squares that fill entire walls of the Dallas Art Museum? Like a picture of a polar bear in a fierce blizzard or an extreme close-up of the side of a tomato.)
Yes, sunshine and happiness are all well and good… but you don’t get a satisfactory skyscape without some clouds in it. In fact, rain clouds provide the most fascinating patterns and colors. What would the picture be without a little drama splashed here and there to make a center of interest or a counterpoint to the happy ending? They say that variety is the spice of life. And when they say that they probably mean cayenne pepper rather parsley or oregano. If that’s not what they mean, then why the hell did we bring food into the discussion?
So, I am thinking, there have to be clouds. (Notice, I said “clouds”, not “clowns”, because… according to the song, there “ought to be clowns”, not “have to be clowns”.)
It is true that clouds can mean sadness… that the rain is coming, that your vision is obscured, that something has come between you and God’s eye. But without clouds, the sky would be plain and boring. Better to burn bright and explode in a short amount of time than to linger over a plain pale blue.
Filed under clowns, commentary, foolishness, humor, photo paffoonies
Catch a Falling Star 
The View From My Little Town
An aerial view of Toonerville in Winter
As immigration officers round up school children and their families blocks from a school in North Carolina, Trump minion Flynn is being accused of violating the Logan Act over discussions with the Russians before Trump took office, and DeVos is being chased away from a Washington middle school by angry protesters who don’t want her sucking the intelligence out the students, I am reminded there are quieter places to go and get away from all the insane noise that is trying to kill us. Thus I head back to Toonerville, my HO scale model train town that has been packed away since we moved to Dallas in 2004. I have laid the downtown and part of the residential area out on a snowfield on the spare bed in my bedroom.
I am reminded, as I revisit Toonerville (with the Toonerville Trolley waiting down front from the train station), that I am a humor writer that writes about small town experiences and the teaching of children. I am imaginative and creative, and I have working strategies for dealing with the stress and insanity caused by all the political baboons doing the politically-charged things that political baboons do baboonishly every baboon day. There are places to go to get away from the Trump Circus’s endless monkey-house of horror.
In Toonerville, none of the clocks keep the correct time and none of them agree what time it is. Certain things are timeless. The village works together to solve its problems. What the wits and twits who chew Red Man tobacco down at Al’s General Store think about politics never leaves the checkerboards in front of the fire place. Mayor Moosewinkle at City Hall has no plans to run for State or Federal office. (Thank God for that, he’s a nut.) And officer Billy Bob Wortle, formerly from Texas, has never shot anybody of any color. The County Sheriff doesn’t even trust him to own bullets for that big old gun of his. As far as executive orders from Washington go, we mostly don’t give a damn.
Down at the Post Office, Mr. Murdoch the postman has never “gone postal” and wouldn’t hurt a fly. He loves to gossip, though. And Mr. Santucci, the hot-headed Italian owner-operator of the Farmer’s Market (who looks just like Santa Claus in the Coke ads, but is one very foul-mouthed Santa at Christmas time) secretly believes that it is the many differences between the various residents of town that keep life interesting. And old Ben Johnson, the town’s only black man, is his very best friend.
It’s a truly good feeling to live in a small town where all the people bicker and throw fits, but no one would every want to throw anyone out of town. People belong together, working for the common good. And it is a rather sad thing if the only place such a town can exist is inside my goofy old head. But if we bicker a little less and throw fits less often on the inside, won’t we be better people on the outside too?
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Filed under artwork, commentary, compassion, goofy thoughts, humor, imagination, insight, inspiration, Paffooney, photo paffoonies, playing with toys, satire, strange and wonderful ideas about life, the road ahead