Category Archives: photo paffoonies

April 1, 2015 · 11:36 am

A Collection of Sunrises

I made the horrible mistake yesterday of revealing the true nature of my hideous mental condition that leads to never-ending collecting of a long list of collections that probably will become a black hole of collecting from its own gravitas and stretch on into infinity. (Yeah. I know… you can see right through my phony over-blown exaggerations that consist mainly of stringing lots of science-y sounding adjectives together. Don’t get all smug about it.)

I did not, however, reveal the newest collection. So today I open my stupid writer mouth and another sacred secret pops out. Since retiring from teaching last June, I have been collecting sunrises.

I know it is a silly, sentimental,, goofy-sort-of self-pitying thing, and I also know that is probably not “normal” from an abnormal psychology viewpoint, but don’t call the loon-catchers just yet. Wait till I reveal my delusional quasi-religious reasons for doing it.

I am retired now from a profession I truly loved. I have a full pension now because Texans Republicans are not completely on their toes about taking benefits away from people who don’t earn them by trading stocks and bonds, running a corporation for maximum profits, or inheriting billions because Daddy did one or both of the previous things for you. They let my pension slip by unaltered on a grandfather clause because I’ve been teaching since a time when education was actually a respected, value-producing industry that rewarded those who did the actual work (This really only occurred in the middle 1990’s when the world was briefly too sane to be Republican.) I can’t do the job any more for crippling health reasons. I am lucky to have a good pension, but not lucky enough to be able to use it for very long. Hence, the interest in sunrises. Every single one is a miracle.

You may have already noticed that most of my sunrises in this collection are taken in the same park. It is where the dog walks me every morning in order to keep my heart pumping. She wants to keep me alive so the food dish keeps getting refilled, and so someone will still be able to bag and dispose of her daily poops. (I swear, that dog is a champion pooper. Three times her own weight in poops every single day.) I also can’t sleep as much as I used to. Five hours a night is about the maximum that arthritis pain, COPD, and diabetes allows me. School trained me to get up early because my last job was a thirty-mile commute one way and classes started at 7:30 a.m. I really began noticing on my morning drive how beautiful city sunrises can be thanks to the colors produced by exotic pollutants.

So, I keep adding to this collection of sunrises because each one is a reminder that a loving God is still being generous with me, and I still get at least one more day. See? I warned you there was crackpot religious sentiment in this post. Now you can call the loony-catchers. But hopefully, they won’t catch me until after sunrise.

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Tagged as collecting, goofiness, humor, philosophy, photo Paffooney, self pity

March 25, 2015 · 12:02 pm

A Maker of Books

For an awfully long time I have been filling blank pages with junk and goofy stuff and saving it in book form. I think it began when I was a Junior in high school. At least, that is the oldest of the homemade books I could find. I fill these handmade and factory-made blank books with stories, drawings, poems, clipped pictures, nonsense, secrets, shamelessly plagiarized gunk, and anything and everything. At 58 and one half years of age, I have been doing this insane thing for a very long time and have quite a pile of it. The above is my Tales of Fantastica, a cartoon journey into my own dreams and personal life.

I believe, based on physical evidence that the first collected writing I have done is in my Journal, Rage. It is called that because I named it after a Dylan Thomas poem in which he “raged against the dying of the light” because he was venting on the subject of his father’s death and the dread of living a life without being allowed to really be alive… to really live. I wanted to write down everything I noticed about being alive… my hopes, my fears, my dreams as fully as I could remember them… and it became, over time, quite ripe and fertile, as stored garbage usually will. I was able to use it as a source for other stuff. I have at least nine volumes of this journal composed over a period of twenty-some years… before I started depositing my daily dose of words and interior monologues in other places.

My old drawing notebook goes all the way back to 5th grade. I saved almost every drawing and doodle I did as a grade-school-and-middle-school doodler. It has some of my very first cartoons and bird drawings and monsters that I filled my quiet hours in childhood with instead of doing the homework I was supposed to be doing.

In college, specifically Cow College… Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, I first began putting stories into novel form. These I kept in binders and neatbooks that I had to illustrate the covers of with my own story-specific logos.

Here is the first manuscript of Superchicken, the first manuscript that I actually finished and followed all the way through with.

This book-maker-mania followed me even into the classroom. I collected classroom drawings from students, either as gifts from them or confiscated from them and put them into the binder I call my Gallery. This will make an interesting post of its own in the near future.

And I am still not cured of making my own covers, even though I am now trying to make them into traditionally publlished books. Here is the cover for Superchicken.

I suppose I will never really be cured of this mental aberration for as long as I still live. I don’t know what my heirs will do with them when they are finally rid of me once and for all. But it is all something I don’t regret doing. And besides, I couldn’t help it.

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Filed under autobiography, NOVEL WRITING, photo paffoonies

Tagged as book making, foolishness, garbage, novel writing, photo Paffooney, scrap booking, writing process

March 21, 2015 · 2:08 pm

Why I Play With Dolls… erm… Action Figures

My daughter the Princess and I went to Toys R Us this morning to spend a little of the money I had earned by proofreading a technical paper for a grad student. I bought a My Little Pony Equestria Girl named Rarity (I already have the pony, I just needed the girl to add to the collection.) I also bought a Minecraft sheep thing that the Princess promptly named Jed. Apparently, in the Minecraft game online, if you name your sheep Jed, it turns rainbow colors. And I know I didn’t slip by you the fact that the Pony Girl was my toy. In this post I intend to explain to you why I play with little girls’ toys… and hem and haw… and rationalize… and lie… because it is really not what it seems.

It all began in 1965, on my ninth birthday, because I had discovered in the Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog the first Action Figure, G.I. Joe, and I begged and begged and begged it for my birthday. There were four different flavors of G.I. Joe to choose from, representing the four branches of the U.S. Military. You could get either a sailor from the Navy, a soldier from the Army or Marines, or a pilot from the Air Force. Of course, I was wild about the Air Force, but I was clever enough to ask for a sailor Joe because my father was a Korean Conflict Veteran who had been in the Navy on board the USS Hornet aircraft carrier. Dad actually liked the idea and got the Navy Frog Man uniform to go along with it. I could change Joe’s clothes and make him a cool undersea adventurer. It only took a half hour to change him from a sailor into a frog man, and another half hour to change him out of his swim fins and wet suit back into a sailor. It was a doll with sets of clothes to change him into just like my younger sisters’ Barbie and Tammy dolls. Wait… what? I had been tricked into playing with dolls? It is like I lost my official man card even before I earned it… or even before I knew what it was.

Oh, well… it was all about the stories anyway. Yes, I was a story-teller even then. I built a submarine out of my Erector Set (a cherished toy from a previous Christmas) and my Joe led adventures through the vast undersea areas of our parents’ bedroom using Barbie (actually a Midge doll) and Tammy (little sister’s knock-off imitation Barbie doll) as crew. We added to the stories and adventures as time went on, and birthdays and Christmases passed, and we accumulated more dolls. I added Fritz, a Soldiers of the World G.I. Joe from Germany, an Air Force Pilot Joe, and an Astronaut Joe. My sister Nanette added a Francie doll, a Christie (the first African-American Barbie), and a G.I. Joe nurse. Little sister Maggie added a Francie of her own, a regular Barbie, and a Skipper doll to the submarine crew. And then the stories went through the roof when I got my sweaty little hands on Captain Action and his Super-hero costumes!

Captain Action was the creation of the now defunct Ideal Toy Company as an answer to the incredible success of G.I. Joe. You could take the basic Captain Action figure (seen above on the far right… this is the actual first figure… what’s left of him. The right hand is long gone. He has no fore arms. The uniform that he is wearing is not his original. It is basically holding his severed body parts together. I did successfully re-attach the head) and put him in a new uniform to turn him into Batman or Superman or… Aquaman! perfect for submarine adventures with sisters!

In the 1990’s my parents gave me the box of my old G.I. Joes. It was like a re-awakening of childhood passions. Several of my Joes were in terrible shape because my little brother and his semi-simian deviant friends had used fire-crackers on them a-la-Sid from Toy Story. I began cleaning them and restoring them. And then the internet happened. Old guys like me that grew up with these classic toys were now trying to recapture their youth by buying and selling the toys on E-bay. Seriously, check out this price for vintage Captain Action stuff (mint in box);

Aquaman on E-Bay (Oops! That $2000 toy that you can’t even play with has already sold!)

Collecting and trading dolls has become a fascinating hobby and potentially profitable (at least until age and death and bankruptcy winnow out all the old crazy guys like me who collect this sort of stuff). And why the added obsession with Barbies and things like My Little Pony dolls? Well, my sisters’ dolls had all been kept in a metal box. Attics in Texas can reach 600+ degrees Fahrenheit in the Summer. Have you ever seen a melted Barbie? Nostalgia made me do it… that, and having a daughter… well, that’s my story, anyway. And I am sticking to it.

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Tagged as doll collecting, goofiness, humor, photo Paffooney, playing with toys, strange hobbies, toys

March 19, 2015 · 12:35 pm

Putting My House in Order

If you don’t remember, this is what my bedroom looked like when I first rubbed the magic lamp and wished for clean from Clean Gene the Cleaning Genii. Since that post in which my bedroom/writer’s nook (sickbed, deathbed, whatever…) looked like the picture above, the Genii has been stooping with a bad back, picking up papers and books and arcane detritus from the writer’s life of a messy, messy writer and artist. Did I mention he was messy? Did I mention he has arthritis, hypertension, diabetes, COPD, and two other incurable diseases? Did I mention he is having surgery on Tuesday? Did I say he was messy? Oops… too much repetitive redundancy being repeatedly repeated. (Purple Paisley Prose Paragraphs are like that.)

Did you figure out that he is me? I say all of this incredibly boring and inane stuff because it gives context to the miracle. Clean Gene granted at least part of the wish. It may not look it, but now the mess is organized.

You will notice that things that may be needed in the middle of the night are now accessible. And the room now actually has a floor again! Oh, and the dolls are not needed for the middle of the night… at least, not that I actively remember (or am willing to admit.)

In this view you can see more of my organized tornado aftermath. Under the books and Barbies in process of being repaired you see what used to be my drawing table, and is now more like a book case with attached tiny area for drawing. My daughter the Princess put the stickers all over the drawer on my 100-year-old-plus dresser when she was two, and I have never had the heart to take them off no matter what they do to its value as an antique. (It honestly has no value. Antique is just another word for very, very old.) And those are not dolls standing around in semi-action poses. Those are ACTION FIGURES!

And finally, this is my work space and writing area where I am currently writing this mundane little post about something that is more about nothing than anything Seinfeld ever came up with. Yes, I am a writer and an artist. Am I a professional? That is harder to say. I was paid for many years to teach writing as a public school English teacher. I currently am proofreading for a couple of professionals who are not writers but have to do it as a part of their jobs in health care. I am getting paid for that. I made at least thirty dollars for writing novels for three different publishers. I have had drawings published before in books and comic books, but nobody ever gave me a nickel for that… those were voluntary and contests I didn’t win. They did help other people make money, though. Maybe, now that I am retired as a teacher, I am justified in claiming that I am even though I don’t make the big bucks people assume I do when I tell them that little white lie. (If you thought that last paragraph was mainly about passing 500 words, you would be right.)

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Tagged as being a writer, Clean Gene, cleaning genii, cleaning house, humor, pathos, photo Paffooney

March 15, 2015 · 1:59 pm

Cardboard Castles

After a long, lonely week by myself, unable to go with my family to Florida for Spring Break due to poor health, my isolation ended suddenly as they returned early. I woke up to find them already here yesterday morning. They were tired from travelling, having arrived in the middle of the night, and so they needed to sleep in… and I was suffering horrible cabin fever. It mattered little, though, that I longed to get out. I was still ill and unable to breathe outside of my sealed bedroom. My arthritic back ached and I needed to lie in bed on the heating pad for the better part of a Saturday. So, what could I do but use my creative talents to take me on a journey into imagination. I built a castle.

I used an old computer program I previously found at Half-Price Books, the big superstore thing on Northwest Highway in Dallas. I printed out castle parts on white paper with colored ink. I gathered pieces of reusable cardboard I had been saving for the purpose. I began to cut and paste and tape.

I nearly forgot the most important step. I put on a Dr. Who DVD I snagged at Walmart. It was An Adventure is Space and Time starring David Bradley (who was playing William Hartnell who was the first Dr. Who, so it was a movie about an actor playing a part in a BBC fantasy series in the 1960’s played by another actor who looked like the original actor… I mean, it was a story about telling a story and it was the true story of the telling… Oh, I give up! You figure it out.) (That was the second longest parenthetic expression I have ever written, by the way.) It also had a full four episode adventure from the very first Dr. Who story, An Unearthly Child, starring the real William Hartnell. So I watched and cut and taped and pasted and built castle all day.

It begins to get exciting as the pieces fit together and it actually starts to look like a castle. Of course, once it was finished, I had to play with the dang thing. I am old, and this is my second childhood after all.

Now, if only I can figure out how to keep female vampires dressed in red from invading my castle.

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Tagged as cut and paste, goofiness, humor, making cardboard castles, paper sculpture, photo Paffooney, playing with toys

March 13, 2015 · 1:40 pm

Friday the 13th

by SeanC15 on DeviantArt

At dawn on Friday the 13th in the year of our Lord 1307 King Philip IV of France ordered Knights Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay and as many other members of the Order of Knights Templar as could be found in France to all be arrested. They were accused of crimes against God and the Catholic Church like spitting on the cross, indecent kissing, homosexual practices, and worshiping false idols. It was said they had found the mummified head of John the Baptist during their brief tenure as the rulers and defenders of Jerusalem. It was also said they used it in pagan rituals of black magic. The charges were assumed to be false, even by Philip, but through torture numerous Templars were forced to confess, and their confessions were accepted as evidence by Pope Clement. De Molay and the rest of the Templars in France were burned at the stake before the Vatican could mount an appeal (numerous Templars recanted their confessions as soon as they were out of the torture chamber). Templar property throughout France was seized and Philip’s war debts to the Templars were canceled. One suspects that this was a grand financial power-play worthy of a Bush family member. (Oh, no! Did I just say that in a post? Here comes the NSA.)

You know that historians generally do not credit the Templar story as the true origin of the Friday the 13th superstition. I’m not sure why they have trouble making that connection, but historians generally think that anything that is obvious to the common man can’t possibly be true. I suppose they may be right.

So, I sit here at home alone with my beloved family still Spring Breaking in Florida. It is raining outside. It is cool, almost cold. And I am contemplating sour luck.

One of the things I routinely do is work on a collection when I am feeling blue and subject to diabetic depression. It helps to be able to make a little progress in completing a set or something. Well, I made the mistake of trying to do that at Walmart. The Walton family have something in common with King Philip (and the Bush family) (Hackers added that last parenthetic expression, honest, NSA!). They know a little something about mercenary financial evil. Their empire was built on the backs of underpaid workers which they excuse by claiming they have to do that to keep offering “Always low prices”. But they use all kinds of cheap tricks to keep the big bucks rolling into big pockets and little bucks being sucked out of little pockets like mine. Case in point, I was trying to score another fix in my recent addle-brained Brony addiction by completing a set of Equestria Girls. On the bargain-clearance-sale table was the perfect thing. Pinkie Pie from the Rainbow Rocks series next to a price that said $11. Now, I don’t have Pinkie Pie. I have Rainbow Dash, Twilight Sparkle, and Apple Jack, but Pinkie Pie is the one every little girl (apparently just like this crazy old man) wants first. So, Bazinga! For the first time I could acquire Pinkie Pie and come in under the $20 dollar rule. But, wait just a minute! This is Walmart we are talking about here. The nearest price checker was broken and hadn’t been fixed in months. So I asked a working Walmart minion stocking the toy shelves where the nearest working price checker was. Of course, they didn’t have one anywhere in the store. But shelf-stockers carry a portable pricing gun, and she checked it for me. $21.97! It was actually the same price it would normally be on the shelves. (Granted it is a lower starting price than Toys-R-Us, but it still breaks the $20 rule.) The $11 price was coded for the Rainbow Dash doll that was sitting there next to the Pinkie Pie. They count on me being stupid enough to run to checkout with the wrong price in my head and gleefully pay the higher price without thinking or looking too closely. So I outfoxed them. Rainbow Dash was sitting there at the shelf-damaged, clearance-sale price and it was (after careful inspection) mint in box.

So, that is essentially my point today. Conservative and mega-fearful paranoid people like your usual conspiracy theorist and distrustful Tea-Party Republican would pull back with venom and recount their Second-Amendment rights. Not me. Life gives me lemons and I make… frosted lemon cheesecake with a dash of rainbow. Sure, I think the Bush family are secretly Nazis… but you are not paranoid if there really is a conspiracy and you’ve seen the evidence. But Friday the 13th can be a lucky day. Good things can happen if you make them happen and use the talents and intelligence that God granted you for that very purpose. (I confess, I used to listen to Norman Vincent Peale on the radio and I actually believed his crap about the power of positive thinking.) Let me show you a few more of my bargain-purchase collectible accomplishments;

I do realize that I posed these dolls on Radasha’s face and that I ought to have put old drawings away in their proper portfolio place, not leave them out on the drawing board. But, what do you think I am? Some sort of irresponsible goofy old cartoonist who gets too caught up with playing with dolls, or something? Please don’t answer that.

The Tinkerbell dolls were also from the bargain table, only one of them was priced correctly on the table. The rest are showing you Barbie dresses on dolls I rescued from Goodwill and a Re-Sale store. These are dolls that were naked, abused, and previously loved and played-with by some little girl (or possibly confused little boy). I have a soft spot for rescue dolls that went naked into charity work at the risk of ending up in the garbage bin. They remind me of me when I went into teaching.

Ah, the power of positive thinking! (And I didn’t just add that last sigh to get over the 1000 word goal, either.)

Snow Day Again… In March?

It is truly amazing how little snow it takes to totally paralyze a city like Dallas. Chicago would be embarrassed to death at having to close school down on a sunshiny day with less than a foot of snow on the ground. But Dallas likes to build major roadways up into the air so freezing air can hit the underside as well as the upper side of roads that, once shut down by a hideous three-car five-death accident on sheets of super-slippery ice, totally prohibits movement from one side of the metroplex to the other.

I have considerable pain from my arthritis, and I am shut down most of the time anyway. But with the city closed around me, there is not much left to do but sit and write and make fun of southerners who can’t drive on snow because they don’t realize that speeds below seventy miles-per-hour do exist in the real world. I have had time to further work on the final edit of my novel, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. I also had time to submit my novel Magical Miss Morgan to the Chanticleer Book Reviews’ YA novel-writing contest called the Dante Rossetti Awards for Young Adult Fiction.

I don’t have a head full of straw and really believe I am going to walk away with a top prize. But I did enter this contest before with Snow Babies, and that book made it into the final round. It will help my manuscript get published. Who knows? I may score something bigger than an Indie publisher this time around. Maybe I can get an agent. (Okay, there’s a little straw in there. I will have to clean more carefully next time.)

But old, broken, bed-ridden me with nothing but time to lay around and fiddle with the computer am definitely making good use of my snow day. I took pictures of the snow. I walked the dog in it. And I didn’t have to drive to any schools or school events. Hot dang! What a fine life.

Fantasy Worlds

If you saw my post yesterday, you have probably already noticed I am not in love with the real world (and for those of you who naturally assume every conspiracy theorist is a nut job, I don’t love the world as I perceive it through my goofy senses). So what is the alternative? How about the world of the imagination?

Like many youths of the late 70’s and early 80’s, I trained my imagination with the Dungeons and Dragons game from Gary Gygax and TSR. I played first with my brother and two sisters, then with kids from the school where I first taught (middle schoolers when I taught them, but mostly high schoolers when they played in the vast worlds of my dungeon-master’s imagination). I first started buying and painting metal miniatures. Later I supplemented them with plastic figures, paper cut-outs, maps, and dungeon tiles.

I can now lay out a pretty impressive scene to play out the stories that I and my three goofy kids love to spin. Of course, you know that, although I lay out the potential story as the dungeon master, the players each pick a character and input their own directions and choices through that character’s point of view.

The characters face the monsters and problems they must overcome, and they must decide when to hit it, when to kill it, or when to try to charm her way through it.

After the monsters are dead you have to choose again. Do you cut up the dead Cyclops and eat it? Do you accept the gold from the princess who is thanking you for saving her and her children? Do you kill the bratty kids and take all their gold earrings and arm bands? Of course, the DM tries to squelch option three.

And then you gather up the group again in the castle courtyard, and away you go. Another adventure. Another problem to solve. It is so much easier than car repairs and school schedules and dealing with a dog that is a walking poop and spare-hair factory. Dungeons and Dragons life is so much more heroic and fulfilling than real life.

And then Mom shows up and says the game is over for today. Time to wash the dishes, vacuum the carpet downstairs, and walk the dang pooping dog. “Go away, Mom! We are busy learning about the important things in life.”

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Tagged as Dungeons and Dragons, humor, irony, photo Paffooney, playing games, real life sucks

February 23, 2015 · 4:23 pm

Snow Day 2015

Snow panic has hit the Dallas area. Schools are all canceled. Idiots are out ramming their cars together on the freeways. TV reports plead for Texans to stay off the roads if travel is not actually necessary. We are snowed in by a light dusting of snow and a serious patina of ice.

We Iowegians transplanted to Texas laugh at storms like this. It should not stop school. I drove through worse than this last year when I still worked for the only school district who refused to cancel school on an icy, snowy day over a year ago. But, a break to daily plans is a welcome thing, except possibly for the fact that you are stuck in the house with family all day with nothing to do. Hopefully we can stand the togetherness.

The Dog-Walk

Yes, I will admit to walking the dog for all the wrong reasons… I take her to prevent more poop piling up in the house on the living room carpet, but that’s just the most obvious reason that my wife and kids truly believe is the only reason. The truth is more sinister. When life goes against me (like my recent trouble with anti-teacher policies in Texas and the scourge known as insurance pirates) I take the dog out for walks so I can stumble and grumble and swear at the dog.

I took my camera along on this walk because I needed something to post for today even though I am all grumbly and rumbly and not ready to write. As we were taking off, I noticed my wife’s daffodils had sprung up to look around, confused by the warmer, wetter weather than we normally get during the time of year when Dallas is known for freezing Superbowls solid.

Daffodils, like most Texas residents, are a little naive and a little too ready to think only good things can happen to them because they are white and relatively wealthy and very Republican, living in the State at the center of the universe.

Then the second one pops out. Like any other Texans, two together make the average IQ in the room drop. Opinions get tossed back and forth to snowball into masses of prejudice against Mexicans crossing the border, too many black folks, too many people on food stamps eating up all the profits, and other massively bright blossoms of bigotry. Sometimes they watch Fox News together and get really dangerous. But fortunately, when two or more fear-charged brain-cells come in close proximity to each other (a feat that requires at least five Republicans) they begin to develop an electro-magnetic sixth sense and begin to perceive truth on the far perimeter.

The forecast in North Texas for this coming week is for a strong chance of severe winter weather (for North Texas that is the code for a slight chance of snow). So, I got a good laugh at daffodil expense. But, I guess I don’t really hope they die an icy death. I’m just grumpy because sometimes my life just doesn’t progress very well.

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Tagged as daffodil ditziness, grumpiness, humor, photo Paffooney, Republicans, swearing at the dog, Texas traumatics

Category Archives: photo paffoonies

A Collection of Sunrises

A Maker of Books

Why I Play With Dolls… erm… Action Figures

Putting My House in Order

Cardboard Castles

Friday the 13th

Snow Day Again… In March?

Fantasy Worlds

Snow Day 2015

The Dog-Walk

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