As I get older… losing my hair… well, okay… growing my hair long to cover psoriasis sores… I don’t get to actually use Beatles’ lyrics in this post except for the opening of the misleading lead sentence. But as my life and movement is limited more and more to one room of the house (okay two rooms, the bathroom is practically an equal partner in my life story) I have expanded outward by turning inward. I look inside at all that is creative in me and commit acts of gaseous art. “Art farts” is the term pointed to in the title. I spend some of my more difficult sick days making art out of the clutter and doll collections that surround me in my bedroom.
This is what the clutter of old “Art Farts” looks like lingering at my bedroom door at the moment.
Small bits and pieces when I am in too much pain to draw can make interesting still lifes or collection-clutter documentation.
The bustling city that has grown up on my upstairs bookshelves is also fascinating.
And it isn’t a matter of always being in bed and never getting out. I managed to get several pictures of Anselmo the cattle egret that lives in the park. He has gotten used to me taking his picture as I walk the dog five times a day so she can load the park with poop (which I do pick up in plastic bags, by the way).
And why do I call him Anselmo? Well, look at him, that pointy beak, that staring eye… He just looks like an Anselmo. I taught three Anselmos in 31 years of teaching, so I ought to know one when I see one.
So, what exactly is an “Art Fart”? Well, making artwork out of the things you see every day around you. Like fart gas, it is a natural outcome of digesting stuff. And why am I surrounded by so many toys and weird things? Well, I am a Mickey after all. And this is my second childhood… or third… or tenth… of three-hundred and thirty-fifth… but who’s counting?
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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