Category Archives: satire

The Haunting

I have been resting and recuperating, but also planning for the worst.  I mean, when I am ill I often get a little depressed because I know what has to eventually happen to me.  I am not immortal.  So I have been having some fun planning all the people I will haunt when I become a ghost.

Haunting

Ghosts are usually around for the sake of cosmic justice, seeking to wrong the rights done to them in life (did I say that backwards?  Maybe so).   So, my first task will be to choose the ones I will haunt because of how they helped shorten my life and contribute to the misery I’ve endured.

I really thought the best place to start grinding axes was in the political arena.  (The sound of grinding axes would be spooky, wouldn’t it?  Especially in a State capitol building like the big pink-marble mausoleum in Texas.)  I would very much like to haunt the people who helped kill me with stress by making it so difficult to be a Texas teacher.  This State is rather anti-education, at least since the conservative Republicans took over and made the State their sovereign province for perpetuity.  Rick Perry and the Republican agenda have slashed budgets for education, cut teacher jobs… especially in the arts and music areas, and set up a system of State tests to measure educational progress that are rigged to show that we are failing in Texas to provide a decent basic education.  (If you make the test harder and harder at the same time you make the stakes higher and higher every single year, you are bound to get results that show educators doing worse and worse.  And, of course, the tests are designed by lawyers consulting with test-makers… no teachers allowed in the process.)  So I can haunt Rick Perry to wrong that right.  (Okay, I am saying that backwards because “right” also means “conservative”, and it is apparent that they hate education, especially for people of color and people who are poor.  Can’t have those unfortunates reading up on basic human rights, now can we?)

So, I plan to haunt Rick Perry by spelling out threatening messages in his alphabet soup.  That’ll get him, right?  Scare him out of his cowboy boots, maybe?  Heck… I don’t know for certain that Rick can read, do I?  Not even with the glasses he wears now to look smarter.  And his successor, Greg Abbot, can he read?  He is advertising his latest education initiative to make education in Texas #1 by establishing higher standards in preschool and the lower grades.  That will make education better, right?  Make the little kids reach higher scores on harder tests?  And do it by passing a law that they have to reach those standards or the schools will be punished?  Not spending more money or anything.  Heck, he probably doesn’t even eat alphabet soup.  What scarier things can a teacher ghost do?  I will have to think harder on this subject.  And I am thinking I want to haunt more people too.  I just have to decide who.  So maybe I save some of my spookier insights into what I will do as a ghost until another post.  Let me end by giving you an idea of what I want old Rick to look like when I haunt his sorry old cowboy behind.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, satire

Family Issues

DSCN4680There comes a time when you simply have to put things on the line to protect your family from the predations of the world at large.  I am in a struggle now over health insurance.  Health insurance companies never complain about receiving premium payments, but you have to go to war at times over claims where you try to activate the services you paid the premiums for.  I am having trouble now even though the previous insurance had no problem with paying their part for the very same services I am arguing for now.  The new insurance will not accept without a fight.  So now my Paffooney picture portrays Daddy going to war instead of Poppa coming home.  I will think hard about what is funny in this situation.  I mean to come back with a lampoon of these pirates.  That’s how you kill a whale, right?  Lampoon it with a really sharp lampoon… or was that HARpoon?  Whatever… more really bad puns to come later when I have gathered my wits and sharpened my harpoons.

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Filed under oil painting, Paffooney, satire

Crazy Old People Driving

You can probably tell that the photo Paffooney is totally staged.  I am not a good enough actor to manage the lookcrazy old driver2 of absolute blood-curdling horror that would be on my face if I were actually driving in the Dallas Metroplex.  My gray Gandalf-hair would be standing on end more, and my eyes would be more popped with horror… especially if I had really seen Suicide Sadie in her death-dealing super-WASP-rocket.  Honestly, I’m risking my life to reveal it, but one of the greatest perils of life in the suburbs in Texas is running afoul of the Texas Killer Grannies.  Yes, there is a secret, Illuminati-like organization of blue-haired old menaces driving big, expensive black battle-boats that try to kill as many other Texas drivers as they can… as well as pedestrians, cop cars, squirrels, poor-people’s children, and ceramic lawn gnomes as they can focus their myopic old granny glasses on.

To Texas Killer Grandmas, slaughtering the innocent on the roadways while your back seat is full of knitting baskets and tins of cat food is a Satanic ritual that gives them special and unnatural powers over life and death.

They all drive at least five-miles-an-hour faster than the speed at which they can actually control the vehicle.  For some of the most deadly grannies like Suicide Sadie and End-It-All Emma that is between 95 and 205 miles-per-hour, though the nearly-as-deadly Grandma McGillicuddy can be almost as guaranteed fatal at only about 35 miles an hour.  They cut in front of you without signalling, and traffic lights are interpreted far differently than normal in the presence of a Texas Killer Grandma.  Green means go.  Yellow means go faster.  And red means floor it and brace for impact.  Now, of course that is the granny interpretation of the light.  For me, green means proceed ultra-cautiously while scanning for hurtling BMW’s, Cadillacs, or Lincoln Town Cars with old ladies at the wheel and skulls painted in white on the driver’s door.  Yellow means pull over to the side of the road at a dead stop and make myself the smallest target possible.  And red means park on somebody’s lawn and wait for the intersection to become clear of all vehicles for several blocks all around.  Sidewalks are not safe either with a Texas Killer Grandma around.  You’re safer walking if you walk down the center of the road.  Of course, the more normal drivers will squish you like road-kill then, and the Texas Killer Grandma knows she was ultimately the cause of this suicidal death, so if they are close enough to see it in any sort of blurred clarity, they automatically count it as a kill.

You never see a Texas Killer Grandma charged with anything in the local media or even in court records.  They are not old ladies unconnected to persons of power.  Rich husbands, rich children, and sometimes even rich boyfriends see to it that they are never prosecuted.  They are immune to the wheels of justice.  Crazy Cat-Lady Clarice is immune to prosecution even though she doesn’t own even a nickel.  We think it is because she is so supremely skilled at vehicular homicide that even the police are afraid of her.  And how does she pay for gas in that 1965 Chevy Impala SS she drives with a blood-smeared hood and the driver’s side of the car painted completely white with skulls?

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Filed under humor, photo paffoonies, satire

Teachers Aren’t People… (Apparently)

Black Tim

If insurance companies are people in the same way the Supreme Court says that corporations are people, then they are pirates.   Not Robin Hoods of the Sea sort of pirates who take from the rich and give to the poor.  No, we are talking about the kind of pirate that latches on to the people too powerless to resist their boarding actions and wrings every last penny out of their rudely squeezed and and drained souls.  That kind of pirate.

The reason for the rant is not something I can fully discuss here.   I am in need of a mental health professional for a member of my family.   Of course, if you have read this blog, you probably have already assumed I am talking about me.  Having been a middle school English teacher the suspicion that I have let all the doves out of the loft is a pretty safe assumption.  Still, one would assume that a retired teacher with health insurance should be able to get whatever professional help he needs.  Not according to the company reps who are happy to take my monthly premium.   Previous Psychiatrist, Dr. Good, was one of the best in the city.  He understood the problem better than any other doctor we encountered, including the emergency room doctor and the behavioral hospital doctor.  But our lovely education-friendly State of Texas has to cut back spending on education.  Teachers make too much money and have too many expensive benefits.  And besides, tests clearly show that we are not doing our jobs right.  (This part is true and not merely sarcasm… of course, the tests get harder every year to prove we are doing worse by lower scores).  So, Statewide we have gone to cheaper health insurance.  Dr. Good doesn’t deal with the cheap-o company.  You can’t blame him.  They don’t pay actual money for health care because that cuts too far into profits.  So, no more Dr. Good.  And we haven’t yet found a doctor  to replace him.   Worse yet, we have been working with a therapist who is more patient and kind than we probably deserve.  He has been billing us only the co-pay and negotiating with cheap-o for the rest of his fee.  The previous insurance gladly paid for his services as he helped prevent needless trips to the hospital and helped us accomplish minor miracles.  Cheap-o  told him that even though he’s listed in-network, he isn’t really in-network  and they don’t intend to pay him for the last four months.  Damn.  I hate pirates.  They don’t treat you like a people…. more like a milk cow or something.

So, with extensive stressors in my life, and poor health getting worse, a little depression to boot… it’s gonna be all right.  God and the devil will work something out.  Since I’m still alive, I can safely say, life is good.

Black Wizard

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Filed under Paffooney, rants, satire