There is a certain amount of worry now in Mickeytown. My hands have begun to tremble. I see things that aren’t there. I have become excessively forgetful. Possibly Parkinson’s… but not diagnosed by a doctor yet.
Maybe it’s only paranoia… but that’s a Parkinson’s symptom too.
And it worries me because I need to be able to draw new Paffoonies. But it is definitely becoming harder.
Yesterday, when my computer was breaking down again, the scanner miraculously reconnected itself and began to work.
I scanned this old pen-and-ink drawing.
Do I know why I drew it, or what it is supposed to be about?
I do not.
But I can still swirl colored pencils and color within the lines, at least as well as I did when I was nine.
You may remember this one from yesterday,
Of course, forgetful me, I couldn’t remember where I had stored my best art pencils. I had to crack open the bag of old school pencils that I still have from my last hurrah as a Texas pedagogue (a word that means a teacher of children, not that other thing that the evil-minded ones among you were probably thinking.)
So, now I have a colored picture of a young-girl space traveler. What to do with it?
Like any old mad god who makes a girl come to life like this (old mad god of colored pencils, a little “g” god, not a blasphemous big “G” one,) I needed to name her and give her a story, a purpose in life.
So, I called her Cissy Moonskipper (a suitably satirical and comic sort of name playing off of Luke Skywalker.)
And I stranded her on a family-owned free-trader starship, alone in deep space. Her family is gone permanently. The ship has everything she needs to survive. She is a sole-survivor on a deserted island in deep space in an unexplored star system. And all she has is a starship owner’s manual and a copy of the novel Robinson Crusoe.
So, I added a background and now I have started a new book idea. That is essentially what a Paffooney is. Words and pictures by little ol’ me.
Things are not what they seem. Life throws curve balls across the plate ninety percent of the time. Fastballs are rare. And fastballs you can hit are even rarer. But if Life is pitching, who is the batter? Does it change the metaphor and who you are rooting for if the batter is Death?
If you think this means that I am planning on dying because of the Coronavirus pandemic, well, you would be right. Of course, I am always planning for death with every dark thing that bounces down the hopscotch squares of the immediate future. That’s what it means to be a pessimist. No matter what bad thing we are talking about, it will not take ME by surprise. And if I think everything is going to kill me, sooner or later I have to be right… though, hopefully, much later.
I keep seeing things that aren’t there. Childlike faces keep looking at me from the top of the stairs, but when I focus my attention there, they disappear. And I know there are no children in the house anymore since my youngest is now legally an adult. And the chimpanzee that peeked at me from behind the couch in the family room was definitely not there. I swear, it looked exactly like Roddy McDowell from the Planet of the Apes movies, whom I know for a fact to be deceased. So, obviously, it has to be Roddy McDowell’s monkey-ghost. I believe I may have mentioned before that there is a ghost dog in our house. I often catch glimpses of its tail rounding the corner ahead of me when my own dog is definitely behind me. And I am sure I shared the facts before that Parkinson’s sufferers often see partial visions of people and faces (and apparently dogs) that aren’t really there, and that my father suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. So, obviously it is my father and not me that is seeing these things… He’s just using my eyeballs to do it with.
But… and this is absolutely true even if it starts with a butt… the best way to deal with scary possibilities is to laugh at them. Jokes, satire, mockery, and ludicrous hilarity expressed in big words are the proper things to use against the fearful things you cannot change. So, this essay is nothing but a can of mixed nutz. Nutzy nuts. And fortunately, peanut allergies are one incurable and possibly fatal disease I don’t have. One of the few.
With Gyro driving, a rather unnerving prospect for those riding with him, the first pink Cadillacko swooped down on the planet Cornucopea out of the clouds. They were supposed to be establishing a base camp on the planet.
Besides Gyro, the Nebulon boy who gave the first Cadillacko its air bubble field and its silly Nebulonin nickname, the grav speeder held Billy Iowa, wearing his cowboy sombrero and leather moccasins, Luigi the Onion Guy, for whom they had no workable space suit, and Mai Ling, scantily dressed in form-fitting battle armor and wearing the ring-sleeve device that could amplify her telekinetic throwing arm.
The second Cadillacko carried Hassan Parker, who had to wear a full space suit instead of being nude like usual, Taffy King and Shu Kwai, all suited and combat ready.
The third grav speeder carried Ged Aero-sensei, Junior Aero, his adopted Nebulon nephew, and Sara Smith, the strongest telepath and healer of the group.
The drop zone looked like a field of flowers undulating in a high wind. But as they zoomed closer, you could see the large daisy-heads and thistle-heads were all ripping into and damaging the other plants.
“What do we do, Sensei?” Billy radioed through the comm dot on his neck.
“Clear the landing zone. Weed-killer weapons and mowers! We have to cut the weeds down to size.”
Gyro, being Gyro, nose-dived the pink-and-white Space Cadillac into the soft dirt of the field of fighting flowers. It plowed a deep furrow in a semi-circle in the middle of the large open space. Shu-Kwai landed his gray-and-white Space Cadillac much more gently beside it.
The telekinetics, Shu and Taffy King, leaped out of their vehicle with weapons that were more like chainsaws than the lawnmowers they were supposed to be. Each had two, one controlled by each hand. So, four flying blades whirled through the air, slicing and dicing, turning Throckpods into salad.
Mai-ling leaped out with a razor pistol in her hand. She fired round throwing-star-like objects in groups of five, then whipped the blades through the air sawing thorns neatly off of every violent flower-person she saw.
Hassan manned the spray-gun with the toxic weed-killer in it, spraying withering death upon Throckpods to a range of fifty feet.
Soon an army of violent flowers was reduced to smoking piles of flower-chips and salad-squares.
By the time Ged-sensei and Sara and Junior disembarked from their pink-and-white Cadillac, the battle was already over.
Luigi the Onion Guy came bouncing furiously across the field to confront Ged.
“nO! Oh, nO! You muSt nOt spILl, ChloroPhyll!” he shouted in his weird little Onion-guy accent.
“But you wanted help in driving away to evil Throckpods and their master, did you not?”
Luigi just stank out a lot of foul smells that the translator couldn’t begin to translate. It is well known that bad words are more a matter of disgustingly figurative language that does not translate well to beings who have no reference for flower emotions, flower body parts, flower behavior, or flower-based bad thoughts.
“Luigi is swearing at you, Sensei,” Gyro tried to explain while adjusting the translator’s many translation-equivalents adjustment bars.
“We need to understand him better. Can anyone read his mind?”
Sara looked at Ged with a sorrowful expression on her face. “I am beginning to sense some of the stronger emotions coming from plant-minds. He is upset because to them, all flower-life is sacred, including the Throckpods. That’s what he wants us to cure about the Throckpods. Their leader makes them render and kill other plant-life sacrilegiously.”
“Very well, then. We will set up base-camp in this cleared field and try hard to understand these flower-people better.”
“Yes, we need to study them and do some research,” said Hassan Parker. “I can get out of this space suit and start research immediately as the rest of you set up the camp.”
“I think I have seen enough of your naked body. And you really should join us in the physical labor before doing the mental work.” Shu Kwai was not making suggestions. He was issuing commands. “And while we are here, everybody wears protective body coverings. There are many unknown plant-based dangers here, and we want no one to be at risk.”
So, eight student ninjas, their ninja sensei, and one irate Onion began building a base camp.
This is how computers actually work. I swear that it is true. I know, I know… I have on occasion stretched the truth just a bit… like down the block and around the corner where I tied it around a lamp post. But in my defense, I write fiction. This is not fiction. This is a narrative of actual experiences that I managed to live through and learn from.
You see, as I was working on my writing, I underwent a plethora of computer malfunctions that made me really, really mad. I took my rubber stress ball and threw it at the far wall. It bounced back directly into my left temple, making me see stars, and then, apparently, summoning a genii. He was standing there grinning at me.
“How can I be of service, master?” he said with magical sparkles in his white teeth.
“Oh, I just wish I could see inside the computer to know why it does these terrible things to me every time I press a key.”
“Your wish is my command, master.” He poofed me in a pink and blue cloud of genii magic, and suddenly I was tiny and digital, able to walk inside my computer and take a look.”
“What makes you the most mad, master?” the genii, whose name I learned was Computus, asked me.
“When it deletes stuff for no apparent reason…” I began.
“Ahh! You need to see the Desert of the Deletion Dervishes.”
So he took me to a digital field of file flowers, where all the files that contained my best saved work were growing peacefully. There were all the maniacal digital dervishes on digital horses, busy slashing the stems of my file flowers with their digital scimitars.
“Aagh! No!” I cried. “Why are they deleting my stuff?”
“Oh, do not worry. They are focusing on the files you use most and deleting only those. They are very efficient in carrying out their orders.”
“And who gives them these orders?”
“Why you do, sir. When you give the computer orders from a drop down menu, you are rarely clicking on the order you intended to. And “Save” is close enough to “Delete” to make our work simple.”
“And why do I keep having new windows opening up randomly where I don’t want them to?”
“Ah, the Public Pool of Pop-up Peris! Let us go see that too!”
So he poofed me into a pit of electrical fire filled with electrical fire beings who were busy crafting evil pop-up windows to plague me.
“So, these creatures are filling my screen with ads for hemorrhoid creams and Asian dating sites?”
“Yes, and surveys about why you love President Trump and thought Obama was terrible.”
“And why when I click on the X’s to get rid of them, do two more appear?”
“Oh that’s simple. They purposefully make the X’s so tiny and the surrounding area so sensitive that if you don’t hit the exact center of the X precisely, then it knows you want to see two more ads chosen specifically for you by the mind-reading genii.”
“But the ads are always the opposite of what I actually want to see!”
“Well, of course they are. Computer genii are the kind made entirely of fire. We call them Efrits, and they are the most powerful evil jinn we have available.”
So then I awoke with a painful knot on my forehead and a new understanding of why this post was so difficult to write. The computer treats me so evilly because that is precisely what it was designed to do.
I am diabetic. I am not supposed to have donuts for breakfast any more. Hence the obsession with donuts. I am only guessing here, but I think it may have something to do with the fact that the very name of donuts tells you what to do.
“What?!” you say. “What goofiness are you talking about now, Mickey?”
Well, I’ll tell you. I had a donut for breakfast this morning… with nuts.
The name “donuts” is literally a command. It tells you to “Do nuts”. So I had nuts with my donut this morning. Peanuts to be precise. Of course that’s what is wrong with the whole scenario. It doesn’t mean “peanuts”. It is commanding you to do something nutty. Maybe more like eating a donut when you have diabetes. No matter how good that particular donut tastes when you eat it, an hour later you are going to suffer.
So here’s the result of my being nuts this morning. I have come to the conclusion that the root of all evils in the modern world is “donuts”. Especially when it is pronounced “doo nutz”. Yes, eating a donut subjects you to the command, “Do nuts!”
And we all know how bad Trump’s diet is. Could he be imbibing donuts? Horrors! That explains Twitter, cabinet firings, tariffs for the fun of it, random protestations of “No collusion!”, and even “Covfefe”. Although Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary is an evil beyond even the power of donuts.
And how did Trump even get elected? Do people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan glory in eating donuts before voting? How about disgruntled Bernie Bros? And one also suspects that middle-aged white women can’t resist a good donut… or an evil one either.
Could it be that I am down on donuts because I ate one and now I am writing this with a pounding high-blood-sugar headache? Well, yes. Eating one inspired this post. It was a chocolate donut with green, mint-flavored frosting. And it was evil. It is taking out its evil revenge on the blood vessels in my brain.
So, I implore you if you are reading this… no, I’m not going to tell you not to “Do nuts”… I am going to tell you, “Please, for the love of God, keep donuts away from me! Eat them yourself if you have to. But be warned! They have a secret meaning.”
I have been drawing these mock-Star-Wars science-fiction-heroes for thirty years. Some of these are that old. Some of them are new this year. All of them illustrate the adventures that started as a science-fiction-role-playing game and became the series of novels called AeroQuest.
This is not actually a picture of Boogendorf, this is Toonerville where the clocks are wrong and a giant Mickey Mouse lurks in the foothills beyond.
Today I mean to justify my existence before God and everybody. Apparently in the modern world you have to be certain things in your basic foundation to justify getting travel visas, citizenship, and a basic right to continue to exist unmolested. We apparently elected a new leader, the Mad King of Boogendorf, to make sure all Boogendorfers are suitably qualified to live in Boogendorf. So this is a brief photo essay to justify my case for why Boogendorf should accept me as a citizen and not execute me outright.
First of all, I am not one hundred per cent crazy. You can tell from this photo, can’t you?
This kooky dorfleflop can’t be any more than 65% crazy because his pin head is not large enough to harbor more than 65 out of every 100 truly derfy and sanity-stealing notions. (What is a dorfleflop, you say? Well, dorf is a German word for town, and dorfleflops flop in a dorf and think they belong like everybody else who has flopped there before.)
But using the Mad King of Boogendorf as a measuring stick (an orange measuring stick with an extra-long tie), that is clearly not crazy enough by half.
What’s the deal with the clocks always being wrong in Boogendorf?
I have always heard it said, “It takes a village to raise a child”. And I think that saying I heard is probably true. I was raised by the village of Rowan, Iowa in the 60’s and 70’s. I learned to draw there. And I can draw real cartoon human beings.
Doofy Fuddbugg here is an example of what a “Nolt” is.
Of course, one must be careful to note that if you could actually draw real cartoon human beings they would be alive after that, and that would make you like God, able to create life from nothing more than pencil, pen, and paper. And in Boogendorf there is only room for one God. That, of course, is the Mad King of Boogendorf. So I guess that is a disqualifying quality too.
And that saying about a child raised by a village is a saying somehow connected to Hillary Clinton, and Hillary Clinton was defeated (I have also heard disgraced, demoralized, and denounced) in the last election by getting more votes than the Mad King of Boogendorf. So I am judged lacking by my upbringing too.
I am also undeniably guilty of playing with dolls. I mean, I collect them, I comb their hair, dress them in different clothes, take them apart and repair them, and pose them for pictures. That can’t be normal. But is it abnormal enough to make me qualified to be a Boogendorfer from the village of Boogendorf? Maybe if I plated them in gold or something, or had enough money to go to “golden shower” extremes? I guess I don’t understand how to be Boogendorfy enough to live in Boogendorf. The “Boo” in Boogendorf proves that you have to be pathologically afraid of things more, just like other Boogendorfers are. I am sure the average Boogendorfer is afraid of people who play with dolls. Especially if those weird people don’t own any guns and don’t like to kill stuff. That just ain’t natural. You even need to give guns to little girls to make them safe against those evil anti-Boogendorfers.
So, I guess I am doomed to live a life outside of the walls of Boogendorf (and they are really great walls, too). I should be grateful that the citizens of Boogendorf have only rejected me and not used their sacred second-amendment rights to execute me. For now, I am simply not a Boogendorfer.
Christopher Marlowe is often sited as the real Shakespeare, a problematic assertion given that he would’ve been forced to write a number of plays after he was dead, giving new meaning to the term “ghost writer”. But I would like to add to the assertion that “Marlowe is NOT Shakespeare!” that I also believe he did not die as they claim that he did. Marlowe is a fascinating character of debauchery and misbehavior, intrigue and mystery, and undeniable genius. As a writer, he was a maverick and risk-taker, having begun the ascendance of the theatrical play as one of the heights of Elizabethan literature with his play Tamburlaine the Great, about the historical figure who rose from shepherd boy to monarch. This play, and its sequel, Tamburlaine the Great Part II, were among the very first English plays to be written in blank verse, meaning there is a very definite connection between the style of writing established by Marlowe and the later work of Shakespeare. It is probable that for a few years, Kit Marlowe was a member of the Gray’s Inn group along with Sir Francis Bacon and several other suspicious literary luminaries like Sir Walter Raleigh and possibly Ben Jonson. (I have to admit at this point that if I am wrong about the Stratford guy and he did write the plays, then he was a member of this group as well, because it was not closed to commoners, only to stupid people. The Stratford guy was in no way stupid or a villain, no matter what you may believe about the authorship question.) But here is where the link to Shakespeare’s plays and poetry both begins and ends. Yes, Kit Marlowe was a capable enough author to have written such sublime plays. He has all the individual skills to make up the whole. But if you read his masterwork, The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, you will see that the voice, the unique literary style of the work is simply not by the same author. Although Shakespeare revisits some of the same themes that Marlowe used in his plays, his manner of development, handling of character, style of humor, and underlying conviction in the existence of God are all different and opposed to Marlowe’s. Marlowe is NOT Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s works have more in common with Bacon’s than Marlowe’s. And I have already said that, “Shakespeare is NOT Bacon… or eggs either.” And if I said it, it must be so. (Don’t throw eggs and tomatoes at your computer screen when you read this. Just call me stupid and vain in the comments like everybody else does.)
And an even more compelling reason to those of you who don’t obsess over reading Shakespeare and Marlowe and Ben Jonson is that, at the time Shakespeare’s plays were probably written, Kit Marlowe was busy either being stone cold dead, or, having faked his death, was busy being a secret agent for Queen Elizabeth.
And why would a goofball like me think that Christopher Marlowe cunningly faked his own death and went into his own thrilling quest to be like James Bond more than 300 years before Ian Fleming? Well, because I know how to read and am not generally bright enough not to believe what others have written about him and his connections to the world of spying in Elizabethan times.
These authors have brought out the fact that Marlowe’s frequent absences from college and later public obligations coincide with things like the mysterious tutor called “Morley” who tutored Arbella, niece of Mary Queen of Scots, and a potential successor to Queen Elizabeth, in 1589. He was also arrested in the Netherlands for allegedly counterfeiting coins related to the activities of seditious Catholics. He was brought back to England to be dealt with by Lord Treasurer Burghley, the closest adviser to Queen Elizabeth, and was then not so much punished as let off the hook and even rewarded monetarily. Still think he was not a spy? Well, his demise probably came about through his relationship with Lord Francis Walsingham and his friendship with Walsingham’s son. You see, Walsingham was Elizabeth’s “M”, leader of her spies and intelligence units. After Walsingham died, there was deep concern that no one was still able to protect Marlowe from possible consequences of being both a homosexual and an atheist. (Being gay was obviously not as serious a sin as atheism for which torture and death penalties lay in wait.) It was possible that rival spies and nefarious forces could kidnap Marlowe and get information out of him that the Queen needed to be kept secret.
So, when Lord Burghley tortured Marlowe’s friend and sometime roommate, Thomas Kyd, into naming Marlowe a heretic and sending men out with a warrant to arrest Marlowe, Kit’s other friend, Thomas Walsingham probably warned Marlowe. The bar fight that supposedly ended Marlowe’s life was witnessed by two friends of his, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, both provably con men and professional liars. The knife that stabbed him in the forehead above his right eye was wielded by Ingram Fizer, another of Marlowe’s disreputable friends, allegedly over an unpaid debt. Fizer, of course, though he freely admitted killing Marlowe, was acquitted of the murder. And the coroner’s report is suspect. Rules of investigation were not followed, and the body was never independently identified by someone other than the three friends at the scene of the crime. And the body was hastily buried before anyone else could get a close look at it.
I am not only telling you that I believe Christopher “Kit” Marlowe was NOT Shakespeare… or eggs either (though that joke doesn’t really work here), but I believe he didn’t die the way it has been reported to us by history. And why do I believe these things? Because I think the story of Christopher Marlowe is a really great story, and it exists as a story whether it is historically true or not.
**This is a repost of my prediction from 11/2/2016 that Trump would win the presidency in 2016, posted again because Pogo and I are concerned he is on track to do it again from prison in 2024.
Yessir, the Cubs have a chance to win their first World Series since 1908 tonight. They have not won the title since Tinker to Evers to Chance was the double-play combo of poetic proportions. They have never won in my lifetime, and I am quite old. So, there is proof positive the world is about to end.
Yes, I can even describe the mechanics of the thing. Donald Trump will be elected President of the United States thanks to Mr. Comey’s timely reveal of more scandalous emails that he has not read and chuckled about yet. You know, the ones that he couldn’t have actually read yet because they come from potential pedophile Anthony Weiner’s computer, and he had to have a separate warrant from a judge to read anything that may have to do with Hillary, even though probably none of them contain nude pictures from Hillary, and she probably didn’t even write those emails. The world had to know about that right before the election, especially members of the Republican House Committee for examining Hillary’s every boo-boo. So, the Donald will win, because nobody is doing any press conferences on the FBI investigation on his ties to the Russian government through the biggest bank in Russia. ‘Taint important, Pogo.
And once the great orange pumpkin-head is our next president, our health care will no longer be under the misguided protection of Obamacare. Instead, it will will be taken care of by “something terrific” that will make high profits for somebody, and make certain that I will never be able to pay another medical bill (since those who are deceased rarely do).
And, of course, President Pompadoodle will be able to declare that we no longer have to believe in the climate change hoax. The result being that we will soon be able to buy beachfront property in Iowa and Missouri, be able to purchase our breathable air in factory-made brick-form, and possibly grow a helpful third eye from the mutating effects of nuclear radiation.
And, lastly, I would like to thank the late great Walt Kelly for illustrating today’s post. One wonders how a cartoonist can look so far ahead from the 1960’s to do such a fine job of illustrating the problems of 2016? Will miracles never cease? I mean, really, we could probably do with a few less of these industrial grade miracles made out of recycled elephant poop.
I am nearing the completion of the rewrite of part two of AeroQuest. Part of that is getting all the illustrations I want to include done. So, here are a few more that I have been working on.
For those who might be wondering, AeroQuest 1 and AeroQuest 2 are comic science fiction, and I have chosen to rewrite them with lots of illustrations since it is a work of fiction that I might’ve done as a graphic novel if only I didn’t have arthritis in my hands.
Catch a Falling Star 
Nutzy Nuts
Things are not what they seem. Life throws curve balls across the plate ninety percent of the time. Fastballs are rare. And fastballs you can hit are even rarer. But if Life is pitching, who is the batter? Does it change the metaphor and who you are rooting for if the batter is Death?
If you think this means that I am planning on dying because of the Coronavirus pandemic, well, you would be right. Of course, I am always planning for death with every dark thing that bounces down the hopscotch squares of the immediate future. That’s what it means to be a pessimist. No matter what bad thing we are talking about, it will not take ME by surprise. And if I think everything is going to kill me, sooner or later I have to be right… though, hopefully, much later.
I keep seeing things that aren’t there. Childlike faces keep looking at me from the top of the stairs, but when I focus my attention there, they disappear. And I know there are no children in the house anymore since my youngest is now legally an adult. And the chimpanzee that peeked at me from behind the couch in the family room was definitely not there. I swear, it looked exactly like Roddy McDowell from the Planet of the Apes movies, whom I know for a fact to be deceased. So, obviously, it has to be Roddy McDowell’s monkey-ghost. I believe I may have mentioned before that there is a ghost dog in our house. I often catch glimpses of its tail rounding the corner ahead of me when my own dog is definitely behind me. And I am sure I shared the facts before that Parkinson’s sufferers often see partial visions of people and faces (and apparently dogs) that aren’t really there, and that my father suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. So, obviously it is my father and not me that is seeing these things… He’s just using my eyeballs to do it with.
But… and this is absolutely true even if it starts with a butt… the best way to deal with scary possibilities is to laugh at them. Jokes, satire, mockery, and ludicrous hilarity expressed in big words are the proper things to use against the fearful things you cannot change. So, this essay is nothing but a can of mixed nutz. Nutzy nuts. And fortunately, peanut allergies are one incurable and possibly fatal disease I don’t have. One of the few.
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