Yes, it is very possible that my imagination was galvanized in childhood by TV.
It seems to me that NBC had even more power over me than the other two networks. We could get CBS and ABC on our black-and-white TV. But the only NBC affiliate in Iowa was not able to be received in our little town. We had to go to Grandma’s house in Mason City where Grandma had a color TV.
Wow! Color!
Of course, it used to be referred to as the “Boob Tube” because psychologists and people who mattered kept saying that TV makes you stupid. Which, naturally, has a grain of truth to it because you don’t watch TV actively. You sit there and passively let the stories, commercials, and propaganda about sugary breakfast cereals flow in one ear, poison your brain, and then flow out the other ear leaving only water-logged thinking-muscles behind them.
The Saturday Matinees on CBS provided my youthful imagination with science fiction, fantasy, and heroes of all kinds.
I taught myself to draw cartoon characters based on the animated shows I watched on TV. I not only copied Mickey, for obvious reasons, but also Donald and Daffy Ducks, Space Ghost, Jonny Quest, Yogi Bear, and the Herculoids.
And Batman! With Adam West and Burt Ward and Cesar Romero as the Joker. Bam! Boff! Sock! Pow! Bright colors, goofy Riddler plots, and really bad jokes that were so bad they made you laugh.
And I loved monster movies. Not horror movies really. I never loved Freddy Krueger or Jason. But the Wolfman? Frankenstein’s Monster? Bela Lugosi’s Dracula? The Creature from the Black Lagoon? My inspirations!
And, of course, Disney on Sunday nights. The Wonderful World of Disney in living color.
People accused of doing magical thinking are basically being accused of doing something awful. Like Republicans telling us that if we cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, working class and middle class citizens will prosper because of it. Of course, they actually know better. So, it isn’t really magical thinking. It is really evil magical thinking.
But when I am actually guilty of magical thinking, it is more along the lines of me pinning my hopes on an intuition brought about by calculations in my overcrowded imagination that are probably horribly miscalculated but that I need to turn out to be accurate and miraculously pull me out of my current difficulty. And then, because I intuit really, really hard… it turns out all right.
Magic is after all, merely what we call science and situations where something amazing is created, but we have no idea at all how and why.
Our movies nowadays are really quite chock full of magical thinking. Wish-fulfillment, fantasy, and violence-laden revenge stories are what fill the cinema with seekers of escapism and relaxation. That is magical thinking of an epic sort. Go see the Black Panther movie and “Wakanda forever” solves racism.
So, what is the point of this little essay? What am I actually thinking about the subject of magical thinking? Well, I needed a topic today to keep my every-day-in-April posting goal alive. And magically…
This 2019-2020 school year was my first as a retired school teacher earning extra money by substitute teaching. It ended before I was ready. I not only didn’t get a chance to earn all the money I needed, I did not get the chance to see some of the kids in five different middle schools I subbed for that I had learned to like and hoped to see again before the year ended. I did put in enough time to get rehired for next year. I even got to keep my sub badge so that I can go back if the schools ever reopen again. But I despair a bit over what I have lost. My health may not be good enough to go back to the job I love so much. In fact, I don’t really expect miracles to happen that would let me survive this pandemic. If I do go back to school next fall, it is more likely to be in order to haunt the hallways than to teach again.
The last few nights I have been sleeping longer than I have at any time since I retired in 2014. And I have had vivid dreams of being a teacher in a classroom yet again. But always in schools that are only vaguely familiar and are obviously new jobs with new kids that I haven’t seen or trained before. And yet, as it always is with teaching, they are all the same classroom, all the same schools, all the same kids, just in new packages that I haven’t seen before.
One of the things that is hardest about being a substitute rather than a regular teacher is the fact that one day, one class period, is not long enough to build a relationship with every kid. You cannot get to really know them in such a short amount of time. That’s why going back to certain schools is so exhilarating because you get a chance to cover the same classes again, see the same kids, and work on being a good teacher for them in the way I used to do it for kids that were mine for an entire school year.
And I was one of those rare teachers who actually likes kids.
Many teachers never get over the difficulty of managing a classroom and doing discipline. It is for them a never-ending battle for order and quiet. They only manage it by becoming fearsome ogres or anal-retentive control freaks. Most of those only ever consider discipline to be punishing kids enough to make them mind.
Those sorts of teachers don’t believe me when I tell them that the way to do discipline is not by quashing behaviors and limiting behaviors through punishment, but by encouraging the behaviors that you want. And by leading them into the excitement of reading a good story or learning an interesting new thing.
As a sub I went into the classrooms of punishing teachers and weak-willed teachers who let students do whatever they will. Invariably you meet boys who are convinced they are stupid and doomed to fail. They suspect their parents don’t like them. And all they want to do is stop lessons from happening by being disruptive. And invariably you meet girls who think the only hope for them is to capture the right boy (without any earthly idea what the right boy will be like). And they suspect their parents don’t like them very much. And all they want to do is fix their make-up, talk about boys with other girls, and talk boys into disrupting lessons to show their manliness.
As a substitute, I also went into the classes of teachers who knew the secret and actually loved kids. They had positive posters on the wall that could be paraphrased as, “There are wonderful things to do in this life, and I believe you can do them. You should believe it too.”
And they will say to their kids things like, “Look at this wonderful thing you have done. You are really good at this. And when you do things like this, nobody can tell me you aren’t a good and wonderful person that makes the world a better place.”
Kids need to see the evidence and hear those things from their teacher. And if the teacher is giving them that, they will even behave well for the substitute with very little work on the part of the substitute.
So, I have been dreaming about being a teacher again. It is a thing that I love to do, and I fear that, because of this pandemic, I will never be able to do it again. Even as a substitute. And if that is the case, then I hope that at least one person reads this and discovers the answer to the question, “How do you become a good teacher?” Because I believe I have it right. I know it worked for me. And I think it is true even if no one ever believes me.
I think a lot of thoroughly thoughtful thuggish thoughts that build and build and build up an idea, and then turn around and knock it all down. Let me demonstrate by knocking down that title right off the bat. Rene DesCartes in the early 1600’s said, “Cogito Ergo Sum”, and he thereby totally disrupted the world as we knew it. Didn’t get that? Let me translate. He said, “Je pense, donc je suis.” Still didn’t help? Okay, here’s the English, “I think, therefore I am.” In other words, the one thing that I know for sure is that I am thinking this particular thought at this particular time. If I am thinking, and I know I am, I must be here and I must be real. So there is one thing I know for certain. But do I know anything else for certain? Uh-oh. How do I know anything? I have to rely on my senses. And my senses lie to me all the time. I am partially color blind, so I don’t see the world the same way you do. I don’t see things in black and white, like Great Grandma Hinckley did in her 90’s, but the colors look different to my eyes than they do to yours and I will never know what things look like to you. Forget politicians and all other people who tell lies, my own eyes lie to me constantly. So can I know anything for sure? Of course not. All I have are firm beliefs based on imperfect senses and best guesses at what is true. So what I am actually talking about is a list of potential essay ideas that I am merely asserting as true based on my imperfect goofy thinking of thoughtful thuggish thoughts.
Idea #1 that I think is certainly possibly maybe true; My brain was taught and I was raised to adulthood by the movies I saw when I was young. I want to talk about this at length in another post. The video is by a guy who was a kid in the 80’s, and he has some really awesome movies to offer as a way to delineate his rise to adulthood.
My list includes the movies of my boyhood seen in the Belmond Theater and on our old black and white Motorola TV. My list of movies that raised me includes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, and The Wizard of Oz.
Idea #2; Animals are people too.
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I mean, as a writer for young adults, I know for a fact that animals are relevant as characters. They have a point of view, feelings, reactions, and complex lives that people rarely pay attention to. I have to write about this some time in the future too.
Idea #3; The worst things that happen to us in our lives, are also the best things that happen. Wow! What a difficult essay topic. But I not only think it, I can prove it… at least to myself. But can I write about it? Time will tell.
Idea #4; Silly thoughts and serious thoughts are two sides of the same coin. And this will be particularly difficult to think about if thoughts are literally coins. That would mean that my head is full of metal, and I know several people who would read that sentence and shout, “I knew it all along!” Fortunately they are all too sensible to read this far in one of my blog posts.
So, at 600 words I still have lots more to say. But people with metal in their heads often talk way too much, so my concluding sentence will be simply; “I promise to shut up for now.”
I read a lot of other people’s blogs for a lot of reasons. As an old writing teacher and retired Grammar Nazi, I love to see where writers are on the talent spectrum. I have read everything from the philosophy of Camus and Kant to the beginning writing of ESL kids who are illiterate in two languages. I view it like a vast flower garden of varied posies where even the weeds can be considered beautiful. And like rare species of flower, I notice that many of the best blossoms out there in the blogosphere are consistent with their coloring and patterns. In other words, they have a theme.
So, do I have an over-all theme for my blog? It isn’t purely poetical like some of the poetry blogs I like to read. I really only write comically bad poetry. It has photos in it, but it isn’t anything like some of the photography blogs I follow. They actually know how to photograph stuff and make it look perfect and pretty. It is not strictly an art blog. I do a lot of drawing and cartooning and inflict it upon you in this blog. But I am not a professional artist and can’t hold a candle to some of the painters and artists I follow and sometimes even post about. I enjoy calling Trump President Pumpkinhead, but I can’t say that my blog is a political humor blog, or that I am even passable as a humorous political commentator.
One thing that I can definitely say is that I was once a teacher. I was one of those organizers and explainers who stand in front of diverse groups of kids five days a week for six shows a day and try to make them understand a little something. Something wise. Something wonderful. Something new. Look at the video above if you haven’t already watched it. Not only does it give you a sense of the power of holding the big pencil, it teaches you something you probably didn’t realize before with so much more than mere words.
But can I say this is an education blog? No. It is far too silly and pointless to be that. If you want a real education blog, you have to look for someone like Diane Ravitch’s blog. Education is a more serious and sober topic than Mickey.
By the way, were you worried about the poor bunny in that first cartoon getting eaten by the fox and the bear? Well, maybe this point from that conversation can put your mind at ease.
Mickey is tricky and gets good mileage out of his cartoons.
You may have gotten the idea that I like Bobby McFerrin by this point in my post. It is true. Pure genius and raw creative talent fascinate me. Is that the end point of my journey to an answer about what the heck this blog is about? Perhaps. As good an answer as any. But I think the question is still open for debate. It is the journey from thought through many thoughts to theme that make it all fun. And I don’t anticipate that journey actually ending anytime soon.
The word for it is Paffooney. I know that is not a real word. It is a Mickian word. Kinda like the word “Mickian”. It is entirely made up gibberish, made up by Mickey, and used to mean an artwork made by the hand of Mickey. So I can’t really explain it. I have to show you what it basically is.
This is a Paffooney. It is inspired by the incredibly unbelievable time in Mickey’s life when they let Mickey be a teacher in Texas. It has no other relationship to reality. Chinese girls in Texas generally do not have manga eyes and blue hair, and while Hispanic girls have been known to eat pencils, they never bring their own notebook paper to class. They always borrow. So there is the basic formula. Colored-pencil nonsense drawn by Mickey and attached somehow to a story.
This Paffooney has a self-explanatory story embedded in it. It is obvious this is the story of an average family car trip in Texas. Notice how they demonstrate the Texas State highway motto of, “Drive friendly”.
And this Paffooney is a Mickian recurring nightmare about a duck with teeth. Silly Mickey, ducks don’t have teeth in real life!
And moose bowling is a Paffooney that needs no explanation… or does it? Well, never mind. I have forgotten what it is for anyway.
And this oil-painting Paffooney speaks volumes about a philosophy of life. See the pilot giving the viewer a thumbs up? And that isn’t a parachute on his back. They didn’t have parachutes in World War I. It is a message pouch with German war plans in it. I even painted it with a bratwurst sandwich inside for the pilot’s lunch. Don’t I do great detail work? But he will have to eat it quickly before he reaches the ground.
And this is me teaching an ESL class. When you teach English to non-English speakers in Texas, you get to hold the big pencil. And it helps to be a big white rabbit.
And this is a science fiction Paffooney, although the science is questionable. Don’t doubt that the flower-people of the planet Cornucopia are real, though. And Mai Ling, the psionic space ninja really can elongate her arm to get maximum thrust into her left-handed karate chops.
And we end for today with the Paffooney of a stupid boy. He’s not really me. Not really. And I don’t even know who gave him the black eye. So it can’t be me. So maybe he is not so stupid. You can’t say that about somebody you don’t know and is not even you.
So, now do you know what a Paffooney is? No? Me neither. But if you Google images with the words “Beyer Paffooney” you can see a lot more of them. Nobody else uses that word but little ol’ me.
I was forced to retire from my career as a teacher by ill health, caused by years of juggling the chaos of a classroom (24 years of it in the middle-school monkey house. Aargh! Seventh graders!) I went into a school in 1981 as a rookie teacher for $11,000 a year. I was expected to take over a class that chased the previous teacher out of teaching permanently with firecrackers under her chair and nearly destroyed the school. The principal and half the teachers were new that year at Frank Newman Junior High. And I was on my own with discipline that year as everybody was scrambling to do their own jobs. The other English teacher was also a rookie.
As a group, we organized an effective faculty. Most of us were there for years as we stabilized the chaos. I personally broke up more than 35 fist fights in my teaching career, more than half of them at that middle school, and more than half of those by myself. I got punched in the back of the head twice, faced down a kid with actual razor-sharp throwing stars as a concealed weapon, and had my car tires slashed twice and car window broken once all because I was a teacher who wanted them to learn how to read and write better.
I built the English department, writing curriculum for three different grade levels to respond to three different State Tests. I was the department head for eight years, in charge of the gifted and talented program, and I helped us achieve a commendation for writing skills on the TAAS Test in the late 90’s. Of course, what I built was torn down and rebuilt more than twice because, well, Education is all about managing chaos.
A typical Texas school bus.
People often say that teachers don”t really earn their pay.because all they do is talk to kids all day and then get three months off in the summer. But I never heard a fellow teacher make that claim.
So, now I am retired, working hard at just staying alive. Retirement is supposed to be a quiet, calm, and restful time of life. But in my now-going-on eight year retirement, I have had a heart problem complete with a week in the hospital with no diagnosis, a five-year Chapter Thirteen Bankruptcy which I finished paying off in November of 2021, a two-year-going-on-three-year Covid 19 pandemic, the loss of both of my parents (neither one because of the pandemic,) and now, a war in Ukraine that could turn into nuclear Armageddon.
So, what am I supposed to do to recover from the chaos?
Maybe stuff hollyhocks in my checkerboard baggy pants. Or maybe just be satisfied with fictional worlds and living in my head.
The truth is sometimes Mickey tells lies. For instance, the title of this post is intended to lure you in with expectations of a juicy something that doesn’t actually exist. There is no controversy on the internet over this particular Mickey. He hasn’t done a very good job of keeping it secret that he tells a lot of lies. In fact, most of the most embarrassing and terrible secret things that he had been keeping secret for going on sixty years are now published in this blog. Talk about a life being an open book!
Of course, being a lover of internet conspiracies and ufo’s and junk, there is always that other Mickey to talk about. Yes, Disney has generated its share of conspiracy theories.
Everyone on the internet knows, for instance, that when Walt Disney died, he had his body frozen cryogenically so that he could be re-animated once a cure for his lung cancer was found. Of course, Snopes.com already did the investigation on it and brought out the fact that not only was Disney cremated with full documentation of the process, the first cryogenic freezing of a human being didn’t occur until a year after his death. This lie about Mickey’s dad, then is easily debunked. See, the internet lies about Mickey!
Of course, the notion that Disney was a racist and a Nazi and worked with the CIA are much harder to disprove.
A character from the original version of Fantasia that doesn’t help Mickey’s image.
Most heads of super-wealthy corporations are by nature fascists. The dictatorial style and oppressive oligarchic command structures of fascism organically grew out of business practices. Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan were also Nazis. And, of course, no one believes me when I start in on the Disney/alien connection. After all, what’s with alien beings in Escape from Witch Mountain, Lilo and Stitch, and even Chicken Little? I may have some more conspiracy-theory investigating to do.
So, let me assure you that lies about Mickey are actually lies. The thing about Mickey’s dream in the 1960’s of seeing Annette Funicello naked is a lie… er, probably. The notion that Mickey trained himself to be a cartoonist by copying Disney characters like Carl Barks’ ducks are… err… um… lies… maybe. Well, anyway, the point is… don’t spread lies on the internet about Mickey. That’s my job.
I intend to to spend a lot of time in this essay talking about Twitter nudists, but that is not what this essay is about. A rather large amount of the meaning behind all of this has more to do with setting priorities, what things to pursue, and what things to abandon.
A lot of my time on Twitter is filled with tweets by nudists, authors who write about nudists, Russian video artists, and Tom Hiddleston fans. I do not fully understand the connections between those things.
If I manage to stay alive long enough to see the next Avengers movie, and hopefully even beyond that, then I am going to have to budget my time and moderate my efforts towards certain endeavors. Does that mean I intend to give up all association with nudists? Or possibly twitter?
Of course not. I am simply not that smart. To give up on Twitter, I mean. It is an ungodly waste of time. It is a media of questionable value to me because I have achieved no measurable marketing value as a writer from it. I have learned a lot about actual nudists and naturists from it. I have made connections with naturist authors and thinkers and other websites through Twitter. I have even learned how valuable some young women and men find pictures and .gifs of Tom Hiddleston with his shirt off and smiling. I am not sure I understand it. But I have learned the obsession is very real.
This is an example of a nudist Tweet from Twitter that I get daily in my feed.
And I have come to accept, to a large degree, that nudism is a good thing. It is a way of life that has good effects on the people who participate in it. They have more confidence in themselves. They are definitely firm in their beliefs about most things. They are positive. And they get enough vitamin D from sunshine to be happy most of the time, and are rarely depressed. I wish I had embraced nudism when I had the chance back in the 1980’s. I might have been happier and healthier than I am now. And even now they are a very accepting group of people, willing to welcome me when I am old and weathered and covered in psoriasis plaques and sores. They are almost as inclusive as Tom Hiddleston fans. But I don’t actually know why his fans want to fill my Twitter feed every day with Loki’s face.
But I said this essay was really about setting priorities. And, like the video suggests, I have to be willing to let go of things. I have to adapt to circumstances and stop doing things that don’t really help me. I have to finish more of my long list of projects. I have to focus. ed
Drawing nudes that are not sexual or erotic in nature has long been an obsession with me. Anatomy drawing is essential to learning to draw believable figures… even cartoon figures.
Uber driving was on my list of things to evaluate and I have already discarded it. It does not pay well. The accident I had in August of 2018 was a difficult financial blow as well as an effective confidence-shaker. The penalties for Uber driving become apparent at tax time because they don’t take care of withholding like other employers are required to. So there is extra money to pay at tax time. I had to continue Uber driving for a while simply because I had another large tax bill to pay on top of the expenses that go along with the sin of being in poor health.
I also have to finish things I have started.
Look for the BARE NECESSITIES, the simple bare necessities… forget about your worries and your strife…ed
I have finished paying taxes for 2023. I have finished rebuilding the retaining wall in the yard. I have finished driving for Uber to make money. I have absolutely no problem finishing writing projects, considering all the novels I have published in the last three years. And I definitely need to finish this essay.
So, what have I decided to give up? Twitter? Twitter nudists? No. I might give up following rabid Tom Hiddleston fans, though.
Catch a Falling Star 