Category Archives: strange and wonderful ideas about life

November 4, 2016 · 3:38 pm

Trolls, Wish-niks, and Garden Gnomes

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(From left to right)  My green-haired Wish-nik from 1966, my teacher troll from 1990, Poppy, and the wizard troll from 1992 (with the garden gnome in the background)

Okay, here is some bad news for a guy who suffers from hoarding disorder, especially when it comes to things like dolls and toys that he can play with while he’s supposed to be trying to be a writer in his burned-out sick-bed retirement.  They are making a movie about Trolls at Dreamworks… and there are dolls already on sale.

The city is after me to repair the house and yard on the outside, especially the cracked swimming pool that now only seems to hold bug-water for brewing the next generation of West Nile and Zika squeetoes to bite me and immediately die from the toxic chemicals already in my sick old blood.  I need to do more than just put mosquito poison in the water.  They say I must have the filter operating and it must be clear enough to see the drain in the bottom of the deep end.  Pool repair guy says the crack repair is in the neighborhood of $14,000, which is $16,000 more than I have to spend right now.  I’m already not buying medicine any more for my six incurable diseases.  I’m also not going to the doctor any more because he will just yell at me for not taking medication anymore… even though I actually feel better not having taken the blood pressure medicine for over a year now.  So the plan is to clean and repair the pool myself.  This apparently will satisfy the trolls at the city inspector’s office, at least until I die from the cold and rain we seem to be getting now.

But those aren’t the trolls I meant to write about today.  I am writing about the little troll doll named Poppy that I bought for $5 yesterday at Walmart.  She’s the pink one in the middle of my photo-paffooney.  The one that’s not a nudist like the rest of my remaining troll collection.  (My daughter, the Princess, played with my troll collection of over 20 troll dolls when she was smaller and decided they all needed hair cuts and make-overs that completely altered them and eventually murdered them when she learned to cut and melt plastic.)

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A troll corpse from the garage, murdered by make-up and partially eaten by rats.

So, the movie will feature a number of different trolls, the corresponding toys for which are already on sale in places where I will not be able to help myself from collecting the entire goofy little crew.  And I do not have any place for them to live.  I had to remove a section of Booggloopenstein Castle just to display the old trolls for a photo-paffooney.  They will take over the house.  And I know I should be out working on the pool instead of plotting where to put more trolls.  But I just can’t help it.  There is something irresistible about collecting ugly and goofy toys.

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Filed under collecting, doll collecting, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, humor, nudes, Paffooney, photo paffoonies, strange and wonderful ideas about life

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October 30, 2016 · 4:01 pm

Tom Sawyer Abroad (Book Review)

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Yep, I read about being an “erronort” traveling in a balloon while sitting in a parking lot in my car.

Believe it or not, I read this entire 100+year-old book in my car while waiting for my daughter and my son in school parking lots.  What a perfectly ironic way to read a soaring imaginary adventure written by Mark Twain and mostly forgotten about by the American reading public.

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My copy of this old book is a 1965 edition published for school libraries of a book written in 1894.  It tells the story of how Tom and Huck and Jim steal a ride on a balloon at a town fair from a somewhat mentally unhinged professor of aeronautical science.  The balloon, which has space-age travel capabilities due to the professor’s insane genius, takes them on an accidental voyage to Africa.

Of course, the insane professor intends to kill them all, because that’s what insane geniuses do after they prove how genius-y they really are.  But as he tries to throw Tom into the Atlantic, he only manages to plunge himself through the sky and down to an unseen fate.  The result being a great adventure for the three friends in the sands of the Sahara.  They face man-eating lions, mummy-making sandstorms, and a chance to land on the head of the Sphinx.

The entire purpose of this book is to demonstrate Twain’s ability to be a satirical stretcher of the truth, telling jokes and lies through the unreliable narrator’s voice of Huck Finn.

Here is a quoted passage from the book to fill up this review with words and maybe explain just a bit what Twain is really doing with this book;

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Notice how I doubled my word count there without typing any of the words myself?  Isn’t the modern age wonderful?

But there you have it.  This book is about escaping every-day newspaper worries.  In a time of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, global warming, and renewed threats of thermonuclear boo-boos with Russia, this proved to be the perfect book to float away with on an imaginary balloon to Africa.  And the book ends in a flash when Aunt Polly back in Hannibal wants Tom back in time for breakfast.  I really needed to read this book when I picked it up to read it.

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Filed under book reports, book review, foolishness, good books, humor, imagination, Mark Twain, old books, strange and wonderful ideas about life

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October 28, 2016 · 2:57 pm

Tricks With Lazy Goals in Mind

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As a writer, my goal is to create wisdom and new ideas and stuff that makes a reader feel happy, or sad, or angry, or even slightly insane.  But thinking is hard when your head hurts and your body aches and your sixtieth birthday is just around the corner.  (Yes, this Mickey is nearly 60, but can you believe that that Mickey is going to be 88 on the day after I turn 60?)  Sometimes you just want to say, “Never mind that I wanted to post every single day for the past two years.  Just curl up in a ball and go to sleep.”  But there are ways to get something done even if your mind is full of the Sandman’s leavings and old, rotted dreams.

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You can always get by with posting somebody else’s wisdom… somebody else’s thinking.  You don’t have to work too hard to paste things together.  After all, why else did you have to look at so many cut-and-paste essays over the years in middle school and high school?

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And you can rely on the work you have already done collecting computer files full of colorful crap and stuff you like enough to steal to complete your cut-and-paste scrapbook post.  You don’t have to feel like you erred and are about to have your head cut off by an angry Groo.

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And you know you can get a lot of cheap likes on Facebook with some of the stuff you have available to put in this post.  You have been working at the “Be funny!” thing for a long time, and have gotten almost good enough at it to be funny on the fly.  And when you’ve gotten more than halfway to the goal, you can rest a bit.  Take a nap.  Regenerate the crazy things in your head so you can do this all again another day.

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And if you can have a laugh before you are finished, even if no one else in the world gets the joke… well, at least you will feel a little bit better yourself.

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Filed under battling depression, blog posting, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, healing, humor, illness, self pity, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism

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October 27, 2016 · 3:12 pm

Reading Twain for a Lifetime

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I wish to leave no doubt unturned like a stone that might have treasure hidden under it.  I love the works of Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.

I have read and studied his writing for a lifetime, starting with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer which I read for myself in the seventh grade, after seeing the musical movie Tom Sawyer starring Johnny Whittaker as Tom.  I caught a severe passion, more serious than a head-cold, for the wit and wisdom with which Twain crafted a story.  It took me a while to acquire and read more… but I most definitely did.  I took an American Literature course in college that featured Twain, and I read and analyzed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I also bought a copy of Pudd’nhead Wilson which I would later devour in the same thoroughly literate and pretentious manner as I had Huck Finn.  Copies of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Mysterious Stranger were purchased at the same time, though I didn’t read them cover to cover until later during my years as a middle school English teacher.  I should point out, however, that I read and re-read both of those, Connecticut Yankee winning out by being read three times.  As a teacher, I taught Tom Sawyer as an in-class novel assignment in the time when other teachers thought I was more-or-less crazy for trying to teach a 100-year-old book to mostly Hispanic non-readers.  While the lunatic-inspired experiment was not a total success, it was not a total failure either.  Some kids actually liked having me read parts of it aloud to them, and some borrowed copies of the book to reread it for themselves after we finished as a class.

marktwaindvd2006During my middle-school teaching years I also bought and read copies of The Prince and the Pauper, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi.  I would later use a selection from Roughing It as part of a thematic unit on Mark Twain where I used Will Vinton’s glorious clay-mation movie, The Adventures of Mark Twain as a way to painlessly introduce my kids to the notion that Mark Twain was funny and complex and wise.

I have also read and used some of Twain’s most famous short fictions.  “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” are both masterpieces of Twain’s keen insight into the human psyche and the goofy and comic corruptions he finds there.

And now, retired old me is reading Tom Sawyer Abroad.  And, though it is not one of his finest works, I still love it and am enthralled.  I will review it and share it with you when I am finished.  But I will never be through with Mark Twain.  Not only is there more of him to read, but he has truly been a life-long friend .

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October 26, 2016 · 3:41 pm

The Silent Sonata

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Being a writer is a life of music that happens only in your head.  You hear voices constantly.  They pulse rhythmically with insights and ideas that have to be written down and remembered.  Otherwise  the music turns clashing-cymbals dark and depressing.  Monday I wrote a deeply personal thank you to the Methodist minister who saved my life when I was a boy.  I posted a YouTube music video by the acapella group Pentatonix with that essay in a vain attempt to give you an idea of the music in my head when I composed that very difficult piece to give myself a measure of peace.

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I realize that I am not writing poetry here.  Poetry can so easily slip into melody and music because of rhythm and meter and rhyme.  And yet, words to me are always about singing, about performing, about doing tricks with metaphor and meaning, rhythm, convoluted sentence structure, and other sneaky things that snake-oil salesman do to get you to think what you are hearing is precisely what you needed to hear.  The Sonata of Silence…  did you notice the alliteration of the silvery letter “S” in that title?  The beat of the syllables?  Da-daah-da a da-da?  The way a mere suggestion of music can bring symphonic sounds to your ear of imagination as you read?  The way a simple metaphor, writing is music, can be wrapped into an essay like a single refrain in a symphonic piece?

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A sonata is a musical exercise in three or four movements that is basically instrumental in nature.  You may have noticed that the movements are loosely defined here by the accompanying pictures, of which there are three.  And it is silent only in the way that the instruments I am using themselves make no noise in the physical world.  The only sounds as I type these words are the hum of an old air conditioner and the whirr of my electric fan.  Yet my mind is filled with crescendos of violins and cellos, bold brass, and soft woodwinds.  The voice saying these words aloud only in my head is me.  Not the me you hear when I talk or the me I can hear on recordings of my own voice, but rather the me that I always hear from the inside.  And the voice is not so much “saying” as “singing”.

Writing makes music.  The writer can hear it.  The reader can too.  And whether I croon it to make you cry, or trill it to make you laugh, I am playing the instrument.  And so, the final notes of the sonata are these.  Be happy.  Be well.  And listen for the music.

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October 22, 2016 · 3:46 pm

Making Portraits

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My biggest regret as a cartoonist and waster of art supplies is the fact that I am not the world’s best portrait artist.  I can only rarely make a work of art look like a real person.  Usually the subject has to to be a person I love or care deeply about.  This 1983 picture of Ruben looks very like him to me, though he probably wouldn’t recognize himself here as the 8th grader who told me in the fall of 1981 that I was his favorite teacher.  That admission on his part kept me from quitting and failing as a first year teacher overwhelmed by the challenges of a poor school district in deep South Texas.

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My Great Grandma Hinckley was really great.

My great grandmother on my mother’s side passed away as the 1970’s came to an end.  I tried to immortalize her with a work of art.  I drew the sketch above to make a painting of her.  All my relatives were amazed at the picture.  They loved it immensely.  I gave the painting to my Grandma Aldrich, her second eldest daughter.  And it got put away in a closet at the farmhouse.  It made my grandma too sad to look at every day.  So the actual painting is still in a closet in Iowa.

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There were, of course, numerous students that made my life a living heck, especially during my early years as a teacher.  But I was one of those unusual teachers (possibly insane teachers) who learned to love the bad kids.  Love/hate relationships tend to endure in your memory almost as long as the loving ones.  I was always able to pull the good out of certain kids… at least in portraits of them.

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When kids pose for pictures, they are not usually patient enough to sit for a portrait artist.  I learned early on to work from photographs, though it has the disadvantage of being only two-dimensional.  Sometimes you have to cartoonify the subject to get the real essence of the person you are capturing in artiness.

But I can’t get to the point of this essay without acknowledging the fact that any artist who tries to make a portrait, is not a camera.  The artist has to put down on paper or canvas what he sees in his own head.  That means the work of art is filtered through the artist’s goofy brain and is transformed by all his quirks and abnormalities.  Therefore any work of art, including a portrait that looks like its subject, is really a picture of the artist himself.  So, I guess I owe you some self portraits to compare.

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Yeah, that’s me at 10… so what?

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Filed under art criticism, artwork, autobiography, humor, kids, Paffooney, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life

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October 21, 2016 · 3:38 pm

Spokes-Dog

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At breakfast I cooked smokies, small-sized fried sausages.  Jade, our family dog got up to the table with the rest of us.

“I can eat twenty of those!” Jade said.

“No you can’t,” I said.  “You are a dog and eat from a bowl on the floor.  I didn’t even set a plate on the table for you.  This is not dog food.”

“Dad?  Did you see these coupons for Taco Bell on the table?” said the Princess.

“Oh, you mean, the Taco Bueno ads?  Remember what the last trip to that other place gave us?”

“Oh, yeah.  That was a horrible day spent in the bathroom,” she answered.

“The next time you go to Taco Bell, take me! ” said the dog.  “I loved the taco meat I found on the table last time you made the mistake of leaving some there.”

“Well, I do know that Taco Bell is universally loved by dogs.”

“How do you know that?” asked the Princess.

“Don’t you remember the Taco Bell dog?  Or were you too young when he was popular?”

“I think I was too young.”

“Look him up on the internet.”

“Oh, yeah!  I kinda remember that.  He was a talking dog, just like Jade.”

“Yes, but I think he mostly spoke Spanish.”

“He’s handsome!” said Jade.  “But look, he’s on television with very short fur… he’s naked!  That would be very embarrassing.”

“Yeah, when it comes to TV spokes-dogs, you’d probably prefer Spuds Mackenzie.  He had more style.”

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“I never heard of him,” said the Princess.

“Well, he was before you were born.  He was the Budweiser spokes-dog.”

“Did he talk too?”

“Just party language.  He was always chilling by the pool with beautiful human girls.”

“Let me see more of him!” demanded Jade.

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“Wow!” said Jade.  “A dog who drinks beer and plays guitar!  I think I’m in love!”

“That was so long ago, though,” I said.  “He is probably dead by now.  The average life span of a dog is only about ten years at the most.”

“Oh, now I am depressed,” said Jade.  “And you know the only cure for that is to give me some of the breakfast sausages!”

So, as I gave a dog a sausage, I was deeply regretting the whole talking dog thing.

 

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October 15, 2016 · 4:29 pm

Good Words We Never Use

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My attempt to draw “synesthesia”

Xanthophobia (from Greek xanthos, “yellow”) is fear of the color yellow. In China the color yellow was feared, specifically receiving the yellow scarf, which was an imperial order to commit suicide.

http://phobia.wikia.com/wiki/Xanthophobia

Yes, “xanthophobia” is a word I have never used in my life before now.  I have no doubt that I will never need that word again in my life.  You, dear reader, will probably never need that word either.  But the derfy space-ranger part of my brain thinks it is neat that I was able to correctly answer a trivia question about the meaning of “xanthophobia”simply because my background as an artist who has shopped for exotic oil colors in artist supply stores helped me to recognize that the “xantho” part of the word meant yellow.

Are there other totally useless words that my space-ranger brain thinks are cool to know?  Of course there are!  How can you ask such a silly question?

Ouzel may refer to:

hobbledehoy

noun hob·ble·de·hoy \ˈhä-bəl-di-ˌhȯi\
Popularity: Bottom 30% of words

Definition of hobbledehoy

  1. :  an awkward gawky youth

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hobbledehoy

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So, what is the actual use of knowing so many words that you can never functionally use?  Besides as a topic of a goofy post like this?

They become like the pebbles and rocks at the bottom of the briskly rushing stream of my mind.  They are not moving with the water, but they are affecting the ripples and splashes on the surface above them.  They cause eddies and backwashes and undercurrents in the complex flow of my space-ranger brain.  They make life more interesting on the surface.

And besides, knowing useless words can make me sound smarter than the fool with a derfy space-ranger brain that I truly am.

perfy derfy
a phrase that you can tell some one when they are being so perfect. since you don’t feel like using the whole word “perfect” you use this phrase.

can also describe a human being/inanimate object and can replace someone’s name.

i just ate a thousand candy bars.
omygod. that’s so perfy derfy.

hey looks it’s perfy derfy!
where?!?!
over there! by the perfy derfy mailbox.
wow. such a perfy derfy.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=perfy%20derfy
https://youtu.be/NZ3FjpBRDVI

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, philosophy, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wisdom, word games, wordplay

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October 13, 2016 · 3:35 pm

Fix Coulrophobia… Now!

I love clowns.  I always have.  When I was five I wanted to be a clown.  Red Skelton is my personal hero and role model, the reason I became a teacher, to use my clown skills for good rather than evil.  But sinister folks who think they are joking are seriously jeopardizing all of that.

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In 1988 I did watch and enjoy the movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space.  It was funny.  And I liked Stephen King’s “It” as a horror movie.  It was definitely scary.  But 2016 has become the year of the creepy clown.  Why would any idiot want to dress up in an expensive horror-clown mask and clown suit to wave at somebody’s security camera at two in the morning?  And, Mr. Idiot, did you at least try to figure out if the homeowner was a gun owner in an open carry State?  One of the recent clowns to be arrested turned out to be a teenage boy… you know, the ultimate planner and thinker-ahead-er.

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I would like to propose that we prosecute a case or two of creepy clowns in the woods at night with a mandatory “How to Love a Clown” class.  After all, clowns are a worthy thing.  How many clowns over how many years have handed out candy to kids and brought a smile to small faces during a Fourth of July parade?  How many circus clowns like the Great Emmett Kelly made us laugh with a pantomime routine?  How many Shrine Circus clowns helped entertain us and raise money to fight childhood disease and cancer?  Bob Keeshan who was Clarabell the Clown on Howdy Doody helped raise me and make me the person I am now as Captain Kangaroo.  The real creepy clown crime is that they are taking the image of a clown, which is a very good thing and turning it into something bleak and horrifying.  My purpose for this post is to remind you of the good things about the people under the face paint.  I want you to remember a few of these.

 

 

 

 

 

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Filed under angry rant, clowns, collage, commentary, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

October 12, 2016 · 3:33 pm

The World is Ending, the Cubs are Winning

Sep 2, 2016; Chicago, IL, USA; Chicago Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo (44) hits a double against the San Francisco Giants during the eighth inning at Wrigley Field. Mandatory Credit: David Banks-USA TODAY Sports

The Cubs, those lovable losers from Wrigley who haven’t won the world series in a century, came from behind in the 9th inning and closed out the hated Giants.  They are going to the National League Championship.  If they win the World Series, the world will end.  And I have to say, in spite of being a Cardinals’ fan and wanting the world to survive, I am rooting for them to do it.

Feb 29, 2016; Mesa, AZ, USA; Chicago Cubs pitcher John Lackey poses for a portrait during photo day at Sloan Park. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

For the record, two critical Cubs are actually Cardinals in Cub suits.  John Lackey and Jason Heyward were both part of the Cardinals’ 100-win season last season.  In my heart, they will always be Cardinals.  If they can’t win the series with St. Louis, at least they deserve to win it with the team that stole them.  And, of course, the Cardinals themselves didn’t make the playoffs, and the Texas Rangers were blasted out of the playoffs by Toronto.  I can’t root for any of the other teams that remain.

So I end up rooting for the world to end.  The goat’s curse will be broken.  Donald Trump will be president.  And solar winds from the sun will strip the biosphere off the planet.  Why would I want such a thing?  Because it is baseball… and baseball is a life.

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