Earlier I alluded to the plan of the super scary villain, Dr. Evil with the removable brain. He was planning on invading Mickey’s library with malice aforethought… er, anger about all the books in there… or something. Anyway, today he attacked. He showed up with several of his evil minions.
He brought some of the most evil minions I could afford on a teacher’s salary. Ming the Merciless is his most evil adviser, a real whiz with the evil plans, even though I suspect he really doesn’t like looking at the Doctor’s exposed removable brain so much.
So, once convinced, Dr. Evil put on his Dr. Normal-Guy mask. It was a disguise he often used, and was successful while wearing it, because he could sneak past his enemies while they were laughing and rolling on the ground. The laughter often started inexplicably after an enemy would ask what nationality a…
I was trying to think what I would post today, and coming up blank. I have a pathological need to keep posting here, especially since my brain is currently switched to editing mode for my novel The Magical Miss Morgan. One can’t keep a sacred oath to write every day if there is no writing going on other than editing (which doesn’t count because no new creative thoughts are being generated and the fertile spore-producing areas of my mental storage shed may grow sterile for want of fresh garbage being piled there). So I went looking through my file of photo Paffoonies to find something I haven’t already inflicted on potential readers to the point of making them gag and doing something sensible like shutting off their computer for a while. Unfortunately all I found was this potential gag-inducing library photo of the time the Mighty Thor got drunk…
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…
My somewhat-better-than-last-time video of playing with dolls.
Yes, I collect dolls, and I play with them too. It is not that I am suddenly turning female in second childhood, it is rather that as I near the ultimate end-of-life diaper time, I am taking things slower and appreciating everything.
I remember the mid-1990s.
At that time my wife noticed that I still had my childhood action figures and occasionally worked on restoring them. At the time those particular toys were hot collector’s items. With the internet came E-Bay, and with E-Bay came the power to find and collect old toys that were rising in value daily. Derfy nutcases like me were willing to spend actual money to revisit the toys of our youth. I bought things like the Captain Action vintage Superman costume, seen in my bedroom next to my hospital cup. My wife started the whole Barbie craze by buying some for herself and starting me on a downward spiral of me buying old and new Barbie dolls for her. That’s when the doll collection spiraled out of control. I did manage to sell some here and there and make a bit of money, but eventually, the collectors’ market dried up as nerdy derfs managed to spend all their money on dolls and couldn’t buy more.
I remember the mid-1960s when I loved G. I. Joe and Captain Action.
My original set of action figures.
My relationship to toys goes back to a childhood where I basically had two younger sisters to play with. My little brother was eight years younger than me. So, most of the play time that wasn’t engaged in alone was all about me providing the adventure story that we were playing, and then directing my sisters either through my action figures and their Barbie dolls (Though one sister’s favorite was a Tammy doll) or through our imaginary selves to fight off the bog monsters, werewolves, and Nazi soldiers that tried to keep us from reaching our goals. We taught ourselves teamwork, problem-solving, and social skills by playing through fantasy adventures in the basement or in the yard, or, better still, in Grandpa’s barn.
I told you yesterday about Tagger, my toy tiger. I remember him as the longest-ago toy memory I can recall.
So, now that I’ve brought you all the way back to the 60s and the roots of my memories of playing with toys, let me explain to you why that’s been so much on my tiny old mind. My current WIP (Walnut Imitating Potatoes… no, correct that… Work In Progress) is called Fools and Their Toys. It is a story about desperately needing to communicate, even if you are a deaf-mute, an autistic young man, a victim of abuse, or a mentally challenged grown man. And the main character is a toy. That is, he is the narrator of the whole story even though he is actually a ventriloquist’s zebra puppet. I am not the only fool who plays with toys long past the appropriate age. And I have to tell this story because that’s the rule to this fantasy adventure game called life. Always play until the end. I have done that before. I am doing that still.
This is Baby Tiger. My daughter named her shortly after learning to talk.
I have a certain mania about hoarding old toys. My toys. My children’s toys. Other toys like abandoned toys from Goodwill and ReSale stores and liquidation toys from the bargain bins in Walmart and Toys-R-Us.
You see, the dependence on the importance in my life of people who are not real began with my own perceptions when the lights first went on in my little attic. Yes, my parents and my grandparents were real people. And I sometimes admitted, when forced, that my little sister was too. But so was Tagger, my own stuffed toy tiger.
This is not Tagger. This is a rare Stieff collectible. Tagger was loved to pieces.
I definitely treated him as my best friend and greatest confidant. I told him my troubles, and he protected me from monsters in bed at night. He often was included when I played with my sisters and their dolls. He was wise and brave and caring, and he talked with a voice that sounded very much like mine. In fact, I often think he was such a part of me that, when I no longer needed him in bed with me to help me sleep, I internalized him and he became a part of me. He did not meet his physical end until my parents had to leave Iowa and move to Texas while I was in grad school. What my sister did with his physical form, I really never wanted her to tell me. The house had to be cleaned out, and stuffed toys from the attic did not fair well.
Baby Tiger came into our lives in October of 1995.
I had almost given up ever being married and having a family when, at the age of 37, I finally fell in love, and then had a family, first of two, and then of three by the end of 1995. On the day my oldest son was born, as the doctor had told me to go home and get some sleep, I went to Walmart and bought a toy tiger. He was not orange like my Tagger, but white. He was about the same size as Tagger, and significantly larger than my infant son. Truthfully, neither number one son or number two son actually played with him. They slept with him and used him as a pillow, but they never even gave him a name. It was my daughter, my youngest child, who took him over and made him into a her. She named her Baby Tiger, loved her, talked to her, carried her around everywhere, and miraculously never loved her to pieces to the point that we don’t still have her 24 years later. The photos of her prove the miracle.
I am not Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame. But I do understand the importance of toy tigers. They help to make you who you are. And while they are technically not real people, technically you could argue, “Yes, they are too real!” and argue it very loudly. Of course, people will think you are a crazy fool if you do. But I doubt that changes anybody’s mind about Mickey.
One of my most valuable books of magic is Uncle Scrooge by Piero Zanotto (with a forward by Carl Barks).
This book is filled with some of the best cartoons from Duckburg written and drawn by Carl Barks. Scrooge McDuck was first created by Carl Barks in 1947. Barks had inherited the Donald Duck comic book franchise from Al Taliaferro in the 1940’s. He used his animation training to create an artfully sequenced series of stories that transformed Donald from an enraged character screaming at life into a responsible Uncle with three nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, as well as relatives like his unfailingly lucky cousin Gladstone Gander, crazy inventor Gyro Gearloose, villain Magica DeSpell, and the richest duck in the world, Uncle Scrooge McDuck. His run of amazing adventure comics created through the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s fueled much of my art training and story-telling training as a boy…
Part of being a dungeon master is the responsibility for creating the dungeon. Now I do intend to fully explain the events of the siege of Castle Evernight in a future Saturday D&D post, but today I want to show you my dungeon setting, the Keep of the Duke of Passage, Dane Evernight. This is me thinking like an insane architect to build a tall, spindly castle that no real-life king or duke would ever try to live in. But insane as it was, it had to be drawn to scale and the inner workings had to be mapped out on grid paper where every little square represented a space of 5 feet by 5 feet.
Level one shows the areas you would enter coming in through the front gate. Colored-in areas represent the solid stone from which this castle is built as well as the rock spire it was…
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.
I have known nudists for a long time, since the 1980’s in fact. I have recently dabbled my toes in the cold waters of being a nudist myself. I did work on pool cracks this past summer while naked. I made one visit to a nudist park and actually got naked in front of strangers who were also naked. It is a certain kind of crazy connection to nature, my self, and the bare selves of others to be a nudist, even if it is for only a few hours. I used to think nudists were crazy people. But I have begun to understand in ways that are hard to understand. And being a novelist, that was bound to creep into the piles of supposedly wise understanding that goes into the creation of novels. I say “supposedly wise” because wisdom is simply the lipstick on the pig of ridiculous human…
Catch a Falling Star 