This is the page I added to The Atlas of Fantastica today. You can find the
whole story-so-far in the pages of my Vault. Here is the link (hopefully);
Category Archives: Uncategorized
An Award I Probably Don’t Deserve
I woke up this morning to an award from Dear Kitty, Some blog. I want to thank this very talented blogger for making the mistake of nominating little old me. You can find her at this link; https://dearkitty1.wordpress.com/ , although I don’t know how to process a link on WordPress any more so that you can just click on it.
The maker of this award wrote that these are the rules for it:
For the award, post the picture of it in your post and thank your nominator while linking to them. Tell the blogging world 5 things about yourself and/or your blog. Select 5 nominees, name and link to them. Put their names in a list then hi lite them and go to the top of the editor and see the chain link, click that and paste their homepage URL. Then send a copy of your finished post’s URL to each person in their most recent post and you are all done.
So, five things about my blog;
- I didn’t start it myself. This blog was set up for me by I-Universe to help me market the book I published with them in 2013, Catch a Falling Star. Began blogging by following the directions my marketing adviser gave me, and it took me at least a year to discover she was all wrong about her suggestions. I have made a total of $16 from I-Universe on a book I invested in to get published. It is, however, still available from I-Universe, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. My blog is no longer ignored the way it originally was, but my novel still is.
- I use my blog to publish the cartoons, artwork, and seriously goofy poetry that I am also guilty of creating. As an old, retired school teacher, I am quietly going to seed with nothing better to do than this silly blog. If you would like to see a gallery of my artwork, go to Google and do a picture search of the words “Beyer Paffooney”. Hopefully the result will not make you insane or blind or both.
- Students in my classes often didn’t realize it, but I communicate primarily with humor. I guess if you don’t laugh at your own joke while telling it, they don’t catch on that it is a joke. Still, I consider this blog a humor blog. Yes, even if it doesn’t make you laugh.
- Since 2013 I have posted something on this blog 838 times. I posted every single day in 2015. 8,542 visitors have seen my blog, and no one has prosecuted or incarcerated me for it yet. I have 790 followers. I know all this is hard to believe, but I swear that it is true according to the WordPress statistics page.
- I continue to blog about my writing and have at least two more novels seriously invested in the pipeline to be published. You can read about them in my blog.
I will nominate 5 bloggers in the comment section below.
Filed under announcement, Uncategorized
Talking to Girls
Communicating with a wife is complicated. In fact, I couldn’t do the whole writer-think thing about that topic without writing a book. But I can successfully ruminate for about 500 words on the that awkward first encounter, the first time I ever was embarrassed in front of a non-sister girl.
In grade school I met my first crush in kindergarten. Alicia Stewart was a honey-sweet little brown-haired girl with a bow in her hair. I was a boy. I was not allowed to like girls. Hating them was the only thing that made sense to my friends and I. But, secretly, I didn’t hate Alicia. In fact, if I was ever to be doomed to be married when I grew up, I would’ve only accepted that horrible fate if it was with her. And in my small town school I saw her practically every school day. In fact, in Miss Malkin’s music class on Tuesdays and Thursdays I sat right next to her in Miss Malkin’s seating chart for six years.
In Miss Malkin’s music class we always did musical stuff like listening to classical records, singing songs for the yearly musical review concert (we did the songs from the musical The Music Man one year… you don’t get more musicky than that), and we did square dancing. Yeah, you heard that right. Square dancing. You had to have a girl for a partner. And one year, Miss Malkin decided it would be cute to have the boys ask the girls to be their partners. Now, as boys… in top secret boy-conversations, we had generally agreed that if such a problem would ever occur, Alicia Stewart was the only acceptable choice. We all hated girls. But we all were secretly in love with Alicia. She was girl-hating-boy approved. When I was twelve, there was another girl that was making me uncomfortable too. Marla Carter was nine when I was twelve. She had big brown eyes and dimples. Her face was somehow heart-shaped, and only Alicia could make my palms sweat any worse than she did. But in top secret boy-conversations it was ruled that she was a booger-eating little girl and totally toxic. Well, I didn’t totally agree, but I was still subject to all girl-hating directives.
“Okay,” Miss Malkin said, “the boys will now pick their partners… one at a time in alphabetical order.”
My last name began with the letter “B”, but my best friend Mark had a last name starting with “A”.
“I pick Alicia,” Mark said.
My heart sank. I had my pick of any girl besides Alicia. Marla was standing about four feet away from me, her hands folded together behind her back, looking at me with those puppy-dog eyes. My throat was too dry to speak.
“Um, ah… I can’t pick anyone…” I croaked. “You pick it, I will dance with it.”
“Now, don’t be like that, Michael. Get on with it!” Miss Malkin commanded. Everyone loved the music teacher, and so everyone obeyed her. I had to submit.
I looked at Marla, dug my toe into the floorboards, and said, “I choose my cousin Diane.”
Talking to girls has always been a matter of embarrassment. The words are always awkward and shaped not by my brain, but by my bowels. This fact has always been a hindrance to my dealings with the female species, but it has been an unending source of potential for writing humor.
Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink, Uncategorized
Mini Breaks
Sometimes life is kinda tough. I am in pain as I write this. Cold rain in Texas. But I am at the end of 15 straight months of posting every single day. So this is a place-holder post. It is an easily done and finished post. It is an I-am-almost-done-already post. And it still counts because I say so. I make the rules. I am the writer of my own story. So, this is me being the bright red little bird that doesn’t fly away when the winter comes.
Filed under cardinals, humor, Uncategorized
A Growing Collection of Sunrises
I have been moaning and complaining in this blog for a couple of weeks. I don’t have bad days. I have bad weeks… bad months… bad years. And making fun of my pain, making light of my suffering, is a way of making myself feel better. Making light of serious stuff… it occurs to me that that is what God does every single morning when the sun rises.
My most recent sunrise… 2016
You may be aware if you have read about me making light of my raging hoarding disorder that not only do I collect things that normal people don’t keep massive quantities of, but I also collect photos I have taken of sunrises I have seen. As I woke this morning with an ache in my chest I really should see the doctor about again (I have seen a cardiologist twice in the last five years about the same nagging pain, and the best they can tell me is that it might be an arthritis pain in my lower rib cage) I thought melancholy thoughts again about my personal end of days. One of the reasons I continue to collect sunrises is to celebrate the fact that I am still here, still witnessing God making light of the serious universe. I really think that may be the most important thing in life… to live, and love, and laugh… to experience existence. I am a tiny little creature on one small blue planet in a vast and seemingly never-ending ocean of space and stars. The iron in my blood was forged in the centers of distant stars that were born, grew old and died, and littered the universe with their element-rich guts when they finally exploded in an amazing super-nova of stellar fart-gas that it is possible no living intelligent being ever witnessed. I am insignificant. And the universe will not miss me when I am gone. And it may not even know I was ever here. But I am here to see the sun come up. That is a duty I continue to perform.
I know it may look like I am endlessly snapping the same picture over and over again. But every day the subtle pinks and purples and blues… the oranges and reds… make a different Jackson Pollack painting of the sky. And I look at it carefully while the dog is impatiently tugging at the end of the leash because she wants to go piddie-paw and poo. It is a beauty to be bathed in… and I apparently have earned one more to add to my collection.
Filed under foolishness, humor, illness, philosophy, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized
Sadder But Wiser
My car was only a few months away from being paid off. Then, while I was at home lying in bed feeling ill, someone driving past blasted into the rear wheel, damaging the axle beyond repair. Yes, it murdered his car. But because of the limits of coverage, my parked car is now dead also. I am doing the paperwork today to have it interred. And I notice, of course, that the paperwork says at the bottom, “State law makes falsifying information on this application a third-degree felony.” Oh, good. If I get any of the answers wrong, I go to prison. And worse, they could deny my claim and pay me nothing for the car. Why am I worried? Because when I asked the insurance company for help with verifying the information, they gave me a license plate number that doesn’t match the way my imperfect memory remembers it. If I put down the information they gave me, will they throw me in prison? I made him repeat it twice and verified that it was right according to their records. So, my memory could be faulty. But that won’t matter when the judge decides the death penalty for my error. Am I using hyperbole here for comic effect? Yes. But I live in Texas. I am going to worry anyway.
Filed under autobiography, humor, rants, Uncategorized
11.22.63
The impact of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination ó and its meaning 25 years later ó are explored in the’ hour-long documentary JFK – A TIME REMEMBERED, premiering Monday, November 21 at 9 p.m. (ET; check local listings) on PBS. Presented by WNET/New York, the program is a production of The Susskind Company and is made possible by funding from General Dynamics.
As a conspiracy nut registered with the Monkey-Brained Theorists of America, the grand old MBTA, I was absolutely tickled pink by the new Stephen King series on Hulu, 11.22.63. I have seen the first episode and loved the mix of fantasy, science-fiction, history, and horror that goes into telling a story of man who walks through a time portal into the past to be able to prevent the assassination of John Kennedy. Believe me, I know it is not true, despite what some of the anti-conspiracy nay-sayers will tell you about me. After all, they have a Monkey-Brained Club of their own and don’t even know it.
I went on a binge of watching JFK assassination-related videos on Hulu and on YouTube. There is some very good information out there compiled by some very dedicated and dogged researchers. The man who wrote the book Crossfire, Jim Marrs, is a very talented writer and researcher whose book became the basis for the movie JFK by Oliver Stone.
Marrs has an unfortunate gullibility that leads him to state as truth some very bizarre things about the New World Order, aliens and Area 51, the research of Alexander Sitchin into the ancient secrets of the Sumerians… and granted, I can’t prove some of the absolutely loony things contained in that aren’t true, but they are absolutely loony never-the-less. But when it comes to researching documents, interviewing and re-interviewing principle witnesses, and verifying facts, Marrs makes a very compelling case for the assassination of the President of the United States being done by the CIA, Secret Service, FBI, and President Lyndon Johnson.
It is a logical conclusion that Secret Service performed a cover-up during the assassination and its aftermath. They spirited the President’s body away in spite of the Dallas rules for murder investigation and autopsy. They washed and repaired the car it occurred in before the murder investigation could examine anything. They interfered with the actual autopsy, with important notes, photographs, and even the President’s brain that were placed in Secret Service’s custody going missing. No matter what you believe about the lone shooter theory, you can’t deny that a cover-up is the only explanation for these facts.
There is documented evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was working on the fringes of the CIA operation in New Orleans and reporting to J. Edgar Hoover about their activities. So, if he was a spy telling the right hand what the left hand was actually up to, who better to frame as the guilty gunman and then silence him before investigators could find out everything he knew?
And why does all this still matter more than 50 years later? Many of the actual perpetrators are dead, including former CIA hit man E. Howard Hunt who confessed to having a part in the assassination on his death bed. They can’t be punished now. But the corrupt organizations and political elite with their attendant influence are still operating in the world. This was a murder that never came to trial. Many of the facts have been sealed away by the very government agencies that have the most to hide. Connections to other CIA manipulations, like those surrounding 9-11, need to be revealed, and the way the government operates needs to be modified. But besides the fact that these things seriously impact our lives now, it is simply fun to dig and make connections and learn things that most people don’t generally know. There is monkey-brained joy in that.
Filed under conspiracy theory, heroes, humor, politics, Uncategorized
Down and Blue
Life for me has always been a struggle with poor health and depression, ill fortune and difficult circumstances. I have always been a “make lemonade” sort of life-gives-you-lemons problem-solver, but the more I make lemonade, the more my sorry old puss gets puckered. I am having chest pains and breathing problems again. I don’t have money for doctor’s visit co-pays and medication. My car is in the shop with more than $6,000 dollars worth of damages, hit by a passing motorist going too fast while it was parked outside my house. Insurance is probably not going to pay that much to fix a five-year-old car. My family in Iowa have recently been buried under huge snowdrifts. And the grim reaper has been knocking on my bedroom door asking if I want to play a game of chess.
But I will tag this post as humor. Because, ironically, humor is not always funny. Sometimes it has the sour puckering effect of lemonade with too little sugar in the mix. When you have worked hard all your life for very little reward, it’s hard to appreciate the tiny amounts of sugar you have been allotted. I see myself ending much the way Mother Mendocino ended, except the community will not even hear about my passing.
The more I sing songs, and rattle the boards, and try to make my puppets dance, the more arthritis crabs up my fingers and makes me ache. Sometimes happy simply comes hard. But self-pity is easy. And I am a pratfall clown most of the time. I use my injuries to make others laugh. And there is still magic to be found here and there in my art. Today’s paffoonies were all culled from my Postable Paffooney file. They are all old artworks of which I am pathetically proud.
Pathos is a part of humor too, you know. You tell a story about someone whose been on a lonely journey, and he finally gets to come home to the ones he loves, and you smile at the end of that. If you laughed at the clown for falling down, you smiled too when he got up again. After all, he wasn’t hurt. In many ways we are all made of spoof and rubber, and while the bullets don’t bounce off, we are more like Superman than we think. There is definitely wisdom buried somewhere in this pile of old quilts I am calling an essay today. I just wish I had the words to make it clearer than I do in this poor excuse for a paragraph.
My sister reads posts like this and tells me they are too depressing, that I need to write happier stuff. But don’t worry the way she does. I do spend a lot of time writing about the low spots. But I would like to point out that most of the time I am climbing out of holes. So I may start the essay in a very low place, but the direction I am going is always up.
Now I have said my 500 words for today, and while I still need bed-rest… there is no doubt the sun will come up again.
Filed under Depression, healing, health, humor, Paffooney, philosophy, Uncategorized
Ugly Bug Cars
My poor little pony has a broken leg… er… wheel. I was told by insurance to get a rental car to drive while it is getting fixed… or maybe shot in the head, because that’s what they do with ponies that have broken legs. They don’t want me driving it with a wobble-wheel that may fall off at any moment. Of course, if the insurance is paying for it, they expect you to go as cheaply as possible. That’s how I ended up driving this little white roller skate that somebody inflated with a bicycle pump. Truly, I could’ve designed a sturdier and better-looking car using the old Ritz cracker boxes I build castles from, and some chocolate donuts on sticks for wheels. The thing does NOT have a Rolls-Royce engine. When it starts, the engine makes a winding-up noise like, “brrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRAHP!” that after three minutes finally gives a little kick and shifts into second gear. The squirrel that runs in the exercise wheel that makes the engine go is surely both spastic and epileptic. It has seizures going around corners. I do not imagine myself driving anywhere in it faster than 35 miles per hour. In Dallas suburban traffic it is going to get me honked at a lot. Not just your ordinary “Go-faster-stupid!” honks, but real, LOUD honks of impending doom piling up behind me.
Here you see it grinning its toothless fat grandpa-grin at me from the parking lot at Braums’ Ice Cream, the first place it successfully took me after getting it from Enterprise Rental Co. It was obviously quite happy with itself. My kids observed, while looking at it for the first time, that it has a smiley face on it that reminds you of a Japanese manga chibi character with little license-plate-gray Hitler mustache. Let me see if I can enhance the effect so you can more clearly see what they meant;
I truly believe that I am going to have fun making fun of this goofy little car.
Filed under autobiography, humor, pessimism, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 
The Cowboy Code
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
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Filed under autobiography, commentary, cowboys, humor, insight, philosophy, politics, Uncategorized
Tagged as autobiography, childhood beliefs, cowboy code, Daniel Boone, humor, politics, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, Wyatt Earp