Category Archives: Uncategorized

January 4, 2016 · 4:16 pm

Gingerbread Town

My recent experiments with holiday gingerbread and happiness have yielded some patently artistical results.  Yes, I know that isn’t a real word.  But I use it anyway because I take bits and pieces and use them to make something new.  You may remember the gingerbread house I made with my kids.  It turned into a disaster you could eat.  But  I got some pictures out of it.  Pictures like this;

I took one and loaded it into an art program and did this to it;

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I also took a picture of some old Christmas chocolate tins;

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I used them together with a stolen background to make this scene;

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Of course, I was not satisfied there.  I had some old cartoon characters lying around.  So, I wanted to use them too.

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And I ended up with an artistical art mess like this;

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If that isn’t artistical, then I don’t know what is.

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January 3, 2016 · 4:47 pm

Monkey-Wild About “Peanuts”

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Yesterday the Peanuts Movie came to the dollar movie theater in Carrollton.  And my two kids at home and me went to it.  I invited my wife, but with the righteous indignation of a Jehovah’s Witness unshakable in her beliefs, she said, “Why would I want to go to a Christmas movie?”  She associated it not with the beloved comic strip in the newspapers, but with the old Christmas special.  And she would not be talked into it.  It is a matter of faith, after all.  Celebrating Christmas, naturally, loses you the chance to live happily ever after on a paradise Earth… after Jehovah God smites all the wicked people and all the deluded people who never worshiped him properly using his proper name, and also that rude postman my wife doesn’t particularly like.  Of course, it is not a Christmas movie.  The only Christmas part it has in it is a brief Christmas carol from the old TV special that Snoopy ruins.  So God didn’t punish us for enjoying this movie… at least, not yet.

We unrepentantly enjoyed the movie.  I enjoyed it as a culmination of more than 50 years of reading and laughing at Charles
Schulz’s satire of the uncertainties of childhood as they affect the whole of our adult lives.  My kids loved it because it is an excellent cartoon that is filled with hilarious moments that trace directly back to the comic strip.

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The central story is about Charlie Brown’s self doubts mixed with his never-ending crush on the little red-haired girl.  In his own hesitant, hide-behind-the-bushes style, Charlie pursues her and plans how he might win her heart.  In the comics, it never worked out.  He always failed.  He was always the lovable loser, and the red-haired girl never noticed.

I was inspired to write a poem about it because I could so deeply identify with his crisis of confidence.  Here is that sappy poem;

Little Red-Haired Girl

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

That little red-haired girl, so cute, so nice

You only looked and looked from afar

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

You could’ve held her hand

You could’ve walked her home from school

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

She never got your Valentine

At least, you forgot to sign your name

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

No hope of marriage now, nor children

Happily ever after has now long gone

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

Now every love poem is a sad poem

And the world is blue and down

You never told her that you loved her…

You never told her that you loved her…

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

 

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The main story is paralleled in Snoopy’s Red Baron fantasies as the movie goes along.  The lady-dog-pilot, Fifi, is kidnapped by the Red Baron.  Snoopy, the dashing, daring WWI pilot sets out in his Sopwith Camel dog house to rescue her.  And after being foiled several times… he succeeds!  And not long after, Charlie Brown himself succeeds.  The little red-haired girl actually chooses Charlie Brown to be her summer pen pal project buddy.  I should probably be outraged because in the comic strip she never knew he was even alive… But I loved the happy ending.  Charlie Brown deserves it.  I deserve it.  I believe even Charles Shulz would be charmed by it if he were still alive to see it.

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I apologize if I spoiled the movie for you, but it is something you should already know anyway if you ever read and loved the comic strip.  It is not the surprises that make this movie work.  It is the being true to a time-honored comic-strip and the bringing of it so completely and so beautifully to life.  And my wife looked again at the movie trailers and decided she had been wrong about it being a Christmas movie.  Maybe we are not doomed after all.

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January 2, 2016 · 5:59 pm

An Autobiography of Mickey

 

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Last night I watched again Part I of Ken Burns’ Mark Twain.   I think it reminds me of who I am as a writer.  No, I am not being all big-head arrogant and full of myself.  I devoured certain writers as a youth, consumed them whole.  Charles Dickens was my first passion, followed by J.R.R. Tolkien, and then Mark Twain.  Of all of them, Samuel Clemens is the most like me.  He was from the Midwest, born and raised in Missouri along the Mississippi River.  I am from the Midwest, born and raised in Iowa along the Iowa River.  He endured hardship and tragedy as a youth, losing his little brother in a riverboat accident, and he dealt with it by humor.  I endured a sexual assault from an older boy, and dealt with it by… well, you get the picture.  We are alike, him and I.  We both draw upon the place we grew up, the people we have known, and the events of our youth to create stories.

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It is a pretty big responsibility to follow in his footsteps, and I will probably never live to see the success and the wealth that came to him.  But I have a responsibility to the people I knew and the time that gave rise to me to tell their story.  I need to build a network of stories that resonate the truth of existence that I have been witness to.  A big responsibility… and I probably will not live up to it.  But I have to try.

Being a writer is somewhat like being cursed.  The words burn inside, needing to get out, needing to be heard.   I have stories that need to be told, and they will be told, even if only to file away in the closet again.  Like Mark Twain, I am good at feeling sorry for myself.  And the Mickey part of me, the writer part of me, is just like Mark Twain, a writer persona, and not the real man himself.  I am simply the container for something that has to exist and has to tell stories.  It is not a bad thing to be.  But the more I get to know it, the more I would not wish the destiny on others.

Forgive how sad and bunglingly boorish this post is.  But sometimes there are thoughts I simply have to think.  And as a writer, I am bound to write down the silly things that I think.

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January 1, 2016 · 9:05 pm

I Has Done a Good Thing

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In 2015 I decided I would post a blog post every single day of the year.  And so I have done it.  WordPress didn’t count every single post on the day it was intended for.  My computer clock doesn’t work right, and their day ends something like four to six hours before mine does.  (Greenwich Time?)  So some of my posts were counted on the wrong day from my point of view.  But that is just a technicality.  I accomplished this writing goal while finishing a contest novel that has made it into the final round, and I did final edits on my novel Snow Babies so PDMI Publishing LLC can make an actual book of it.

WordPress says my blog was viewed 9,500 times in 2015.   I am up to 759 followers, some of whom seem to like every post I put up.  I have gotten no real troll comments so far (probably due to the fact that the only people who look in on my humble blog are the kind that like to read the sort of stuff I write).   No readers have as yet made it their personal mission in life to try to save the world from my brain-boggling goofiness and potential for killing people by making them laugh themselves to death.  Either those readers haven’t found me yet, or my posts are not as grin-inducing as I tell myself when I am lying to myself on a semi-daily basis.

I will have posted 776 posts with the posting of this one in all the time I have been writing on WordPress.  It is a lot of wordy talkiness in printy printyness.  And I have not stopped the flow yet.  I need a break from posting, but just as I posted every day for two months before 2015, I will probably need some time to break the bad habits I have developed over the last year.  I still need to blog, because it is the only writing I do that gives me any kind of feedback beyond editors saying, “You can’t write that in a young-adult novel!” or, “People don’t actually talk like that in real life.  You can’t just go around inventing new language.”  (But Shakespeare did it… or, rather, whoever really wrote Shakespeare’s plays did it… so I have the right to try, consequences to the sanity of Western Civilization be damned.)  So I will continue to cut and paste purple paisley prose into this brain-bogglingly bumptious blog, and I will continue to illustrate it with perfectly pickled Paffooney pictures.

 

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December 31, 2015 · 2:49 pm

2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,500 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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December 30, 2015 · 5:11 pm

Google “PAFFOONEY”

One of the most important things about my blog has been that I can share my artwork.  I have always been capable of a reasonably high level of drawing ability.  I can also paint and create artistically original photographs.  I have that artist’s eye that sees creatively.  If you follow directions in this first Paffooney, you will see a wider variety of the kind of Paffoonies I post than I will post here.  This will be, however, a picture post.  I intend to share a bunch of my artwork here, both old and new.  Take a gander.  (And while you hold on to that male goose, look at some of my pictures, too.)

Animal Town

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You have to admit that I am clearly not an artist like Van Gogh or Picasso… certainly nothing like Andrew Wyeth or Winslow Homer.  I am more of an illustrator, or … worse, a cartoonist.

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So, this is at least partially about sharing artwork.  I am not a professional artist.  I have made no money from drawing, even though my artwork has been published before.  I have been given this talent by God not to be famous and wealthy, but to be a better teacher and a better storyteller.

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December 29, 2015 · 4:09 pm

Home Stretch

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I have almost reached the end of my trek, my year-long goal of posting something every single day of 2015.  I have hopes of finding something profound to say.  That’s what a wizard does, right?  He provides wisdom and wit.  I am not saying my magic is nearly used up.  My cauldron is still boiling and full of eye of newt and gingerbread bat-wings.  I can still weave a few spells from it.  In fact, one of the effects of writing regularly and in a sustained manner is the priming of the pump, enabling me to more readily produce the magic liquids from the very depths of the well.  If I can keep breathing and limping forward, I will write many more good things.  I am not bragging here.  It is just a fact.  Practice empowers the sorcery.  But I also need to slow down and have a break… or two… or twelve.  I will not stop writing.  But I will post less because I will be putting more of my words into my fiction.  I have several unfinished novels to move forward, to shape, to mold, to breathe life into.  There is a necromancy there that cannot be ignored if we are to avoid the results of Victor Frankenstein’s Promethean follies.

space cowboy23 I have given you a picture Paffooney today of the tapestry created by the town of Rowan, Iowa for its centennial in 2002.  I consider Rowan my home town.  I was not born there, but it is the scene of most of my childhood.  It shaped most of who I am and how I am and what I am.  It is the scene of most of my fiction because that’s where the most valuable treasures of Truth are hidden, near the wishing wells of our youth.  I keep it on my bedroom wall because, not only do Pooh and Fozzie like it to be there, it is a beautiful thing to look at and reflect upon.  It keeps what is most important in my life in focus.  I have a lot of physical pain from my six incurable diseases, and pain makes the focus blur at times.  But pain is also the source of what wit and wisdom I have to offer.  I will continue to contemplate and write and think and create… and draw.  I will continue to post at least a portion of the results here.  I do desire to make some money with my writing, but that is only a secondary concern.  I am not really writing for the people who know me in real life.  They already know me and made up their minds about me long ago.  They might read this and that and recognize something of themselves, but they are not the ones I am speaking to at this moment.  I am talking in prose to those who see my ideas for the very first time with new eyes, no preconceived notions about me.  It is for them, the readers I do not personally know, that my magic spells are cast in words.

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December 26, 2015 · 4:31 pm

Roses at Christmas Time

When bad things happen, we can usually make something good out of them.  I have always believed this.  It is Midwestern pragmatism in action.  Hail destroyed the crops?  Martial your resources for the next growing season, or change from a farmer to something else more profitable.  There is always a way forward, even if you have to learn to be tougher and tighten the belt, or next year’s food supply depends on the farmer in the next county.  Global warming is threatening to cook us in our own juices?  Well, this year our confused roses in the yard are blooming like it was Springtime.  The part of the wheel at the bottom, crushed against the pavement, rises to the top again as we move forward on the bicycle of human life.

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All of these roses have bloomed during the Christmas holiday this year when temperatures sank no lower than the 50’s and got as high as 77 degrees.  It recalls a recent year when dorky daffodils poked their yellow heads out of the ground in January only to be murdered by snowstorm a week later.  Will these roses be subjected to the same fate?  Robert Herrick says, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…”  We will pragmatically enjoy them while they are here, no matter what happens.  I have been writing a science fiction novel about environmental and political Armageddon.  It is set on another planet, but that planet stands in for Earth in my book.  But the point is that the universe goes on even if we are dumb enough to destroy ourselves by pillaging the natural world.  Yet, I don’t believe that will happen.  I see movement towards renewable energy, and political change for the better is in the wind.  In the end, I think humanity will dig down deep for that magical force we all possess.  We will be able to change for the better when we are forced to.  I don’t expect to live to see it.  I don’t figure I have another whole decade left to live, and the course we are on won’t be decided before 2050… probably.  But, all speculation aside, I am here now to enjoy roses blooming at Christmastime… and to share that rare feeling with you.

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December 24, 2015 · 3:42 pm

Wordless Christmas Post

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This is a wordless Christmas post.

Oops!  I shouldn’t have explained.  Okay, a six-word Christmas post.

Wait a minute, I didn’t count those words…

Seventeen words, then… urm… Twenty-seven… Twenty-nine… Is a hyphenated compound two words or one?  Dang it!

Okay… a too-many words Christmas post.

Have another picture to look at while I sort this out.

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December 23, 2015 · 9:04 pm

Humbuggery

Technically I am not supposed to be celebrating Christmas.  Jehovah’s Witnesses have institutionalized “Bah, Humbug” and made it a religious offense to celebrate Christmas or any other birthdays.  And I have not yet been disfellowshipped from the JW religion.  That is, however, a mere oversight on their part.  They have not read this blog enough to be offended with my worldly views.  I have suggested here that I am a Christian existentialist… something that any JW who understands what that philosophical term means would call an atheist.

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Fozzie tells really bad jokes, which isn’t necessarily irredeemable, but Alf not only tells bad jokes, he also eats cats. How can they be saved by religion?

I definitely understand why atheists avoid proactive religions like the Witnesses.  For one thing, JW’s believe in the redeem-ability of the human race.  Open the door, listen to the proselytizer’s mini-sermon, read the infallible Bible verse, and paradise in an everlasting life on Earth is yours for the taking.  So, get out there and knock on some doors with a Bible in your book bag!  These redeemable Texans whose doors they knock upon being the same ones that have the police arrest Muslim clock-making teens for showing their project to a teacher, and throw hungry school children’s lunches in the trash in front of their friends if they owe $1.70 over the limit for their reduced lunches.  These redeemable Texans are also the ones who sent Ted Cruz to the US Senate and may help elect him president.  Despicable is too good a word for that type of human being… unless Sylvester the cat is the one saying it with extra sloppy spray coming out of the sides of his mouth.

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I confess that I have been working on a comedic science-fiction novel about a planet-wide civilization destroying itself for greed and despicableness.   I even put Ted Cruz in that story as lizard-man alien (which I am not sure if it is an insult or a complement to Cruz).  I also idolize Mark Twain, and often wonder if he isn’t right about the “damned human race”, and how Noah should’ve let them drown.  So I should be embracing humbuggery for so many reasons…

Senator Tedhkruzh

Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.

But today I re-connected on Facebook with a former student from not so long ago.  Ronan Pablomia was an ESL student from the streets of Manila in the Philippines.  As a teacher, I normally love students, even the stinky ones, and I tried for three years to get through to this kid.   He was repeatedly in fights in school with other students.  He was disruptive in the classroom, saying intentionally horrible and insane things during class.  He was probably an un-diagnosed bipolar person, but he was definitely diagnosed as having a learning disability and a rage disorder.  He was hostile and made life so miserable for his classmates that they begged both the principal and me to expel his sorry behind from our high school.

Today he had the remarkable good sense to tell me on Facebook that I was the best teacher ever.  He said he finally acknowledged his fighting problem and got help (after getting out of jail).  He has a job now and is helping to support his parents.  He apologized for how stupid he acted in class, and I ended up reminding him that the best students are the ones that learned the most.  He was not the smartest kid ever, but he was bright, and if he has learned to control his bipolar temper, he definitely qualifies as one of kids who came the farthest down the learning path, and probably learned the most after all.

So Ronan gave me an excellent and unexpected Christmas gift.  He added one more hint that my career as a teacher was not in vain, and three years worth of patience and suffering did not go for nothing, even though he never graduated high school.  Maybe the aggressive and carnivorous primates that populate this planet are not all that irredeemable after all.  So have a happy Christmas.  Frohe Weinachten.  Feliz Navidad.  And God bless us, every one.

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