Yep, Denny knows the truth of it. My new dentist is a small, demented Vietnamese female sadist. She has kept me on the dentist’s chair for over two hours at a time twice now. She never got a full scream out of me, but that’s because it is hard to scream with a mouth full of fingers and sharp tools.
And it only mirrors what the Pumpkinhead Sadist in the White House is doing to the mouth of our government. Killing foreign aid so African children can starve to death while the food the farmers made for feeding them rots on the wharf unsent and unpaid for. The Consumer Protection Bureau is killed next so that bankers can swindle credit card users and loan institutions can commit usery on a level that collapses economies. Cancer research is suspended and possibly ended because we apparently have to preserve drug companies/ profits on cancer drugs that drain savings accounts and personal wealth can continue to eat us. Meals on Wheels for Seniors is too expensive to continue, as is Snap payments for poor people. Let’s starve out the people who can’t defend themselves.,
Mickey is tired of cruelty, pain, and hardship being relentless. He is not in favor of the death penalty for sadist dentist-pirates. But he is still thinking about treasonistic Pumpkinhead government wreckers.
When I started this whole blogging-every-day thing, I decided the rule had to be 500 words written in a day. And I meant to hold myself to writing 500 words somewhere in the writing day, whether it was my blog post or the novel I was working on, or a combination of both. I followed that rule religiously through more than 1,500 blog posts and five first draft novels. I found it easier and easier to surpass 500 words on a daily basis. There are all sorts of bits of time available and I collect ideas faster than a rich kid generates empty candy wrappers. The more I call on the well of words for more words, the more words are available. Now, it seems, writing only 500 words is the trick.
I suppose I have become an Old Man of Words. I know both the rules and the exceptions.
Knowing that I can write more than 500 words easily, then the question becomes, why don’t I? Well, the cardinalrule is “Say it short. Say it simple. And say it sweet.” That rule can generate a lot of wonderful writing, full of juicy ideas that splash with flavor when you bite into them. Ernest Hemingway knew that rule. Every poet knows it. Readers generally prefer the easily accessible idea expressed with elegance.
Now, I also have to admit a guilty pleasure in perpetrating purple paisley prose. That is the style of writing in which I generally write convoluted sentences with complex ideas that fold back in on themselves and over-use alliteration to criminal degrees. Charles Dickens liked to do that with descriptive details. Paragraphs about the boarding schools of London, the streets filled with child chimney sweeps and flower girls, and dingy mind-dulling workhouses could take up two or three pages per paragraph. And two pages further on, he layers more details on the same setting. Piles and piles of words and wordplay fill the pages of William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. And if you haven’t read at least something from each of those gentlemen, you will never know what you are missing. But you can prune your paragraphs like a greenhouse master florist with limited space will do to his orchids, and you can actually end up fitting great beauty and powerful content into something even more limited than a 500-word essay. In fact, if you take your ideas and distill them, and keep distilling them, over and over, you will eventually have pared the words down into poetry.
So, there you have it. The reason my essays are about 500 words. This one is four hundred and forty-one words.
I am not well again after a couple of weeks of rain and cold working on my arthritis. So I am going to merely post a few past Paffoonies to make up today’s post. If you would like to see what Paffoonies are all about, then go to Google picture search “Beyer Paffooney”. It will basically give you a Mickian art gallery, peppered with other pictures that I used in posts that aren’t actually Paffoonies (but the algorithm doesn’t know that).
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.
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.
The Pumpkinhead is running amok, shutting down programs I want the government to continue with my tax dollars. I don’t approve of them spending a single penny of the three thousand and some dollars worth of taxes I pay out of my pension every year on tax cuts to billionaires and multi-millionaires. The Ultrarich class does less actual work in a year than I do as a retiree. They do not deserve to make even more money while sitting on gluttonous natural cushions built into their derrieres. They are the parasites that drag on our quality of life. Their money-sucking vacuum mouths no longer need to be attached to our jugular veins. The Immigrants working in farmer’s fields and the local McDonalds and two other jobs to make ends almost meet are not the takers in this society.
Personally, I have had a truly miserable start to 2025. I visited a dentist for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. I had to have a molar with a broken crown yanked out of the right side of my jaw. It was infected and took an hour longer to pull out than it was scheduled for. It hurt like they had tried to pull my whole skeleton out through my mouth. While recovering from that, my wife came home from her teaching job with a viral infection of some sort. I immediately caught it. Two weeks of illness followed. Towards the end of that infection I painfully passed four small kidney stones, too small to see when they were finally out. That painful weekend resulted in a urinary tract infection that could easily have turned septic and killed me. The urologist gave me a super strong antibiotic that stained my underwear neon green. And at the end of January, I had to have a second molar with a broken crown removed… apparently with the same ten-pound skeleton-hoisting pliers.
Trump is still rolling out outrages against schools, against the FBI, against women, against trans kids, and everyone else he can be relentlessly cruel to. Richard III of England solved his Winter of Discontent with murder. I sent a ghost post message to the parking lot in London where he was buried to inquire if he was at all interested in using the same procedure to replace the Pumpkinhead on the Throne of America. He booed back that he would think about it. American President is apparently not as cushy a post as the Yorkish King of England.
The girl who posed for this picture is an Asian beauty, chosen because she’s the spitting image of a former student from eleven years ago. This girl is actually 18 years old, though she looks twelve. The girl she reminds me of was 16 then, and would have to be around 27 now. This girl is Cambodian. That girl was Vietnamese. I like the picture. I love both girls, not in an inappropriate way. And what it comes down to is that I have kept my string of 196 daily posts in a row intact.
I have been down and out with a serious urinary tract infection the last two weeks. That overlapped the flu-like virus that had me down for the weeks prior. There is not a lot you can accomplish when you are too sick to even get out of bed. I watched a lot of streaming-service television and used my computer to do a lot of drawing. I really like the first final version I posted above. It is a picture of my posable plastic doll Ariel. I have two other similar-sized dolls, Nicole and Tom Sawyer, who are not posable and made out of porcelain. So, Ariel is my artist’s model more often than the other two.
I never had a fever while I was ill, but some of my medication caused dizziness and the inability to avoid passing out for five to ten minutes at a time. But initially, I created the outline directly above by putting the photo of Ariel on my drawing pad app and tracing features in the layer I placed on top.
This is, of course, the actual photograph used. I did draw over it leaving out Pluto and Mickey due to copyrighted character concerns.
I used colored paints in the drawing app to fill in the outline with color, but my arthritis in fingers and wrists makes it look crude and childish compared to what you see above. So, I use the anime-style overlay in the AI Mirror App to make it come out properly shaded and blended. The colors may appear a little off to you. But that would be because I am somewhat colorblind (red-and-green-scale colorblind) and can’t accurately judge between orange and carmine red, or rust brown and siena brown. I am doing a lot of guessing. You can also see that I change the background with Picsart AI Photo Editor.
Drawing in this way got me through a few difficult days.
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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Tagged as arizona, autobiography, childhood beliefs, cowboy code, Daniel Boone, fiction, guns, humor, politics, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, satire, writing, Wyatt Earp