Category Archives: Uncategorized

Synesthesia (Part One; French Blue Monday)

This link will help you understand Synesthesia

Francois spotlight

Yes, Mondays are blue.  Specifically French blue.  Every day of the week has its own color.  Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre,  Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue.  I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints.  I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head.  I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world.  I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name.  It is called synesthesia.

Image

It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”.  When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence.  I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns.  Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns.  It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color.  Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word.  But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue.  It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”.  And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.

sunnyface2

Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.

I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do.  I certainly was.  I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue.  My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing.  I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word.  I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there.  But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true.   The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded.  I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls.  My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters.  She is left handed and also gifted at drawing.  I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.

Creativity

Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.

Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about.  But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about.  And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases.  It is not a bad condition to have.  In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing.  I could use some good for a change.  Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway.  (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, autobiography, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Uncategorized

Little Red-Haired Girl (A Poem and Paffooney)

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 for old age

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

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

A Useful Blizzard

This weekend, a blizzard snowed us in here in Iowa. I took a photo out of the bathroom window and used it to make a picture with AI Mirror. It provided fodder for a composited picture which I could use for a new cover for my work in progress.

I then added some modified elements of my previous cover using Picsart AI Photo Editor.

Finally, I put it in a Mickey-style order as a possible front book cover.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

An Antagonist for Friday the 13th

She is the main antagonist in my work-in-progress, He Rose on a Golden Wing.

Her name is Charlotte Robbins, and she has anger issues. She is directly opposed to the protagonist, Valerie Clarke, on the issues of the cheerleader squad, whose boyfriend Ricky is, and why each should tolerate the other’s existence.

I tried editing the original drawing with AI Mirror. That yielded a less appropriate expression for the raging Robbins.

So, what do you think?

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

The Daily Post

15822841_10154008704191891_2897296190757686136_n

Yes I will continue to coddiwomple for a while.  On my birthday in November of 2014, after retiring in May, I decided I would do a blog post every single day for at least a year.  Now, eleven years and ten months later, I am still posting every single day that I possibly can.  I think that I shall continue for a while because there are real benefits to doing so.

  • It keeps my seriously old and worn-out brain active, chugging along even though it is held together with mental duct tape.
  • It challenges my ability to come up with new ideas.  I admit, sometimes I sit down to write a post with nothing in my head but random snippets of music and empty space.  Yet, I have managed to increasingly create bizarre and exotic thought-artifacts at an increasingly volatile pace.  Perhaps soon the ideas reach critical mass, and my writing goes boom like a series of fireworks.
  • It has increased my visibility on WordPress and the reach of my writing through social media.
  • It has taught me how much I hate Twitter.  People tweeting in a rage at each other makes the world a birdhouse full of angry birds.
  • It has also taught me to edit carefully and quickly because my writing time is theoretically limited, as is my target word count.
  • And I have learned that some days I need to do a simple and easy post like this to give my mind-muscles a chance to rest and grow. Frequently, I get by through reposting old posts. I have a number of them that I really like.

So I will continue to post on WordPress, putting up pusillanimous Paffoonies to treat and entertain you.  (Yes, I know that “pusillanimous” means timid.  But the root words mean “small mind”, and my mind is nothing if not small.  And I also needed a multi-syllabic p-word to make the alliteration sound funnier.)

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

Johann Sebastian Bach may or may not have written his organ masterpiece, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in 1704. All we know for sure is that the combined efforts of Johannes Ringk, who saved it in manuscript form in the 1830’s, and Felix Mendelssohn who performed it and made it a hit you could dance to during the Bach Revival in 1840 made it possible to still hear its sublime music today. Okay, maybe not dance to exactly… But without the two of them, the piece might have been lost to us in obscurity.

The Toccata part is a composition that uses fast fingerings and a sprightly beat to make happy hippie type music that is really quite trippy. The Fugue part (pronounced Fyoog, not Fuggwee which I learned to my horror in grade school music class) is a part where one part of the tune echoes another part of the tune and one part becomes the other part and then reflects it all back again. I know that’s needlessly confusing, but at least I know what I mean. That is not always a given when I am writing quickly like a Toccata.

I have posted two different versions for you to listen to in this musical metaphor nonsensical posticle… err… Popsicle… err… maybe just post. One is the kinda creepy organ version like you might find in a Hammer Films monster movie in the 1970’s. The other is the light and fluffy violin version from Disney’s Fantasia. I don’t really expect you to listen to both, but listening to one or the other would at least give you a tonal hint about what the ever-loving foolishness I am writing in this post is really all about.

You see, I find sober thoughts in this 313-year-old piece of music that I apply to the arc of my life to give it meaning in musical measure.

Toccata and Fugue

This is the Paffooney of this piece, a picture of my wife in her cartoon panda incarnation, along with the panda persona of my number two son. The background of this Paffooney is the actual Ringk manuscript that allowed Bach’s masterwork not to be lost for all time.

My life was always a musical composition, though I never really learned piano other than to pick out favorite tunes by ear. But the Bach Toccata and Fugue begins thusly;

The Toccata begins with a single-voice flourish in the upper ranges of the keyboard, doubled at the octave. It then spirals toward the bottom, where a diminished seventh chord appears (which actually implies a dominant chord with a minor 9th against a tonic pedal), built one note at a time. This resolves into a D major chord.

I interpret that in prose thusly;

Life was bright and full of promise when I was a child… men going to the moon, me learning to draw and paint, and being smarter than the average child to the point of being hated for my smart-asserry and tortured accordingly. I was sexually assaulted by an older boy and spiraled towards the bottom where I was diminished for a time and mired in a seventh chord of depression and despair. But that resolved into a D major chord when the realization dawned that I could teach and help others to learn the music of life.

And then the Fugue begins in earnest. I set the melody and led my students to repeat and reflect it back again. Over and over, rising like a storm and skipping like a happy child through the tulips that blossom as the showers pass. Winding and unwinding in equal measure, my life progressed to a creaky old age. But the notes of regret in the conclusion are few. The reflections of happinesses gained are legion. I have lived a life I do not regret. I may not have my music saved in the same way Johann Sebastian did, but I am proud of the whole of it. And whether by organ or by violin, it will translate to the next life, and will continue to repeat. What more can a doofus who thinks teaching and drawing and telling stories are a form of music ask for from life?

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Reposting Another Old Picture

Great Grandma Hinckley 1982

Acrylic paint on canvas board

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Reposting an Old Picture

To Dance in Heaven 1984

colored pencils on white paper

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

When I Was Twelve

20160226_213831

There comes a time when a mind turns inward and begins to learn that self is as complicated and in need of exploration as any African jungle or surface of a distant planet.

The Paffoonies today all come from my sixth grade school notebook.  When that school year ended I owned one book of my own, Rudyard Kipling’s First Jungle Book, the paperback version.  I kept my colored pencil drawings in my school notebook, and I kept the notebook in my bedroom to continue to fill it with drawings on notebook paper.

20150325_123601

As you can see, the notebook is age-worn and falling apart, but I still have it.  It still contains my twelve-year-old artistic visions, the beginnings of who I am as a thinking, drawing, story-telling human being.

20160226_213546

20160226_213715

At one point I even had a package of pink notebook paper.

20160226_213511

So I admit it.  I was a dorky, weird child.  And I drew a lot of weird pictures at twelve.  Now you have some of the evidence.

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, autobiography, colored pencil, drawing, dreaming, Uncategorized

Cowboy Dolls

Cleaning in the library led me to rediscover an old project.  Roy Rogers and Trigger had been sitting next to the TV in the library.  I found them both on the floor between the TV and a book stack.  Time to pick them up and put them back in shape.

20160310_085333

The doll is a random military action figure rescued naked from a thrift store.  I thought the face looked enough like Roy Rogers to turn him into that particular hero.  The horse is from Mattel and is probably part of a Barbie play-set. It was given to me by a relative.  I dressed Roy in a Lone Ranger Captain Action uniform with a Tonto gun belt, both created by Playing Mantis Toy Company in the late 1990’s.  The hat is actually from a Cowgirl Barbie because I wanted a Roy Rogers-style, almost-white hat.  The Lone Ranger hat is too flat-brimmed to look right and way too large to fit on Roy’s smaller head. The only other cowboy hat I have for it is a Johnny West hat from Marx Toys in the 1960s, and that is dark brown.

Everything Johnny West that I still have was salvaged from the house where I grew up back in the 1980s.  They belonged to my little brother, but ended up in my collection because he outgrew dolls and action figures long before I did.  I wish I still had the doll himself, but I think Dabney blew him up with a firecracker when he was a teenager.

20160311_190942

So, I have to be happy with only having Roy and Cowgirl Barbie to play with.

Leave a comment

Filed under action figures, Barbie and Ken, doll collecting, humor, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized