Category Archives: wisdom

March 8, 2016 · 4:41 pm

The Beasts of Armeggedon

Today may very well be the last day on Earth.  I laugh when I write that, but it could literally be true.  There is an asteroid approaching the earth and it is supposed to pass within 11,000 miles of Earth.  That is close enough for a minor math oops to fool us into not panicking about an extinction event.  The Dallas Fort-Worth area is being soaked in thunderstorms and potential high winds as I write this in a house that has foundation cracks made worse by a high number of fracking-induced earthquakes the last couple of years.  I woke up with chest pains this morning, and I have a family history of heart trouble.  (Although the last time I panicked and had the chest pains checked it was apparently arthritis in my rib cage… and the weather does make my arthritis worse.)  So, in very many ways, this really could be the last day.  And as I reminded everybody yesterday, I am a pessimist in all things.

So, I am girding up in armor as a pessimist always does, preparing for the worst.  If I am not going to be here tomorrow, then I need to prepare by counting my blessings today.  Number one, I have completed a successful 31-year career as a teacher.  I touched over 2,000 lives, made a difference in a lot of them, and screwed up only a handful of them.  I taught some kids to read, and I taught a lot of kids to write.  I was a good writing teacher.  I know how to build a theme and I can teach others to do the same.  I have lived a life of service, and though I have not been made money-rich by my efforts, I have wealth greater than Croesus (I know you don’t really know who that is, but I didn’t want that sentiment spoiled by using a name like Trump or the Walmart heirs.)

Senator Tedhkruzh

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

Number two, I am a survivor who has seen an amazing amount of history roll past without ever being crushed under its wheels.  I was alive for John Kennedy’s Presidency and assassination.  I watched Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon.  I taught the day the Challenger exploded with the first teacher in space on board.  I also taught the day the twin towers fell on 9-11.  I have seen how the world was changed, and I, like most people, experienced the changes necessary to adapting to a new world.  As a pessimist, I am already planning for life under President Ted Cruz.  It will be the worst possible outcome for our nation of the election of 2016.  We really should not elect a Reptilian as our leader.  But I survived the Ronny Ray-Gun revolution, and eight long years under the Cowboy of Very Little Brain, so if I live to see it, I will adapt.  And so will you.  We have only rarely ever been truly free and prosperous, but in our minds, no one, no matter how tyrannical, can ever truly deprive us of our freedom.

Dansegawd 4

So, if these are the last words I ever write, then know that I am at peace with the world.  If the big space rock does us all in today, then at least we have to consolation that humankind has had its chance to live and love and laugh, and we didn’t do everything wrong.

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, insight, Paffooney, philosophy, teaching, wisdom

Tagged as , , , , ,

March 4, 2016 · 9:05 pm

Wizarding Ain’t Easy

wizzyme

A wizard selfie taken at Mad Ludwig’s Castle in Bavaria.

My quest to become a wizard began when I was but a kid reading comic books.  It got a boost when I became a middle school English teacher and realized the fundamental truth of the universe, human beings know practically nothing at all… about anything.  The only path to wisdom is the way of the fool.

So, I embraced it.  It made it so much easier to teach and manage a classroom full of teenybumpers to realize the only thing that works when they laugh at you and make fun of you, is to be able to laugh at yourself and make fun of them right back.

I learned along the way that things that hurt you and make you suffer cause wisdom to happen.  You walk under a ladder and the painter accidentally drops a paint bucket on your head, and you realize that walking under a ladder is a bad thing to do in the future… not simply because of superstition either.

Tabron2

Drawing and painting wizards is something I began to do too.  I find it fascinating to try to draw a wrinkly old face and attempt to put some kind of intelligence in the eyes.  I can get vapid and stupid really really well.  I think I know what that looks like in the eyes of another far better than I know what wisdom looks like.  And how do you know it is wisdom, anyway, and not merely constipation?  Can you see understanding and intelligence in the eyes of another?  I think you can.  But looking into the eyes of young learners for so many years and searching for those things, I realized that the best you can do is guess.  You could easily be wrong.

That is what wisdom is.  Make your best guess, but remember that you are probably wrong.  It is possible to do great and powerful magic in the world if you are a wizard and you have wisdom.  But it will not be easy.  And you must work hard.  And when you have to decide whether to speak or stay silent, the wise man is always silent first, giving himself time to think before he speaks.

“Are you a wise man, Mickey?” you ask.

“…” Mickey says.

6 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, photo paffoonies, wisdom, wizards

Tagged as , , , , ,

December 31, 2015 · 4:46 pm

Wisdom of the Mickey

 

 

MickeyOne must end the year on a note that is either upbeat or regretful.  A heartfelt, “Meh,” just won’t cut it.

So here are a few particles of wisdom from the dustbowl of Mickey’s imagination.

The world is getting brighter… also hotter.  If we continue to chill on the topic of global warming, soon we will be fricasseed.

Ima mickey

You should definitely pay attention to your teachers.  They are mostly old and cranky and undervalued, and it makes them sad when they realize that no one really listens to them.

I learned this from the poet Dylan Thomas, “Rage! Rage! Against the dying of the light!”  He cursed death, and then he promptly went out and drank so much liquor, he died at a very young age.  Thank God I have lived to be old.

You are also pretty much stuck with the face that you are born with, so you better get used to it, and it has many varied uses… especially in the comic sense.

And I would also like to re-iterate the wisdom of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery;

12143187_1051707514840839_1279228919571126946_n

It is a bit of a disappointment to an artist to realize that what is essential is actually invisible to the eye… but I know it is true.  Truth resides in words.

The only wisdom I truly possess is the knowledge that I am a fool.

Since I was a mere stupid boy, and before I grew up to be a mildly stupid man, I always yearned to have wisdom.  And wisdom comes through experience and pain.  Now, years later, I realize what true wisdom is… I’d have been better off without all that pain.

Millis

People are a lot like rabbits, except that they are not.

They can never eat too many carrots… unless they do.  And then their skin can turn orange.

There is no beast as noble as a rabbit… except for practically every other beast.

Turtles are not as noble as rabbits.  When you challenge them to a race, they cheat.

HK1

People really ought to be naked more.  It’s true.  If you can strip yourself down to only what is fundamentally nothing but you yourself… you begin to know who you really are.  And it is not shame to let other people see.  Oh, wait a minute!  You thought I was talking about being literally naked?  Oh, no!  Metaphorically naked only!

One should be so opaque and obtuse that other people can see acutely right through you.  It is the only thing that makes nonsense into sense.

And we need to sing and dance a little more than we do.  A good song is healthy for the soul, no matter how badly you sing it.  And even if you are old and arthritic like me, dancing a good jiggity-jig keeps the bones loose and the heart thumping.

Everyone needs to dance with their children.  And talk to them.  You can learn more from them than they can from you.  They have more recently come here from the hand of God.  And they know things that you have forgotten… and will need to remember before you return to Him.

 

556836_458567807502181_392894593_n

I hope my anti-wisdom has not seriously screwed everybody up.

2 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, wisdom, wizards

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

November 10, 2015 · 2:34 pm

Mickey is Retired

Dr Seabreez 3Okay, I have discovered that retired means re-tired… You now have to get tired all over again.  I live in a modest little suburban home in the suburbs of Dallas.  It is a place where kings and queens have their castles, but we are separated from them by castle walls.  While many don’t work in this city because they are wealthy enough that their money makes money, I have to get by on less and less of the pension I have earned because expenses keep going up.  I am smarting at the moment because the school’s clarinet teacher forgot to send me a bill for two months.  Suddenly I owe her $120 dollars, and it is over-due.  And she’s mad at me for being a dead-beat that doesn’t keep up with his bills.  But that’s a big lump of heart’s blood to surrender all at once.  I will squeeze it out of my budget by the end of this week, but I am already cancelling my medical bills before the visit to the doctor in order to get the dog her medical check-up.  I feel like she could at least be a little less grumpy about it.  I have paid $72 dollars already.  Doesn’t that at least earn a partial thank-you?

I recently painted the upper portion of the outside of the house, though the rain stopped me from putting on a needed second coat.

I recently painted the upper portion of the outside of the house, though the rain stopped me from putting on a needed second coat.

I have spent serious amounts of thought and energy on reducing expenses and living a simpler life.  I am doing all my own maintenance on air conditioning, house paint, and minor repairs.  I have stopped buying most of the optional items and even reduced the expenses for things like food and gas for the car and… toilet paper (something you really don’t want to run out of at the wrong time).  But you see, I had to retire because my health was too poor to continue teaching daily.  At this point, I am not really well enough yet to either do sporadic substitute teaching, or working at Walmart part time as a greeter to smile at the people coming and going with a big goofy grin to keep them from realizing I am watching them for signs of theft.  (I really don’t want to work for Walmart if I can help it because they still hate my car, but who else hires doddering old retired fools like me?)

Tabron2

I guess that what it comes down to is that in retirement, I have taken up Daffy Duck’s purported profession of being a wizard.  I write, I read, I collect wisdom… and I use it to try to do magic, making money out of books and making people laugh.  Wizarding is not a lucrative field.  People really don’t pay much for wisdom any more.  I have gotten some attention and created some smiles with my work here on this blog, but it doesn’t generate much of anything beyond smiles and good feelings and people going “Hmmm, is that right?”  I’ll take it.  I’m satisfied that I have done my bit to make this world a better place.  And I enjoy the freedom to write and think that retirement provides.  But at the end of the day… I am still tired all over again.

2 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, wisdom

Tagged as , , , , , ,

July 5, 2015 · 1:27 pm

One True Thing

Sometimes I wonder why I write and what purpose it serves.  And the fact that it is impossible to know the answer to things like that doesn’t even slow me down.  The speculation-and-imagination machine chugs on, churning out all sorts of clever platitudes and sophomoric sayings that the editorial glands in my brain sometimes make me choke on.  Purple paisley prose rolls out of my pen and curls and swirls across the page being more about the silly sounds and internal rhymes and alliterations than about the actual ideas.  And I enjoy the process far more than you do.

newwkid

Making connections is probably the most important process of the whole endeavor.  Having returned home to Iowa for a week in July, I can testify that connecting your childhood to your recent past and your promising present is essential to determining both who you are and who you are supposed to be.  The boy I was in the 60’s and 70’s is a key to understanding why I write what I do.  I was smarter than a kid is supposed to be.  A nerd is a target for verbal and physical abuse based on a shared feeling among those not as cerebral that it is somehow unfair to be smarter than ordinary folks.  I learned to defend myself with wit and superior planning.  I found it is possible to create an indispensable role for myself in practically any situation.  I learned to be a good listener.  I absorbed all the fascinating little nuances of personality and possibility that other people unintentionally exude.  I learned to organize and prioritize and use all the other ize-es that help you structure reality to your liking.  And I learned that it is possible, as a teacher, to pass the secrets of life and love and laughter on to others.  Here is one true thing… The point of learning anything is to pass it on to others.

Skater girl

If you get nothing else at all out of this silly, meandering post of purple paisley prose, I hope it is that previous sentence.  I delude myself into believing that all the experiences I have had and all the things I have learned can be wrapped up into pretty packages and given as gifts to coming generations.  I strive to write with quality and make the ideas engaging and powerful.  I am always experimenting with style.  For example, this post is based on free-writing and associative thinking.  I intended to create a “boneless” structure of gelatinous prose centered around one true thing.  And I intentionally wrote it to resemble a blobby pile of mud in which the reader must dig for that nugget of gold.  And I think I have succeeded in making it thoroughly muddy with random big words, loose connections that risk bursting the paragraph’s seams, and word eddies that could potentially explode the flow.  If you have waded this far through the mess, then let me reward you with one more pointless Paffooney, re-posted like a pirate.

Blue and Mike in color

2 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, wisdom

Tagged as , , ,

February 9, 2015 · 1:21 pm

Wisdom from the Outsider

There is so much left to be said before my time runs out.  Wisdom, whether hard won or acquired entirely through wit, bears a certain responsibility in the possession of it.  We are duty-bound as wizards, the masters of wisdom, to pass it on.mrFuture

Now, you certainly have every right to protest that I am not wise and I have no wisdom.  You are certainly right to point out that I am a doddering old fool that sits around the house all day in the midst of his poor-health-enforced retirement doing little beyond writing silly stories and drawing pictures of mostly naked cartoon girls.  I get that.  But the beginning of wisdom is the realization of how big everything is and how little I really know about anything.

Take for instance the question of where we came from and what our purpose is?  (And the question of why I put a question mark on that when it really wasn’t a question.)

I originally believed in the God of the Christians and in the promises of Jesus… everlasting life and an eternity of sitting on a cloud with a harp and…  Okay, it didn’t take me long to see the logical holes in that line of reasoning.  So much of that is fear of death and the need to believe that I am the center of all things, the most important person in existence.  The truth is I am only a tiny part of a nearly-infinitely-large universe.  And the universe is conscious… self aware.  How do I know this?  Because I am conscious and self-aware.  I am an infinitely tiny piece of the whole… but there are untold trillions of others just like me.   Mai LingAnd when I die… when this body ceases to function, as it already has a great deal of trouble doing, the parts that make up the individual creature and thought patterns I identify as me will be scattered to the far corners of everywhere to be gathered up once again and be something new.  All of mankind passes away.  Human beings and the planet Earth will one day be no more.  But that is not what matters.  There is so much more beyond the boundaries of what my limited eyesight can behold, and what my limited mind can comprehend.   I am made of star-stuff (just ask Neal DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan), and I am a part of the universe as a whole.  I am in no hurry to die.  Life is worth fighting through the pain for… but I do not fear death.  Like birth, it is only a stop along the way in a journey that, as far as I can tell, never ends.

2 Comments

Filed under Paffooney, philosophy, wisdom

Tagged as , , , ,

December 19, 2014 · 9:22 pm

The Truest of Magicks

Okay, life is like this; you are born, a lot of dumb stuff happens that you are mostly not in control of, you suffer a little bit, you are happy a little bit, and then you die.   That is a pretty gloomy prospect, and most of us spend our entire lives obsessing over it, examining it with microscopes, doctoring it with needles and potions and chainsaws, trying to make it last a little longer, wailing and complaining about our sorry allotment, and wasting what little time we have.  So what secret exists that could ever make a difference?  Could ever open up our eyes… even just a tiny bit?

Zoric

The secret, as far as I can tell (and I am certainly one of the dumber and more random among you because I am cursed with insight and wisdom won through suffering and making huge mistakes), is reading the right books.

Eli Tragedy

I am not alone in this sort of thinking.  There are those who believe that if you gather the best books together into a personal library and read them, they add experiences and knowledge to your life that you would not otherwise have.  (Of course, one must acknowledge, especially if you read fiction, that most books are filled with lies and misinformation, and some, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus leaps to mind, might leave you stupider than you were when you started.)  It deepens, broadens, and intensely colors the experience of life.

Skorpio

People who read books a lot… really read them, and re-read them, and collect them, and study them, and think about and write about them… are called wizards.  Wizards are wise men.  It is what the word means.  Being one does not make you better than anyone else.  In fact, wizards are generally weaker than normal men.  It comes from all that ruining of eyes and fuddling up brains with too much thinking.  You don’t want a wizard to back you up in a fist fight.  You will certainly lose.  And you don’t want a wizard to tell you how live your life.  They are not good role models.  But if a wizard tells a story, you should listen.  Because if you really listen, and the wizard is really wise, you can expand the borders of your life, and push on nearer to immortality.

Ice Alchemist

2 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, wisdom, wizards

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

November 8, 2014 · 10:31 pm

In the Mind’s Eye

horse3So, why do I write what I write, and why do I draw what I draw?  The answer to those questions is critical to why I am me and not you, or some other goofy-stupid-crazy-intellectual-boring-weird-nutty person.  The answer is somewhere out in left field right now, lost in the tall grass where the left fielder will never find it.  What makes us unique?  What makes us individual?  Why is my brother not a photo-copy of me?  Why is my son so separate, different, and unique from me?  Will I ever stop asking these damned questions?

I am the knight of the white rose.  I am that because of my philosophical links to Rosicrucians, choosing empiricism over dogma, science over faith, and being willing to heal the world without payment.  We’re talking secret society stuff here, because when the world stumbles across real Rosicrucians, it tends to kill them.  Oh, and I’m not a real one, by the way.  Please don’t immediately start planning my tortured death. But I do believe that stories about love and forgiveness can change the world for the better.  Look at what the carpenter from Galilee was able to do.

And I tend to treat the fantasy elements, the Pegasus and unicorns from my daydreams, as real.  Not because I am loopy enough to actually believe in nonsense.  I said before, “empiricism over dogma” and “science over faith”.  But belief in human imagination and its magical power is not heresy.

So, here it is… the answer that you seek; I am infected seriously with Disney-itis in my artwork.  A strong layering of Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish over a Dr. Seuss base.  In my fiction, my prose, and my poetry, I am Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens and the Bard, and a dash of Kurt Vonnegut mixed in for taste.  Put in the oven and baked for six hours at 350 degrees, and then frosted with a thick, creamy covering of Robert Frost and sequins.

Did I make you laugh?  Make you smile, at least?  Make you angry?  Make you want to hire Opus Dei hit men to track me down and kill me with holy hand grenades?  If you pick any of those answers, then my work here is done.  I have explained myself… and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

4 Comments

Filed under colored pencil, drawing, foolishness, goofiness, humor, Paffooney, Pegasus, philosophy, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wisdom