I must make a confession about crippling depression,
Cause today I have the blues.
It requires a concession of time for regression,
And dark days enveloping all views.
There is no progression in a working profession,
Cause clouds leave me missing all news.
I start the procession of blue notes in session,
And all melodies tend to be blues.
Filed under Paffooney, pessimism, poem, Uncategorized
So, I decided to update my portrait of Red Skelton from colored pencil to digital. Before I finished I happened to notice my Amazon sales report for October. One day old and a large number of pages read from about four different books. And all last week I had at least two somebodies reading from three different books every day. I apparently sold one e-book and had over a thousand pages read in a week for the first time ever on Kindle Unlimited. Has something suddenly broken my way? Or is the world still irredeemably broken?
Okay, the first one is more like him since it is more cross-eyed. I can goof up even in digital.
Filed under Uncategorized
I don’t usually do portraits, but, as I believe I may have said on an older post, Red Skelton is like a god to me. Much of what I know about comedy, I learned from him back in the 60’s and early 70’s. I watched him religiously on Wednesday nights on both CBS and NBC (channels 5 from Mason City, Iowa, and 13 from Des Moines). He made me laugh. Sometimes he even made me cry. So I honor him now with a portrait (or insult him, depending on your opinion of my artwork) in a Paffooney of Red as Clem Kadiddlehopper, pride (or maybe village idiot) of Cornpone County, Tennessee.
Filed under Uncategorized
Children are a resource that we, as a people, cannot live on without.
If we stop having children, nurturing children, raising children, providing children discipline and education, entertaining children, guiding children, and, most of all, loving children, in eighty or so years, human beings will be extinct in this universe.
How many universes are there with humanity being extinct in them? It is impossible to answer. But if there is more than one universe, there is more than one.
When I was a child myself, family farms were still the rule in Iowa. Couples would try for lots of kids to help with the farm work. Chores! I fed animals. I went with my grandfather to the feed store, the hardware store, and the hatchery. I drove a tractor. I walked bean fields and pulled weeds. I mucked out a hog house once (and believe me, once is enough for a lifetime.) I have slopped hogs. I shingled a house and a garage. I painted the family house (in town, not Grandpa’s farmhouse.) As a child, I helped my uncles who were farmers, and worked for other farmers in the area. I was just as important as fertilizer to the maintenance of the world I lived in. (I did not say I was important to USE AS fertilizer. They would’ve had to kill me to use me that way. But my work was a part of what made the land yield plenty.)
I was left, as a child, with the distinct impression that we were meant to live in the land as a part of the land. Nature was our friend. We didn’t cut down all the trees and pave over everything like the city folks did. The kid who never went skinny dipping was rare indeed.
There once were people who knew they lived with the land, and they were good stewards of the land. They knew if the land was not living well and healthy, then neither would they live well and healthy.
But I am not arguing that we should go back to the world of the 1960s. The work I did in the land back then is now mostly mechanized and done by machines, computers, automation, and factorization. But we can teach our precious children the values of old to use in new ways. If we don’t, well… I hope the AI Terminator Robots of the future will have a happy life without us.
Filed under artwork, farm boy, farming, humor, kids, Liberal ideas, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wisdom
This picture was created from my porcelain doll made for me by my mother from the pattern and mold called, “Tom Sawyer.” I used my digital art tools to trace the photo and color it in on top of an AI background.
This doll, made by my mother also, I call “Nicole” after my niece whom she resembles.
You can judge for yourself how well I did recreating this photo of Nicole and the Grey Stuffed Dog.
Filed under Uncategorized
Some Sunday thoughts require the right music.
Some Sunday thoughts actually are music.
noun
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I had originally thought to call this post “A Walk with God.” But that would probably offend my Christian friends and alienate my Jehovah’s Witness wife. It would bother my intellectual atheist friends too. Because they know I claim to be a Christian Existentialist, in other words, “an atheist who believes in God.” Agnostics are agnostics because they literally know they don’t know what is true and what is merely made up by men. And not knowing offends most people in the Western world.
But Debussy’s Reverie is a quiet walk in the sacred woods, the forest of as-yet-uncovered truths.
And that is what I need today. A quiet walk in the woods… when no literal woods are available.
I have apparently survived the Covid pandemic. But this pandemic has been hard on me. Having had the Omicron variant, I am left without the strength I once had even though I am fully vaccinated. I have lost the power to be a substitute teacher, a job I love. The loss of the ability to teach in any form still drives me to tears. I am a prisoner in my room at home most days. My soul is in darkness, knowing that the end could be right around the corner. There is so much left to do, to say, to write down for those who come after so they can fail to read any of it and reinforce the cruel irony that informs the universe. I have stories and lessons and morals and meanings to give the world still if only someone is willing to listen.
I am not afraid to die. I have no regrets. But I have been in a reverie about what has been in the past, what might have been, and what yet may be… if only I am granted the time.
And, as always, I feel like I have more writing yet to do. I am about to finish The Education of PoppenSparkle. And I have started He Rose on a Golden Wing, The Haunted Toystore, and AeroQuest 5. And I have stories beyond that to complete if I may.
But the most important thing right now is having time to think. Time for Reverie. And reflections upon the great symphony of life as it continues to play on… with or without me.
A romantic place to be, but it would be better with at least a couple of bars on the phone.
I am liking the ease of using digital tools to make a picture, but there was a time when I liked oil paint better.
Filed under Uncategorized
Wrapped in sunshine, things are always better.
Artificial light simply does not compare.
Nudists like me are happiest when the only clothing we are wearing is sunshine.
Kids are prone to love being naked outdoors,
But they do tend to think what their parents teach them to think.
And their parents usually think nudists are dangerous…
Or just plain crazy.
But Sunshine can be an idea. What we former English teachers call a metaphor.
Having sunshine in your mind is a way of thinking that can benefit you better than you know.
Sunshine in your mind can simply be happy thoughts. And, remember, happy thoughts could make Peter Pan fly!
So, wrap yourself in Sunshine… And light up the world!
Filed under battling depression, foolishness, goofy thoughts, healing, health, philosophy, poetry
Catch a Falling Star 