“One Day it will Be My Turn!”
It is a new version of an old artwork that shares childhood baseball dreams. It is made with two colored-pencil figures on a Picsart AI Photo Editor background.
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The Same Old New Day
Today is…
a new day.
an opportunity.
a day to celebrate.
But Last Night was…
a horror show.
proof our Prexydent is a monster.
reason to be afraid of the future.
So, what do we do?
I wish I had answers. I woke up with a slight sore throat this morning. I have a cough that comes and goes. That is nothing new for me and my allergies this time of year. Still… it might be COVID. I could be dead before the end of the week. My power to affect anything in the world right now is very limited. I have to wait in Texas until early voting starts on October 13th, a very ominously-numbered day. I still have to finish and publish book number 18. And I feel like it is a very good novel. But I may be too ill to write that last chapter today. And it would be a shame to leave this world without finishing it.
We must never give up hope.
We must remember where we came from.
And look for new dawns more than colorful sunsets.
But most of all…
We must remember who we care for…
…and the value placed on love.
Filed under insight, inspiration, potpourri
How the Story Ends
How the Story Ends (a poem of sour grapes)
This is how the story ends…
When fox plus grapes make themes.
It tells you all the grapes are sour…
So give up on your dreams.
But that is not the fox I know…
At least, not how it seems.
The fox who knew the little Prince
Knew love will live in dreams.
The fox I know would think of ways
To live and work in teams
He’d find a farmer, kind and large,
And share with him the dreams.
The fox would learn to plant and grow
Grape seeds in warm sunbeams,
He’d tend and also harvest
And then he’d have his dreams.
And so, when thinking the story ends,
And not accepting themes
Remember that stories never end
If you don’t deny your dreams.
Filed under Paffooney, poem, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Transition
I have now moved from Texas back to Iowa, the land I was born in. It is a big change in my life, especially leaving my wife and daughter in Texas, not because of divorce but because I am retired and in poor health, while my wife is not done with her Texas teaching career.
I will live on the family farm with my sister and use Iowan healthcare to stay alive while my wife teaches for four more years. If we both still live that long, then decisions will be made again.
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Driving in Texas
Yes, this cartoon illustration shows how we drive in Texas. Of course, it all moves much faster than this in real life. I hope to get on the road tomorrow and make my way back to Iowa for the rest of my life. Outrunning road-raging alligators on the interstate is heck.
Filed under cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, humor, Paffooney
How To Avoid Dropping Dead Like a Dunderhead
This post originally appeared here on April 21st, 2015, the anniversary of Mark Twain’s expiration date.
If it is inevitable that I will surely drop dead some day, and if it is likely that it will come sooner rather than later, then I hope to go out with a bit of style and leave something behind that speaks not only to my own children, but to anybody searching for truth and beauty, people of the future that I will never know who are living beyond the confines of my little life. What makes me think that I can do it? Well, I’m a writer… and Mark Twain did it… and I don’t have to be vain or loopy or maniacal or delusional to make the same thing happen.
On this day one-hundred-and-five years ago, April 21, 1910, Mark Twain left the world of the living. He caught a ride on Halley’s Comet (It deposited him on Earth in 1835, appearing in the sky when he was born, and took him away when it appeared in the sky again in 1910… He didn’t have to be some kind of suicidal Heaven’s Gate nut to manage that.) But it wasn’t the comet that showed me the truth… it was his books. I learned to take a wry view of a complex world that I could do nothing to change and tweak it with intelligence and understanding from the story of racism and justice he left behind in Pudd’nhead Wilson. I learned the value of ingenuity and opportunity and how to use them properly from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I also learned a profound love and understanding for small town people like me and the people of my little hometown in both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Samuel Clemens, Mr. Mark Twain, left himself behind in stories to speak to the ages. He spoke to me… directly to my heart, and he had been dead for 46 years before I was even born. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
media.npr.org
Now, I am not a fool (wait a minute! I know you have proof to the contrary if you read my blog posts, but I am not an UNINTENTIONAL fool), so I do not think that my words and wisdom are ever going to have any sort of effect on the entire world the way Mark Twain’s have. I can accept reality. This whole world is dying and may not long outlive me. There are a large number of talented fools… er, I mean writers, out there who have put out a number of published good books, and have, like me, made diddly-zero-bupkiss in dollars on the deal. I have no delusions. My work is good enough to turn into a best-seller or maybe two, but I do not have the time or the backing to make it happen. If anything other than obscurity embraces my books, I won’t live to see it. Only eleven per cent of published authors make a livable wage from writing and I will never be one of them. But I have ideas that resonate. I can write in ways that touch the heart (as you may have seen if you have read my post “When Compassion Fails” that was a minor hit with the 1000 Voices Speak For Compassion group).
So, I am satisfied to confess my girly addiction to Barbie Dolls and My Little Pony… talk about cartoons and cartoonists on WordPress… make people giggle a bit… or even guffaw, and put together books that my family will read, and only be mildly embarrassed by, and maybe one day will reach and touch the heart of some boy or girl who really needs to read what I wrote at a time in their lives when it can actually help… the way so many other philosophers, wits, and word-wizards have helped me. (How’s that for some prime purple-paisley prose?)
Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Telling Teacher Stories
Here’s a secret that is only a secret if you are one of the well-over-six-billion people that don’t know I exist; I loved being a public school teacher. I taught for 31 years. 24 years of that was in middle school. I taught more than 1000 different seventh graders. And I loved it.
Please don’t reveal this secret to any mental health professionals. I like my freedom. And I am really not dangerous even after teaching that many seventh graders. I promise.
But it has left me with a compulsion. I confess it is the reason I write humorous young adult novels and why I continue to write this blog. I have to tell teacher stories or I will surely explode.
I have to tell you not only about the normal kids I taught, but the super-brainy mega-nerds I taught, the relatively stupid kids I taught, the honor students, the autistic kids, the kids who loved to sleep in class, the classroom clowns that tried to keep them awake, the kids who loved my class, the kids who hated my class, the times I was a really stupid teacher, the times I achieved some real milestones for some wonderful kids, the kids I still love to this day, the kids I tried really hard to love, but…. (well, some kids not even a mother could love), the drug dealers I had to protect my class from, the kids who talked to me about suicide and abuse and horrible things that still make me cry, the kids I lost along the way, and, well, the list goes on and on but this is an epic run-on sentence and the English teacher inside me is screaming at the moment.
You get the idea. Like most writers… real writers, not hacks and wannabees, I write because I have to. I don’t have a choice. No matter what it costs me. And what do I have to talk about in writing except being a school teacher and the almost infinite lessons that experience taught me?
I loved being the rabbit holding the big pencil in the front of the classroom. And that metaphor means, as crazy as it sounds, I loved being a teacher.
Filed under autobiography, commentary, education, humor, kids, Paffooney, teaching
Catch a Falling Star 
Over the Rainbow
Here is a notion that I find disturbing, compelling, and totally fascinating. The world portrayed to us through history, current media, and what is assumed to be common knowledge of the facts is all warped and incorrect. The people who make the world go round, like Glinda the Good Witch, Dorothy, and the Wizard in Oz are all lying to us.
What? You thought I was talking about something more than the Wizard of Oz? Well, you were right. You cannot consider the real meaning of the story Frank L. Baum wrote without realizing that it has more than one meaning.
You understand that in this story we are talking about a girl who becomes an interdimensional traveler. She visits a dimension which contains the Land of Oz (a place you cannot find anywhere on a map of the Earth) first by means of an interdimensional Kansas tornado, and later, after learning how to use them properly, finds her way back to her own dimension by magic-heel-clicking ruby slippers.
Not only that but after she learns of the whole rulership of Oz by witches and wizards, she allows herself to be recruited as an assassinator of evil witches by a supposed “good witch”. Again, she kills the first one by accident, then learns by trial and error how to kill the second one despite the witch’s winged-monkey minions.
Nothing in Oz is, of course, really what it seems to be. The Scarecrow, representing the rural farm worker, has been convinced he is an idiot know-nothing who doesn’t even have a brain. Yet, in the story, his were the plans that led the group to successfully overcoming obstacles. The Tin Man, representing the modern factory worker, has been told he doesn’t have a heart. Yet he is the one with the most empathy, willing to make any sacrifice necessary for the benefit of those he loves. And the Lion, symbolizing the military, is told he is cowardly, and he believes it, though he is willing to face grave danger and bravely takes on Dorothy’s enemies in spite of his paralyzing fear.
And we all know the Wizard, the man behind the curtain, is a humbug and a con man, trying to deceive others to stay in control of every situation and potential problem. (I am actually surprised his face is not orange and he doesn’t have tiny hands for signing executive orders,)
So I believe I have definitely shown there is a conspiracy behind the whole Wizard of Oz thing. It becomes obvious if you match up the signs, symbols, and clues. But the biggest thing of all is the obvious evidence of making everybody wear green sunglasses in the Emerald City. The cover-up is the greatest giveaway that there is when something odd is going on in Oz that they don’t want you to know about. It is the biggest clue that George W. Wizard is actually the instigator behind 9/11. The Scarecrow is also behind the back-engineering of alien spaceships at Area 51. The Tin Man is behind the chemtrails in the sky that are trying to undo the damage of global warming. And the Lion led the assassination team of CIA shooters who killed Kennedy. I know it all sounds crazy. But still… if we are willing to believe little Kansas girls can ride tornadoes into otherworldly dimensions…
And we all know who really voted Trump into office in 2016 and again in 2024.
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Filed under commentary, conspiracy theory, humor, metaphor, Paffooney, Uncategorized
Tagged as ariana-grande, conspiracy theories, movies, musical, wicked, Wizard of Oz