Yes, I’d have to say I am enjoying digital art. This portrait is nominally supposed to be Jenna Ortega. Of course, I did not make it look like her, even with an AI tool trying to help.
Here’s a digital update of “The Leap.” Do you remember what it looked like in colored pencil?
Remember Shannon who danced with me?
And “Basketball Player #3?
And KlownTown’s noble Piewhacker Police Department?
“The Spirit Stag?”
And “Rianna Going Bear”
Ah, I have been having a blast!!!
Filed under Uncategorized
This is artwork from this blog in 2015, a year after I retired from teaching.
Filed under artwork, colored pencil, oil painting, Paffooney, pen and ink
As a family, when our three kids were small, we were seriously addicted to camping. National parks, commercial campgrounds, and sometimes even in the back yard next to the pool. (We had a swimming pool until changing weather conditions changed that, cracking the pool and giving the city the excuse it needed to bully us into removing the pool and declaring bankruptcy over the expenses my week in the hospital after losing the argument with the city caused.) So, in the back yard it was okay to sleep naked outdoors and go skinny dipping in the pool accidentally in the middle of the night when you have to go into the house to pee. And it was great.
And even in national parks, you can get away with a bit of naked camping if you wait until after dark. And in Texas the risk of rattlesnakes was real. Except in one place we camped. Over East near Victoria, Texas there was a park with a man-made lake that had alligators in it… and water moccasins… and eagles flying above it. So, there were no rattlesnakes. The alligators and the eagles eat them. But the alligators and eagles don’t eat water moccasins. So, no skinny dipping after dark
We spent one Thanksgiving weekend at that park in Victoria with the gators, eagles, and water moccasins.
And we went with my in-laws, grandpa and grandma, and my sister-in-law and her second husband with their three kids and their fancy, air-conditioned motor home. And my parents, one of my two sisters, and my little brother and his wife, dedicated tent campers all. (And all of them dedicated to the idea of NOT being nudists.) It was an unusual Thanksgiving because my wife’s family is Filipino. And we had a lot of fried fish and fried hot dogs and friend stuff with Filipino names. And a turkey that my brother was determined to cook in an oil cooker that sat over the campfire which he had learned how to use at his place near Houston. The Thanksgiving campfire, oil-cooked-turkey experiment got flash-cooked in a sudden whoosh of unexpected fireballs, and the blackened bird meat ended up being a favorite of all the Filipinos. Myself, I was planning to eat hot dogs all along. I don’t like turkey. But it was a very warm November in Southeast Texas that year. And it was hot way late into the night. I was not allowed to sleep nude because… well, wife’s orders. She and my three kids left our tent every night before a half hour of tossing and turning in the humid heat had passed, and ended up in the motor home with the air conditioning. Leaving me to swelter in the tent alone. Which I didn’t do.
Having learned from the alien encounter in Iowa about the possibility of naked transcendental experiences, I spent four nights that holiday walking in my sleeping robe down to a picnic table on the shore of the lake. Water moccasins hunt in the water. So do alligators. So as long as I stayed at the picnic table on the land side, I could sit naked in the coolest night air available, occasionally glancing at the water hoping to see alligators whenever I heard a splashing. And I could look up at a star-filled, cloudless sky. And I thought about nothing, but felt everything. I was connected to the heart of the universe for four straight nights, and it cleansed my soul. I eventually felt cool enough to go back and sleep in the tent, but my mind stayed connected as I slept. And it was a memorable holiday experience for more reasons than just the blackened turkey story.
And most importantly, no relatives were mooned beyond their ability to cope with Mickey’s weirdness. Nobody even asked about it… almost as if no one had seen.
It Hin
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If you are as goofy and cartoon-obsessed as me, you may remember that Popeye the sailor was known for the catchphrase, “I yam what I yam”. And if you do remember that, it will not surprise you that, when told a yam is another name for sweet potato, Popeye was furious. “It cannot be!” he argued. “I would not say I sweet potato what I sweet potato! That’s ridicumess!”
Well he has a point.
But I would like to talk today about the things that I sweet potato, and why I sweet potato those things.
First of all, I yam a humorist.
I yam this thing not because I am funny. You may think I yam funny because I say really goofy things for no apparent reason, and then keep on talking long enough to convince you that I did have a point to make, but my brain leans so far to the left that I am hardly right about anything.
And I make bad puns a lot.
You see, I have to use humor constantly to deal with all the hard things in life, because being too serious in the face of the world’s basic uncaring cruelty only leads to depression and taking a beating from life. In fact, I can think of any number of situations in my past where I avoided a beating only because I made a joke that made the bully laugh.
So, being a humorist is a survival tactic. Humor keeps you alive.
You see someone like me has to face all the pain and heartache and cruelty the world has to offer by using humor. The real reason is that, when faced with a bad situation, if the humor gland can’t empty itself of all the jokes it produces, it will begin to swell. The humor gland is located either in the brain or maybe in the behind (I am not medically qualified to tell you which it really is), and it can only swell to a certain point, and then it will explode. This is very bad thing for you, if you survive it, and certainly unpleasant for anybody nearby.
But the joke, properly launched at the target, will make somebody laugh, even if it is only the humorist himself. And laughter is the best medicine. Unless it kills you. You have to be careful not to die laughing. The angels will be offended, and the demons will all laugh too.
But I yam not only a humorist. I yam also a teacher.
I began to realize that I might be a teacher when, in graduate school to get a remedial master’s degree to help with the fact that plain English majors all starve to death, I discovered I had a talent for explaining things in simple terms. And then, immediately afterwards, I discovered I had an even greater talent for being ignored while the people I was explaining to made the mistakes they wouldn’t have made if only they had listened to me, before they failed spectacularly, and then realized how the solution I had explained would’ve made them succeed instead. There is apparently no better way to learn an important lesson.
Teaching is, of course, a pretty cool job. You tend to have the summers off. And you get paid for summer because they split the amount of money you earn for the year (which considering what a babysitter makes on average per child and per hour is far too little for the hours you put in) into twelve monthly pittances.
Of course you are expected to have a university degree (although no teacher college in the world can teach you what you really need to know in order to face that many little monsters… err, darlings… every day) and preferably some grad school, and a certification to teach in your chosen subject, and an additional certification if you are going to teach more than one subject (and ESL and Speech and Journalism, all of which I was expected to teach, are separate certifications) and you have to take hours of additional training every single year, and you have to get re-certified every five years, and… Well, you have to be basically smarter and much better-educated than Bill Gates… But the school janitor will probably be making more money per month than you do.
Anyway, it’s a job you just gotta love. I yam a teacher.
And really, there are a whole lotta yams in my basket yet that I could tell you about. I yam a Red Skelton fan. I yam sometimes a nudist (when I don’t have to put on clothes to keep myself from scratching all my psoriasis-plagued skin off). I yam also an artist (of the type known as a cartoonist). I yam pig-headed sometimes, and I yam Grumpy sometimes (so I go from being Porky to one of the Seven Dwarfs.) I yam a lotta things. And my sweet-potato basket is large.
But I can’t talk about all of my yams today. Too many yams are bad for my diabetes.
But here’s one last yam. I yam a storyteller. And I have a free Kindle e-book promotion this weekend. The book is the first in my series of AeroQuest books. It is a science fiction story with a humorous bent. And I mean, it is seriously bent in some places.
So, click on the link and get yourself a copy. It’s funny. And I will save the other sweet potatoes for another day.
Filed under humor, metaphor, novel writing, Paffooney, self portrait, writing teacher
I admit it. I do wear pajamas when it is cold. But I sleep best when it is cool and I am naked.
But one of the hard parts about being a closet nudist, only naked in complete privacy, preferably in the back of the closet, sleeping naked can also be hard on the old PTSD.
More than once I awoke in the middle of the night naked and paralyzed in fear. Before I got married, it was almost a monthly thing. I would wake up, feeling a presence in the room, a presence that would terrify me. And I was in a state of completely un-armored nakedness. Naked to fangs, claws, and knives. Of course, the intruder was never real, only a phantom created by too much cortisol in the bloodstream due to stress and the horrors of the assault I endured as a child.
One night my two sisters, my wife, my oldest son, my niece and nephew were all sleeping in the farmhouse in Iowa which, on a temporary basis, was empty of everything even furniture as my grandmother lived in the retirement apartments and my parents stayed with her as they still lived in Texas. We were all there on a summer holiday visit. in the early 90s.
In the middle of the night, I got out of my sleeping bag to pee in the nearest bathroom, putting my robe on so as not to accidentally moon anybody. I went to the bathroom, and looked up at the window above the shower. There was a small, alien being staring at my berobed nakedness. I jumped out of my robe and ended up stark naked in the kitchen. I looked out the kitchen windows and saw the alien, or another one like it, walking across the yard under the yard light. It was green and as naked as I was.
Of course, I didn’t believe it was real. I was used to phantoms waking me up to paralyzed terror. Only, I wasn’t paralyzed. And I am pretty sure I wasn’t asleep.
Of course, I didn’t tell anybody, because they would tell me I was crazy, and I would believe them. So, I spent the rest of the night completely zipped up and trembling in my sleeping bag. If anybody was abducted and probed that night, their memories of it must’ve been completely erased. Mine too, probably.
The next night I had an elaborate dream. I dreamed that the aliens returned and were tapping at the windows, calling me outside to show me something. Uncharacteristically, I got up, completely naked, and went outside. In the dark, looking out above the machine shed and the eastern cornfield, the planet Jupiter completely filled the sky. I couldn’t believe it. I knew from having taught the subject in school that being that close to Jupiter’s gravity, the Earth would be mangled and turned into a volcanic mess like the moon of Jupiter called Io.
So, the third night, I took matters into my own hands. After everybody else in the empty farmhouse was asleep, I got up and put on my robe. I went out the back door of the house. And then I dropped my robe and preceded out to the hill in the yard overlooking the eastern cornfield. The same place where I saw the planet Jupiter in my dream. The star-filled sky was absolutely absorbing in its inherent beauty. In the country in Iowa, far away from city lights, and with no clouds in the sky, it was all the very substance that God is made of. I saw the twinkling stars. I saw the red-tinged light that was Jupiter, and the other one that was Mars. I saw the glittering path of the Milky Way’s spilled milk. The fear was gone. I was naked and completely connected to the universe. It is one of those moments in a life that came unexpectedly, but became a fundamental keystone to all the experiences of my life.
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My title for today has at least a double meaning, if not a triple or fourple one.
“Fourple?” you say.
Yes, four plus the color purple. Purple, after all is the dominant color used in the video game “The Legend of Hoodwink“.
And, of course, the video game is not real. It is the virtual reality video game used in the story as the secret land that the orphans and their mother’s friend flee the authorities to live in after the deaths of the Brown family’s parents.
So, I have been living in the world of Glammis, the imaginary game world inside a mainframe supercomputer. I started this story back in the 1980’s, inspired just a little bit by the Disney movie Tron. Of course there are all kinds of more current technological details to employ to make the story more up to date. The story has been reset to 1999. (I don’t write stories set in the 21st Century. I just don’t. Mark Twain never set one in the 20th.) And one of the ways to create the game-world of the story is to draw pictures of it that I can use as illustrations in the book.
Hoodwink and Babbles (the horse-headed Kelpie) are both game characters that play key roles in the story. They transform from game characters following the script to real people fighting for their lives and honor in the course of the story.
A key setting is the candle-castle called Candlemere, for obvious reasons. The wizard, Milt Morgan, lives there, though he is a real person from Iowa living in Texas as a game designer.
These are the three orphans that Milt Morgan has rescued after the car crash. Mortie Brown, Daisy Brown, and Johnny Brown now live in Glammis after the deaths of their parents, Brom and Stacy Brown.
The three orphans are being pursued in the real world by an FBI agent, a relentless tracker and pursuer named Agent Brent Clarke. What the kids don’t know is that Agent Clarke is trying to find them for their grandparents that they don’t realize are still alive. And Clarke is also their uncle, their mother’s older brother.
In the video game, they are pursued by the evil Daniel Quilp, who is in the video game playing the wicked King Murdstone of the Chelsrod’s Spire. He is not a relative. He is secretly the enemy of their parents and the wizard Milt Morgan.
The servant of Murdstone in the game is Errol of the Devylkind. He is more than he appears to be as well. He is another player character who is also very much acquainted with Daisy in the real world, and has a huge crush on her.
But, at present, I haven’t yet reached that part of the story, the latter half of Act One. Instead, I am today establishing setting further by narrating the visit to BrooglieTown, the home of the chocolate dwarves (literally made of chocolate and not a racist faux pas by any means.)
So, in the middle of writing a novel, I am describing the world-building I have been doing… and drawing… while pretty much living in this made-up game world due to the ongoing pandemic and intense heat of Texas in July. It is a better place to be living for now, though it is soon to heat up too as the plot gets churning and the Devylkind, rather hot-blooded fantasy characters, get further involved.
Filed under novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
The criminal was led into the courtroom in chains and forced to sit in a box made of metal bars so his influence would not reach out and harm anyone by drawing their sympathy in.
“Mr. Prosecutor,” said the learned judge, “what terrible crime has the perpetrator been charged with?”
“The alleged perpetrator!” objected the defense attorney, a mousy old man who looked like a cross between Santa Clause and Robert E.Lee because of his white beard, stern face, and a twinkle in his eye.
“Shut up please, Mr. Badweather. You will have your turn to speak.” The judge banged his gavel smartly to emphasize the shut-up-ness of his overruling.
“Your honor,” said the prosecutor, “Mister Pennysnatcher Goodlaughs stands accused of being a clown.”
“The people of the State of Texas, home of the free, land of the brave, and place where cowboys can hang their hat on the antlers of a moose they shot in Canada, will prove that Mr. Goodlaughs did willfully, and with malice of forethought, commit acts of supposed humor in order to make people laugh. And we will further prove that in a time of very serious things, he intentionally made light of very serious matters and the very serious men who try to turn those serious things to their exclusive… err, sorry, I mean… everyone’s benefit.”
“Your honor,” said the defense attorney, looking like a cross between Mark Twain and Colonel Sanders, “I would like to request a new venue for this trial. My client will not get a fair trial here.”
“Sir, your stupid request is rejected on the grounds that Mr. Goodlaughs cannot get a fair trial anywhere. We are all conservatives, and are therefore incapable of having a sense of humor. Continue, Mr. Prosecutor.”
“We will show numerous instances of Mr. Goodlaughs putting paint on his face to hide his true features or assume the identity of a character not his own. He has repeatedly used false noses, large shoes, and floppy hats to exaggerate his flaws and scare young children. He repeatedly wears polka-dotted clothing to simulate terrible taste and ridiculous lack of fashion-sense. He employs pratfalls and slapstick humor in his performances, things that, if any school-age child would imitate the behavior, might lead to serious injury or even death. And he has even dared to make fun of our glorious leaders, implying that they make mistakes and may even have hurt people. That they act without thinking about anything but their own pocketbooks. In other words, this clown has knowingly made jokes in order to get people to not take things seriously.”
“Your honor, I object to this jury. I object to the fact that it is made up of fifty percent rednecks and fifty percent kangaroos! My client demands a new, more impartial jury!” cried the defense attorney, looking like a cross between Captain Kangaroo and Ronald Reagan.
“Has anybody noticed?” asked the judge, “that this attorney looks like he could influence this jury unfairly? He looks like two people who could lead the two halves of this jury to the wrong conclusion. Bailiff! Take the defense attorney out back and execute him by firing squad.”
After the entire courtroom heard the gunshots go off, the judge then turned to the prisoner.
“It seems, Mr. Goodlaughs, that the defense’s opening statement is now entirely up to you. Do you have anything to say in your own defense?
“I do, your honor. Ladies and gentlemen, kangaroos and Reagan Republicans of the jury, I submit to you that I have never actually been a circus clown, or wore face paint. Not that I wouldn’t if the opportunity presented itself. I merely claim the right to laugh at anything I think is funny… or can be made funny. Whether I am being what you call a clown, a humorist, a cartoonist, a comedian, a fool, a village idiot, or a witty fellow, I believe I have the right to make light of anything. Life is always better when you can laugh. Especially if you can laugh at yourself.”
“I’ve heard enough,” said the judge. “What say you, jury?”
“Guilty!”
“Yes. And I preemptively waive the prisoner’s right to appeal. Sir, you are guilty, and you shall be executed immediately.”
Everyone in the courtroom breathed a long-awaited sigh of relief.
Filed under clowns, comedians, commentary, foolishness, humor, insight, Paffooney, pessimism
Yes, I am leading with a digital cartoon of my imaginary granddaughter. And I know it’s probably concerning that I have an imaginary granddaughter. She’s not a ghost. The child that didn’t carry to term was never really alive. That is the reason she didn’t happen. She’s not a ghost, rather, a pretend friend. And I only write about her now as an exercise in fiction. She’s no more real than any other character I have ever written. No more real than Valerie Clarke, or Devon Martinez, or Oliver Twist, or Atticus Finch…. I know, I know… I didn’t write those last two characters. But I am mostly ignored as an author, and I had a point to make in there somewhere.
This is her. She looks like Bollywood child star Sidra Khan because that’s whose Instagram photo I used as a model. So, what do I name this imaginary little girl? Samantha? Serendipity? Sara? But why do they have to start with S? I tend to use the first letters of real names of people I based a fictional character on, but my granddaughter never had a name. Or even a sex. Sam? Sandy? Norman Nobody?
But why am I obsessing about somebody who never came to be? Am I lonely? Am I unfulfilled? I am talking to nobody, aren’t I? Nobody reads what I write. At least, nobody I will ever know about.
Somebody is reading three of my books on Kindle Unlimited this month. Superchicken, The Baby Werewolf, and Recipes for Gingerbread Children. That somebody is reading in Canada. I know how many total pages. But I have no idea who this person is, or, since there will be no review, what they think about the stories.
Rianna didn’t ignore me. In the 1980s she was in my English class for two years. No, she didn’t fail. She was in my class as a seventh grader, and again as an eighth grader. And she loved me when she was a seventh grader. And the next year she hated me. And as soon as she left my class and moved on to high school, I was her favorite teacher again. She didn’t ignore me, anyway.
The world doesn’t ignore me if I owe taxes. It doesn’t ignore me when the pool cracks and can’t hold water anymore, and the city forces me in court to have the pool removed, and I ended up in the hospital with heart issues, and I went bankrupt. Medical bills and Bank of America certainly didn’t ignore me. Lawsuits over money are not about ignoring somebody.
But I am the author of 21 books with 3 more that may get finished before I croak. I mean, curl up my toes and go permanently bye-bye, not that I am turning into a bullfrog (though I do suspect a curse on me somewhere in the mix.)
There are numerous best-seller lists that I am not on for any of my books, even the best ones. And book promoters have increasingly been calling me. Of course, they want me to spend money on their marketing and publishing services. They are not promising to help me sell anything. They haven’t read any of my books. They are only promising to take my money. But the joke’s on them. I don’t have any money.
But let them ignore me. I wrote those books and this post. So what if everybody ignores all of it? They exist. I am a writer. And you can’t disprove it.
Filed under Uncategorized
I have never been an attention-seeker. In the Elysian Fields of modern society, I have never really been the honeybee. I have always been the flower. I had a reputation in high school for being the quiet nerd who ends up surprising you immensely in speech class, at the science fair, or at the art show. I was the one they all turned to when everybody in the conversation had already had their chance to strut and pontificate and say dumb things, and they were finally ready to get the solution to the problem being discussed, or the best suggestion on where to begin to find it.
When I became the teacher of the class instead of the student, I had to make major changes. I had to go from being patient, quiet, and shy to being the fearless presenter, forceful, sharp as an imparter of knowledge, and able to be easily understood, even by the kids whom you couldn’t legally call stupid, but were less than smart, and not in a pleasant Forrest Gump sort of way.
Shyness is only ever overcome by determination and practice. The standard advice given is to picture your audience naked so that you are not intimidated by them. But if your audience is seventh graders, you have to be extra careful about that. They are metaphorically naked all the time, ready at a moment’s notice to explode out of any metaphorical clothing they have learned to wear to cover the things that they wish to keep to themselves about themselves. And while you want them to open up and talk to you, you don’t want the emotional nakedness of having them sobbing in front of the entire class, or throwing things at you in the throes of a mega-tantrum over their love-life and the resulting soap operas of betrayal and revenge. And you definitely don’t want any literal nakedness in your classroom. (Please put your sweat pants back on, Keesha. Those shorts are not within the limits of the dress code.) Calling attention to yourself and what you have to say, because you are being paid to do so, is a critical, yet tricky thing to do. You want them looking at you, and actually thinking about what you are saying (preferably without imagining you naked, which they will do at any sort of unintentional slip or accidental prompting.) The ones who ignore you are a problem that has to be remedied individually and can eat up the majority of your teaching time.
I trained myself to be fairly good at commanding the attention of the room.
But now that I am retired, things have changed. I can still command attention in the room, which I proved to myself by being a successful substitute teacher last year. But I no longer have a captive audience that I can speak to five days a week in a classroom. Now my audience is whoever happens to see this blog and is intrigued enough by the title and pictures to read my words.
Now that I am retired and only speaking to the world at large through writing, I am ignored more than ever before. Being ignored is, perhaps, the only thing I do anymore. It is the new definition of Mickey. Mickey means, “He who must be ignored. Not partially, but wholly… and with malice.”
I put my blog posts on Facebook and Twitter where I know for a fact that there are people who know me and would read them and like them if they knew that they were there. But the malevolent algorithms on those social media sites guarantee that none of my dozens of cousins, old school friends, and former students will see them. Only the single ladies from Kazakhstan and members of the Butchers Union of Cleveland see my posts. Why is this? I do not know. Facebook and Twitter ignore me when I ask.
My books, though liked by everybody who has actually read and responded to them, are lost in a vast ocean of self-published books, most of which are not very good and give a black eye to self-published authors in general. I recently got another call from I-Universe/Penguin Books publishers about Catch a Falling Star, the one book I still have with them. They are concerned that my book, which is on their Editor’s Choice list, is not performing as well as their marketing people think it should. But to promote it, I would have to pay four hundred dollars towards the marketing campaign, even though they are already subsidizing it by fifty percent. They tell me they believe in my book. But apparently not enough to pay for 100% of the promotion.
I have decided to invest in a review service that will cost me about twenty dollars a month. But my confidence is not high. The last time I paid somebody to review a book, they reviewed a book with the same title as mine from a different author. That service still owes me money.
But the only reason it is a problem that I am being thoroughly ignored these days is that an author needs to be read to fulfill his purpose in life. Maybe pictures of pretty girls in this post will help. But, even if they don’t, well, I had their attention once upon a time. And since my purpose as a teacher is already fulfilled, perhaps that will be enough for one lifetime.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, education, humor, Paffooney, publishing, teaching
Catch a Falling Star 
The Real Magic in that Old Home Town
Rowan, Iowa… Not the place I was born, but the place where I got to be a stupid kid, and have the lessons of the good and god-fearing life hammered into my head hard enough to make a dent and make it stay with me for more than half a century. I got to go to grade school there. I learned to read there, especially in Miss Mennenga’s third and fourth grade class. Especially in that old copy of Treasure Island with the N.C, Wyeth illustrations in it, the one Grandma Aldrich kept in the upstairs closet in their farm house. I got to see my first naked girl there. I learned a lot of things about sex from my friends there, and none of them were true. I played 4-H softball there, and made a game-saving catch in center field… in the same game where my cousin Bob hit the game-winning home run. But those were things kids did everywhere. It didn’t make me special. There was no real magic in it.
Being a farm-kid’s kid taught me the importance of doing your chores, every day and on time. If you didn’t do them, animals could get sick, animals could die, crops could be spoiled, the chickens could get angry and petulant and peck your hands when you tried to get the eggs. Cows could get grumpy and kick the milk bucket. Cats could vow revenge if you didn’t direct a spray or two at their little faces as they lined up to watch you milk the cows. And you never knew for sure what a vengeful cat might do to you later, as cats were evil. They might jump on the keyboard during your piano recital. They might knock the turkey stuffing bowl off the top of the dryer when Mom and Grandma and several aunts were cooking Thanksgiving Dinner. And I know old black Midnight did that on purpose because he got to snatch some off the floor before it could be reached by angry aunts with brooms and dustpans. And all of it was your fault if it all led back to not doing your chores, and not doing them exactly right.
But, even though we learned responsibility and work ethic from our chores, that was not the real home-town magic either. I wasn’t technically a real farm kid. Sure, I picked up the eggs in the chicken house at Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich’s farm more than once. And I did, in fact, help with milking machines and even milking cows by hand and squirting cats in the faces at Uncle Donny’s farm. I walked beans, going up and down the rows to pull and chop weeds out of the bean fields at Uncle Larry’s farm. I drove a tractor at Great Uncle Alvin’s farm. But I didn’t have to do any of those things every single day. My mother and my father both grew up on farms. But we lived in town. So, my work ethic was probably worth only a quarter of what the work ethic of any of my friends in school was truly worth. I was a bum kid by comparison. Gary G. and Kevin K, both real farm kids and older than me, explained this to me one day behind the gymnasium with specific examples and fists.
Being a farm kid helped to forge my character. But that was really all about working hard, and nothing really to do with magic.
I truly believe the real magic to be found in Rowan, Iowa, my home town, was the fact that it was boring. It was a sleepy little town, that never had any real event… well, except maybe for a couple of monster blizzards in the 60’s and 70’s, and the Bicentennial parade and tractor pull on Main Street in 1976, and a couple of costume contests in the 1960’s held in the Fire Station where I had really worked hard on the costumes, a scarecrow one year, and an ogre the next, where I almost won a prize. But nothing that changed history or made Rowan the center of everything.
And therein lies the magic. I had to look at everything closely to find the things and strategies that would take me to the great things and places where I wanted to end up. I learned to wish upon a star from Disney movies. I learned about beauty of body and soul from the girls that I grew up with, most of them related. And I invented fantastical stories with the vivid imagination I discovered lurking in my own stupid head. I embarrassed Alicia Stewart by telling everyone that I could prove she was a Martian princess, kidnapped and brought to Earth by space pirates that only I knew how to defeat. And I learned to say funny things and make people laugh… but in ways that didn’t get me sent to the principal’s office in school. Yes, it was the magic of my own imagination. And boring Iowa farm towns made more people with magic in them than just me. John Wayne was one. Johnny Carson was one also. And have you heard of Elijah Wood? Or the painter Grant Wood? Or the actress Cloris Leachman?
Yep. We were such stuff as dreams were made on in small towns in Iowa. And that is real magic.
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Filed under autobiography, commentary, dreaming, farm boy, farming, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, magic, Paffooney