June 5, 2023 · 1:39 am

Where-in Lies the Funny?

The author without his make-up and after imbibing extra caffeine.

The author without his make-up and after imbibing extra caffeine.

I am attempting to be a humor writer.  There’s a statement that calls for more than a little rationalization.  Why would anyone want to be funny?  Especially why would a manic-depressive sick-old former school teacher want to be funny and write books for young people that tackle subjects like suicide, lying, nudity, sex, trans-genderism, death, suffering, religion, alien invasions, and getting old?  (Well, okay, getting old is inherently funny… especially the noises you unintentionally make from orifices and joints whenever you try to sit, move, lift, eat, or breathe.)  I ask myself this question only because I need to get to 500 words and stretch out the hoopti-doo to cover up the fact that I already know the answer and it is short and simple.  Joking about the things that tear your life apart is the only way to handle things and not become a serial killer.  (Make that cereal killer, especially Kellogg’s cereal of any and every description.  I am a very loving and accepting fool at heart and could never kill even one person… probably even in self-defense.)  I recently took a Who-do-you-write-like test that I found on another blog at All Things Chronic.  Here is the link; https://painkills2.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/who-do-you-write-like/

That silly little analyzer took a bit of my purple paisley prose and churned out a horror-writer answer, H.P. Lovecraft.  The Lord of the Old Mad Gods and Moonbeasts is a particular favorite of mine, one of several writers whose novels I have read everything I can get my hands on.  I still sleep with the lights on at night because of The Dunwich Horror, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth.  I am mad with admiration for his allusions to gibbering sounds and unholy terrors that taint and transfix our lives with fear to the very marrow of the bones.  I have to admit, I like the idea of being compared to him, in spite of the fact that he tries to inspire fear and madness, while I aim for goofiness and gaiety.   It is a delicious irony to try always to be Mark-Twain funny while writing with a horror writer’s convoluted and dictionary-intensive style.

And don’t get the idea from my mention of him in this self-reflecting ramble through jumbled ideas that I really believe I am as funny as Mark Twain.  I am not deluded or mentally ill… well, not deluded, anyway.  I am still learning to make people laugh with words.  And I don’t mean to be mean about it.  I don’t do George Carlin F**k-the-world-style humor.  I don’t even do Don Rickles-style insults.  I am more in favor of gentle humor.  I am not looking to call anybody names or trying to make certain folks look like Biblical-word-for-donkeys.  (Not even Republicans named Rick in yesterday’s post).  I want to show fictional people undergoing some of the dark things that filled my life with hurt, and doing it with the grace and good humor that only comes from a heart full of self-sacrificing love.  (Gee, no wonder I find comedy hard… I have chosen the most difficult and elusive kind of humor for my art.  I’d do a lot better with poo-poo jokes.)  (Oh, wait, I do poo-poo jokes, don’t I.  This one counts too.)Senator Tedhkruzh

I wonder if I made a mistake yesterday in portraying Senator Ted Cruz as a lizard man from outer space.  Was that a mean, name-calling sort of joke?  Or was I painting him in broad, humorous strokes with my colored pencils?  Once again, you can be the judge.  Here’s the picture again.  And you get to decide if anything I have ever said is funnier than it is just plain sad.

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June 5, 2023 · 1:31 am

Red State Hate

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It has taken me some time to put ideas together to tackle this terrible thing.  Jon Stewart did a segment at the beginning of his show that was not funny.  It was somber, thoughtful, and full of real outrage that cast lightning bolts at the heart of the dragon.  And I admire Stewart for what he is… someone who truly cares about things, and fights the good fight using the best weapon he has.  Humor.  Mark Twain said that against it, nothing could stand.  But some things are so terrible that not even a joke can put it right.  Why?  Because there are places in this human world where ideas are like a festering sore, spreading at an alarming rate, and daily becoming more and more poisonous.  Texas is like that.  It is a Red State.  That means it is a hotbed of conservative ideas and nurtures Republican values… like being distrustful and fearful of them…  And who are they?  They are not us.  They have a different religion.  They have a different skin color.  They are not opposed to raising taxes on the rich, even if they are rich themselves.  They are not capitalists… Or not freedom-loving…  They think it can be left up to women to decide what to do with their own bodies.  They don’t see abortion as murder.  They don’t think teaching evolution in schools is evil.  We must fear them… and, yes, even hate them.

kids

As a school teacher, I learned early on that if you only look for the bad in other people, then that is what you will be left with, a world in which there are only bad people.  I don’t know about you, but I can’t live in a world like that.  I learned to look at the world as being full of imperfect people who all have good in them, lots of good.  I grew up in Iowa where the people were so white in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s that when the winter snow fell heavy enough, we all had the super power of invisibility.   I remember only one black face from my childhood that wasn’t on television.  There was a little girl from Chicago who came to stay with a volunteer family so she could get out of the inner city for a while.  The adults warned us that she might be prone to stealing things, so don’t do anything to tempt her.  And we didn’t.  And she didn’t.  And damn it, I don’t know whether we did a good job of not tempting her, or that warning was just an empty prejudice.  She was just like us.  She laughed at things.  She loved kittens.  She played our games.  She was just like us… but she had a better tan.

I started teaching in South Texas.  I quickly learned how to deal with Hispanic kids who were mostly poor and mostly Spanish-speaking.  I learned that they didn’t laugh at the same things as I did.  When they called me Batman for a while, it wasn’t a compliment.  I learned to laugh at the things they found funny and learned to joke the way they joked.  I played their games.  I learned to love pit-bulls and other dogs the way they loved dogs.  I was just like them… but they couldn’t hide in the snow as easily as me.

I learned to teach black kids like they complain about on Fox News, the ones they throw to the ground and sit on at pool parties in McKinney, Texas, when I moved to the Dallas area and the town of Carrollton.  I quickly learned why some teachers are so stressed out by them.  They are louder than the white kids.  Their nerves can be more raw and their tempers hotter than the other kids.  Not all of them… just about 51 %.   But you have to look close enough to see that… they laugh at most of the same things as us.  Some of the brightest, widest smiles I have ever seen are on the faces of black kids when you laugh at their jokes.  They play the same games as I do.  They love puppies just like I do.  They sometimes even have more faith in God than I do.  Some of my favorite students of all time had very dark faces.  I still think of them often… and i will never stop loving them… all of them.  And when something happens like it happened in South Carolina…  Forgive me, I have to cry again for a bit.

And how do we solve the problem of places where love is so badly needed, but is not present in large doses?  How do we overcome this passion some people have to exclude illegal immigrants, and the need some people feel to move their children out of schools where there are too many of the wrong colored faces?  I do not know the answer.
But you do not create love by passing laws and building walls.  You have to spend time with them.  You have to laugh at the same jokes.  You have to play the same games.  You have to love puppies and kittens.  Don’t you?

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June 4, 2023 · 1:31 am

Consonant Conundrums

Yes, health problems and eye problems and depression problems are cutting into my writing time. Again.

I am battling. It is not the last battle. But it is bloody (in a metaphorical sense.)

I will recover. But suffering builds character. I wonder which character I am building. It is probably a ghost in the Haunted Toy Store.

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June 4, 2023 · 1:10 am

Writing in My Head

I am reposting this old post from 2015 because I am in the same situation of not being able to write 500 words today.

Okay, I am justifying and vilifying today because yesterday I didn’t write 500 words… the first time in 2015… not in my blog, not in my novels, not even counting text messages.   I had extenuating circumstances.  I went to a movie, Disney’s Inside Out which made me laugh and made me cry like any good Disney/Pixar movie always does.  Then I got a message that one of my children went into the hospital in Florida.  And I have been down and out with a bad back, so I missed the Florida trip all together… (the child is fine, by the way, thanks for asking that in your head while reading this).  But all of that stuff and nonsense is really just an excuse for a dastardly act of cowardice.  I didn’t write a full 500 words.  How dare I?   This writing thing has now become my sacred mission from God.  After all, I retired from the first sacred mission because poor health was God’s way of telling me, “MICKEY, IT IS TIME TO BE A WRITER.”  Really!  He talks to me in all capital letters just like that.

girl n bird

And you have probably noticed already that I am doing stream-of-consciousness writing for today’s post, a useful form of pre-writing that is known for producing lots of garbage to go along with the gemstones-in-the-rough.  My mind is still boiling with emotional turmoil and upset and less-than-critical thinking…  The reasons for that are understandable… I am guessing. …  But I think the point is (if points are possible in this no-win game I am playing, and losing, called Old Age) that I am never really not writing.  I have two novels in rough drafting at the same time.  Both When the Captain Came Calling and Stardusters and Space Lizards are both on my task bar at this very moment.  I add new inspirations for the next canto every time a new light bulb clicks on over my little furry head.

20150216_152544 Happy Doodle
swallowtail

So the ideas are already there for several pieces of writing that I simply have to sit down and knock out on the keyboard.  Potentially I have way more than a mere 500 words waiting to blossom and unfold like flowers into paragraphs of purple paisley prose.  (Since this is as close as a writer can come to showing how he actually thinks, I guess I have also answered a question that many who try to read my writing have been wondering about… I really do think in loopty-loops with streamers attached and a knot in the tail.)  Writing is not something I can ever be accused of not doing because writing and thinking are the same thing… the only difference between the 500 per day and the leventie-leven trillion in my head is your access to it in a form that is written down and edited (well, at least re-read for typos… I kinda like leaving the stuff and nonsense… and moldy bananas… in the final product because I can pass that particular form of goofiness off as humor).  (And, yes, it just helped me pass 500 for today.)

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June 3, 2023 · 2:22 am

Goodbye Sweet Society

This is a short soliloquy about giving up being a nudist and practicing nudism.

There are many complicated reasons why I have to give up practicing nudism. It certainly isn’t that I have given up on my love for the feeling of walking naked in the dappled sunshine and shade of the cool green forest floor, or swimming nude on a summer’s day with other nude people. (My memory of that revolves around kid friends at Duffy’s Creek and the swimming hole near the railroad bridge.)

But it does involve my malignant melanoma in 1983. My family has long been susceptible to skin cancer. And even slathered with sunscreen, I do have the problem of sun-damage in old age increasing my chances of a relapse.

And it does include the fact that every nudist camp or park is far away from home, and long drives are harder now to do alone. My wife refuses to entertain the possibility of visiting a nudist park, even if she didn’t have to take her own clothes off. That is a religious stance that she simply will not compromise. My children, while they were not opposed to skinny-dipping in the pool when they were young, are embarrassed by the memory of it now that they are all adults themselves. I have no one to share it with.

I used to have the back yard to sit outside under the trees wearing nothing but sunscreen, mosquito repellent, and a sun hat. I liked to read good books that way, and even edit my own books that way. But now the wind blew down a portion of the privacy fence, and public nudity in Texas is a serious offense in a Baptist and Catholic neighborhood.

I am not claiming that I am no longer a nudist. I am certainly still that. But I am now nothing but an indoor, only-in-the-bedroom nudist. And though it stings a little, I have to accept that new reality.

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June 3, 2023 · 1:34 am

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

This post is a reprint of the time I set out to become a nudist since I was retired and no longer had to fear what it would do to my career as a teacher.  

This is not a tribute to Winston Groom and his famous creation, Forrest Gump.  This is an admission that when I have had very little sleep and lots of worry lines on my brow, I often do remarkably stupid things.

Eden

And sometimes, doing something monumentally stupid makes me feel better.  You know, more a part of the stupid, meaningless, and goofy world around me.  So, what stupid thing did I do?  I joined a nudist organization’s website.  Me, who freaks out when members of my own family happen to see me naked.  And, you see, there is more to joining this organization than just signing up for some random thing on the internet where you get a lot of random emails.  I had to submit nude photos of myself to be posted in community forums.  And I may be able to write a blog for this website, which will mean taking some camping gear and actually going to the naturist club site near Dallas to experience the things I will be writing about… and probably making jokes about.  But don’t be afraid of being subjected to the hideous torture of having to see me naked.  In order to see any of that, you would have to join the organization yourself, and you are probably not as stupid as me.  (But I am not telling you the name of the website anyway.)

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This is a detail from an illustration based on Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  But it is also a picture of me and a childhood friend from back in the skinny-dipping days, based on an old black-and-white photo.

You see, I have some real life experiences with nudists before this happened.  I had a roommate in grad school who liked to go au naturel, and even was comfortable with me being in the room when his girlfriend was visiting.  He was nude in the kitchen one time when my grandparents came to visit.  It is a good thing my grandfather entered that room ahead of my grandmother.  I also had a girlfriend in the eighties who had a sister living in the clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin, Texas.  Every time we visited Austin, the city nearest where my parents lived, she would stay with her sister there and I would have to go in to fetch her whenever we had plans.  Sometimes I was there just to visit.  But always, since clothing was optional, I took that option.  I did get used to being around naked people, though.  I actually have nudist friends.

So, though I am not a nudist, I guess I already know a lot about how to be one.  It is how I managed to stumble into this awkward arrangement.

bareboy2

I know I will never be able to get my wife to go along on this harrowing adventure.  She refuses to even consider going nude in the house.  She has to wear clothes to bed even though studies say that sleeping nude is good for you.  I will be facing this basically naked and alone.  And possible paid writing work will never make this worth it by itself.

But my photos are already posted and approved.  My membership is a real thing.  And I am not ready to shoot myself for this stupid decision.  In fact, I will probably be less naked there than I have been here in this very blog where my every secret is laid bare and made fun of on a daily basis.

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June 2, 2023 · 1:29 am

Goofball Conspiracy and Nuthouse Nonsense

If you read my blog more than just taking the passing flyby notice of the odd Paffooney picture, you may have noticed the fact that I have many unfortunate mental quirks basted in a flavorful sauce of vivid imagination and fatally high intelligence.  I am too smart to live, most of the time, and so my mental quirk about constantly searching conspiracy information is probably a self-destructive attempt to get hold of seriously secret information that will probably get me killed.  But conspiracy theories are dangerous in more than just the paranoid delusional way that somebody like Alex Jones always perceives it.

b780bda0f5dba4d43d764bc35a5bed4c9618662a1fd433ffd9ca3526cd072530Since I already mentioned the Infowars  rage-clown, let me talk a little bit about how Alex Jones is a truly dangerous force crying about sinister suppositories of conspiracy constantly…  I do not follow the man.  His website takes all kinds of conspiracy-type information and puts it through the grinder of his manic-orangutan persona and turns it all into a giant salad of poop and nuts covered in puree of mystery meat.  The truth is sometimes in there, but all mangled and bunged-up.  For instance, he claims that the Sandy Hook shooting of all those innocent children and heroic teachers was a false-flag operation by the government.  He claims that no children were actually killed… the event was staged…  The government is simply trying to turn public opinion against gun owners and wants to threaten Second Amendment rights.  Gene Rosen, one of the people who heroically helped students fleeing from the Newtown shooting, was harassed by phone calls calling him a “government stooge”.  Jones’ true believers are not smart enough to leave things like this alone.  They take it upon themselves to press the matter and rub salt in the wounds.  In fact, some Alex-Jones-true-believer criminal types stole the memorial for Grace McDonnell and Chase Kowalski, two seven-year-olds who died at Sandy Hook Elementary, because they didn’t actually exist… they weren’t actual children… and then they phoned those children’s parents to taunt them… all in the name of Infowars’ version of the truth.

Here is the article I used as the source for my information;  Why Conspiracy Theories Aren’t Harmless Fun

These facts about conspiracy theories and the people involved in them make me physically ill over the fact that I am also a believer in some very prominent conspiracy theories.  But unlike Alex Jones, I don’t pull things out of a Pandora’s box of paranoia and mental cesspools.  I try very hard to site my sources and choose them critically.   I believe that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, not by a lone gunman, and probably not by Lee Harvey Oswald at all.  There was a massive conspiracy.  I have dug into the roots of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK.  I know who Jim Garrison is… who Guy Bannister and Cord Meyer are… I know about the mysterious history of questionable deaths of witnesses to the shooting and where the efforts at cover-up become apparent enough to know that somebody powerful was behind the whole thing.  But, although I think I know who and why… there is not enough evidence to name names and try to prosecute anyone.  Kennedy’s death was an important blow to the architecture of my childhood.  It combined with other terrible things to take away any chance I may have had to grow up innocent and happy.  Pursuing the truth will haunt me for the rest of my days.

And there are other places where I want to believe.  How about aliens?  I wrote a comic novel or two about that.  There is a source of endless comedy and clowns.

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But I am a believer here also.  The thing about Roswell and the numerous flying saucer incidents that have grown into an entire conspiracy subculture is that so much of it can be traced back to ingenuous and credible witnesses.  Many of them not only had nothing to gain from lying, many of them lost their reputations, their careers, and sometimes even their lives because they tried to tell us truthfully what they witnessed.

I promised to back that sort of assertion up, so one of the sources of my belief is the astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon.  Here is a video readily available on YouTube to let you hear it in his own words.

I apologize for dumping my strange obsessions on you simply to feed monsters lurking in my silly, questioning head.  I have to make sense of the world for myself, and I do it here in writing.  I pulled you in with the promise of humor, and while I may have salted this essay with a bit of that, I have basically tried to convince you of my pet conspiracies.  Forgive me.  For as long as I keep blogging (especially when I am trying to do it every day and need things to talk about) I will continue to try these same tricks.  Watch me carefully.  Hold me to a standard of truth that makes me better than Alex Jones.

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June 1, 2023 · 1:25 am

The Last Day of May

There comes a time when you stop and realize…

My heroes are now long gone.

No part of my crumbling carcass is working well, and most of it will soon be dust.

My energy is at the lowest of levels, the fuel tank is full of leaks.

My most important work in life is now almost all done and in the past.

So, I now have to take stock of the few tasks still ahead…

I must still be a parent until I am breathing no more.

There are still a few tales, wisdoms, and words that I can still share.

And I must still provide the world with the rest of the love in my heart until it finally stops.

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June 1, 2023 · 1:04 am

Stalled and Swimming in Place

I was originally planning to have AeroQuest 4 published by now and AeroQuest 5 well underway as my regular novel-writing segment on Tuesdays. The manuscript for 4 is written and formatted, awaiting only a final edit. And half of 5 is already written. It is only the expanded first part of this manuscript that has yet to be written.

But since finishing the manuscript for 4, all I have managed to do is work on other projects. I have added nothing to it since February.

My Fairy stories have taken over my writing time.

The Education of PoppenSparkle has taken over the Tuesday slot in my supposedly structured blogging week. I am enjoying writing it, yet, it is only happening on Mondays every week. The last-minute nature of that writing style is producing a lot of adrenalin and obsession with deadlines, but it is also draining the creativity out of writing time every other day of the week. I haven’t failed to post something for my daily blog, but even the writing I do get done lacks the luster of older posts.

I need to get back to writing on my main work-in-progress, He Rose on a Golden Wing. That book continues to grow and get more complicated as it marinates in the creative juice of my overly juicy mind.

So, there it is, me writing about something I was not supposed to write about on this Memorial Day. I am not suffering from writer’s block, for I am writing every day. But I am suffering from doldrums with the sailboat of progress not having any wind in my sails. How do I get the wind back? I will find a way.

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May 31, 2023 · 12:56 am

Life is Still a Book, an Open Book

This is the updated version of that last post. I have written more books. I have published more books. And I have gotten more people to read and like my work since 2018.

Here is a better idea how things currently stand;

And of course, I left out the book I was using to copy the list from, The Wizard in his Keep.

So, now I stand revealed as the published author, hard-working writer, and total fool that I am.

And here’s a link to the book I forgot. Only a dollar if you’re interested.

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