The sun is finally going down,
And shadows lengthen o’er the town.
And all the kids from their playgrounds fled,
To places where they’ll lay their heads.
Will ‘morrow come and bring new dreads?
The king refuses to put down the crown.
And aldermen steal the treasures from town.
So now our hope is in our dreams,
And we dream tomorrow’s not as bad as it seems.
Now that she regularly steals people food from the pantry, Jade the dog is becoming more and more like the human race she wants to be a member of. Recently she was reading my blog and got the idea that she could write poetry. So, I was searching for an idea for today’s post and decided I would let her give it a try. So all of this poetry today will be written by the family dog.
Introducing Dog Thoughts
Woof! Grumph-hak-borph-borph… Rrrr.
Did you get that? Or do I have to translate everything into your language?
Boofa-Rrrrr. Bork bork grumph…. okay, we’ll do it your way.
But every time I need to add a tail wag,
Ima gonna go “*************” where each “*” is one wag.
Got it now? People are so dumb!
The family dog after eating enough potato chips to become all people-y…
It Is a Stinky World!
Ooowow! I go outside and I can smell dog poop in the park!
The rabbit that lives in the hedge leaves those little round brown things!
I want to put my nose in a pile of those *********!
I like to eat cat droppings, but you have to dig them up *******
And I am deathly afraid of the white cat… it kills and eats rats!
And it’s almost as big as I am
With breath that smells like dead rats
It is a stinky world! *******
Isn’t that great! ********
Queen of the Couch
Why do you not understand
That the couch is mine all morning and all afternoon?
I will get off when it’s time to eat
And I will get off when it’s time to go outside
But the rest of the time the couch is mine
So don’t disturb me
Or I’ll pee in your shoes!
.
Rats Are NOT Our Friends
I smell them more than see them
With rank and nasty sewer smells
And I never, ever catch them
They don’t come ringing bells
And my master puts out poison
Which they eat with garbage sauce
But it only makes them poison-proof
And I am at a loss…
All I do is bark at them
When I smell them in the walls
And my family’s mad at ME
When all the blame and curses fall.
The Beg-Eye
Do you really not see me here? *****
Here right by your knee? ******
I know you’re eating bacon! *******
I can smell every bite disappearing! ********
Look into my eyes! *********
My big, sad dog eyes! **********
Don’t you want to give me some? **********
I mean, it’s BACON! ************
**************************************!!!
I Do Love My Family
I take my beloved family members for walks
Four or five times a day
It keeps them healthy
With cold, wet noses
And shiny coats of fur
And I always make sure they are on the other end of the leash
How else can I guide them, and keep them safe?
From passing cars?
And other dogs?
But I wish they would be patient
when I stop to sniff all the tree trunks and posts
Where I check the messages from boy dogs
Written in pee
Some of them sure do have healthy bladders! **************!
Filed under autobiography, family dog, humor, Paffooney cartoony, poetry
I need to explain something here which you may already know if you read this blog for any length of time. No, I don’t mean repeated viewing of my old-coot humor can cause cancer. (That study has not yet concluded.) I mean that I repeat things… repeatedly and often.
To be honest. I am getting old. My fingers hurt from typing. My eyes hurt from viewing the screen on my laptop through squinty eyes. I am also forgetful. If I told you that before, I’m sorry. I forget things. And it makes me repeat stuff. I repeat a lot because I am forgetful. Did I tell you I forget things? Well, I do. And I repeat things. Repeatedly.
And I see things differently from other people as shown in the Paffooney above. A Paffooney, in case you didn’t know, is a picture I created myself that illustrates something that is in my blog post. And if you use Google to image-search the word Paffooney, you will get a lot of those. For some reason. And they are all mine… except for the ones that confused Google image-search for some reason. Did I tell you what a Paffooney is already? If a goony babboonie Googles Paffooney and balloons the many spoons in the cereal bowl of the screen of your computer, on image search, you will almost have a Paffooney if… wait, what was I talking about again? Oh, yes! I repeat myself a lot. Sorry!
So, I repeat myself a lot. And when the writing of blog posts gets hard, I go back to the thousands of old blog posts I already posted and post those suckers again. Sorry!
Filed under Uncategorized
Troubled hearts can be soothed with words. In 1Samuel 16:23 David plays the harp and his singing was a relief for Saul and the bad spirit departed from upon him. In the same way, the written word can touch the soul of the reader and, like Saul, free the reader from the demons besetting him. That is power. That is responsibility.
Of course, I am the last person to claim that I can teach you to write with power… I can’t even claim that I can write with power myself. But I know how to write well enough to make myself laugh, cry, and feel through my writing. And occasionally someone else reads my writing and agrees. Through years worth of being a writing teacher, I do have some thoughts about how it may be done.
First of all, I am not wrong to choose David’s harp playing, inspired by Jehovah as it was, as a metaphor for writing power. It is in the very sounds of the words that a great deal of emotion and meaning is embedded. One can evoke a very bitter and angry feeling by describing a cruel woman not as a “mean girl” but as one whose laughter is “like the crass cackling of devious old witch”. Mean girl has too soft a labial sound, even with the hard g, to be as ugly and staccato as the repeated k sounds added to the tch and the fact that “devious” comes so close to “devil”… a related word. A happy feeling can be created by describing a smile as “a sudden sunburst of white teeth and happiness”. That almost makes me laugh…unless you add “shark’s” between “white” and “teeth”… and then I am convinced I am about to be eaten. The s sounds in the description are like a sizzling burn that leads into the firework display at the end of the word “sunburst”. To write with the music inherent in words, at some point you have to hear it out loud. I always hear the words in my head when I write, spoken in a wide variety of voices. But to truly get it right, I have to read aloud to hear with my ears… which I have already done three times to this paragraph alone.
In order to have power, writing must manipulate feelings. I don’t mean by using the word “manipulate” that it is some sort of Machiavellian bad thing. Simply put, a writer must control the feelings of the reader, not by sound alone, but by the depth of meaning of the words. You must be able to weave a paragraph together not only with the simple meanings of the words themselves, but all the connotations and denotations in those words. You must use metaphor and simile, comparison, allusion, and sensory details. Ernest Hemingway had a working style almost completely devoid of metaphor and the writer’s own personal commentary… but that only worked because all his themes were about dispirited people suffering tragedy and loss and a pervasive sense of disconnectedness. Hemingway is a powerful writer… but his books never make me laugh. Purple prosey over-describers like Charles Dickens can make me laugh with a simple list of things. “The boy’s desk had a nearly dry ink bottle, several pens that needed new nibs and were chewed about the grip, and a small stack of papers crammed full of ink drawings of skulls and skeletons.” It is that last startling detail in the list that makes the mundane suddenly funny.
I suppose to do today’s topic true justice, I should write about it in book length. There is so much more to say. But I have bored you long enough for one post with writing nuts and bolts. It is enough to say that I believe in the magic of words, and I think that if, like any good Dungeons and Dragons wizard, you study your books of magic long enough, you can soon be casting fireballs around the room made up of nothing but words.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, writing, writing teacher
Canto 20 – Esperanza Blanca Guajardo
Maria had been met at the doorway by a young pink skeleton girl named Esperanza Blanca Guajardo. She had been pulled into the very ghost body of the girl, her clothes magically dissolving, and the pink skeleton being pulled inside her naked body. She walked then, not under her own power, but by steps taken by the ghost inside her. The panties she had been wearing were on the floor behind her as she walked into a desolate black landscape where every feature she saw was nothing but a gray and white outline, including the simple ghost dress she was wearing.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked the ghost. It felt weird to be walking nude through what seemed like the inside of a video game more than a real place. The nearly invisible dress she wore felt like nothing. It was slightly cold with no wind.
“This is the first time the angel ever let us try something like this. Always before, Imelda simply dies at the quinceañera, being stabbed to death by the gringo.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The game… from the toy store. You know about the game, or the skull wouldn’t have chosen you. But never did he choose someone to play the game as me in all the times it was played in the past.”
“This is the game that Yesenia is playing? With Rogelio?”
“Yes, Imelda and Steven play it with your friends as their game pieces.”
“What are the rules of this game?”
“Imelda’s story ended as a tragedy. It was a story that none of .us could move on from when we died. We must replay it over and over until somehow we get it right.”
“Oh, I don’t like the sound of that. Why do you need living humans to play the game?”
“We, the Lonely Ones, can only play out the actions we took in life. It is the reactions of the game pieces that are the only hope of changing the outcome.”
“And what happens to the game pieces if you don’t win the game?”
“We have played this game more than once a year for a hundred and sixty-nine years. Always the game pieces are lost and their bodies disintegrate, and their souls become a part of the land of the dead.”
“Do the game pieces get to go home alive if you win the game?”
“Those that did not die in the game. Si.”
“What happens, then, that we need to fix in order to win the game?”
“Well, Imelda was in love with Steven. So much in love, in fact, that they made love one night, making Imelda’s poppa feel his honor could only be restored if he forced Steven to marry her.”
“So, how did that become an unhappy ending?”
“It is complicated. You see, Javier was supposed to marry Imelda. But he was not a nice young man. He beat Imelda twice while they were supposedly courting. Imelda wanted to tell her poppa how he had treated her. But her poppa would’ve killed Javier and then been hanged for murder. Imelda didn’t want that.”
“What was the plan, then?”
“Imelda was hoping Steven would show up at her quinceañera and run away with her.”
“And he never showed up?”
“Oh, no, much worse than that.”
“Then what?”
“Steven showed up covered in blood. He had a huge knife with him. And he was angry at Imelda. He ran up to her and stabbed her in the heart. As she died, Javier took the knife from Steven and cut his head off.”
“That is really terrible! How do we stop that from happening again?”
“I don’t know. But the rules of the game have never before allowed me to have a playing piece in the game.”
“So, it is up to the two of us?”
“Yes, and the game pieces that Imelda and Steven are using this time through the event.”
“Well, let’s go talk to Imelda and Yesenia, then.”
“Si. I am her best friend, after all.”
“Imelda’s best friend, Esperanza Blanca Guajardo. Am I right?”
“Si, and my name, in youir language, means Hope.”
Filed under ghost stories, horror writing, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Harker Dawes asleep was certainly no prettier or better looking asleep than he was when he was awake. You know how people will say about a demonically possessed child that causes chaos and havoc and dread in the lives of the people who gave life to him, “He looks like such an angel when he’s sleeping”? Well, no one ever said that about Harker. Even when he was a child, he looked more like a deformed potato with its eyes shut when he was sleeping. His balding head had an odd dent in the crown that had been there since birth. His kinky-curly red-brown hair was only a fringe around his ears and the back of his head that could accurately be described (and usually was by local Iowans) as Bozo-the-Clown-hair. His eyes were somewhat bugged out of their sockets, giving him a look of being permanently surprised by life… or more accurately… permanently stupefied. Mercifully those goofy-looking eyes were closed in slumber. 
It was a benefit to Harker himself that his eyes were closed and he was sleeping. And this was because he had accidentally fallen asleep on Poppy’s grave in the Norwall cemetery. And also because he was currently surrounded by skeletons, members of the local un-quiet dead, standing in a semi-circle and ogling Harker with their eye-less eye sockets.
“Do we have to eat him?” asked the tall male skeleton with the seed-corn company baseball cap on his head. “I mean, if it’s all the same, I’d really rather not.”
“I think you only have to eat his brain,” said the little boy skeleton. “I don’t know for sure because that Night of the Living Dead movie didn’t become popular around here until years after I died and video tapes became popular.”
“How do you know about that then?” asked the church lady skeleton. It was obvious that she was the remains of a church lady because she still had quite a bit of long white hair on her skull, along with a pillbox hat, and she was dressed in a tattered church-lady-type dress of green rayon with a printed pattern of red roses turned brownish gray by years under the mud.
“When I wandered into town one Halloween night in the 80’s, I looked in the living room window of the Martin family, and the two boys were watching that movie on what they call a VCR.”
“Was the movie any good?” asked the skeleton in the cap. “I heard of it in life, but never watched it. It would’ve been too scary for my daughter, the Princess.”
“The zombies were all fake. And when they ate human flesh, you could tell it was all special effects. They should’ve asked me. I could have shown them how it really looks.”
“Heavens!” said the church lady, “They don’t actually kill people when they make a movie, do they?”
“I don’t think so,” said the boy. “That may have changed since I passed away in the 60’s.”
“I still don’t think I really want to eat him,” said the skeleton in the cap, “even if it’s just the brain.”
“We can’t start the Zombie Apocalypse without eating brains and making new walking dead,” said the boy.
The other two skeletons turned and looked at the little boy skeleton. Both of them let their bottom jaws drop open, but without flesh, it was impossible to tell if that was an expression of surprise, disgust, or… hunger.
“Do we really need to end the world with a Zombie Apocalypse?” asked the church lady. “I’m not sure eating living people’s brains is a very Christian thing to do.”
“Aren’t there supposed to be bad consequences for falling asleep in a graveyard?” asked the skeleton in the cap.
It was then that they noticed a fourth skeleton had joined the group.
“Why, Bill Styvessant,” greeted the church lady, “I haven’t seen you in half a century!”
“True. You were but a girl in the late 40’s when I passed on from a broken heart.”
“You remember me in life?” asked the church lady.
“Of course I do. You are Ona White. I sat with you the night you died, under the street light on Pesch Street. You were mauled by those two dogs that shouldn’t have been loose. I tried to comfort you as you passed away from shock and blood loss.”
“I thought you were an angel, Bill.”
“I was. Angels take many forms. An angel is merely a message from God.”
“Wait a minute! How can a skeleton know who another skeleton was in life?” asked the skeleton in the cap. “Especially if you died many years before she did?”
“It’s in the nature of angels, Kyle. I know you too. I watched over your family several times when evil lurked near… for a couple years after your suicide. You are ready to take over that job now.”
“Kyle Clarke?” asked the church lady. “You’re Kyle Clarke? What’s this about a suicide?”
“You died before me,” said Kyle, “so you wouldn’t have heard. I lost a third of the family farm to the bank in the early 80’s. The shame and despair was so overwhelming that I shot myself to death in the barn. It was the stupidest act of my entire life.”
“Well, I should think so,” said Ona White.
“Is that why we walk the Earth?” the child skeleton asked Bill. “We all had a tragic death and were doomed to walk for all eternity? How did you die, Bill?”
“Of a broken heart,” the old skeleton said. “My wife died while mourning our son Christian who died in Germany during World War Two. I lived alone for a short while and then simply expired from the weight of my sadness.”
“You didn’t join your loved ones?” asked Ona.
“Of course I did. The same way you joined your father and mother, Ona. Also the way little Bobby Zeffer here was joined by his father a couple of years ago.”
“You are Bobby Zeffer?” asked Ona, surprised. “The little boy who died of Hemophilia?”
“Of course. Who’d ya think I was?”
“But I don’t understand,” moaned Ona, “how did we get to be walking dead when we already have one foot in Heaven?”
“People die, Ona, but the memory of them lives on, and they continue to impact people’s lives in many ways. We walk not as ghosts, but as metaphorical spirits of the past. No man could live in the present if there had not been those who walked the Earth before him. A life doesn’t end with death. And the word angel has many meanings.”
“So we don’t have to eat this man who is sleeping on the grave of his father?” asked Kyle.
“Of course not. I think that might have a very negative effect on the poor man’s dreams.”
“I don’t think he would taste good anyway,” said Bobby. “He looks like a deformed potato, and I hate potatoes.”
“You can all go back to your rest,” said Bill. “I’ll watch over this one and protect him.”
The skeletons all faded gratefully from view.
Harker Dawes woke up, stretched his arms and yawned. He looked around at the graveyard and the dark of the night. He smiled to himself. He only ever seemed to remember the good dreams.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, short story
I would like to say going in that there are good reasons why young people can become obsessed with death and suffering and the color black and the dance towards the grave. I danced that jig too when I was younger. At age 22 my experience with sexual assault came back to me in dreams. I thought they were only dream images, but as I continued to think about it and be tormented by it, I began to clearly recall the terrible things he did to me that I had been repressing for twelve years. And I deal with traumatic experience with art for some crazy reason. I took a week in 1981 to get all the horrid feelings out on paper.
You will notice the tombstone lists the date of death as being before my eleventh birthday in 1967. That is when it happened. It was not actually a sexual experience… it was torture. He took my pants off and did things to my private parts to cause me intense pain. And he even said to me that it was my own fault, that somehow I had told him that I wanted this horrible thing to happen. For several years after I intentionally used the furnace in my home to make burn scars on my lower back and the back of my legs. I believe now that I was hurting myself in order to extinguish sexual thoughts and feelings. The worst thing he did to me was make me feel guilty about what happened.
When you go back to the art of the middle ages, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and other European artists both young and old, you see artists grappling with mortality, the fact that all people, including me, will die. At times it can seem to the immature mind that death is the only possible escape from suffering. This artwork comes from a time when I was contemplating exactly that.
If you are looking at this closely, you will see that I signed my name to it backwards. I signed my art as Leah Cim Reyeb, or simply Leah Cim. I put these four panels into my big black portfolio and never showed them to anybody until after my abuser passed away from a heart attack. I don’t believe in Hell and I don’t believe in ghosts, so now, I finally feel safe about sharing this artwork with others. The terrible secret is a secret no longer. He can no longer reach out and hurt me any further.
I apologize for not being funny… even remotely funny… in this post. Funny is probably not the appropriate thing for this post. You may be wondering why I even bother to post it. Isn’t this a private matter, best kept to myself? You tell me. This is a terrible thing that happened to me. I am now honest about it in a way I could never be before. I can explain it without worrying about any retribution by or against him. I can finally forgive him. I can overcome what happened and be the stronger for it. And if you have read this far without being so revolted by it that you stopped reading and stopped following my blog, maybe you need to do the dance with me. Is there something you need to overcome? It can be overcome. So dance with me… and rejoice.
Filed under forgiveness, Paffooney, philosophy
I should be happier right now. The Republican Party is imploding rapidly, and Fox News is preceding them down the sewer drain.
But they continue on with their extremely bad badness caused by creepy, crazy corruption. We are running out of time to save the planet. They undermine attempts to convert to renewable energy. Alaska gets opened up to additional oil fields on public lands where they have long been forbidden to preserve the environment. And they continue to legislate in their States with gerrymandered super majorities to hurt trans kids for being trans, making gender-confirming medical care illegal, and forbidding them (all one or two of them) from being in sports with others of their chosen gender. And they pass laws against any kind of school talk about sex education or gender discussions or science class… And then History class. No more black history, or talking about the Antebellum period before the Civil War, or what the “War Between the States” was even about. The works of James Baldwin and Langston Hughes and biographies of Rosa Parks, Roberto Clemente, and Jackie Robinson have been banned or altered.
No one should be allowed to force you by laws to think and feel the same as everybody who is in charge… even if you strongly disagree with their beliefs.
But all Republicans are not like their grotesquely hateful and controlling leaders. The vast armies of the MAGA Minions are made up of people who are seriously misled by the conspiracies of Q-anon and the relentless propaganda of FOX News. Many of them follow the MAGA leaders because they want to believe the lies they are fed and don’t want to hear anything, even factual proof, that contradicts what they want to believe. But most of them, separate from their strongly clutched-to beliefs are wonderful, good people. If they met the two trans kids I encountered in 31 years of teaching, (especially the girl who didn’t commit suicide because her parents supported her chosen gender-identity) would love them. They were real people who acted like the real people they were. The gender issues they had were biological facts that have a basis in the science of genetics. XX and XY are not the only possible gender chromosomes. There are also XXY and XXX and many variations in strength of those genomic effects. They might even have liked the boy (whom, it was discovered, actually had a uterus and fallopian tubes on the inside) had his parents allowed him to be the girl he really was and loved him enough to keep him alive.
And if you talk to them about ice loss at the North Pole, the looming extinction of polar bears, and the death of the Great Barrier Reef, they do care about climate change, and will agree with you about oil companies being the bad guys.
But the hardest one is convincing them they shouldn’t hate the people they fear. They fear Muslims, Blacks, Hispanics, Antifa (who don’t exist in the form they fear,) and, apparently Black History. That comes about mainly because they have never had a chance to interact in a positive way with members of the groups they fear.
But what I am saying is that we must continue trying to separate good people from what the MAGA group has become. They are worth saving. And that’s the only way we can keep from ultimately losing everything to them.
Filed under Uncategorized
Normally people portray themselves as successful, competent, and worthy human beans. I confess to doing that too, especially when protecting my teacher-reputation. And those nice things that you say about yourself on Facebook, Twitter, Tik-Tok, Instagram, WordPress, and… (Not Truth Social, cuz Trump’s Twitter Clone is only for insulting people and claiming Democrats are pedophiles,) are not entirely (but mostly) made up of lies. And somebody who is trying to be a humorist will talk endlessly about everything that is wrong with that hairy, stupid tramp in the mirror. So, this essay is not about the good stuff Mickey does (if there is any,) it’s about the dumb stuff and the bad stuff and the goofy stuff Mickey does that we probably all do.
One thing Mickey does that nobody should ever do is write two books at the same time. Mickey thinks it is like baking a cake in the oven (the primary work in progress, He Rose on a Golden Wing) while, at the same time, boiling soup on the stove top (the novella, The Education of Poppensparkle.) Seems simple enough. But it is simply not simple. At the same time Golden Wing is baking, the sequel, (or is it an equal?) is taking shape (Kingdoms Under the Earth happens during the time that Golden Wing is set and involves characters from both novel and novella.) So, the potatoes on the stove top has some peas and carrots from the soup in it, as well as some frosting from the cake. And at any moment, something on top of the stove or inside the oven may explode. That is no way to cook a dinner.
And another thing stupid Mickey has been trying to do is to fix the plumbing in our old house by himself because he doesn’t have enough money to replace every disintegrating 1960’s lead pipe in the whole house’s plumbing system. When we finally called a professional plumber because there was finally a toilet clogging that Mickey couldn’t handle, (after sweet-talking three erratic toilets and occasionally hitting them with hammers for five years to keep them running,) he paid three hundred and ninety dollars to find out that it would take nine hundred dollars to get even one of the toilets working again by digging up the floor of the house and putting in PVC for rotten lead.
So, Mickey paid the pirates’ gold to the plumber and promised to call him again if ever Mickey could afford to fix a single toilet. And the family reverted to a plan of peeing down the bathtub drain (not connected to the toilets’ sewer link,) and going to the nearby grocery store any time we need to have a poo.
And Mickey continues to write both YA novels and nudist stories (because the nudists on Twitter are the only audience that reads his stories at present.) He longs to be a nudist. But in the house, he can only do that in his bedroom with the door locked to avoid offending she who must be carefully and completely obeyed or scaring the dog. And any and all attempts to return to the nudist park have been defeated by bad weather, allergies, a raging pandemic, and interfering responsibilities at .home (mostly due to spurting plumbing leaks in new places.) So, for the time being, naked Mickey is only a pretend nudist.
So, Mickey is not the wonderful person he portrays himself as on Facebook, or the good little nudist he pretends to be on Twitter. But he knows what the problems are. And while he may never defeat that warty, hairy guy in the mirror, he is okay… and still trying to make you laugh as he continues to laugh at himself.
Catch a Falling Star 
Dave Barry
I threatened to write a post about Dave Barry and the writing gods apparently thought that was a very very bad idea. They have tried to prevent me from carrying out this idle threat by attacking my computer with gremlins. Now my WordPress page is shrinking practically out of sight. I can barely see what I am typing. You don’t believe me? Here’s what it looks like at the moment;
They obviously tricked me into pressing the secret shrink button on my computer, and I have no idea where to find the un-shrink features. Not only that, but my Facebook page is automatically translating everything it can into French. They really don’t want me to tell you about Dave Barry. And why do you suppose that is?
Well, Dave Barry may actually be me from a parallel dimension. He started writing for The Miami Herald in the early 80’s, at about the same time I started teaching. He retired from that in 2004 after winning a Pulitzer Prize and started writing humorous novels…. the same thing I started doing when I left the job I loved and was good at. Okay, so I am stretching the analogy to the point that all the buttons are popping off its shirt… but the point is, we are alike in some ways and I admire his work and I steal things from it whenever I possibly can. Like this post. I deeply admire the way he can say witty and pithy things. Like some of these quotes;
So, you see, he is very good at doing what I want to be good at. He is a humor columnist and all-around imitation Mark Twain. And I have read and loved his novels. Especially the Peter Pan things he writes with a partner.
So, I will leave this post here even though I could talk for hours about how Dave Barry makes me laugh. I have to stop. the words on the screen keep getting smaller and smaller, and my old eyes are about to fall out of my head.
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Filed under commentary, horror movie, humor, Uncategorized