We like miniature figures and homemade illustrations in our D&D campaign. Let me show you a bit of the excessively obsessive results of this preference.
Double Character Study; Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates
Mike Murphy and Blueberry Bates are recurring characters in my hometown novels. So far they have appeared in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius and Magical Miss Morgan, both of which are now published and available through Amazon.
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is now available on Amazon through this link;
Magical Miss Morgan is available through this link;
The first book documents their star-crossed romance, beginning as ten-year-olds and following through until they are going on thirteen. Blueberry is a girl with a terrible secret. She is not like other girls and has to protect this secret, which will only become harder and harder to contain as time goes on. She lives with her father who barely notices her, an aunt, her father’s sister, who knows the secret and punishes Blueberry for it, and her two older sisters who cherish her and dote on her, and probably are the only reason she is still alive. Her mother, unfortunately, died when she was a baby. But both books she appears in so far are comedies. I will not go into the possible tragedies lying wait in ambush for her in her distant future. The tragedies are simply not funny enough to be a part of everything. Like many of my characters, she is based on people from my own life and experience. She is a combination of a girl I once loved and a boy I once taught. If that’s not confusing enough, I can add that Blueberry loves to draw, a detail that comes about because she is also partly based on me. She particularly loves to draw pictures of Mike Murphy. She might have drawn the next Paffooney (if she were a real person and not just some made-up girl that only lives in my weird old imagination).
Mike Murphy is a Norwall Pirate. Not just any Pirate, but their best athlete, tree-climber, and wild-story believer. He does everything the Pirate leader, Tim Kellogg, (the grand and glorious and mostly notorious Pirate leader) thinks up for him to do. He believes every lie Tim tells him, and faithfully defends the Pirates and their leader, even when it gets him detention (again!) from their favorite teacher, Miss Francis Morgan. He starts out running away from Blueberry, as any red-blooded, normal American boy would. But he eventually lets her catch him, as any red-blooded, normal American boy would at about that age, the middle of the wonder years. He becomes her best friend and greatest white-knight-sort-of protector, even though he is torn between that and loyalty to Tim and the Pirates and the lies they tell.
I am now planning a third book that will allow these two characters to adventure together. I will call this novel Kingdoms Under the Earth. It will begin with Blueberry being kidnapped by evil flu fairies that take her away to the dark parts of the fairy world under the surface of this world in a feverish coma. Mike Murphy must decide to follow her and rescue her, which he will do via the bad advice of a fairy friend, kissing Blueberry on the lips, contracting her disease, and sharing in her comatose suffering. Then Mike’s best friend, Tim Kellogg, and his big sister Dilsey both agree that they must follow also to help rescue both Blueberry and Mike. It will be a great adventure through illness, imagination, and the many hidden kingdoms of fairy magic that lie directly under our world.
Now, I suppose you are wondering why I am giving you details about characters in a book, or rather books, that I haven’t even finished writing yet. Well, if you are dedicated enough to reading my loopy and boring old posts to get this far, it is probably safe to tell you that I don’t really know either. I also want to find out. What do the next sentences say? Oh, yes. Mike Murphy already exists as a Pirate in my published book Catch a Falling Star. He is an established character that I have to twist and tweak into fitting into new stories. Blueberry has been prancing around in my imagination and drawing colored-pencil Paffoonies since the 1970’s, but I am only now weaving her into the stories I have in me and are burning with a red-hot flame to get told. So I’m not completely crazy to do this. Only about ninety percent… right?
Filed under Uncategorized
Obstacles
After the cardiologist’s good report yesterday about my recent stress test, today’s visit to the dermatologist put a damper on my plan to move back home to Iowa before Labor Day. The last doctor’s visit before moving was supposed to say I am in good health in spite of the pacemaker operation in May, and ready to make the Interstate move.
The obstacle now is a biopsy report on something that could be the early stage of skin cancer. And if it is positive that the sore is malignant, more steps and more delay will ensue. Dang! Texas really doesn’t want to let go of me!
But I do plan on overcoming this obstacle and, like Michelle, I hope to ride, unencumbered and free, into the future.
Filed under Uncategorized
The Dark Side
Originally written the week of Robin Williams’ death by suicide.
The thing about depression is that it really is not very funny. That’s what makes it difficult for someone like me who relies on humor and wit to deal with every problem that attacks in life. Sometimes you have to stand toe to toe with the devil and look him square in the eye.
Robin Williams’ death is one of those things that can send you on a downward spiral into depression and darkness. Whenever someone loses the battle, you are reminded how hard it is to pull yourself out of the old black oubliette, the dark hole that is depression. I had to take some time this weekend to mourn and be alone. No one else can really do anything to help, other than to be there and be willing to listen. People think you have to say something to help someone with depression, but, in truth, talking makes it worse. If you tell the person you know what they are going through, or you know how hard it is, they might become violently upset. Nothing is more personal or individual than suffering depression.
Now, I know some skeptical sorts of know-it-alls out there are going to immediately think, “What the hell makes this guy a so-called expert?” And they are probably right to question it. But here is what you probably didn’t know. Of the five members of my immediate family, two of them have been hospitalized for depression a total of four times. One incident involved self-inflicted injury. We reacted quicker than is financially sensible the next three times. Two members of my family suffer from bi-polar disorder, though only one of those has been diagnosed by a doctor, and only one of those was ever hospitalized. We don’t get many visitors in our home any more. My wife is rightly embarrassed by all the holes that have been punched through the plaster of the walls. I have been thrown down the stairs once. I have had to hide all the knives in the house three times. One of my children had to dodge a knife that was thrown at them. We have called the police on at least one occasion, and been called in by child protective services once. Through it all, I have been the one faced with talking down the sufferer. You look them in the eyes and see their pupils dilate, and sometimes the eye-twitch, and you know, “uh-oh, it’s time for the hurting again.” There is nothing I can say. There is nothing I can really do. I just have to stay there (you can’t leave the sufferer alone for obvious reasons). I have to keep the sufferer safe, and hopefully calm, and wait it out. And I have to be ready to listen. No jokes are allowed. If you haven’t stopped reading this yet because it is too hard and ugly to consider, I can offer a little bit of light and hope. I have gotten so good at doing this, that when a girl in one of my classes had a suicidal bi-polar meltdown, I was the one who knew what to do. (All those hours spent with psychologists and therapists count for something.) The principals and the counselors helped to keep her safe, but I’m the one who allowed her to vent and have her say, who took the time to listen and assure her that she really was being heard. I’m also the one who got the thank-you and the apology for having to listen to how much she hated me and hated the school when she was at the bottom of the dark hole. I never asked for any of this, but I have come away with a rare set of skills. For now my children are safe and happy, and for now my worries seem to have come to a close… well, a temporary reprieve. These problems never go away. You get to keep them for a life time. But they are not 24/7.
So, you would think, with my ability to help others, I might not be totally without resources when battling my own depression. You would, of course, be wrong. You cannot beat back the darkness by yourself. Long hours of staying in bed and hating your life do not help. They are easy, but they do not help. So, I have to take to the keyboard and write. I fight back with words on paper. And more than that, I have to write for others to read, even if I have written personal things that really aren’t other people’s business and will probably be used against me if I ever try to do something totally stupid like run for public office. And from being a wordless wonder suffering in the bedroom yesterday, I have transformed myself into an eight-hundred-plus word fountain today. To get through life I have to sing and dance and tell jokes and write and play harmonica and write and spend time with my kids and write and write some more. Those things help when even the depression medication has no effect… when your favorite movie comedian loses his own battle.
Filed under Uncategorized
Native Americans Invade My Artwork
I don’t know if you’ve seen enough of my colored-pencil Paffooneys to tell this, but for an old white guy, I draw a lot of Native Americans and am rather deeply in love with American Indian images. You may have seen this dream painting I posted before.
The girl in the painting is a combination of this warrior’s daughter and myself. I was naked in the dream and a female, facing this huge ghost-stag. The dream came while I was reading Hanta Yo by Ruth Beebe Hill. Maybe that book was the beginning of my Native American obsession. Who knows? I am a crazy dreamer. But that wonderful book turned me on to the rich spiritual life that the Dakota people lived. I identified with it so completely that I dreamed myself into their culture. I was also struck by the manner in which a Native American culture handles education. The grandfather is in charge of the boy’s learning. He teaches by story-telling. Here you see the grandfather in Sky Lodge teaching his grandson. The girls would learn very different things from their mothers and grandmothers.
I am also entranced by the life of the people expressed in dance and ritual. Dance has deeper meaning than we white guys normally assign to it. Dances could be magical. Of course, the notion of a “rain dance” is the result of too much simplification in movie scripts and ignorant popular white culture. Dance could connect you to the Earth, the Sky, and the Spirit World. That’s what this most recent Paffooney shows.
So, you can see, I don’t really understand the concept of moderation when it comes to my obsessions in the world of colored pencil art. Hanta Yo! Clear the Way! In a sacred manner I come!
Filed under Uncategorized
A Poem Is…
When you try to create a poem,
You find out that it is…
A cry of rage…
From your very soul…
Or a deep-bellied laugh…
From your very soul…
Or an untamable sadness and tears…
From your very soul…
And you cannot help but put it into words…
From your very soul.
Filed under Uncategorized
Backlash
To be perfectly honest, there was a time in my life when I would’ve argued this statement. I was a victim of an older boy when I was ten. Not raped. Sexually tortured. Neither one of us had any sort of orgasm. He subjected me to a lot of pain in a very private area of my body and told me he would hurt me more… or kill me if I screamed for help. Or told anybody afterwards. It made me repress the memory totally for the next twelve years of my life. I burned myself across my lower back repeatedly because of it until I was seventeen. I couldn’t tell anybody why. Not the doctor. Not the coach. Not my own mother. I didn’t remember. When I had suicidal thoughts in high school, I couldn’t explain to the counselor why. But I am lucky that I had friends who talked me out of it, even though they didn’t know this was what they were doing.
I know that this is not a humor post. It probably can’t be made funny. But, ironically, these sad facts are the reason I turned into a nudist in later life. I had to teach myself what it was that happened to me, why it made me hate myself and hate my body, and why not just nudity but sexuality also are not inherently bad things. I had to relearn love, especially for myself.
I do look back on these things with a heavy touch of self-effacing humor. My transition from being an uptight coward about my own nudity to becoming someone comfortably nude at a nudist park (and being stared at from a distance by Charley and Lucy) was a very slow and gradual process. It is more fully explained in my non-fiction essay, Naked Thinking. But I have become someone who practices nudism in private at home (my wife and children know but don’t wish to participate.) I write fiction stories that include nudist characters. I also write blog posts like this one.
But my audience tends to be limited by a cultural fact about Americans. They are mostly afraid of and suspicious about being naked in the sight of others. Naturism is not porn. Being naked is not limited to being sexual. I like to draw naked boys and naked men because I like anatomy drawings of all kinds. I draw dogs, bears, and horses without putting pants on them. I am not a homosexual, though I have had homosexual students and friends in the past. I like drawing naked women and girls, but that does not make me a rapist or a child molester. But there are people who see my nude art who automatically register a protest. Facebook will reject this post just because it is about nudity. I don’t even have to show a bare butt, a female breast, or a penis. The words are enough to make Zuckerberg kvetch. I know this because Facebook has removed a number of my nudism essays for these same prudish reasons. WordPress stopped promising me ad revenue (which never came anyway) for these same reasons.
There are people in our society who think nudity is sinful and wrong, and they do not wish to allow me to talk about it, draw pictures about it, or even think about it (which hopefully the software doesn’t yet exist that allows them to regulate that.) The point is I have certain rights to express my thoughts in places like this that are built for it. And there are many like-minded nudists and naturists who think like I do. Learning to love my body instead of hating it helped me eventually get married and father children of my own. And I don’t throw any of my passions in the face of people who don’t want to know about them. You had to make an effort to come here and look at and read this. I didn’t force any of this on you. And in my experience, learning to let go of fears and be naked saved me from self-destruction. Forgive me for repeatedly trying to make that point in a very prudish, finger-wagging world.
Filed under art criticism, artwork, autobiography, drawing, feeling sorry for myself, nudes, philosophy
Being and Artistry
Being an artist is a matter of genetics, luck, and loads of practice. I began drawing when I was only four or five years old. I drew skulls and skeletons, crocodiles and deer on everything. My kindergarten and first grade teachers were constantly gritting their teeth over the marked-up margins of every workbook and worksheet. I drew and colored on everything. I eventually got rather good, drawing in pencil, crayon, ink, and as you see here, colored pencil. I loved to draw the people and things around me. I also drew the things of my imagination. I drew my best girl, Alicia, and I drew the half-cobra half-man that lived in the secret cavern under our house. I drew a picture of the house across the underpass from Grandma Mary’s house. I drew cardinals, and I drew Snoopy cartoons. I drew my sports heroes in football and hockey, Donny Anderson and Gordie Howe. I drew monsters with fangs and fuzzy animals with huge soulful eyes. I still draw and it’s mostly the same things that I drew when I was a child. I will post more of the drawings here in the near future to dazzle you with my talents and ridiculous sense of the absurd.
I inherited art talent from my father’s side of the family. He could always draw fairly well, though he only used the talent to draw things he meant to build or create in his workshop. He was a practical man who loved to tinker and make things work in a useful manner. He had no love or need for that which is fanciful and fantastic. I suspect, though, that he encouraged my artistical flights of fancy because it spoke to an unfulfilled portion of his own creative instinct. My Great Aunt Viola was also an artist. She loved to paint flowers on porcelain and create delicate beauty in items like plates and vases. Her art was more fanciful than my Dad’s art, but it still had a certain Midwestern practicality at its roots.
I hoped early on to be a cartoonist or comic-book artist. I loved to draw wildly imaginative things. The first cartoons I created were all about outer space. I wrote stories and drew pictures of Zebra Fleet, a Star-Trek-like space force that kept peace in an area of space inhabited by dog-headed humanoids. It was fanciful and goofy at the same time. Since then I tried my hand at a Cowboys and Indians cartoon strip, built around the massacre of Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn. I researched the Indians of the Dakotah, Crow, Shoshone, and Hidatsa Tribes for my cartoon. I learned to love drawing feathers, totems, magic men, shamans, shirt men, and lovely Indian girls. Nowadays I draw the adventures of weird little Toons from Animal Town and the various strange places in Fantastica. Teenage Panda Girls go out for cheerleading and fail, seeking to wreak revenge on Animal Town. Hairy Bear is a Grizzly with a tiny body and a huge reputation earned by fantastical hair growths and the ability to make large hair-pieces. The Four Bares are a family of bears who live at Newt’s Naturist camp and turn Animal Town upside down when they insist on their right as top-of-the-food-chain predators to go anywhere they like naked. If you are lucky, I will never be a published cartoonist. I made a serious stab at it. I came close in two different job interviews and one major submission, but I have arthritis, and it attacked my hands at just the right time to make me a school teacher instead of a cartoonist.
Drawing has become for me a hobby and a lifestyle all about the color and the symbol. I try to cram as much story and meaning into every figure or picture I do. Each drawing is precious, and I must squeeze as much as I can from each one, because drawing has become so hard to do and is such a rare thing. I lean towards the blue in my cartoons. There is a certain Blue Period about my melancholy work and life. Things turn out wrong at the end of my stories and there is no happily ever after. When the nighttime comes, I have to go to sleep with the urge to draw more. I’ll draw more in the next life, or maybe in my dreams.
Filed under Uncategorized
Reluctant Rabbit
Mister R. Rabbit is a school teacher. He is not the scariest animal in the world, but he is quick and eats carrots, and for thirty-one years he started off the first week of school as the one holding the BIG pencil. He was the one that planned and carried out the lessons. He was the one with the carrot of irony in his pocket and the carrot of good humor tucked away in his desk drawer. For thirty one years he stood in front of the class just as you see him here.
But tonight, he is contemplating the end of the first week of no school. This week, this school year, Mr. Reluctant R. Rabbit has no class. He is now retired. No more F’s and no more A’s. No more students standing on desks to get a different perspective a la The Dead Poet’s Society. No more giant pencils. No more carrots of irony in the pockets.
This bit of a classroom rules poster is from 1982. The old rabbit had it on his classroom wall for most of the first five years that he taught. She didn’t know it at the time, but this girl is a colored pencil portrait of one of the quietest little mice that he ever taught. She didn’t know it was a picture of her, but many others recognized her. When he taught her son twenty two years later, the boy asked because he thought he recognized her. Mr. Rabbit lied and said it was somebody else in the picture.
Mr. R. Rabbit has stopped crying about it now. You can’t plant carrots of wisdom in your garden forever, and sooner or later the carrots of irony get chewed. But he still misses it mightily. He still wonders if he couldn’t have lasted one… more… school… year…
Filed under Uncategorized
Silly Tyger!
I think I posted this picture once before and told you it was inspired by William Blake’s poem The Tyger! That is still true. I wasn’t telling a lie, at least, I don’t believe I was. So the poem goes like this;
The Tyger
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
The idea is that the Tyger represents some unknowable evil that we must fear and respect because it is beyond our understanding. But the kid in the picture seems to be unafraid. Was that a mistake? Or was I really thinking this?
Apologies to Bill Watterson for stealing his cartoon for this post. I needed a more dangerous-looking Tyger than the one I had.
Filed under Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 