I wish I could be more efficient in my old age, especially with writing things for this blog, continuing to write good books, and doing all the things around the house that need to be done just to make my way from one week into the next. But now that I have to lug baskets of clothing to the washateria to get my clothes clean, and I have to pick my clothes up off the floor of the bedroom to put them in baskets, and my arthritis says “NO!” rather painfully every time I need to do these things, I get discouraged and have to be a nudist more or accept being a rather smelly individual.
I have also found that being in pain and having the volcano-hot weather make the pain worse slows me down when it comes to getting good ideas for the daily blog. This blog is a good example of what I am talking about.
The one thing that has gotten easier, ironically, is going to the toilet. Zip, splash, zoom! And I am done with something many people my age take a half hour or more with the assistance of a newspaper, I-phone, or a good book to accomplish. Dang! Eating lots of fiber does pay off.
Imagination is always the place I go in times of trouble. I have a part of my silly old brain devoted to dancing the cartoon dance of the dundering doofus. It has to be there that I flee to and hide because problems and mistakes and guilt and pessimism are constantly building un-funny tiger-traps of gloom for me to rot at the bottom of. You combat the darkness with bright light. You combat hatred with love. You combat unhappiness with silly cartoonish imaginings. Well… maybe you don’t. But I do.
When reading the Sunday funnies in the newspaper on lazy Sunday afternoons, I spent years admiring Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes for its artistry and imaginative humor, believing it was about a kid who actually had a pet talking tiger. I didn’t get the notion that Hobbes was actually a toy tiger for the longest time. That’s because it was basically the story of my own boyhood. I had a stuffed tiger when I was small. He talked. He went on adventures with me. And he talked me into breaking stuff and getting into trouble with Mom and Dad. It was absolutely realistic to me.
I have always lived in my imagination. Few people see the world the way I view it. I have at least four imaginary children to go along with the three that everybody insists are real. There’s Radasha, the boy faun, my novel characters Tim Kellogg and Valerie Clarke, and the ghost dog that lurks around the house, especially at night. That plus Dorin, Henry, and the Princess (the three fake names that I use in this blog for my three real children).
Have you noticed how Watterson’s water-color backgrounds fade into white nothingness the way daydreams do? Calvin and Hobbes were always a cartoon about turning the unreal into the real, turning ideas upside down and looking at them through the filter-glasses of Spaceman Spiff.
Unique and wonderful solutions to life’s problems can come about that way. I mean, I can’t actually use a bloggular raygun to vaporize city pool inspectors, but I can put ideas together in unusual ways to overcome challenges. I almost got the pool running again by problem-solving and repairing cracks myself.
So, I am now facing the tasks of working out a chapter 13 bankruptcy and having a swimming pool removed. The Princess will need to be driven to and from school each day. I will need to help Henry find another after-school job. And the cool thing is, my imaginary friends will all be along for the ride. Thank you, Calvin. Thank you, Hobbes. You made it all possible. So, please, keep dancing the dance of the dundering doofus.
I like taking pictures of my doll collection. Those pictures are then qualified for Art Day posting. So, here are random pictures of dolls, most of which are from the doll shelf in my bedroom.
Not all of my dolls are on the doll shelf.
Chilly Willy here is a carnival prize that was probably won in a basketball-toss game at Six Flags and purchased by me for five dollars in a garage sale. He is technically not a doll. He is a stuffed animal.
So, let’s get back to dolls.
More stuffed animals, as well as ponies and paper dolls to add to this immense doll collection.Creepy Captain Action lurks behind mint=in-box Emma Watson as Belle while he looks for his lost hat. But Bo Peep and Wonder Woman are keeping an eye on him.I had to stop here as the caveman Minion had to go and start a fight with Peter Rabbit. Leave it to a mindless Minion… “Oobah Dee?” “Sorry, boss.”
(This is a post from 2017, before the swimming pool had to be removed, before it caused my heart trouble, and before I had to declare Chapter 13 Bankruptcy.)
Being retired for health reasons and unable to work, I would be dead already without my writing and art endeavors to fill my time and keep me sane. I can do some work, as proven by my attempts to patch and repair the swimming pool this summer. But my limitations drive me crazy, as proven by the fact that I did about half of the work on the pool wearing only sunscreen and a hat. My kids are not married yet, and two of them are still in high school, but they are not much interested in toys any more. And I don’t yet have grandkids to spoil. So when I go the Resale Store or Goodwill to shop for old toys, I am basically buying them for myself.
The Princess of the Korean Court Barbie was lying on the bargain shelf for $3.49. I bought the ceramic wishing well behind her for $5.00. So the bargain-hunting gene I inherited from Scotch ancestors was duly satisfied. But I had to do more with things like these than merely own them. Toys are for playing. And what does a 60-year-old man do with dolls when he is playing? Besides being a bit creepy, I mean? Well, this photo is the answer. I use my toys to create pictures and artwork.
Here’s a creation using the ceramic wishing well again. It is apparently, on closer inspection, actually a candle holder. But it serves to make my Walmart Clearance Sale Disney toys happy. Here you see the pony-brushing party held by Minnie Mouse with Daisy Duck and the gay snowman from Frozen.
Here you see the metal miniatures I got in a pack from Walmart as they visit the cardboard castle. Two of the lead figures on the ground are hand painted by me in days long ago. The entire cardboard castle was printed and glued on cardboard, cut out and put together entirely by me. Mickey, Minnie, Alice, Stitch, and Kermit are the metal miniatures not painted by me.
So, my days have not been overwhelmed by boredom and frustration and problems with city pool inspectors (he doesn’t even know about doing the repair work in the nude, so he can’t give me a ticket for that.) I have been filling my time with toys and creative play. I have been mostly a good boy… err… old man.
My two previous laptop computers were really hard-working and amazing machines. The first one my wife bought me in about 2008. That was after a series of big, boxy desktop clunkers, only one of which could fill up an entire desktop, especially with speakers and scanner/printers attached. The biggest problem with desktops was finding new parts when one broke down. Computers are in a hurry to become obsolete. Monitor not showing a non-fritzing picture anymore? A new monitor compatible with your clunky old computer is going to be super expensive. Whatever everybody is using during the year it broke down requires an octopus-like 5,000-pin adapter. And Apple don’t play dat with Windows. And Windows 98 don’t play dat with Windows 7, 8, or 9. And there’s no Intel inside the expensive new processor you get to match the new cpu and keyboard you have to buy. Your system, which is slowly taking over the house, now costs three times as much as the laptop your wife bought, and it still doesn’t work properly.
Laptops are better than desktops. As you can see, even nudist Stacy dolls can monitor the Webb Space Telescope with it.
So, I relied heavily on a laptop from 2008 until 2018 when the battery finally died. I had, fortunately, bought a second laptop in 2012 for my number two son to use, and when he was finished with it, having bought an expensive gaming system with his own money, he passed it on to my daughter, who also bought herself a computer after using it for a couple of years. So, when the battery of Mickey Computer 1 died, and no battery could be found that fit as a replacement battery, I started using Mickey 2, with all kinds of hidden downloads on it from being a kids’ computer for six years.
And so, I discovered that I quickly had to relearn Windows 8, upgrade to Windows 9, and finally be forced to use Windows 10 because the laptop had been customized twice by two different customizers. And for a while I was forced to log into everything through my daughter’s Google Account. Very quickly I found myself degrading in my computer skills from negotiating the ins and outs of a well-used computer’s eccentricities to panicking and running to my daughter to help me handle actual glitches. The computer would erase whole paragraphs of my writing and autosave immediately so that my only recourse was to recompose the writing from an increasingly fallible memory. And the more I depended on my laptop to publish 21 novels through my retirement from teaching, to years of Uber Driving to pay off medical bills, and then a bankruptcy, to a brief stint as a substitute teacher that ended with the pandemic the more the computer glitched… or possibly my arthritic fingers and stupid brain made it seem that it did. The computer becamme glitchier and glitchier. I wrote more and more. I ended up with typos in my final drafts that made it through to publication because my computer would make auto-changes on pages that weren’t even on the screen. How did it do that?,
Then Grandpa Joe Biden repeated the Trump thing about sending us survival money without having to wait for Biden’s name to be printed on every check. And I could pay off my debts and still squeeze out just enough money to buy a new and better laptop. Oh, Goody! Learning Windows 11! Except, I bought a Chromebook. Windows 11 was incompatible. So, I learned Google Chrome. Or it learned to enrage me more effectively than my old computer did.
What I continue to do in spite of glitches… and fingers and stupid brain.
At the end of this brief computerized history of how computers have taken over my life and changed me for the worse, I am still glitching along. I had a brief computer crisis today. But I have already learned the lesson about turning it off and turning it back on today.
This is actually a writer’s literary site meant to promote novels, and one day possibly earn money from writing instead of simply filling my closets with prose and old manuscripts (along with the wife’s many, many shoes). But since I am also an amateur artist of the irradiated subspecies known as “cartoonist”, I also have many visuals to share. I think in pictures as often as I think in words. So one of the features of this blog is that I tag artwork with a made-up word I coined myself. It allows the curious (or those immune to nightmares) to get an almost instant idea of how afflicted I am with cartoon-ism.
Yes, I tested it out. If you do a picture search on Google using the words “Beyer Paffooney” you get a free gallery of my artwork, the good, the bad, and the ugly. You might even find my picture of Clint Eastwood… but beware, he shoots first if you try to “make his day”. If you are brave… or foolish enough to try it, it should come up something like this;
So, there you have it. A cheap and easy 200-word post from a bad idea that’s still out there working.
Here is a collage that represents one of my hoarding-disorder collecting diseases enabled by the internet. The rules for this collection are basically;
Only photographs.
Only human bodies, or people parts.
Only artistically created people parts made of non-people stuff.
Naked is not only allowed, but preferred.
This is a porcelain doll, not a real girl… just so you know I didn’t break any rules.
The point is, art is a depiction of us. No matter how you create it, what it visually portrays is a reflection, like the one in the bathroom mirror every morning. Beautiful, grotesque, sexy, repulsive, adorable, or disturbing… it is who we are. The point is also, it allows me to point, click, and save and create a collection that I don’t have to hide from my wife. Because, well, you know… it’s art.
Yes, I am philosophically a pessimist. I expect always that the worst outcome is the one I will have to live with. Hence, I was not as devastated by Donald Trump’s election as some who were too confident that Hilkary would win. And the climate crisis seems to be good reason to prepare for the worst that can happen. Some of it is already happening, already here.
But you really should listen to what this career futurist has to say about it.
The near future is, as documented with evidence in the video, far worse than we think it is. “Just doom, nothing else,” as Robin Williams declares. But too much pessimism at this point is the death of us. We have to keep trying. We can’t just give up.
A cheerleader who is not me.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not the right person to be elected head cheerleader on this issue. I have given in to despair and weeping on more than one occasion already. Since the election of Trump, the conservative pillaging of the Supreme Court, the roll-back of EPA guidelines and restrictions, the erosion of fundamental voting rights (soon to be followed by other rights,) the mismanagement of the economy, the Covid crisis, wildfires in the West, the insurrection after the election of Joe Biden, and more and more things that signal doom and possible Armaggedon, we have to battle the urge to lie down and die.
Here is where the optimism of the Reverand Peale is critical.
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, also definitely not me.
If we stop trying, our loss and subsequent death is insured. It is only by continuing to fight that we will have a chance to save ourselves. And this is beginning to happen everywhere.
In 2020 we turned out against the Evil-Clown President in record numbers. We wrested the control of the government out of the hands of the corrupt elephants and put it back in the hands of the hard-working but mostly stupid jackasses. Biden’s donkey-like devotion to following through on the work that needs to be done got us through the rest of the pandemic, getting ourselves vaccinated and acclimated to life with the reality of the new deadly virus.
We need, like the faun, to be one with our environment.
We have tried hard and kept at it to achieve much-needed climate-control legislation. The fossil-fuel industry has made it difficult, and we nearly gave up on the Build Back Better program, but it seems through perseverance that we may have finally gotten a critical piece of that over the hurdles after all.
One thing definitely indicated is that we will need to turn out to vote in the midterm elections again this year. If we don’t, the elitist elefantiasis party will take away all our gains and punish us again, playing their golden fiddles while the world burns.
We will never have the magic we need if we don’t try to conjure it.
But despair is still not warranted here. We know what we can do to solve the problems that face us. We have done similar things before, with the Cold War, World War II, and the hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s. What’s more we have the tools we need already, and what we don’t have is quickly being developed. There are plans in the works for mountain-sized storage batteries, massive solar-power arrays, and wind farms (many of which are already built and operating.) We can rebuild and upgrade the entire power grid, not just in the USA, but for the whole world. It needs, of course, to all be weather-proofed, meteor-proofed, solar-storm-proofed, and, hopefully, greedy-Republican-idiot-proofed.
We are not beaten if we don’t give up.
And as the futurist tells us in the video you didn’t watch, pessimists prepare us for disaster, but only the optimist can make us successful in living through it to a brighter future beyond.
I was a school teacher for thirty-one years, and in spite of the immense amount of brain damage that builds up over time, especially as a middle-school teacher, I think I know what we’ve been doing wrong.
We need to take a look at an education system where things are working better than they are here.
Now, I know you probably didn’t click on the boring video about school. Heck, you probably aren’t even reading this sentence. But I can summarize it and put it in easy-to-understand words. Finland does not have to educate as many poor and disadvantaged kids as this country does. The video gives five ways that Finland does it better, but all of them boil down to the basic notion that the country is more homogeneous and uniformly middle-class than ours is. Still, we can learn things from them.
The first of the five ways that Finland does it better is a difference in government. While U.S. governmental safety-net programs blame people who need food stamps for being lazy (even though some of them work 40-hour work weeks in minimum-wage jobs), Finland gives a huge package to parents of everything they might need as soon as their child is born. As long as the child is in school, the government does many things to support the family’s efforts to educate them. Imagine what we could accomplish here if we invested some of the vast fortune we give to corporations in subsidies into educating poor black and Hispanic children instead. Children have a hard time learning in school when they come to school hungry. If we could only feed them better, the way the Fins do, we would revolutionize our classrooms.
The second point the video makes is the biggest suds-maker every time I get on my teacher’s soap box. They don’t give kids homework and they only give them one standardized test when they leave high school. I have recently covered this topic more thoroughly in a post in which I was able to ridicule Florida governor Rick “Skeletor” Scott. (Boy, did I enjoy doing that.) But I won’t go into all of that again here.
The third thing is respecting teachers. In Finland they treat teachers with the kind of respect that they give to doctors and lawyers. How cool is that? In Texas, calling someone a teacher is an epithet. If a teacher is liked or even loved by their students, administrators are encouraged to keep a closer eye on them to figure out what’s wrong. Students are supposed to hate their teachers and sit all day filling out mind-numbing test-preparation worksheets. Imagine what it could be like if teachers weren’t the scum of the earth. They might actually have students convinced that learning goes on in their classrooms.
The fourth point is that Finland does not try to cram more and more memorized details into young brains so they can spit it all back out on a test. They take students thoroughly into the subject of study, and at a slower, easier pace. They dive deep into the river of learning instead of wade through the wide and shallow parts. All questions get answered. And by that, I mean, student questions, not teacher questions. The learning is student-centered.
Finally, the video states that Finland simply has fewer social ills in their country to get in the way of good quality education. But even though the work is harder in this country, the potential is really there to go far beyond what Finland is capable of. We have a natural resource that is totally untapped in this nation. We don’t develop the minds of a majority of our children in any meaningful way. And I can tell you from having done it, you can teach a poor or disadvantaged child to think. You can give them the tools for academic, economic, and personal success. You can make them into valuable human beings. But you should never forget, they are already precious beyond measure. We just ignore and trash that inherent value. So, the information is out there about how to do a better job of educating our children. We need to follow through.
Canto 143 – Morning Aboard the Starship Aboard the Starship
I couldn’t help but fixate on the things Admiral Tang had bragged about knowing from the future during his villain speech in a previous episode. Apparently, he had outwitted and killed a Time Knight at some point, and he had specifically told us that I was going to survive this adventure while poor Ham Aero was doomed to die in the upcoming battle for the planet Outpost.
I was sipping on my cup of designer coffee, my own special concoction called Isaac Newton’s Favorite Cup of Joe. And I was staring out of the front viewport of the Leaping Shadowcat at the guards in the cavernous docking bay of Admiral Tang’s flagship, Bregohelma. The Lupin child who served as cabin boy came out of the crews’ quarters completely naked and rubbing at his doglike eyes. Of course, the boy’s shameless nudity didn’t bother me since Lupins are covered in wolf-fur and don’t really need clothing to cover up relentlessly white, pock-marked skin and rolls of fat the way I do.
“Professor Marou, do you think the Imperials will just execute me or toss me out into space?” Sahleck asked.
“Well, if they are frugal, they will toss you out into space. It costs less.”
“Oh.”
The destroyed look on his puppylike face reminded me that maybe a strictly logical answer to the question wasn’t the kind of answer he needed to hear.
“But don’t go planning on dying yet. Time is a relative dimension in space and, as such is totally malleable.”
He looked at me as if he wanted to ask another question, but didn’t really understand what I had just told him.
“You know that there are Time Knights constantly meddling with what they think happened in the past to correct the outcome to some sort of plan created in the distant future…”
“Oh, yes…” Sahleck stammered.
“And since Tang says he killed one of those Time Knights, we know for certain that somebody is out there working on solutions to the problems we are now facing.”
“So, maybe they won’t kill everybody but you?”
“Oh, you all are probably going to die. Tang seems to know what will happen with information gleaned from the Time Knights themselves. But nothing is ever certain. Maybe I get killed too.”
That didn’t seem to help much.
Ham Aero wandered in drinking his own morning beverage, probably potent liquor of some sort.
“Sahleck? You are out of uniform, boy. You know that the job of steward aboard a starship is critical to staying alive in space.”
“Yes, Ham. I know I am supposed to scrub floors, maintain the air quality, and do whatever the cook asks me to do, but we are almost all going to die. So, what’s the point?”
“We are not giving up, my boy. What we are blessed with is lots of time, and the freedom to plan without worrying about being overheard. Tang doesn’t know it, but this ship is shielded from telepaths. Ged had me do that back when he was first dealing with becoming a Psion. So, we don’t have to just sit back and wait for death. We can plan and carry out our own rescue and escape. And I am not ready to die myself, knowing now that I am going to be a father for the first time.”
That made Sahleck smile.
“So, you have an idea about how to do it?” I asked.
“Not yet. But we have more collective smarts than they do. How many of their crew are rot warriors? Skeletons with robotic life? Nearly mindless undead things?”
“Mechanoids and reanimated dead folks make up at least 75 percent of all Imperial Navy personnel. You know this well, Ham.”
“Sure, but my point is… We have you. You are one of the smartest living humans in the entire Orion Spur of the Milky Way.”
Now, I know, of course, when I am being flattered in order to manipulate me. But he was not wrong. Duke Ferrari was on board, and he carried considerable political significance, and potentially leadership ability. And Ham’s young Nebulon wife knew a lot of secrets only formerly enslaved aliens really knew about. Ham himself was a canny strategist and ship-board leader. He knew how to solve the problems of living mostly in space aboard a starship. And he was not wrong about me being smarter than practically everyone else in the universe. (Not bragging, just an irrefutable fact.)
“Yes, you are right, Ham. We are not helpless. We do have an intelligence advantage over our enemies. And we will think of some way out of this situation.”
Catch a Falling Star 
Don’t Give Up!
Yes, I am philosophically a pessimist. I expect always that the worst outcome is the one I will have to live with. Hence, I was not as devastated by Donald Trump’s election as some who were too confident that Hilkary would win. And the climate crisis seems to be good reason to prepare for the worst that can happen. Some of it is already happening, already here.
But you really should listen to what this career futurist has to say about it.
The near future is, as documented with evidence in the video, far worse than we think it is. “Just doom, nothing else,” as Robin Williams declares. But too much pessimism at this point is the death of us. We have to keep trying. We can’t just give up.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not the right person to be elected head cheerleader on this issue. I have given in to despair and weeping on more than one occasion already. Since the election of Trump, the conservative pillaging of the Supreme Court, the roll-back of EPA guidelines and restrictions, the erosion of fundamental voting rights (soon to be followed by other rights,) the mismanagement of the economy, the Covid crisis, wildfires in the West, the insurrection after the election of Joe Biden, and more and more things that signal doom and possible Armaggedon, we have to battle the urge to lie down and die.
Here is where the optimism of the Reverand Peale is critical.
If we stop trying, our loss and subsequent death is insured. It is only by continuing to fight that we will have a chance to save ourselves. And this is beginning to happen everywhere.
In 2020 we turned out against the Evil-Clown President in record numbers. We wrested the control of the government out of the hands of the corrupt elephants and put it back in the hands of the hard-working but mostly stupid jackasses. Biden’s donkey-like devotion to following through on the work that needs to be done got us through the rest of the pandemic, getting ourselves vaccinated and acclimated to life with the reality of the new deadly virus.
We have tried hard and kept at it to achieve much-needed climate-control legislation. The fossil-fuel industry has made it difficult, and we nearly gave up on the Build Back Better program, but it seems through perseverance that we may have finally gotten a critical piece of that over the hurdles after all.
One thing definitely indicated is that we will need to turn out to vote in the midterm elections again this year. If we don’t, the elitist elefantiasis party will take away all our gains and punish us again, playing their golden fiddles while the world burns.
But despair is still not warranted here. We know what we can do to solve the problems that face us. We have done similar things before, with the Cold War, World War II, and the hole in the ozone layer in the 1980s. What’s more we have the tools we need already, and what we don’t have is quickly being developed. There are plans in the works for mountain-sized storage batteries, massive solar-power arrays, and wind farms (many of which are already built and operating.) We can rebuild and upgrade the entire power grid, not just in the USA, but for the whole world. It needs, of course, to all be weather-proofed, meteor-proofed, solar-storm-proofed, and, hopefully, greedy-Republican-idiot-proofed.
We are not beaten if we don’t give up.
And as the futurist tells us in the video you didn’t watch, pessimists prepare us for disaster, but only the optimist can make us successful in living through it to a brighter future beyond.
Leave a comment
Filed under angry rant, battling depression, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, healing, health, humor, insight, inspiration, Liberal ideas, magic, Paffooney, pessimism, philosophy, politics, strange and wonderful ideas about life