Simple, clean lines and basic, well-defined shapes go together in black and white. They are in the basic nature of being a cartoonist. You translate what you see into line drawings where a few simple lines become a complex and meaningful image.
My one-legged Batman is an exercise in foreshortening and trying to burst through the two-dimensional confines of the page to grab the viewer. I learned this trick from comic book artist Jim Lee.
His sidekick is rendered as a static portrait where the computer monitor in front of him lights up Robin’s intense and thoughtful face.
She was an excellent teacher and former nun… she was a mentor to me, taught me a lot about life and love and great beauty. How do you adequately portray the wisdom and the patience in those highly magnified eyes? I drew from memory only. She never considered herself beautiful. But she was. And it hurts not to be able to capture it correctly.
Not every portrait is literal. Sometimes you exaggerate facial characteristics and behavioral quirks are emphasized to create humor in the portrait.
When I was first married I did a double portrait of us as a knight and his lady fair. I know, I know… it is so sickeningly sweet that it punches me right in the diabetes. But, hey, it doesn’t really look like me anyway. It is more of a portrait of Porky Pig in glasses and hair.
There is an art to pen and ink that cuts right to the heart of who you are and who you want to be. Simple lines in black and white… there is no more incisive tool for putting my goofy old mind down on paper.
1. understood by few; mysterious or secret:”modern math and its arcane notation”
Yes, “Arcane” is one of those vocabulary words that a former teacher like me needs you to learn in order to appreciate the meaning of this goofy little post Arcane knowledge is something not known to most, and possibly not even understood by science in general. The things I will relate to you in this post were learned the hard way, by capturing, threatening, torturing, and finally bribing with cookies a grumpy, disagreeable, and very, very old Elf Sorcerer named Eli Tragedy. Difficult as he was to talk to until you break out the ginger snaps and macaroons, the old grizzle-grump did have a lot to say about Fairies.
The spell words are…
“I can tell the story from here if you don’t mind. Mickey, you are a gigantic Slow-One nimnul with the thinking capacity of a block of ice in July weather!”
“I would be happy to let you take over the writing, Master Eli. But explain things like what a Slow One is, or a nimnull.”
“I can do that, but I will have to cast certain spells that cause Slow Ones, especially big, dumb nimnul ones like you to have to laugh at what I say in order not to completely forget it. I just now said the secret words aloud to cast the spell, but whoever is reading this won’t be able to remember them being in this paragraph because you didn’t laugh and the spell is working. Don’t believe me? Look at the picture of stupid Bob and brilliant me and read them under our picture. They don’t appear there, do they? See! the spell is working.”
This picture is the perfect encyclopedia illustration of both what a nimnul is, and what a Slow One is.
Nimnul
– Insult, implying that the one being insulted has low intelligence, roughly akin to “dummy” or “idiot”. (from the Orkan Dictionary as composed by Mork from Ork)
Slow One
-Mild insult- What Fairies call anyone larger than three inches tall and not as quick of mind as the Fey Children (Also known as Fairies, Elves, Sylphs, Butterfly Children, Fauns, Satyrs, Brownies, Knockers, Gnomes, and Whisps- though some Whisps are also almost as dense as a Slow One.)
Dollinglammer, a typical Butterfly Child maiden wearing nothing but her wings and a hair braid.
“Now, if you don’t mind me saying so, the best way to get to the heart of the matter about how Fairies see the world is to call in an actual Fairy to testify. I, of course, am an Elf, and technically one of the Fey Children too. But I know more magic than any of your Slow Ones’ heads can possibly hold. So, I will leave the froofroo and unimportant stuff to this shamelessly and inexplicably naked fairy, Dollinglammer, to explain. (She is my student… far dumber than me… but way smarter than you.”)
“Master Eli, they might like to know how you came by knowledge of their scientific term, “nimnul,” which I cannot tell them, because that was long before I was born.”
“Okay, Dolly. I got that danged Orkan word by watching a TV show in the late 70’s and early 80’s called “Mork and Mindy.” It was a documentary about an alien from the planet Ork who was stranded on this planet that we Fairies call “Middle Earth” and foolishly fell in love with a Slow One female named Mindy. She covered up her entire body with sweaters and coveralls and blue jeans to the point that I have no idea if she was pretty or not, or if so many sweaters made her sweat too much. You can never tell such things by looking at a Slow One’s TV set. The blamed things have no odor-vision function whatsoever.”
“It is a shame that Slow Ones are addicted to wearing clothes and don’t know the joy of flitting about through nature completely and naturally nude.”
“Shut up, Dolly. You do things the opposite way far beyond reason. But, as I was saying… We Fair Folk get to watch TV for free in Slow-One homes. People who are only three inches tall and disguised by magical glammers can seat an entire audience under the legs of Slow-One easy chairs. The only part where we have to pay for the exhibition is the fact that the stupid Slow One always gets to pick what documentaries appear on the screen. That’s how we end up watching goobers like Sean Hannity and that orange-faced guy so much. “
Fairies are much more disciplined than Slow One children are. We have never seen a Slow One child beheaded for talking back to their elders.
“Oh, and tell them about the magical people the little Slow Ones watch on a thing called Cartoon Neckwork!”
“Dolly, you were supposed to be telling them about the whole Fairy point of view thing! And the documentary channel is called Cartoon Network. Though you never see those creatures in the wild. You tell them all about it.”
“Well, you see, on the tellubishion thingy there are magically animated people made from drawings that come to life, with some of them being ducks and rabbits who insult each other, and ducks who wear sailor suits, and Flintstones… whatever they are…”
“Okay, okay… That’s enough of that drabble. I can safely say there are many kinds of magics and miracles that Slow Ones use that we can’t replicate. And we do find cartoons mesmerizing. But that’s all immaterial now. I am not saying one thing more until stupid, Slow-One Mickey finishes making those sugar cookies he promised me.”
If you would like to learn more about it without continuing to make cookies, there is a book about all of this…
No man is an island. John Donne the English poet stated that. And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it. We need other people. I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.
When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan. My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island. This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!” By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan. But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island. And no man is an island. Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.
You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be. It was who I was as a teacher. Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan. Being a teacher gave me an identity. And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger. Not a bad thing to be. And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.
But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here. Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now? We never really find the answer. Answers change over time. And so do I.
The field on which I have printed these supposedly poetic words is part of the farm that I and my two sisters have inherited. The land belonged first to my great grandfather, Friend Aldrich. His son, Raymond Aldrich, was my grandfather, the father of my mother. Now that my parents are both gone, one-third of this farm is now mine. But I don’t own the land. The land owns me.
I have endured with my roots in this land for more than 65 years. The old cottonwood tree on the corner has been there longer than that. You see the cottonwood in both of the pictures so far used in this post. They say that the total root system of this old tree is just as large and spread out as the part of it you see above ground.
Ironically, my roots are here where the ancestors who came before me planted them in the 1800s. Ironic because my life now blooms in the Dallas, Texas suburbs, almost 750 miles away from my roots. That is a deeper and larger root-connection than the cottonwood has.
I don’t farm the land myself. Another local farm-owner rents the land and farms it for us, increasing his yield and profits in order to keep his own farm producing food for the world. My own crop consists not of corn or soybeans, but rather words, memories, statements, stories, and meanings distilled from more than 65 years of brewing them from the things that formed me, the things that came from farm and family, and resulted in the poetry that is my life.
Yes, it is poetry written by a fool and a notable terrible poet. But it makes people laugh and sometimes cry and reaches out from the center of my soul to communicate the wisdom of a life that has been lived and is now almost done. How is that not poetry? A poem written by a fool.
I first heard this song as a freshman in college. It struck me that it was hauntingly beautiful… but maybe I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.
The song is about losing body parts and being okay with that.
That can actually be kinda creepy, right?
It is probably a song about gradually dying.
But that’s not really what it’s about.
I am there now. Peeling, cracking, drying out… my life has reached the downhill run toward the finish line. But I am not worried and not afraid. Life is so much more than hands and eyes and legs and feet. I can lose those things and have no regrets. I am so much more than merely the sum of those physical things.
My spirit soars. And my life is bound up in words and meanings that are now written down, and are at least as imperishable as paper. And may, in fact, be written on a few human hearts here and there.
There isn’t a great deal of actual meaning in this title. It is kinda nonsense.
Looking at it through a magnifying glass, I can see a really big capital “R” and a really large, small “eco.” The rest of it looks ordinary, but I am probably looking at it with the other eye. See what I mean about nonsense?
It’s like a Republican telling you the election was stolen and Biden has ruined the economy. The truth is… the Pumpkinhead President failed to steal it, though he tried. And the Republicans ruined the economy by botching the pandemic response, and Biden has been slowly trying to fix it even though the Republicans and Joe Manchin have been throwing monkey wrenches into the efforts.
It doesn’t help anything to start shouting at Republicans and other sheep-like Fox News viewers, coloring the inside of my mind with a fiery red anger color. That color, if kept hot and intense enough, can cause scar tissue on the inside of my thought processes.
It is better by far to realize you cannot move stupid people to let go of tightly held beliefs. Maintain, rather a cool blue, but factual, color in the quiet part of your mind.
If you are going to effectively regather your energy for the next fight over solving the world’s problems, you need to think in many colors and puzzle them together in a way in which no single color dominates overmuch. Being a liberal means being open to new ideas, but only accepting them if they are actually workable and useful. Leaving it to the conservatives to throw monkey poo and accusations of being a pedophile into the process means liberals don’t get their hands dirty, and, hopefully, there will be enough non-stupid people coming along to recognize which side of the argument stinks.
So, I am actually advocating you deal with the Evil Empire the way Obi-Wan did, by laying low, going by another name, and eventually helping Luke Skywalker to rid the galaxy of the evil old Spider Emperor while helping blow up the Death Star.
Sometimes the creative brain gets a little too hot and needs time to cool. That means I need a meaningless filler post to maintain my every-day posting. So, I give you a picture of Mike Murphy carrying his girlfriend, Blueberry Bates’ books home from the bus stop on a country road in Iowa. And, of course, they happen to meet an alien named George Jetson, whose father named him after a character on his favorite Earther TV show from the 60’s. It is a strange thing to have your brain over-heat from too many creative neurons firing at the same time. But it can lead to notions of intergalactic peace and cultural exchange… or racist comments like, “Tellerons have heads that look like giant boogers!” But I should be able think more rationally tomorrow. I hope that turns out to be a good thing.
As the group continued to ride the roosters, little Schtinker could not stop talking. Poppy talked to him as soothingly as possible, hoping to calm him and quiet him.
“We is headed to badness!” insisted Schtinker.
“You should say, We are headed for trouble,” corrected Poppy.
“We are headed for trouble. That knight don’t care bout ennybuddy but his own self.”
“You mean, That knight doesn’t care about anybody but himself.”
“See there? You know it yourself!” said the exasperated Schtinker.
“You know,” said Flute leaning over from his rooster saddle to look Schtinker squarely in the eyes, “This kid is learning to speak better almost instantly.”
“This kid can thinks bedder dan he ever does before. Troll thinking comes hard and slow. But my mind is getting faster da more I uses it.”
“Let’s make for that abandoned barn over there. We need to study this polymorphed little phenomenon a little bit closer.” Flute pointed at the huge rotting structure that had once been the kind of fortress for cows that Slow Ones called a barn.
“But it is urgent that we get to Castle Cornucopia fast,” warned Tod.
“I have an idea that we may benefit more by what Poppy has learned to do with her magic than any sword swings or fireballs we could add to the battle to come.” Flute grinned as he spurred Tannehauser towards the run-down old barn.
“You is no knowing what you is doing, Prinz-guy. Dat barn be da home of Gobbuluns!” warned Schtinker.
“Yes, I know. But tell me, Stinky, do you really want to become a Troll again? Or would rather stay a Sylph boy?”
Schtinker got suddenly wide-eyed and serious. “You mean I can be dis permanent-like?”
“He can, can’t he, Poppy?” Flute asked.
“I would have to make a difficult spell translation to turn him back into a Troll, and I like him better like this.” PoppenSparkle smiled at the wiggly former Troll.
Schtinker gave her a hug for the sheer joy she had apparently filled his little Sylph body with.
Once inside the old barn Flute made the group dismount and gather in a circle amidst the old tractor-tire ruts on the barn’s dried mud floor.
“Poppy, I need to cast a rather invasive spell on you to measure things in your mind. You will have to disrobe for me to do it,” Flute said. He was not asking for permission.
“Sure. I prefer to be naked.” Poppy had no trouble slipping off the bikini-like armor that protected her from mind spells. Her butterfly wings magically unfurled.
Flute pulled a scroll out of his pouch attached to his loincloth. “Messen Sie die Metriken in ihrem Kopf. Finschole!” Sparks flew out of his fingertips and embedded themselves in her forehead. Poppy’s field of vision turned into multicolored clouds.
“Aha! It’s just as I thought. Her polymorph spell not only reshapes the body, it boosts the intelligence in the parts of the brain of the subject that serve the principles of light. It’s a mix of changing the shape and changing darkness into light.”
“So, what does that mean?” asked Tod.
“Let me test the boy to make certain of it.” Flute cast the same spell on young Schtinker.
“Just as I thought. We can turn Gobbuluns of various sorts into Sylphs, Elves, or Brownies simply by turning their inherent darkness into light.”
“Weez doan no wut you iz talkin’, but weez tanks you for bringin’ us chickie meatz an Fairy bodeez to eats!”
Four Gobbuluns gathered together atop a rotting hay bale with mushrooms growing on it. They were armed with spears that were basically sharpened sticks.
Prinz Flute looked them over humorlessly, then broke into a huge smile. “Poppy, I think we may have just found some recruits for the upcoming battle. Can you morph them the same way you did Schtinker? Please?”
Poppy leaned into the spell and enveloped the three Wartoles and one Cyclopes in her spell cloud.
The Gobbuluns didn’t even have time to scream. The cloud dispersed leaving behind three Sylph warriors with iron-tipped spears and one Elf with an Elven bow and quiver of arrows.
I was born and raised a Methodist. But I married into the Jehovah’s Witness faith. Yes, those annoying little people who come knocking at your door offering free Bible studies and wanting to talk to you about the “good news from God’s Word the Bible”. I was one of them for the better part of 20 years. And I want to tell you from the outset that I have been guilty of knocking on doors. I have been threatened to have the dogs sicked on me. I have been threatened with guns by Winchuks, Hickenloopers, and other rednecks. Laughingboy Larry, a seventh and eighth grade former student of mine even begged me to come to his door so he could throw a pie in my face. I requested lemon meringue pie because… mmm, lemon meringue! Jehovah’s Witnesses are not bad people. They are real honest-to-God Christians who believe and teach the essential lessons of Christianity, Love and Forgiveness. Some of the finest people I have ever met are self-sacrificing, hard-working Jehovah’s Witnesses. I would never speak against them. But this post has to explain why I no longer am one of them.
I have always been a reader of the Bible. I began seriously reading it in my youth when I was a victim of sexual assault and the life-threatening depression that can cause. A very thoughtful and loving Methodist minister, the father of my best friend, taught me how to use the Bible to seek answers and find comfort. As a Jehovah’s Witness, I have read the entire Bible cover to cover twice.
But I have also always been a Christian Existentialist, even before I knew what that was. I believe that existence precedes essence. There has to be a real, observable rock in front of me before I grant faith in the existence of a rock. I don’t accept “rock-ness” as something that is real because other people tell me that “rock” exists. If God is going to be the rock upon which I build my faith, then I have to observe that God is real. I need proof. Superstition is acceptance of something without proof. As far as I can tell, almost all religions… organized religions… are based on superstitions. “How do you know that Jesus loves me?” “Because the Bible tells me so.” “Why must I believe I go to Heaven when I die?” “Because your father and his father before him believed it.” “Can I accept these as real reasons… as evidence?” “Of course not. These things follow the patterns of superstition.”
“Kill the infidel! Die a hero’s death, and you will be granted 99 virgins in paradise.” “How do you know this to be true?” “Allah has told me in a dream.”
So, if you follow any of this (undoubtedly due to the same curse of relentless intelligence that plagues me), you are probably wondering why I don’t just come out and claim to be an atheist like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens? Well, because I believe in God. I have seen the proof. When I talk to God, he answers me. When I ask him to guide me, he sends signs and leads me to the answers I seek. He comforts me, even though it is only by helping me to find comfort in my own mind… my own self. He helps me find the power within me to do what is right and overcome what is wrong. Why, then, am I not still a Jehovah’s Witness? Why am I not still knocking on doors?
The truth, as I see it, is… each of us must find God for ourselves. Each of us must obtain the certainty we seek with our own efforts, or be satisfied with a perpetual state of not knowing all the answers. Either result is perfectly acceptable. Jehovah’s Witnesses will tell you that you can’t obtain eternal life unless you believe what they believe, do what they do, and accept everything just as they interpret it from their magic book. Personally, I believe there is no eternal life. I am made of star stuff (as Carl Sagan used to say, because science has mathematically proven it is true). When I die, the configuration of star stuff that is me will simply be no more. But I have existed. And my atoms will go through a large number of processes that disperse them and turn them into something else. My individual consciousness will be disbanded, but the overall consciousness of the universe will remain. The universe is greater than I am. In fact, the whole human race could wink out of existence in a massive fireball that consumes planet Earth, and the whole still remains. I don’t have to worry about any of it. I am the author of my own story. I am responsible for its content, both good and bad. And I am not sorry for any of it.
Most of the angels used in this post are by William-Adolphe Bouguereau…and one is by me.
Now you know the awful truth. Mickey is a humanist. He thinks for himself about everything… even matters of religion. How horrible!
“Tell me, oh great and powerful, Vishnu, will I be offered 99 virgins in paradise if I kill him for you?”
“No, Singh-Rama O’Malley. You are simply being stupid and superstitious. And besides, that particular superstition doesn’t belong to my religion. You are mixing things up.”
“Oh, sorry, Lord Vishnu. But is it okay if I don’t kill myself for my error?”
“Singh-Rama, you are a child of the universe… no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, the universe is unfolding… as it should.” (Note; These last words are the words of the poet Max Ehrmann in his wise poem, Desiderata.)
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.
ege. It struck me that it was hauntingly beautiful… but maybe I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.
Catch a Falling Star 
Living Life as a Poem Written by a Fool
The field on which I have printed these supposedly poetic words is part of the farm that I and my two sisters have inherited. The land belonged first to my great grandfather, Friend Aldrich. His son, Raymond Aldrich, was my grandfather, the father of my mother. Now that my parents are both gone, one-third of this farm is now mine. But I don’t own the land. The land owns me.
I have endured with my roots in this land for more than 65 years. The old cottonwood tree on the corner has been there longer than that. You see the cottonwood in both of the pictures so far used in this post. They say that the total root system of this old tree is just as large and spread out as the part of it you see above ground.
Ironically, my roots are here where the ancestors who came before me planted them in the 1800s. Ironic because my life now blooms in the Dallas, Texas suburbs, almost 750 miles away from my roots. That is a deeper and larger root-connection than the cottonwood has.
I don’t farm the land myself. Another local farm-owner rents the land and farms it for us, increasing his yield and profits in order to keep his own farm producing food for the world. My own crop consists not of corn or soybeans, but rather words, memories, statements, stories, and meanings distilled from more than 65 years of brewing them from the things that formed me, the things that came from farm and family, and resulted in the poetry that is my life.
Yes, it is poetry written by a fool and a notable terrible poet. But it makes people laugh and sometimes cry and reaches out from the center of my soul to communicate the wisdom of a life that has been lived and is now almost done. How is that not poetry? A poem written by a fool.
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