When I was a teenager and suffering from a terrible secret, I first began to see and hear invisible people. I know this is not normal. In fact, it comes under the heading of “wacko-stupid-maniac-loony”. The first one was my friend the faun. Now, for those of you who do not know, a faun is a mythological creature in the shape of a man (or possibly boy, or even little girl) with the legs and tail and horns of a goat (or possibly kid). This creature is a sensual being in the Dionysian tradition. Wine, women, and song so to speak.
When he first came to me it was a snowy winter’s night, long about December of my 17th year. At that time I was still repressing the memory of what happened to me out behind the neighbor’s house when I was ten. But I guess I knew I needed help in reaching out to others. I was lonely and convinced that for some terrible unknown reason I was a horrible creature not worthy of love. Then he came rapping at my window. He was kneeling there in the snow, outside my upstairs bedroom window, on the roof of the front porch of the house, naked except for the goat fur on his legs. But he wasn’t shivering. After all, he wasn’t real. No one but me would ever see him. He was grinning at me.
“You aren’t going to leave me out here in the snow, are you, stupid?” he said.
“Who and what are you?” I asked, as I opened the window. The snow was shining with a silvery, blue-white light that originated with the street light out in front of the house.
“I am Radasha,” he said. “I am your faun… the part of you that feels things and needs things… the part of you you have stupidly been pretending doesn’t exist.”
All right, I know it sounds crazy. But I needed him in my life. Elwood P. Dowd had an invisible white rabbit. Why couldn’t I have a faun? And it was a very, very good thing. He taught me how to laugh, and how to love… how to actually live. And I know he has always been inside me, not really separate from me. In many ways he is the real me. But crazy people have their own set of priorities. And when I was a confused teenager whose personal self-concept had been sexually violated by another, older boy… Radasha was mine. An invisible friend to talk to. One who could explain everything… make me laugh and make me happy. And there is a sound to that. Do you know the piece by Debussy that this post is titled after? It is my favorite piece of music in all the world. And it tells the sweet-sad story of Radasha and me.
Not all my Paffoonies are completely sane. The never-ending struggle of darkness and light can color things funny in a world of swiftly swirling imaginings. Lyrical joy opposed to malignant menace, devouring worlds in the palm of my hand.
As I get older and continue to deteriorate with a myriad of small problems, losing visual acuity, pain in every joint from arthritis, loss of hearing, peeling skin eaten up by psoriasis (or possibly eczema, depending on which doctor I choose to believe,) and bouts of serious forgetfulness, I am challenged to find ways to make it through the day and still do what I intended to do.
Yesterday I struggled to publish a book because these small problems created numerous proofreading errors that never used to exist. I am not a fast typist, but I tend to be very accurate. Yet, slips, glitches, and misspelllings were everywhere when I tried to submit the manuscript electronically. (The misspellling in that last sentence was intentional as a humorous irony. I know it’s not funny, but that’s a mental glitch I can’t overcome too.) To make matters worse, I have two computers to use for that. My new laptop which I am not fully used to yet, as I am using it now and repeatedly correcting errors as I go. (Apparently not correcting incomplete sentence fragments.) And my old laptop which inexplicably deleted it’s entire spell-checking program overnight one night last week. I tried re-loading Grammarly, but couldn’t do it since key program parts that come with every word-processor are now apparently fried. (And it doesn’t help that I keep forgetting to go back and make complete sentences out of fragments.)
Self-Examination has always been a feature of my inner, mental life. I keep count of psoriasis (possibly eczema) sores because some of them have to be specially treated, covered, or peeled in order to heal. One gets infected out of control, and diabetic that I am, I could lose an arm or leg… or even life. I also take note of some of my mental sores or infections. I try hard not to think like a Republican, but I find myself suddenly being grumpy, judgmental, or impossible to be around over money matters, dog-walking, or the opinions of others that I have strong opposing opinions about. I even worry that since I have been thinking more and more like a nudist in my personal philosophy (technically a Christian-existentialist-with-Stoic-leanings sort of nudist) I have not been holding back in reusing nude artwork too much in this blog, possibly over-using child-nudes which symbolize my own innocence and honesty in my mind, but symbolize perversion and possible pedophilia in conservative minds. I don’t care what other people think about me, and yet… as a survivor of a cruel childhood sexual assault, I am sensitive to certain conclusions other people probably jump to. I will try to use drawings of naked people less.
My car isn’t going anywhere again today.
Driving has become a serious area of fudging to get by. I can’t see well enough to pass that vision test when next I have to renew my license. I almost ran over a bicyclist walking his bike across the street simply because he was in shadow emerging into bright sunlight and I was unable to adjust my vision fast enough to even see him. I ended up getting a single-fingered salute that I seriously earned. (We both had the right-of-way because I was turning the corner and we both had a green light.) I have to nearly press my face against the windshield in order to see through sun glare or low light conditions. I swear I will not drive when I no longer can see well enough, but that day is coming soon if it is not already now. My son drives for me as much as possible. But he is planning to go off to Air Force boot camp in a couple of months.
Life is definitely changing in large ways due to small things. I have to look at everything from both sides now and make necessary adjustments. Mark Twain was about my age when the police had to escort him home for walking down the street naked. Except he didn’t. It was actually Sam Clemens that did that. But, like me, he was having trouble remembering that too.
Today’s Paffooney is a tribute to a childhood hero, Aquaman. I drew the picture from a comic book inspiration source coming from DC Comics in the 1960’s. Aquaman is a B-level superhero with not nearly so many fans as the big three, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. He was, however, my second favorite after Spiderman. He was more important to me than the Avengers. And this was strange, because I only had the chance to read the sacred comic books in the old barbershop in uptown Rowan. I only remember about two different issues that I was able to read during the long wait for a haircut. (Haircuts on Saturday took forever, because all the bald and crew-cut farmers would take forever getting their hair cut. And they hardly had any hair! I think the barber cut each hair individually.)
Aquaman and Aqualad would journey together in an incredible undersea world of sea monsters, giant fish, scuba divers, villains like Black Manta, and Mera, a real hot underwater babe. Topo the octopus could play comic relief by playing musical instruments or getting drunk on old lost kegs of pirate rum. I became a part of the adventure. I’m not sure whether I imagined myself more as Aquaman himself, or Aqualad. Aqualand was dressed all in red and blue, my favorite colors. I liked his blue swim-trunks. I myself could never wear swim trunks without a fatal case of embarrassment over my knobby knees and hairy legs. I admired Aqualad’s smooth and muscled boy-legs, though not without some shame and embarrassment. Some suggest that the relationship between Aquaman and Aqualad was a homo-erotic thing just like Batman and Robin. But, hey… NO IT WASN’T! It was a hero and sidekick that mirrored the complex relationship between a father and son. My father and I could never talk at any deeper level than Aquaman talked to Aqualad. Yet my father had super-powers for solving my problems and helping me do things and make things. Yes, I think I loved Aquaman because he reminded me of my own father in his quiet competence.
And I had a Captain Action Aquaman costume, a Christmas present and wonderful treasure. I played with it so much that only the broken trident, mask, and swim fins remain. The rest was all broken and unraveled and disintegrated from being played with. The Aquaman in my Captain Action collection has replacement parts in it to make it more complete. Yes, I spent time and money putting that toy back together so that I might play with it yet again.
So why is the super-powered King of the Sea so important to me? After all, his super powers are to breathe underwater and telepathically talk to fish. I think, reading back over this stupid little essay, that the most important theme is the father-son thing. I never owned a single Aquaman comic book as a kid, but I watched him on Saturday morning TV. He was one of the Superfriends. And my father had been in the Navy on Aircraft Carriers. Yes, Aquaman is my favorite because Aquaman is secretly my father.
Ice and snow hits the Dallas area once again. About one year from the disastrous deep-freeze of 2021 that helped make Ted “Cancun” Cruz infamous, we are hit with another deep-winter snowstorm. So far, no one in this household has frozen to death, and the electricity has not yet gone out. But it is a snow day. My daughter, the Princess, has no college classes. My wife does not have to teach any masked middle schoolers. The city streets are are icy and hazardous. But I have been busy.
Prior to today, I had already finished the final draft, proofread, and all other preparations for publishing The Necromancer’s Apprentice.
So, even the dog is not getting our and going very far. Only going a couple dozen feet to poo and pee in the snow. And the computer I do most of my writing on gave me death rattles and glitchy delays for doing it, but I did this;
This is only the e-book. The paperback takes longer to be approved.
So, here is one secret recipe for baking a Paffooney with some humor in the process.
Step 1 : First you have to get a stupid idea and draw a witless drawing of it on a nice fresh piece of paper. Here the Princess is holding step one, a portrait of what I believe Valerie Clarke, the main character of Snow Babies might look like. She is supposed to be the most beautiful little girl who ever lived in Norwall, a small Iowa farm town.
Step 2 : Then you must get a good digital picture of it. Here I used the Princess as a makeshift picture stand and took the picture in sunlight muted by clouds.
Step 3 : I must then remove all clutter and background from the image using the big old eraser thingy on the Microsoft computer paint program. sometimes I need to erase pixel by pixel until I am thoroughly pixelated.
Step 4 : This gets me ready to use my handy-dandy cheap-o photo program (I always wanted to use both handy-dandy and cheap-o photo in the same sentence! Item 128 on my bucket list.) I can layer the image over any of a number of stolen and parolin’ background photos.
And so, I thus become a pretend world-renowned unknown clown artist with a penchant for multiple uses of internal rhymes as well as multiple uses of the same boring, wretched sketches.
I remember a time when you could get a card with a cut-out paper doll on it, and pages and pages of doll clothes with the little tabs all over them. On the internet you can find all sorts of old paper-doll doobiddies that somebody copied or scanned. There was a time when, growing up with two sisters old enough to play with and a baby brother who wasn’t good for much but crying at night and pooping on stuff, I have to make a confession, I did girly things. Back then I often resorted to playing with dolls and making dolls by cutting them out, and making them less naked by cutting out clothes with the little tabs, and often pasting them on because we forget the little white tabs were not supposed to be separated from the clothing.
This Annette Funicello paper doll, just like one my sister once had, was made from a scan of the back of a box of 1950s Cheerios. I borrowed the thing from Pinterest, printed it out in color with my printer/copier/scanner, and then pasted it to cardboard before cutting it out.
The clothing, mostly dresses, I left on mere paper and then cut them out to dress and re-dress Annette. For instance, I like this cowgirl get-up because I saw the episode where Annette and Darlene were working jobs for teens at a dude ranch. That was fascinating to me at age thirteen. Yep. And you could take the clothes off the paper doll again, though you couldn’t actually make the doll naked, since she had yellow gym bloomers under her clothes.
I decided that if I was going to make art from paper dolls, that I wasn’t limited to pre-made dolls from other artists. I took some of my own drawings, copied, cut out, and pasted them to cardboard. Here you see young Prinz Flute, Mandy Panda, and little Henry.
This little cutie is Luz from Owl House on Disney+. But don’t sue me, Disney. She is borrowed from fan art on Pinterest, so it’s fair use of copyrighted material that actually gives you free advertising.
Where this anime nudie cutie actually came from, I do not know. But she fits Annette’s striped skirt.
As much as I would like to make a paper doll of this Shirley Temple doll, I cannot in good conscience do it since I traced this image to a site where the paper dolls are advertised for sale.
Still, it might be worth the money. My sisters had one of these too.
I will just have to be satisfied with whatever I can make from this little guy/girl? public-domain character from the 30’s. You can make wonderful things out of something like that.
This novel, my new work in progress, was not the original choice to fill this space on Tuesday’s NOVEL WRITING posts. It is not like novels I have written before. It will be longer, deeper, and probably more controversial. It will also probably not be a stand-alone story/ It will be deeply intertwined with When the Captain Came Calling, Snow Babies, and Sing Sad Songs, my previous Valerie-Clarke novels. The Cantos will not be short and will be titled with Classical music. An emphasis will be placed on thematic development and character development. And I may not do more than a few Cantos here.
Prelude and Opening Movement
Just because you cannot see someone knocking on your front door anymore, it doesn’t mean they are totally gone from your life. In fact, sometimes the most important people in your life are the ones that you can’t touch anymore… the ones who don’t sit down at the dinner table with you anymore… the ones you can’t talk to and have them actually give you an answer anymore… the ones who will never actually kiss you ever again.
That’s why Valerie Clarke was crying in her bedroom. It was why she was awake with her eyes closed early into the wee hours of the morning. It was also why she hadn’t really been aware when the racing thoughts and weepy sighs turned directly into a conversation with her angel. It was as if Michel Volant was a part of her every-day living world.
“Why are you crying, Mon Cher? What solace can I give to thee?”
He flapped his large white wings only once, and the swirl of cool night air helped draw away some of the heat on her face because she had been crying, and cooled her body down just enough to drain away the tightness and stress.
“Because they’re all gone, Michel. I have nobody left.”
“Who has gone? You mean Mary and Pidney because they have gone to College in Cedar Rapids?”
“Yes, my two best friends from high school are gone far away. But not just them.”
“Danny Murphy because he has fallen in love with the Bates girl?”
“Yes. He was never my boyfriend. But he made me laugh. And he doesn’t have time for me anymore because of Carla. He’s deeply in love with her, and won’t risk making her jealous. I had no closer friend when I was twelve and he was thirteen.”
“But surely there are others…”
“No. Really, there are not.”
“You mean?”
“You I know. But…” Valerie’s eyes were open, but seeing only the darkness of the bedroom. “I was in love with him too. And he was… he never got to… Oh! I can’t even say it.”
“But I was him and he was me… for a time. So, I know he was deeply in love with you. But he had no choice. A hematoma in the brain that the doctors had missed…”
“And before him it was Tommy. He came with the blizzard, and left with…”
“But you knew he had a mission in life. He had to go. And perhaps he will return one day.”
“He never asked me if I would let him go. Or if I wanted to go with him. Now, I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”
“He is. That boy was made of iron. He was stronger than any adult you ever met. At least, stronger of heart.”
“And I have lost so many adults in my life too.”
“Your mother is still here. And Uncle Dash.”
“But there was Catbird.”
“The old hobo from the blizzard? The man with the crazy-quilt for a coat?”
“He was so wise and so good. But when the blizzard was over… he was gone.”
“And who else did you lose?”
“My cousin Stacy. I could talk to her about anything. And Uncle Dash drove her away because…”
“Because she fell in love with the Toad, Brom Brown.”
“Yes… And don’t forget Ray Zeffer. He simply disappeared. Remember how he saved me when the Voodoo Guy was tricking everybody?”
“The first boy who ever saw you naked.”
“Well, the first non-cousin boy.”
“And before that?”
Valerie’s eyes were blurry with tears. Did that mean this wasn’t a dream? Do you get blurry vision in a dream?
“Daddy…”
“Yes. You found him in the barn…”
“And the gun was still there…”
“Oh, Ma Belle, I’m sorry to make you remember.”
“Why did he do it? Was it because of something I did wrong? Was it my fault?”
“This I do not know. But I think not. And you must remember, the pain of losing someone is caused by their value to you. If it hurts that much…”
“…Then that’s how much you loved them. I know. The pain will never go away. He left me without ever even trying to tell me why he had to go.” She could say nothing more. Her whole mind was full of tears. She laid her head on his soft bare shoulder, and he folded his wing around her. And then she realized that she was awake. It was not so much a shoulder as it was a damp pillow. And she desperately needed him to come back. Her heart was broken. Even her angel had left her behind.
Can I do this? This is going to be the hardest novel to write that I have ever yet written. I had to write it to answer critical questions I have about my own life. But reading this through for the fifth time, I still had to stop and cry three times. It’s worse now that both my mother and father have died. But if I can mend Valerie’s broken heart before this story is over, then it will more than be worth it.
When I was a teenager and suffering from a terrible secret, I first began to see and hear invisible people. I know this is not normal. In fact, it comes under the heading of “wacko-stupid-maniac-loony”. The first one was my friend the faun. Now, for those of you who do not know, a faun is a mythological creature in the shape of a man (or possibly boy, or even little girl) with the legs and tail and horns of a goat (or possibly kid). This creature is a sensual being in the Dionysian tradition. Wine, women, and song so to speak.
Catch a Falling Star 