…Write About Nothing.
Going nowhere, moving fast
Wearing nothing, at the last
Leave this life the way you entered
Blind and naked, not quite centered
There is no meaning
In this post
Besides the picturess
You like most
And things in here
Will make no sense
Full of nothing
And yet so dense
So, Have yourself a lovely day…
…cause things don’t matter anyway
There’s nothing here for you to see
So move along and happy be!
Filed under Uncategorized
Yes, I admit it. I am a goofy old coot and an embarrassment to my children.
That’s my role in life now. Eye rolls abound when I am around.
There are several reasons why, which I intend to list here in detail in order to embarrass my children further. But it basically boils down to the fact that I am a writer, and though I write mostly fiction, another way of saying I lie a lot, a real writer tends to reveal more of the naked truth about himself than a child can stand.
Who wants to see their father naked? Especially when he is old… wrinkled, spotty, and mostly fish-belly white.
Speaking of nakedness, one of the things that my children are most embarrassed about is the fact that I know a lot about nudists and naturists, in fact, I know many real nudists, and I have been nude in at least one social situation with other naked nudists. And, even worse, I admit it in writing where my children and their friends can see it. Of course, none of them read this blog anymore for that reason.
I have written novels where there are nudist characters based on some of the real nudists I have known. The novels with nudist characters in them so far are, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, The Baby Werewolf, Superchicken, The Boy… Forever, and A Field Guide to Fauns. And these novels might not embarrass them so much if they read them to discover that the novels have something to say that really isn’t about their father being a crazy naked coot. But they won’t read them because I am embarrassing to them.
And there is the verified fact that I am something of a conspiracy theorist. I firmly believe that the actor/theater owner William Shakespeare only offered his name to the real writer of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward DeVere. There is actual evidence that is so, though it was a secret that DeVere took to his pauper’s grave after spending away his entire family estates and fortune. A pauper’s grave that no interested scholar can find the location of to this very day, although maybe he’s buried in the same place of honor as the actor/theater owner, as there are cryptic clues to that as well.
I also believe that Dwight Eisenhower met with alien civilizations in the 1950s and the Roswell Incident was a real crash of more than one spacecraft from other star systems. There exist real deathbed confessions that confirm those details, and the government has been covering up the facts for decades.
The conspiracy-theory skills I have as a crazy, embarrassing coot have resulted in books like Catch a Falling Star, Stardusters and Space Lizards, and the Bicycle-Wheel Genius.
And lastly, I was a school teacher in middle schools and high schools for thirty-one years, which means I can create kid-characters in fiction that are very realistic and have a good-but-comic quality that make readers generally like my stories.
So, my children are probably right to be seriously embarrassed by my very existence. Of course, I, like all old coots registered with the Crazy, Embarrassing Coots of America, the CECA, am totally immune to being embarrassed by the embarrassment of my children.
No one listens to me anyway.
So, I might as well have my say.
The world will someday go away.
Maybe only me that day,
But possibly everybody else should pray.
But rhyming is just goofy play,
And this is not a poem, okay?
If I am trying hard to get stuff done before the end of life, I have made some headway in 2021, I have published Twenty-One books in my lifetime all published with three different legitimate publishers and one criminal publisher. Oh, and all currently available on Amazon. Of the soon-to-bees listed above, I have published Cissy Moonskipper’s Travels along with an unlisted novella, Horatio T. Dogg, Super Slueth. AeroQuest 4 : The Amazing Aero Brothers is finished and undergoing final edits. And I have added a working rough draft of The Necromancer’s Apprentice, a satire I hope won’t be sued by Disney Corporation.
I now own a third of the farm you see in the foreground of this picture. The farm on the far side of the road is Uncle Harry’s farm that was sold when Uncle Harry passed away long ago.
In a sense, I have already had my say in the books I have written. The themes are my fundamental thinking, the horrid insults flung at me in my internal monologue by my inner critic, the rough nuggets of supposed wisdom that I have not only cut my writer’s teeth on. but, in some cases, chewed on relentlessly for decades until it comes out again as sweet as honey. Or, sometimes, as sour as the bile and vomit created by extended illness. Whatever its quality, the writings I will leave behind me are my fair say in an attempt to help the world evolve.
There is still a considerable record of having had my say in middle school and high school English classes. That say, that attempt to influence the future, has already been written in the memories of students that sat through my classes. They endured a lot, put up with a lot of mistakes by me, but also, hopefully learned some real lessons.
Here’s the current gist of what I have to say;
We are in a time when the environment is out of control and getting worse. It will probably kill us all, including all other life on Earth. But we are creative enough and smart enough to invent our way out of that problem. If only the stupid people and the greedy-evil people will let us.
We are also in a time when there is a definite threat that our leaders are going to embrace the easy and profitable path of being a Fascist. We have to hope there is enough empathy and morality left amongst our people to avoid this and find a fairer way for all.
And that is not all I have left to say. But it will do for now.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, insight, inspiration, novel plans, novel writing, Paffooney
Some characters need to have their story told for reasons that are buried deep in the author’s personal history and damaged psyche. For me, Torrie Brownfield, the Baby Werewolf, was that kind of character.
The book, The Baby Werewolf, is a different kind of horror story. The central question of the book is this, “Am I a monster? And do I know why or why not?” And Torrie has to answer that question because he was born with a rare genetic disorder called hypertrichosis. It is the “werewolf-hair disease” where hair growth happens in unusual places on the body and in Torrie’s case, everywhere but the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. He is a perfectly normal boy who really only looks like a monster. But how you look can have a profound impact on how people treat you.
And the character of the boy who looks like a werewolf and thinks he is a monster is based entirely on me. Unlike Valerie Clarke whose origins I can pinpoint, I have to honestly admit the way Torrie thinks and feels and acts are all based solely on me and me alone.
You see, when I was a boy of ten I went through a horrible traumatic experience that threw my whole life into darkness. And I kept it secret from everybody. In fact, for a few years, I kept it a secret even from myself.
It is not that I really didn’t remember I had been sexually assaulted by an older boy. The nightmares and remembered pain were a constant even when I couldn’t admit to myself what had happened. I defended myself from it all by burying the knowledge deep, and worrying about things that only sexual-assault victims worried about. I embarrassed myself twice in seventh grade by wetting my pants in class, all because I couldn’t go into the boys’ bathroom at school. Whenever I would have sexual urges of any kind, I would lie down or sit on the heating grate at home, burning scars into my lower back and the back of my lower legs. I fretted about how to fight monsters. And I knew from the movies that if a vampire bit you, you could become a vampire. And if a werewolf bit you, you could become a werewolf. So, if a sexual predator bites you, do you not become a…??
In all honesty I probably became a teacher at least in part to protect other kids from the same kind of thing that happened to me. And I had to write this book to tell the story of how not to be a monster.
The true monster in this monster-movie tale is actually Torrie’s uncle, the person who actually psychologically abuses him. And the villain proves himself to be a sexual deviant, trying to create kiddie porn in his photography studio.
I suppose I just spoiled the whole whodunnit part of the book. But the murder mystery was never the point of the novel. The message of this novel is that no child is ever a monster unless he actually chooses to become one.
And that is the kind of character Torrie Brownfield is. The autobiographical kind. The kind that brings the author’s worst fears about himself to light, and tries to answer the question with… “No, I am not a monster.”
Filed under autobiography, characters, horror writing, monsters, novel writing, Paffooney
Actual anatomy should be studied with live models and strong light.
…And making a human form look real depends on how you render the shading and shadow to reveal 3-D shapes in 2-D.
And it probably becomes an issue if you are only drawing children’s anatomy.
You have to have parental consent for a child to pose nude for you. This picture not only shows adult male anatomy and deer anatomy drawn from photos, but a nude girl who was 13 when the photo was taken, but 22 when she gave me permission to use it. And, of course, I returned the original photo when this was done. The girl was the daughter of Canadian nudist friends.
This picture was drawn from a model that was actually a nude statuette rather than an actual human being. The important factor in creating nude art is that it is not sexual or intentionally erotic. It does not focus on genitals or breasts, and can, in fact, obscure those parts of the body completely and still be a nude.
Filed under artwork, nudes, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, studio
Today’s Art-Day Saturday post is about the pictures I have drawn to establish in my mind the characters that make up the fictional world of Norwall, Iowa. Specifically, the kids in my YA novels.
I do manage character development and detailed descriptions by creating early on a picture of what the character looks like for me.
Filed under artwork, characters, humor, illustrations, kids, novel writing, Paffooney, Pirates
This is a story about an innocuous piece of furniture in Great Aunt Minnie Efram’s house. It was a little brown loveseat with carved wooden monster feet.
As the story begins, the little loveseat was sitting in the parlor in front of the small black and white television. During the monthly Efram family card party, the love seat was the only place for the two of them to spend the evening. But he was ten and he hated girls. He had a reputation with the guys at school as a girl hater, and he couldn’t have it known that he was sitting on a loveseat with Uncle Henry’s stepdaughter, the one the guys all said they had seen eating her own boogers.
She was also ten, and in his class at school. She liked to watch him more than any of the other boys. But she didn’t know why. She liked unicorns and the color pink, but she also kinda liked the way boys looked at her when she wore shorts. And she liked seeing him in PE class at school, wearing shorts. He was athletic and often won games in PE.
After two years of monthly card parties happening during at least three different months every year at Aunt Minnie’s place, he had discovered that girls didn’t actually smell bad, and this one actually listened when he talked about playing football, and how it made him feel when he scored the seventy-five-yard touchdown. In fact, the more he talked about football, and the closer they sat to each other, the better she seemed to smell. He liked that smell.
She liked that he didn’t only pay attention to her at the card parties anymore. He actually said, “Hi” in public. And she liked his smile, even when he got braces. He let her pick the shows they watched on the old black and white television while seated on the loveseat. She actually worked up the nerve to tell him that she had told Jane at school to ask him if he liked her, and stupid Jane had completely forgotten to ask him, or maybe Jane was just too chicken to ask him and used the excuse that she forgot.
He said that if she liked him, he liked her. But if she didn’t, he didn’t either. “Like” her, he meant. Which he did because she did.
After two more years and six more card parties worth of scootching behinds closer together on the old loveseat, something different had happened. And it was about time too. Aunt Minnie had bought a puppy, and that not only was a bad thing for the seven cats that lived with old Minnie, but it was hard on the loveseat too. One of the little couch’s monster feet was lost, and the numerous instances of terrified cat claws digging in were beginning to have an effect on the upholstery. And that danged dog wizzled everywhere. The loveseat had one purpose in life, and it didn’t want to give in to wear and tear before achieving that purpose.
But the very next year brought disaster. He apparently told the members of the freshman football team that something had happened on that old love seat that really hadn’t happened. The football team was impressed because they all thought she was pretty hot stuff, and he was generally thought of as a lame-o dweeb. She heard about it from Jane who heard about it from Nanette’s boyfriend who was on the team. And she got mad. How dare he say something like that when it wasn’t true?
In January of that year, Aunt Minnie passed away in her sleep. The loveseat was sold at auction to a farmer who liked to do re-upholstery as a hobby. It got re-done in red velvet and leather with wheels replacing the wooden monster feet and sold to a car dealer in Des Moines who placed it in the lobby show-room for customers to sit on.
But the story has a happy ending. She would later make his locker room lie into the truth on Prom Night (fortunately with protection) and then went on to marry him when they both were sophomores in college. Of course, it wasn’t always, “They lived happily ever after,” because they didn’t. They got divorced once and got re-married shortly after… to each other. They had three kids. And the loveseat didn’t ever learn any of that. Because it was a loveseat. You didn’t really think loveseats could know anything, did you?
Peaches, it seems, mean something I don’t really need to be talking about here when used in their emoji form. Especially by teenage boys and girls texting each other and sending pictures to each other to learn the secrets of human anatomy in spite of parental prohibitions. Things that make the teacher in me squirm in my own skin.
But my wife and daughter love eating peaches. And peach cobbler can be a real sensual experience. We often call situations “peachy” when we mean it is all good. And a beautiful woman, a beautiful car, and a lovely sailboat can all be called a “real peach.”
So, while pretty girls are a good thing, and peaches are good food, It is especially a blessing if you have a life full of peaches. That is really “peachy keen.”
Fiona Long, dragon name, Firefang. was a hot peach in The Boy… Forever.
So, let’s reclaim the meaning of peaches from the emojis. For God looked upon them and dectared, “Peaches are good.”
‘
I have always had an inquiring mind. That is a curse instead of a plus if your main goal in life is to be happy and unbothered by anything. But it has proved to be of benefit to me as I have become an old coot who actually cares about what is true. Yes, I am willing to personally suffer to bring to light that which is actually true and that which must be disbelieved before it truly hurts us.
Don’t judge me yet based on this next question;
“Did you know that the Democratic party is funded by billionaires who want to use the “Deep State” to promote their Satanic rituals involving the murder and cannibalistic consumption of human children?”
I hope you know that I would never promote such a thing as being true. I am even careful of posting this pernicious lie in a question rather than a statement, because that’s one of the tactics the malign promoters of this religious belief use, not actually stating something that will be contradicted immediately, but taken merely as something to be considered and discussed simply because it is offered in question form.
So, how do you tackle such dangerous nonsense?
I prefer the scientific method which provides the structure for your thinking that will keep you on the most likely paths that lead you to what is true and what is not.
We don’t talk much about cold fusion nowadays because when it was discovered in 1989 by a pair of electrochemists whose single experiment produced more heat than what should result from the energy put into the tabletop experiment, it quickly blossomed into the huge, major breakthrough story that it really would’ve been if only it had been verified. But, as is required by the entire scientific community, it couldn’t be reproduced in more repeats of the experiment than those that turned out negative. So, even though Pons and Fleischman did an experiment that answered the dreams of science-fiction nerds like me, they are mostly ignored by now. Cold fusion? Only one flawed source, studied in 1989 and proved still basically untrue in 2004 by a multitude of scientists who wanted it to be true.
Consider the source for Q-Anon conspiracies. One (or possibly more) anonymous government whistle-blowers whose credentials have never been presented or identities revealed, and mind-blowing statements appearing on places like 4-Chan, 8-Chan, and Parlor to be picked up and amplified on such reliable sources of scientifically proven knowledge as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I hope you understand sarcasm after making that last statement.
Q-Anon is not the only conspiracy religion out there. My friend Giorgi (above) has a more benign, but no less ridiculous religion that chooses to replace God Jehovah, Zeus, Odin, Buddha, and other religious figures and deities with Ancient Aliens.
Here’s a second and third test offered by Carl Sagan to use against their ideas;
2. Encourage debate from knowledgeable people from all identifiable perspectives.
3. Do not accept arguments only from positions of authority.
Q-Anon arguments only have the authority of repetition because social media endlessly asks the same “questions” over and over. There is no debate from any recognizable “authority,” just a plethora of unsubstantiated statements and commandments.
In a way, the Ancient-Aliens crowd is guilty of the same thing. They never have skeptics and debunkers on their History-Channel show. You never see Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society, offering his opinions of their conclusions on that show. Neither do they allow Christian theologians or Buddhist scholars to offer their take on what probably really happened. They do employ physicists, engineers, and historians on their show, but never the ones that don’t agree with their radical theories and conclusions. Since there is no real debate on that show and no identifiable peer review, that show does not qualify as History, let alone Science.
4. Don’t get overly attached to your own ideas.
If you are going to investigate any conspiracy that holds thrall a number of “true believers,” approach everything with a truly open mind. I actually believe alien beings from “out there” have visited Earth. That is based on things, science, and testimony I haven’t even begun to go into here. But I reserve my right to be skeptical about everything, especially my own prejudices, theories, and beliefs. Otherwise I could too easily get trapped into believing in the truth of something that I otherwise would recognize as false. This is the factor that has pulled so many of my otherwise sensible Republican friends onto the flypaper of spurious Q-Anon claims.
5. Use numbers wherever possible. Math is quantifiable information that can “prove” the facts better than most ideas expressed in mere language. It is more precise, and reveals truth in verifiable ways that no poet ever could.
I am known to some in my family (here you could read wife and sisters) as the family conspiracy nut and generally crazy old coot.
But I am not so crazy that I don’t recognize the dangers inherent in some the ideas I am talking about here. As an English teacher I have learned some effective thinking skills that protect me and mine. I can honestly tell you that these thinking skills explained here will help you too. I learned them from a friend who pointed me to Carl Sagan as the source of these thinking skills.
And to any of my friends who might read this post and be offended, I apologize. But you were wrong about Pizzagate, and you are on the wrong side of this too. Aliens probably did NOT build the pyramids. But logic IS the primary structure of this essay.
I am unhappy about an election for Governor of Virginia held last night. Why does an election so far away from Texas matter to me? I couldn’t vote in it. I couldn’t benefit from it in any way, no matter how Snidely-Whiplash evil the winner may be or how right his Dudley-Do-Right opponent is in his arguments about Virginia education. It only matters symbolically, as it shows who continues to win the gunfight over survival of the human species and life on planet Earth.
You see, the Skywalker Jedi Alliance just threw the evil Emperor down the power shaft of the doomed Second Death Star. We did so in an election that involved more votes cast than in any American election in history. But the evil Emperor didn’t die down that shaft. He claimed the election was fraudulent and tried to take the victory away by committing election fraud.
In times of swords and kings the would-be usurper, having failed, would’ve been beheaded so that he would bother the kingdom no more. But not in our time. The deposed Emperor can continue his rule in Mar-a-lago over all his crazed subjects who will give their allegiance only to him.
It’s funny how that works. They are excessively hostile. They insist their constitutional right to own guns trumps our right to expect our children to come home from school alive. They insist every fetus, once conceived, has a right to be born, but once they are born, they have no inherent rights to have parents, or medical care, or a full and equal education, or love, or food to eat, or a home to live in, or a right to stay out of prison… unless, of course, they are lucky enough to have white-skinned parents with enough money to afford those things. No money. No more rights. Only money makes you worthy.
There are two sides politically in today’s struggle. The Republicans are transparently the party of rich white guys. They favor authoritarian rule, possibly fascism. They favor minority rule in which they only authorize the spending of tax dollars on making rich men and corporations richer. Never on the public good that might benefit… ugh, poor people and minorities. They will use violence to maintain power. They will steal Supreme Court appointments. They will filibuster anything they don’t like and the things they like can be counted on one finger… the finger that points at themselves.
The other party, the Democrats, are the party of everybody else. Particularly the everybody else who have little or no individual power. 0h, there are a few conservative white guys mixed in. Those are mostly there to vote against the interests of the rest of the Democrats. Thank you, Joe Manchin. We are the party that meets the gun-toting opposition with roses to place in the barrels of guns. And we try to win the battle simply by being on the sensible, more generous side.
The new governor of Virginia won his seat of power by making an issue of whether or not parents can go into school libraries and school curriculums to ban books and ideas. He took the side of those who want to ban a terrible book. The book is Beloved, by Nobel Laureate Author Toni Morrison. What makes this book bannable when a book like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is not?
It appears to be the fact that the best-selling author is a black woman.
I fear we are ultimately going to lose the battle. I am on the side of those who bring roses to the gunfight. But if we don’t win the fight, because people are deep-down good at heart, then no one wins. The side with the guns won’t believe that people can go extinct like the Dodo bird./ But the Dodo birds are all dead. Are the Dodo men any smarter?
Filed under politics
Catch a Falling Star 