I have been drawing these mock-Star-Wars science-fiction-heroes for thirty years. Some of these are that old. Some of them are new this year. All of them illustrate the adventures that started as a science-fiction-role-playing game and became the series of novels called AeroQuest.
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Filed under aliens, heroes, illustrations, novel, satire, science fiction
Here’s a maudlin old post to fill in for a day in which I will not have the time or energy to blog.
Last night I watched again Part I of Ken Burns’ Mark Twain. I think it reminds me of who I am as a writer. No, I am not being all big-head arrogant and full of myself. I devoured certain writers as a youth, consumed them whole. Charles Dickens was my first passion, followed by J.R.R. Tolkien, and then Mark Twain. Of all of them, Samuel Clemens is the most like me. He was from the Midwest, born and raised in Missouri along the Mississippi River. I am from the Midwest, born and raised in Iowa along the Iowa River. He endured hardship and tragedy as a youth, losing his little brother in a riverboat accident, and he dealt with it by humor. I endured a sexual assault from an older boy, and dealt with it by… well, you get the picture. We are alike, him and I. We both…
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Today I had a good half day with well-trained, well-behaved accelerated sixth-grade English students. It is gratifying to be able to use my best teacher skills and have them work. It is a rare day for a substitute teacher. And it is always the work of superior classroom teacher that makes this happen.
Being a pessimist sometimes makes planning for the future difficult. I knew that the biggest argument against me going back into classrooms as a substitute was the fact that I could easily die the next time the germ factory that is your average middle school or high school is hit with a flu outbreak. And as a pessimist, I know the coronavirus is going to hit in a big way. So, part of the plan has to include dying in 2020.
Watching the way Democratic debates get reported in the media, I also have to live with the knowledge that Donald Trump will win in November. (That, of course, will lead to him making himself Emperor after his eight years are up, and then Don Jr. gets the Empire by birthright and rules us with a very stupid ham-fist until he is either assassinated by school teachers or the world ends from climate change.)
We may be on the way to losing the house we have owned since 2005, since property taxes are soaring beyond my ability to pay them in the middle of my Chapter 13 Bankruptcy. So, I will be planning to make my way through life in the near future living under a Fascist dictatorship while being both homeless and dead.
There are too many bad things coming that I cannot control. So, as the tidal wave draws nearer, I need to put on shark repellent and prepare my surfboard.
So, my priorities need to be adjusted since continued survival is probably not achievable. Living longer isn’t the most important thing after all.
So, here are my current priorities;
I have given myself things to think about in the time remaining. And, possibly, I have given you things to reflect upon too. My reality is that there is a great deal more past in my life than there is future, so let me not waste the present I have been given.
Filed under autobiography, insight, irony, novel plans, Paffooney, pessimism, philosophy, politics
Canto 80 – Jungle Darkness and Damnthings (The Green Thread)
Running and sweating in the jungle darkness had begun to get very old.
“Climb a tree!” ordered King, pounding down the jungle path behind Hooey and Culver. The damnthing, a huge, smelly pig-dog sort of predator, was close on their heels and all three men were beginning to tire.
A large, gnarled tree loomed straight ahead. King leaped and caught its lower branches, swinging himself up into the lower branches like Johnny Weissmuller playing Tarzan on steroids. Dr. Hooey imitated him to the very best of his ability, meaning he was as graceful as a hundred pounds of chopped liver being flung through the air by a baboon that had drunk three too many cups of coffee. The good doctor managed to lodge himself on a branch just above the apex of the damnthing’s leap, though he was hanging upside down by one knee hooked over the branch.
“Help me! I’m the expendable one!” cried Willie Culver as he missed the branches and tumbled butt first into the undergrowth.
“Dang it!” swore King Killer, “I told you that we were ALL going to make it!” He leaped down from the branch that held him directly in front of Willie Culver. “You do not have permission to die right now!” he swore.
Unfortunately, directly behind King, the snorting damnthing lumbered up and came to a gum-gnashing, teeth-grinding halt so close that its spittle ran down into the back of King’s collar.
“Oh, Gawd…” prayed Willie. The pale expendable sidekick scrambled out from under King and used his fingernails to claw his way up the side of a foul-smelling babuti tree. Babutis were an exotic form of alien tree that existed on several jungle planets which sprouted gorgeous orange and yellow flowers, but smelled so bad they made your eyes water like raging rivers. The damnthing moved first to grab Willie, but the smell wrinkled its big pignose and resulted in the damnthing turning its attention to the Corsair King of Killing.
King, partly frozen in place by the vague hope that the thing’s vision was based on movement like he’d seen in an ancient Earther video about a dinosaur park, and partly winding up his interior springs for the leap of his life, slowly turned his head to stare right down the slavering gullet of the huge, nasty pig-dog thingy.
“King, old buddy, you can’t die here either, you know,” admonished Hooey from his upside-down perch.
“I’m working on it,” said King. His legs were taut with stored energy, ready to leap. He vaulted forward at the same instant that the damnthing struck with its big-piggy chompers. The beast growled. King screamed. Big pig teeth pierced the flesh of his shoulder.
“Aaargh!”
“Oh, no!”
“King! My gawd!”
Just as it seemed that the damnthing would devour the King, a sudden flesh-colored flash came blazing out of the canopy on a sort of bungee vine. It was a relatively small boy wearing nothing but some furry animal skins tied around his delicate parts. He grabbed on to King with a grip of steel, and then the bungee pulled them both back up into the canopy, ripping King’s flesh out of the very mouth of death and dismemberment.
The damnthing, stunned in its piggy surprise, blinked twice, and abruptly walked away into the jungle.
“What was that?” asked Willie, clinging to the bark of his smelly tree.
“That would have to be Randy the Jungle Boy,” said Hooey, without missing a beat. “He’s not the only weird character we are about to meet in this jungle.”
“You knew what was going to happen?”
“Well, some of it. I read about it in Googol Marou’s book, which I read in the future. Of course, the timeline has been altered again, so I can’t predict anything with certainty.”
“Why? What’s changed?”
“You were supposed to be the pig-dog’s lunch. So, I guess you have to write your own destiny from here on, Willie Culver.”
Willie’s eyes grew round with sudden fearful gratitude to King Killer. And it would only take another chapter or two for his heart to actually start beating again.
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
Sometimes the fact that you are writing up a storm on your current work in progress works against you in that you have no writing electricity left to spark an idea for the daily blog . So, what do I write about on day like today?
I can’t talk about the previous novel anymore. It is out there now. It is complete, and a part of my over-all body of work.
It is a good one, though. It is funny, full of magic, and action, and characters that I love.
I can’t really talk about A Field Guide to Fauns. It is too new, and I haven’t had time to fully digest what I’ve done in the last four days.
That sort of work in progress is too fresh to have the analysis boiled out of it.
I can show you an illustration from the novel that is new and hasn’t been seen before.
I can illustrate this post with recent pictures used in recent posts, but that doesn’t get me a topic to write about either.
This picture of Randy is an illustration from AeroQuest 3 : Juggling Planets. That’s my novel rewrite which I am working on at the same time as I am doing the current work in progress.
So, I guess there is really nothing to write about today. And I must now end this post by saying, “I guess I am just not going to write a post today.”
Filed under artwork, humor, illustrations, new projects, novel writing, Paffooney
I have begun work on a new novel called A Field Guide to Fauns. In it, I will make use of one of the most central metaphors in all of my art and writing. The mythological figure of the faun is usually portrayed as a young boy or youth, nude, and potentially having goat horns, goat legs, a deer’s tail, and/or pointed ears. It represents sensuality, connections to nature, and a willingness to partake in enjoyments without hiding anything.
Fauns were defined in art long before I came along. The Marble Faun was a book by Nathaniel Hawthorne that I read in college. I looked endlessly in libraries after that for pictures of Praxiteles’s masterpiece from all angles. I would eventually be inspired to make the picture above by a picture made in print by Maxfield Parrish printed in Collier’s Magazine. I have been fascinated for years by fauns. And I began drawing them repeatedly.
As a teenager, I had a faun as an imaginary friend. His name was Radasha. He made it his business to lecture me about sex and nudity, morals, religion, and what was wrong with me. At the time I was repressing the memory of being the victim of a sexual assault, a very painful and traumatic experience that I did not allow myself to remember and admit was real until I was twenty-two. Radasha turned out to be a coping method who helped me heal, and helped me realize that just because it was a homosexual assault, that did not make me a homosexual.
Fauns would come to dominate my artwork through the eighties. I drew Radasha multiple times. I would use the image to express things I feared and fought with and won victories over .
I would come to learn that there were fauns in real life to be found. The portrait above is of Fernando, a favorite student from my first two years as a teacher. He is portrayed as a faun. The cardinal on his shoulder is a symbol of courage and endurance, a bright red bird that never flies away when the winter comes.
Devon Martinez is the main character of my novel in progress. He is an artist like I am. He is fifteen at the time of the novel, and faced with living the rest of his childhood in a nudist community. He doesn’t consider himself a faun to begin with. But that changes during the course of the novel.
Here is the first illustration done for the novel. It is supposed to be a picture drawn by Devon himself.
So, as always with Saturday artwork, there is more to come.
Filed under artwork, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
As a retired school teacher who retired for health reasons, I have a limit to how much I can teach. As I substitute, mostly for teachers who planned on being out for in-service training or special educational meetings, I can usually only do two jobs a week. That limits the number of kids you have contact with, especially the more gifted and talented sorts of kids. But that doesn’t really matter much. As a regular classroom teacher I always focused more on making connections with kids, especially the challenging ones. My two jobs this week consisted of sixth grade Science all day on Tuesday, and seventh grade AVID classes on Thursday.
Sixth graders are the rabid squirrel monkeys of the middle-school monkey-house. They are the ones who jump around the most, scream at each other the most, and swing from the light fixtures the most. And if you think of it as being only metaphorically true, you don’t really know much about sixth graders and modern education.
But the coach I was subbing for is very good at discipline. He gave them an article on the organ systems of the human body and told them to to use the annotation marks on his close-reading poster. Now, you and I both know that coaches don’t really walk sixth graders through note-taking and reading-comprehension drills regularly. There’s a reason coaches are more likely to teach Science, History, or even Math before taking on English or Language Arts teaching assignments.
So, I did a quick-teach using the two-page article on how to circle key words, underline main idea sentences, and how to do a SWBS (Somebody-Wanted-But-So Charts) analysis to summarize the article. They, of course, did not do that before in science class, or even in English that they could remember. I basically simplified his fifty-minute busy-work assignment into a simple twenty-minute reading assignment that would take the slow readers longer. So, I had to occupy the smart, quick, and evil kids with something else while I helped the stragglers finish. I drew a cartoon rabbit, a cartoon duck, and a Disney-esque Goofy on the white board, challenging them to copy it.
I got to work one-on-one with several slow readers. Xavier, a hyper, mouthy kid who had dyslexia was tickled pink to learn he could pick out and put together key words and main ideas. He was unable to write the summary, but he annotated correctly, possibly for the first time ever. And that was a break-through for him. I subbed with him in other classes where he was one of the awfullest chandelier swingers, so that connection made a huge difference for him for at least fifty minutes of his school life. Malik the Mouth who never does anything but insult the others, and gives somebody else’s name to the sub when he gets in trouble, actually kept his bargain with me from the last time he was baby-sat by me. He stayed in his seat and kept working all period. The only time I had to make him give me his name was at the end of class so I could leave a good-job note for the coach after class ended. I actually like those sorts of kids who other subs routinely blow up at and send out of class. Xavier and Malik (possibly not their actual names) are both a hoot to teach. And they help add to my list of funny classroom anecdotes when they lose control and get in trouble with me. I always try to turn those into teachable moments.
But when the coach came in at the end of his smartest class, saw everybody was done, and saw cartoons on his board, he got mad at them. I had to take the blame for them and explain why they were not simply blowing the assignment off and playing around. Coaches don’t usually understand that classroom learning can be fun.
Thursday I was subbing for AVID classes again. These are special classes where at-risk kids are put in college-prep courses and treated like gifted kids. The program is misused as a warehouse for failing discipline-problem kids by this school district. But the Field Middle School has their act together for this program. The kids were working with college-level education students as tutors, and had to fill out self-examination forms that evaluated how they were doing in working with their tutors.
These are well-trained, smart, and seriously funny kids. Xochitl (an Aztec name pronounced ZOACHIE for a Hispanic girl that I have suprisingly encountered more than once in Texas) was a giftred complainer and procrastinator who was too lazy to lift a pencil, yet did the actual work in a few short minutes when she finally got around to it. She had time to tell the kids at her table, one of the tutors, and me about a time when she knocked the head off of a cucaracha (a cockroach who speaks Spanish) and tried to wait for an entire day for it to finally die so she could pick it up and flush it. The thing is, a cockroach only needs its head to eat with and see with. It is perfectly fine otherwise until it starves to death or gets eaten by a rat. So, when she went to pick it up with salad tongs, it was still alive and wiggly. She pantomimed how she threw the thing across the kitchen in surprise, and when it landed in the sink, she nailed it with the garbage disposal. This girl is a gifted story-teller. She had us all laughing. And her school grades were all A’s and B’s.
I admit it. I love kids like that. They are the best things about teaching. And whether they are Aaargh! Sixth Graders! or Uggh! Seventh graders! (the chimpanzees of the middle-school monkey-house) I actually love them. (But PLEASE don’t tell them that!)
As I have exhausted myself in substitute teaching for 7th graders yet again today, I thought I would share an old rant bout testing season, which is now here to visit once again.
I miss being a teacher. But even if I was suddenly healthy enough again to return to the classroom, I would have to think twice… or three times… or twelve times about it. I know excellent teachers who are being driven out of the education field by the demands of the job in the current educational whirlpool of death and depression. My own children are very bright and capable, but they face State of Texas mandated tests this next couple of weeks because that’s what we do in Texas, test kids and test kids and test them some more. If we don’t stress them out and make them fail on the first round of testing, there will be at least two more to get the job done. And believe me, the real reason for all the testing is to make kids fail. It sounds harsh, and like one of my…
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As my resolution to illustrate my novels grows further and further into solid, irresistible form and driving obsessional shape, I have been working on new pen and ink projects. Some are for AeroQuest. Some were for The Boy… Forever. And I will soon need to create new ones for A Field Guide to Fauns. Today’s post is just a glimpse of what I have been doing.
Filed under artwork, humor, illustrations, Paffooney, pen and ink
Catch a Falling Star 