Looking for stuff to organize into a post today led me to realize that I currently exist swimming in a tidal wave of goofy images that I myself have created.
So, lazy and goofy old me will now show you some of these things.
I don’t even remember why I drew some of these things.
Some of it, is obviously because I was a teacher.
But some of it is merely wacky.
Though some might be considered inspirational.
While some of it is just meant to be appealing.
But all of it provides me with an easy post that you can read fast, but still get plenty to think about from. It is even good for a re-post if I add something newer.
Being dead is not all down-side. There is a certain amount of goodness to be found in the fact of being already dead.
I know some of this morbid thinking comes about simply because I am facing my own mortality and lingering about in bed most of the time in pain and waiting for a heart-attack or a stroke to put the fireworks into the finale. It is not because I desperately need to get out and drive for Uber to make all the pennies I can for taxes and medical bills and can’t yet do so because of arthritis and diabetes and fear of fainting behind the wheel. I can live with that. It is about preparing and facing the final curtain with as much grace as a fool can.
Of course, the greatest boon that death grants is that it brings an end to suffering. My joints will no longer be on fire and blazing with pain (assuming there isn’t a Hell capable of delivering torments beyond what we get a heaping helping of during life.) I will not have to worry about medical bills and hospital bill collectors any longer. Not that the same can be said of my loved ones. But I myself will no longer have the capacity to think and worry about paying for my many sins of poor health and being sick. In fact, I will be spared a number of things that eat at me while I am alive.
I will not have to watch any more Adam Sandler movies.
I will not have to consider anything that is said on Fox News (unless, of course, Hell is real and they have cable TV there… Because, well, what else would be on?)
And no more of this guy! But I need to check on that no Hell thing. And if there is one, and he is headed there soon for all eternity, I might have to figure out some spiritual hack to get into Heaven.
If there is a Hell, though, it will be like Mark Twain once alluded to. The weather will suck, but the most interesting company to keep will all be there.
And it is a proven fact that writers and other artists make more money after they are dead than they did while they are alive. Think of how much money Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, J.R.R. Tolkien, and John Steinbeck have made selling books since they passed away. Edgar Allen Poe died a pauper like me, but his books continue to be sold and made into movies. And then there’s Maurice Hampton Greenblatt. You never heard of him, right? That is because he never wrote and published anything. (Although it also might have something to do with the fact that he is not a real person, and I made him up for this essay.)
Being dead will be like having written the final chapter in your last book about living life. You will close the book and simply be done… once and for all time. There is a certain satisfaction to be had if your life story has, at the very least, been an interesting story. And there is the whole becoming-a-ghost-writer thing to think about. People will still be able to read my words after I am dead. And who knows? The story may continue. There is a lady who writes classical music for dead composers. She has Schubert and Liszt and Beethoven whispering in her ear. Maybe I can find some goofy kid somewhere to start whispering my stories to.
Yes, I know it is not a real word. But it should be. It means an excuse for sharing stuff I have drawn, colored, and/or created because I have this sense of being an artist despite all evidence to the contrary. (Take note of this fact; art has never directly made me money, only helped me to do numerous other things, like being a teacher, that did.)
…. …. ……. …. ….. …. …. …. …… …….. … So, I guess you get the idea. Making pictures is a part of my life. I can’t help it. I do what I do because it represents what is inside me constantly burning to get out. There are all kinds of stories that go with each and every one of these pictures. Fiction stories, true stories, somewhat true stories, dreams, nightmares, and sometimes just plain imagination. Story + Picture = Paffooney. You have been thoroughly Paffoonied for today.
Canto Ten – Cat Magic, and It Isn’t Even a Black Cat
Valerie and Danny walked back towards Main Street unsure of
what to do next in spying on Billy’s weird family. How do you find out if someone is being hurt
or tortured by their own family? And
what was old Witch Haire talking about?
Didn’t she know how scary she was?
And couldn’t she just come out and tell them what she knew? Did she have to make kids discover stuff for
themselves?
“Are you gonna try to do what she said?” asked Danny,
kicking a stone down the street ahead of them.
“Do you even understand what she wants me to do?”
“Do I understand what a witch wants?”
“Yeah, that.”
“I have no frapping idea.”
“Frapping?”
“Hey, I have to go home and face Mom later. She’ll know.”
Val grinned at him. “Yeah,
I suppose she would.”
“Look there, Val, it’s that damned cat she was talking
about.”
It was indeed the cat the witch had mentioned. It was a whitish color, about the color of
muddied milk. It had an ugly, misshapen
head that was as flat as the flight deck of an aircraft carrier on top. Valerie imagined little flying flea squadrons
taking off from it in formation. Its
cat’s eyes were unusually large, expressive, and somewhat scary. It had one light blue eye and one sickly
green-colored eye. And scariest of all,
it was looking back at her like it was waiting for her to say something. It just sat there in the alley behind the
fire station, looking at her as if it wanted her to speak.
“Gawd, you are one ugly cat,” she finally said. It blinked.
“You are pretty for a human. But aren’t you supposed to talk to me about
something else?”
Val was startled.
“Danny, did you hear that cat say something just now? Without moving its lips, I mean?”
“Um, well, no… Why?”
“What makes you think the stupid tail-yanker could hear
me? Did you know he once tied
firecrackers to a cat’s tail and it wasn’t even the Fourth of July?”
“Danny? That cat is
talking to me.” The cat seemed to be
frowning, not something Val had ever considered a cat to be doing before.
“Val? Are you feeling
all right?”
“My name is Scraggles.
I don’t know if Mistress Haire told you that.”
“Mazie Haire didn’t tell me that cat’s name, did she?”
“Sure she did. She
said it was called Scraggles.”
“If you are capable of learning the knowing, girl,” the cat
hissed, “you’re gonna have ta pay a lot better attention than that.”
“Scraggles,” was all that Valerie said.
“You need to follow me down this alley,” said Scraggles in
his spooky cat-voice.
“Okay,” Val answered.
The cat leisurely stood up and turned about, showing his somewhat scuffed-up hindquarters to Valerie and Danny. It sauntered in an unhurried manner down the alley. It passed between the fire station and the water tower. Then it went behind the Post Office. When they got to the garbage barrels in the alley behind Martin’s Bar and Grill, it sat down in the middle of the alley.
“Barkbarkbarkbarkbarkbarkbarkbark… BARK!”
Valerie and Danny both nearly jumped out of their
skins. It was Barky Bill, the dog the
Martin family kept to keep the rats away from the trash barrels. It shot out towards the cat who continued to
sit with total unconcern. Then, reaching
the end of its chain, the dog nearly strangled itself and flipped on its back
in a cloud of gravel, inches from the cat.
“I think the stupid dog knows he can’t get me,” said the
cat, licking its right front paw disdainfully.
“It always nearly pulls it own head off to get me. It is a beast with very little wit. You’ll never hear any talking from him, no
matter how much knowing you actually learn.”
“I think it’s cruel of you to torture the poor dog like
that,” Valerie said.
“Are you talking to me or to the damned cat?” asked Danny.
“To the cat.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t you have some important questions to ask me?” the cat
said.
“Yeah. How does a cat
talk like this? You don’t seem to be
moving your mouth. Is it telepathy? Mind to mind?”
“You are using the knowing.
You see what I do. You look at
the movements I make and the expressions I have on my face, and knowing what
you know about cat behavior, you can actually infer what I have to say to
you. It is a matter of your brain
figuring out what your eyes are actually seeing.”
“Why can’t Danny hear you?”
Scraggles looked at Danny, making Val turn towards him
too. She noticed the confused look of
stupefaction on Danny’s face.
“He’s a boy. Not even
a very smart example of the species.”
“Hmm,” said Valerie.
She didn’t like the way this was going.
“So what…?” Valerie
stopped mid-thought. What was the misty
purple smoke that was suddenly filling the alley? “What else am I supposed to learn from you?”
“Follow me.” The cat
continued down the alley, behind the Hardware Store and into the smoke.
Valerie followed.
Danny followed her.
Lurking at the far end of the alley was a dark, cloaked figure
that seemed to be wearing a yachting cap, or a cap like the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island wore… a white one.
“Who’s there?” Val asked.
“I see him too,” Danny remarked.
In that instant someone seemed to whip off the cloak and
cap… and then no one was there. The
alley was empty, except for a small wooden man carved from a block of wood and
wearing only a skirt of grass and a super-ugly mask.
I am certainly no expert on the Golden Age of Comics. I was, in fact, born the year that the Golden Age ended. I am a child of the Silver Age (1956 to the early 1970s) and those were the comics I grew up with. But I admit to a fascination with the initial creation of the characters I love, including Batman, Superman, the Flash, Captain America, the Phantom, Steve Canyon, Wonder Woman and numerous others who were first put on the comic book pages in the Golden Age. And being subject to comic book prices that zoomed upward from a dollar an issue, I was bedazzled by the ten cent price on old comics.
Comic books owe their creation to the popular newspaper comic strips from the Depression era and WWII wartime. Originally, comic strips were gathered and printed on cheap paper. Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon, and other adventure strips would lead to the war comics and hero-centered comics that would morph into superhero comics.
Some of the artwork in Golden Age comics leaves a lot to be desired. Especially original, straight to comic book publications that were produced fast and furiously by publishers who would open one week, produce three issues. and go out of business three weeks later. But in the mad scramble, some truly great artists formed the start of their illustrious careers, Will Eisner, Hal Foster, Milt Caniff, and Bill Elder learned to master their craft in the newspaper strips, and all later created comic books and graphic novels. True geniuses like Jack “King” Kirby and Bob Kane and Jack Davis grew directly from comic book studio madhouses into comic-book-artist immortality.
As with most things that have a Golden Age, the truth was that later comic book eras were superior in most ways. But this Golden Age was the foundational age for an American art-form that I truly love. So, flaws and warts are overlooked. And some of these old ten cent books on super-cheap paper are worth huge amounts of money if you still have a rare one in mint condition. Ah, there’s the rub for a manic old collector guy like me.
Most of the Golden Age comic book images used for this post were borrowed from the ComicsintheGoldenAge Twitter page @ComicsintheGA. If you love old comics like I do, you should definitely check it out.
Of late I have been rather obsessed with the coming darkness. Death. Ragnarok. Mass extinction of all life on Earth. My own situation as a pessimist quickly approaching the end of my own personal life has probably colored my obsession to a very large degree. And I should point out, my own prognosis is not going to change for the better. I do not have the financial power to prevent the problems I already have using modern effective healthcare. I am personally doomed. But even though the whole world seems easily as doomed by climate change, that doesn’t mean everyone shares my sad fate. There are potential solutions to the problem that only require the people who do have the financial power to fix it to decide that life on Earth has more value than their personal wealth and privilege. (Uh-oh… there’s a dependence on goodness where it seems like none actually exists.)
I often turn to science and books by very smart people to give me ideas that comfort me and give me hope. I recently did some binging on YouTube’s Answers With Joe. He does an excellent job of providing answers to things that worry me underpinned with scientific facts.
Thomas Malthus (from Wikipedia)
I have been worried about the environment from the times in high school science class when we learned about Paul Ehrlich and his book The Population Bomb.
Then we were learning about how the overpopulation of the Earth and its attendant need to produce food for all those people threatened massive famine, resource scarcity, and eventual extinction for humans. It was pointed out that, at the time in the 1970s, we were using chemical fertilizers and pesticides on the fields in Iowa to increase yields that would not only pollute the water and air in Iowa, but would eventually make its way through the watershed system into the oceans where it would overstimulate the algae and create an ocean environment throughout the world devoid of oxygen, fish, and all other lifeforms. I could see the threat and the validity of the science that Ehrlich had done.
Paul Ehrlich
I learned, over time, that population stresses do not necessarily cause extinction events in a matter of decades. The 1980s came and went and we were not extinct, despite eight years of Ronny Ray-gun, the jelly-bean president, and massive success in increasing food production. As Joe does an excellent job of explaining in the video above which you didn’t watch, population problems proved at least partially self-correcting. Families generally slowed their growth rate as health and wealth improved and made them more productive, more intelligent, and better able to support the heavy layer of living people that now covered the Earth.
Recently I became obsessively and pessimistically concerned with the dire predictions of environmental scientist Guy McPherson. I do recognize that his work reflects the extremist point of view among climate scientists, but ;there are a number of facts that he presents that are irrefutable in the same way as the arguments of… Paul Ehrlich.
In the second video above that you also didn’t watch, Joe explains how the problem of greenhouse gasses can be undone by renewable energy, carbon capture and air-scrubbers, and the search for viable products made from CO2, helping to reverse greenhouse gasses. He also explains how chemical cooling of the atmosphere and actual planetary weather control are possible. Technology already exists to solve the climate problem. The only drawback is that somebody has to pay for it. And the people in control of that kind of financial power are all entitled low-down greedy bastards that would rather build massive survival bunkers in the Ozarks than pay for the rest of us to survive. So, there is hope, which comes not with a grain of salt, but with a giant’s saltshaker filled with rock salt. Still, it isn’t time for all of you to give up. Just me. I am the one most completely doomed.
Xanthophobia (from Greek xanthos, “yellow”) is fear of the color yellow. In China the color yellow was feared, specifically receiving the yellow scarf, which was an imperial order to commit suicide.
Yes, “xanthophobia” is a word I have never used in my life before now. I have no doubt that I will never need that word again in my life. You, dear reader, will probably never need that word either. But the derfy space-ranger part of my brain thinks it is neat that I was able to correctly answer a trivia question about the meaning of “xanthophobia”simply because my background as an artist who has shopped for exotic oil colors in artist supply stores helped me to recognize that the “xantho” part of the word meant yellow.
Are there other totally useless words that my space-ranger brain thinks are cool to know? Of course…
The most important part of a novel is how it ends. It is the ending of the story that does the most to establish the theme, make the points the author wants to make, or gives you the all-important feeling that the story is complete.
I have written nine good novels and ended the story nine times. I have reason to believe they are good books. Two of them were contest finalists. I have gotten no bad reviews (of the minimal number of times someone besides me has actually read one of these books). And even experienced editors have told me that my books are competent and good enough to be potential best sellers. But, of course, they have little chance of ever reaching a wider audience. I am an Indie author and have either published through pay-to-publish publishing companies or the free Amazon/Kindle publishing services. The way the story of me being a published author will end, though, is not a story of success and wealth and critical acclaim. I am dissolving into abject poverty and fatal ill health. I will not last to see my books hit the big time. And when I croak and become worm food, my books will be forgotten and mostly ignored, even by my family who look at it as a pie-in-the-sky dream rather than reality. Reality, unfortunately, really sucks.
The fact is, all the greatest and most worthwhile people that ever lived have suffered terribly and they were forced to endure much. Greed, villainy, injustice, inequality, bullying, rape, murder, and income taxes prevail in an unbalanced and unjust world. If Guy McPherson in the opening video is to be believed (if you haven’t already watched it, I suggest you don’t. Hearing that message from a credible climate scientist like him is very depressing.) then greedy, rich, and powerful people made the decision to murder us all decades ago, and there is nothing we can do about it.
So, here is how my story ends; I will continue to tell stories and write essays like this one until the very end. And, for me, that will come any day now. It is the only thing worth doing for me at this point in my life. I also hope that you will take heed of my example and endeavor to be the author of your own story’s end. And I am not suggesting you commit suicide or hole up in a bunker somewhere. I suggest you spend every day as if it is your last one on Earth. Cherish your loved ones. Do what pleases you to do. And, most of all, be the author of how your own story ends… plotted out with grace, theme, and meaning. A tribute to how you lived. And maybe you will be able to tell me sometime in the next life about what a colossal fool I was when I wrote this essay.
When last we left the Captain Action Hero Team, they were busy trying to rescue Mickey’s beloved X-Box with the EA Sports Baseball ’04 game that Mickey loves. The Evil Doctor Evil had taken over the library and turned it into an evil lair for his evil minions of Evil. But Captain Carl Action had led his team into the fray and clobbered the Agent in Red with a kiss and the Grammar Nazis with bad grammar. Dr. Evil was feeling foiled.
The pretty Barbie doll (whose name was really City-Style Christie) was captured and at the mercy of Evil Doctor Evil.
Dr. Mindbender had an evil talent for bending minds. He possessed considerable talents of ESP (which here stands for Extremely Stupid Puddlebrains). The poor captive doll was bent to Dr. Evil’s evil will.
Suddenly Mickey’s blog stood on the verge of losing its PG rating (which was already…
My attempt to draw “synesthesia” 
Catch a Falling Star 
Hope Comes From Science
Of late I have been rather obsessed with the coming darkness. Death. Ragnarok. Mass extinction of all life on Earth. My own situation as a pessimist quickly approaching the end of my own personal life has probably colored my obsession to a very large degree. And I should point out, my own prognosis is not going to change for the better. I do not have the financial power to prevent the problems I already have using modern effective healthcare. I am personally doomed. But even though the whole world seems easily as doomed by climate change, that doesn’t mean everyone shares my sad fate. There are potential solutions to the problem that only require the people who do have the financial power to fix it to decide that life on Earth has more value than their personal wealth and privilege. (Uh-oh… there’s a dependence on goodness where it seems like none actually exists.)
I often turn to science and books by very smart people to give me ideas that comfort me and give me hope. I recently did some binging on YouTube’s Answers With Joe. He does an excellent job of providing answers to things that worry me underpinned with scientific facts.
I have been worried about the environment from the times in high school science class when we learned about Paul Ehrlich and his book The Population Bomb.
Then we were learning about how the overpopulation of the Earth and its attendant need to produce food for all those people threatened massive famine, resource scarcity, and eventual extinction for humans. It was pointed out that, at the time in the 1970s, we were using chemical fertilizers and pesticides on the fields in Iowa to increase yields that would not only pollute the water and air in Iowa, but would eventually make its way through the watershed system into the oceans where it would overstimulate the algae and create an ocean environment throughout the world devoid of oxygen, fish, and all other lifeforms. I could see the threat and the validity of the science that Ehrlich had done.
I learned, over time, that population stresses do not necessarily cause extinction events in a matter of decades. The 1980s came and went and we were not extinct, despite eight years of Ronny Ray-gun, the jelly-bean president, and massive success in increasing food production. As Joe does an excellent job of explaining in the video above which you didn’t watch, population problems proved at least partially self-correcting. Families generally slowed their growth rate as health and wealth improved and made them more productive, more intelligent, and better able to support the heavy layer of living people that now covered the Earth.
Recently I became obsessively and pessimistically concerned with the dire predictions of environmental scientist Guy McPherson. I do recognize that his work reflects the extremist point of view among climate scientists, but ;there are a number of facts that he presents that are irrefutable in the same way as the arguments of… Paul Ehrlich.
In the second video above that you also didn’t watch, Joe explains how the problem of greenhouse gasses can be undone by renewable energy, carbon capture and air-scrubbers, and the search for viable products made from CO2, helping to reverse greenhouse gasses. He also explains how chemical cooling of the atmosphere and actual planetary weather control are possible. Technology already exists to solve the climate problem. The only drawback is that somebody has to pay for it. And the people in control of that kind of financial power are all entitled low-down greedy bastards that would rather build massive survival bunkers in the Ozarks than pay for the rest of us to survive. So, there is hope, which comes not with a grain of salt, but with a giant’s saltshaker filled with rock salt. Still, it isn’t time for all of you to give up. Just me. I am the one most completely doomed.
3 Comments
Filed under battling depression, commentary, farming, feeling sorry for myself, humor, insight, Liberal ideas, pessimism, sharing from YouTube, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as Answers with Joe, climate change, human extinction