The New Discipline
I sit in the corner, a dunce cap on my head.
Behind me the class rises. I miss recess in their stead.
And what was my criminality, that earned me this despise?
I told them that I loved them, and that was just not wise.
They tell me all are equal and each one’s on his own.
And if I can’t pull myself up, they must all leave me alone.
Thinking anyone will help me is an assumption with great risk.
The new order is the quiet that is whipped in with a whisk.
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The Pumpkinhead is running amok, shutting down programs I want the government to continue with my tax dollars. I don’t approve of them spending a single penny of the three thousand and some dollars worth of taxes I pay out of my pension every year on tax cuts to billionaires and multi-millionaires. The Ultrarich class does less actual work in a year than I do as a retiree. They do not deserve to make even more money while sitting on gluttonous natural cushions built into their derrieres. They are the parasites that drag on our quality of life. Their money-sucking vacuum mouths no longer need to be attached to our jugular veins. The Immigrants working in farmer’s fields and the local McDonalds and two other jobs to make ends almost meet are not the takers in this society.
Personally, I have had a truly miserable start to 2025. I visited a dentist for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. I had to have a molar with a broken crown yanked out of the right side of my jaw. It was infected and took an hour longer to pull out than it was scheduled for. It hurt like they had tried to pull my whole skeleton out through my mouth. While recovering from that, my wife came home from her teaching job with a viral infection of some sort. I immediately caught it. Two weeks of illness followed. Towards the end of that infection I painfully passed four small kidney stones, too small to see when they were finally out. That painful weekend resulted in a urinary tract infection that could easily have turned septic and killed me. The urologist gave me a super strong antibiotic that stained my underwear neon green. And at the end of January, I had to have a second molar with a broken crown removed… apparently with the same ten-pound skeleton-hoisting pliers.
Trump is still rolling out outrages against schools, against the FBI, against women, against trans kids, and everyone else he can be relentlessly cruel to. Richard III of England solved his Winter of Discontent with murder. I sent a ghost post message to the parking lot in London where he was buried to inquire if he was at all interested in using the same procedure to replace the Pumpkinhead on the Throne of America. He booed back that he would think about it. American President is apparently not as cushy a post as the Yorkish King of England.
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The girl who posed for this picture is an Asian beauty, chosen because she’s the spitting image of a former student from eleven years ago. This girl is actually 18 years old, though she looks twelve. The girl she reminds me of was 16 then, and would have to be around 27 now. This girl is Cambodian. That girl was Vietnamese. I like the picture. I love both girls, not in an inappropriate way. And what it comes down to is that I have kept my string of 196 daily posts in a row intact.
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Not many words today…
Ate too much… feel bad (a five-word poem about diabetes by a diabetic)
I have been down and out with a serious urinary tract infection the last two weeks. That overlapped the flu-like virus that had me down for the weeks prior. There is not a lot you can accomplish when you are too sick to even get out of bed. I watched a lot of streaming-service television and used my computer to do a lot of drawing. I really like the first final version I posted above. It is a picture of my posable plastic doll Ariel. I have two other similar-sized dolls, Nicole and Tom Sawyer, who are not posable and made out of porcelain. So, Ariel is my artist’s model more often than the other two.
I never had a fever while I was ill, but some of my medication caused dizziness and the inability to avoid passing out for five to ten minutes at a time. But initially, I created the outline directly above by putting the photo of Ariel on my drawing pad app and tracing features in the layer I placed on top.
This is, of course, the actual photograph used. I did draw over it leaving out Pluto and Mickey due to copyrighted character concerns.
I used colored paints in the drawing app to fill in the outline with color, but my arthritis in fingers and wrists makes it look crude and childish compared to what you see above. So, I use the anime-style overlay in the AI Mirror App to make it come out properly shaded and blended. The colors may appear a little off to you. But that would be because I am somewhat colorblind (red-and-green-scale colorblind) and can’t accurately judge between orange and carmine red, or rust brown and siena brown. I am doing a lot of guessing. You can also see that I change the background with Picsart AI Photo Editor.
Drawing in this way got me through a few difficult days.
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Here you see me doing some serious art-starting. I am working on ideas about how clowns can be compassionate. I am hoping this is true, because I am one… a clown, I mean. But I have some serious noodle and doodle work to do. So I will start with a doodle of Klown Kops from Klowntown’s finest. More will be explained later… and more will be doodled too.
Filed under clowns, compassion, doodle, humor, new projects, Paffooney Posts
At Mother’s breakfast table we were always encouraged to talk about stuff. That was a given. It was how families operated in the 60’s and 70’s. Mom and Dad not only listened to the mindless drivel coming out of the childish mouths of me, my two sisters, and my stinky little brother, but they also tended to hold forth about things they wished to teach us. We learned Methodist-Church-flavored Christianity and Eisenhower-Republican values. Ike had been president when I was born and got most of the credit for the post-war boom in the economy. We were middle-class people with solid middle-class values.
And then I had the bad sense to grow up and start thinking for myself. Nixon had let me down big-time when I was in high school. I had defended him against my McGovern-leaning loony liberal friends. My best friend was a preacher’s kid, a Methodist preacher’s kid. His father actually believed in progressive nonsense about sex-education for children and helping to feed the poor. And then Nixon turned out to be a liar, a coverer-upper, a cheat, and a bad-word-user. I suspect, though my Dad never admitted it, that he may have voted for Carter over Ford. It was my first time voting, and it actually felt good to use my vote to strike back at the party that betrayed my trust.
Religion, too. In the late seventies a man named Carl Sagan put on a TV show called Cosmos. The man bedazzled my father and I with Science. He taught us that every molecule of us was composed of atoms that could only have been forged in the cosmic furnaces in the centers of stars. He showed us how spectroscopy of the stars could show us what they were made of. He showed us the meaning of Einstein’s special Theory of Relativity. He pulled the universe together for us in a way that could not be undone. And he did it without calling upon the name and blessings of God. But he pointed out that we are connected to everything in the universe and everything is connected to us. To me, that seemed to define God. My religion was changing from Christianity to Saganism. Of course, Mom heard that as “paganism”. Breakfast table talking changed into early morning arguments. We didn’t exactly throw chairs at each other, but some pretty heated and pretty large ideas went flying through the air. Religion and politics became the banned topics at the breakfast table.
So that brings me to the Paffooney points for today. This blog has turned into a place where a disobedient son, a horrible sort of “free-thinker” type of radical hippie pinko goofball, can talk about the loony-liberal progressive ideas that have taken over his good-little Eisenhower-Republican little-boy mind. I spent the last post talking existentially about my religious beliefs. My conservative, old-fashioned friends and family call me an atheist now, but I truly believe in God. It’s just, I recognize the factors behind Christian myths. I bow to the wisdom of Scientists like Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking… as well as hippie psychologists like Alan Watts… and literary heroes like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S, Lewis.
I am proud to be an Iowegian (a Mickian word for being from Iowa), yet my birth-State produces gawd-awful Tea Party politicians like Steve King and Joni Ernst. The stuff that comes out of their mouths doesn’t even make good fertilizer. But they are comedy gold. Will Rogers would have pointed out that the jokes will write themselves. All the humorist would have to do is consult the front page of the newspaper. I also live in Texas where the debate over secession from the United States still goes on with new Governor Greg Abbott, a man who is a Rick Perry clone, except that he hasn’t bothered to put on glasses as much to make him smarter. And Texans are looking forward to the next Republican president in 2016. Both Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are running. That doubles Texas’ chances, right? (Boy, howdy, did that missed prediction from 2016 age poorly!) With Global Warming not being accepted as a real thing, the need for giving all our money to the Koch brothers and the Walton family being recognized by both parties in Congress, and looming war with foreign nations that have the bad sense to be “Muslim in nature”, the future looks kinda bleak. But it is a great time to be a humorist, and I am guessing I won’t be doing very much talking at the breakfast table for a while.
Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain from Disney’s Fantasia
The old faun
In musical terms, Allegro Non Troppo means fast tempo, but not too fast. So, I recently discovered that Allegro Non Troppo is one of many rare and obscure old movies which I am passionate about that can be found in its entirety on YouTube. I will include the YouTube link to a portion of it at the end of this post, and I sincerely recommend that if you have never seen this movie, you watch the whole thing at least once. No matter how many cringes or winces or blushes it causes, this is a movie of many bizarre parts that you really need to take in as a whole. It ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime, the atrociously ugly to the lyrically beautiful, from the brilliant classical score being played by a mistreated band of old ladies with orchestral instruments to a gorilla running amok, from Debussy to Ravel, from an artist released from his cage to single-handedly draw the animation, to a satire rich with baudy humor making fun of no less a work of animation than Prisney’s.. I mean Disney’s Fantasia. The dark elements are there. The light-hearted, lilting comedy is there. The fairy tale delicacy and technicolor dreaming is all there.
And why should this be important to me? Especially now that I am retired from a long and fruitful teaching career? Well, I have history with this movie. I saw it first in college. I was an English major, but I took every film as literature class I could fit into my silly schedule. As an undergrad, I was determined to be a cartoonist for a career. I took classes seriously and aced most of them, but I was at college to intellectually play around. I didn’t take the prescribed courses to be an English teacher. That had to wait for the more responsible me to come along in grad school for that. I saw both Fantasia and Allegro Non Troppo during one of the play-time years. Much as the old satyr in Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, I was enamored with sensory experience. I took my first girlfriend to see Disney’s Fantasia, and she later turned down the opportunity to see Allegro Non Troppo with me. Good sense on her part, but the beginning of the end of our relationship.
Just as Fantasia has the part in it where Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring describes evolution from the beginning of the Earth to the end of the dinosaurs, Allegro Non Troppo uses Ravel’s Bolero to describe the evolution of life on a weird planet from germs in a discarded Coke bottle to the inevitable coming of the malevolent monkey who is ultimately us. And, of course, the satire would not be complete without some off-set for Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. 
As near as I can figure it out, the apprentice, played by Mickey Mouse, becomes the snake from the Garden of Eden in Allegro Non Troppo. When the snake is unable to get Adam and Eve to eat the apple, he makes the mistake of eating the apple himself. He learns the hard way that, no matter how clever, even diabolically clever, you think you are, you are not really in control of anything in life. Every would-be wizard in the world has to understand that he is powerless without hard experience. And what a boring world full of naked people this would be if there were never any apprentices in it foolish enough to actually become wizards. 
Of cou
rse, I haven’t really talked about the most heart-twisting part of Allegro Non Troppo… the sad cat wandering the ruins of his former home, or the most laugh-aloud part with the super-tidy little lady-bee trying to eat a blossom, but being interrupted by a couple of picnickers.
But the thing is, this movie is a timely subject for me. Not only did I, just yesterday, rediscover it, but it still has the same meaning for me now as it did when I first saw it. Then I was an aspiring young artist who loved this movie because it approached ideas non-consecutively, just as I approached my learning years… rambling here and there, finding first a bitter-sweet something, and then a sad beauty behind everything in life. And it is where I am again now, in a poor-health enforced retirement… divorced from teacher’s schedules and time itself. Able to do as I please, and aspiring once again to commit great acts of art.
Filed under movie review, philosophy
I had a second broken molar extracted today. And I lived through it. One more day is the hope. One day at a time.
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Catch a Falling Star 
The Cowboy Code
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
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Filed under autobiography, commentary, cowboys, humor, insight, philosophy, politics, Uncategorized
Tagged as arizona, autobiography, childhood beliefs, cowboy code, Daniel Boone, fiction, guns, humor, politics, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, satire, writing, Wyatt Earp