December 22, 2024 · 1:02 am

Christmas Catalogs of the 60s

They came in the mail every November in the 1960’s. Particularly important was the Monkey Ward’s catalog because there was a Montgomery Ward Catalog Store in Belmond on Main Street. Mom and Dad could order, pay for, and pick up things there, particularly Christmas and birthday gifts. The four of us; my little brother, my two younger sisters, and I would argue about who would get to look at it next for hours at a time (the catalog, not the store… although the man who ran the store sold tropical fish in the back, so I could look at that for hours).

I, of course, dog-eared different pages than my sisters Nancy and Mary did. And David was eight years younger than me and was into baby toys, blocks, and books.

Nancy owned the three on the left.
I was nutty about model trains… and so was Dad.

I am amazed at how cheap things were back then compared to now. Of course, things were more easily destroyed because of the cheaper plastics and simpler ingredients and materials common in the 1960’s. So, it is truly amazing how many of those toys I still have. And how many survived me only to be destroyed by my own children.

And it often wasn’t enough to look at just the Monkey Ward’s catalog. (Grandpa Aldrich always called it “Monkey” instead of “Montgomery”, a pretty standard old-farmer joke in the 60’s). Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich always got a copy of the Sears catalog. And we would pour over that to find treasures that Monkey Ward’s didn’t have. That was inconvenient for Mom and Dad. The nearest Sears store was in Mason City, 50 miles northeast.

I was 10 years old in ’66.
Mary Poppins was a 60’s Disney hit.

Just the mention of Christmas catalogs of old when discussing with sisters flashes me back to the time when I was in grade school and Christmas time was all about being good for Santa because… well, toys.

And old Christmas catalogs still fascinate me. I love to look back through ten-year-old Mickey-eyes at a simpler, kinder time. Although, if I’m honest with myself, it probably wasn’t really any better than now. I just choose to believe that it was.

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December 21, 2024 · 3:24 am

Three Wishes

This morning, I was cleaning out a closet when I came across a familiar magic lamp. I rubbed it with a clean cloth, and blue smoke billowed out of the fire spout.

“Ah, hello again, Master Mickey.”

“Gene? You should not still be here. I already used my wishes.”

“That is true, Master Mickey, but I find myself back in your possession again.”

“How did that happen?”

“Well, the first new master I found did not wish nearly as wisely as you.”

“Oh, how so?”

“Well, apparently old Smedley Pinchpenny wanted to be extremely wealthy. So, he wished it would be possible for Donald Trump to be President again.”

“So, you made it possible.”

“Yes, I did. And then he wished that it was possible for gold coins to rain from above right where Smedley was at that moment… In his kitchen.”

“So, you made that possible too.”

“Yes. And when he didn’t see anything happening, he asked why. I told him that he only made the wish for it to be possible. He didn’t actually wish for it to happen. So, he got mad and wished for the kitchen to be filled with gold coins.”

“So, it rained coins on his head and that killed him.”

“Well, you know that the kitchen held more than two tons of gold. It kinda squished him before he realized what was happening. When his wife opened the kitchen door, the magic lamp flowed out on top of the gold coins. She was happy as soon as I explained about the three new wishes. She wished for all the gold to be transferred into her bank account. I explained it would have to be transformed into numbers to be wired into her bank account. She told me to count every single coin and put that all in the bank. So, I counted them as I made each one disappear and placed a penny in her account for each one. It was a tidy little sum of cash.”

“She was upset when she checked her account, wasn’t she?”

“Extremely. She said for her final two wishes that she wanted two million dollars and a handsome man to replace her pancake of a husband.”

“So, how did she die?”

“The handsome bankrobber skidded to a stop in his getaway car right in front of her house. He tossed her the satchel with the two million in it and told her he needed her to be his human shield. She could share in the loot if they survived. The police skidded to a stop and returned fire when the robber tried to shoot his way out of trouble.”

“So, who got the lamp?”

“The couple’s twelve-year-old son got home from school at that moment. I explained about the three wishes. He wished his parents alive again.”

“So, what did the zombies do?”

“They started out eating the cops… you know, their brains. Then when they came for the boy to eat his brain, he wished loudly that no one had made any bad wishes that day.”

“So, the zombies became parents again and the robber and the cops disappeared?”

“That’s right. The only good wish of the day… up to that point.”

“What was the third wish?”

“He wished the lamp would go back where it came from.”

“Ah, I see…”

“Mickey, you do make good wishes, but you can’t use the same three as before. What are your new three wishes?”

I knew right away how careful I needed to be. But I didn’t waste any time.

“I wish you would make it possible for as many of us as feasable to survive the climate crisis with perseverence and creativity. I wish it will be possible for as many of us as is reasonable to survive Trump’s second administration without suffering too much. And I wish you and your family have a nice Christmas in the Bahamas.”

“Mickey, you are a good wish-maker.” He disappeared with his lamp in a puff of blue smoke.

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December 20, 2024 · 1:08 am

Christmas Woe

Why is Ariel dressed in armor? Well, the American people reelected the malevolent and vengeful Pumpkinhead. He plans to hurt us all deeply for giggles and profits. Honestly, he was merely a corrupt criminal leader in his first administration. And then he committed treason and we failed to execute him, so he merely stewed for four years. The number of deeply racist, angry, and evil poor folks have also been stewing and becoming worse, ready to anoint him and back him as he visits cruelty and death on everybody they hate. The near future is not Disneyland.

I pixelated this 80’s style of a computerized portrait of Ariel using AI Mirror.

So, Ariel is the only one I can depend on not to change for the worse. Things will become horrible financially, and socially, and we may even starve to death. Climate change will devastate civilization. The Pumpkinhead will loot and pillage, blame and punish, and make our lives Hell as the world crashes to an end.

Ariel, of course, is made of plastic. (I did not cut her hair. I gave her a ponytail with a scrunchy.) That is why she will not change until the world burns down. I am not superstitious and tempted to believe the Bible’s Armageddon prophecy is coming true. Because I do not believe in salvation and an afterlife. We get the life we need and deserve, and then the universe is done with us, and our part in the greater story is done. But I take comfort in the fact that the book does not close. The story goes on without me. Therein lies eternity.

The facts are depressing, but it will be quite an experience. And the Pumpkinhead does not live forever, either.

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December 19, 2024 · 1:08 am

What Dreams Will Reveal

Dorin, Me, My Wife, the Princess, and Henry

I respond to dreaming in ways that make sense in my stupid head, though the responses probably seem crazy to others.

The picture above was painted in oils in the early 1990’s before I met my wife. It was in response to a Bambi dream that seemed to be about my family as a family of deer. This was not about my family from childhood. It was, at the time, about my family in the future. Somehow I got it right. Two boys and a girl. Together for 30 years next month.

This picture is called, “The Boy Who Saw the Colors”,

Some pictures are dream images that can only be interpreted metaphorically. This one is about me being creative and artistical… or autistical as the case may be. It is also about being a synesthete with pronounced synesthesia.

This dream was a dream about being a Native American during a thunderstorm. It is called “the Magic-Man’s Daughter” because the Dakota Sioux tribe held the belief that dreams about lightning reveal you as a Shaman or Magic Man. Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka is the Lakotah word for “the Great Mystery”. That was a dream that sent me to the library to look things up.

I have dreams with clowns in them that are not nightmares. Here the clown known as Mr. Disney is encouraging me to sing sad songs.

I wrote an entire novel about that whopper of a dream.

This dream had me trapped in a tomb with a Mummy who wouldn’t stay in his nice warm sarcophagus.

It is not uncommon to dream about death and mortality. More than once I have dreamed about my own death. None of them have yet proved prophetic, but you never know.

I dreamed about my eldest son 14 years before he was born.

I think dreams can be prophetic because they are not bound by our perceptions of time in the physical universe. You can look ahead in a dream to that which has not yet happened. You can also look backward into the past beyond the boundary of your own birth. I often think some of my most vivid dreams are about peering into past lives and a very different me.

I know I sound crazy when I talk about my dreams. But they are a significant source for my artwork and creative endeavors. And dreams have a logic that doesn’t work by the rules of the world we know. Rather, it is a world of wonder.

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December 18, 2024 · 2:32 am

Holidays Begin to Set In

This year has been different than practically any other year I have lived through. 2016 was a little bit like now, but then the Pumpkinhead hadn’t applied the infected screws to our collective rumps before. This time it is not a mystery how bad it could get. Liberals and people who have empathy for people other than their own families and close friends are all depressed. Hope for the future is fading.

And this is supposed to be the happiest time of the year. Well, hatred and loathing of “others” is what they voted inB. Revenge and retribution is what the Pumpkinhead is hot for. So, don’t expect me to be jolly and cooperative. Kill me if you must, but you will not make me call him President anymore.

But they can not take my joy and love away. Most of the happiness in my life comes from memories of the past. I hope to outlive the Pumpkinhead. It will add to my happiness to read his obituary, especially if it contains even more felony convictions. I may not have any grandchildren, and my wife doesn’t celebrate Christmas for religious reasons. But I do still look forward to time and laughs with family.

Both of the Paffooneys in this post are mere practice doodles. Being an artist, though not a professional one, keeps me going when everything else brings gloom.

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December 17, 2024 · 1:00 am

Living in the Spider Kingdom

Life seems to be getting harder and harder. And I realize that a big part of that perception is the fact that my health is deteriorating quickly. This is a humor blog, but it has been getting more and more serious and more and more grim as the grim reaper becomes more and more a central character in my own personal story.

My perception of reality, however, is best explained by a passage in a novel that spoke to me in college. It comes from the novel, the Bildungsroman by Thomas Mann called Der Zauberberg, in English, The Magic Mountain. In the scene, Hans Castorp is possibly freezing to death, and he hallucinates a pastoral mountainside scene where children are happily playing in the sunshine. Possibly Heaven? But maybe not. As he goes into a stone building and finds a passage down into the ground, he sees wrinkled, ugly, horrible hags gathered around a child’s corpse, eating it. And this vision explains the duality at the center of the meaning of life.

For every good thing, there is an equal and opposite bad thing that balances it out. There is no understanding what perfection and goodness mean without knowing profanity and evil. Just as you can’t understand hot without cold nor light without darkness. And you don’t get to overturn the way it is. You try your hardest to stay on the heads side of the coin knowing that half the time life falls to tails.

So, what good does it do me to think about and write about things like this? Well, it makes for me a sort of philosophical gyroscope that spins and dances and helps me keep my balance in the stormy sea of daily life. I deal with hard things with humor and a sense of literary irony. I make complex metaphors that help me throw a rope around the things that hurt me.

We are living now in the Spider Kingdom. Hard times are here again. The corrupt and corpulent corporate spiders are spinning the many webs we are trapped in. As metaphorical as it is, we wouldn’t have the government we currently have and be suffering the way we are if that weren’t true.

But no bad thing nor no good thing lasts forever. The wheel goes round and round. The top of the wheel reaches the bottom just as often as the bottom returns to the top. So, it will all pass if we can only hold out long enough.

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December 16, 2024 · 3:29 am

Character Portraits in a New Novel

I am past the 50,000 word mark. It is almost finished. Here I wish to show you the main characters of the novel through illustrations I have created over the years..

Milt Morgan is one of the four main narrators of the novel.

He is a fifteen-year-old Belle City High School freshman in 1976. He is the most imaginative of the Norwall Pirates softball team and liars’ club.

He tells his portion of the story in the form of journal entries.

Anita Jones and her boyfriend the Superchicken (Edward Campbell)

Anita Jones is the most central of the four narrators in that she is the cousin of Icarus Jones, the character at the center of the whole plot.

She is a fifteen-year-old freshman girl who has had a steady boyfriend since the spring of 1975. She tells her part of the story by writing letters about Icarus and the things happening in the little town of Norwall in the summer of 1976. She is writing to her cousin Dot who is much more interested at the start about Anita’s boyfriend Eddie than she is about cousin Icky.

Brent Clarke is the high school freshman athlete and leader of the Norwall Pirates. He is interested in becoming a policeman or detective, and as one of the four narrators, he tells his part of the story through his investigator’s notes which he takes religiously on practically everything.

He feels responsible for all the Pirates, especially Icarus when he comes under attack during the adventure in the summer of the Bicentennial year.

The fourth narrator is Sherry Cobble who has a twin sister named Shelly and is dedicated to being a nudist. In fact, she very much wants to convince all the Pirates to be comfortable with their own naked bodies. Realizing that dream, though, is complicated.

Especially because it’s Bible Belt Iowa and her nudist family is looked at as being the somewhat crazy hippie-type kind of people that are barely tolerated by the law.

She writes about it all in her Lovely Nudist’s Diary where she can write about her naturist beliefs, successes and failures, and her boyfriend, Brent.

Icarus Jones is the central character of The Boy… Forever. He tries to kill himself early in the year of 1976 and finds out by jumping off the MacArthur Bridge in St. Louis that he cannot die naturally. And worse is in store. Beyond the fact that he is an immortal, he is being pursued by an undead Chinese wizard who is a dragon in human form.

Fiona Long, usually called Fi, convinced her stepfather to move to Norwall, following Icarus as he moves to Norwall from St. Louis. She tells everyone in her freshman class that Fi is really short for Firefang, and she is a red dragon in human form.

She becomes friends with the Pirates. She learns to trust and like Anita and Sherry. And she is mightily attracted to Brent who is actually Sherry’s boyfriend.

Fi’s stepfather, Tien Long, is the villain. He is in reality a Chinese Celestial Dragon in human form. He also needs Icarus’s blood to continue to live his long, nearly-immortal life.

It is almost done, this novel. And as you can probably tell from the character pictures, this is not the first novel about the Norwall Pirates. So, it is a pirate novel with dragons and immortals in it. It has been fun to write. And soon it will be complete.

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December 15, 2024 · 2:39 am

Practicing Swimming in Place

Miranda’s Selfie in Hawaii

I don’t begrudge Miranda for having her extended vacation in Hawaii. After all, she lost both of her parents in a plane crash. And even if she did inherit twenty million dollars, and the people who actually take care of her are still with her because she has always been raised by her nanny and the household staff, she is still dealing with a terrible loss that most teenagers don’t have to deal with. Also, there’s the fact that her life is entirely fictional. I need a vacation from my life too. I have dealt with the harm done me by Donald Trump, Covid, Bankruptcy, and ill health for eight years already. Now I have been given the gift of four more Trump years. What the heck? I voted against the Pumpkinhead. Why didn’t that work?

My writing time has become unsustainable. I am barely getting anything new done day by day.

But I have gone back and reread some of my own best writing. And as much as any good author always feels like his work, even his best work, is little more than a pile of crap, I have discovered that some of my crap-tastic creations are really pretty good.

Have you read this one, for instance?

So, when Miranda gets back from Hawaii, we’ll see what happens next. I want to finish some of what I already started. I also want to tell Miranda’s story and bring her to life as well. That’s only fair after I killed off her parents in my imagination. Such a devastating crash!

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Christmas Elves and Holiday Fairies

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December 14, 2024 · 1:00 am
December 13, 2024 · 1:05 am

I Hope You Dance…

When you walk to the front of the classroom and take up the big pencil in front of a group of young teens and twelve-year-olds, there is a strong pressure to learn how to sing and dance. That, of course, is a metaphor. I was always too arthritic and clunky in my movements to literally dance. But I looked out over a sea of bored and malevolence-filled eyes, slack and sometimes drooling mouths attached to hormone-fueled and creatively evil minds. And I was being paid to put ideas in their heads. Specifically boring and difficult ideas that none of them really wanted in their own personal heads. So I felt the need to learn to dance, to teach in ways that were engaging like good dance tunes, and entertaining in ways that made them want to take action, to metaphorically get up and dance along with me.

I wanted them to enjoy learning the way I did.

But the music of the teacher is not always compatible with the dance style of the individual learner. The secret behind that is, there is absolutely no way to prompt them to dance along with you until you learn about the music already playing in their stupid little heads. (And you can’t, of course ever use the word “stupid” out loud, no matter how funny or true the word is,) You have to get to know a kid before you can teach them anything.

The discordant melodies and bizarre tunes you encounter when you talk to them is like dancing in a minefield blindfolded. Some don’t have enough to eat at home and have to survive off of the nutrition-less food they get in the school cafeteria’s free-and-reduced lunch program. Some of them have never heard a single positive thing from the adults at home, enduring only endless criticism, insults, and sometimes fists. Some of them fall in love you. Some due to hormones. Some due to the fact that you treat them like a real human being. Some because they just stupidly assume that everyone dances to the same tunes they hear in their own personal head.

Some of them automatically hate you because they know that if you hear their own secret music in their own self-loathing heads, you will never accept it. They hate you because you are a teacher and teachers always hate them. Some of them, deep down, are as loathsome as they think they are.

But, if you find the right music, you can get any of them, even all of them, to dance. It might be hard to find. It might be a nearly impossible task to learn to play that music once you find it. But it can be done.

And if you get them to dance to your music, to dance along with you, I can’t think of anything more rewarding, anything more life-fulfilling. Have you ever tried it for yourself? If you are not a teacher, how about with your own children or the children related to you? Everybody should learn to dance this dance I am talking about in metaphors. At least once in your life. It is addictive. You will want to dance more. So the next time the music starts and you get the chance… I hope you’ll dance!

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