One way to define myself is through the pictures I draw. So today… less words… more draw.
I am certainly not the greatest artist who ever lived. But when you draw a lot… and do it for 60 years… man, you have a lot of drawings stuffed away in drawers and closets!
Yes, she was a real car. My dad bought her in the 60’s as a used car. But she was a hardtop, not a convertible. She was the car he drove to work every day in Belmond. We called it the “Pink and White Pumpkin”, my sisters and I, referring to the pumpkin in Cinderella which the fairy godmother changes into a coach. But it would only later become the car of my dreams.
You see, she was killed in the Belmond Tornado of 1966. Her windows were all broken out and her frame was twisted. So the pictures of her, though they look exactly like my memories of her, minus the rust spots, are not actual pictures of the car in question. Our next door neighbor, Stan the Truck Man, was a mechanic always on the lookout for salvage parts. He took her apart piece by piece while she sat in our driveway. We continued to sit in her and play in her until all that was left was the bare frame. My friend Werner told me for the first time about the facts of life and where babies really came from in the back seat while she was being gradually dismantled. Of course, I was nine at the time and didn’t really believe him. How could that grossness actually be true?
But she still lives, that old dream car… She is the reason that I objectify my imagination as a ship with pink sails. My daydreams, my creative fantasies, and those long, lingering plays in the theater of my imagination as I am drifting off to sleep all start in the three-masted sailing ship with pink sails. And that dream image was born from the Pink and White Pumpkin. I have sailed in her to many an exotic place… even other planets. And when I die, she will take me home again.
The Mickey gets tired of Donald Trump-Duck quacking on Twitter and knacking his flitter like so many ditter and bitter pitter witter.
Yeah, I know. Mickey could be using spell check better. But sometimes you just have to let the pink-and-white four-door 1957 Mercury Monterey of your imagination wander where it will, even if it takes you to the land of misspelled words.
Destroyed by the tornado in 1966, it still chugs around inside my head.
So let me tell you a misspelled story;
Pompolina Cookiespitter was spooplemad for blaying dinkleball with the doofenburgers. She doorsized dinkleball ten times more fopserisciously than any doofenburger ever minxyblootered. And if you minxyblooter too snerkly you will dopserizingly biffle dorpsnitz. So no doofenburger ever really snorkled dinkleball with Pompolina. It shlayed her so fopserisciously that she almost blootenbursted. Doofenburgers everywhere schneed from horpspittoon.
Now, that story makes no sense at all. Yet, I am confident you can tell me, how does Pompolina feel about blaying dinkleball? And how do doofenburgers feel about it? And is it safe to minxyblooter too snerkly? What is the possible outcome of that?
If you can answer those questions about my story, then you have some idea about how American politics feels after Donald Trump-Duck blootenbursted everywhere his first two weeks in office. So there.
This is not a picture of Betsy DeVos. This is an orc used as a metaphor, something children will no longer learn how to use in the dark new future of education.
Orcs, as depicted by Tolkien in his epic work The Lord of the Rings, are an unhappy lot, hating everyone, especially themselves and their masters whom they serve only out of fear. Sound like modern-day Republicans? Well, that’s probably not a fair comparison. Shame on you for thinking like that. Although, I must admit, looking at the Secretary of Education that Donald Trump has foisted upon us with the aid of senate Republicans, there is probably good reason you might think that.
Orcs, according to Tolkien, create no beautiful things. They live out their lives violently destroying everything and everyone they touch. They are greedy, corrupt, disloyal, and generally the very definition of ugliness. And they have been the opponents of good public education for as long as I have been associated with schools and teaching.
Here is an actual portrait of DeVos. Sorry to spring something so foul and gut-wrenchingly horrible on you, but I thought you ought to have some idea how hideous this orcishness really is.
Orcs always tell me, “You can’t solve education’s problems by throwing money at them.” What they really mean when they say this is either, “I can afford to put my kids in a good school that will only teach them what I want them to know, and I don’t think any of my money should be taken from me by taxation to pay for the education of poor people’s kids, especially not stupid poor people’s kids.” Or, more likely, “I am too dumb not to believe rich white people when they say the world will be better for me and mine if I let rich white people keep all the money they make and make all the money they want.” Either way, in Texas where the orcs have ruled since the Reagan Revolution first won over the rich white orcs that carry their orcish tribal banners all over oil-rich Texas, money has never been an issue for Texas public schools. There simply is no money for public schools in Texas. Over the past decade the State has always chosen to cut school funding before dipping into their vaunted billion-dollar rainy day fund whenever the Republican legislatures create a huge budget shortfall. And whenever there has been a budget surplus, education funds are not restored. Things like the fight against evil Planned Parenthood clinics take precedence.
Members of the Texas State Legislature
Now Betsy DeVos, who became our current Secretary of Education despite resistance from all non-orc members of the US Senate, plus two orcs, will now give the orc hordes everything they want for education. The federal Department of Education will be dismantled from the inside. Privatized for-profit schools will become the new normal and receive funding disproportionate to the work they actually do. All the cream belonging to rich folks will be skimmed off the top of the educational milk vat, and the rest will be left to fester and spoil in public school vats, becoming, at best, really really stinky cheese.
And so, let me end by saying, “Thank you, orcs, for doing such a wonderful job of protecting my children and grandchildren from the horrors of education and the ability to think for themselves. You have protected them from ever learning enough to pull themselves out of the poverty and slavish lives you have put them in.”
Filed under angry rant, education, feeling sorry for myself, humor, metaphor, monsters, politics, red States, satire
Canto Thirty-Three – Aboard Golden Wing Thirteen
Shalar looked at the readout on the control panel in front of her. There was no mistaking that signature. It was the same kind of supra-magnetic photon drive used in a Golden Wing, and it was no longer operational. It also appeared to be crash-landed in the middle of a debris field, and that couldn’t be good. In addition, it also had to be the tadpoles’ ship, because Farbick and Biznap on the other missing ship were too capable to have crashed in that manner.
“Is it them?” asked Harmony Castille. The beautiful young Earth woman who was really an old lady made young and beautiful by Commander Biznap’s own de-evolution machine. She had a grim face, like someone who expected the answer could only be bad news.
“I don’t see how it could be anybody else.”
“Life signs?”
“I register bodies with no breathing and considerable signs of disease. No living bodies… but no confirmation that the dead ones are our missing tadpoles.”
Harmony seemed to stifle a sob.
“Why are you so affected by Telleron tadpoles, Harmony? I understand how much you are in love with Commander Biznap, but none of these tadpoles are his.”
“I have never in my long life had children of my own. I have always loved children vicariously through the young brats and evildoers I taught in Sunday School at the Methodist Church back in Iowa.” A tear escaped the beautiful young woman’s eye and rolled down her powdered and rouged cheek. Shalar couldn’t help but notice that even though the woman’s face was young, her eyes held a certain look of wisdom and experience, as well as pain.
“I will be very sad if I have lost young Tanith and Davalon. They are very probably children from my own eggs, even though we usually only keep track of the male parents.”
“I will miss young mistresses Brekka and Menolly, too,” said Harmony sadly. “Their immature giggles and love of dancing always seemed to brighten the room whenever I tried to teach them important life lessons from the Bible.”
“I thought the way you talked to them while teaching them meant you loathed their immature behavior.”
“Oh, I did hate most of the behavior, but I adored those girls. Underneath the death-eye frowns I gave them, I was always secretly laughing at their antics.”
“I never realized that about you before, Harmony,” Shalar said with some sympathy.
“What kind of mean old fuddy-fuss did you take me for, Shalar?” Harmony gave a small chuckle with the reply.
“The kind you were pretending to be, apparently.”
“I will miss the Morrells, too. They were a little dim sometimes, but basically good Christian people.”
“…And how about little George Jetson?”
Harmony’s eyebrows raised in disbelief of some sort. “That little heathen? He was almost as full of Satan and evil ways as one of our Earth boys from the Norwall Methodist Church! He made me wonder sometimes if he actually had a little bit of wicked Baptist in his demon blood. I never met such a child for pranks and playing with his privates when he should be listening to some good, soul-saving advice!”
Shalar was amused by that reaction. She was beginning to understand how self-contradictory Earther primates actually were. In fact, she understood that the reaction actually meant that Harmony would miss that little rapscallion more than all the rest put together. Shalar had come to see that the old church lady always claimed to hate most what she really loved and adored.
“Studpopper, can you land this wing near the wreckage down there? We need to find our missing children.”
“I will certainly do my very best, my lady.”
Harmony quickly grabbed Studpopper’s pointy green ear and twisted.
“You’d dang well better do better than that!” the young old lady cried with passion.
*****
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, science fiction
I don’t know if you have seen the news about the unauthorized portrait statue of The Great Orange Face and the excitement it generated. The statue is totally naked. And, as you can see, people reacted by taking pictures of the statue, taking pictures of themselves with the statue, and taking for themselves a good, long look-see. This person naked is somehow inherently more interesting than he is with all his clothes on, and his big red tie too. And I am mystified by that. I mean, we don’t have to actually see him naked to know what he looks like naked. And it is not a pretty sight.
And you know full well that the orangutan we elected did not pose for this statue. It could only come into being because the artist knows enough about anatomy to create it just from what he already knows about the man. The man is naked enough in his daily life that we all know almost everything about his naked character, even though he never seems to be without his business suit. He’s a naked racist. He’s a naked misogynist. He has a naked affection for his eldest daughter and thinly concealed dissatisfaction with his other kids. We see far more of him than we really want to see.
If you are, perhaps, wondering where I am going with this, what today’s theme is, then here it is. All people are naked all the time. (Well, maybe not Iron Man in his suit or soldiers in bullet-proof combat armor, but we are talking metaphorical here, not literal.)
The girl who posed for this portrait, whose name I will not reveal, doesn’t really quite look like this. It is titled Her #2 because it was actually drawn in pen and ink while looking at the original pencil sketch. And she was actually another man’s girlfriend and became another man’s wife. She posed for me out of respect for my art skills and from the urging of others rather than anything I ever said or did. As an artist you never really capture the nakedness of your subject. You can really only capture what is in your own head, your response to the subject, and so, the nakedness becomes your own. This picture shows the awkwardness I felt since I really haven’t drawn a nude model more than a handful of times in my entire life. I made her look younger, thinner, and more child-like than she actually was. She liked the result, at least the version I gave to her, which was different as well. But the nakedness here is really mine.
The girl in the second nude portrait I am sharing is done from more than one photograph, and the red panda was even a picture from a magazine. So again, the picture tells you nothing about the model herself. It tells you about me. The happiness and warmth the picture conveys comes from the colors and the composition. A certain freeness of spirit and joy of life. It probably also helps you interpret this to know that my wife is from the Philippines, and hence, is the actual island girl who inspired this particular piece even though she did not pose for it herself. The nakedness in the picture is not about sex or desire. Rather, it is about innocence and happiness and love, warm sunshine on your naked body while at the nude beach (an experience I have only actually witnessed myself, never taken part in.)
So I am claiming in this essay that everybody is naked when you look at them with eyes of understanding. People reveal their own naked selves by their every action, word, and deed. As a blogger, I am probably more naked than most. I have written a bit about literally everything that touches my life and experience. I am a novelist too, which makes me more naked still. But as I show you my most recent nude self-portrait and contemplate me in my utter nakedness I hope you will agree that I am not a pornographer, and I am not as ugly on the inside as I am on the outside. Be prepared for a slight shock;
Surely you are not surprised that the picture is in cartoon form, and not the picture of a naked sixty-year-old fat man. It is my naked, shy self. On the inside Mickey has always been twelve years old. And keep this in mind. According to my silly art-philosophy bull-puckie, you are naked too.
This is not actually a picture of Boogendorf, this is Toonerville where the clocks are wrong and a giant Mickey Mouse lurks in the foothills beyond.
Today I mean to justify my existence before God and everybody. Apparently in the modern world you have to be certain things in your basic foundation to justify getting travel visas, citizenship, and a basic right to continue to exist unmolested. We apparently elected a new leader, the Mad King of Boogendorf, to make sure all Boogendorfers are suitably qualified to live in Boogendorf. So this is a brief photo essay to justify my case for why Boogendorf should accept me as a citizen and not execute me outright.
First of all, I am not one hundred per cent crazy. You can tell from this photo, can’t you?
This kooky dorfleflop can’t be any more than 65% crazy because his pin head is not large enough to harbor more than 65 out of every 100 truly derfy and sanity-stealing notions. (What is a dorfleflop, you say? Well, dorf is a German word for town, and dorfleflops flop in a dorf and think they belong like everybody else who has flopped there before.)
But using the Mad King of Boogendorf as a measuring stick (an orange measuring stick with an extra-long tie), that is clearly not crazy enough by half.
What’s the deal with the clocks always being wrong in Boogendorf?
I have always heard it said, “It takes a village to raise a child”. And I think that saying I heard is probably true. I was raised by the village of Rowan, Iowa in the 60’s and 70’s. I learned to draw there. And I can draw real cartoon human beings.
Of course, one must be careful to note that if you could actually draw real cartoon human beings they would be alive after that, and that would make you like God, able to create life from nothing more than pencil, pen, and paper. And in Boogendorf there is only room for one God. That, of course, is the Mad King of Boogendorf. So I guess that is a disqualifying quality too.
And that saying about a child raised by a village is a saying somehow connected to Hillary Clinton, and Hillary Clinton was defeated (I have also heard disgraced, demoralized, and denounced) in the last election by getting more votes than the Mad King of Boogendorf. So I am judged lacking by my upbringing too.
I am also undeniably guilty of playing with dolls. I mean, I collect them, I comb their hair, dress them in different clothes, take them apart and repair them, and pose them for pictures. That can’t be normal. But is it abnormal enough to make me qualified to be a Boogendorfer from the village of Boogendorf? Maybe if I plated them in gold or something, or had enough money to go to “golden shower” extremes? I guess I don’t understand how to be Boogendorfy enough to live in Boogendorf. The “Boo” in Boogendorf proves that you have to be pathologically afraid of things more, just like other Boogendorfers are. I am sure the average Boogendorfer is afraid of people who play with dolls. Especially if those weird people don’t own any guns and don’t like to kill stuff. That just ain’t natural. You even need to give guns to little girls to make them safe against those evil anti-Boogendorfers.
So, I guess I am doomed to live a life outside of the walls of Boogendorf (and they are really great walls, too). I should be grateful that the citizens of Boogendorf have only rejected me and not used their sacred second-amendment rights to execute me. For now, I am simply not a Boogendorfer.
Filed under angry rant, cartoons, humor, mental health, politics, satire
This is my bird-walking illustration. I know that it is totally the wrong picture for the job, but it is a bird walking, isn’t it.
It is not a stretch to suggest that most of what you find on Facebook is not real. Especially when it comes to the endless posting and sharing of topical political memes. I had thought when Facebook came out with their reaction-emoji thingies, that there was at least one I would never find a use for. 
Boy! Was I ever wrong about that. Now that the gold-plated pumpkinhead that got himself elected somehow is busy with his markers and crayons making executive orders, it is about the only one that really fits anywhere.
We made a big mistake allowing Trump to play Prexy and be the one in charge of making the rules of the game. You all knew he was gonna cheat before the game even started, didn’t you? And it won’t last long. He is making allies like Australia into offended enemies. He is banning burn victims, heroic Iraqi translators, doctors, and researchers from coming into the country with their entry visas and green cards and other proof that they have a right to be here. He is burning up any goodwill and patience and level-headedness that we have tried to afford him. He will be impeached, or worse, sooner rather than later. And then we will have to live with the irreparable damage he has done. 
And we probably deserve it. We have made mistakes before, and if we live long enough, we will make more in the future. But this was a big one. And I don’t have to feel happy about it. No matter what my conservative friends on Facebook tell me… or what names they call me.
So that’s where the bird-walking comes in. The mind has to wander away down paths of lesser resistance. We need to go where the sandpiper would go, walking down the beach to look for new and interesting-looking seeds to eat.
You really should add this to your Bob Ross Bible if you haven’t already.
All of my illustrations in this article, except for the walking bird, which I drew myself, are clipped directly from Facebook. Facebook is sometimes the soul source of wisdom for Village Idiots, and I should probably make an effort to be one less of the time. But it is also an excellent source of bird-walking topics that get my mind off the terrible things and onto free-floating tangents that take me to places my mind would really rather be.
I would’ve liked to have attended Pillsbury’s funeral, but the meme only gave the time and length of the service, not the date. I fear that by now I have missed it. But I am sure the service was well done.
Nostalgia memes on Facebook are great. They make me feel all squishy and sad again about the times long gone and how terrifyingly horrible they were compared to how terrible they are now.
Remember John Wayne Gacy? Or reports on television about the Viet Nam War? With pictures? Full color pictures of the My Lai Massacre in living color on NBC, with all the blood in bright red. Yeah, that stuff on TV kept us outdoors quite a lot.
But Facebook bird-walking is a dangerous sport. If you let it, it will eat up your whole life, minute by minute, hour by hour. And I’m not sure it makes you smarter in any way. I know some pretty stupid people who are on Facebook quite a lot.
Bird-walking at its best, though, is to coddiwomple. And though you don’t know where you are going, you will get there sooner or later, so you might as well look at the scenery and appreciate the irony along the way. Life should be a leisurely stroll, not a rush to get away from gold-plated pumpinheads with executive orders in their tiny, tiny hands.
Filed under angry rant, battling depression, clowns, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, humor, irony, memes, Paffooney
This is a doodle even though it may look like finished art. I began doodling with a pencil and she wasn’t a starship captain until I began inking it.
Yes, now and again I have to doodle. You pick up the drawing tool and a blank piece of paper, and you let your mind go anywhere and everywhere that it wants to go. Why did I choose to doodle a girl? Sounds kinda creepy and bad, doesn’t it? But I like science fiction and adventure and young people… I’m turning myself into a young adult author, after all. And I like girls… even though I am 60 and my prostate is enlarged and rather dead. I’m still a guy and I ain’t completely dead. So maybe it isn’t really so creepy. I am trying to keep my mind off of you-know-who… he-who-shall-not-be-named. Yeah, this guy.
This is truly a doodle. I drew it in pen in about ten minutes time. And it sucks (in the sense of a vacuum cleaner) because the overlong tie looks like a stream of blood and I think I drew the hands too big to look realistic.
Random and open to the bizarre, allowing for accidents to appear on the page (both the Bob Ross happy kind and the not-so-happy kind), able to follow the wandering mind as fast as the hand can capture the flow of images and ideas in the silly old noodle. That is not only what a doodle is, it is what this essay is. A doodle essay.
I can do that without making a total poo-poo mess because I have practiced so much with pencil and pen and ink and paper that the lines flow naturally from my fingers. And I can rely on my constant habit of writing stupid thoughts down to create a semi-coherent essay out of random jumbled thoughts. Instinct born of practice guides my mind and hand.
Here’s a random picture of the wall by my bed where I am writing this. Perhaps it could be called a camera doodle?
Doodling helps me avoid the things needing to be avoided. The world is ending. Betsy DeVos is likely to be the Secretary of Education. A trade war with Mexico will bring an end to much of the fruits and vegetables we can afford to eat. I am big on avoiding. You can tell that in my camera doodle. Christmas lights Mickey hasn’t taken down yet? Yeah, I’m thinking about leaving them up permanently. You know, just until the world finishes ending. My family, as Jehovah’s Witnesses, don’t celebrate Christmas anyway. So what can it hurt if I keep my one dollar string of colored lights up for another few weeks. Just until the Russian nukes start raining down on Dallas Fort Worth thanks to the red tie guy.
So there is nothing important at all in today’s blog. Just doodles everywhere. But why, then, does it make me feel so much better? Well, I would say, “Because doodling makes it better.”
Filed under artwork, cartoons, doodle, drawing, foolishness, humor, illustrations, insight, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Catch a Falling Star 
Ponderously Pondering the Imponderable
Now that I have retired as a school teacher, I have so many spare thinks to think which I do not have to use to guide the future of school children, that I begin to wonder what I am really going to do with all those closets and suitcases full of spare thinks beyond allowing them to simply pile up.
A lot of those spare thinks lately have been taken up by the imponderable primate that has taken over the government of our little country. I am keenly aware that, in the arc of history, nations and countries and even peoples reach the eventual end of the road and simply are no more. Our country could very well be headed the way of the Roman Empire, the Maurya Empire, the Mongol Empire, and the Abbasid Caliphate. They all ended with a mixture of violence and upheaval and suffering. And did you even know that they existed? Did you know that the Roman Empire was the smallest one on my list?
The imponderable primate has also moved the Doomsday Clock thirty seconds closer to midnight. The threats posed by nuclear war and global warming are made greater now because the hand on the ship’s wheel of the most powerful ship of state in the modern world is a tiny, unsteady hand controlled by a “really good brain”. That’s why my Stardusters novel is a comedy about the end of the world and uses parodies of conservative politicians from our world to play the roles of lizard men intent on destroying their own planet.
I had intended to write a piece today about naked people, a light and breezy essay in more ways than one. But I don’t want to let that turn into soft core porn or anything. It needs to be more carefully planned and carried out. Naked people really aren’t the danger that conservative and born-again Christians fear that they are, but you have to be careful of people’s sensibilities anyway. Especially when you are mentally writing stuff with no metaphorical clothes on. So I put that aside for the moment and spent some time this morning pondering the nature of pondering, what I think about thinking. And so, while sorting through baskets and suitcases and a packed garage full of spare thinks, I wrote this essay instead, to write about nothing in a way that might actually mean something. And if you believe that, it is no wonder the orange fellow was able to fool us all.
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Filed under blog posting, commentary, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, goofy thoughts, humor, metaphor, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as Metacognition, pondering, worry, writing and planning writing