Life Inside

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There is a certain amount of frustration that comes with age and arthritis and limited ability to move.  A good share of the time I am stuck within my bedroom/studio.  Bad weather and weather changes, as well as the strains of housework, stiffen my back into immobility.  So, I am stuck exploring not the outside world, but the inner world of stories, pictures, and my own imagination.

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Of course, one has to beware of a life lived in imagination and isolation.  Some of it can be kinda wicked and dangerous.  Okay, maybe not, but definitely in danger of overwhelming goofiness.  As you can see, I take a bit of my artwork and use photo-shop to make even goofier arty things.  I experiment and stick stuff together just for the heck of it.

I suppose this is probably evidence a good psychiatrist could use to keep me locked up for a while.  But I’m kinda stuck anyway in my little room.

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Filed under autobiography, cartoony Paffooney, goofiness, humor, Paffooney Posts, philosophy

Truthfully…

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Truthfully… I rarely ever tell the truth.  I am a retired school teacher who now spends a majority of the time left to me on writing fiction and drawing colored-pencil pictures.  Truth is not an asset for that kind of fantastical foolishness.  But that doesn’t mean that the truth is irrelevant.  In fact, after the last round of politics as usual (if 2016 even remotely qualifies for that) it is more important than ever to divine the trends and consequences for who we are about to elect.

If you look at the events in Flint, Michigan… the world becomes a scarier place.  What are the actual consequences of having Republicans in charge?  Because of cost-cutting measures by Governor Rick Snyder’s spend-less-on-the-people so we can give-more-tax-breaks-and-wealth-to-the-wealthy initiatives, the water system of Flint, Michigan has been neglected to the point of poisoning everyone who is poor enough to have to drink city water.  Reptile-man Snyder reassures people with a Republican grin that shows his fangs.  Then he lies, first about the water being safe to give to your children, then that he will do everything in his power to fix the problem… as long as it doesn’t cost actual money.  And the truth is every city in America is under the same threat.  Texas is a Republican-controlled paradise for billionaires. You can taste the taint in the Texas frogwater that comes out of the tap.  Plus, we have all kinds of fracking going on underground, pumping toxic stuff into the ground to pump shale oil out.  North of here in Oklahoma, the fracking has caused powerful earthquakes.  We have felt lesser shakes here in the Dallas metroplex.  The animals are so mad for meat in their feeding frenzy that even the ground under us is not safe from their appetites.

After the Iowa Caucus it became very possible that the Republican nomination could end up in the claws of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.  This shape-changing lizard man is the popular choice among the rabid evangelicals.  He is supposedly the most conservative and the most Christian of the Republican candidates.  But if you type into Google the phrase “Is Ted Cruz…” you get a result that says “the Zodiac Killer?”  Of course, he was not born at a time that allows him to be the actual mysterious serial killer who was never caught.  But people are searching this question for a reason.  According to the New York Times, in 1997 a young man named Michael Wayne Haley was convicted of stealing a calculator from Walmart.  The crime carried a maximum two year sentence.  Texas, the loving State that it is, mistakenly gave him 16 years.  When Haley tried to get the courts to fix the mistake, Ted Cruz was Solicitor General for Texas.  He took the case all the way to the Supreme Court to try to force Haley to serve the entire sixteen years.  The Supreme court ruled that Haley should be released for time served after serving six years of a maximum two year sentence.  The man has no compassion, no mercy, no Christian love in his reptile heart.  It is entirely possible that he could become President of the United States.  I confess, ttuthfully…, I am deeply afraid of that happening.  He is the Zodiac Killer.

So, I have run out of truth for today.  Telling the truth is hard to do.  Especially for a practiced liar like me.  But I promise you I will tell more truth in the days that are left to me.  Truth is important.  And the thing about writing fiction, especially humorous fiction, is the point of telling all those lies is to ultimately get at the truth.

 

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Filed under angry rant, humor, Paffooney, politics, Texas

A Growing Collection of Sunrises

I have been moaning and complaining in this blog for a couple of weeks.  I don’t have bad days.  I have bad weeks… bad months… bad years.  And making fun of my pain, making light of my suffering, is a way of making myself feel better.  Making light of serious stuff… it occurs to me that that is what God does every single morning when the sun rises.

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My most recent sunrise… 2016

You may be aware if you have read about me making light of my raging hoarding disorder that not only do I collect things that normal people don’t keep massive quantities of, but I also collect photos I have taken of sunrises I have seen.  As I woke this morning with an ache in my chest I really should see the doctor about again (I have seen a cardiologist twice in the last five years about the same nagging pain, and the best they can tell me is that it might be an arthritis pain in my lower rib cage) I thought melancholy thoughts again about my personal end of days.  One of the reasons I continue to collect sunrises is to celebrate the fact that I am still here, still witnessing God making light of the serious universe.  I really think that may be the most important thing in life… to live, and love, and laugh… to experience existence.  I am a tiny little creature on one small blue planet in a vast and seemingly never-ending ocean of space and stars.  The iron in my blood was forged in the centers of distant stars that were born, grew old and died, and littered the universe with their element-rich guts when they finally exploded in an amazing super-nova of stellar fart-gas that it is possible no living intelligent being ever witnessed.  I am insignificant.  And the universe will not miss me when I am gone.  And it may not even know I was ever here.  But I am here to see the sun come up.  That is a duty I continue to perform.

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I know it may look like I am endlessly snapping the same picture over and over again.  But every day the subtle pinks and purples and blues… the oranges and reds… make a different Jackson Pollack painting of the sky.  And I look at it carefully while the dog is impatiently tugging at the end of the leash because she wants to go piddie-paw and poo.  It is a beauty to be bathed in… and I apparently have earned one more to add to my collection.

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Sadder But Wiser

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My car was only a few months away from being paid off.  Then, while I was at home lying in bed feeling ill, someone driving past blasted into the rear wheel, damaging the axle beyond repair.  Yes, it murdered his car.  But because of the limits of coverage, my parked car is now dead also.  I am doing the paperwork today to have it interred.  And I notice, of course, that the paperwork says at the bottom, “State law makes falsifying information on this application a third-degree felony.”  Oh, good.  If I get any of the answers wrong, I go to prison.  And worse, they could deny my claim and pay me nothing for the car.  Why am I worried?  Because when I asked the insurance company for help with verifying the information, they gave me a license plate number that doesn’t match the way my imperfect memory remembers it.  If I put down the information they gave me, will they throw me in prison?  I made him repeat it twice and verified that it was right according to their records.  So, my memory could be faulty.  But that won’t matter when the judge decides the death penalty for my error.  Am I using hyperbole here for comic effect?  Yes.  But I live in Texas.  I am going to worry anyway.

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11.22.63

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The impact of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination ó and its meaning 25 years later ó are explored in the’ hour-long documentary JFK – A TIME REMEMBERED, premiering Monday, November 21 at 9 p.m. (ET; check local listings) on PBS. Presented by WNET/New York, the program is a production of The Susskind Company and is made possible by funding from General Dynamics.

As a conspiracy nut registered with the Monkey-Brained Theorists of America, the grand old MBTA, I was absolutely tickled pink by the new Stephen King series on Hulu, 11.22.63.  I have seen the first episode and loved the mix of fantasy, science-fiction, history, and horror that goes into telling a story of man who walks through a time portal into the past to be able to prevent the assassination of John Kennedy.  Believe me, I know it is not true, despite what some of the anti-conspiracy nay-sayers will tell you about me.  After all, they have a Monkey-Brained Club of their own and don’t even know it.

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I went on a binge of watching JFK assassination-related videos on Hulu and on YouTube.  There is some very good information out there compiled by some very dedicated and dogged researchers.  The man who wrote the book Crossfire, Jim Marrs, is a very talented writer and researcher whose book became the basis for the movie JFK by Oliver Stone.

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Marrs has an unfortunate gullibility that leads him to state as truth some very bizarre things about the New World Order, aliens and Area 51, the research of Alexander Sitchin into the ancient secrets of the Sumerians… and granted, I can’t prove some of the absolutely loony things contained in that aren’t true, but they are absolutely loony never-the-less.  But when it comes to researching documents, interviewing and re-interviewing principle witnesses, and verifying facts, Marrs makes a very compelling case for the assassination of the President of the United States being done by the CIA, Secret Service, FBI, and President Lyndon Johnson.

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It is a logical conclusion that Secret Service performed a cover-up during the assassination and its aftermath.  They spirited the President’s body away in spite of the Dallas rules for murder investigation and autopsy.  They washed and repaired the car it occurred in before the murder investigation could examine anything.  They interfered with the actual autopsy, with important notes, photographs, and even the President’s brain that were placed in Secret Service’s custody going missing.  No matter what you believe about the lone shooter theory, you can’t deny that a cover-up is the only explanation for these facts.

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There is documented evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was working on the fringes of the CIA operation in New Orleans and reporting to J. Edgar Hoover about their activities.  So, if he was a spy telling the right hand what the left hand was actually up to, who better to frame as the guilty gunman and then silence him before investigators could find out everything he knew?

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And why does all this still matter more than 50 years later?  Many of the actual perpetrators are dead, including former CIA hit man E. Howard Hunt who confessed to having a part in the assassination on his death bed.  They can’t be punished now.  But the corrupt organizations and political elite with their attendant influence are still operating in the world.  This was a murder that never came to trial.  Many of the facts have been sealed away by the very government agencies that have the most to hide.  Connections to other CIA manipulations, like those surrounding 9-11, need to be revealed, and the way the government operates needs to be modified.  But besides the fact that these things seriously impact our lives now, it is simply fun to dig and make connections and learn things that most people don’t generally know.  There is monkey-brained joy in that.

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A Simple Matter of Recovery

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Ah, my poor little Ford Fiesta has been declared dead by the insurance company.  Soon I will have to give up the chibi clown car I have been driving and buy something new.  Can I get a used car for the money they will give me for the accident?  I was counting on not having a car payment every month after June of this year.  Ah, but it means a new member of the family to replace the loved one I have lost.

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The ghost dog continues to haunt me in the night.  Last night, outside my bedroom door, I heard a whining and whimpering again.  I checked (had to make a nocturnal potty-stop anyway) and it was not our family dog.  The downstairs family room door was closed to her and she sleeps in the other end of the house in my son’s room.  So, either it was the ghost dog whom I totally don’t believe in, or I was dreaming that part (do I really have dreams as weird as that?), or maybe I am going insane… the most probable explanation.

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I am still working in dedicated fashion on my hometown novels.  I have added to the rewrite of When the Captain Came Calling and I have started a new novel project I am calling Recipes for Gingerbread Children.  It is a novel about the old German lady who inhabited our little town in the 1960’s and 70’s.  She was a Holocaust survivor with a tattoo on her forearm.  Mother still can’t talk about her without mentioning what a terrible life she must’ve had, yet she was one of the most sunshiny people I have ever known.  It is a new idea that excites me, like the one that became Magical Miss Morgan.

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I am also still desperately trying to overcome illness without doctor’s visits or medication.  A lot can be done with careful monitoring of diet and blood-sugar levels.  I owe my life to over-the-counter Mucinex and Vicks Vaporub.  My son is also suffering at present, and I have to talk to professionals about it today, because I will not risk his health to protect my empty pocketbook.

So challenges remain challenging and I keep moving forward and upward.  What more can be done?  I have in the past couple of months not only faced several different difficulties, but I have reached new levels of success with this blog, much of it by writing a lot in ways that are full of self-medicating thoughts with healing words and ideas.  People seem to like that.  My average daily views is up above thirty.  I am nearing 800 followers.  I may not have writing income, but I do seem to have a personal brand that others respond to.  So, if you have read all the way through this recycled oatmeal post with nothing but old pictures in it, please be reassured… oatmeal is good for you… and for me.

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Mapping the Stories

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By golly, I finished it.  It may not look like it, but this map of a place that really only exists in my memory and imagination took a lot of work.  I surveyed the town and made a set of rough map sketches back in 1994.  Some of the places on this map don’t exist any more, while a few never existed at all in any real sense.  I finished drawing it out in pen and ink yesterday, February 15th, 2016.

This map is Norwall, Iowa, population 275 (If you count the squirrels… and we had a lot of squirrels in this town… in more ways than one).  The map is attributed to Bill Stuyvessant, known to the locals as “Cherries Bill” because he loved cherries more than any other fruit and it was the exact same color of red he had on both his cheeks and nose.  For the last decade of his life, the 1960’s, he lived alone.  His wife died in 1958.  His only son, Christian, died near Bastogne in December of 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge.  He lived alone with a house full of stacks of old newspapers.    It is believed by many that he was a sorcerer and knew practically everything.  Some even said he was God.  The map probably had to originate with him because it shows the locations of key settlements in the Faery Kingdom of Tellosia, which of course is known only to practicers of magic and those with vivid imaginations.

Norwall is the setting for my hometown novels series.  They are not exactly science fiction and not exactly fantasy, but have heavy doses of both.  They are actually about real life as it can be warped by imagination and dreaming.  You can make the argument that they are surrealism.  The four pictured above are completed novels, except for When the Captain Came Calling on the right.  It is undergoing a complete rewrite and is only about 50% complete.  I have one published novel in this series through I-Universe, an imprint of Penguin Books.

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I also have a number of novel projects in the planning and rough-draft stages that are also set in this little imaginary Iowa town.  I am continuing to write and expand it all as time continues relentlessly forward.

Francois

 

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Filed under humor, maps, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, surrealism

Down and Blue

Life for me has always been a struggle with poor health and depression, ill fortune and difficult circumstances.  I have always been a “make lemonade” sort of life-gives-you-lemons problem-solver, but the more I make lemonade, the more my sorry old puss gets puckered.  I am having chest pains and breathing problems again.  I don’t have money for doctor’s visit co-pays and medication.  My car is in the shop with more than $6,000 dollars worth of damages, hit by a passing motorist going too fast while it was parked outside my house.  Insurance is probably not going to pay that much to fix a five-year-old car.  My family in Iowa have recently been buried under huge snowdrifts.  And the grim reaper has been knocking on my bedroom door asking if I want to play a game of chess.

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But I will tag this post as humor.  Because, ironically, humor is not always funny.  Sometimes it has the sour puckering effect of lemonade with too little sugar in the mix.  When you have worked hard all your life for very little reward, it’s hard to appreciate the tiny amounts of sugar you have been allotted.  I see myself ending much the way Mother Mendocino ended, except the community will not even hear about my passing.

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The more I sing songs, and rattle the boards, and try to make my puppets dance, the more arthritis crabs up my fingers and makes me ache.  Sometimes happy simply comes hard.  But self-pity is easy.  And I am a pratfall clown most of the time.  I use my injuries to make others laugh.  And there is still magic to be found here and there in my art.  Today’s paffoonies were all culled from my Postable Paffooney file.  They are all old artworks of which I am pathetically proud.

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Pathos is a part of humor too, you know.  You tell a story about someone whose been on a lonely journey, and he finally gets to come home to the ones he loves, and you smile at the end of that.  If you laughed at the clown for falling down, you smiled too when he got up again.  After all, he wasn’t hurt.  In many ways we are all made of spoof and rubber, and while the bullets don’t bounce off, we are more like Superman than we think.  There is definitely wisdom buried somewhere in this pile of old quilts I am calling an essay today.  I just wish I had the words to make it clearer than I do in this poor excuse for a paragraph.

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My sister reads posts like this and tells me they are too depressing, that I need to write happier stuff.  But don’t worry the way she does.  I do spend a lot of time writing about the low spots.  But I would like to point out that most of the time I am climbing out of holes.  So I may start the essay in a very low place, but the direction I am going is always up.

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Now I have said my 500 words for today, and while I still need bed-rest… there is no doubt the sun will come up again.

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Binge-Watching Two

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Having successfully binged on the current first season of the television series Quantico, I was determined to try something different on the second try.  I turned to the HBO series Band of Brothers.  Now, I admit, being a war buff of the worst kind in every way, I have seen the entire thing before when it was broadcast on TBS back in 2003.  The thing is, I did not have all the tools at that time necessary to fully appreciate and understand the dramatic arc of the story.  I found it practically impossible to keep up with all the many characters who come and go so quickly.  Some are introduced for the first time in the same episode in which they are killed.  Some are wounded, leave for an episode or two… or four, and then return as if we are supposed to remember them in their entirety.  So the secret magical spell I employed this time around for better and more intimate understanding is…  I read the damn book.

Yes, the uncritical critic took on Stephen Ambrose’s masterpiece, Band of Brothers.

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Having read the book, I now had all the background information I needed on each of the characters.  I could begin to match names and faces from the cast list of each episode with the real people I read about in the book, and the real people who matched those characters in the movie from the brief interview segments at the start of several episodes.  I began to understand why so much of the film was devoted to the stories of Major Dick Winters, C. Carwood Lipton, and Sergeant Don Malarky… these being men who led Easy Company of the 101st Airborne through the most terrible parts of the war and lived to tell the stories that got made into the book and then the series.  I really began to appreciate the heroics of people like Sergeant “Wild Bill” Guarnere who found out his brother had died in combat in Italy the night before the big D-Day parachute jump, and ended up losing his leg in the Battle of the Bulge, at the defensive stand in Bastogne.  I learned more about the key leadership role of Bull Randleman who was separated from Easy Company in Einhoven and spent a night hiding from the German troops during the failed Operation Market Garden.  I felt the deep hurt felt by people like Eugene “Doc” Roe the combat medic as he tried and repeatedly failed to treat horrible war wounds.  They are not just characters in a war movie any more.  I feel like I know them as people.

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Things about war and good war movies leave me in tears constantly.  They grind up my soul and leave me sick at heart that people could be guilty of such things.  I almost had to look away at times during the concentration camp episode.

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Winters quietly orders his soldiers to open the prison gates

But ultimately it feels like a series like this is good for the soul.  You can’t truly know how good and heroic people can actually be until you see how they live through and conquer these terrible experiences.  And it is good to see an excellent book brought faithfully to life like this.  It helps me lie to myself that writers can have a worthy effect upon life, the universe, and everything.

 

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Mother Mendocino

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I am about to lay on you a story full of humor, lies, and distortion… but I wanted to warn you first.  This is real-life story about someone near and dear to my heart.  You can laugh all you want… but please don’t think ill of Mother Mendocino.

She was a Science Teacher.  Appropriately enough she taught seventh grade Life Science.  And she taught students about life and love in ways that no other teacher was ever able to do.

I met Endira Mendocino the very first year I taught in the little South Texas town of Cotulla.  They hired me to teach eighth grade English.  And from the first time I saw her until the very last time twenty years later, she always looked exactly the same, like a plump little Wish-nik Troll Doll with frizzy hair.  The picture I drew from memory clearly looks more like Al Franken, the Senator from Minnesota than it really looks like her  To draw her accurately from a photo would be more like an insult than a portrait.  20160213_110859

Her great beauty was entirely on the inside.  And I, of course, am not the only person who was ever made privy to this wonderful secret.  She was a teacher who cared passionately about kids.  She had been a Catholic nun before she became a teacher.  And she brought the Bible teaching of the rod of discipline to her students.  But not the rod of whacking.  She was not one of those Catholic school nuns who whacked your knuckles with a wooden ruler for every perceived sin.  Rather, she used the rod of discipline as it was meant to be used by the Bible writers who wrote about it.  The rod was used to sight along straight lines for laying brick building foundations.  It was used as a line of sight for making paths straight, not for whacking feet at every misstep.  And this is how she taught students.  She modeled good behaviors for them, how to speak respectfully to your elders, how to meet anger with calm and reason, how to think through a problem and sort out solutions to find the best one.  She did as a matter of course on a daily basis things it took me years of trial and error to figure out how to do in a classroom.

Kids would do anything she ever asked of them.  And they didn’t do it out of fear. Oh, she did embarrass them frequently.  If a boy in her class became extra-wiggly and acted out at all, she would make him hold her hand for a few a minutes, and she would refer to him as her “boyfriend” when she reminded the class how you properly go about listening and learning.  But those few minutes of red-faced humiliation imprinted on the wiggler’s young psyche that problems are best confronted not with anger and punishment, but with love.

She never married.  She never had a romantic relationship that any of us ever knew about.  But she definitely had family.  We were all her family.  Her students and fellow teachers all loved her and treated her like a loving mother, hence the nickname “Mother Mendocino”.  And when her diabetes and kidney problems proved too much for the miracles of modern medicine and dialysis, she took an early retirement and quietly passed away.   The whole town mourned her.  But she is not gone.  She lives in all of us.  The lessons she taught were paid forward by all of us who knew her.  And so I offer that little bit of her here and now to you.

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Filed under autobiography, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, teaching