January 6, 2016 · 4:22 pm

New Dawns for 2016

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You may recall that one of my obsessive-compulsive collection-addictions is pictures of the dawn sky over eastern Carrollton and Dallas.  So far I have only taken two.  Through Sunday I was still sleeping late with no children to drop off at school.  Just so the numbers match, here is number two;

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So, why not three, you say?  Today is Wednesday after all?  Well, I can’t take a picture of the sunrise when it is overcast and threatening cold rain.  We may have our share of clouds on the horizon this year, with El Nino raging to the West and the jet stream dipping down to Mexico to deliver freezing Arctic blasts thanks to climate change.  Does that mean I expect bad things to be coming my way?  Of course I do.  I am old.  I have six incurable diseases, and I have survived cancer once already.  I am closer now to the day I will die than I have ever been in my life.  And now Donald Trump has the technical possibility of being elected President of the United States.  Who says Jehovah God and the Greek goddess of History don’t have bizarre senses of humor?

But despite the ill omens and the badness I anticipate, life is still good and will not be repressed.  I intend to live for all I am worth.  Have I not earned it, being a public school teacher for 31 years?  Have I not earned it by raising three wonderful kids, one of whom serves this country as a US Marine?  Have I not earned it by picking up dog poop in the park four times a day, and sometimes more off the carpet in the house for the last four years?  I believe in savoring what we have been granted, and using the gifts and abilities given to me by God.  That is why I am still blogging every day for the fourteenth month in a row.  And, miracle of miracles, I am not talking to the wind with no one really listening any more.  When I was blogging on Xanga from 2005 to 2007, I only had one or two followers that even read my stuff… and they didn’t tune in every day.  Some of you have started doing more than just looking at the pictures.  I have evidence in the comments that some of you read my posts all the way to the end.  I thought I was the only blogger that did that.  And I had 276 views last week.  349 the week before.  9651 people viewed my blog in 2015.   I have 87 views in just the three days of this week so far.  I can no longer claim to be the best-written blog that nobody ever reads.  I have to compete now with the other writers who write good stuff.  Ooh… I am doomed.  But I intend to enjoy it.  I have at least one novel in the works to be published.  I have another one already published that should be available at least on Amazon until well after I have curled up my toes and went for a final bye-bye.  Bad things are sure to happen.  But for now, the sun is still coming up every morning in my little world.

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January 5, 2016 · 3:35 pm

Grumpy Old Mike

My middle child, my son Henry, recently found an online source that said being grumpy is not as bad for your health as people think it is.  Bless his little black heart… everything on the internet is true, right?  But if it is true, it could be of benefit to me.  Mickey is not the only other me.  There is also grumpy old Mike.

Gingeyhousegrumpy

I recently wrote a poem about being grumpy.  A grumpy poet?  That could be a thing, right?  Here is what that poem looked like;

Grumpy (a poem about Grumpy life)

Dang it, you old grumpy man!

You annoy me as only a grumpy man can.

You grouse and growl and sometimes howl,

And pace the house like a cat on the prowl.

You worry me, weary me, and generally nasty be,

And of course you are… yes, you are… naturally me.

So why do you worry me, weary me, moan and make bother,

Now that you’re old, and you sound like your father?

Because you are cranky now, creaky with age,

And know you now, soon, the book’s turning its page.

And, though you complain, you do love your life,

And, loathe you will leave it, and your sweet-smiling wife.

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Yes, I come by grumpiness naturally.  It is a function of constant, nagging pain from arthritis and constant struggles with low blood sugar from diabetes.  And things go so wonderfully well all the time…

Like yesterday.  It was the first day after winter break, and so, since I hadn’t heard otherwise, I thought the kids had school.  And they go to two different schools at two different times.  So, I got up and cooked bacon for breakfast.  Wife and daughter both ate happily and only complained a little bit that the bacon was too burnt and the hash browns apparently got freezer burn in the freezer.  Then wife reminded me to check to be sure Henry actually had school before I took him.  She got in her car and took off for the school where she teaches.  Then, daughter and I got into the car and I dropped her off at her middle school.  Mere minutes later she called me on her new cell phone and told me that it was a teacher work day and no school for her after all.  So, I picked her up again.  So, grumbling and rumbling only a little bit, because why didn’t wifey tell me it was a work day only?  And then I checked on Henry’s school website.  Their last day of vacation was listed as Friday, January 1st.  That meant they did have school, right?  So I drove him all the way there in Lewisville.  There was only one other student there.  And the door was locked.  Then a principal told Henry that it wasn’t a class day.  Why couldn’t they have posted it on their screwy @#$%! website.  So, I went home again with the boy, and consoled myself that at least we did not have to do the afternoon pick-me-up-from-school tango with DFW area traffic.

This morning my wife got a good laugh at my expense.  After complaining about the slightly burnt sausages I made, I was told in no uncertain terms that I should be humble about making mistakes and not get mad when people laugh at my follies.  That was not fire coming out of my ears.  Honest, it was not.  I put on a happy grin.  But I was told it was a sarcastic smile at best, and I should stop it.  So I stopped it.  I probably won’t smile again today.  I bought a chocolate doughnut from QT, and I wrote about grumpiness as I ate it.  It helped.  I tried to find my son’s article about the health benefits of grumpiness, but, failing that, I found this article;

http://goodlifezen.com/17-sure-fire-ways-to-overcome-grumpiness/

So grumpy old Mike needs to go away now, and leave me alone.  Better days are coming.  And today the kids really are in school.

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January 4, 2016 · 4:16 pm

Gingerbread Town

My recent experiments with holiday gingerbread and happiness have yielded some patently artistical results.  Yes, I know that isn’t a real word.  But I use it anyway because I take bits and pieces and use them to make something new.  You may remember the gingerbread house I made with my kids.  It turned into a disaster you could eat.  But  I got some pictures out of it.  Pictures like this;

I took one and loaded it into an art program and did this to it;

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I also took a picture of some old Christmas chocolate tins;

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I used them together with a stolen background to make this scene;

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Of course, I was not satisfied there.  I had some old cartoon characters lying around.  So, I wanted to use them too.

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And I ended up with an artistical art mess like this;

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If that isn’t artistical, then I don’t know what is.

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January 3, 2016 · 4:47 pm

Monkey-Wild About “Peanuts”

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Yesterday the Peanuts Movie came to the dollar movie theater in Carrollton.  And my two kids at home and me went to it.  I invited my wife, but with the righteous indignation of a Jehovah’s Witness unshakable in her beliefs, she said, “Why would I want to go to a Christmas movie?”  She associated it not with the beloved comic strip in the newspapers, but with the old Christmas special.  And she would not be talked into it.  It is a matter of faith, after all.  Celebrating Christmas, naturally, loses you the chance to live happily ever after on a paradise Earth… after Jehovah God smites all the wicked people and all the deluded people who never worshiped him properly using his proper name, and also that rude postman my wife doesn’t particularly like.  Of course, it is not a Christmas movie.  The only Christmas part it has in it is a brief Christmas carol from the old TV special that Snoopy ruins.  So God didn’t punish us for enjoying this movie… at least, not yet.

We unrepentantly enjoyed the movie.  I enjoyed it as a culmination of more than 50 years of reading and laughing at Charles
Schulz’s satire of the uncertainties of childhood as they affect the whole of our adult lives.  My kids loved it because it is an excellent cartoon that is filled with hilarious moments that trace directly back to the comic strip.

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The central story is about Charlie Brown’s self doubts mixed with his never-ending crush on the little red-haired girl.  In his own hesitant, hide-behind-the-bushes style, Charlie pursues her and plans how he might win her heart.  In the comics, it never worked out.  He always failed.  He was always the lovable loser, and the red-haired girl never noticed.

I was inspired to write a poem about it because I could so deeply identify with his crisis of confidence.  Here is that sappy poem;

Little Red-Haired Girl

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

That little red-haired girl, so cute, so nice

You only looked and looked from afar

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

You could’ve held her hand

You could’ve walked her home from school

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

She never got your Valentine

At least, you forgot to sign your name

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

No hope of marriage now, nor children

Happily ever after has now long gone

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

Now every love poem is a sad poem

And the world is blue and down

You never told her that you loved her…

You never told her that you loved her…

You never told her that you loved her, Charlie Brown

 

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The main story is paralleled in Snoopy’s Red Baron fantasies as the movie goes along.  The lady-dog-pilot, Fifi, is kidnapped by the Red Baron.  Snoopy, the dashing, daring WWI pilot sets out in his Sopwith Camel dog house to rescue her.  And after being foiled several times… he succeeds!  And not long after, Charlie Brown himself succeeds.  The little red-haired girl actually chooses Charlie Brown to be her summer pen pal project buddy.  I should probably be outraged because in the comic strip she never knew he was even alive… But I loved the happy ending.  Charlie Brown deserves it.  I deserve it.  I believe even Charles Shulz would be charmed by it if he were still alive to see it.

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I apologize if I spoiled the movie for you, but it is something you should already know anyway if you ever read and loved the comic strip.  It is not the surprises that make this movie work.  It is the being true to a time-honored comic-strip and the bringing of it so completely and so beautifully to life.  And my wife looked again at the movie trailers and decided she had been wrong about it being a Christmas movie.  Maybe we are not doomed after all.

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January 2, 2016 · 5:59 pm

An Autobiography of Mickey

 

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Last night I watched again Part I of Ken Burns’ Mark Twain.   I think it reminds me of who I am as a writer.  No, I am not being all big-head arrogant and full of myself.  I devoured certain writers as a youth, consumed them whole.  Charles Dickens was my first passion, followed by J.R.R. Tolkien, and then Mark Twain.  Of all of them, Samuel Clemens is the most like me.  He was from the Midwest, born and raised in Missouri along the Mississippi River.  I am from the Midwest, born and raised in Iowa along the Iowa River.  He endured hardship and tragedy as a youth, losing his little brother in a riverboat accident, and he dealt with it by humor.  I endured a sexual assault from an older boy, and dealt with it by… well, you get the picture.  We are alike, him and I.  We both draw upon the place we grew up, the people we have known, and the events of our youth to create stories.

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It is a pretty big responsibility to follow in his footsteps, and I will probably never live to see the success and the wealth that came to him.  But I have a responsibility to the people I knew and the time that gave rise to me to tell their story.  I need to build a network of stories that resonate the truth of existence that I have been witness to.  A big responsibility… and I probably will not live up to it.  But I have to try.

Being a writer is somewhat like being cursed.  The words burn inside, needing to get out, needing to be heard.   I have stories that need to be told, and they will be told, even if only to file away in the closet again.  Like Mark Twain, I am good at feeling sorry for myself.  And the Mickey part of me, the writer part of me, is just like Mark Twain, a writer persona, and not the real man himself.  I am simply the container for something that has to exist and has to tell stories.  It is not a bad thing to be.  But the more I get to know it, the more I would not wish the destiny on others.

Forgive how sad and bunglingly boorish this post is.  But sometimes there are thoughts I simply have to think.  And as a writer, I am bound to write down the silly things that I think.

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January 1, 2016 · 9:05 pm

I Has Done a Good Thing

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In 2015 I decided I would post a blog post every single day of the year.  And so I have done it.  WordPress didn’t count every single post on the day it was intended for.  My computer clock doesn’t work right, and their day ends something like four to six hours before mine does.  (Greenwich Time?)  So some of my posts were counted on the wrong day from my point of view.  But that is just a technicality.  I accomplished this writing goal while finishing a contest novel that has made it into the final round, and I did final edits on my novel Snow Babies so PDMI Publishing LLC can make an actual book of it.

WordPress says my blog was viewed 9,500 times in 2015.   I am up to 759 followers, some of whom seem to like every post I put up.  I have gotten no real troll comments so far (probably due to the fact that the only people who look in on my humble blog are the kind that like to read the sort of stuff I write).   No readers have as yet made it their personal mission in life to try to save the world from my brain-boggling goofiness and potential for killing people by making them laugh themselves to death.  Either those readers haven’t found me yet, or my posts are not as grin-inducing as I tell myself when I am lying to myself on a semi-daily basis.

I will have posted 776 posts with the posting of this one in all the time I have been writing on WordPress.  It is a lot of wordy talkiness in printy printyness.  And I have not stopped the flow yet.  I need a break from posting, but just as I posted every day for two months before 2015, I will probably need some time to break the bad habits I have developed over the last year.  I still need to blog, because it is the only writing I do that gives me any kind of feedback beyond editors saying, “You can’t write that in a young-adult novel!” or, “People don’t actually talk like that in real life.  You can’t just go around inventing new language.”  (But Shakespeare did it… or, rather, whoever really wrote Shakespeare’s plays did it… so I have the right to try, consequences to the sanity of Western Civilization be damned.)  So I will continue to cut and paste purple paisley prose into this brain-bogglingly bumptious blog, and I will continue to illustrate it with perfectly pickled Paffooney pictures.

 

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December 31, 2015 · 4:46 pm

Wisdom of the Mickey

 

 

MickeyOne must end the year on a note that is either upbeat or regretful.  A heartfelt, “Meh,” just won’t cut it.

So here are a few particles of wisdom from the dustbowl of Mickey’s imagination.

The world is getting brighter… also hotter.  If we continue to chill on the topic of global warming, soon we will be fricasseed.

Ima mickey

You should definitely pay attention to your teachers.  They are mostly old and cranky and undervalued, and it makes them sad when they realize that no one really listens to them.

I learned this from the poet Dylan Thomas, “Rage! Rage! Against the dying of the light!”  He cursed death, and then he promptly went out and drank so much liquor, he died at a very young age.  Thank God I have lived to be old.

You are also pretty much stuck with the face that you are born with, so you better get used to it, and it has many varied uses… especially in the comic sense.

And I would also like to re-iterate the wisdom of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery;

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It is a bit of a disappointment to an artist to realize that what is essential is actually invisible to the eye… but I know it is true.  Truth resides in words.

The only wisdom I truly possess is the knowledge that I am a fool.

Since I was a mere stupid boy, and before I grew up to be a mildly stupid man, I always yearned to have wisdom.  And wisdom comes through experience and pain.  Now, years later, I realize what true wisdom is… I’d have been better off without all that pain.

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People are a lot like rabbits, except that they are not.

They can never eat too many carrots… unless they do.  And then their skin can turn orange.

There is no beast as noble as a rabbit… except for practically every other beast.

Turtles are not as noble as rabbits.  When you challenge them to a race, they cheat.

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People really ought to be naked more.  It’s true.  If you can strip yourself down to only what is fundamentally nothing but you yourself… you begin to know who you really are.  And it is not shame to let other people see.  Oh, wait a minute!  You thought I was talking about being literally naked?  Oh, no!  Metaphorically naked only!

One should be so opaque and obtuse that other people can see acutely right through you.  It is the only thing that makes nonsense into sense.

And we need to sing and dance a little more than we do.  A good song is healthy for the soul, no matter how badly you sing it.  And even if you are old and arthritic like me, dancing a good jiggity-jig keeps the bones loose and the heart thumping.

Everyone needs to dance with their children.  And talk to them.  You can learn more from them than they can from you.  They have more recently come here from the hand of God.  And they know things that you have forgotten… and will need to remember before you return to Him.

 

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I hope my anti-wisdom has not seriously screwed everybody up.

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December 31, 2015 · 2:49 pm

2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,500 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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December 30, 2015 · 5:11 pm

Google “PAFFOONEY”

One of the most important things about my blog has been that I can share my artwork.  I have always been capable of a reasonably high level of drawing ability.  I can also paint and create artistically original photographs.  I have that artist’s eye that sees creatively.  If you follow directions in this first Paffooney, you will see a wider variety of the kind of Paffoonies I post than I will post here.  This will be, however, a picture post.  I intend to share a bunch of my artwork here, both old and new.  Take a gander.  (And while you hold on to that male goose, look at some of my pictures, too.)

Animal Town

tree time_ginger

Aztec

You have to admit that I am clearly not an artist like Van Gogh or Picasso… certainly nothing like Andrew Wyeth or Winslow Homer.  I am more of an illustrator, or … worse, a cartoonist.

Blue in the back yard

So, this is at least partially about sharing artwork.  I am not a professional artist.  I have made no money from drawing, even though my artwork has been published before.  I have been given this talent by God not to be famous and wealthy, but to be a better teacher and a better storyteller.

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December 29, 2015 · 4:09 pm

Home Stretch

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I have almost reached the end of my trek, my year-long goal of posting something every single day of 2015.  I have hopes of finding something profound to say.  That’s what a wizard does, right?  He provides wisdom and wit.  I am not saying my magic is nearly used up.  My cauldron is still boiling and full of eye of newt and gingerbread bat-wings.  I can still weave a few spells from it.  In fact, one of the effects of writing regularly and in a sustained manner is the priming of the pump, enabling me to more readily produce the magic liquids from the very depths of the well.  If I can keep breathing and limping forward, I will write many more good things.  I am not bragging here.  It is just a fact.  Practice empowers the sorcery.  But I also need to slow down and have a break… or two… or twelve.  I will not stop writing.  But I will post less because I will be putting more of my words into my fiction.  I have several unfinished novels to move forward, to shape, to mold, to breathe life into.  There is a necromancy there that cannot be ignored if we are to avoid the results of Victor Frankenstein’s Promethean follies.

space cowboy23 I have given you a picture Paffooney today of the tapestry created by the town of Rowan, Iowa for its centennial in 2002.  I consider Rowan my home town.  I was not born there, but it is the scene of most of my childhood.  It shaped most of who I am and how I am and what I am.  It is the scene of most of my fiction because that’s where the most valuable treasures of Truth are hidden, near the wishing wells of our youth.  I keep it on my bedroom wall because, not only do Pooh and Fozzie like it to be there, it is a beautiful thing to look at and reflect upon.  It keeps what is most important in my life in focus.  I have a lot of physical pain from my six incurable diseases, and pain makes the focus blur at times.  But pain is also the source of what wit and wisdom I have to offer.  I will continue to contemplate and write and think and create… and draw.  I will continue to post at least a portion of the results here.  I do desire to make some money with my writing, but that is only a secondary concern.  I am not really writing for the people who know me in real life.  They already know me and made up their minds about me long ago.  They might read this and that and recognize something of themselves, but they are not the ones I am speaking to at this moment.  I am talking in prose to those who see my ideas for the very first time with new eyes, no preconceived notions about me.  It is for them, the readers I do not personally know, that my magic spells are cast in words.

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