So, here is what it looks like now after watching The West Wing. I love that show. They do such a wonderful job of weaving story, theme, and relevant political issues together into a compelling series. It is like the very best and most poetic of the novel series. I have read two books of John Galsworthy’s Forsythe Saga, and I think the TV show is better. Of course, I realize the novels are quite old and fusty in temperment.
I now have all three main characters colored in. Dr. Elefun on the left in his pinstripe shirt, Astro in the middle, and Mr. Pompous on the right in the back seat. I have most of the cockpit of the flying car done, and must start pondering how to make it fly in this drawing. I put a piece of cardboard under the drawing and that gives it a funky ribbed effect with the colored pencil rubbed over large areas. I am enjoying this homemade coloring-book art project. I have also added 173 words.
Here’s coloring step #1. I was watching Supernatural, the one where Sam and Dean go to Folsom Prison to fight an old ghost who is killing prisoners. I could’ve done more, but the episode was good and drew my attention. I had to do less than I planned because arthritis can make my coloring-knuckles hurt. I also needed to write a much shorter post today because I had to spend considerable time taking people to the airport and to doctors’ offices. Yes, it was my family and my in-laws… and yes, I did it gladly without complaint. And though I did not get to put the usual purple-paisley spin on today’s paragraphs, and I only got a little over 100 words… I did get a post for today, and my post-for-every-day-of-2015 goal is still intact.
This post is about Mickey and his crayons. Little Mickey always loved to color. He always had a cigar box full of Crayola crayons that he treasured and kept where he could always reach them whenever the art urge struck. (Well, except for that one time on the drive home from Mason City, Iowa when he left them in the back window of the 1960 Ford Fairlane and the sunshine melted the entire box… tears there for about a week.)
But Mickey has grown up and graduated to colored pencils. Radical change, huh? The need to color stuff is still there. So, what do I do about it now that Mickey is a rational, responsible adult? Well, you know there is a surge in the publishing industry of adult coloring books. I think that means that Mickey is not alone in the fevered fetish to put crayons… er… colored pencils… er, some kind of color to black and white pictures with plenty of white space to fill in. This is something I do while watching television. Other adults do it during meetings, at school functions… during sex… It is something that occupies your hands and a tiny portion of your brain and fills in all the blank spaces with color. And Mickey has the added advantage of not having to buy adult coloring books because he can make his own black and white pictures to color.
So, the crayons are out… er, the colored pencils, anyway. Mickey has this new picture he drew that honors his childhood cartoon hero, Astroboy. He is going to fill it in with colors and patterns and two-or-three color blends and have a whee of a time while watching Supernatural or The West Wing or Dr. Who on Netflix. It is a hoot.
And you may be wondering why the narrator of this silly Paffooney post always refers to himself in the third person as Mickey when talking about his art? Well, no one actually calls me Mickey in real life. Mickey is the cartoon character who lives within me and controls the part of my brain and personality that paffoonies out all kinds of art. It is not complicated. Mickey is definitely me. But not everything I am is Mickey. Mickey will always be that little boy with the cigar box of crayons coloring an original picture of lions eating that bully in third grade who called him a sissy for liking coloring books.
Yes, I live in Texas… And yes, I know a redneck or two… or 600. But it is a unique joy that almost has to be shared to be believed. They do not think like I do. To them, I am just a commie, liberal, tree-huggin’ atheist with very bad hippie-hair. But not all of them are automatically unkind to me for who I am… in fact, some of them are my friends.
Now, I have to say that, being a Texan is not an advantage for making friends with rednecks. The home-grown brand of Texas Mexican-hating, gun-loving redneck are suspicious of me because I was a gol’ dang Texas edjumacator for so many years. You gotta be suspicious of anybody who teaches, cuz they want to make our children smarter than us. That’s a gol’ dang liberal trick from way-back-when. Who knows what kind of communist liberal ideas a communist liberal college edjumacated idiot wants to plant in the heads of our kids? Oh, and people who are smarter than us are all idiots, because they have all them new-fangled ideas and facts and some-such, but we got common sense. That makes us better’n them no matter how gol’ dang smart they are… gol’ dang ’em! (I can’t even write these words without hearing that South-Texas Winchuk-family-from-the-Brush-Country accent in my head.) Texas rednecks are hard to warm up to unless they’ve already reached the stage of wanting to grill your ass on the Winchuk family barbecue pit. Then it is entirely the wrong part of you that gets warmed up because they don’t accept that the word “ass” is the Biblical word for donkey.
The majority of my redneck friends are actually from Iowa. They are the people that I grew up with who knew me as a boy. They know I am intelligent all the way to insane levels of intelligence. And while they also believe their common sense trumps my intelligence, they have a soft spot in their hearts for the old egghead Superchicken they used to know in high school. They mistakenly believe I am still a Republican by nature and probably support Ted Cruz for President, because he seems like a good Christian conservative fellow. They argue with me about why they have a right to keep their guns and refuse all background checks or gun registration or licensing of guns because, sure you have to have a license to drive a car and get married because those are seriously important and potentially dangerous things, but we are talking about guns here. They argue about why I should not be offended by their Confederate flags and why I really ought to listen to Fox News because they don’t lie to you like the rest of the liberal media. And how did they get to be so sunburned on their backs of their necks and all over their political ideologies? There was a time I voted for Charles Grassley. But Republican Iowa… the Iowa of Republican Governor Robert Ray in the 70’s and President Eisenhower supporters in the 50’s… has changed right along with the entire Republican party. They are now goose-stepping along to the conservative beat of drums worthy of Hitler and Goebbels politically. But they don’t identify with fascism. They believe conservative means good and liberal means bad… so Hitler was a liberal, right? They vote in a way that allows racist-fascists like Iowa Congressman Steve King to goosestep all around the country saying ignorant and destructive things, and think that General Eisenhower wouldn’t shoot King as if the Iowa Congressman were one of the enemy were he to hear some of King’s rants in favor of the military industrial complex that Ike himself warned us against. You can’t convince them that they’re wrong. They are louder than you, and that makes them right. But I love them. I grew up with them. And I know they are too Iowa-stubborn to ever change their Iowegian minds in a direction that might actually make their lives better. So bless them and take care of them for me, Lord, because they have common sense… which makes them better than me.
In 1927 in the mythical land of Austria, where they seem to know how to make candy… a condensed form of peppermint was created in a lozenge form and then placed into a plastic toy dispenser. The spells that were cast to make this magical item probably had nothing to do with toad warts and bat wings and eye of newt. It has more to do with Mickey Mouse, then Katzenjammer Kids, and Marvel Super Heroes. I have been caught under the spells of a PEZ fixation since childhood. I remember begging for a Bugs Bunny dispenser in Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines when I was probably six years old. My parents wisely said no hundreds of times when I was a kid. Who wanted to spend a nickel on a penny’s worth of candy? Just for a Pez dispenser. If they ever caved to my begging, even once, I don’t still have the dispenser. But now I am supposedly a responsible adult. I have money. Well, I used to have money before I spent it on collecting PEZ dispensers. I can’t even eat the the stupid candy. I have diabetes. So I feed the candy to my kids and risk giving them diabetes.
Here, my minion Stuart is showing off my Avengers collection. It took him nearly thirty minutes to line these six dispensers up so that they were all standing at once. The Hulk kept falling on him repeatedly.
I am proud of my Toy Story collection. I had to go to some lengths to find some of these (particularly Slinky Dog and Rex).
Disney Princesses were easy. Both at Walmart and Toys R Us they were all grouped together on the Disney hooks.
The Muppets were also grouped together with the Disney Pez.
Winnie the Pooh is Disney, too. I got some of these on discount at Toys R Us. I still need Piglet and Owl… and Christopher Robin. I don’t have an unbroken Minnie Mouse either. I had small children when I first started collecting these, and now I have fat children and a lot of empty Pez dispensers.
My Star Wars collection seems to be evil Pez dispensers and Yoda.
And poor Stuart is getting tired of standing up Pez dispensers, so I will end here without having shown you all of my PEZ dispensers. Besides, I have reason to keep the newest dispensers a secret from my minion.
I know this is incredibly hard to believe, but there are now 700 people who are computer literate enough to follow a blogger on WordPress who actually made the mistake of following my goofy little blog and failing to figure out how to un-follow someone.
I believe, based on evidence in the comments I have received, that some people go beyond looking at my happy little Bob-Ross-and-Disney-crossbred-clone-artworks and actually read my posts. And further, they seem to enjoy and be mostly amused by my witless attempts at humor and wit… at least the non-political and non-kook-apple-conspiracy-buff stuff. How I ever managed to thoroughly snow and deceive that many literate people… I will probably never figure out. But if you have waded through this lazy-post paragraph of purple paisley prose about own-horn tooting… thank you so much for reading my words.
You know by now, if you have been reading my posts and not just looking at the pictures, that I am a doll… er, action figure… er, toy collector with a raging case of hoarding disorder. So, after finishing the My Little Pony/ Equestria Girl collection, I went on to work on a Monster High collection. I still need at least Draculaura to complete that set. But I stumbled into Minions. I couldn’t resist. “Oh toot jour, Pappagaina!” Stuart said from the shelf. So I had to buy him.
You know how dangerous it is to have Minions. Just look in the background at what happened to the Red Baron when I bought Stuart. Minions can have a bad effect, as well as a funny effect, on the outcome of an evil genius’ evil plots for doing evil-ness. So I started thinking of the dangers. The Minions only cost $8.85 apiece… but of the three main movie Minions, Stuart, Kevin, and Bob… there were already at least three different versions of each. Besides the “bored silly” set, there was a pirate set and a beachwear set. And what if they start issuing all the other minions? You know, Dave and Charlie and all the boys? I could be financially doomed by my need to collect.
And what am I investing in? Here is a close-up of Stuart after taking him out of his mint-in-box to play with him, posing in the cardboard castle atop Mount Blue Blankie where I have built my secret evil genius’ lair. Please don’t tell any would-be heroes or rival despicable villains that my lair is located in my bedroom.
And it turns out that Stuart is fully pose-able. That is going to be even harder to resist. Let me prove he is pose-able.
And after I made the horrific mistake of buying fully pose-able Stuart, I discovered he was not my only Minion. I also found out today that my novel Snow Babies has been assigned to an editor finally. Jessie Cornwell of PDMI LLC was assigned to edit my novel back on June 28th. Of course, I didn’t know about it until today because the email informing me went straight to the spam folder in typical Minion fashion. So now I feel fully ready to face the evil world and try to steal the moon, while actually accomplishing something completely different that I don’t expect. That’s what having Minions means.
Life is never quite like the way it is in your head. Things you don’t believe are true will constantly surprise you with the reality they belt you over the head with at the most inopportune of times.
Today’s colored-pencil Paffooney masterpiece is a case in point. I never believed it was possible to take this good of a picture of it. It is a horror movie to try to light this picture so I can snap it with a camera and get a result with no fades or reflected glare. It was created in 1992, when I was really at the height of my colored-pencil cartoonist super-powers. The subtle lighting is so much better than I can convey with the arthritic turkey-claw hands I now use for such artwork. Torchlight in a pyramid is a hard thing to convey. And over time, this picture’s colored-pencil patina has become glossy and difficult to photograph without glare. It has subtle waves in the paper that photograph as shadowy valleys and reveal the two-dimensionality of the piece. You can still see them if you look closely. But it is far better than any previous photo. Go back and check my archives if you don’t believe me… or you wish to be bored to death with old posts that you have somehow managed to dodge before now.
But like Tanis in the Tomb, things always turn out to be surprisingly different in their reality than they were in your little mind’s eye when you went into that dark hole in the ground.
We were discussing this at lunch, my kids and I. We were talking about how Sims 3 portrays reality and how really surprising it can be when you realize that the game has got it right. When I walked all the way to the bottom of the stairs this morning before realizing that I had forgotten my shoes upstairs, I had to turn around and go all the way back upstairs. This, I am told, is exactly how it works in Sims 3. A character in the game cannot turn around on the stairs. If you change your mind half way down, the character. or avatar I think they like to call them, must go all the way to the bottom to turn around and go back up. So obviously this morning, God was playing Sims 3 and using me as an avatar.
Now, I don’t really like to believe God plays video games with reality… but my son Henry brought up the Rolling Stones as proof. It is common knowledge that Kieth Richards is an un-dead creature, having so completely altered the bio-chemical make-up of his entire body with drugs that he died in 1988 and still goes on tour because his brain has not yet fully registered the fact that he is dead. My son pointed out that in Sims 3 you can make your avatar all gray or green and zombie-looking and then play the game with your avatar walking around and doing all sorts of stuff without realizing he or she is dead. So, not only Kieth Richards, but the entirety of the Rolling Stones who are all skeletal old druggies who should’ve passed half a century ago, goes to prove that God is playing Sims 3 with the universe. My gasted is totally flabbered! And I hope this glimpse into the unholy truth has not ruined your day.
I get a little tired of friends, family, and especially online acquaintances calling me a liberal and meaning it as a severe antonym of a compliment. They are basically conservative by nature and they are trying to hurt my feelings by calling me liberal. (Or “libtard” or “libturd” or “liberaloon”) They don’t like my fact-based arguments and strike out at me from the deepest depths of their deeply-held-and-so-long-stored-in-the-same-barrel-that-it-fermented set of conservative beliefs. Often they pull potentially intoxicating talking points out of the well of watching Fox News and expect me to drink it… even though I know it has intentionally been laced with poison.
I am not offended by the Confederate flag. It was a part of the Civil War that fascinates me and still stands for the brave regiments of Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg who marched into a hail of cannonball-laced death to prove once and for all that an entire way of life can be destroyed on the battlefield. It was a terrible tragedy and those men paid the ultimate price for being on the wrong side of that argument. I believe we should honor them and reconcile ourselves with what remains of them. They are indeed still out there. But we do not have to honor the thing they were fighting for and ended up losing. Slavery is inherently unjust and evil. And the racism that is its aftertaste is just as despicable. It is understandable that in that long gone culture it was normal to view black skin as the sign of an inferior creature. They treated slaves as working farm animals, like oxen or donkeys. It is the way they thought of those… actually people… whom they failed to accept as fellow human beings.
I am not offended by the Confederate flag. But I am upset at the most common uses of it. Klansmen use it as a symbol of their race-hatred. They fly it at their protest marches along with the Nazi swastika. The flag at the South Carolina capitol building went up during the equal rights struggles of the 50’s and 60’s as a defiance of the entire movement. I am not offended by the flag, but I do not like when it is used as a symbol of redneck America believing they’re better than blacks and Hispanics because their skin is white, and that their conservative white values are superior to the values of Jews, liberals, and intellectuals. I don’t like being told that their heart-felt hate trumps my nerd-boy thinking-too-much. I don’t like the way they believe they win the argument by shouting at me in a louder voice than I am capable of shouting back. (Watch Bill O’Reilly on Fox News and see if he doesn’t do exactly that.) I don’t like the way they don’t listen to me in the same way that I try hard to listen to them.
People I care about and even love in Iowa are posting things on Facebook about liberals attacking the Confederate flag, and how terrible it is that liberals are trying to take away “our heritage”. But wait a minute… At the Battle of Shiloh in Missouri, the 5th Iowa Infantry Regiment and the Iowa 13th were embroiled in the Hornets’ Nest, the intense fight all along the “sunken road” that ultimately tipped the horrible battle in favor of the Union. Iowans were shooting at the Confederate flag. Many of them were killed by it. How can that flag possibly be “our heritage“?
I believe the rebel flag is not an appropriate symbol to be used in government buildings or 4th of July parades. It is a symbol of more than one thing… and some of those things are terrible things. I am not advocating making the flag illegal in the U.S. But, consider, the Nazi flag is illegal in Germany. It is the flag of a defeated rebellion against our government, fought for the purpose of defending the institution of slavery. Why are my conservative Iowegian friends supporting such a flag?
And I refuse to be insulted by being called a liberal. Conservative doesn’t mean “good” while liberal means “bad”. Conservative means wanting to preserve the good things about the past and not change them without good reason. Liberalmeans wanting to change things for the better. I used to be a conservative. I am only comfortable being a liberal now because conservative powers are trying to protect things that have to change because they are hurting us. I love all people in general… and I don’t want to see them hurt by their government or their society. So, if you feel the need to argue in the comments… or if you feel you have to call me a libturd… feel free to do so. But please don’t call me a libturd in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!!!
I have to say, I was predisposed to like this book for far too many reasons to ignore it.
Reason #1: I love John Green. I don’t mean in some crazy boy-crush sort of mixed -up thing. That would be too much like one of his characters, or one of mine. I just find him an absolutely enthralling intellect and personality.
Reason #2; I know him from YouTube.
He posts videos for Vlog Brothers (with his brother Hank who is also someone I wish I knew in real life). He also does Crash Course History and Mental Floss. You can get to know how the man truly thinks and feels because he puts all of himself into his writing. (I know the YouTube videos don’t seem like writing, but they are. How could they not be?)
Reason #3; I know him as one of the geniuses behind the Mental Floss series of books and magazines.
These wonderful books are brimming with weird and wonderful facts and narratives that are researched enough to feel like, if they aren’t actually true, they should be.
The books contain all kinds of things that make you go “Hang on there a minute, Bubba! What the hell are you saying?” These are things you have to reread at least twice. You have to reread once for yourself, and at least once reading out loud to members of your family to watch their eyes pop out of their head like they are in a Tex Avery cartoon right before they explode with laughing.
Reason #4; I saw the movie of The Fault in Our Stars before I ever had a chance to find and buy a copy of the book. It made me laugh and it made me cry… both with the same degree of soul-punching feeling I want so desperately to put into my own fiction. I have not read this book yet, but I already know it is on my list of top ten all-time favorite books.
So, of course I have left myself only two hundred words to actually review the book itself. And I can’t do it.
This book is a quest book. It tells the story of Q (short for Quentin, a near-genius thinker and feeler who has to be John Green’s idea of himself) who meets a girl at his bedroom window one night. She’s a girl who he has known and gone to school with his entire life. But he doesn’t know her at all. And she takes him on a whirlwind one-night adventure of doing crazy things he would’ve never done otherwise. Then she disappears. She is gone. She may be dead. And she has left clues for Q to follow and maybe find her. She leaves clues in a copy of Walt Whitman’s poetic masterpiece, Leaves of Grass for Crissake! It becomes a quest of one person finding another person… not just that physical person… but who that person really is… how she thinks and feels. It is a quest to find the meaning of “Paper Towns”… places that aren’t real, even though they are. It is about connecting yourself to other people by the roots, the same way that the “leaves of grass”in your lawn are connected to each other. And, dammit! I am well over 500 words again. And why? Simply because you have to read this book. It is so good it crosses over all boundaries of genre and intended audience. Yes, it is a Young Adult novel… a kids’ book. But it was written for you, even if you are 559 years old like me. (And that is not a typo… If you don’t already know what hyperbole is, you should look it up, because I just gave you 500 years worth).
Catch a Falling Star 