January 20, 2025 · 1:52 am

Receding Positives

It’s getting harder to draw anything without artificial help. I drew this from an Instagram post by putting the photo on my digital drawing pad, putting a layer on top, and then outlining everything. But turning it into a drawing done entirely without the help of AI Mirror left me with something that looked almost ugly due to the misses and tiny mistakes that my arthritic hands can’t help but make. As it is, the AI misinterpreted the intent enough to give her an extra hairy chest instead of putting the gray frills on the front of the blouse.. It gets to be too much work to redo large portions of the picture. As it is I have to be satisfied with unintentional Rapunzel. But, it also means that I can do decent pictures still even though I would’ve given up drawing at this point were it not for how AI Mirror fixes the picture for me.

The expenses of my life have all gone up. Some of it is due to the Pumpkinhead President who has already inspired China to punish American farmers by closing our best marketplace and opening it up to Brazil instead. China did this, of course, because of the stupid clown threats of more tariffs. My car insurance is going up to $300 a month because of last summer’s accident. My Medicare premium is going up to $185 a month. The dentist is extracting two broken molars from my mouth this month and extracting $149 a month from my bank account for the next eighteen months. Oy vay! And next month’s heating bill will be over $300 again. I will have to downsize many things on my budget to get by. Maybe even giving up food. That’s one way to lose weight fast.

But that means simplifying my life again. After all, I am getting too old and sick to deal with complications.

The heart of the matter is this… It really takes less and less to be satisfied with life. I have already started giving up some of my massive collection of toys, books, and various collectible nonsense. I hope to pare it down to a manageable amount to move back to Iowa to live on the farm with my sister. My wife will remain in the Dallas area, teaching and becoming wealthy in miraculous ways. There’s goodness in the future despite the Pumpkinhead, and all the badness of the end of the world he is hastening. The important things in life can’t actually be taken away from me, unless God turns me into a walking compost heap of forgetfulness.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

January 19, 2025 · 1:16 am

A Poem Written on a Picture

C360_2016-12-27-07-57-11-113

-a poem written by Mickey and pasted on a picture.

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, healing, humor, insight, poem, poetry

January 18, 2025 · 1:20 am

Return of the Star Wars Figures

On a previous Saturday I admitted to the crime of using 12-inch action figures to play the Star Wars role-playing game.  The Dungeons and Dragons RPG world was horrified.  You are supposed to use scale-appropriate metal miniatures.  How can you simulate combat without small figures on a grid?  I have to confess.  It was via x’s and dots on graph paper.  But we didn’t use the action figures to represent ranges and lines of site in combat.  And one of my players was my niece, an actual girl.  So, I guess, to be honest, we were actually playing with dolls.

But it helps to have a lot of dolls.

20180127_090841

Emperor Palpatine, Snow Trooper, Obi-Wan, Jar Jar, Quigon, Droid Soldier, and home-made Mace Windu

We started play after the first two movies in the Prequel Trilogy.

20180127_091016

Wicket, Imperial Walker, Astroboy (What’s he doing there?) Darth Vader, Little Anakin, and Boba Fett.

We got creative with stories.

20180127_091501

Jango Fett, General Grievous, and Admiral Akbar

20180127_091246

Anakin Skywalker

20180127_091606

Robot from Lost in Space, R2D2, Slave Girl Leia, and a Green Orion Slave Girl Dancer from Star Trek

So there is evidence available to my offspring to help them have me committed to an institution.  The truth is, these are not even all of my Star Wars Dolls.  So this morning’s confession session is now at an end, though all of the horrible truth is not yet revealed.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under action figures, autobiography, doll collecting, Dungeons and Dragons, goofiness, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 17, 2025 · 1:22 am

How To Write A Mickian Essay

mickeynose

I know the last thing you would ever consider doing is to take up writing essays like these.  What kind of a moronic bingo-boingo clown wants to take everything he or she knows, put it in a high-speed blender and turn it all into idea milkshakes?

But I was a writing teacher for many years.  And now, being retired and having no students to yell at when my blood pressure gets high, the urge to teach it again is overwhelming.

So, here goes…

c360_2017-01-02-10-17-06-058

Once you have picked the silly, pointless, or semi-obnoxious idea you want to shape the essay around, you have to write a lead.  A lead is the attention-grabbing device or booby-trap for readers that will draw them into your essay.  In a Mickian essay, whose purpose is to entertain, or possibly bore you in a mildly amusing manner, or cause you enough brain damage to make you want to send me money (this last possibility never seems to work, but I thought I’d throw it in there just in case), the lead is usually a  “surpriser”, something so amazingly dumb or off-the-wall crazy that you just have to read, at least a little bit, to find out if this writer is really that insane or what.  The rest of the intro paragraph that is not part of the lead may be used to draw things together to suggest the essay is not simply a chaotic mass of silly words in random order.  It can point the reader down the jungle path that he or she can take to come out of the other end of the essay alive.

Once started on this insane quest to build an essay that will strangle the senses and mix up the mind of the reader, you have to carry out the plan in three or four body paragraphs.  This is where you have to use those bricks of brainiac bull-puckie that you have saved up to be the concrete details in the framework of the main rooms of the little idea-house you are constructing.  If you were to number or label these main rooms, this one you are reading now would, for example, be Room #2, or B, or “the second body paragraph”.  And as you read this paragraph, you should be thinking in the voice of your favorite English teacher of all time.  The three main rooms in this example idea house are beginning, middle, and end.  You could also call them introduction, body, and conclusion.  These are the rooms of your idea house that the reader will live in during his or her brief stay (assuming they don’t run out of the house screaming after seeing the clutter in the entryway).

Teacher

The last thing you have to do is the concluding paragraph.  (Of course, you have to realize that we are not actually there yet in this essay.  This is Room C in the smelly chickenhouse of this essay, the third body paragraph.)  The escape hatch on the essay that may potentially explode into fireworks of thoughts, daydreams, or plans for something better to do with your life than a read an essay written by an insane former middle school English teacher at any moment, is a necessary part of the whole process.  This is where you have to remind them of what the essay is basically about, and leave them with the thought that you want to haunt them in their nightmares later.  The last thing that you say in the essay is the thing they are the most likely to remember.  So you need to save the best for last.

So, here, finally, is the exit door to this masterfully mixed-up Mickian Essay.  It is a simple, and straightforward structure.  The introduction containing the lead is followed by three or four body paragraphs that develop the idea and end in a conclusion that summarizes or simply restates the overall main idea.  And now you know why all of my former students either know how to construct an essay, or have several years left in therapy sessions with a psychiatrist.

Leave a comment

Filed under commentary, education, humor, Paffooney, teaching, writing, writing teacher

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

January 16, 2025 · 1:07 am

Special Snowflakes

snowflake12

When conservative cultural warriors, Twitter Trolls, or dyspeptic gasbags like Rush Limbaugh call you a “Special Snowflake”, I have discovered, to my chagrin, that they don’t mean it as a compliment.  In their self-centered, egotistical world you have to be as emotionally tough and able to “take it” as they believe (somewhat erroneously to my way of thinking) they themselves are.  They have no time for political correctness, safe spaces, or, apparently, manners polite enough not to get you killed on the mean streets where they never go.  Being a retired school teacher who was once in charge of fragile young psyches trying to negotiate a cruel Darwinian world, I think I disagree with them.

in-snow-big

Have you ever tried to draw a snowflake?  Believe me, it is difficult.  Snowflakes are hexagonal star-shapes with enough lace and  filigrees in them to make it a nightmare to draw it with painfully arthritic hands.  The one above took me an hour with ruler and compass and colored pencils, and it still doesn’t look as good as a first grader can create with scissors and folded paper.  Much better to use a computer program to spit them out with mathematical precision and fractal beauty.  That’s how all the tiny ones in the background were created.  But even a computer can’t recreate the fragile, complicated beauty of real snowflakes.

You see how the fragile crystalline structures will break in spots, melt in spots, attach to others, and get warped or misshapen?  That is the reason no two snowflakes are alike, even though they all come from the same basic mathematically precise patterns generated by ice crystals.  Life changes each one in a different way.

4f0f6392eb9ed-image

And that, of course, is the reason this essay is really about people rather than mere physical artifacts of cold weather.  Our fragilities and frailties are earned, and they make us who we are.  I have a squinky eye like Popeye from playing baseball and getting hit by a pitch.  I have a big toe that won’t bend from playing football.  They both represent mistakes that I learned from the hard way.

As a teacher, I learned that bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders are very real things.  I lost a job once to one of those.  And I spent a long night talking someone out of suicide one horrible December.  Forgive me, I had to take fifteen minutes just there to cry again.  I guess I am just a “special snowflake”.  But the point is, those things are real.  People really are destroyed by them sometimes.  And they deserve any effort I can make to protect them or help them make it through the night.

snowflake1

But people are like snowflakes.  They are all complex.  They are all beautiful in some way.  They are all different.  No two are exactly the same.

snowflake13

And I really think boorish bastards have no right to insist that we need to take safe spaces and sanctuaries away from them.  Every snowflake has worth.  Winter snow leaves moisture for seedlings to get their start every spring.  If you are a farmer, you should know this and appreciate snowflakes.  And snowflakes can be fascinating.  Even goofy ones like me.

snowflake_with_cartoon_face_0521-1012-0818-0641_smu

Leave a comment

Filed under 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion, artwork, battling depression, commentary, compassion, humor, metaphor, Paffooney, self portrait, Snow Babies, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as , , , , , ,

January 15, 2025 · 3:16 am

Malevolent Marx Brothers’ Movies

8_1

“I wanna thank you for meeting with me in this super-secret high-level meeting in the White House, okay.  I brought you here… I am really good at bringing people and stuff together, by the way… I brought you here so we could make the Marx Brothers great again, okay?  We are going to make a new Marx Brothers’ movie.  It’s going to be great… really tremendous.”

“Wotta you sayin’, boss?  The Marx Brothers is dead.  How you gonna make a movie with dead guys?  You gonna dig ’em all up and do a Frankenstein number on ’em, or what?”

“No, no…  We will play the roles ourselves.  I’ll be Groucho, you know… the really smart one… the one with an amazing mind.  I really am very smart you know.  Everyone says so.”

“And who am I gonna play?”

“Elon, you get to be Chico.  You know, the fast-talking Wop guy.  You think of the greatest plans.  They are really great, you know.”

“Okay, boss, I got one already.”

“Really?  What is it?”

mv5bmtu4ote4mzgyn15bml5banbnxkftztgwnzy5mtm4mte-_v1_ux148_cr00148216_al_

“I think we gotta do an executive order.”

“Executive order?  What’s that?”

“It’s a order you give like Obama did, you know?  You take a pen and phone and say something in writing that everybody’s gotta do, and then, because it’s an executive order and you signed your name to it, you gotta execute somebody.”

“Ooh!  I like the sound of that.  We’ll call the movie Horsefeather Soup.  It’ll be tremendous.  The most tremendous thing people have ever seen.”

“Yeah, and the executive order will say we are banning Mexicans that come from places like Panama, Honduras, and Guatemala.  That kind of Mexican has to be sent back to where they came from.  You know, just the ones where they might want to vote for Democrats.  And we can say we are doing extreme vetting so we are keeping America safe from terrorists.  And WOKE Mexicans.”

“Ooh!  Yeah!  Extreme vetting, rhymes with bed-wetting.  Tremendous.   But what if people say I’m being racist again?”

“We say we intend to protect Americans from those really bad people you keep talking about, you know?  We’ll claim that nobody who’s innocent will get hurt.  And the good thing is, the immigration people will just know that anybody who is a Mexican is a bad person.  No matter where they’re from.  We’ll get everybody that way.”

“Good one, Elon, I mean… Chico.”

duck-soup-and-beyond-the-3-best-marx-brothers-movies-image-4

In the Homeland Security camps after the executive order.  (Possibly people waiting to be executed.)

“Wait a minute, boss, who do I get to be in this movie?”

“Hogsweat, you get to be Harpo, okay?”

“My name is Hegseth, boss.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry, Heegsop.”

“HEGSETH!”

“Okay, Harpo doesn’t talk, so shut up, Hogsbreath!  Here, take this bicycle horn and, when you go on George Stefenopolis’s show and he doesn’t let you talk either, just honk it at him.  It will be really great.”

“And me, boss?”

“Oh, Vivek.  I almost forgot about you.  What’s the name of that other brother?  Dumbo?  You get to be that one.”

“Hey boss, we gotta get goin’ on this executive order crap.  Somebody needs to get executed in the worst way.”

“Oh, yeah!  The worst way to execute is the best way.  I feel the need to tweet a truth about it.  This new Marx Brothers’ movie will be the best, just the best.  It will be so bestest that America will get tired of bestiness.”

go-west-marx-bros

Trump, Hegseth, and Elon ready for Woke Mexicans, and protesters.

4 Comments

Filed under angry rant, humor, politics, satire

Tagged as , , , , , ,

January 15, 2025 · 2:47 am

Know This…

I have been married for thirty years now.

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

January 14, 2025 · 1:19 am

An Autobiography of Mickey

 

20160102_102647

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.

farmgirl1

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

January 13, 2025 · 1:09 am

Cold Comfort

I don’t fear death, but I don’t seek it.

I had a lost crown on a molar that turned into a tooth crater that became infected. The dentist was happy. I took on almost two thousand dollars of medical debt to stop the pain. She extracted the molar and apparently, the infection is still there. After a week of antibiotics, it still hurts as if the infection is still there. Good opportunity for the Grim Reaper to use sepsis and a blood infection to do me in.

So, I am anticipating death in the near term, but hoping to avoid it. There are still several things I can do even if my dentist is a Sadist.

No matter what happens, my life is complete.

I was a teacher for 31 years. I managed to be an English department head, an ESL teacher, a teacher rated exemplary on evaluations many more times than the one time I was fired and treated like an incompetent. I made a difference for far more students than I failed. Many of them told me so later in life. I taught students whose parents I taught, and I almost lasted in one place long enough to teach a student whose grandparents were former students. I created an Odyssey of the Mind team for my Gifted and Talented students. I read to them. I even fed some of them on weekends.

I was married for thirty-plus years. I was a father of three, a band parent, a military parent, and a beloved parent.

I experienced life and art and music. I knew what beauty was. I know what wisdom is.

None of these things can the Grim Reaper or the Devil take away from me.

Any time the race actually ends, I am guaranteed to win. After all, I was only racing against myself.

Others may judge me as a fool, an egomaniac, or a buffoon. But I am okay with that. I learned early on to laugh at myself, even when others point at me and accuse me of my shortcomings. I wished to be a humorist after all. There is no one left behind me who has wronged me that I have not forgiven.

I am not ready to die, but Death cannot deprive me of anything.

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

January 12, 2025 · 1:40 am

The Butterfly of Hope

The sad fact of it is that life on Earth is probably doomed. We elected the Pumpkinhead to be President again, and he will remove the limited climate change mitigations that Democratic administrations put in place. Things like the wildfires in California will be allowed to worsen beyond the power of humans to survive. We cannot work together enough to prevent a convicted felon, rapist, and con man from seizing the office of President for a second time.

We are flawed, and it appears it will be what we all get capital punishment for. But the human race deserves to have existed. Consider art, architecture, science, and philosophy. Religion? Shakespeare’s work, Emily Dickenson’s poetry, the paintings of Norman Rockwell, Vincent Van Gogh, and Leonardo DaVinci, the novel A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, Der Zauberberg by Thomas Mann, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the Empire of the Incas, the City States of Hellenic Greece, and the glories of the Roman Empire? The Life of Christ. The humor of Mark Twain. The courage in battle of Sergeant York. The sacrifice of Joan of Arc. It is a good thing that life on Earth existed.

So, our time on this planet is further limited. It is bad fortune. But I will spend what I have left being happy and hopeful. We may not be totally doomed. And there is still laughter in the world. There is still beauty to be seen, truth to be told, and love enough to go around if we allow it to.

Butterflies have a limited lifespan. More so than we do. However, for now… there are still butterflies.

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized