I struggled to get started today… weird clouds covered the pinks and purples of a Dallas dawn as I stumbled through walking the dog. I think I mentioned before, I believe, that our goofy dog (who fortunately does not wear a hat and drive a car, so she is not a Goofy dog) has become a record-setting poop factory, pooping out five times a day and producing what I suspect is actually five times her own weight in doggy poo in a single day. If only it were worth money! I felt ill with an acrobatic stomach doing inner flip-flops while trying to transport twenty pounds of poop to the trash can. My arthritis made my joints crackle and walking was a total pain. But I made it. I walked the dog… deposited the poop…made breakfast for two kids… eggs for one, sausage for the other (I am not so much a dad as I am a short-order cook at breakfast time)… I avoided talking about religion or politics… I dropped them both off at school… and then I went back to bed. I woke up in time to hop in the car again and pick them up from their early release day. And on early release days they don’t feed the kids even though they don’t release them until after the noon hour. So rather than cook again… Taco Bueno! It is overpriced and really bad for you… especially with an upset stomach… but, hey, we didn’t have much food left in the pantry anyway. So, in spite of feeling like sudden death by heart attack would be a blessing… I made it through the morning of a weird and wacky, goofy, goofy day. And now my work for the day was nominally done. So I sat down and tried to think of a post for this blog. (44 days in a row with at least one post, you know) No luck. I couldn’t think of anything to write. And my schedule of ideas took way to much work to use on a goofy day. So, I took a picture of my toys… some of them… and tried to tell myself that I could turn that into a worthy post. The evidence is clear, however… I most certainly could not.
At Mother’s breakfast table we were always encouraged to talk about stuff. That was a given. It was how families operated in the 60’s and 70’s. Mom and Dad not only listened to the mindless drivel coming out of the childish mouths of me, my two sisters, and my stinky little brother, but they also tended to hold forth about things they wished to teach us. We learned Methodist-Church-flavored Christianity and Eisenhower-Republican values. Ike had been president when I was born and got most of the credit for the post-war boom in the economy. We were middle-class people with solid middle-class values.
And then I had the bad sense to grow up and start thinking for myself. Nixon had let me down big-time when I was in high school. I had defended him against my McGovern-leaning loony liberal friends. My best friend was a preacher’s kid, a Methodist preacher’s kid. His father actually believed in progressive nonsense about sex-education for children and helping to feed the poor. And then Nixon turned out to be a liar, a coverer-upper, a cheat, and a bad-word-user. I suspect, though my Dad never admitted it, that he may have voted for Carter over Ford. It was my first time voting, and it actually felt good to use my vote to strike back at the party that betrayed my trust.
Religion, too. In the late seventies a man named Carl Sagan put on a TV show called Cosmos. The man bedazzled my father and I with Science. He taught us that every molecule of us was composed of atoms that could only have been forged in the cosmic furnaces in the centers of stars. He showed us how spectroscopy of the stars could show us what they were made of. He showed us the meaning of Einstein’s special Theory of Relativity. He pulled the universe together for us in a way that could not be undone. And he did it without calling upon the name and blessings of God. But he pointed out that we are connected to everything in the universe and everything is connected to us. To me, that seemed to define God. My religion was changing from Christianity to Saganism. Of course, Mom heard that as “paganism”. Breakfast table talking changed into early morning arguments. We didn’t exactly throw chairs at each other, but some pretty heated and pretty large ideas went flying through the air. Religion and politics became the banned topics at the breakfast table.
So that brings me to the Paffooney points for today. This blog has turned into a place where a disobedient son, a horrible sort of “free-thinker” type of radical hippie pinko goofball, can talk about the loony-liberal progressive ideas that have taken over his good-little Eisenhower-Republican little-boy mind. I spent the last post talking existentially about my religious beliefs. My conservative, old-fashioned friends and family call me an atheist now, but I truly believe in God. It’s just, I recognize the factors behind Christian myths. I bow to the wisdom of Scientists like Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking… as well as hippie psychologists like Alan Watts… and literary heroes like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S, Lewis.
I am proud to be an Iowegian (a Mickian word for being from Iowa), yet my birth-State produces gawd-awful Tea Party politicians like Steve King and Joni Ernst. The stuff that comes out of their mouths doesn’t even make good fertilizer. But they are comedy gold. Will Rogers would have pointed out that the jokes will write themselves. All the humorist would have to do is consult the front page of the newspaper. I also live in Texas where the debate over secession from the United States still goes on with new Governor Greg Abbott, a man who is a Rick Perry clone, except that he hasn’t bothered to put on glasses as much to make him smarter. And Texans are looking forward to the next Republican president in 2016. Both Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are running. That doubles Texas’ chances, right? With Global Warming not being accepted as a real thing, the need for giving all our money to the Koch brothers and the Walton family being recognized by both parties in Congress, and looming war with foreign nations that have the bad sense to be “Muslim in nature”, the future looks kinda bleak. But it is a great time to be a humorist, and I am guessing I won’t be doing very much talking at the breakfast table for a while.
There is so much left to be said before my time runs out. Wisdom, whether hard won or acquired entirely through wit, bears a certain responsibility in the possession of it. We are duty-bound as wizards, the masters of wisdom, to pass it on.
Now, you certainly have every right to protest that I am not wise and I have no wisdom. You are certainly right to point out that I am a doddering old fool that sits around the house all day in the midst of his poor-health-enforced retirement doing little beyond writing silly stories and drawing pictures of mostly naked cartoon girls. I get that. But the beginning of wisdom is the realization of how big everything is and how little I really know about anything.
Take for instance the question of where we came from and what our purpose is? (And the question of why I put a question mark on that when it really wasn’t a question.)
I originally believed in the God of the Christians and in the promises of Jesus… everlasting life and an eternity of sitting on a cloud with a harp and… Okay, it didn’t take me long to see the logical holes in that line of reasoning. So much of that is fear of death and the need to believe that I am the center of all things, the most important person in existence. The truth is I am only a tiny part of a nearly-infinitely-large universe. And the universe is conscious… self aware. How do I know this? Because I am conscious and self-aware. I am an infinitely tiny piece of the whole… but there are untold trillions of others just like me. And when I die… when this body ceases to function, as it already has a great deal of trouble doing, the parts that make up the individual creature and thought patterns I identify as me will be scattered to the far corners of everywhere to be gathered up once again and be something new. All of mankind passes away. Human beings and the planet Earth will one day be no more. But that is not what matters. There is so much more beyond the boundaries of what my limited eyesight can behold, and what my limited mind can comprehend. I am made of star-stuff (just ask Neal DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan), and I am a part of the universe as a whole. I am in no hurry to die. Life is worth fighting through the pain for… but I do not fear death. Like birth, it is only a stop along the way in a journey that, as far as I can tell, never ends.
Of late I have encountered many roadblocks on the road to creativity. Illness gets in the way. It is hard to think when I have too much arthritis pain. I have a hard time composing anything on days like yesterday when my blood sugar is out of whack. I haven’t been chased by car-driving crocodiles in red fright-wigs and green race cars. At least, not while I was awake. I am trying to follow a writing schedule that has me editing a novel for a contest in April, writing two other novels simultaneously, a set of short stories, and this daily blog that I am trying to average 500 words per day in every day (and succeeding now for roughly 41 straight days) (some days I write less words, but some days I go way over the stated limit). I end up squeezing the toothpaste tube of new ideas from both ends until the big wad in the middle finally bursts and gets white gobbets of creative-idea paste on everything in the room. I will admit that I mangle a metaphor or two, and give meaning to random blobs of description merely for the sake of adding more words. And what is this bit about, then? Clearly I am thinking about how I think and it is not a pretty sight. Sometimes my children bounce out of the rumble seat towards the river of man-eating fish, and I have to depend on the odd three-eyed alien tootling along in a space-doughnut to catch him or her in the nick of time. But sometimes, too, I am the rabbit, calmly watching from the sidelines hoping not to get run over but too fascinated to look away from the slap-dash slap-stick chase scene that is my actual life. This particular bit of tooth-paste squeezing is known as free writing, where I just keep stringing words and phrases together for as long as I can keep my aching fingers from falling off. I make corrections as I go, but there is no outline here, no discernible pattern, and very little logical coherence. Like the picture Paffooney, once it gets started, it just goes. And goes and goes. I have bounced over broken bridges and landed squarely on the pavement on the other side more than once of late. I paid the tax on the house and managed to remain a homeowner for another year. I fought off numerous bill-collecting crocodiles set on me by credit-card banks who are after me to pay off mountains of accumulated debt and interest after my multiple career-ending illnesses. I have lawyers helping me with debt reduction, the step before bankruptcy, which is also probably the step before stepping off the ledge at the top of the Chrysler Building. I continue to draw stuff that makes little or no visual sense, and post them here to further delight, dazzle and delude you. And, of course, I have the audacity to label this word free-for-all as humor… but I have reached five hundred and five words.
Over the past 50 years I have spent considerable time creating my own cartoons and cartoon characters. In general I have always been stuck on adventure cartoons. Milt Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and Roy Crane’s Buzz Sawyer were always foremost in my goofy little cartoonist’s mind when I created. I made an entire universe of characters and space-opera plots for what started as Zebra Fleet and would turn into Aeroquest. I tried my hand at sword and sorcery fantasy with Hidden Kingdom. In more recent years I started journaling in cartoon form with Adventures in Fantastica, a story that involves my dream self, Mickey. and a number of people from my real life, past and present, re-cast as talking animals and other weird cartoon characters.
I can’t publish stuff directly out of this large and ever-growing pile of cartoons because it is a pen-and-ink rough draft and includes lots of personal information about family and friends… and former students. It is also x-rated at several points. It is actually about my life. But there are weird and wonderful story-arcs in it that could easily be converted. The section set in Clowntown in particular… (Klowntown if I write it in Fantastican Kambobbulated Language) is a good story about a Klown detective named Squiggy who is trying to catch a thief who stole the heart-tarts from the Queen of Hearts. I want to try making this into a cartoon strip that I intend to publish here on WordPress as a sort of web comic. Don;t know what web comics are? Here is one my son put me onto that you should give a look-see; Two Kinds
The Klowns in today’s Paffooney are Klowntown Kops. They reveal what the average beat-klown-kop looks like in Fantastica. They are pratfall and slapstick clowns that use rubber whack-bats and pie-whacker pies (like the Ray Brad-berry Sci-Fi Pie the Klown is holding, ready for pie-whacking bad guys.)
Here you see me doing some serious art-starting. I am working on ideas about how clowns can be compassionate. I am hoping this is true, because I am one… a clown, I mean. But I have some serious noodle and doodle work to do. So I will start with a doodle of Klown Kops from Klowntown’s finest. More will be explained later… and more will be doodled too.
The 1000 Voices Facebook initiative wants me to write about Compassion more. I am totally in favor of more compassion in the world. But how do I get there from the somewhat sarcastic and derisive author-voice I use to create humor on my blog?
Well, I do believe compassion and humor are not incompatible. In fact, I have good reason from the realm of personal experience to believe that compassion is the fertilizer most necessary to the ultimate flowering and bloom of wondrous things. (See, the Grammar Nazis did teach me to spell wondrous right!)
Let me start with a character analysis of a witch. Yes, you heard me correctly. Mazie Haire is a witch. She is a secondary character from my novel Snow Babies. Her sister, Jeanette Haire is also a witch. They are both cantankerous, people-hating old ladies who have lived their lives in spite-filled isolation. They don’t even like each other very much. They also both “have the knowing”. They can both use their prodigious powers of observation, insight, and imagination to know things about other people, even if they’ve only just met. Mazie has kept the town of Norwall gossiping for two decades at her uncanny ways and unpleasant presence.
During the killer blizzard that hits the little Iowa farm town, Jeanette Haire is riding the Trailways bus headed to surprise her elder sister Mazie with an unwelcome visit. The bus ends up in a ditch in white-out blizzard conditions. A young woman on the bus with Jeanette loses her newlywed husband in the storm. As they reach the little town (due to heroic actions on the part of at least one main character in the book) Jeanette offers to take the young woman in during her time of grief, even though the only shelter and solace she can offer is her sister’s house where she herself isn’t welcome. The young woman has lost everything in the world that matters to her. She is left to the mercy and compassion of witches. Will they actually help her? Or will they cook her and eat her? Well… I’m hoping you will buy the book to find out… If I can just get the thing actually published.
Today’s Paffooney is a portrait of Mazie, based not on the real-life character I knew as a boy, but taken from the face of a beautiful young model. In the book Mazie is made to recall the beauty of her youth. If you look carefully at the gimlet eyes of the sour old woman, you may be able to detect at least a smidgen of the clear-eyed beauty she once was. It is possible for any person, no matter how bilious or contrary they may have become, to connect with someone else by the heart when they realize the deeper connections they may possess without knowing it. Not every act of kindness is committed by a saint. Sometimes the sinner does the same. It turns out the two sister witches do not eat the young widow. They offer her instead… well… I already have my 500 words, so I will end here.
Yes, Futterwacken, the dipsy-doodah dance of the Mad Hatter. That is what life has been for me of late. This is my first school year in 33 years wherein I will not be teaching at all. The two jobless school years in 2005 to 2007 saw me teaching a cappella without a safety net (in laymen’s terms, substitute teaching- where a good sub can be called at the last possible minute to fly across town to take the class from hell that the regular teacher can’t tame with a whip and a chair. (Personal survival is entirely optional.) ) (Wow! I never pulled off a parenthetic expression inside a parenthetic expression before.) Being now in the eighth month of the Mad Tea Party of retired-teachery-ness, I have never truly been so free and schedule-lite before. I have pulled off repairing siding and painting the house while being arthritic and extra-wobbly on an aluminum ladder. I have registered two children for school three times (my son Henry in two different schools this school year). I have written and completed three novels (The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, The Magical Miss Morgan, and Superchicken). I have signed a contract to get one published in extreme slow-motion (Snow Babies). And I have managed this blog with the latest accomplishment being 36 daily blog posts in a row and uncounted Paffooney pictures, both photographical and colored-pencilical. I have invented three new words in this blog post alone (according to my computer spell-checker who was apparently an anal-retentive old-maid school teacher from the New England countryside in a past life.) So, imagining myself as a Mad Hatter, dancing a disjointed dance where my head spins like a top, is not so far out after all. Let me share with you one last wacky Paffooney choice for no particular reason…
Or maybe this Paffooney was to honor the comic book artist Murphy Anderson who inspired it. (Yeah! I’m gonna go with that explanation).
Okay, I know that is the squirreliest title possible, but it has been the squirreliest situation you can imagine. At the beginning of the year, the Texas school-rule system of shoot-from-the-hip-and-let-somebody-else-take-the-blame educational decisions pinched us into a small ball and tossed us into a basket where we didn’t deserve to be. My middle child was forced to repeat his eighth grade year of schooling because of last Spring’s hospital stay and missing the sacred State test that you must pass or forever after be shamed and classed as an ugly duckling in a world full of swans. He was dying of sheer boredom at having to re-take those classes. He is a gifted student with above-average intelligence and a super-power of asking his father questions so difficult and numerous that it makes his father’s head explode. (The exploded head is mine if my third-person-ness is confusing you). So, at the half year, we tried to get him into Creekview High School. We had a counselor on our side who had told my wife that Henry belonged in high school. Except, at enrollment time, we never got to talk to her. An assistant principal looked at the fact that he had not taken the sacred State test (tests, actually… you have to pass Reading, Math, Writing, Science, and History… all made harder by the State with every passing year) and told us to go back to middle school, do not pass Go, and do not collect 200 dollars. That cruelty was not unexpected. It is the way education works in Texas.
So, today we went to re-enroll him in the middle school. But the counselor from there, the very excellent counselor who was responsible for Henry last year, knew all the reasons that school was a bust for Henry last spring and also knew how wonderfully, intensely smart he really is. She insisted that the high school was the only right place for him. She contacted the higher administration on our behalf, and Henry’s former 6th grade principal, now assistant superintendent for the district, agreed. The decree was given and several good people who were in our corner were vindicated. And here’s the part that made me tear up. Henry got his wish to be in high school with the kids that were his friends in middle school last year. Miraculously… unexpectedly… the gods of Texas education decided to smile on my family for a change.
Catch a Falling Star 