When you are reading a good book, it is hard to stop even though you know you’ve no reading time left. It is hard to put the thing down. My comic book, Hidden Kingdom, is absolutely nothing like that. I am doing five pages today, and no more. I am adding them also to my vault. So maybe today’s the day you would be better served to go look at the whole thing (so far) in the vault.
Here are today’s five pages (along with another look at my goofy cover)
I am getting better. but the headaches have not gone away and it is hard to write. Give me time and I will do better.
I am forced to cheat a bit today. I am ill, and I am trying hard to keep my ghost inside. But it is only cheating a little bit. I am posting today. I am using old cartoons. I am doing less than the target 500 words, but I have gone over the target all week, and it averages out. So this is a ghost post… not because a ghost writer is posting it, but because this writer is ill and trying not to become a ghost. So here are the ghost hunters again. You will help them most by NOT pointing at the ghosts and screaming. That kind of scare can’t be good for their health.
Iowans are simple people and have a simple faith. We believe in the land and we believe in making things grow. Whether we use Christian symbols and Republican moral imperatives, or liberal thought experiments laced with atheistic flavors of actual thinking, we all basically accept that we should believe in the land and make things grow.
The church in the Paffooney picture is a real church in my real little Iowa home town. Once it was the Congregational Church in Rowan, the second location. The first Congregational Church building that stood on Main Street burned down before I was ten. But it didn’t remain pure Congregational. Little Rowan was not really big enough to support two different churches. So long about the time when I was wrestling with the fact that I had lust in my heart, and looking at the pretty Congregationalist farm girl two seats ahead of me and the Methodist Minister’s son on the school bus made my soul hurt, the Methodist Church and the Congregational Church were forced to become one church. They used both church buildings on a weekly rotating basis, using the same minister for both. It was the Methodist minister, my best friend’s father who got the job of spiritual leader for the entire community. And there was hell to pay. Congregationalists hated the idea that the minister was no longer speaking Congregationalist approved Biblical ideas. And Methodists resented the fact that they had to have their immortal souls saved in the same church building as those unclean Congregationalists. Heckfire, they didn’t even like taking cold showers as much as Methodists did. They took them, all right, but didn’t really like them enough. So religious wars were fought in our little town for decades. But only in the manner of Iowegian Christians. Silent wars employing laser-focused glares of righteous disapproval. Attacks on the other side committed solely with clucking tongues and expressed only to members of the same congregation in places where the other side will never hear of it. And of course, as children tackling the full range of punitive forces and concepts associated with puberty, we were completely unaware of what was going on behind closed doors. Fury of Biblical proportions was disrupting the digestion of nearly one quarter of the Yoke Ministry of the United Churches of Rowan, Iowa, and causing innumerable bottles of Milk of Magnesia to be consumed in the middle of the night. These two Midwestern flavors of Christianity were just too different to co-exist in the same building. Of course, I couldn’t tell you what the differences actually were. I still can’t. But I learned the tremendously terrible and atheistic notion that all Christians are the same, and they all worship the same God, and they are all equally worthy of love.
The scariest thing of all is this. I went on from the religious wars of Rowan, Iowa in the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s to living in a community in South Texas where the two sides were Hispanic Catholics versus Southern Baptists. I got married to a Jehovah’s Witness, and tried very sincerely for a while to be a Jehovah’s Witness. I taught kids who were Catholic, Baptist, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist. And scariness comes with the realization that I still believe “they are all equally worthy of love.” Atheists too, for that matter. I am sorry that atheists are not crazy enough to actually talk to God. There is comfort on so many levels with the ability to speak to an invisible mythological father. And I speak to Him daily. So what is my real religion? I am not sure. But Valerie Clarke in the church Paffooney agrees with me (because I totally created her and she has no choice); the church parking lot is a great place for skateboards.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, philosophy
Some people might say I was born in the wrong century. I love castles and knights and everything medieval. Of course, the Dungeons and Dragons part of my life, my twenties and early thirties (1980’s and 1990’s) only made the situation worse. I am cursed by a desire to build castle walls.
I mean both figuratively and literally, of course. I have blogged already about incessant cardboard constructions that I can’t help but build and add to my ever-increasing set of Dungeons and Dragons toys. And always it is for the sake of the story. I love not only making the castle walls and castle buildings, but also the castle people. It flows in an unbroken stream of goofiness from cardboard and paper to brick and wooden towers and finally to knights and wizards and commoners and goblins. It takes all kinds to fill a kingdom.
Figuratively, I keep hoping to build ramparts against the coming enemies that I know are lurking, waiting to attack and take my life. I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor. I had two benign lumps removed from my body this school year. I can no longer teach because of health. I can’t supplement my retirement income, because part-time jobs I can physically do are either too distant to travel to or simply not available. The Dire Wolf of Poverty and the Grim Reaper are both sniffing around my barbican, looking for the way inside the castle.
But I continue to people my castle with new and fascinating folk. Endless elves and half-elves, were-creatures, and halflings all take up residence in my imaginary castles. They take over my art, my house, and sometimes… even this blog.
These are just a few of the interesting folks I’ve invited into my house and my life through the windows of my imagination.
And the most fascinating thing about this whole castle-building thing is that it touches my life in so many places. I am sincerely addicted to castle-building games on Facebook like Magecraft and Stormfall.
I have used those moments when I am waiting for things… telephone calls to insurance offices that put me on endless hold, those times after midnight when body aches wake me and I can’t get back to sleep, winding down after doing whatever yard work or house work that I can, and even when I am in the pre-writing stage letting ideas percolate. I came up with this lame idea for a blog while watching my troops take down marauders in Magecraft. And these games let me people the castles too.
So I spend a good share of my days now building and mending castle walls. Of course, I know the enemies I am trying to defend against are both undeterred and unimpressed by castle walls. They are immune to my vain attempts at constructing defenses. But even though the darkness looms on the horizon, I still have some of my bright, shining day left. And there is something majestic about castles with towers and walls.
Filed under humor, making cardboard castles, Paffooney
At the outset of 2015, back on January 1st, I made a plan to blog every single day of the year. Now in June I am nearing the halfway point and I haven’t missed a single day. I was worried at the outset that I would quickly run out of ideas or have to re-post a lot of old writing. But I hammered out a goal of writing 500 words every day… not rough draft words, but polished words that were as near to finished writing as I can get without obsessive-compulsive editing and the post-traumatic stress syndrome that causes. I found out that the more I write, the more the well refills with fresh prose needing to be drawn out in my daily bucket-full.
I am supposing that it doesn’t hurt that I have been in poor health and spend a lot of my day in bed where I do the writing. You have more time to write when you are limited in what you can do every day. For instance, wasting a day water-skiing is not really an option. Neither is mountain-climbing, tennis-playing, race-running. and acrobatic maneuvers in a space-plane. Well, I actually do some of that last thing… but only in my science fiction stories. Moose-chasing, pun-hunting, time-travelling, working elaborate voodoo spells, and swashbuckling are the things I really do… and I do them in my imagination.
It also really doesn’t hurt my overall goals that I am a cartoonist and I draw constantly. It gives me plenty of visual punch punch to fill up spaces between paragraphs, and I have real, honest-to-god professional writer friends that say the visuals are a key to good blogging now and in the near future. People respond more to the pictures than the prose.
I really can draw upon my life for topics. I recently read an article that claims stress and uncertainty in day-to-day life fuels creativity and writing efficacy. So that is good news for me. The house is falling apart. The weather has gone from a serious five-year drought to record spring rainfall. The ground our house is built on is shifting with the transition from shriveled to soaked like a sponge. So the foundation is cracking and the rafters will soon be landing on our heads. The flower garden that is the yard is turning into more of a jungle. I am in no condition health-wise to mow and maintain, but the city will fine us a lot of money I don’t have if I don’t do something to curb the jungle’s enthusiastic spread. And of course the dog produces five times her weight in dog poop every day. (Here’s that disturbing thing about poop references turning up in my posts again.) But the exercise I am forced to get from dealing with those problems on a daily basis is probably keeping my heart going and keeping me alive. And, besides, ranting about troubles is a source of humor and gives me something to write about.
Now, I started blogging in 2013 because my publisher at the time, I-Universe, told me it was a necessary part of marketing my book. They neglected to tell me that I would be the only one marketing my books and that I would probably never see a penny of profit in my lifetime from writing, but that’s the breaks, ain’t it? There is a very good chance that, even though I have been published more than once, and though editors say my writing is good, my books will never be read widely during my lifetime. I may get discovered along the way given enough time and endurance… but I may just be writing books for my own satisfaction and reading pleasure. It is the nature of the beast in this day and age that being a good writer and a mediocre marketer is a recipe for failure, while being a poor writer and a good marketer yields success. So, while irony is having its way with me, I would just like to say… blogging is now where I find my happiness… and thank you for reading my blog.
Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Every day of my life I have dealt with lies. After all, I was a public school teacher for 31 years and taught middle school for 24 of those years.
“Please excuse Mauricio from writing the essay today. He was chopping ham for me yesterday and his hand got numb.”
“I have to go to the bathroom at 8:05, Teacher! Not 8:10 or 8:00! And no girl will be waiting by the water fountain… oh, ye, vato!”
“Can’t you see I have to go home sick? I have purple spots all over my face! It is just a coincidence I was drawing hearts on my notebook with a purple marker.”
But now the classroom is quiet. I am retired.
Okay, I know, the first part of that is a lie. The classroom is not quiet. I am retired and don’t go there any more. Some other teacher (or long-term substitute after the rookie teacher ran out screaming after the first week of school) is now listening to the lies.
So, nothing but the truth now, right? Who is around during the day to tell me lies? The dog? Well, yes… when she wants to go outside and pretends the poop and pee are bursting out of her, but really only wants to sniff the street lamp and all the male dogs who have peed there.
But there is also me. Yes, me! I am working at being a writer now… so I tell myself lies… and not little ones, either. Whole episodes of my past have come pouring out in my stories… and I am not always the good guy or the main character in the tale. Sometimes I was the villain, the mistake-maker, or the fool. I’m definitely not perfect now, nor was I then, but I’m a writer now. I can change it. I tell lies. I can make it work out in ways that never happened in real life.
I put lies in this blog. For instance, I may have suggested, a few posts back, that because of psoriasis in my usually-covered region, I sit around naked all day when I type this post. Not true. I suggested that for comedy value at the time. Well, it’s mostly not true. I don’t know how much you know about severe-plaque psoriasis, but it only flares up at times. Some days, like today, a half hour in a steaming hot Sitz-bath with extra salt allows me to wear clothes for quite a while after. So I merely exaggerated because I thought making you picture plump and pasty-skinned old me sitting around nude and typing a blog was funny… but… okay, maybe that was just weird. Still, a good lie is always at least twelve cents better than the ugly truth. (I must note, the truth of this paragraph has changed since I originally wrote this post. Now I am more of a nudist and enjoy being naked while I type. But that now being a lie does not spoil the point of this essay.)
And the fact that my stories are filled with little-boy liars, giant rabbit-men who can talk and cook vegetables like people, and invading invisible alien frog-people, derives naturally from the fact that I have been a highly imaginative liar since childhood. Just ask any of my grade school classmates. I used to make them believe there was an evil clone Michael out there somewhere trying really, really hard to get me in trouble. I told them that I was in contact with a race of blue-colored people that lived in an underground world deep beneath our little Iowa town. I even showed them the knotty old stump that was the doorway to the tunnel that led to the Blue World. Of course, the key was never available when I showed them. And my friends were not completely gullible. In fact, I suspect that once in a while, they knew I was… lying.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, telling lies
Today I want to direct your attention to my vault. It is a new blog page where I keep cartoon stories that I intend to continually edit and update with new ‘toons. It is called Mickey’s House of Fiction. You can find it here;
The Paffooney’s I offer today as a sample are merely the title page and introduction of a new cartoon project.
Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney, Paffooney cartoony
I am sure by now you are probably aware of how much rain has been pouring down on our heads here in Texas. We are soaked to the bone and some of us are under water. My poor cracked and useless swimming pool, useless because five-years-plus of drought has shrunk the soil and cracked the cement in the cement pond, is now full of water again. The ground under it is so saturated that even though the holes are still not repaired, the water has no place to go. At least the North Texas area we live in is now greener than I have ever seen it this time of year.
The grass needs cutting desperately since I have not had a rain-free day to cut it in so long. The upshot is, I need the sun to come out. If you have been reading my blog of late, a serious mistake that some people are willing to commit, you may have noticed how down and depressing my writing has been of late. I have been writing about how the insurance pirates have been wounding me deeply in an economic sense. I have written about dead people talking in the cemetery in an Our Town sort of scene gone completely weird. And yesterday I wrote about dealing with my own childhood victimization through grisly Middle Ages-inspired death-art. I have reached the low point in the valley and decided it is now time climb the next mountain. I need my sunshine back.
So, today, the sun came out. Even better, the forecast for the next week has rain chances down around four per cent. The ducks have come back to our pool. The songbirds have returned from wherever they’ve been hiding. The world is cheering up. And in spite of problems with arthritic limbs aching, book publishing going in super-slow-motion, financial doom looming above me ready to swoop down like an avenging eagle at any second, and numerous other things that are hard to turn into humor, the sunshine has restored my smile.
Filed under happiness, humor, photo paffoonies
I would like to say going in that there are good reasons why young people can become obsessed with death and suffering and the color black and the dance towards the grave. I danced that jig too when I was younger. At age 22 my experience with sexual assault came back to me in dreams. I thought they were only dream images, but as I continued to think about it and be tormented by it, I began to clearly recall the terrible things he did to me that I had been repressing for twelve years. And I deal with traumatic experience with art for some crazy reason. I took a week in 1981 to get all the horrid feelings out on paper.
You will notice the tombstone lists the date of death as being before my eleventh birthday in 1967. That is when it happened. It was not actually a sexual experience… it was torture. He took my pants off and did things to my private parts to cause me intense pain. And he even said to me that it was my own fault, that somehow I had told him that I wanted this horrible thing to happen. For several years after I intentionally used the furnace in my home to make burn scars on my lower back and the back of my legs. I believe now that I was hurting myself in order to extinguish sexual thoughts and feelings. The worst thing he did to me was make me feel guilty about what happened.
When you go back to the art of the middle ages, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and other European artists both young and old, you see artists grappling with mortality, the fact that all people, including me, will die. At times it can seem to the immature mind that death is the only possible escape from suffering. This artwork comes from a time when I was contemplating exactly that.
If you are looking at this closely, you will see that I signed my name to it backwards. I signed my art as Leah Cim Reyeb, or simply Leah Cim. I put these four panels into my big black portfolio and never showed them to anybody until after my abuser passed away from a heart attack. I don’t believe in Hell and I don’t believe in ghosts, so now, I finally feel safe about sharing this artwork with others. The terrible secret is a secret no longer. He can no longer reach out and hurt me any further.
I apologize for not being funny… even remotely funny… in this post. Funny is probably not the appropriate thing for this post. You may be wondering why I even bother to post it. Isn’t this a private matter, best kept to myself? You tell me. This is a terrible thing that happened to me. I am now honest about it in a way I could never be before. I can explain it without worrying about any retribution by or against him. I can finally forgive him. I can overcome what happened and be the stronger for it. And if you have read this far without being so revolted by it that you stopped reading and stopped following my blog, maybe you need to do the dance with me. Is there something you need to overcome? It can be overcome. So dance with me… and rejoice.
Filed under forgiveness, Paffooney, philosophy
