I am celebrating because I have done a lot of blogging and I believe it has reached a few people who really read and like what I post. I know for a fact that many like my artwork. I am not foolish enough to believe that I deserve to make loads of money as a writer. So far I have made 28 dollars worth of royalties on two published books. That makes a lot of hard work for very little return. I have spent more than that on my writing, so I am realistically making negative dollars. But the important thing is that my writing and art is now out there in the world, inhabiting closet and desk drawers no more. Some of it now resides in you who are reading this. I thank you. My life was complete before I started this endeavor, beginning and ending with being a teacher, so every word I can possibly write on the heart of a reader is pure whipped cream on top of the lemon-meringue pie.
Nerds… by any other name!
This is an essay from 2006 that I dug up to make more fun of nerds (which can be considered self-referential humor).
A while back I had the misfortune to write an essay that I called a Bestiary for the Modern Classroom. I delineated the nonsense as if it were more than the half-disturbed ravings of a burned-out junior-highschool English teacher, something like the wit and wisdom gleaned from a twenty-four year sentence to the educational gulag of our time. I told you about the Pepsi girls, Snarks, and Invisible Kids. I deliberately ignored an entire wing of the monkey house by not breaking down for you the tremendously terrible and totally trigonometric totality of the modern Nerd.
When I drew this particular nerd cartoon, I am a cartoonist, by the way, Steven Q. Urkel still strutted and polka-ed his way across the TV screen in the 80’s sitcom, Family Matters. I fear nerds are still pretty much the same. I will have to admit, I will probably also be accused of being a Nerd, and though I do love cheese and polka music and Star Trek… I AM NOT A NERD! That second Paffooney is NOT a self-portrait, though I have to admit I do grin just like that, and wear glasses, and… but enough of that!
In my previous article, I made the most heinous mistake of mentioning that there were Gomers lurking in the classroom. Well, GooooOlleee, everybody seemed to think that that meant a clueless hayseed from the back hills who went to and fell in love with the Marine Corps. Do you remember Gomer Pyle, USMC? Yeah, that make-believe soldier that made Sergeant Carter’s life a living heckfire during endless training sessions while real marines were getting cut to pieces by Russian-made weapons in the rice paddies of Viet Nam? The rube part of that story, nor the military part are neither one of them the part that makes a Gomer a Gomer. It is entirely the idiot-savant part. Remember Gomer’s ability to burst into song and solve the problems of the whole camp with a beautiful basso rendition of “Oh, My Papa”? Gomers are all like that. They are nerds who can’t follow directions, get everything wrong in a Steve Urkel, “Did I do that?” sort of way, and who are two earnestly sweet and silly to ever be mad at. They also have that one unmatchable talent hidden somewhere inside that they can whip out without warning and melt the hearts of every LuAnn in the crowd. It isn’t necessarily a singing talent. Young Master Victory Brown was a hip-hop wannabe who couldn’t get the attention of a decent cop by blowing up the Chemistry lab, but who could dance like a wild man. Everything went against the boy, it seemed, except when a professional singer like Patsy Torres came to play and sing in the high school gym for Red Ribbon Anti-Drug Week. Young Vic got up on that stage and started dancing. Ordinarily, the performer’s bodyguards would’ve had a punk like that in chains before the song was over, but he was so enthusiastic and downright good, that Patsy Torres was wowed and let him stay. He danced so hard he executed a perfect back-flip off that stage and into the audience, where he landed on his feet like a cat and kept right on dancing like he meant to do that all along. You know what? I believe he really did mean to bust that move. And man, did he ever bust it! Gomers can excel in math, chess, theater-arts, drawing and painting, sewing, singing, and practically anything else that could ever be that one miraculous talent that lets them strut and fret for hour upon that stage. Victor would be offended to hear it, but he was a Gomer through and through.
Goths as a subspecies of nerd are worrisome at best. Girls and boys, though mostly girls for some strange reason, who wear spiked dog collars like Droopy’s enemy Spike in the old Tex Avery masterpieces, and all look like they must surely belong to Bela Lugosi’s fan club with their black clothes and black lipstick and eyeliner (even on the…No! I mean especially on the… boys) and their notebooks scrawled with death’s head symbols and Marilyn Manson stickers are all under the mysteriously medieval label of Goth. Now where did this nonsense ever start? I will admit that I was once at a midnight screening of Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I did briefly admire the poems of Baudelaire and Rimbaud in College, but I wouldn’t be caught dead pasting my hair down with hair gel just to show off my Eddie Munster widow’s peak, and I would never let anyone read my gloomy Death Poems and Devil Poems from the late 70’s, let alone paste them on MySpace or Xanga (Read that now as WordPress) billboards. I am mortified by the obsession with mortality displayed by the average Goth. Did they not hear Kevin McCarthy’s warning about the pod people? Did they never fear the bite of Barnabas Collins because it would make them tainted and like him? Whether the whole Goth scene is dying or not, I have to regretfully report, there was a girl last week at Ted Polk Middle School wearing her eye-liner like a tribute to Alice Cooper. The dramatically dying and dreary undead are still ironically alive in the teenage Goth.
That leaves only Trekkie Techies to complete my bestiary. And you will undoubtedly agree with me that they have been around since the 1950’s. In the 1970’s we called them the “Audio-visual Club.” Yes they were the ones that strange-old Mr. Hickenlooper would get to run his eighth grade social studies film backwards to fill the remainder of a period. He somehow thought that seeing the cannon fire off of the Battleship Missouri blowing back into the barrels in black and white newsreel footage was the height of humor. Mr. Hickenlooper never truly realized that he was the only one laughing at his jokes. The rest of us laughed at how he was laughing at his own jokes. In other words, we were not laughing WITH him, we were laughing AT him. The Big Hick was himself a nerd, probably of the subclass known as a Trekkie Techie. Yes, they watched Star Trek just as I watched Star Trek. But they were also the ones who could actually explain to you how a warp drive worked, and fantasized about kissing Uhura as a Klingon Captain. You probably won’t believe it, but Trekkie Techies are still around and going strong. Now, instead of 35mm film and tape recorders, they work with I-pods, Dell Computers, and Flash Drives, but they are still making technology dance to their own different drum. Instead of Captain Kirk and the Vulcan Death Grip, they talk about Jackson’s version of Frodo, the other Jackson’s Master Mace Windu, and how Marv whacked ’em all in Sin City, but they are still living in their own little fantasy worlds and talking Klingon and Huttese. Don’t get me wrong. I know Bill Gates was one, and Bill Clinton was another, and probably Obama is too(or is that O’bama? he doesn’t look Irish?), and all three of them probably would get a laugh out of ionizing George W. Bush’s underpants, but it will never be cool to be a Techie Trekkie. The question will undoubtedly arise, since I like Star Trek and Star Wars and Star Anything, am I a Techie Trekkie too? Well… “May the Force Be With You!”
So now my little bestiary is complete with all the major species of anniemule in the middle school classroom. Do you think I left any out? No doubt. There are more kinds of human beings in middle schools than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio. (Yeah, isn’t there a kind of Snark who always misquotes Shakespeare to keep us entertained?)
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Wearing the Tinfoil Hat
I get laughed at when I talk about some of the conspiracies that engage and utterly horrify me. Yes, I believe there was a conspiracy involved in the events of 9-11. Even if you accept the government’s version of what happened, you accept a conspiracy too. So, what is more realistic to believe in? Did 19 Muslim terrorists with some training in Afghanistan really take over four airliners with box cutters? Entering the cockpits where they would be opposed by at least equal numbers of people (if they were not actually outnumbered), take over with 100 % success, not allowing any pilots to reach down a few inches and set off a hijack alert system? Then fly the planes, making them do aerial maneuvers that would’ve torn the aircraft to pieces at speeds beyond the capability of the aircraft at the altitudes they were executed at? With pilot skills so inferior that their American instructors laughed about it? And then making the buildings fall down due to fire even though no high-rise concrete and steel skyscraper had ever fallen down due to fire before? Even making WTC-7 fall down though it never got hit by a hijacked airplane? And all three skyscrapers fell straight down into their own footprint, suspiciously like a controlled demolition?
Or could it be that Neo-conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld felt that they needed a “New Pearl Harbor” in order to make profitable warfare in Iraq (With untapped oil reserves) and Afghanistan (with mineral wealth like Lithium for batteries)? Does it maybe matter that Larry Silverstien, who not only bought the World Trade Center complex shortly before the events with leveraged debt and faced a billion dollar project to remove the asbestos problem from the buildings, but took out an insurance policy that covered acts of terrorism on the buildings and scored a doubling of billions of dollars because the two planes represented two acts of terrorism? Does it matter that L. Paul Bremer didn’t show up in his World Trade Center office that day as some of his chief operations people were meeting about possible financial problems of embezzlement or fraud and were almost all killed while the evidence they were presenting was destroyed? And this is the same Paul Bremer who would become the occupational governor of Iraq, managing the corporate exploitation of Iraq by companies like Halliburton?
It bothers me that there was no real investigation of the entire attack. The steel from the destroyed buildings was quickly disposed of, sent overseas to be quickly recycled rather than forensically examined. It bothers me that a retired Chemistry professor from Denmark, Niels Harrit, found incontestable evidence of nano-thermite in dust from the WTC disaster. It bothers me that a physicist like Steven Jones could give up his teaching job at BYU to found a group like Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice because he was so certain that the government explanation of events was a deliberate lie. It also bothers me that groups of reputable people form organizations like Pilots for 9-11 Truth and Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth and the 9-11 Family Steering Committee have so many legitimate questions that the government and mass media refuse to answer. I may be obsessing about a conspiracy theory, but there is a conspiracy to obsess about, questions to be answered, and people who need to answer for what was actually done.
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My Latest Novel
I sent this novel to the publisher during the October submission window last night. I am hoping it will get published and add to my published catalog. Superchicken was my nickname in high school, so this one is a little autobiographical. This is also the one where a boy is tricked into going camping with a girl who has a crush on him at a nudist camp. So it should be noted that some things in this story really happened. Still this young adult novel is mostly funny, a little serious, and a lot of fantasy.
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Dr. Seabreez
In my artwork and in my novels, there exists a phantom character. His name is Dr. Thornapple Seabreez. He is a mysterious fellow, born in the 1860’s, taken into deep space by the ancient Sylvani race of aliens, and mysteriously re-appearing in my stories from the distant future, 7,000 or more years ahead, from the fabled Xandar Empire, a type-5 civilization that spans the Milky Way Galaxy. In these Paffoonies he appears in name only, a doctor’s office sign;
So, What is the purpose of such a character? Sometimes in comedies, you need a totally silly solution, a Deus ex machina to save the day for characters who find themselves in a totally impossible situation. I know this falls into the realm of what a writer should never do, but I am a completely silly writer. So there. 
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Red Skelton
I don’t usually do portraits, but, as I believe I may have said on an older post, Red Skelton is like a god to me. Much of what I know about comedy, I learned from him back in the 60’s and early 70’s. I watched him religiously on Wednesday nights on both CBS and NBC (channels 5 from Mason City, Iowa, and 13 from Des Moines). He made me laugh. Sometimes he even made me cry. So I honor him now with a portrait (or insult him, depending on your opinion of my artwork) in a Paffooney of Red as Clem Kadiddlehopper, pride (or maybe village idiot) of Cornpone County, Tennessee.
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Foreshortening
When something is nearer in the picture, it appears bigger than those things that appear farther away. This is called foreshortening. It is artists’ jargon for the kind of superhero pictures that Jack “King” Kirby always used to do on the covers of Avengers, Fantastic Four, and Captain America comic books in the 60’s and 70’s. The hands that reach out to grab you. The fists or the gun-barrels that rush toward you. These are the things I must draw bigger than the anatomy or the scenery that comes behind. So let me try that with novel ideas.
Snow Babies is being published as you read this. Here is a one-sentence foreshortening of that novel; A blizzard so terrible that omens of death by freezing begin appearing, descends on a small Iowa farm town, and four young runaways on the Trailways bus must find shelter of more than one kind.
I have gotten Superchicken ready to be submitted to a publisher. Here is a one-sentence foreshortening of that; A boy moves to a small Iowa farm town where he doesn’t fit in and is treated as an outsider, but before he can feel like he truly belongs, he must learn about himself and the super powers he has always had inside him.
The first draft that I have just finished is called The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. This is the foreshortening for that; A genius inventor has lost his wife and son to a lab accident, so he must come to terms with the dangers inherent in science as he tries to heal himself by making friends with the gifted boy who lives next door.
If you are a writer and have written a book or two, can you do a foreshortening on that story? I would be fascinated to hear about it, even if it takes more than one sentence.
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Protagonists
I have been thinking about who qualifies as the Protagonist in my most recent novel, The Bicycle Wheel Genius. I have to ponder this because the title character, the inventor Orben Wallace, doesn’t actually seem to be the center of his own story. Instead, it is the boy who lives next door that is learning about life, adventure, girls, and imagination. In the novel, the inventor has taken a vow to never use electronic devices if he didn’t have to because it was an electromagnetic invention that went awry in his laboratory and started the house fire that killed his wife and son. So he tries to invent things with pedal power and tries to forget the wife and son he lost. But it happens that Tim Kellogg, the inquisitive boy next door, not only reminds him of the lost son, but he actively tries to learn about Orben and make friends with him. Tim has a best friend, Tommy Bircher, who shares in his adventures and always stands by his side. But Tommy’s parents are involved in an international business that moves them away from Tim. He has to deal with the loss of his best friend. At the same time, his new best friend, Mike Murphy, has discovered girls. One particular girl, Blueberry Bates, is in love with him and captures his young heart. So naturally Tim is upset, and so tries to get back at the girl who took his replacement best friend. He has to learn to understand an appreciate the girl and her needs better. Tim and Orben desperately need to be friends with each other, and through shared adventures, they discover that the bond between them is very powerful. So, I have to conclude that Orben is not really the protagonist of his own story. He is not the one who has to learn something and fundamentally change. And Tim Kellogg begins and ends the story, just as he does in this post.
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Finishing the Wheels of Stone (I finished my novel…Yay!)
I finished a novel today. I reached Canto One Hundred and Eighteen (I inexplicably call chapters cantos and pretend that they are really parts of an epic poem or story-song). I put an ending on the story I have been working on since the Summer of 2012. Now, it probably is not obvious to you, especially if you are a writer who takes a rough draft and reworks, rewrites, revises, and does several other things to it that start with re-. I don’t work that way. I build a story with stone blocks, and am loathe to take foundation stones out of it once I’ve constructed the castle in the air. So this story, 
The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, starts with gossip in a post office, and ends with tears and laughter at a wake for a beloved character whom I never expected to die when I started the story. It can no longer be changed. Like any stone structure, all I can do now is polish the surface. So, I am elated. The worst of the birth pangs are over. Have you ever tried to pass a stone castle? Painful is a total understatement. And I have to say, I love this story now with a passion, even though when I reread it out loud to polish it, it is going to tear my heart out all over again. But it is done, and the celebrations must now begin!
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Maxfield Parrish Pictures
Much of what I draw is inspired by Maxfield Parrish, the commercial artist who created stunningly beautiful work for advertisers in the 1920’s and 30’s, and went on to paint murals and masterworks until the 1960’s. He is noted for his luminous colors, especially Parrish Blue, and can’t be categorized under any existing movement or style of art. No one is like Maxfield Parrish. And I don’t try to be either, but I do acknowledge the debt I owe to him. You should be able to see it in these posts, some of mine, and some of his.
Mine; (In the Land of Maxfield Parrish)
His; (Daybreak)
Mine; (Wings of Imagination)
His; (Egypt)
Believe me, I know who wins this contest. I am not ashamed to come in second. I will never be as great as he was. But I try, and that is worth something. It makes me happy, at any rate.
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Catch a Falling Star 