We Are Not Alone

Photo0157

The Photo Paffooney I have provided for today is one I have been sitting on and pondering over for several months now.  It isn’t the cloud formation that is troubling, it’s the light.  You see, the problem is, it was early morning.  The sun was in the east, not far above the horizon.  This picture shows two bright lights glowing behind the clouds in the southern sky.  So, what were they?  Lights that merely hovered there.  We are in the zone flown over both by DFW and Love field.  These weren’t airplanes.  I checked UFO reports continuously.  Three times unidentified objects were reported in the Dallas Fort-Worth area.  The reports were online, but not covered by local media, newspapers or TV.  In fact, they rather swiftly disappeared from You-Tube.  So, what does it all mean?

Well, you know I am a nut-case.  If you’ve read any of my tinfoil hat posts, you know I think the Roswell incident revolved around at least one crashed ship from another star system.  I also think the primary proof that we have that we are not the only intelligent beings in this universe is the very fact that the government has worked so hard to convince us that it is not so.   Liars tend to protest too much.  And there is an ever-increasing pool of whistle-blowers that have risked everything to come forward with tales of close encounters and government programs to conceal the science we have learned from back-engineered alien space-crafts.  You don’t have to believe me.  Look up the Disclosure Project and Dr. Steven Greer and Astronaut Edgar Mitchell.  Hear it in their own words on You-Tube.  I am a kook, but I’m not the only one… and some of them have impressive resumes.

Am I claiming, then, that my picture shows UFO’s from outer space?  Of course it doesn’t.  It is an unidentified phenomenon that would be easily explained if I just had a few more facts… like the amount of facts I have looked at that make me think that We Are Not Alone.

Not Alone

So, was the purpose of this post merely to remind you that I have an idiotic faith in flying saucers?  Not at all.  I am in the midst of week of total isolation at home.  My family went to Florida for Spring Break to visit my oldest son.  I stayed home with the dog (somebody has to feed her and pick up poop).  Actually, I am not well enough to travel and I convinced them that it would be okay to go without me.  And it is okay too.  I may be full of self pity and feeling lonely and blue right now like some sort of fool, but I am not alone.  By myself, sure, but not alone.  I got to thinking about all the people my life has touched over the years.  I have known teachers in four different school districts, people in five different communities, workers at QT where I buy my Big Q cup of Diet Coke every morning, family members by the freight-train-full, cousins, nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts, great aunts, grandparents long gone, and over 2,500 students who sat in my 31 years of classrooms.  I guess I know a few people, huh?  And none of them have truly left me… not even those who died.  As I continue to deteriorate and die… and continue to put my wealth of life experience into silly fictional forms, I realize they are all still with me.  It is the only real wealth a human being ever has.  I, like you, like all of us, am never alone.

Leave a comment

Filed under aliens, autobiography, being alone, Paffooney

The Magic Boy (1959)

When I was a boy in the magical, wonderful days of black-and-white photos and Howdy Doody on TV, the 1960’s, the Belmond movie theater did free Christmas movies for kids.  Every weekend when I was nine we went to the show and took the neighbor kids, packed ourselves five-to-a-seat along with every other kid in Wright County, Iowa, and watched wonderful movies.  We saw westerns with Jimmy Stewart and Alan Ladd.  We saw Tarzan find the Elephant’s Graveyard in a movie starring Mike Henry.  And best of all, we found a movie playing there as part of a triple-feature free-movie day, all in Japanese animation (known today as anime) called The Magic Boy.  I fell in love.  No, not with a neighbor girl or girl cousin that I was either sitting on or holding on my lap, but with the magic that is Japanese animation.  Now, I won’t lie and say this was before I became slavishly devoted to the animated cartoon show Astroboy that played most weekday afternoons at three, and for several years at five o’clock in the morning.  I was already immersed in that as well, but it was all on the black-and-white Motorola TV.   It was the color, the motion, the cuteness of the characters, and the Japanese-ness of the basic story that I fell in love with.

220px-Magic_boy

It was the story of  Sasuke, a young boy living in feudal Japan with his sister and several cutesy, highly-personified critters.  One day, a marauding eagle comes and snatches up the little Bambi deer-thing and takes him to a lake.  The fawn is dropped into the lake as a necessary sacrifice to the eagle’s evil mistress.  Sasuke and his pets come to the rescue, leaping into the lake and saving the drowning deer.  A huge evil salamander, actually the witch in her accursed form, nabs one of the rescuers, one of Sasuke’s pets, and eats it to gain the power to re-constitute herself in witch form as the evil Yakusha.

cNGgJPSXQxidmjEaQeBxyU3WHNk hqdefault (1) snapshot20120117011053

Sasuke then goes on a quest.  He must learn magical powers from a wizard and grow into a competent sorcerer so that he can defeat the witch and avenge his lost pet.  It was a quest that closely mirrored my own.  (The year after I saw this wonderful movie, I was sexually assaulted by an older boy, a trauma it took me a lifetime to overcome.  My quest was to become a wizard and find magic power to restore myself and protect others.  My quest led to becoming a story-teller, a teacher, and an artist… as well as being a wizard.  I chose colored pencils as my wands of power.)

bfi-00n-fcg mb4 mb2 images

This movie changed my drawing style and my life goals for good.  And I had never been able to see that old movie again or find it on video despite years of searching because I could not remember what it was called.  Today I found it.  It is posted online with it’s German title, but the dialogue all in Spanish.  I will watch it anyway.  But I will only post the snippet I found in English here.

1 Comment

Filed under anime, autobiography, movie review

What I Have Learned by Writing

DSCN7060

I have been doing an edit on a completed novel called The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, and I have discovered that I have grown quite a bit as a writer since I first began practicing the craft.  This particular story has been rattling around in my brain since 1977.  The mad scientist who is the title character, Orben Wallace, is based loosely on me.  It is also to some degree a favorite science teacher from high school mixed up with a rather eccentric college professor whose bizarre nature led, apparently, to some really profound insights about the scientific reasoning process and how a person thinks rationally.  From this character recipe I have learned the scientific method of experimenting, observing, theorizing, and testing theories works in all areas of life, including the complex mess that is our social life and relationship muddle.  Order can be imposed on chaos, and even when chaos is not controlled, it can still be tamed.

I have learned also a thing of two about writing science fiction.  I have made this story very science-y by adding elements of time travel, UFO’s, and conspiracy theories… as well as genetics, nutrition, black holes, and history from 1916 (World War I).   I have done significant amounts of research because, even though the science is all about big, black, hoo-haw lies and prevarications, it sounds a lot more realistic and palatable if the science is right.

I have learned a few things about writing sequels and tie-ins.  This novel is technically a sequel to Catch a Falling Star.  No, that’s not right either.  It is a prequel-equal-sequel because it happens before, during, and after the previously published book.  I have learned to pick up scenes from the other book and rewrite them from the point of view of a different character than the story before.  The dialogue is already fixed, but the interpretations and commentary on everything is from a whole different perspective.  Not easy to do, but very enjoyable and educational.

I have learned that even though I am basically writing a comedy it also has to have its beautifully sweet-sad moments of melancholy to achieve balance and depth of theme.  Two beloved characters die in this book, whereas in Catch a Falling Star only the villain dies without getting a last-second resurrection at the end.  We do terrible things to our characters sometimes if it gives the book deeper meaning and resonance with reality.Millis 2

I do still slavishly rely on the ridiculous.   One of the characters in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is a rabbit who bites a high-tech carrot attached to the time machine and morphs into a rabbit man.  Millis, the pet rabbit, is the second Paffooney I am repeating for this recycled sort of post.

I have also learned that by using my obsession with that which is surreal, I can actually write things that make me laugh even though I’ve read and re-read them ten times, and am now reading them again.  Humor comes from word-play and cleverness as well as from situations full of slapstick.

So, whether you can stand my purple paisley prose…or not, I am definitely working towards throwing a new novel out there… into the world of publishing… or am I throwing it at your head instead?

4 Comments

Filed under NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction

Snow Day Again… In March?

20150305_083532 20150305_083452 20150305_083505 20150305_083447

20150305_083349It is truly amazing how little snow it takes to totally paralyze a city like Dallas.  Chicago would be embarrassed to death at having to close school down on a sunshiny day with less than a foot of snow on the ground.  But Dallas likes to build major roadways up into the air so freezing air can hit the underside as well as the upper side of roads that, once shut down by a hideous three-car five-death accident on sheets of super-slippery ice, totally prohibits movement from one side of the metroplex to the other.

I have considerable pain from my arthritis, and I am shut down most of the time anyway.  But with the city closed around me, there is not much left to do but sit and write and make fun of southerners who can’t drive on snow because they don’t realize that speeds below seventy miles-per-hour do exist in the real world.  I have had time to further work on the final edit of my novel, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  I also had time to submit my novel Magical Miss Morgan to the Chanticleer Book Reviews’ YA novel-writing contest called the Dante Rossetti Awards for Young Adult Fiction.  265469780

I don’t have a head full of straw and really believe I am going to walk away with a top prize.  But I did enter this contest before with Snow Babies, and that book made it into the final round.  It will help my manuscript get published.  Who knows?  I may score something bigger than an Indie publisher this time around.  Maybe I can get an agent.  (Okay, there’s a little straw in there.  I will have to clean more carefully next time.)

But old, broken, bed-ridden me with nothing but time to lay around and fiddle with the computer am definitely making good use of my snow day.  I took pictures of the snow.  I walked the dog in it.  And I didn’t have to drive to any schools or school events.  Hot dang!  What a fine life.

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, photo paffoonies

Naked and Nude

Be warned… this is one of those art things that people use to post naughty pictures on the internet.  Some of my conservative Christian friends will tell you that the local art museum is one of the most atrocious sources of pornography and images of naked people you can find.  It is a terrible thing.  People being exposed to what people look like if they take their clothes off!  How could I do such a dastardly thing as to draw people… naked?

Beauty and Beast

It is difficult to rationalize my terrible crimes.  I mean, the “Beauty and the Beast” picture is clearly the depiction of mental depravity and sex addiction from the mind of a fiend.  There could be no other explanation of it, right?  I mean, Beauty’s stark nakedness can’t possibly represent fearless innocence in the face of ugliness… or a compounding of meanings that have to do with the notion that true beauty exists also under the outward ugliness of the Beast.    After all, I am a cartoonist.  How dare I think that I have the same right to draw naked people as some great painter or long-dead artist?

eve

It doesn’t count for anything that I had art training in college and sat through at least two courses in anatomy drawing where I not only drew skeletons and body parts and clothed people, but also sat down in front of live nude models (mostly fellow art students, but all were paid for modeling… I think I posted elsewhere about what happened when it was my turn to model… but I also think you have to search my posts yourself if you want to know more about that embarrassing episode).

I must also confess that I have had some experiences with naturists.  Here we are talking about those crazy hippie-inspired folks who go camping in the wilderness with their kids, take off all their clothes, and go hiking and biking and playing volleyball in front of real bears.  It was there that the artist in me first noticed there was a difference in anatomy, shape, color, and form between bare kids and bare adults.  There are distinct differences between my pictures of Eve and Artemis here, based solely on the fact that one is an adult and the other a child.

Artemis

I am not trying to depict something evil and horrible that will strike you in the eyes and corrupt your very soul.  I am not a pornographer or a pervert when I create these drawings and share them with you.  They really represent only about one per cent of all the drawings in my portfolio.  They represent mainly my need to get the form and lighting right on the most fundamental level.  They are an attempt to share something about what is like to be human.  Being naked is a part of the life of everyone except the most monumental of prudes who don’t ever get naked and probably wear long underwear in the bathtub even in the summer.  Let me end with the first paragraph of Kenneth Clark’s 1956 book, The Nude; a study in ideal form.  

“The English language, with it’s elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude.  To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition.  The word “nude” on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone.  The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed.  In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the eighteenth century to persuade the artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central object of art.”

So, you see?  I am not merely making excuses for posting naughty pictures on my blog.  At least, not unless all artists are making the same excuses and there is a vast world-wide conspiracy to put pornography in every art museum…  Conspiracy?  Wait a minute… let me think about that some more.

1 Comment

Filed under humor, nudes, Paffooney

Fantasy Worlds

If you saw my post yesterday, you have probably already noticed I am not in love with the real world (and for those of you who naturally assume every conspiracy theorist is a nut job, I don’t love the world as I perceive it through my goofy senses).  So what is the alternative?  How about the world of the imagination?

Like many youths of the late 70’s and early 80’s, I trained my imagination with the Dungeons and Dragons game from Gary Gygax and TSR.  I played first with my brother and two sisters, then with kids from the school where I first taught (middle schoolers when I taught them, but mostly high schoolers when they played in the vast worlds of my dungeon-master’s imagination).  I first started buying and painting metal miniatures.  Later I supplemented them with plastic figures, paper cut-outs, maps,  and dungeon tiles.

fantasy world1

I can now lay out a pretty impressive scene to play out the stories that I and my three goofy kids love to spin.  Of course, you know that, although I lay out the potential story as the dungeon master, the players each pick a character and input their own directions and choices through that character’s point of view.

fantasy world2

The characters face the monsters and problems they must overcome, and they must decide when to hit it, when to kill it, or when to try to charm her way through it.

fantasy world3

After the monsters are dead you have to choose again.  Do you cut up the dead Cyclops and eat it?  Do you accept the gold from the princess who is thanking you for saving her and her children?  Do you kill the bratty kids and take all their gold earrings and arm bands?  Of course, the DM tries to squelch option three.

fantasy world4

And then you gather up the group again in the castle courtyard, and away you go.  Another adventure.  Another problem to solve.  It is so much easier than car repairs and school schedules and dealing with a dog that is a walking poop and spare-hair factory.  Dungeons and Dragons life is so much more heroic and fulfilling than real life.

fantasy world5

And then Mom shows up and says the game is over for today.  Time to wash the dishes, vacuum the carpet downstairs, and walk the dang pooping dog.  “Go away, Mom!  We are busy learning about the important things in life.”

2 Comments

Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, humor, photo paffoonies

Finding the Truth

Ted Cruz articlelaOu4vk

I am an intelligent human being and I understand a lot about science and how to do research.  Unfortunately, I am also now retired with time to burn when I can’t make much use of any physical activity other than surfing the web and finding out things I have always been wondering about.  I say unfortunately because I really dislike most of what I have discovered and found corroborating evidence for.  I have become, for lack of a less loaded-with-excess-baggage sort of term, a conspiracy theorist.    Aliens did crash near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, and the American government did recover the craft and alien crew.  JFK was murdered by a hit squad working for and with the CIA, and George H.W. Bush, whose father was a Nazi supporting Adolf Hitler during World War II, was most likely the event controller on scene that day, although he claims he wasn’t in Dallas that day or wasn’t even a CIA operative at the time, despite photos and a letter from J. Edgar Hoover that disprove both of those claims.   And most disturbing of all, the attack on the U.S. on 9-11 was a fake terrorist attack perpetrated by the elements of the American Government that Eisenhower warned us about, calling them the “military-industrial complex”.    Three buildings fell down in a manner that suspiciously looks like a controlled demolition done by professional demolition experts, and only two of those buildings were struck by airplanes.  The sheer weight of evidence generated by the cover-up alone guarantees that we are looking at an event papered over with falsehoods that we are expected to accept and not question.  Is it a coincidence that George W. Bush was president and his brother Marvin Bush was in charge of a company that did security for the World Trade Center complex?   Architects, airline pilots and plane manufacturers, and law enforcement personnel have all ruined their careers (and some even lost their lives) by expressing publicly their doubts over the government’s version of events.

Here is a Youtube video you might want to check out if this is totally new to you;

9-11 WTC -0151 04

So what does this mean for pointless little people like me?

We are increasingly being treated as farm animals.  Rich people have taken over control of our government and society so that profit-takers can continue to do whatever it takes to continue reaping all the rewards while we do all the work.  Keep in mind that pigs and calves are kept in pens where their movements are completely constricted, not even able to turn around and face the other direction, all so their muscles are never exercised, and their meat remains as tender as possible.  We have no say in what happens to us.  We are merely here to do the work, and be as productive (and possibly tasty) as possible for the least amount of compensation possible.

Ted Cruz as Grandpa Munster is such an apt image for this problem.  He is a laughable clown throwing Texas cow poop all over the American government.   But he is also an un-dead blood-sucker with no human soul (at least that he hasn’t already sold to someone).   Will he be the next president of the United States?  I sincerely hope not.  He is totally owned by the powers in the darkness (dark money providers like the Koch Brothers who are so dark that the Koch Brothers are probably only the outward face of the problem and someone else is behind the scenes).  But it appears to me that he is only the joke candidate that is there only to guarantee that we are forced to choose either Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, both of whom accept and represent financial interests and bankers who melted down the economy in 2008.

The scariest thing on the web, I think, is the message in the Georgia Guide Stones.  Who put them there?  What do they mean?  Here is what Wikipedia says are the inscriptions on the stones;

A message consisting of a set of ten guidelines or principles is engraved on the Georgia Guidestones in eight different languages, one language on each face of the four large upright stones. Moving clockwise around the structure from due north, these languages are: English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic,Chinese, and Russian.

  1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
  2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
  3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
  4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
  5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
  6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
  7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
  8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
  9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
  10. Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

How are we supposed to get the world population from 7 billion down to 500 million?  We are not going to murder everyone not a U.S. citizen, are we?  Or everyone with a economic worth below a million dollars?  I would like for some of these guidelines to come into play.  4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 are all very good ideas.  1, 2, 3, and 10 all chill me down to the marrow in my bones.  I am not cancer.  And now might not be a good time to be a farm animal… particularly not Daffy Duck.

So make of it what you will.  I believe these things are at least partially true.  Am I a loon?  Yes.  But don’t let that keep you from looking into these things yourself.

Georgia_Guidestones

Guidestones article

Leave a comment

Filed under conspiracy theory, politics, tinfoil hats

Sanctuary

I am trying to hold everything together.  I have made my plans, including plans for dealing with irrational things that some people might do.  And so, it is time to go visit the rabbit people.

fmoog8

The Rabbit people represent the people and personalities from my past, fortifying me with good memories and pleasant thoughts.  I depend on my interior mental life more and more as my body breaks down and my present life is more and more limited.

Fmoog9

The hero is a younger me, leading the way to places I have been before and ready to defend me with old truth.

fmoog10

But there is no such thing as a perfect sanctuary.  No castle of willpower and mental toughness is ever impregnable.

fmoog11

A thousand things now assail me.  Unpaid tax bills, surprise expenses, continued struggles with illness, and other horrible goblins of chance and bad fortune continue to hound me.

fmoog12

fmoog13

The battle is not over.  I have not yet lost, though I have not won yet either.

2 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, rabbit people

Rabbit People

castle carrot

On days when I am still recovering from life-altering blows, I often try to find new realms, alternate realities to live in.  (Retreating into a fantasy world is one of the reasons she gave for leaving.)  And since, as a youth in Iowa, I raised rabbits for a 4-H project, I know rabbits better than I do human people.  Rabbits are people too.  So, I have been walking among the rabbit people.  Seriously, bunnies are better people than most human people.  They are not trying to profit off you.  They are not trying to get everything they can off you.  They are merely there to wiggle their whiskers, sniff for food, poop, gnaw on stuff, and make more bunnies.

Mr. R Rabbit

I often see myself as a rabbit person.  In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.

As a teacher, I am always pulling out carrots of irony and gnawing on the ends of them in front of students.  If they complain that eating food in class is supposed to be against the rules, I ask them, “Do you want a carrot of irony?”

“Oh, no, thank you sir.”

“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight.  You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”

“Oh, no sir,” they say.  “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”

And so, I taught on like that… like a rabbit, fast and frumious (a Jabberwocky sort of word), and never really bit anybody.  Teaching is like that.  You offer the good healthy stuff to nourish their little animal minds, and they always choose the junk food instead.

Millis

And so life goes on like that.  Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.

I have started on the final edit of my novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  One of the main characters in the book is Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit Millis.   During the course of the story about invading aliens, Secret Agent Robots from the CIA, and making friends when you need friends, Millis is turned into a rabbit-man by a lab accident.  He teaches Tommy that you don’t have to be human to be a good, caring, self-sacrificing person.  He also teaches him to eat his carrots and greens like a good boy should.

So, I will spend more time with the rabbit people and heal a little bit.  That is what you do with the tragedy that life brings you.  You spin it into whole cloth, making humor and poetry out of everything bad that happens… wrapping yourself up in a comforting blanket of lies (you can also call those fiction stories), and eating a little chicken soup on a cold day to heal your soul.  (Oh, I forget, rabbits often gag on chicken soup.  Let’s make that bean soup with carrot chunks.)

6 Comments

Filed under humor, irony, Paffooney, rabbit people

Cold, Hard Truth

20150227_113015

At the snowy end of a cold, hard week… I have some facts to face.  As a family we are suffering from anxiety disorders, depression, and other mental health issues.  And my family is coming apart at the seams.  You may have noticed that much of the joy… the love, and life, and laughter… has gone out of my recent posts.  We are breaking up.  We are not staying together as a family.  I am not spending much time feeling sorry for myself about it.  I have known the potential consequences for quite some time.  You can’t pull the family wagon over the next hill when one horse is pulling to the west, another goes east, and two more go south.  Families often come apart with age.  Children leave the nest.  Sometimes you push them out so they will start flying on their own.  But sometimes they plummet to the ground and break a wing.  Sometimes they break two wings when foxes are prowling nearby.  We have had too much pushing and plummeting this week.  Words have been spoken that I wish were not.  Fires have been lit not to keep us warm, but to burn things down.  And the snow is still coming down.  I will be all right.  I do not fly away when the winter comes.  I will stand by my children for as long as my legs will hold me upright.  And if you have read this far in this gloomy, grisly post, don’t be sad for me.  Happy times we all enjoy make good memories, but the hard times hammer us into stronger, more tempered steel.  Life is a great forge, and we are all under the hammer of God.

14606_572121106146921_759536432_n

Remember, the cardinal is my personal symbol because he is the little, bright-red bird who doesn’t fly away when the winter comes.  Cardinals bring warm red colors to coldest of winter days.

Leave a comment

Filed under autobiography, insight