I am not well again after a couple of weeks of rain and cold working on my arthritis. So I am going to merely post a few past Paffoonies to make up today’s post. If you would like to see what Paffoonies are all about, then go to Google picture search “Beyer Paffooney”. It will basically give you a Mickian art gallery, peppered with other pictures that I used in posts that aren’t actually Paffoonies (but the algorithm doesn’t know that).
Filed under artwork, Paffooney, Uncategorized
Communicating with a wife is complicated. In fact, I couldn’t do the whole writer-think thing about that topic without writing a book. But I can successfully ruminate for about 500 words on the that awkward first encounter, the first time I ever was embarrassed in front of a non-sister girl.
In grade school I met my first crush in kindergarten. Alicia Stewart was a honey-sweet little brown-haired girl with a bow in her hair. I was a boy. I was not allowed to like girls. Hating them was the only thing that made sense to my friends and I. But, secretly, I didn’t hate Alicia. In fact, if I was ever to be doomed to be married when I grew up, I would’ve only accepted that horrible fate if it was with her. And in my small town school I saw her practically every school day. In fact, in Miss Malkin’s music class on Tuesdays and Thursdays I sat right next to her in Miss Malkin’s seating chart for six years.
In Miss Malkin’s music class we always did musical stuff like listening to classical records, singing songs for the yearly musical review concert (we did the songs from the musical The Music Man one year… you don’t get more musicky than that), and we did square dancing. Yeah, you heard that right. Square dancing. You had to have a girl for a partner. And one year, Miss Malkin decided it would be cute to have the boys ask the girls to be their partners. Now, as boys… in top secret boy-conversations, we had generally agreed that if such a problem would ever occur, Alicia Stewart was the only acceptable choice. We all hated girls. But we all were secretly in love with Alicia. She was girl-hating-boy approved. When I was twelve, there was another girl that was making me uncomfortable too. Marla Carter was nine when I was twelve. She had big brown eyes and dimples. Her face was somehow heart-shaped, and only Alicia could make my palms sweat any worse than she did. But in top secret boy-conversations it was ruled that she was a booger-eating little girl and totally toxic. Well, I didn’t totally agree, but I was still subject to all girl-hating directives.
“Okay,” Miss Malkin said, “the boys will now pick their partners… one at a time in alphabetical order.”
My last name began with the letter “B”, but my best friend Mark had a last name starting with “A”.
“I pick Alicia,” Mark said.
My heart sank. I had my pick of any girl besides Alicia. Marla was standing about four feet away from me, her hands folded together behind her back, looking at me with those puppy-dog eyes. My throat was too dry to speak.
“Um, ah… I can’t pick anyone…” I croaked. “You pick it, I will dance with it.”
“Now, don’t be like that, Michael. Get on with it!” Miss Malkin commanded. Everyone loved the music teacher, and so everyone obeyed her. I had to submit.
I looked at Marla, dug my toe into the floorboards, and said, “I choose my cousin Diane.”
Talking to girls has always been a matter of embarrassment. The words are always awkward and shaped not by my brain, but by my bowels. This fact has always been a hindrance to my dealings with the female species, but it has been an unending source of potential for writing humor.
Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink, Uncategorized
With numerous health problems, I have difficulty with sleeping every night. One of the worst problems I have is nocturnal acid reflux. It makes me wake up in the middle of night with fire in my throat, like some sort of dyspeptic acid-spitting dragon. I have to vault out of bed, arthritis and all, and go toss the contents of my stomach into the toilet. Sorry to be so gross, but it is important to this theme to get a sense of just how bad it is to be on the wrong side. What do I mean by that? Well, I learned from a doctor recently that which side you lie on to sleep makes a big difference. If you sleep on your right side at night, your stomach is oriented in a way that the top opening angles down towards the esophagus. This leads to an unfortunate ooze of stomach acid that sets off the reflux crisis. If, however, you sleep on your left side, the stomach is angled in a manner that allows gravity to work for you instead of against you. I have been intentionally lying on my left side every night for a month. It works. No acid reflux. Until last night. But when I woke up gagging, I had unconsciously rolled onto my right side. So it has become obvious to me, the left side is the right side.
Life has to be in balance. But, unfortunately, it constantly shifts back and forth, up and down, and all around. Keeping life in balance is a juggling act that may involve lying only on your left side while you sleep.
I worry too about the balance affecting the world as a whole right now. We are very deeply mired in a time when political right and left are out of balance and have been for too long. In politics, the right is the conservative belief that things should remain the same. Since the Reagan administration, that has meant deregulating in the name of profits, free market capitalism, and letting Wall Street profit-makers do anything and everything they want to do to make higher profits. The left is in favor of change. When I was a kid, I can remember the left being a very bad thing. They wanted communist-style revolution. They robbed banks and blew things up. But most of those leftists are now dead. They still exist, but the far right is just as dangerous, the KKK, the militias, and they are far more numerous in this day and age. The leftist agenda now is more what used to be the moderate position. Senator Elizabeth Warren and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders want to re-regulate the Wall Street trends that caused the economic meltdown in 2008. They want to promote progressive tax systems that move the money out of corporate profit-funnels and back into the hands of the middle class, and the institutions that benefit them. There is a need to shift to the left. There is need to restore balance. Once again I think it is proper to say, the left side is the right side.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, philosophy, politics, self pity
The New Discipline
I sit in the corner, a dunce cap on my head.
Behind me the class rises. I miss recess in their stead.
And what was my criminality, that earned me this despise?
I told them that I loved them, and that was just not wise.
They tell me all are equal and each one’s on his own.
And if I can’t pull myself up, they must all leave me alone.
Thinking anyone will help me is an assumption with great risk.
The new order is the quiet that is whipped in with a whisk.
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The Pumpkinhead is running amok, shutting down programs I want the government to continue with my tax dollars. I don’t approve of them spending a single penny of the three thousand and some dollars worth of taxes I pay out of my pension every year on tax cuts to billionaires and multi-millionaires. The Ultrarich class does less actual work in a year than I do as a retiree. They do not deserve to make even more money while sitting on gluttonous natural cushions built into their derrieres. They are the parasites that drag on our quality of life. Their money-sucking vacuum mouths no longer need to be attached to our jugular veins. The Immigrants working in farmer’s fields and the local McDonalds and two other jobs to make ends almost meet are not the takers in this society.
Personally, I have had a truly miserable start to 2025. I visited a dentist for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. I had to have a molar with a broken crown yanked out of the right side of my jaw. It was infected and took an hour longer to pull out than it was scheduled for. It hurt like they had tried to pull my whole skeleton out through my mouth. While recovering from that, my wife came home from her teaching job with a viral infection of some sort. I immediately caught it. Two weeks of illness followed. Towards the end of that infection I painfully passed four small kidney stones, too small to see when they were finally out. That painful weekend resulted in a urinary tract infection that could easily have turned septic and killed me. The urologist gave me a super strong antibiotic that stained my underwear neon green. And at the end of January, I had to have a second molar with a broken crown removed… apparently with the same ten-pound skeleton-hoisting pliers.
Trump is still rolling out outrages against schools, against the FBI, against women, against trans kids, and everyone else he can be relentlessly cruel to. Richard III of England solved his Winter of Discontent with murder. I sent a ghost post message to the parking lot in London where he was buried to inquire if he was at all interested in using the same procedure to replace the Pumpkinhead on the Throne of America. He booed back that he would think about it. American President is apparently not as cushy a post as the Yorkish King of England.
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The girl who posed for this picture is an Asian beauty, chosen because she’s the spitting image of a former student from eleven years ago. This girl is actually 18 years old, though she looks twelve. The girl she reminds me of was 16 then, and would have to be around 27 now. This girl is Cambodian. That girl was Vietnamese. I like the picture. I love both girls, not in an inappropriate way. And what it comes down to is that I have kept my string of 196 daily posts in a row intact.
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Not many words today…
Ate too much… feel bad (a five-word poem about diabetes by a diabetic)
I have been down and out with a serious urinary tract infection the last two weeks. That overlapped the flu-like virus that had me down for the weeks prior. There is not a lot you can accomplish when you are too sick to even get out of bed. I watched a lot of streaming-service television and used my computer to do a lot of drawing. I really like the first final version I posted above. It is a picture of my posable plastic doll Ariel. I have two other similar-sized dolls, Nicole and Tom Sawyer, who are not posable and made out of porcelain. So, Ariel is my artist’s model more often than the other two.
I never had a fever while I was ill, but some of my medication caused dizziness and the inability to avoid passing out for five to ten minutes at a time. But initially, I created the outline directly above by putting the photo of Ariel on my drawing pad app and tracing features in the layer I placed on top.
This is, of course, the actual photograph used. I did draw over it leaving out Pluto and Mickey due to copyrighted character concerns.
I used colored paints in the drawing app to fill in the outline with color, but my arthritis in fingers and wrists makes it look crude and childish compared to what you see above. So, I use the anime-style overlay in the AI Mirror App to make it come out properly shaded and blended. The colors may appear a little off to you. But that would be because I am somewhat colorblind (red-and-green-scale colorblind) and can’t accurately judge between orange and carmine red, or rust brown and siena brown. I am doing a lot of guessing. You can also see that I change the background with Picsart AI Photo Editor.
Drawing in this way got me through a few difficult days.
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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.
Filed under clowns, compassion, doodle, humor, new projects, Paffooney Posts
The Cowboy Code
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
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Filed under autobiography, commentary, cowboys, humor, insight, philosophy, politics, Uncategorized
Tagged as arizona, autobiography, childhood beliefs, cowboy code, Daniel Boone, fiction, guns, humor, politics, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, satire, writing, Wyatt Earp