I am a fool. I am a fool who tells stories. The stories are made up of lies about things that never happened to people who don’t really exist. But I am good at it. I have had a few successes with a few readers. I have even won awards that don’t translate into earning any money. Ah, well. A fool gets what he deserves. And though they are lies… my stories are always about things that should be true. You can tell the real truth with real lies.
Grandma Gretel in this book is based on a real woman and holocaust survivor I knew as a boy. It is one of my best books because I tell lies about the twin girls who told me they were nudists, a brave old grandma who survived Nazis in World War II, and fairies I believed in as a child and once were real to me.
Another book that I consider one of my best is full of lies about fairies and a teacher I once knew whose classes were more like her own children than mere students, even though she never had a child of her own. And she faced troubles in keeping her job that teachers actually face in the modern classroom.
I consider this one to be the finest story I have ever composed. It is full of lies about a killer blizzard that I experienced two different times in my childhood. Once in grade school and once in high school. And the children who survive this blizzard are all based on kids I actually taught during my teaching career. Definitely filled with lies, but lies that bare the scars of real experiences.
These are all book links to Amazon, just in case you are fool enough to want to buy any of these lies. You can’t go wrong reading wisdom from a fool who doesn’t know anything. Knowing you know nothing is the beginning of wisdom.
I was born in the 1950’s in Mason City, Iowa… the town that produced Meredith Wilson, the creator of the Broadway Musical, The Music Man. Yes, River City in The Music Man is Mason City. So I was born into a unique Midwestern farm-town heritage where swindlers came to town and saved the day with music and an eleventh-hour change of heart. I was born into the land of Chmielewski Fun Time on the black-and-white TV, Lawrence Welk champagne accordion music, and the Beer-Barrel Polka, courtesy of loads and loads of German ancestry. I am that unique crossbreed of Scandahoovian and sqare-headed Deutschmann known by the only slightly racist term of Iowegian.
Corn Country!
Land of Long Winter and the ice-storm breezin’ down the plains.
And if you ask an Iowegian if he loves Iowa, he will answer, “You bet!”
And if you ask a northern Iowegian the same thing, he will say “You betcha!”
Iowans talk funny, don’t you know…
There are still corner stores and farm supply stores, though they have gone to brand names now, like Casey’s, BP, and Tractor Supply Co. You can still find HyVee and Safeway grocery stores. There are still a precious few family farms that haven’t been swallowed whole by big corporations and agri-businesses. If you go to the county fairs, you will still find kids showing the cattle or pigs that they raised for 4-H projects, and if you go into the barns after the auction, they are still producing tearful kids hugging and kissing that calf that won a red ribbon and now has to be sold… and they will never see poor Barney or Moo-berry again…
It is the land of the lonely gravel road… the back-street cattle pen… the Saturday night tornado (nearly every Saturday in Spring)… The VFW and the Lion’s Club Fish Fry at Lake Cornelia….And it is a place where most everything reeks of the past and old ghosts and times long gone, soon to never be remembered because there’s no longer anybody around who is old enough to tell the stories that grandparents and aunts and uncles used to tell. I not only miss it desperately, but I feel deeply saddened by the loss. Would I like to go home again?
Use the comments to tell me what this story is about. Who is she? Why the golden horse? What happens. I promise I won’t steal your idea. I will probably write my own in the future.
Things are not what they seem. Life throws curve balls across the plate ninety percent of the time. Fastballs are rare. And fastballs you can hit are even rarer. But if Life is pitching, who is the batter? Does it change the metaphor and who you are rooting for if the batter is Death?
If you think this means that I am planning on dying because of the Coronavirus pandemic, well, you would be right. Of course, I am always planning for death with every dark thing that bounces down the hopscotch squares of the immediate future. That’s what it means to be a pessimist. No matter what bad thing we are talking about, it will not take ME by surprise. And if I think everything is going to kill me, sooner or later I have to be right… though, hopefully, much later.
I keep seeing things that aren’t there. Childlike faces keep looking at me from the top of the stairs, but when I focus my attention there, they disappear. And I know there are no children in the house anymore since my youngest is now legally an adult. And the chimpanzee that peeked at me from behind the couch in the family room was definitely not there. I swear, it looked exactly like Roddy McDowell from the Planet of the Apes movies, whom I know for a fact to be deceased. So, obviously, it has to be Roddy McDowell’s monkey-ghost. I believe I may have mentioned before that there is a ghost dog in our house. I often catch glimpses of its tail rounding the corner ahead of me when my own dog is definitely behind me. And I am sure I shared the facts before that Parkinson’s sufferers often see partial visions of people and faces (and apparently dogs) that aren’t really there, and that my father suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. So, obviously it is my father and not me that is seeing these things… He’s just using my eyeballs to do it with.
But… and this is absolutely true even if it starts with a butt… the best way to deal with scary possibilities is to laugh at them. Jokes, satire, mockery, and ludicrous hilarity expressed in big words are the proper things to use against the fearful things you cannot change. So, this essay is nothing but a can of mixed nutz. Nutzy nuts. And fortunately, peanut allergies are one incurable and possibly fatal disease I don’t have. One of the few.
There are many goofy people on social media. Here are a few of my own interpretations of a few of them. Starting with these twins. Did you know they are naked under their clothes? They assured me that if they took off their clothes, they would be naked. I didn;t let them prove it. You can’t do that on Facebook and Instagram.
This is Mel. Short for Melanie, I think. She is goofy enough to wear sunglasses indoors. She insists, however, that they are “shades,” not sunglasses.
Mel has intensely blue eyes. She can look right through you and see what’s inside you. At least she thinks she can. She can’t read my mind. Too many cobwebs and bats in there.
This is one of my best works of fiction. You can use this link to check it out.
Carl Barks was born on March 27th, 1901. So, Wednesday was his 123rd birthday. If you have no idea who I’m even talking about, then you were never a kid and a comic book fan in the 1960s. Carl Barks is both Uncle Scrooge’s father and Donald Duck’s stepfather.
That’s essentially true. A large part of my character as a junior high school English teacher was based on what I learned about mentoring from Scrooge McDuck and about teaching important facts from Gyro Gearloose.
Carl was not immune to criticism. Cartoonists get blow-back, a fact of life. But he overcame it with a wry sense of humor and interesting views of how you pursue goals in life. He had a firm sense of fair-play and justice. You could get actual morals to the stories in a Carl Barks’ duck cartoon.
The characters were not perfect. They all had glaring flaws, the heroes right along with the villains. Of course, the villains never learned to change their ways, while the heroes often learned to improve themselves by working on the weaknesses, and it wasn’t all about becoming a gazillionaire (a term I think Barks may have invented).
I even learned a good deal about adventure story-telling from Carl Barks’ comic books about Duck people doing ducky stuff that was really about people doing people-y stuff in the real world. Yes, people in the world around me are very Carl Barks’ ducky.
So, happy birthday, Carl. 121 years young. And he’s only been gone from our world since August of 2000. He still talks to me and teaches me through his Duck comics.
Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect picture. I struggled with the fingers on this one. I made it from a photograph. And the photo only showed three visible fingers on each hand. The pointer finger on each hand is tucked behind the rest of the hands with the thumbs. They make Susu look like a cartoon character. So I tried extra hard to suggest what you can’t see. I had to make the right-hand pointer finger extra long to show the tip in shadow underneath. And then the stupid AI editor made the left hand flip the bird… but with the ring finger… So I had to redraw that even though it was the wrong finger for that. It looked stupid. AI can be very stupid.
But Susu likes it. I should say, however, that Susu is imaginary. She exists in my mind to take the place of the grandchild I lost to an ectopic pregnancy resolved before the Supreme Court made fixing the problem illegal and threatened the life of the poor mother. But Susu makes it easier to live with the loss, and everything that makes her happy is a pure healing miracle for my troubled mind.
“Take my hand, Grandpa. Let’s go take a walk in the park.”
I have lately been feeling like the Grim Reaper is lurking somewhere near again. Can I whip him in a game of chess again? Debatable.
Derfentwinkle, the Necromancer’s Apprentice, turned out to be a good student.
As a teacher, I have always been one of those who sincerely believes,
You must never give up on any student. They all can learn. They are all worth teaching.
And reflecting on that philosophy, in spite of the fact that I have been having a hard time getting things done and writing very little, I should not give up on myself.
I am not yet done telling my story. There is more to do, and more life to live.
Here’s the book about a teacher who doesn’t give up on a student and is proven right the hard way.
Up until now I have been doing little but writing stories and working on getting a lot of them into a published form. Admittedly a self-published form. For the most part, I am the only reader who knows how good my writing is. Well, there’s an editor from I-Universe who thinks I am as good as many authors on the best-seller lists. Not better than… as good as. And the editorial and marketing staff at PDMI Publishing (a publisher now out of business for over eight years) know how good my novel Snow Babies is. And a lot of nudists here, in England, in France, and in Germany know how good Recipes for Gingerbread Children is. But my reputation is tiny and the splash I have made is limited to puddles.
If the literary agent I have been talking to actually gets my book Catch a Falling Star republished by a major publishing house, things will change for the better. However, the current marketplace still puts most of the burden on the authors to promote and make their books succeed. The only difference would be having an agent on my side instead of me doing it all with no one on my side.
Most of the best writing I have done includes strongly realized female characters. Particularly Valerie Clarke, the female protagonist of Snow Babies. Good writing builds on previous writing. I may have already written the best things I am capable of writing. But as I continue to write, I can deepen characters that already have been established. And I can add new ones. For example, the character depicted in the Paffooneys of this post is Charlotte Robbins. She is a complex young lady with an anger management problem. She is also Valerie Clarke’s hated rival, one who beats her out for head cheerleader, but only because Valerie quits cheerleading in her senior year. She is destined to become Valerie’s best friend somehow in the course of my manuscript He Rose on a Golden Wing.
Of course, none of that happens if one of my health problems croaks me before my 70th birthday. I don’t mean to end on a downward note when everything has been looking up. But there it is, in spite of myself.
After a year-long post-Covid publishing drought, I am back in the page-making storyteller business once again. This post is about recent publication accomplishments, evidencing some pride in a comeback.
The poetry book is finished and will be published within a month (knock on wood, barring sudden unexpected death, prison time, or Armaggedon battles.) I have never thought of myself as a poet. But now I seriously think of myself as one of the worst poets in the history of the world.
This book was my only appearance on a best-seller list anywhere at any time as it made the number one spot on Amazon’s hottest-selling newly published books on two separate days in its first week of publication. It is about nudism and naturism, so it is the nudist community on X, formerly Twitter, that I have to thank for its achievement.
This book, the 4th in the AeroQuest series was published just this month, and it has already sold two copies and a whole bunch of KENP pages read. It has been a couple of years since book 3 of this series, so some readers have been waiting for it for a while.
This book, published during the pandemic has also been getting attention from readers, making it the most popular title on my author’s page.
And this book, a fairytale, is the most ignored book I have recently published. I think it is an excellent comedy adventure that even has some illustrations with nude fairies in them. But nothing is ever truly sure-fire.
I am now hoping that the interest in my books will begin to really pick up. I am talking to an agent for the first time about my book, Catch a Falling Star. I could actually be going places this time.
Catch a Falling Star 
Nutzy Nuts
Things are not what they seem. Life throws curve balls across the plate ninety percent of the time. Fastballs are rare. And fastballs you can hit are even rarer. But if Life is pitching, who is the batter? Does it change the metaphor and who you are rooting for if the batter is Death?
If you think this means that I am planning on dying because of the Coronavirus pandemic, well, you would be right. Of course, I am always planning for death with every dark thing that bounces down the hopscotch squares of the immediate future. That’s what it means to be a pessimist. No matter what bad thing we are talking about, it will not take ME by surprise. And if I think everything is going to kill me, sooner or later I have to be right… though, hopefully, much later.
I keep seeing things that aren’t there. Childlike faces keep looking at me from the top of the stairs, but when I focus my attention there, they disappear. And I know there are no children in the house anymore since my youngest is now legally an adult. And the chimpanzee that peeked at me from behind the couch in the family room was definitely not there. I swear, it looked exactly like Roddy McDowell from the Planet of the Apes movies, whom I know for a fact to be deceased. So, obviously, it has to be Roddy McDowell’s monkey-ghost. I believe I may have mentioned before that there is a ghost dog in our house. I often catch glimpses of its tail rounding the corner ahead of me when my own dog is definitely behind me. And I am sure I shared the facts before that Parkinson’s sufferers often see partial visions of people and faces (and apparently dogs) that aren’t really there, and that my father suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. So, obviously it is my father and not me that is seeing these things… He’s just using my eyeballs to do it with.
But… and this is absolutely true even if it starts with a butt… the best way to deal with scary possibilities is to laugh at them. Jokes, satire, mockery, and ludicrous hilarity expressed in big words are the proper things to use against the fearful things you cannot change. So, this essay is nothing but a can of mixed nutz. Nutzy nuts. And fortunately, peanut allergies are one incurable and possibly fatal disease I don’t have. One of the few.
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