Synesthesia (Part One; French Blue Monday)

This link will help you understand Synesthesia

Francois spotlight

Yes, Mondays are blue.  Specifically French blue.  Every day of the week has its own color.  Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre,  Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue.  I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints.  I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head.  I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world.  I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name.  It is called synesthesia.

Image

It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”.  When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence.  I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns.  Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns.  It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color.  Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word.  But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue.  It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”.  And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.

sunnyface2

Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.

I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do.  I certainly was.  I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue.  My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing.  I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word.  I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there.  But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true.   The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded.  I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls.  My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters.  She is left handed and also gifted at drawing.  I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.

Creativity

Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.

Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about.  But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about.  And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases.  It is not a bad condition to have.  In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing.  I could use some good for a change.  Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway.  (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, autobiography, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Uncategorized

Risky Pictures

Mandy Panda is an Animaltown character who represents my wife. She is from the Pandalore Islands and speaks Pandalog as well as English and a little bit of Spanish. With her on my laundry basket is my middle son, Henry Panda. Both of them are in their paper doll Avatar form.

Albert loves reading in the nude. He does it whenever he can be alone in Dad’s home library. Here he is reading his personal copy of Watership Down. Of course, he has noticed that all the main characters in that book are naked. They don’t wear clothes at any time in any chapter. He has also noticed that they are almost all rabbits, one seagull, and some cats… all naked!

This is a tattooed, red-headed lady with evil intentions. This is a risky picture that my wife didn’t want me to draw, let alone post here.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Animal Town in Daylight

This is a place I explore in cartoons and daydreams.  It is a little town known as Animal Town for fairly obvious reasons.  It is populated by silly anthropomorphic animals who wear clothes and keep naked people as pets.

Animal Town

Animal Town is one of the all-time silliest places to visit in the cartoon dreamland of Fantastica.

Animal Town212

Mandy Panda and little brother Dandy are my constant companions and guides when I tour the dangerous streets of wild Animal Town.  In my cartoons, Mandy is an immigrant from the Pandalore Islands.  She is also the cartoon version of my wife.

20160429_202559

Three of the Town’s most important head monkeys.

It was Mandy who introduced me to the government officials who run Animal Town.  Judge Moosewinkle is the head of the Animal Town court system.  He is a hanging judge, so I am very careful about littering and loitering when I am in town.

Constable Geoffrey Giraffe does all the arresting and police work.  He used to work in a toy store, but quit his job there when he couldn’t get them to stop writing the R backwards on all their signs.  Grammar infractions annoy him more than any other crime.

Linus the Kitten-Hearted is the mayor of Animal Town.  They wanted to crown him as king, but he always says that’s only for when he’s in the jungle.  In town he prefers to be a democratically elected leader.  Of course, if you refuse to vote for him, he might eat you.

Most of my dreams in Animal Town are about the school there.

20160428_200859

                                                                                                                                                         Yes, this is a yearbook picture from Animal Town Elementary School.

Miss Ancient’s Class of 5th graders is usually rather rowdy and difficult.  You may have noticed there is a bare bear in the old buzzard’s class.  The fact is, the bears in Animal Town are all naturists and refuse to wear clothes.  This disturbs poor Miss
Ancient greatly, and it is therefore a real godsend that a fig leaf just happened to be drifting down through the air at the time this picture was made.  Bobby Bare is not shy, but some things are better not put into a cartoon.

20160428_200803

                                                                                                                                                   Yes, this is another yearbook picture. And I am in it twice, since Mr. Reluctant Rabbit is also me.

As a visitor to Animal Town, Cissy Bare took me to Mr. Rabbit’s class as her pet for show and tell.  She is also a bare bear, and she also benefited from a passing leaf at picture time. You may notice students putting rabbit ears behind each other’s heads in pictures… something that human children do too in real life.  But when I study this picture, I can’t help but think that maybe Mr. Rabbit started it.  Now, Animal Town is located in Fantastica, a part of the Dreamlands.  So that sort of explains how I ended up in school naked.  My dreams are like that.  You are in school in the middle of lessons before you realize that haven’t got a single stitch of clothing on.

20160427_213231

When I am inevitably charged with public indecency for being in school naked, I can turn to Animal Town lawyer Woolbinkle Moosewinkle.  He is totally incompetent and not very bright, but unlike most of the animals, he is friendly and on my side.  Spot Firedog is a Dalmatian who knows how to use a newspaper.  He is a reporter, publisher, and all-around good dog.  He wrote an expose on me being naked in the Animal Town Elementary school.

20160428_185837

Big Bull Beefalo runs the local hamburger emporium, which might seem like collusion to cannabalism, but Bull is a very gentle and very large soul.  He is himself a vegetarian, but he is a gifted fry cook and chef.  I can go to his restaurant when I get out of jail, though hopefully not as food.

So, Animal Town is a very different kind of place.  It is the result of dreams and goofiness and uncontrolled spurts of cartoonist creativity.  It is a cartoon sort of place where spontaneous and random humor happens.

Leave a comment

Filed under cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, characters, comic strips, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink, Uncategorized

More Digital Art Practice

I like drawing classrooms. This is a British schoolroom, possibly a photo from the Harry Potter movies. I think the girl in the middle is Emma Watson. This was made from a small internet photo and my eyesight is having setbacks from aging and glaucoma. I can’t be sure the colors are right either.

This picture has an interesting brick wall pattern to play with. I think in pink and purple, but I can’t be sure it’s not brown and gray instead. I do know that Ashlynn likes to show off her wardrobe that never seems to keep her belly button warm. Which is alright with me. And I am not using her real name here, or even making it look like her. Nobody is going to find her on TikTok based on this drawing.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Writer’s Block

I have always contended that I don’t have writer’s block. But some days, especially if I am not feeling well, I have writer’s lethargy. I can be slow to come up with the next thing. Writing can become bogged down and I am easily distracted or lose focus and have to return to what I was trying to do previously.

There is evidence that I have often had that kind of problem frequently on this blog. One thing I do to overcome writer’s lethargy is suddenly start thinking about how you can overcome writer’s block. What are the strategies that help me overcome it?

I often resort to “kickstart statements.” These are surprising or deep-left-field items that give the old brain a shot of adrenaline. The picture of the girl with the message blackboard is that kind of kickstarter. I never could have used that thing in any kind of social-media post when I was still employed as a teacher. It has the potential to generate parent complaints and administrative thoughts about evaluations and contract cancellations. But there really are kids who have thoughts like that in your classroom, and I know because not only was I a kid like that myself, I used it as an optional journal topic for writing practice, and, boy! do they ever catch fire when they can write about something like that and they know only the teacher is ever going to read it. It is the way I learned how many of my students had ever been to a nude beach in Corpus Christi or Lake Travis (Hippy Hollow.)

I can also look around the room, or scroll through my media library on WordPress and find an image or an item that generates ideas, responses, and even stories. I scrolled through to find this image of the Gummi Bear, who was a brief internet sensation on YouTube a few years ago coming from German CGI cartoons that illustrated earworm music with dancing green gummy bears. There’s a lot a goofy writer like me can run away with inspired by a nonsense thing like that.

It is also possible to generate new ideas by deconstructing a metaphor in as humorous and convoluted a way as possible. This word-food thing is the result of writer’s lethargy of a while back.

Of course, there is always the ranting factor. This, I think, is a go-to method used by stand-up comedians. They will pick something that is deeply bugging them, like the rats that inhabit my attic and walls during a winter that hasn’t yet completely gone. And they start listing all the ways they can make funny stories about the time the rat appeared on the bathroom floor tiles while my daughter was on the toilet, or the time the dog killed a rat that was in the trap already, but not dead enough not to bite back with the dog’s nose conveniently within the reach of rat teeth. And then they can rant onward about how disgusting rats are. And how can anyone look at a rat face and think they are cute? You look at that evil, beady-eyed face and you don’t think Mickey Mouse, you think plague, disease, the Black Death, and how much the Bank of America lawyer who sued you looks just like that.

So, you can see that generating ideas is easy. And you can write something interesting even on days when you can’t think of anything … quickly. When you have, not writer’s block, but writer’s lethargy.

Leave a comment

Filed under angry rant, autobiography, comedians, humor, insight, inspiration, Paffooney, writing, writing humor, writing teacher

Grandpa Futty Drives Again

In Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley comics there is one old flivver-driving fool named Grandpa Futty.  He is the slowest driver on the road.  Rarely does he go over the breakneck speed of two miles per hour.  He is so overly cautious, that if there are two lanes going his way, he takes the middle of the road and effectively moseys along in his putter-banger taking up both lanes.  What is that you say, young whipper-snapper?  You don’t know what a putter-banger is?  Great galloping goat galoshes!  It’s a car, dang it!  You see them all over the metroplex.  They are so ancient that when you start it up with the hand crank, the engine coughs and the muffler falls off in back.  They were purchased as a used car two decades ago.  The only thing more miraculous than the fact that the car still runs is the fact that the old goat driving it is still alive (though the local police routinely have to stop him to check and see if his heart is actually still beating.  If it isn’t they have to fight with him about dropping him off at the nearest funeral home.)

Sadie2

So, if you haven’t guessed already, this post is about the generically named drivers I refer to as a Grampa Futty, and they are the exact opposite of the Texas Killer Grandmas I wrote about yesterday. Believe it or not, I think I have graduated into the Grandpa Futty class of driver.  I can still see more than three feet in front of my car, but I do have a dumpy-lumpy body that hobbles around with a cane, and I do smell like Ben Gay Ointment and Vick’s Vapo-rub.  (…And no, you can’t say Ben Queer Ointment and have it mean the same thing, young whipper-snapper!  That joke is nearly as old as I am!)  I am not entirely in that category of driver, though, because I still curse them with gusto and interjections like “dang it!” whenever I am behind one of that breed.  And besides, the last time the cop stopped me to check my heartbeat, it was going strong.

Grandpa Futtys are a real road hazard in the obstacle-filled world of Texas city driving… if it were a video game like Super Mario Brothers, they would not be Bowser, but rather that annoying Koopa Troopa that you just can’t bounce on hard enough to get past.  They are in the way, endearingly cute in an ugly-old-fart sort of manner, and potentially deadly as they put you in line for the easy kill by the nearest Texas Killer Granny.  So I am seriously studying now how to avoid Grandpa Futty on the road next time I see him, and I am definitely studying how not to become him.

Leave a comment

Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney

A Day Late and a Chocolate Egg Short

Eggsy Chocobunny has arrived a day late.

“Late for what?” You ask.

“For the Bunnies with chocolate eggs in their wicker baskets full of plastic grass. It is Eater Day yesterday,” he answers.

“Didn’t you leave the S out of EASTER?” you shout.

“What do you mean? How does Easter make more sense than Eater? Kids everywhere eat chocolate eggs and other candy on this holiday!”

Well, you can’t actually argue with Eggsy because he is profoundly stupid.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Why I Wear a Tinfoil Hat

Davalon ad

You know by now if you have read what I’ve written, or been around me when people make the mistake of letting me talk about what I want to talk about, that I am a kook.  Yes, I believe things that you have been told that only crazy people believe.  Why would you want to read any more of that nonsense now?  Because it is true and it will impact our future.

I came into a wealth of secret knowledge when I wrote and published my first good novel, Catch a Falling Star.  Of course, like most of the things you research on the internet, ninety-nine per cent of everything is big, black rubber hoo-haw lies.  I researched a lot of things that I have always been fascinated by, but specifically I investigated UFO phenomenon.  I already followed author Stanton Friedman and knew who Bob Lazar was before starting my research, but I wanted to dig deeper and find the truth.  My novel, after all, is about close encounters of the third, fourth, and fifth kinds… including an invisible invasion of Earth from outer space.  I wanted to portray such events as alien contact and alien abduction as realistically as possible.  But then I found stuff like the Disclosure Project headed by Doctor Steven Greer.  Did you know he has been collecting eye-witness and whistle-blower information in written and video form since the 1990’s and presenting it to members of congress?  There is an immense database of information about contact with UFO’s and the government’s response to it that can be cross-referenced and even corroborates itself.  There comes a point at which eye-witness testimony, even loony-sounding testimony, has to be accepted when there is a preponderance of evidence.

The thing that makes the case most strongly for me is the provable amount of cover-up and misdirection that the government has applied to this body of knowledge.  They are still doing it.  NASA footage and photographic records are open to the public and available online.  Lots of people have examined the wealth of evidence very closely and have found things that the government apparently overlooked.  There are also an even more impressive number of identified re-touched and faked photos of the Moon and Mars and especially the Earth from space.  Things have been removed so that we the people will not see.  Some nut-cases even believe we never actually went to the moon.  Some of the moon footage and photos are provably fake.  (But you can also spot the landing sites of the Apollo missions on the surface of the moon with some of the very good telescopes available now… The proof of our moon landings is there.  The stuff was redacted and faked for different reasons… a different cover-up.)

So, why does this matter?  Maybe we are better off being protected from this secret knowledge.  We are too fragile to take it.  There will be riots in the street and the economy will crash.  We are safer being ignorant of all of this.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…no!

It’s time we were given the straight poop (because everybody hates crooked poop… at least they should.)  Our world is dying from pollution and global warming, yet the alien technology can provide clean, free energy.  Rich people are exploiting the poor and the middle class and so much suffering occurs that doesn’t have to happen if we embrace the potential for taking our place in a galactic community that apparently already exists and that we are excluded from solely on the basis of how dangerous our own ignorance makes us.

Leave a comment

Filed under aliens, humor, Paffooney

The April Fool

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Being Iowegian

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!

943363_457313854350548_485543538_n388135_298275616878726_103835066322783_936339_2005428082_nLand 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…

1399024_220039334824422_480122723_o 1450109_688917614523503_5237770938249269421_n 10418988_688917684523496_8272199480536313576_n 10350345_10152788940611349_2865049925004654610_n 10563018_688909541190977_6371844517698833981_n DSCN7127It 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?

“You betcha!!!”

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, nostalgia, photo paffoonies