I sit at my drawing board, drawing quite madly,
Before glaucoma curses with blindness so badly,
And my age is advanced, so the Reaper is watching,
And papery skin all over is splotching.
I have to be vigilant and wise with my time,
And clever enough to catch the next rhyme.
Time’s running out on the next thing to do,
As I’m leaving behind small wisdoms for you.
Filed under Uncategorized
The impact of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination ó and its meaning 25 years later ó are explored in the’ hour-long documentary JFK – A TIME REMEMBERED, premiering Monday, November 21 at 9 p.m. (ET; check local listings) on PBS. Presented by WNET/New York, the program is a production of The Susskind Company and is made possible by funding from General Dynamics.
As a conspiracy nut registered with the Monkey-Brained Theorists of America, the grand old MBTA, I was absolutely tickled pink by the new Stephen King series on Hulu, 11.22.63. I have seen the first episode and loved the mix of fantasy, science-fiction, history, and horror that goes into telling a story of man who walks through a time portal into the past to be able to prevent the assassination of John Kennedy. Believe me, I know it is not true, despite what some of the anti-conspiracy nay-sayers will tell you about me. After all, they have a Monkey-Brained Club of their own and don’t even know it.
I went on a binge of watching JFK assassination-related videos on Hulu and on YouTube. There is some very good information out there compiled by some very dedicated and dogged researchers. The man who wrote the book Crossfire, Jim Marrs, is a very talented writer and researcher whose book became the basis for the movie JFK by Oliver Stone.
Marrs has an unfortunate gullibility that leads him to state as truth some very bizarre things about the New World Order, aliens and Area 51, the research of Alexander Sitchin into the ancient secrets of the Sumerians… and granted, I can’t prove some of the absolutely loony things contained in that aren’t true, but they are absolutely loony never-the-less. But when it comes to researching documents, interviewing and re-interviewing principle witnesses, and verifying facts, Marrs makes a very compelling case for the assassination of the President of the United States being done by the CIA, Secret Service, FBI, and President Lyndon Johnson.
It is a logical conclusion that Secret Service performed a cover-up during the assassination and its aftermath. They spirited the President’s body away in spite of the Dallas rules for murder investigation and autopsy. They washed and repaired the car it occurred in before the murder investigation could examine anything. They interfered with the actual autopsy, with important notes, photographs, and even the President’s brain that were placed in Secret Service’s custody going missing. No matter what you believe about the lone shooter theory, you can’t deny that a cover-up is the only explanation for these facts.
There is documented evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was working on the fringes of the CIA operation in New Orleans and reporting to J. Edgar Hoover about their activities. So, if he was a spy telling the right hand what the left hand was actually up to, who better to frame as the guilty gunman and then silence him before investigators could find out everything he knew?
And why does all this still matter more than 50 years later? Many of the actual perpetrators are dead, including former CIA hit man E. Howard Hunt who confessed to having a part in the assassination on his death bed. They can’t be punished now. But the corrupt organizations and political elite with their attendant influence are still operating in the world. This was a murder that never came to trial. Many of the facts have been sealed away by the very government agencies that have the most to hide. Connections to other CIA manipulations, like those surrounding 9-11, need to be revealed, and the way the government operates needs to be modified. But besides the fact that these things seriously impact our lives now, it is simply fun to dig and make connections and learn things that most people don’t generally know. There is monkey-brained joy in that.
Filed under conspiracy theory, heroes, humor, politics, Uncategorized
There is a certain amount of frustration that comes with age and arthritis and limited ability to move. A good share of the time I am stuck within my bedroom/studio. Bad weather and weather changes, as well as the strains of housework, stiffen my back into immobility. So, I am stuck exploring not the outside world, but the inner world of stories, pictures, and my own imagination.
Of course, one has to beware of a life lived in imagination and isolation. Some of it can be kinda wicked and dangerous. Okay, maybe not, but definitely in danger of overwhelming goofiness. As you can see, I take a bit of my artwork and use photo-shop to make even goofier arty things. I experiment and stick stuff together just for the heck of it.
I suppose this is probably evidence a good psychiatrist could use to keep me locked up for a while. But I’m kinda stuck anyway in my little room.
Filed under autobiography, cartoony Paffooney, goofiness, humor, Paffooney Posts, philosophy
She came over the fence at Elmer’s farm,
Leaping like a deer, the white tail flying behind her,
Into the middle of Elmer’s cookout seeking me.
“What’s this?” I exclaimed, “A faun wearing clothes?”
“Elmer’s oldest boy is a Sensitive like you,” she said.
“I don’t need farm boy to see me nude again,,
At least, not until I decide to seduce him.”
“You must be Su-Fey Pan,
Radasha told me about you.”
She grinned a sinister grin.
“It must be nice to own your own faun.”
“I own him not,” I said of Ra,
“He came to me during my trauma.”
“He led me to the garden in my mind to heal.”
“That’s what I must do for Elmer”s boy, Wilbur.”
“Because he alone survived his mother’s car crash?”
She only nodded sadly.
The farmer’s wives with plates of mashed potatoes,
Looked at me strangely for talking to myself.
“So, why have you come here seeking only me?”
“Because you write a book of poems,
And claim you are an awful poet.
And you know of fauns and fairies,
And what their uses are.
And you understand the metaphors,
And sling the symbols all around.
And you understand that poetry
Sucks the poison from your soul
And turns venom into candy,
With sound and fury and sometimes even rhyme.”
“And you are asking me to give you some of that for him?”
“That magic, yes, to save his life,
From you through me to him.”
“And how is this miracle to be done?”
“Kiss my cheek, and give it me,
And I’ll bestow on him.”
I kissed her lightly on the sun-tanned cheek.
She grinned, a twinkle in her hazel eyes.
And she kissed me back on the lips.
The magic took my sight away.
Su-Fey was gone.
“Mickey, are you all right?” said a farmer’s wife,
“Or are you having another episode?”
“Oh, I’ll be fine,” I said, still smirking.
“Is there any of that sausage left?”
“
Filed under 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
The gentle Belle of Amherst
Wrote carefully pruned poems
Like roses groomed and purely bred
To take prestigious prizes
At flower shows she never would attend.
1,800 poems carefully handwritten
And preserved in locked desk drawers
While only ten were published in her lifetime.
Poems of death and immortality,
Art and society, nature and spirituality,
After an entire life lived in secret,
She profoundly affected poetry,
And achieved immortality after all.
Filed under Uncategorized
In poetry, some things can stand for other things.
This is called Symbolism.
In Mickey’s Book of Life, Love, and Laughter, certain silly symbols are commonly found.
Cardinals are the little red songbirds that never fly away when the winter comes.
A cardinal symbolizes courage, fortitude, and profound persistence.
When Mickey sees a cardinal, he stupidly thinks it’s a good omen.
Cardinals deliver the will and favor of God Himself.
This is why Catholic Cardinals can become Pope.
Fauns are creatures of Greek Myth, naked young boys or girls,
With horns of a goat and tails of a deer, living in the forest.
In Mickey’s stupid head, they symbolize sensuality and oneness with nature.
Fauns are what Mickey is trying to be when
He takes off his clothes and claims to be a nudist.
The ship with pink sails is a symbol too.
It is a symbol of Mickey’s imagination,
Especially the imagination that shows up in Mickey’s dreams.
It sometimes appears as a 1957 pink and white Mercury,
My dad’s car until it was destroyed in the Belmond tornado of 1966.
Filed under Uncategorized
At Mother’s breakfast table we were always encouraged to talk about stuff. That was a given. It was how families operated in the 60’s and 70’s. Mom and Dad not only listened to the mindless drivel coming out of the childish mouths of me, my two sisters, and my stinky little brother, but they also tended to hold forth about things they wished to teach us. We learned Methodist-Church-flavored Christianity and Eisenhower-Republican values. Ike had been president when I was born and got most of the credit for the post-war boom in the economy. We were middle-class people with solid middle-class values.
And then I had the bad sense to grow up and start thinking for myself. Nixon had let me down big-time when I was in high school. I had defended him against my McGovern-leaning loony liberal friends. My best friend was a preacher’s kid, a Methodist preacher’s kid. His father actually believed in progressive nonsense about sex-education for children and helping to feed the poor. And then Nixon turned out to be a liar, a coverer-upper, a cheat, and a bad-word-user. I suspect, though my Dad never admitted it, that he may have voted for Carter over Ford. It was my first time voting, and it actually felt good to use my vote to strike back at the party that betrayed my trust.
Religion, too. In the late seventies a man named Carl Sagan put on a TV show called Cosmos. The man bedazzled my father and I with Science. He taught us that every molecule of us was composed of atoms that could only have been forged in the cosmic furnaces in the centers of stars. He showed us how spectroscopy of the stars could show us what they were made of. He showed us the meaning of Einstein’s special Theory of Relativity. He pulled the universe together for us in a way that could not be undone. And he did it without calling upon the name and blessings of God. But he pointed out that we are connected to everything in the universe and everything is connected to us. To me, that seemed to define God. My religion was changing from Christianity to Saganism. Of course, Mom heard that as “paganism”. Breakfast table talking changed into early morning arguments. We didn’t exactly throw chairs at each other, but some pretty heated and pretty large ideas went flying through the air. Religion and politics became the banned topics at the breakfast table.
So that brings me to the Paffooney points for today. This blog has turned into a place where a disobedient son, a horrible sort of “free-thinker” type of radical hippie pinko goofball, can talk about the loony-liberal progressive ideas that have taken over his good-little Eisenhower-Republican little-boy mind. I spent the last post talking existentially about my religious beliefs. My conservative, old-fashioned friends and family call me an atheist now, but I truly believe in God. It’s just, I recognize the factors behind Christian myths. I bow to the wisdom of Scientists like Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking… as well as hippie psychologists like Alan Watts… and literary heroes like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S, Lewis.
I am proud to be an Iowegian (a Mickian word for being from Iowa), yet my birth-State produces gawd-awful Tea Party politicians like Steve King and Joni Ernst. The stuff that comes out of their mouths doesn’t even make good fertilizer. But they are comedy gold. Will Rogers would have pointed out that the jokes will write themselves. All the humorist would have to do is consult the front page of the newspaper. I also live in Texas where the debate over secession from the United States still goes on with new Governor Greg Abbott, a man who is a Rick Perry clone, except that he hasn’t bothered to put on glasses as much to make him smarter. And Texans are looking forward to the next Republican president in 2016. Both Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are running. That doubles Texas’ chances, right? With Global Warming not being accepted as a real thing, the need for giving all our money to the Koch brothers and the Walton family being recognized by both parties in Congress, and looming war with foreign nations that have the bad sense to be “Muslim in nature”, the future looks kinda bleak. But it is a great time to be a humorist, and I am guessing I won’t be doing very much talking at the breakfast table for a while.
Lately I have been having memory troubles. You know what I mean, when you walk through a doorway with a definite purpose in mind.and then, on reaching the other room, you have no earthly idea what that purpose was. It happens to me regularly. In fact, I can even start writing a sentences, and then I… What was I talking about? Oh, yes. I need to practice writing some more spectacularly bad poetry, before I forget how to do it.
Re-minders
Sometimes…
My mind slips out of my left ear…
And I can’t remember things.
So, I have to search under the table…
To find my mind…
And then I remember that that’s not how a mind works.
******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Forgetfulness
Tell me now, before I forget…
What was I supposed to remember?
Was it something religious, important, and good…
That comes towards the end of December?
Was I supposed to buy something for somebody then?
I wrote a note to myself in September…
Oh, gosh! How could I ever forget that?
Now the fire is nothing but embers.
******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Finding Fairies in my Hair
Why do I have elflocks all snarled up in my hair?
Surely some fairies have been twisting it up there.’
But if I can catch one and make him confess,
He claims I don’t comb it, and that’s why it’s a mess.
**********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Doofy Me
If I forget everything I ever knew,
Would it be possible that I am still smarter than you?
Old Socrates said he knew nothing at all.
And so he asked questions from Winter through Fall.
I hope I retain enough brain to remember
That everyone needs to wear clothes in December.
******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Yep, I still obviously remember how to write spectacularly bad poetry. It is my contribution to literature. Virtually all poets will be able to say, “At the very least, I am a better poet than Beyer.”
Filed under autobiography, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, poem, poetry
Catch a Falling Star 
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.
Leave a comment
Filed under autobiography, commentary, cowboys, humor, insight, philosophy, politics, Uncategorized
Tagged as arizona, autobiography, childhood beliefs, cowboy code, Daniel Boone, humor, politics, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, satire, writing, Wyatt Earp