I shared this Paffooney last year too. I don’t really celebrate Christmas any more, but I do believe in the self-sacrificing love that informs Bob Cratchit, and is so obvious that it converts Ebeneezer Scrooge. There in lies the “reason for the season”.
Okay, I do admit that the title is entirely misleading and wholly inaccurate, but it got you wondering… Didn’t it? I have apparently developed tachycardia, a condition where the heart races and beats like a jackhammer plugged into a nuclear reactor. It is not fatal in itself, though it may lead to heart attack or stroke which are definitely in the fatal category. Yesterday I did two things about that little heart condition, one which hopefully helped, and another which definitely hurt. So, let me tell you a fairy tale.
No kidding. It is a fairy tale about novel writing, feeling like a murderer, and cardiologists.
Step one… I went to the cardiologist in Plano, Texas. I have had a heart monitor taped to my chest for three weeks. I have to push the record button three or four times every night. The tachycardia is a night-stalker, hitting me while I’m asleep. Then it shakes me awake, makes me sweat and fret and try to decide if I need to go to the emergency room or not. I lie awake worrying just long enough that when I awake in the morning I am a sleepless, colorless zombie that feels the need to stay in bed all day, but can’t for fear the heart problem will attack again at any moment. The heart monitor itself likes to complain and make a nasty beeping noise to irritate my sleep-deprived brain, and the places where the electrodes are taped to my chest are so itchy from three weeks of sticky plastic thingies stuck to them that I want to claw my own skin off.
At the cardiologists office, I had a sonogram done. They used sound waves to map out what my beating heart looked like and how the blood was flowing through it in daylight. The objective was to make certain that there were no holes or lumps or discarded candy wrappers in there that would require surgery. So I got probed with a hot sonogram beeper offset with cold contact gel, and wouldn’t you know it… I didn’t even get to take the heart monitor off for the procedure. No rest for wicked, itchy chests. But on the up side, I did not at any point notice the technician shaking her head sadly or calling for an ambulance. There were no immediate negative results to the testing. So now I get to fight tachycardia some more without knowing anything more about my condition until the doctor explains on December 30th.
Step Two… I am using my down time to continue writing my NaNoWriMo novel, The Magical Miss Morgan, which I didn’t finish in November. It is a story about a sixth grade English teacher based on personal experience, when I taught sixth graders myself and was a woman… wait, that can’t be right. Is it possible that tachycardia effects the brain after a while? The novel has a number of characters who are fairies. 
(I did say this was based on real life experiences, didn’t I?) The fairies get involved with an irate parent, trying to help the teacher who has befriended them, and I am at the critical part of the plot where a crisis point is reached and a murder is about to take place. (The usual for parent-teacher conferences.) Anyway the conflict comes to a boil, and though the murder is prevented, a fairy is killed in the prevention of it. And it isn’t just any fairy. It is my favorite among all the foofy little buggers. I wrote that part on Monday and edit it into permanence yesterday.
Step Three… I spent half an hour crying my eyes out. I know it is not normal to be so affected by the unexpected death of a beloved character, but I can blame it on the tachycardia. It kept me awake so much, and I am such a sleep-deprived zombie-writer that it is possible that I dreamed the whole thing. I may discover when I reread it for a fourth time that the fairy character didn’t die after all. Except… no, wait… that’s not what it says. I need to finish this up now so that I can go on another half-hour crying jag. I have no one to blame except myself. And I can’t even write the character back to life (though I may try) because the scene is just too good the way it is. Oh, well… hopefully soon the cardiologist can give me a magic pill to make everything all better.
Filed under artwork, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Birds are always talking,
And birds are always squawking,
And they are using bird-words,
These are the words I heard.
Twitter-pated – this word comes from the owl in Bambi and means not being able to think straight because you’re in love.
Aviary – is a great big bird house, big enough to fly around in
Feather-dusted – to you and me it means clean, to a bird it means the feathers are dirty
Bird-brained – don’t be insulted if a bird calls you this. It is a compliment.
Fume-fluttered – you gotta fly and get away from that bad smell.
Wing-walking – it’s how you get from here to there if you’re a bird… Duh!
Wakka wakka – it’s those dang ducks again, always telling jokes!
Egg-zactly – as precise and perfect as an egg.
Coo-coo-karoo – that stupid rooster wants us to get up again at daybreak. It’s like a bird can never sleep in!
Clucker butter – Can you believe that KFC place? Butter on improperly cremated dead chickens (ah, well, they were only chickens after all).
Now that you have less than one per cent of the bird vocabulary, please don’t try to tell me what they are saying. I really don’t want to know!
If you have looked carefully at my blog and tried to make sense of it, you have probably noticed that sense is hard to make. It certainly makes no cents. Though, I am told by my writer and publisher friends that a blog is critical to marketing books, I really and truly have not figured out how. I am guessing here, but successful authors must do what they love in their blogs and hope that leads people to think seriously about buying a book with their name on it. But will people ever want the frabjous daylight that makes them say “caloo calay!” from my burbling books filled with nonsense and purple paisley prose?
Maybe I need to clarify what I write about. Hmm, how do I do that? I end up with such a plethora of scattered categories… err cattered scattergories… err, no… right the first time, that no one can make a mental framework that accurately describes my work… including me. But I have to try… even if it kills me… but if it wants to kill me, I already have six incurable diseases (maybe seven) and am a cancer survivor, so it will have to take a number and get in line.
The bird-word post I did yesterday is what I call humor. It is pun-ish if not punny, but possibly pun-ishable. I like word play and word pictures and rhymes and alliteration, all the stuff that my serious writer friends warn me against. Mark Twain, whom I actually deeply respect, says “When considering the adjective, cut it out!” But I find myself unable to do that. I have to spread the adjectives on two or three layers thick like butter, jam, and peanut butter. I never use one word for something when I can use seven. So part of the style that is mine is excessively goopy phraseology. I guess I write like I talk and, since it’s humor, I actively try to talk funny.
What else can I say is characteristic of what I do? Well I was a teacher for three hundred and ten years (possibly divisible by ten). That may have impacted the way I write and what I write about. I am pigeon-holed in the Young Adult novel genre because I write mainly about school age, particularly junior-high-aged, kids… Their problems with corresponding creative solutions, and the kind of things that make them laugh (there’s a lot of pigeons in that hole!). Education issues are important to me. That is probably the key reason that the novel I am working on today, The Magical Miss Morgan, is about a classroom teacher. I hope that doesn’t limit me to an entirely kid-audience, because adults have the book-buying money, and not every adult gives in to a kid whining about wanting to buy a book (because most kids don’t and there are adults who don’t have kids). (Besides, says another aside, kids is really little goats who eat books before they read them).
Finally, I am a student of art. I search for it, chew on it, digest it, rearrange it in my heart and guts, and spit it back out with colored pencils (Dang! I must be a kid too, at least at heart). In my blog I have written about and shared with you Norman Rockwell, Paul Detlafsen, Thomas Kinkade, Maxfield Parrish, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and Frederick Remington. I know of a few more like George Herriman, Cliff Sterrit, and E.C, Segar that I am compelled to write about too. Oh, and N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Milt Caniff. Uh-oh, better stop before another list comes on. So, in conclusion, this whole mess will never really be concluded and since it’s convoluted, it will get all mangled up and end up back where it began. I have tried to make sense out of everything, but instead I’ve just made soup… or if I take out the broth… stew!
Okay, life is like this; you are born, a lot of dumb stuff happens that you are mostly not in control of, you suffer a little bit, you are happy a little bit, and then you die. That is a pretty gloomy prospect, and most of us spend our entire lives obsessing over it, examining it with microscopes, doctoring it with needles and potions and chainsaws, trying to make it last a little longer, wailing and complaining about our sorry allotment, and wasting what little time we have. So what secret exists that could ever make a difference? Could ever open up our eyes… even just a tiny bit?
The secret, as far as I can tell (and I am certainly one of the dumber and more random among you because I am cursed with insight and wisdom won through suffering and making huge mistakes), is reading the right books.
I am not alone in this sort of thinking. There are those who believe that if you gather the best books together into a personal library and read them, they add experiences and knowledge to your life that you would not otherwise have. (Of course, one must acknowledge, especially if you read fiction, that most books are filled with lies and misinformation, and some, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus leaps to mind, might leave you stupider than you were when you started.) It deepens, broadens, and intensely colors the experience of life.
People who read books a lot… really read them, and re-read them, and collect them, and study them, and think about and write about them… are called wizards. Wizards are wise men. It is what the word means. Being one does not make you better than anyone else. In fact, wizards are generally weaker than normal men. It comes from all that ruining of eyes and fuddling up brains with too much thinking. You don’t want a wizard to back you up in a fist fight. You will certainly lose. And you don’t want a wizard to tell you how live your life. They are not good role models. But if a wizard tells a story, you should listen. Because if you really listen, and the wizard is really wise, you can expand the borders of your life, and push on nearer to immortality.
Okay, I need to keep my string of daily posts going. So today, I will show you Pennie. She is a copper dragon. She’s been too shy to meet you until now. But better meet than eat you.
Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, Paffooney
Back in about 1968 my Grandma Beyer was seriously scandalized by an artist named Paul Detlefsen. Detlefsen did a lot of covers for the “Ideals Magazine” that Grandma always had on her coffee tables. He scandalized her by putting a painting on the cover that showed a young boy taking his pants off, the rear view only, so he could go skinny dipping with a group of naked boys. Truthfully the picture shown above is by Detelfsen, but it is not the one that offended her. I have discovered that this painter of old-timey things like blacksmith shops and one-room school houses has painted at least four different versions of “the Old Swimmin’ Hole”. And Grandma was easily scandalized when we were kids. She was a very conservative woman who loved Ronald Reagan and his politics most severely and thought that Richard Nixon was a leftist radical. She didn’t like for people to be naked, except for bath time, and maybe not even then. She is one of the main reasons, along with this painter whom she adored, that I came to learn later in life that “naked is funny”.
http://www.freeplaypost.com/PaulDetlefsen_VintageArtPrint_A.htm
Grandma Beyer also seriously loved puzzles, and besides “Ideals” covers, Paul Detlefsen did a beaucoup of jigsaw puzzles. (Beaucoup means a lot in Texican, I tend to think in Iowegian and talk in Texican and completely forget about the need to translate for those people who don’t know those two foreign tongues) One of the puzzles we spent hours working on was “Horse and Buggy Days” that I pictured here. They were the kind of puzzle paintings where every boy was Tom Sawyer and every girl was Becky Thatcher. And there were a lot of them. Here is another;
http://www.bigredtoybox.com/cgi-bin/toynfo.pl?detlefsenindex
Grandma had this in puzzle form also. We put the puzzle together, glued it to tag board, and framed it. It has hung on the wall in a Grandparent’s house, first Grandma Beyer’s and then Grandma Aldrich’s, since the early 1970’s. My own parents now live in Grandma Aldrich’s house, and that puzzle-painting may be hanging in an upstairs bedroom to this very day. Detlefsen is not known as a great artist. He was a humble painter who painted backdrops for films for over 20 years. In the 1950’s he switched gears and started doing lithographs that were turned into calendars, jigsaw puzzles, laminated table mats, playing cards, and reproductions you could buy in the Ben Franklin Dime Store in Belmond, Iowa and hang on your back porch at home. I believe I saw his paintings in all these forms in one place or another. According to Wikipedia (I know, research, right?) “In 1969, UPI estimated that his artwork had been seen by 80 per cent of all Americans.” That is pretty dang good for a humble painter, better numbers than Pablo Picasso ever saw. Let me share a few more of his works, and see if you recognize any of these;
Filed under art criticism, art my Grandpa loved, artwork, homely art, oil painting
It doesn’t come in on cat feet.
That’s probably Chicago you’re thinking of.
It comes in on the sound of screeching tires…
and ambulance sirens…
because of all the idiot drivers…
in their silver-gray WASP rockets…
that don’t know how to slow down…
or turn on their low beams…
for safety in the big, cold city of Dallas…
where the air is yellow…
except in the fog…
and rush, rush, rush…
business never waits…
for a foggy day.
The more I looked at the silly simpering grin on my old foolish face, the more I realized it needed a few things added. So I added a few of my dream babies. You know, those characters I have created in cartoons and novels who may have started with my own three kids, or kids I grew up with, or kids I taught over the years, but ended up with a large injection of my own mental DNA in their final, fictional selves. So here is a self portrait that I privately refer to by the title “Goofy Me”.
Man, is that ever goofy!
Filed under artwork, cartoons, drawing, self portrait
