Do I believe in the little people? Of course not. If Tinkerbell depends on me, she is dead meat… or maybe dead fairy dust.
But if they do exist, then they are like the rooster riders in my picture, exploiting the world in the same way the big old slow ones do.
They are not our inferiors or our superiors. They are us. They mirror us and our beliefs, our dreams… our nightmares, and all the things deep within us that could ever possibly go bump in the night.
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This Paffooney was created with the mistaken idea that I would never have a child or be a Dad. Little did I know that after I turned 37 it would happen three times. This picture is one of my dream children, of the sort Charles Lamb once wrote an essay about. This is little Disney-Michael Beyer… a child who never was and re-created me in the birthing.
Step one… perform some random act. (choose a random illustration from Spiegelman & Mouly’s Classic Children’s Comics)
Step two… redraw in the Mickian style (stupidly recast images in garishly wrong colors and cutsie goofishness)
Step three… realize you don’t have any idea what you are doing this for (What am I doing this for?)
Step four… yield to despair and get depressed (let me think about this too much and end up moping)
Step five… do other things and try not to think about it (What was that movie I wanted to see?)
Step six… give it time to percolate or get forgotten (Say what?)
Step seven… come back to it eventually (maybe later this week… or in 22 years)
How’s that for a Pointless Paffooney Prose Poem?
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You may have noticed the word “Paffooney” used in some of my posts. You may have been deceived into thinking it is some kind of real word. Sorry. It isn’t. It’s my own original made-up word for postable buffoonery, baloney, and goofiness… with accompanying picture. Yes, the picture is the key, though it may have no discernible connection to whatever the heck I happen to be writing about. It is an illustration for illustration’s sake… and a story for the sake of putting words with the picture. I confessed early in my blogging endeavors that I am basically a surrealist. I juxtapose disparate images and ideas and make meaning by forcing the relationship. Of course, you have no idea at all what I just said, and rightly so, because I tend to speak in college-art-history-meta-cognitive-gobblety-gook-speak, a language I first learned in college and have since banged into weird word-sculptures over the last thirty-three years by trying to explain things in a classroom to teenagers. (I love the job, but I do not recommend it for those with a loosening grip on sanity.)
So, here is the definition; Paffooney, proper noun, (Origin from a silly blogger’s head, consisting of Paff, meaning a silly cartoon sound effect, and fooney an even sillier derivation from buffoon and looney.) A silly picture and post combination caused by a brain fart or other gaseous anomaly inside Mickey’s head.
Forgive me, for I know my sins are many.
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This is a re-post of an old poem with a new Paffooney.
Icarus
“You never believe in me,
You only hear the lie,
You never believe in me,
You never even try,
You never see the good in me,
You only fear I’ll die,
You never hear the words I say,
You never tell me why,
You never care how I plan,
Or why I touch the sky,
You’ll never lift me up,
You never let me fly,”
That’s how it always was,
Between my father and I,
Until the day I reached the sun,
And burned my hands on high,
And so it is he’ll never know,
How much his son was worth,
Because he couldn’t understand,
The day
I fell
To Earth.
My teenage son and I have been through some rough times. One time, though, we sat down and talked about him wanting to be a music composer. I realized then that the things I have been through as a writer, being discouraged by other, more sensible people, having to defend my art, and not even being believed in by my own family, were the very things that he was talking about. So I wrote a poem about it. The central metaphor is Icarus from classical mythology. I even suggested he use it as lyrics and turn it into a song. Of course he told me how stupid that idea was. So let me put the poem here and see what you think.
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The Thumb-Sucker
Darkness surrounds us
As the nighttime moves in
And we feel overwhelmed
And burdened by sin
But comfort can come
From a place we’ve all been
Just open your mouth
And shove your thumb in
Our childhoods were happy
And made us all grin
And simple we were
With our little thumbs in
So as we’re all worried
And all feeling dumb
We can make it all better
By sucking our thumb
(Silly poems and blue cartoons are a specialty of mine. I’m no Ogden Nash, but I make it all rhyme.)
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In 1969, the summer after I had to travel to a new school in another town, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. I stayed up and awake that entire summer night, as did my whole family, watching everything the TV was able to show. I vowed to myself that summer that I, too, would one day walk on another world. My fantasy was, as I’m sure most thirteen-year-old boys in the entire world agreed, was to be the first Earth man to set foot on Mars.
I set out to get myself into the Air-Force Academy in Colorado Springs. We visited there during one of our yearly family tent-camping car trips. It was an elegant, pristine dream. But life has a way of putting needle holes in the balloons that make up the loftiest of dreams. I developed bursitis and eventually arthritis by the time I was eighteen. My eyes were always too myopic to ever become an astronaut. Then Challenger blew up. Reagan, who didn’t believe in the U.S. Government as a way to accomplish important things, or at least, didn’t believe in spending money for such things when that money didn’t go into the pockets of his rich friends, changed young boy’s dreams. Our trajectory towards Mars was slowed.
So, do you let dreams die? Never me. No, not I. I would still travel there. But I could not take my physical body. I would have to go by the ship of imagination. I would have to rely on the fantastic inner eye.
Some of my junior high English students and I took up role-playing games. We graduated from Dungeons and Dragons into the space fantasy game called Traveller. We fought space wars, built space colonies, absorbed Doctor Who, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and The Last Starfighter. All things were possible. With a role of the dice, you could save the universe. And so my novel Aeroquest was born.
Catch a Falling Star and all the stories I have percolating now continue that plan, that goal, that young boy’s dream of placing his feet on another world. Today’s Paffooney is a symptom of that illness, not an absolute definition of it. Young Buster Crabbe, if you can’t tell, is the human boy in the picture.
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Hear the Music (a love poem)
The singer sings his song,
And wants the world to sing along,
Though the world has gone all wrong,
And the darkness stays too long.
The singer warms and croons,
Under bright romantic moons,
And carries hopeful tunes,
To the listening dolts and loons.
Can a song bring truth to light?
Can it help us win the fight?
Does it ease the world’s plight?
And set the wrongs aright?
Yes a song can save the world,
Though the truth must be unfurled,
And the listeners’ ears are twirled.
So the hurts will all be pearled.
Okay, okay… goofy poetry, I know. That’s the way I am. I have a goopy-sappy-goofy faith in the power of words. I call the chapters of my fiction Cantos because I believe them to be musical compositions and pieces of poetry. Ooh, what a goof that I am! But I really do believe that the words of a song, the stories in a book, or the beat of a poem can save lives, change worlds, and make all things better. Why would I believe that? Because words and ideas have power. And as I feel my mortality creeping nearer and nearer, I am feeling more and more power in my words. I almost have to burst into song like some sappy musical… like Camelot, like My Fair Lady, like Man of LaMancha. Like the stupid boy in the Paffooney, I have to sing. I have my impossible dreams.
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Here is an old pencil drawing from 1980. It shows MT as an observer of all that country cornpone stuff that makes up his humor and written genius. It also shows the loyal dog that would dearly love to get his teeth into that piece of chicken.
In both the books Snow Babies and The Bicycle-Wheel Genius I used the characters of the Magnificent Murphy Clan to weave actual people from my past into my stories. The Murphys; Mary and Warren, Warren’s father Sean “Cudgel” Murphy, Mary’s and Warren’s kids, Danny, Dilsey, Mike, Little Sean, Daisy, Sarah, Thomas “Pumpkin” Murphy, and Baby Jane all live together in a small, four- bedroom house dubbed “Murphy Mansion”.
Here is a look at a Paffooney of the irrepressible Mary Murphy with daughter Dilsey, and Little Sean on her shoulders.,
And here is one of my anti-hero Pirates, Mike Murphy with his little girlfriend Blueberry Bates.
Mike has the distinction of being in all three of my Norwall Novels, a very rare character indeed. And, NO, that doesn’t mean that he is me just because we have the same first name… Okay, maybe a little bit me, but that’s just the nature of writing silly novels about adventures through time and space and farm-town Iowa. I’m hoping to make you curious enough to buy one of my books. Catch a Falling Star is available as a hardback, paperback, or e-book from Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and the link here to I-Universe. But I know you are far too smart for me, and I can never hook you just on the strength of my nerdy humor or my implausible Paffoonies. Here’s hoping a look at the Murphys will help.
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Catch a Falling Star 