Sometimes people break,
And then, they fall apart,
And it takes a jigsaw master,
To Puzzle back their heart.
And if a foot falls off,
Quite busted on Monday’s hump
They may be legless, headless, limp
And lying in a lump.
But no face is ever busted
To a point of no repair,
And lips are pasted back in place
With a smile that wasn’t there.
Spring cleaning is how I have spent at least a portion of my lonely invalid’s Spring Break. I get to walk the dog and clean the house while my family is enjoying the somewhat chilly beaches of Florida’s panhandle. Well, it isn’t all misery. As I was cleaning in the library upstairs, I came across a set of drawings from the 1980’s that I had been looking everywhere for. You have no idea what kind of treasure exists under stuff until you start putting stuff in other places. I picked stuff up, and low and behold… treasure. How long since I last moved that stuff? I have no idea. Stuff moves around in the library constantly. Some of the books fly off the shelves in the middle of the night, I swear it. But this stuff wasn’t books, so it was becoming a permanent accretion of stuff. Not yet icky stuff, but it was painter stuff, brushes and oil paints and mixing bowls and acrylic paints and linseed oil and all kinds of stuff that can become very icky in an upstairs room in Texas with no air conditioning.
So, let me give you a look at what I found before I start trying to turn it into writer’s stuff and Paffooney posts.
This first picture is called Bobby, because Bobby Zeffer sat for the portrait of the boy. (You are aware that I don’t use people’s real names in my work. So, Bobby, if you read this post and see this picture, you will have to remember that it is really you.) (No chance of that, though. Bobby is not illiterate, but I know he hates to read.) I could also call it Horatio T. Dogg, because that is the name of the talking dog detective who smokes a pipe and wears a hat and was the main character of a mystery novel that became too silly to finish. It turned out to be one of those stories where I reached the point of having a Tyrannosaurus leap out of a wormhole and eat all the main characters. I gave up on that story rather abruptly.
The second picture is rather obviously Robert Newton playing the part of Long John Silver in the Disney version of Treasure Island. I was still in my twenties when I drew this. I was inspired to try my hand at further portraiture because the picture of Bobby turned out to actually look like him.
The third picture is the reason I was desperate to find these old drawings. It is one of my prescient pictures. I drew it in the 1980’s from an image that haunted my dreams as a young teacher. I later realized how remarkable it was while I was teaching in Cotulla in about 2000. The girl was in my seventh grade fifth period English class. I can’t tell you how many times I had to dig this picture out and stare at her face. Almost twenty years before, six or seven years before she was even born, I drew this girl, and it looks exactly like her. I became even more mystified by this portrait when the boy walked into my classroom last year. He was from Africa. Eritrea to be precise. He was a wonderful, soft-spoken, highly-intelligent boy with a deep Christian faith in God. I almost went crazy searching for this picture so I could compare what I had drawn to the real boy. It turns out he has a bit less hair in real life and a small scar above his left eye. How did I not see that in my dream?
The last picture was designed as a cover for my graphic novel Hidden Kingdom. I have recently revisited that project and I am thinking now more strongly than ever of trying to finish it. I can do a lot of drawing with my arthritic hands as long as I only do a little bit at a time. And this whole drawing thing, this raging addiction, has finally become fun again now that I am retired and have the time to do stuff. Not icky stuff… Treasure!
Try not to be upset with me for drawing a naked lady. You see, she is not really a lady, she is a caryatid, a stone pillar for holding up a building. Besides, I have been recently very ill, and drawing naked ladies makes me happy, even though it is a sin and means I will probably burn in hell. I am a hopeless sinner in this regard. I got kicked off Pinterest for liking an oil painting of a naked lady. I think it was a painting by William Adolphe Bouguereau. How could I be so terrible? You should check out my post about his sinful, horrible paintings so you can see how terrible I am for yourself. (Bouguereau) 
Of course, This post is not about naked ladies at all, so why am I fuming and ranting and telling all my darkest secrets about that?
This post is about architecture, about giving structure to things, about holding things together and holding things up. Is it clever that I drew this picture of an ornate pillar and placed it in this post so it looks like it is standing on later paragraphs and holding up the introduction? I find weird surrealist things like that help me write stuff that makes a few people laugh. It helps me because I can focus on nonsensical side-stuff like that (mixed up with obscure puns and alliterations like “pillar” and “placed” that, when cooked together with goofy rhythms in over-long sentences end up sounding funnier than they really are), and then I can say stuff that is actually funny because I don’t realize how wrong, or weird, or silly some of these words I am futzing it all up with truly are. (And I am amazed that the Pinterest police haven’t come and kicked me off WordPress for using a word like “futzing”, even though they don’t know what it means. Heck, even the spell-checker didn’t object to the word!)
But someone like me who is trying to be funny needs structure more than anyone else you can think of. Why? Because the sad-clown-crying-on-the-inside is so very true. The dark dips of depression… pain, illness, and more pain… family stress from others in my family who also suffer… That’s what makes the laughing so very necessary. You need the lighter stuff to fill up the room (somewhat like a really big fart) because you depend on the sheer buoyancy of it to lift the entire house up and keep it from sinking to the very center of the earth. (And the stink of it can also help keep you awake when otherwise you might never get out of bed again)… (But please don’t light any matches around my house.)
So, in conclusion, this stuff I write does have basic structures, basic rules. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a theme, a point that needs to be made, And then it needs to end with some kind of a kicker line or punch line… because when that finally hits me square in the face (like a pie thrown by a pie-whacker clown), it helps me remember… I am still alive, and I can still laugh about it.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, surrealism
Of late I have encountered many roadblocks on the road to creativity. Illness gets in the way. It is hard to think when I have too much arthritis pain. I have a hard time composing anything on days like yesterday when my blood sugar is out of whack. I haven’t been chased by car-driving crocodiles in red fright-wigs and green race cars. At least, not while I was awake. I am trying to follow a writing schedule that has me editing a novel for a contest in April, writing two other novels simultaneously, a set of short stories, and this daily blog that I am trying to average 500 words per day in every day (and succeeding now for roughly 41 straight days) (some days I write less words, but some days I go way over the stated limit). I end up squeezing the toothpaste tube of new ideas from both ends until the big wad in the middle finally bursts and gets white gobbets of creative-idea paste on everything in the room. I will admit that I mangle a metaphor or two, and give meaning to random blobs of description merely for the sake of adding more words. And what is this bit about, then? Clearly I am thinking about how I think and it is not a pretty sight. Sometimes my children bounce out of the rumble seat towards the river of man-eating fish, and I have to depend on the odd three-eyed alien tootling along in a space-doughnut to catch him or her in the nick of time. But sometimes, too, I am the rabbit, calmly watching from the sidelines hoping not to get run over but too fascinated to look away from the slap-dash slap-stick chase scene that is my actual life. This particular bit of tooth-paste squeezing is known as free writing, where I just keep stringing words and phrases together for as long as I can keep my aching fingers from falling off. I make corrections as I go, but there is no outline here, no discernible pattern, and very little logical coherence. Like the picture Paffooney, once it gets started, it just goes. And goes and goes. I have bounced over broken bridges and landed squarely on the pavement on the other side more than once of late. I paid the tax on the house and managed to remain a homeowner for another year. I fought off numerous bill-collecting crocodiles set on me by credit-card banks who are after me to pay off mountains of accumulated debt and interest after my multiple career-ending illnesses. I have lawyers helping me with debt reduction, the step before bankruptcy, which is also probably the step before stepping off the ledge at the top of the Chrysler Building. I continue to draw stuff that makes little or no visual sense, and post them here to further delight, dazzle and delude you. And, of course, I have the audacity to label this word free-for-all as humor… but I have reached five hundred and five words.
Here you see me doing some serious art-starting. I am working on ideas about how clowns can be compassionate. I am hoping this is true, because I am one… a clown, I mean. But I have some serious noodle and doodle work to do. So I will start with a doodle of Klown Kops from Klowntown’s finest. More will be explained later… and more will be doodled too.
Filed under clowns, compassion, doodle, humor, new projects, Paffooney Posts
My name is Skaggs. I am a cat. It is as simple as that. I have to tell you, life is not very fair to cats. In my last life I was an alley cat. I lived on rats that bred and thrived under the water tower in the alley behind the small-town post office. I was basically happy. You have heard the old expression, “happy as a cat”, right? I could kill and eat any rat I wanted at any time, no matter how big of a Mickey he thought he was. I was good at ripping out rat guts and breaking mouse spines. I was the baddest cat in the whole damn town.
But I had to share my alley with a dog. That Barky Bill was an insane killer canine that the owner of the local restaurant and bar kept chained behind his Main Street building to keep the rats away from the restaurant garbage. I hated that dog with a hate as great as a vampire has for the sun. (What’s that you say? You didn’t know that cats knew about vampires? Silly human, how little you know about the things that should truly scare you in the world. Cats, vampires, and Barky Bill are far more complicated issues in the world than you realize.) Anyway, needless to say, I teased that dog on a heavy chain leash for the better part of three years when one day, to my utter horror, I discovered he was loose at the same time that I was totally focused on catching and eating a beautiful gold-colored squirrel. I was so sure that the squirrel would be the finest thing that any cat had ever eaten, that I didn’t even notice, mainly because I had that squirrel right between my paws, toying with it before devouring it, that the dog was pouncing. Barky Bill bit clean through my neck. It was so shocking that even as I was being transported to life number seven, my severed head watched in confusion and fright as that ugly, smelly dog ate my finely tuned rat-catching body.
So, having been a bad, bad Leroy Brown sort of cat, I was sentenced to a next life with a crazy cat lady. Miss Velma Proddy owned at least fifty cats. I was reborn in an underwear drawer in her back bedroom, the one she kept for the company that she never had. My mother was the cat called Pinkie, even though she was a milk-white cat. My father was Proddy’s favorite, a tomcat called Tom Selleck. He would’ve killed and eaten me soon after I was born because my mother was not a very dominant fighter and alpha cats like Tom could always sense when a cat filled with pure evil is born. But Proddy was having none of that. She rounded up all the kittens and raised them in a blanket box in the corner of the kitchen near the stove. I owe that woman everything, which is why I don’t understand why she had to go and buy Pepe.
Pepe is more of a malnourished rat than a dog. Like a lot of Chihuahuas he trembles a lot, and he blinks at you with those big round eyes of his. Proddy thinks that everything he does is so cute. She carries him around like a prize possession or a human baby or something. In my past life I was a white cat like my mother. (Everyone knows that when a cowboy wears a white hat, it means he’s a good guy, but when a cat has white fur, it means that it is evil.) In this, my seventh incarnation, owing to the fact that my father was a gray tiger cat, I was a sort of white cat with gray tiger stripes. It meant I thought like a tiger. Pepe looked like a rat to me. Pepe was prey. Pepe was meat. I was going to eat him.
“You tell this story so scary, Señor Skaggs,” says Pepe, “you make me so afraid!”
“Shut up, stupid dog. I’m telling this. And you are not afraid. Remember what happened that time I tried to drown you in the toilet?”
“Si. I remember well. That time with the super-fancy drinking bowl.”
“I saw you trying to hold on to the plastic toilet seat and dip your tiny little tongue into the water that was too far below you to reach. Only your hind legs and stupid little tail were even visible.”
“Si! And you jumped up to smack me on my cute little behind and push me in. I remember.”
“But I was surprised that such a little dog could react so fast and leap so far.”
“Si, Señor. I jumped right on that handle and flushed it.”
“Just as I fell into the water. That would’ve been the start of number eight if Proddy hadn’t come along right then.”.
“Oh, you make me laugh so hard, Señor. And she was so mad at you for playing with the toilet!”
“And you remember the time I almost got you with that pot of boiling water and hard-boiled eggs?”
“Si, Señor. You got up on the kitchen counter right next to the stove. I was sitting on the floor in front of the stove sniffing up all the smell of the bacon. You tried to push the pot off the stove.”
“I still haven’t figured out how you planned it. The bald spots I have all around my front paws are still there from my fur catching on fire. You must’ve been sitting in the precise spot on the floor where I couldn’t knock the pot down on you without passing my paws through the flames.”
“You owe that one to Señora Proddy too. She had that fire extinguisher next to the stove. That saved you from being cooked cat-burgers. And you looked so funny when she almost drowned you in that white foamy stuff. Oh, you make me laugh so hard Señor.”
Well, I am guessing that I made my point by now. This little underfed rat of a dog is more evil than I am! The harder I try to kill and eat him, the more I suffer for it. And I still don’t know how he does it! He makes my life miserable. He needs to die.
“Oh, you make me laugh so hard, Señor!”
Filed under humor, Paffooney, short story
There are limits to what people will believe. No really, there are, I promise. You can believe me because I’m a fiction writer, a story-teller, and I therefore tell lies all the time. I was a teacher for thirty-one years, so I not only tell kids how wonderful they are in order to get good behavior and real learning out of them, but I have been told some of the most convoluted, inside-out, purple-in-the-face hoo-haws that are ever told anywhere in human culture throughout human history, and told them by a child with a straight face, perfectly seriously, and with little red horns holding up their crooked golden halos. We are taught to misrepresent the truth from early childhood on.
“Do you have to go potty, sweetheart?”
“No, mommy, I jest like to dance.”
“Do you love me, Mortimer? Or do you just want to get me alone in a car after the prom?”
“Oh, I love you, Alicia. Really I do!”
“So are you in favor of taxing the oil companies at a fair and balanced rate, Senator, so we have more money to spend on Education and public works?”
“Why, I most certainly do, young voter. Ignore that man with the “I Love Exxon” button trying to bash me over the head with that Tea Party campaign sign. Let me kiss that darling little baby of yours.”
This post was inspired by all the lies told in the State of the Union speech last night by President O’Bama (He’s Irish and a conservative like Bill O’Reilly, isn’t he?) Now, I am well aware of the white lies the President buttered our bread with. The economy has actually improved, but not nearly as much as was claimed. And not nearly enough for someone like me, a white male retired educator with significant health problems living in a Red State under Republican-Nazi governor/emperors who want to privatize education and spend my pension money on tax breaks for billionaires. But those lies are nothing compared to the damn lies told by the Republican response lady, Ernst from Iowa. She laid out a plan for undoing everything that’s been done to improve my life by the government since 2008. The Affordable Care Act is to be repealed. Tax breaks for “job creators” are going to be re-instituted. We are going to heal the middle class by deregulating industry and predatory banks and by giving more benefits and goodies to the rich folks who will treat us better than those horrible Democratic liberals who want to turn us all into socialists. This is coming from the Iowa Senator who won her seat by promising your average pork-eating Iowan to use her “hog-castrating skills” to motivate Democrats in congress to see things her way. Iowans (of which I once was one of) know good fertilizer when they smell it. It makes you want to shout, “Hoo-Haw!” (Yes, it’s true, I once knew an old farm hand that, when he heard a ridiculously contorted lie, would shout “Hoo-Haw!” as a sort of derisive laughter to hear such a funny truth-twister.)
Lies are our way of life. We lie about what we think. We lie about what we feel. We lie about how we view the world. We lie about whether or not we tell lies. Could we live a life without ever lying? I hate to tell you this, but if I say, “yes”, then it might not be entirely truthful of me.
It took three days to complete. I watched a lot of TV while I was doing the drawing. So the goofiness of this Paffooney is easy to explain. I am not, however, dissatisfied.
I am wondering now if it is appropriate to call what I do in my writing and my cartooning humor. I tell stories. As a school teacher in both junior high and high school, I told stories in class and made kids laugh. (Okay, I admit, kids that age mixed with hormones, experiments with sex and alcohol, and under-developed frontal lobes in their brains will laugh at practically anything. I know a teacher who crosses her eyes when talking to kids about their mistakes, and she has them rolling on the floor with giggle-fits. This is now my fourth longest parenthetic expression, also known as an aside. They would probably laugh about that.) But is it fair to call that humor?
I write stories filled with feel-good crap. I’m as likely to make you cry as I am to make you laugh. (At least, that is my intention. You may laugh at things I intend to make the reader sad, and be sad or nauseated by the things I think are funny.) How does that fit with the definition of humor on the internet? I get a big kick out of some humor blogs I found on WordPress. http://https://irtfyblog.wordpress.com/ I Refuse to Follow Your Blog is a master complainer. He disses and crabs and totally kicks butt about a number of things. (Though I must admit I used his list of un-funny humor blogs to follow a few more that give me chuckles… What can I say? I’m a contrarian at times. How can you teach seventh graders and not be?) http://https://buffalotompeabodyblog.wordpress.com/ Buffalo Tom Peabody not only rocks my rib-cage with his wonderful photo-shopped self-cat-portraits, he makes a really guffaw-inducing set of videos on YouTube. http://http://bensbitterblog.com/ Ben’s Bitter Blog is blithely bitter and better at bitter than any bitter blogger blogging bitterly that I have ever found. Ben blogs bitter better than other bitter bloggers who blog with bitter butter… (All right! I know. Alliteration by itself isn’t funny. It took me tons of tempestuous years teaching to learn that.) http://http://dougdoeslife.com/ Doug Does Life does a blog with a monkey that you have to see to believe. They all make me laugh and they all seem to know better than I how to do the humor shtick. So how dare I call what I write humor?
After the Charlie Hebdo incident, (which you may have noticed has seriously bruised my cartoony little heart) I have to take humor and comedy in a whole new, more serious light. Ralph Bakshi, a master cartoonist whom I adore, says that if your cartoons don’t piss somebody off and make some enemies, then you’re doing it wrong, and you have to stop calling yourself a cartoonist. He says you are just an illustrator… in my case a children’s illustrator. Do I need to be insulted by that? Am I not a humorist? Am I not funny? I will tag this lunatic post as humor even though it’s not funny… well, not funny funny… just funny odd. Will I get in trouble with the cartoon gods for doing it? (Wait a minute… cartoon gods? Are they gonna zap me with a cartoon fun-bolt or hit me in the face with a pie or something? If they send terrorists, it may elevate my status.) So I am asking a whole lot of questions and not answering them myself like usual. After all, who decides if this is humor? Not I.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, philosophy
Last night a tornado dream, the one I posted about on January 4th, came true. We had five earthquakes in Carrollton, Texas. Of course, none of the epicenters were in Carrollton. They were a few miles away in Irving, Texas. But tornado dreams always precede some sort of disaster, usually a personal tragedy. I realized during the final pair of shakes around 8:15 last nigh that the dream truly was about the earthquakes. Remember, we were looking out the south windows of the farm house, my mother and I, at the funnel cloud, and the south windows are located right next to the storm cellar. The storm cellar is safety. It has symbolized safety in my mind since the night we spent in the basement in Rowan, Iowa when the tornado ripped the shingles off the roof of our house. We were safe that night, and we were safe last night because none of the earthquakes were worse than a 3.6 on the Richter Scale. Earthquakes that are that mild do little or no damage. My mother was in the tornado dream because she heard about the earthquakes on the news she was watching up in Iowa (at the same farm place where the dream was set),and she emailed me about the earthquakes to make certain my family and I were safe. So it was another dream of future events, and it did come true… at least in my goofy little mind.
Dreams come true in more than one way. I finished the initial edit of my contest novel, The Magical Miss Morgan. I now believe firmly that it is the best novel I have yet written. It is short. At 44,500 words it is barely more than the minimum acceptable word-count for the contest. It is simple. The main plot is about Francis Morgan having her notions of what constitutes good teaching tested by a parent, a school board member, and an angry principal. The first subplot is about a group of fairies who recruit Francis to help them save the fairy kingdom of Tellosia from a lack of the vital belief in fairies necessary to overcome evil. The second subplot is about one of her favorite students undergoing an attack on her belief in herself from another student. Main plot and two subplots are almost too few for me and my fevered, fertile comic imagination. I can’t seem to juggle (usually) without twenty balls in the air at once. But the simplicity of this novel is one of its main charms, and a quality I am hoping may help win the writing contest. I know from my experiences with the novel Snow Babies that I am not far from reaching the top in a writing contest.
The dream may also have signaled an important milestone in my continuing health problems. I ruled out the things that are most likely to kill me in my recent cardiologist quest. I do not have heart problems after all. I only have six incurable diseases, and am still a cancer survivor (the growth removed from the back of my head was infected, but not cancerous. I only have diabetes, arthritis, hypertension, COPD, psoriasis, and an enlarged prostate. Nothing is bad enough by itself to be unmanageable and deadly). So I am probably going to be alive for a few more years and able to draw and write more. I was forced to retire from teaching by health problems, but now that I am managing my debt with help from a lawyer and do not have the stress from a job, I actually have fewer sick days, more money to spend, and enough time to do the artistic work that I have always wanted to do.
So I close with the Disney song in my head… “A dream is a wish your heart makes… and dreams really do come true.”
Catch a Falling Star 