This drawing was created when I started this blog as a way of illustrating the kind of writing I wanted to do. Not only the book I published called Catch a Falling Star, but everything else I have written and plan to write. There’s a certain surreal philosophy expressed in this picture if you look at it right (squint your eyes and tap yourself on the temple hard with a brick).
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.
In the novel I am working on at the moment, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, I have a character that does something weird with rabbits that I used to do. I had a plastic dog-walking collar and chain that I used on a pet who definitely was not a dog. Ember-eyes was my New Zealand White buck rabbit. He was a large rabbit with bright red eyes, whiter than snow. He liked to go for walks, but it was definitely a dangerous undertaking for him. Dogs lurked around the neighborhood wandering loose and uninhibited. Dogs, of course, viewed old Ember-eyes as a tasty snack. I never really got into trouble with that, though, until my neighbor and friend Harry brought home a baby raccoon. He also bought a dog collar and chain, planning to walk the raccoon as I walked my bunny. Did you know raccoons will attack and eat a rabbit? Me neither. But they will. Nasty little hissy things they become when they are presented with food at the end of a chain. And of course, it was a baby coon, so my buck rabbit was larger and more muscular than her. And Ember-eyes didn’t like the idea of being a rabbit-burger for any teeny bandit that wasn’t even a proper predator. So the scratching claw-fight went on for about fifteen hare-raising seconds. I ended up carrying the victor back to his hutch, his heart beating so hard I could feel it with the hand I had under his behind. Harry had to figure out how you treat claw wounds to the nose of a raccoon. The vet didn’t want to see a vermin like that on his exam table any more than Harry’s dad wanted to pay the bill for it. Some salve on the tip of the nose was the eventual solution.
In the Paffooney I have a picture of Tommy Bircher and his pet rabbit Millis. Here he’s crossing Main Street Norwall in front of the VFW Hall.
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Yep. Danged snake-men used to keep me awake as a kid. Kept checking under the bed… the closets… Could one of them swim through the plumbing and get into the upstairs toilet? One never knows. Drawing them was a way to make them go away.
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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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As creative projects go, I think the best ones I am currently undertaking are the Paffoonies. These, of course, are the colored-pencil and ink cartoon-o-matic creations that come out of my fevered little-boy mind as it has been stretched and contorted to fit into my old-man brain.
There are rules to this stupid creation game. First of all, a Paffooney must tell a story and have a piece of writing to go with it. Naturally, though, the picture must come first. The tortured elements of the Sci-fi or Fantasy that comes out of it result from the need to explain every oddity, punkitation, and warped perception that went into the picture. I draw pictures from dreams. I also draw from the monkey-shine metaphors that well up in my overly-wordy conscious mind. I do not take drugs to accomplish this. I do not drink alcohol. I am on numerous medications for numerous medical conditions… but I like to think there is no pharmacological element to my creativity. I am just your basic goofy old man with an exploding right brain.
You remember the writing that went with the first Paffooney in this post, don’t you? If not, you can still see the post here on WordPress where I wrote a poem that convicts the average school teacher of being a serious clown and puppet master. Some Paffoonies are poetic in nature. Others require a piece of fiction, like the one I wrote about Mai Ling’s encounter with the plant people of the planet Cornucopia. Here is a another version of it…..
So, a Paffooney is a creative project, a game, an exercise if you will, that will hopefully make me a better story-teller, writer, and cartoonist. I hope to post a lot of them on the web. So-called social media marketing experts tell me this kind of thing will get you, dear reader and viewer, to buy my book Catch a Falling Star, a sort of extended Paffooney of its own. The theory is, if you like the stuff I give away for free in these posts, you will want to actually pay money to see more of what I can do. I really think that is a big black Hoo-Ha, though, as I have not seen any evidence that social media marketing experts know anything more about marketing than I do. Are they really worth that expensive salt I put on their tails to trap them into to telling me their secrets and lies?
Ah, well… here is one last Paffooney that does not yet have a story to go along with it. At least, I am not aware of a story yet. Hmm, I think something is coming to me even as I post this picture.
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Catch a Falling Star 