Tag Archives: goofiness

Mickey and the Really Cool Car

As a former public school teacher, I have always driven a sensible car.  I was owner of a long line of Ford Tempos, Ford Escorts, and Ford Fiestas.  Cars on a teacher’s budget.  I was lucky to be at least one step above Hondas and AMC Gremlins, though Ford, as we all know, is the acronym for “Fix Or Repair Daily”.  Well, this week I have encountered a Really Cool Car for the first time in my life.  Oh, I have ridden in them before… had show-off-y friends who owned them and rich relatives.  (Did you know I’m related to Nelson Rockefeller?  It’s through the Aldrich part of his family, his mother’s side.  But distant enough to be totally out of the inheritance lottery.)  But never before have I driven one.

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The latest daily repair which involved hitting a pothole in my new Fiesta and destroying a front wheel, required a rental car.  But thanks to recent hail in the DFW area, Enterprise Rent-a-Car had no cheap ones available that the insurance would completely pay for.  Instead, I had to settle for a 2015 Dodge Challenger, a $95 a day expense that would’ve bankrupted me two months ago.  As it is, the cost is taking a big bite out of my newly restored credit standing.  But… hey!  A sports car!

Of course, the threat of more hail has been looming, and though my car insurance would cover the damage (minus the $500 deductible) I would have to continue to pay rent on it each day it spent in the shop… and that could take months.  It gives me pause because I do not have any place to shelter it beyond one live oak tree that spreads her mighty greens out over the street where my previous Fiesta was killed in a drive-by.  But… hey again!  A sports car!

It drives like a dream.  I never imagined a car could handle so easily and have so much potential power under the hood.  The rental people told me there was no mileage limit at this price level.  A weekend in Vegas?  Tempting, but I am a former school teacher.  The level of trouble I could get into as the country mouse in the big city is too scary to contemplate.  I would be some cat’s dinner for sure.  I have dared to drive the thing to pick up kids at school, and driving to Walmart where there are evil decorative rocks lurking everywhere.  But that is the limit of the daring side of me.  I might take my family to a movie at Cinemark later.  But that’s about as wild-side as I ever walk.

Will I ever drive a sports car like this again?  A sleek black Batmobile-looking thing that makes me feel powerful and potentially wild?  Of course not!  It’s Mickey we are talking about here.

 

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Filed under autobiography, humor, Mickey, photo paffoonies

Gooseberry Pie

I would like to contend that a blog is a form of self-portrait.  Do you want to argue with me?  Have a piece of Gooseberry Pie….

You see, gooseberries aren’t made from geese.  They don’t look like gooses… er, goosei… um, geese.  They aren’t the favorite food of a goose, unless, maybe…  Mother Goose.  The name is a corrupted form of the Dutch word kruisbes , or possibly the German Krausbeere.   You know, because people who speak English don’t know how to talk right.  They don’t have anything to do with geese.  In the same way, a person’s name doesn’t really help you understand the person that wears it.  You have to dig deeper.  Do you know, I have never actually tasted gooseberry pie?  I have seen and even picked the gooseberries.  They are danged ugly, spikey-furred snot-green berries.  I am not tempted in any way to put one in my mouth.  And yet, I should not judge gooseberry pie before I taste a piece.  I know people who adore gooseberry pie.  Maybe you are one of them.

The point is, blogs are exactly the same thing.  An artist, a writer, a producer of something, or a day-dreamy noodling goober has put together a blog to display their wares, show off their creations, and share their words and wisdom.  You have to look at them, warts and all, and actually take a bite.  You have to try them out and test them.  Follow them over time.  Read, absorb, and appreciate… not merely zoom through and look at the pictures… and maybe click “like” at the bottom of the post.

Of course, I admit, I do the very thing I am advising you not to do.  The first few times I visit a blog, I scan through and only focus on a few things that catch my falling stars.  (oop!  Shame on me… I should say “catch my fancy”.  Forgive me for lapsing into Mickian brain farts for a moment there).  But if I am lured into coming back, I dip deeper and read more… tasting it thoroughly, as it were…  And much of what I taste there will end up in my own recipe somewhere down the line.  I begin to learn who that blogger is, and their writing style… sometimes even their thinking style (though I don’t read minds… only smell brain farts and odoriferous mental cooking smells) and I picture them as people in my minds eye.  Sometimes I wonder if they match in real life the person I am picturing.  Of course, the answer is no.  People don’t look like what you think they should look like.  They don’t even look like what they think they look like either… even in photos.  So let me end this goofy pie-based argument about why blogs are self portraits with a few self portraits I have created that aren’t really what I look like , even if it is a photo.

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Me in the mirror, 1980

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Scary pictures of the artist as a creepy old man…

 

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The novelist me…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A wizard selfie taken at Mad Ludwig’s Castle in Bavaria.

 

 

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Who I am and who I was…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Seriously grumpy me…

Gag!  Enough of the gooseberries already!  Or are they gross-berries?  I think that I really don’t look anything like me anymore.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, blog posting, goofiness, goofy thoughts, humor, metaphor, Uncategorized

60’s Rock and Roll (Poems made of Memory)

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  1. Pete Townshend is Now Old

I heard it and didn’t believe

Who heard it, you say, and then leave?

Yes they heard it and didn’t believe

Who sang it, you say, for reprieve?

Don’t shoot me, they sang it, believe!

Who told it, the pinball retrieved?

Yes they told it, and now I am peeved

Who wrote it and must be believed?

Yes they wrote it and made me believe

A pinball wizard, his song has grown cold

And finally they sang it and now it is sold

And a generation loved and laughed and were bold

But both Pete and Roger are now really old!

TheWho

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  1. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart

They were the soul of the movement

And love did surround them

The little girls screamed and that’s how

We all found them

With a real nowhere man

Living in a nowhere land

And poor Elinor Rigby’s lost love

There were one, two, three steps

Right down Penny Lane

Blue meanies and lovers regret in the main

And light shines upon us from somewhere above

But the thing I regret beyond yesterday

Is the fact that love grew and then went away

And in the darkness a shot rang out…

And John’s voice was silent…

As tears replaced cheers and grew dark all about.

Sgtpeppergatefold

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  1. Monkees and Mayhem

I saw her face, and I’m a believer

I laughed when she laughed and never deceived her

On the last train to Clarksville in the quietest car

I watched her bright antics and loved from afar

The song they were singing was really quite frantic

And never could I be quite so pedantic

To tell the daydream believer her show was now over

And move on to leave her for a dog, name of Rover.

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Filed under poem, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life, wordplay

Blog Happy

Gingeyhouse12n

I can’t seem to help blogging daily on this goofy little blog spot.  I am a writer and I write every day whether I publish anything or not.  I am not connecting with readers through my published novels.  In fact, I seem to be nose against a brick wall with publishing anything further in novel form despite doing well in writing competitions.  Publishers exist mainly to make money for corporations, and creators of content of any kind are only paid serious money when the publishers are forced to by the healthy flow of cash into certain authors’ established platforms.  But feeling sorry for myself is a full time job and doesn’t pay very well… actually, if you can’t afford a lawyer, it doesn’t pay anything at all.  Instead I have been looking at the arc of this blog and rereading old posts.  To my amazement, I actually communicate ideas much more interestingly than the goofy-drunk word-flinger I thought I was.  Let me recount some of it so I can get the benefit of clip-show laziness the way television shows do.

Yesterday’s post was about the Lennon Sisters, a nostalgia post where I slathered on some goopy nostalgia about being a farm boy spending Saturday nights at my grand parents’ house and salted it with YouTube videos of the sisters singing some of my favorite songs from the Lawrence Welk Show.

The day before saw two posts about collecting Star Wars Action Figures, the twelve-inch size, not the three-inch.   They are a part of my over-all G.I. Joe/ Barbie obsession and have to be the same size.  One post was about the collection, and the other was a correction because I goofed on font size with speech balloons.

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The post before that was me mooning about this year’s apple blossoms and how I use them to counteract the moaning about how ill allergies make me while doing yard work.

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Before that was an extra-silly post about where creativity comes from, which recognizes the fact that I do, indeed, fall into the general category of “too creative to be outside of a mental institution”, but actually have no earthly idea why.

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That post was preceded by a post about my antique library books that I treat as treasure, though I found them at Goodwill prices or got them free as library discards.  The Sherlock Holmes books were even rescued from the middle school trash bin.

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Prior to that was a post moaning about having to deal with my daughter’s cold.  It gave me an excuse to re-post an old picture I drew that looks remarkably like my daughter the Princess, even though I drew it in colored pencil fifteen years before she was born and eight years before I even got married.

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The post before that was about marketing my published book, and how the review I paid for ended up being about the wrong book (same title, different author).  The mistake made by the book-review company has not been corrected yet even as of this writing.  They haven’t refunded my money either, I have noticed.

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Before that was a collage post of collected artwork and photographs from my Monster Movie file.  It focused mainly on the Universal movie monsters, and it provided a worthy use for my habit of filling my computer’s memory with all kinds of pictures copied from the internet.  I am a hoarder and collector in so many disgusting ways.

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And on the first day of April I posted an April Fool’s Day post full of pictures I have drawn of fools and photos of foolish things.

The conclusions I have drawn by looking at the last ten days of posting include these;  I definitely do not think in straight lines.  I think in quirky squiggles that double back on themselves and allow freaky ideas to meet themselves mid-sentence.  I also crave loopy levels of variety and my selections of topics and illustrations are completely unpredictable.   I like bright colors.  I dwell mostly in the past, though sometimes in the future.  My mind is a lot like a boomerang, travelling woop-woop-woop willy-nilly through the air, but always coming back to essentially the same things over and over.  I call all of this humor, though not all of this is funny because humor is basically pointed and takes you by surprise more often than not.  But if it is good humor, you can’t help telling yourself, “You know, when you stop to think about it, it is funny, but it’s also true.”

I came back to this post today thinking, “Wouldn’t it be a great idea to take some old blog posts, essays like this one, and put them all together into e-book form.  But then I began tinkering with the mechanics of the format, and then I realized, I use too darn much incompatible media to put into book form under the current Amazon publishing set-up.  And how do I shift my full-color imagination into strictly black-and-white?  So, there’s another blogging notion that requires a re-visit on another day.

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Filed under blog posting, humor, Uncategorized, writing humor

Apple Blossoms Return to Texas

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There are certain things that keep me going when my connection to the mortal coil begins to chafe and itch.  Apple blossoms are one of those things.  The apple blossoms have bloomed in our two Texas apple trees in April of 2016.  As I was raking endless live oak leaves out of my yard, making it harder for myself to breathe and continue living because I am allergic to live oak… and most of the rest of Texas to boot, I saw that the apple blossoms had burst forth from their buds.  Between coughs and gasps for breathe, it made me smile.  I ended the raking of endless live oak leaves after only thirty minutes and one sack of leaves.  I am laboring in the face of impending doom, but I am not stupid.  I needed to live to rake another day.  Otherwise I’ll never get it done.

But apple blossoms are worth the heartache and pain and toil of life.  They are not only something to remind me why I keep going.  They are a reason for being.  So I used my phone camera to take a picture of an open blossom.  Then I photo-shopped in a picture of my novel character, Valerie Clarke, the character I created as an amalgam of my lovely daughter and the pretty little girl in my third grade class that I fell madly in love with when I was a little boy.  Like most artists, I am quite capable of slapping beautiful things and ideas together haphazardly to make something that is either a huge pile of kitschy crap, or even more beautiful.  And like most artists, I am entirely too close to the feelings and memories and realities that make up this work of art to ever know for sure which of the two things it really is.  Forgive me if I chose the opposite one that you did. I try not to offend with my Paffoonies.  I try not to be a creep or a bore or a Philistine… but those things are not always possible to avoid.  But there are apple blossoms, and sunrises, and a number of other things as well that, in the end, balance out the equations quite nicely.

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Filed under artwork, feeling sorry for myself, finding love, humor, illness, Paffooney, philosophy, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Uncategorized

Where Does Creativity Come From?

Ima mickey

Okay, I hooked you in with a title that sounds like I actually know something and somehow have some expertise to share beyond the usual brain-drippings of a noodling writer-type idiot.  Unfortunately I don’t.  I am a practicing creative person.  But do I know how it works? I do not.

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I suspect that it has something to do with my actual life experiences.  I am not God.  When I get a creative idea, it is made from known things.   I don’t snap my fingers and make a snerflkuppie, the first one that ever existed, and give it actual substance and reality.  Okay, metaphorically I did just make the first snerflkuppie… It is about three feet tall, has glossy purple fur and three legs.  Four puppy-like eyes, a wide mouth, and no nose… I dare you not to try and picture it in your mind’s eye.  But there isn’t one skipping about in this universe.  I can only take known things and recombine them in unique and surprising ways.  My novels are about kids doing kid stuff… you know, like time travel, being kidnapped by aliens, uncovering werewolf plots, and making magical cookie people.  Stuff that really happened.  And I am a former teacher, so I have experience knowing real kids.

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If you think kids you see depicted on television and in the movies are realistic, you have never played a video game with a real kid.  You have never had them tell you what they are really afraid of.  You have never come to the conclusion that they actually know a whole lot more about sex than you do.  And kids are not afraid to try something new for the first time (unless, of course, the thing they are going to try is what their parents want them to try for the first time).  You take liquid one and mix it with powder two, watch it fizz, and then drink it.  You don’t know if it will taste good, turn you into a muscle-bound Mr. Hyde-type monster, or blow you up like a firecracker.  But you made it yourself and you are going to try.  We generally think of kids as being creative and undisciplined.  We expect time and experience to take the unruliness, as well as the creativity, out of them.  It is the thing we refer to as, “growing up”.  But I think being creative is, to some degree, remaining a child.  I am a child because I continue to hold play-time in high regard, and do it as often as I can.  Writing words on paper, or on my laptop, is playing to me.  Drawing pictures with pen and ink and colored pencils is also playing to me.  Fortunately mixing chemicals from the cupboard like a mad scientist and testing them on my sister is no longer playing to me.  (And that, Nancy, is just a joke… I never actually did that… I think… I hope…)

The Car Chase of Life

The metaphorical car chase of life… with an old dog behind the wheel.

So, there you have it.  The ultimate answer.  Where does creativity come from?  I do not know.

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Feeling a Little Loony

Some days I feel loony… April first comes to mind

Loonies

And I can be quite cartoony… It really helps to unwind

little Toy Trio

So I’ll make some Paffooney… and draw it while blind

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And grow really prunie… old wrinkles unwind

Eli Tragedy

And magic up some moony… to leave all worry behind.

Dumb Luck

April Fools! from an old fool.

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Monster Movies

I am fascinated by the darker alleyways in the city of human thought.  I love monster movies, those love-story tragedies where the monster is us with one or more of our basic flaws pumped up to the absolute maximum.  We are all capable of becoming a monster.  There are consequences to every hurtful thing we have ever thought or ever said to other people, especially the people we love.

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The monster movies I love most are the old black and whites from Universal Studios.  But I can also seriously enjoy the monsters of Hammer Films, and even the more recent remakes of Frankenstein, The Mummy, and their silly sequels.  I am fascinated by the Creature from the Black Lagoon because it is the story of a total outsider who is so different he can’t really communicate with the others he meets.  All he can do is grab the one that attracts him and strike out at those who cause him pain.  It occurs to me that I am him when having an argument with my wife.  Sometimes I am too intelligent and culturally different to talk to her and be understood.  She gets mad at me and lashes out at me because when I am trying to make peace she thinks I am somehow making fun of her.  How do you convince someone of anything if they always think your heartfelt apology is actually sarcasm?  How do you share what’s in your heart if they are always looking for double meaning in everything you say?

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But other people can change into monsters too.  I am not the only one.  People who are bitter about how their life seems to have turned out can strike out at others like the Mummy.  Wrapped in restrictive wrappings of what they think should have been, and denied the eternal rest of satisfaction  over the way the past treated them, they attack with intent to injure, even just with hurtful words, because their past sins have animated them with a need to change the past, though the time is long past when they should’ve let their bitterness simply die away.

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And we might all of us fall into the trap of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, who never asked to be made.  He finds life to be an unmanageable nightmare with others constantly assaulting him with the pitchforks and torches of their fear and rejection.

13076_998843660144998_6984648371609353495_n But the thing about monster movies… at least the good ones, is that you can watch it to the end and see the monster defeated.  We realize in the end that the monster never really wins.  He can defeat the monstrous qualities within himself and stop himself.  Or the antidote to what ails him is discovered (as Luke did with Darth Vader).  Or we can see him put to his justifiable end and remember that if we should see those qualities within ourselves, we should do something about it so that we do not suffer the same fate.  Or, better yet, we can learn to laugh at the monstrosity that is every-day life.  Humor is a panacea for most of life’s ills.

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A bust of Herman Munster

 

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Signs

Fools n Toys

Signs, by their very nature, are powerful.  They give you direction.  They tell you what to do… and what not to do.  They control you and control others.

Richard and Victor Martin were sitting at the table in front of the stage they had just finished constructing at the center of Martin’s Bar and Grille.  It had turned into something of a gift from heaven to have the young cousin from France living with them.  When he put the clown paint on his face and sang karaoke, people came from several counties away to hear it.  They also brought their money and their thirst with them.  The brothers had labored for two days to build the stage and make better use of the unexpected gift that came with taking in their uncle’s orphaned son.

“Have a beer, brother.  You have earned it,” said Richard to his older brother.

“Generous of you.  Especially since it is my bar and my beer to begin with.”

At that moment they both noticed the balding young man standing at the bar with his zebra hand puppet on his right arm.

“We’re not open for business yet,” Victor said.  “The bar is still closed.”

“You are going to have give the dummy here a Kewpie Cola,” said the zebra puppet.  “We can’t do anything but stand here and look at the sign until you give him one.  He does have enough money to pay for it.”

“What?  What are you talking about?” asked Victor.  He looked at the young man, Murray Dawes, standing and looking up at the antique Kewpie Cola sign that Victor had hung as a decoration over the bar.

“It says, Drink a Kewpie Cola Today!” the puppet said.  Victor did not see the young man’s mouth moving, but he had heard the boy had a gift for ventriloquism even though he was autistic and hardly ever spoke.  “Murray always does everything signs tell him to.  His mother told him signs tell us to do things for our own good.”

“So if he reads it on a sign he has to do it?” asked Richard.

“Yes,” said the zebra puppet.  “You wouldn’t believe how long we have to stand and wait in front of that stop sign on the west end of Main Street.  Every time we pass it he has to do what it says until he feels safe.”

Both men laughed.

Crooner “The fool’s mother constantly puts a sign on his bedroom door that says,  Clean your room!   So he has to do it every day before he can do anything else.  One day he decided he didn’t want to clean his room that day, and he made a sign himself.  It said, Don’t put any signs on this door!  He put it on his bedroom door.  But then he read what it said and had to take it down again.”

“That’s pretty funny,” said Richard.

“Yeah,” said Victor.  “Do you think you could do that ventriloquist thing on stage?  We’d pay you to do it for our customers.”

“You have to understand,” said the zebra puppet, “that Murray is very shy.  He won’t be very talkative on stage.  I would have to do all of the talking.”

“If you can do it and be that funny, I think it will work,” said Victor.

“You have a deal.  But every time we get on the stage, you will have to put a sign on the wall for Murray to read.”

“What would the sign have to say?  Break a leg or something?”

“Not unless you want him to fall down and hurt himself.  It should only say, Believe in yourself… and be funny!”

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Wizarding Ain’t Easy

wizzyme

A wizard selfie taken at Mad Ludwig’s Castle in Bavaria.

My quest to become a wizard began when I was but a kid reading comic books.  It got a boost when I became a middle school English teacher and realized the fundamental truth of the universe, human beings know practically nothing at all… about anything.  The only path to wisdom is the way of the fool.

So, I embraced it.  It made it so much easier to teach and manage a classroom full of teenybumpers to realize the only thing that works when they laugh at you and make fun of you, is to be able to laugh at yourself and make fun of them right back.

I learned along the way that things that hurt you and make you suffer cause wisdom to happen.  You walk under a ladder and the painter accidentally drops a paint bucket on your head, and you realize that walking under a ladder is a bad thing to do in the future… not simply because of superstition either.

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Drawing and painting wizards is something I began to do too.  I find it fascinating to try to draw a wrinkly old face and attempt to put some kind of intelligence in the eyes.  I can get vapid and stupid really really well.  I think I know what that looks like in the eyes of another far better than I know what wisdom looks like.  And how do you know it is wisdom, anyway, and not merely constipation?  Can you see understanding and intelligence in the eyes of another?  I think you can.  But looking into the eyes of young learners for so many years and searching for those things, I realized that the best you can do is guess.  You could easily be wrong.

That is what wisdom is.  Make your best guess, but remember that you are probably wrong.  It is possible to do great and powerful magic in the world if you are a wizard and you have wisdom.  But it will not be easy.  And you must work hard.  And when you have to decide whether to speak or stay silent, the wise man is always silent first, giving himself time to think before he speaks.

“Are you a wise man, Mickey?” you ask.

“…” Mickey says.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, photo paffoonies, wisdom, wizards