Tag Archives: goofiness

Critiques in Color

20151104_shawn

I recently posted about being synesthetic and discovering how I am different from normal people.  Here is the post if you are interested..   Then I discovered that Kanye West is also synesthetic as he gushed some southern-fried crappie-doo about how wonderful he is as an artist because he sees the colors of his music.  Well, now I don’t want that mental affliction any more.  I don’t wish to be anything like him.  Of course, it has to be incurable, doesn’t it.

20150910_122142

Now I am wasting today’s post on another metacognative thinking-about-thinking style of paragraph pile when I could be rhapsodizing about the humor of Dave Barry or the wisdom of Robert Fulghum, the author of

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Here it is on Amazon.

I could be shamelessly promoting the work of artists whose works I love instead of examining the random filing cabinets in the back rooms of my stupid old head.  But I can’t because I now need to explain myself to myself again.  Self doubt and self examination are features of being an artist.  We reach a point where we have to think about how we do what we do, because if you don’t know where the magic comes from, you might not be able to call on it the next time you need it.

That Night in Saqqara 1

I am a self-taught artist.  I have had art classes in high school and college, but never professional art training.  I know how to manipulate the rule of thirds, directional composition, movement, perspective, and lots of other artsy-craftsy techniques, but it is all a matter of trial and error and an instinct for repeating what works.  I have had a good deal more professional training as a writer.  But I do that mostly by instinct as well.  Trained instinct.  I have reached a point where my art is very complex and detailed.  And I don’t mean to suggest there are no flaws.  In fact, I am capable enough to see huge, glaring mistakes that really skew my original intent and make me feel hopelessly incompetent.  But others who see it and don’t know the inner workings of the process can look past those mistakes and not even see them.  Given enough time to look at my own work with new eyes, I am able to see at least some of what they see.

the Clarkes

Now that I have totally wasted 500-plus words on goofy talking-to-myself, what have I really accomplished beyond boring you to death?  What’s that you say?  You are not dead yet?  Well, that’s probably only because you looked at the pictures and didn’t read any of my sugar-noodle brain-scrapings in loosely paragraph-like form.  And if you did read this awful post by a colorblind artist who doubts his own abilities, you probably didn’t learn anything from it.  But that’s not the point.  The point is, I care about doing this, and I need to do it right.  And I managed to learn something… how to ramble and meander and make something that is either a hot mess… or something that vaguely resembles self-reflective art.

 

2 Comments

Filed under art criticism, artwork, autobiography, colored pencil, coloring, feeling sorry for myself, humor, magic, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Uncategorized

Boyhood

newwkid

Fifty years ago when I was ten, the world was a very different place.  Many people long for the time when they were young.  They see it as a better, more innocent time.  Not me.  Childhood was both a blessing and a nightmare for me.  I was creative and artistic and full of life.  And my family encouraged that.  But I was also a victim of a sexual assault and believed I had to keep a terrible secret even from my parents so that the world would not reject me as something horrible.  We were on the way to the moon and the future looked bright.  But President Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963, and Apollo 1 would end in a fiery tragedy in 1967.  I look back with longing at many, many things, but I would never want to go back to that time and place without knowing everything I know now.  I am grateful that I survived.  But I remember the nightmares as vividly as I do the dreams.

 

As a teacher, I learned that childhood and young adulthood defines the adult.  And the kid who is coddled and never faces the darkness is the one who becomes a total jerk or a criminal… or Donald Trump.  I almost feel that the challenges we faced and the tragedies we overcame in our lives are the very things that made us strong and good and worthy.

 

When you are a boy growing up, hating girls on the outside and pining to get a look in the girls’ shower room on the inside, you can’t wait to grow up and get away from the horrors of being a child.  Except, there are good things too.  Tang, of course, wasn’t one of them.  We drank it because the astronauts drank it, but it was so sweet and artificial it tasted bitter in that oxymoronic way that only fake stuff can achieve.  Quisp is nasty-tasting stuff too… but we begged for it because, well, the cartoon commercials were cool.  I only ever choked down about two boxes of the vile stuff.  You went to school a little queasy on mornings when you ate Quisp in milk for breakfast.  But one box had a toy inside, and the other had an alien mask on the back that you could cut out, but not actually wear.

556836_458567807502181_392894593_n

But when it comes down to how you end a goofy-times-ten-and-then-squared essay like this one, well, how do you tie a proper knot at the end of the thread?  Maybe like this; It is a very hard thing to be a boy and then grow up to be a man.  But I did it.  And looking back on it, the pie was not my favorite flavor… but, hey!  it was pie!

5 Comments

Filed under battling depression, feeling sorry for myself, finding love, goofy thoughts, happiness, healing, humor, Paffooney, Uncategorized

Stuff That Works

What makes people visit your blog and maybe even click “like”?  I should tell you up front, I have no idea how best to navigate the crazy internet.  I want to.  I have a book to promote.  I have ideas and experiences to share.  I am a writer and I would like to make something more than excessive heartache out of being one.  But how you actually go about it is still a mystery.

Ima mickey

I know what I surf the internet for.  I like artwork, especially original artwork.  That is why I try to post as much of my own stuff as I can.  I am an amateur artist, self-taught with a little bit of college art classes, contact with real artists, and a lot of TV Bob Ross.  I surf to find other artists whose stuff catches my eye.  I post about artists like Loish, Maxfield Parrish, Paul Detlafsen, and Norman Rockwell.  I go to sites like DeviantArt (Example at this link) and follow artists like James Brown and Shannon Maer on Facebook.  I help promote their work by sharing as often as I can.  Do I worry about copyright violation with my artwork?  No.  I am long past the point of making a profitable career as an artist.  I like having people see my work and if someone decides to claim they are the artist instead of me, I have the real originals and even some pictures of work in progress.  The Big Eyes thing will not happen to me.

big_eyes_2014_movie-1280x960

So sharing pictures seems to matter.  I got lots of hits from the monster picture post because I used a lot of monster-movie images that people normally search for on the internet.  Pictures of pretty girls work too.  It doesn’t seem to matter if I drew them or if they are a picture of a relative, those pictures pull people in too.

19252_1208834303891_1319717771_30512468_3124599_n

Pictures of photogenic nieces aid my blogging popularity in a rather noticeable way.

Yes, I do believe I have just intimated that Minnie Mouse is my niece, a daughter of my sister-in-law.  Lying is part of blogging.  You have to put spin on things and make people understand the things they want to understand more than you need them to see what is really true in the empirical sense.

Jungle Girl

Being able to put the words “nude” or “naked” in titles or in the tags brings in more views too.  Those words get lots of hits on search engines and some of the people who visit my blog looking for that actually read what’s posted.  Just because an idea is a little bit naughty, it doesn’t mean only perverts and bad people respond to it.

487568_551418624928144_2068450047_n

This is a picture of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. It is NOT a picture of me.

And it doesn’t hurt to be a little funny now and then.  Humor is something I look for in the posts of others.  I try to be funny in my posts too… though whether they are hah-hah funny or merely eeuw! funny is debatable.  Much of my humor is only intended to raise a smirk or half a smile.  I am most satisfied when I make you think, “heh, that’s right, isn’t it.”

Millis

This is Millis, not me. He was an actual rabbit that was turned humanoid by a scientist’s experiment with alien technology.

So why is this post called Stuff That Works if, as I am claiming, I really don’t know anything about how blogging works?  I may have been a little less than truthful when I made claims.  Or maybe I was claiming with a little bit of “tongue in cheek”?  I hope I have demonstrated that I do know how.  The thing I have yet to wrestle with is WHY.  So now I have to get busy and work on that.

 

 

7 Comments

Filed under artwork, autobiography, blog posting, commentary, humor, nudes, Paffooney, surrealism

Oopsie… I forgetted

My last post was about the movie Jungle Book and how happy I was at the beauty of that movie which fulfilled my childhood love affair with that story.  But I failed to share my own Paffoonies created from the story of the boy raised by wolves in the Seonee Hills.

So here they are… although they are late;

20160424_174223

20160424_142601

This last one is a picture from a page in my wizardly tome of picture magic.  The poem is called “Nobody Knows Why” and is interpreted here in case you can’t read the Mickian script in the Paffooney.  Here is the text of the poem;

Nobody Knows Why

The world turns

And I must die

And ‘morrow comes

And Russians spy

And Doo-dahs Doo-dah

And Blueberry pie

And Monkeys shake

When they hear a Lie!

The mysteries in the meaning of this poem is supposed to remain a mystery.  It is from a magical tome that belongs to a wizard.  So, for all I know, it could be a very dangerous incantation.  So don’t you dare try to figure it out.  You don’t want to be a Monkey, do you?

Leave a comment

Filed under humor, illustrations, Paffooney, poetry

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.

20160422_220348

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.

 

2 Comments

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.

selfie 001

Me in the mirror, 1980

mewall24

Scary pictures of the artist as a creepy old man…

 

Self Portrait vxv

The novelist me…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

wizzyme

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

 

 

20160301_1245m23x

Who I am and who I was…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

20151026_223658

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.

4 Comments

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

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

who logo 2_0

  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

thebeatles

  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

monkees_logo

  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.

Monkees_Television_special_1969

Leave a comment

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.

appleblossomval

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.

Self Portrait vxv

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.

20160404_152602

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.

girl n bird

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.

1-14069dd51a

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.

10501822_1499033517018697_23032178962926005_n

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.

Loonies

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.

3 Comments

Filed under blog posting, humor, Uncategorized, writing humor

Apple Blossoms Return to Texas

appleblossomval

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.

Leave a comment

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.

Self Portrait vxv

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.

Urkel

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.

2 Comments

Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, insight, metaphor, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing humor