Tag Archives: goofiness

April 7, 2016 · 3:03 pm

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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April 6, 2016 · 3:37 pm

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.

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.

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April 1, 2016 · 2:44 pm

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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March 31, 2016 · 3:46 pm

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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March 29, 2016 · 3:44 pm

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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March 4, 2016 · 9:05 pm

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.

Tabron2

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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February 29, 2016 · 4:25 pm

Secrets in the Vault

The award that was given to me yesterday was not so much this blog as it was for my little vault.  I opened a can of worms a while back when I created a second blog on WordPress more or less by accident.  I wasn’t really interested so much in giving myself more writing tasks to do, rather, I decided I would use this other blog to store whole stories, poems, and cartoons.  I really haven’t figured out how to link this blog to that one, or that one to this… and since WordPress “improved” everything by changing all the controls, I really don’t know how to properly link something or put a URL into this prose, but here is the web address for that blog;

https://authormbeyer.wordpress.com/2015/06/

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It is a place where I have posted more complete works that, though mostly still unfinished, will take a little bit longer to look at and read.  I know that my daily 500 words on this goofy blog is too much for most internet readers, and these things take way more time to read than is good for you.  But some readers of this blog have recently discovered that the thing exists, and I have had a sudden burst of interest.  I gained five followers to the vault yesterday.  I think I have six total.  I don’t post there often enough to generate traffic, but I do keep stuff there that certain of my followers here are likely to enjoy if they are foolish enough to buy into this whole artwork and wordswork nonsense that I constantly do.  So, there it is… a little bit more of me than you were probably ready for.

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February 17, 2016 · 4:07 pm

A Simple Matter of Recovery

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Ah, my poor little Ford Fiesta has been declared dead by the insurance company.  Soon I will have to give up the chibi clown car I have been driving and buy something new.  Can I get a used car for the money they will give me for the accident?  I was counting on not having a car payment every month after June of this year.  Ah, but it means a new member of the family to replace the loved one I have lost.

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The ghost dog continues to haunt me in the night.  Last night, outside my bedroom door, I heard a whining and whimpering again.  I checked (had to make a nocturnal potty-stop anyway) and it was not our family dog.  The downstairs family room door was closed to her and she sleeps in the other end of the house in my son’s room.  So, either it was the ghost dog whom I totally don’t believe in, or I was dreaming that part (do I really have dreams as weird as that?), or maybe I am going insane… the most probable explanation.

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I am still working in dedicated fashion on my hometown novels.  I have added to the rewrite of When the Captain Came Calling and I have started a new novel project I am calling Recipes for Gingerbread Children.  It is a novel about the old German lady who inhabited our little town in the 1960’s and 70’s.  She was a Holocaust survivor with a tattoo on her forearm.  Mother still can’t talk about her without mentioning what a terrible life she must’ve had, yet she was one of the most sunshiny people I have ever known.  It is a new idea that excites me, like the one that became Magical Miss Morgan.

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I am also still desperately trying to overcome illness without doctor’s visits or medication.  A lot can be done with careful monitoring of diet and blood-sugar levels.  I owe my life to over-the-counter Mucinex and Vicks Vaporub.  My son is also suffering at present, and I have to talk to professionals about it today, because I will not risk his health to protect my empty pocketbook.

So challenges remain challenging and I keep moving forward and upward.  What more can be done?  I have in the past couple of months not only faced several different difficulties, but I have reached new levels of success with this blog, much of it by writing a lot in ways that are full of self-medicating thoughts with healing words and ideas.  People seem to like that.  My average daily views is up above thirty.  I am nearing 800 followers.  I may not have writing income, but I do seem to have a personal brand that others respond to.  So, if you have read all the way through this recycled oatmeal post with nothing but old pictures in it, please be reassured… oatmeal is good for you… and for me.

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February 15, 2016 · 5:36 pm

Down and Blue

Life for me has always been a struggle with poor health and depression, ill fortune and difficult circumstances.  I have always been a “make lemonade” sort of life-gives-you-lemons problem-solver, but the more I make lemonade, the more my sorry old puss gets puckered.  I am having chest pains and breathing problems again.  I don’t have money for doctor’s visit co-pays and medication.  My car is in the shop with more than $6,000 dollars worth of damages, hit by a passing motorist going too fast while it was parked outside my house.  Insurance is probably not going to pay that much to fix a five-year-old car.  My family in Iowa have recently been buried under huge snowdrifts.  And the grim reaper has been knocking on my bedroom door asking if I want to play a game of chess.

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But I will tag this post as humor.  Because, ironically, humor is not always funny.  Sometimes it has the sour puckering effect of lemonade with too little sugar in the mix.  When you have worked hard all your life for very little reward, it’s hard to appreciate the tiny amounts of sugar you have been allotted.  I see myself ending much the way Mother Mendocino ended, except the community will not even hear about my passing.

My Jester

The more I sing songs, and rattle the boards, and try to make my puppets dance, the more arthritis crabs up my fingers and makes me ache.  Sometimes happy simply comes hard.  But self-pity is easy.  And I am a pratfall clown most of the time.  I use my injuries to make others laugh.  And there is still magic to be found here and there in my art.  Today’s paffoonies were all culled from my Postable Paffooney file.  They are all old artworks of which I am pathetically proud.

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Pathos is a part of humor too, you know.  You tell a story about someone whose been on a lonely journey, and he finally gets to come home to the ones he loves, and you smile at the end of that.  If you laughed at the clown for falling down, you smiled too when he got up again.  After all, he wasn’t hurt.  In many ways we are all made of spoof and rubber, and while the bullets don’t bounce off, we are more like Superman than we think.  There is definitely wisdom buried somewhere in this pile of old quilts I am calling an essay today.  I just wish I had the words to make it clearer than I do in this poor excuse for a paragraph.

Cool School Blue

My sister reads posts like this and tells me they are too depressing, that I need to write happier stuff.  But don’t worry the way she does.  I do spend a lot of time writing about the low spots.  But I would like to point out that most of the time I am climbing out of holes.  So I may start the essay in a very low place, but the direction I am going is always up.

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Now I have said my 500 words for today, and while I still need bed-rest… there is no doubt the sun will come up again.

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February 4, 2016 · 4:42 pm

The Ghost Dog

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Before I begin this very confusing and confusticating tale, I need to start by stating clearly that I do not believe in ghosts.  I am firmly convinced that there is a rational scientific explanation for everything, and those things we may be tempted to see as a spirit living on after death of the body are really only misperceptions of other things… and wishful thinking.

In spite of all that, we have a ghost dog living in our house.

I know that contradicts everything I just said, but human beings are like that.  Practically everything about this life is shot full of contradictions and impossibilities.  So, let me lay out those contradictions as I encountered them.

This house we live in now was built in the 1970’s.  It was lived in by a middle-class white family.  A woman showed up here ten years ago wanting to look at the house because she grew up in it, and it had been sold when her parents died.  So this house is not young enough to be free of potential spirits of those who lived before.  But no tragic deaths, the kind that the lore says cause ghosts to walk, happened in this house.  Except for the possibility of a family pet hit by a car in this neighborhood.

The first time I saw it was when I got out of the bathtub one evening in early January.  As I opened the door to the bathroom, still not having my glasses on, I saw a dog sitting in the upstairs hallway, panting with its tongue hanging out.  Now, we do have a dog, but our dog, Jade, is a small yellow-and-white dog.  The dog I glimpsed out of the corner of my near-sighted, astigmatic eye with no corrective lens in front of it was a rather large chocolate brown dog.  I jumped a bit and looked directly at it.  It was no longer there with a speed that gave the lie to the notion that it was a real dog.  It had to be a trick of the eye and the goofy old brain.  Our mind is wired in a way that makes sense out of every visual stimulus-blob  in the best way that it can.  I must have misinterpreted some shadow or blob of color in a way that my brain instantly converted into a chocolate-brown Labrador-retriever sort of dog… with a goofy, open-mouthed dog-smile.

So, I didn’t really think anything more about it.  I investigate ghost stories and conspiracy theories all the time as a part of the kind of surrealist writing I like to do.  I always find those wedges of doubt that smugly allow me to dismiss the Don Knotts’ Mr. Chicken response.

Then, I saw it again.  I have to get up in the night to go to the bathroom at least three times every night.  About a week ago, I was making one of these necessary nocturnal treks when I happened to look down the staircase in passing.  I saw the tail end of a big chocolate-colored dog trotting past on the way towards the garage.  My heart leaped.  And then I reminded myself we have a dog and she lives on a very different schedule than we do.  I went to the bathroom, and then went down the stairs to investigate.  The family room door was shut and blocked with a clothes-hamper.  We have been trying to keep the dog out of the family room because she has a bad habit of trying to pee on the family room carpet in the middle of the night to mark her territory.  There are certain discolored spots on the rug that we have worked very hard to keep dry.  And I found our dog asleep on the foot of my son’s bed where she always sleeps.  Whatever I saw wasn’t her.  But again, I didn’t have my glasses on.  I began mulling over the possibility of this post at that point.

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Last night made this post a necessity.  While returning from my nocturnal pee-break after midnight, I distinctly heard a dog whimpering, coming from the landing of the stairs.  I stepped into the landing, and I still heard it.  If it was not a dream sound or a misinterpretation of my own stomach growling, then I was hearing an invisible dog whimpering.  It didn’t last for more than a minute.  Again, the dog herself was nowhere near the place.

Should I be scared?  Of course not.  Ghosts don’t exist, do they?  And even if this one does exist somehow, it was a beloved family pet, more likely to protect us than hurt us.  So I was able to get back to sleep easily.  But this post became absolutely necessary.  If you read in the newspapers that a family in Carrollton, Texas was eaten by wolves in the middle of the night some night… tell somebody about my unfounded suspicions.

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