Some days I feel loony… April first comes to mind
And I can be quite cartoony… It really helps to unwind
So I’ll make some Paffooney… and draw it while blind
And grow really prunie… old wrinkles unwind
And magic up some moony… to leave all worry behind.
April Fools! from an old fool.
Filed under foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, magic, Paffooney, poetry, Uncategorized
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
A bust of Herman Munster
Filed under autobiography, humor, monsters, satire, surrealism, Uncategorized
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.
“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!”
Filed under humor, Paffooney, satire, strange and wonderful ideas about life
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.
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.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, photo paffoonies, wisdom, wizards
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/
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.
Filed under announcement, blog posting, cartoony Paffooney, humor, my vault, Paffooney
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Filed under Depression, healing, health, humor, Paffooney, philosophy, Uncategorized
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.
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.
Filed under family dog, ghost stories, goofy thoughts, humor, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized
“Kaw-Liga”
KAW-LIGA, was a wooden Indian standing by the door
He fell in love with an Indian maid over in the antique store
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.
He always wore his Sunday feathers and held a tomahawk
The maiden wore her beads and braids and hoped someday he’d talk
KAW-LIGA – A, too stubborn to ever show a sign
Because his heart was made of knotty pine.
[Chorus:]
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he never got a kiss
Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he don’t know what he missed
Is it any wonder that his face is red
KAW-LIGA, that poor ol’ wooden head.
KAW-LIGA, was a lonely Indian never went nowhere
His heart was set on the Indian maiden with the coal black hair
KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show
So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.
Then one day a wealthy customer bought the Indian maid
And took her, oh, so far away, but ol’ KAW-LIGA stayed
KAW-LIGA – A, just stands there as lonely as can be
And wishes he was still an old pine tree.
“The Complete Hank Williams” (1998)
The quirky movie I reviewed, Moonrise Kingdom, reconnected me with a song I loved as a child. It was on an old 45 record that belonged to my mother’s best friend from high school. When the Retleffs sold their farm and tore down their house and barn, they had a huge estate sale. My mother bought the old record player and all the collected records that Aunt Jenny still had. They were the same ones my mother and her friend Edna had listened to over and over. There were two records of singles about Indian love. Running Bear was about an Indian boy who fell in love with little White Dove. They lived on opposite sides of a river. Overcome with love, they both jump into the river, swim to the middle, lock lips, and both drown. Together forever. That song, it turns out, was written by the Big Bopper, and given to Johnny Preston to sing, and released the year after the Big Bopper died in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.
Kaw-liga, by Hank Williams, was a wooden Indian sitting in front of a cigar store. His love story is even worse. As you can see from the lyrics above, he never even gets the girl. Dang, Indian love must be heck!
But I have come to realize that these aren’t merely racist songs from a bygone era. They hold withing them a plea for something essential. They are a reminder that we need love to be alive.
When I was young and deeply depressed… though also insufferably creative and unable to control the powers of my danged big brain, I knew that I wanted love. There was one girl who went to school with me, lovely Alicia Stewart (I am not brave enough to use her real name), that filled my dreams. We were classmates, and alphabetical seating charts routinely put us near each other. She had a hypnotic sparkle in her eyes whenever she laughed at my jokes. She was so sweet to me… sweet to everyone… that she probably caused my diabetes. I longed to carry her books or hold her hand. I cherished every time she spoke to me, and collected the memories like stamps in a stamp album. But like the stupid cigar store Indian, I never spoke up for myself. I never told her how I felt. I was endlessly like Charlie Brown with the Little Red-Haired Girl. Sometimes you have to screw up your courage and leap into the river, even if it means your undoing. Because love is worth it. Love is necessary. And it comes to everybody in one way or another over time. I look at pictures of her grandchildren posted on Facebook now, and wonder what might have been, if only… if only I had jumped in that stupid river. I did find love. And I probably would’ve drowned had I done it back then. Life has a way of working things out eventually. But there has to be some reason that in the 50’s, when I was born, they just kept singing about Indian love.
Filed under autobiography, finding love, humor, Paffooney
As terrible as my first published novel turned out to be, I have not given up on the idea of Aeroquest. I am interested in whipping a part of it into the shape of a graphic novel. So I bought a sketchbook and noodled down some Baby Mutant Space Ninjas gunk into it in full color. But it is only a rough draft. It is not finished artwork. I can’t get over how pretty and colorful it is turning out to be. I thought I would show you how it is going so far.
There are obvious signs that the dialogue and text boxes need to turned into a more finished form. And serious editing decisions probably need to be made about moon shots.
Here is what it looks like to use computer editing to try to fix some of the problems.
I will continue to work on it, but I needed something to post today. And sometimes you need to consider the work-in-progress warts and all.
Filed under art editing, cartoons, humor, new projects, Paffooney
Catch a Falling Star 