Tag Archives: goofiness

April 22, 2015 · 12:44 pm

A Year Full of Sick Days

A year ago, I had to make the tough decision to end my teaching career of thirty-one years. I had a run of about three months where the sick days were costing me $330 apiece and my monthly paycheck kept sinking lower and lower. It was a choice between continuing to work hard, catch every virus that germy school kids carried into my classroom every day, and end up owing the school money at the end of the month. Teacher paychecks are earned during the nine months of teaching time, but spread over the twelve actual months (actually we work for ten and a half months because holiday breaks are always filled with paperwork, homework, and preparation, but you don’t actually get paid for that… eleven and a half months if you teach summer school for $20 an hour), and retiring on a fixed income that would turn out to be more each month than I was taking home each month while working.

After a year of headaches and breathing trouble… visits to the heart doctor… dealing with family bouts of social anxiety disorder and bipolar disorder… along with the resulting depression and physical pain… I am beginning to believe I made a good decision. I never could’ve weathered another year of teaching. I would’ve physically given out. But I have had ample time to write, to talk with and spend time with my children, and heal. I am still not well enough to get a part time job to supplement my income… but the chance to achieve good health again is closer now than it would’ve been if I hadn’t retired. Goofing off and playing with my toys has been good for me.

During the school day, with my kids in school, I can sit and write stark naked. (I know that sounds kinda perverted, but with psoriasis chewing my skin up in all the covered parts, that is far more comfortable than wearing clothes. Sitting in a hot bath is even better.) I have taken up Facebooking and WordPressing and playing Facebook games like Magecraft (I am now level 35 and gaining). I can’t keep playing and wasting time for too much longer, but I have never been more creative than I have in the last year. I wrote and finished four novels.

So, why am I telling you this instead of creating some humorous post about city driving or why bankers are better pirates than Blackbeard ever was? (Hmm… I think I better write those topics down). Because I can. I have recently undergone several setbacks with family and health, and that takes some meditation and healthy thinking to recover from (especially when you don’t have enough money to get help from the doctor). And besides, you all read my posts and offer words of comfort and pity… and I have a perverse need to write things that elicit comment and other proof that readers are actually reading what I write. Most of my fiction-writing life has been addressed to the unseen ghosts of future readers… and I’m always a little bit afraid of ghosts.

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Filed under healing, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as goofiness, healing words, humor, novel writing, paffooney, philosophy, retirement finances, self pity

April 21, 2015 · 5:53 pm

How To Avoid Dropping Dead Like a Dunderhead

If it is inevitable that I will surely drop dead some day, and if it is likely that it will come sooner rather than later, then I hope to go out with a bit of style and leave something behind that speaks not only to my own children, but to anybody searching for truth and beauty, people of the future that I will never know who are living beyond the confines of my little life. What makes me think that I can do it? Well, I’m a writer… and Mark Twain did it… and I don’t have to be vain or loopy or maniacal or delusional to make the same thing happen.

On this day one-hundred-and-five years ago, April 21, 1910, Mark Twain left the world of the living. He caught a ride on Halley’s Comet (It deposited him on Earth in 1835, appearing in the sky when he was born, and took him away when it appeared in the sky again in 1910… He didn’t have to be some kind of suicidal Heaven’s Gate nut to manage that.) But it wasn’t the comet that showed me the truth… it was his books. I learned to take a wry view of a complex world that I could do nothing to change and tweak it with intelligence and understanding from the story of racism and justice he left behind in Pudd’nhead Wilson. I learned the value of ingenuity and opportunity and how to use them properly from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I also learned a profound love and understanding for small town people like me and the people of my little hometown in both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Samuel Clemens, Mr. Mark Twain, left himself behind in stories to speak to the ages. He spoke to me… directly to my heart, and he had been dead for 46 years before I was even born. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.

media.npr.org

Now, I am not a fool (wait a minute! I know you have proof to the contrary if you read my blog posts, but I am not an UNINTENTIONAL fool), so I do not think that my words and wisdom are ever going to have any sort of effect on the entire world the way Mark Twain’s have. I can accept reality. This whole world is dying and may not long outlive me. There are a large number of talented fools… er, I mean writers, out there who have put out a number of published good books, and have, like me, made diddly-zero-bupkiss in dollars on the deal. I have no delusions. My work is good enough to turn into a best-seller or maybe two, but I do not have the time or the backing to make it happen. If anything other than obscurity embraces my books, I won’t live to see it. Only eleven per cent of published authors make a livable wage from writing and I will never be one of them. But I have ideas that resonate. I can write in ways that touch the heart (as you may have seen if you have read my post “When Compassion Fails” that was a minor hit with the 1000 Voices Speak For Compassion group).

So, I am satisfied to confess my girly addiction to Barbie Dolls and My Little Pony… talk about cartoons and cartoonists on WordPress… make people giggle a bit… or even guffaw, and put together books that my family will read, and only be mildly embarrassed by, and maybe one day will reach and touch the heart of some boy or girl who really needs to read what I wrote at a time in their lives when it can actually help… the way so many other philosophers, wits, and word-wizards have helped me. (How’s that for some prime purple-paisley prose?)

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as autobiography, books, doll collecting, goofiness, humor, novel writing, paffooney, photo Paffooney, silliness

April 15, 2015 · 11:54 am

Cartoonist Super Powers

I call myself a cartoonist because I draw stuff and use it for crap that makes a point about stuff or makes people laugh at other stuff… and maybe qualifies as a super power.

I really am not always sure about the super power stuff… but my dog and I got into an argument yesterday about doggy duties. I was insisting that a dog should earn her keep. Work for her food and the obedience of all the humans in the house when it comes to following her commands about taking her for walks, picking up her poop in the park, and allowing her to chew up my car keys without punishing her because they smell like me, and make her think about me, and so she has to chew the electronic automatic un-locker-thingy until it is in plastic shards because… well, she loves me so much. I wasn’t asking for much. I just ask that she help the security in the household by eating any burglars that come in to steal our precious stuff (precious in the sense of sentimental value only… unless thieves have developed a market for VHS tapes and television sets fifteen years out-of-date.) So she was sulking.

When the burglar came in… burglars always come in when they have something going for them like the dog sulking… the dog didn’t eat him. So he came upstairs to the room where I was working on cartoons.

“Gee, you have a lot a worthless crap,” the burglar said.

Startled by the fact that the burglar thought all my worthless crap was nothing more than worthless crap, I turned to my drawing table and quickly drew a gun.

“Okay, you have the drop on me,” said the burglar, using an old TV cliche. When he raised his hands over his head, I could clearly see that he had boobs. He was a she!

“You are a woman!” I said, displaying my quick and wily wit… rather slowly.

“Don’t shoot!”

“Oh, I wouldn’t shoot a woman. It ain’t the honorable thing to do. Now take off all your clothes. We will make a little whoopee and then I will let you go.”

“But I’m not a woman! I am a guy burglar who likes to wear dresses and fake boobs. Besides, this is open-carry Texas where every house has an NRA member with semi-automatic weapons and a law that allows you to shoot anyone of any age if they step on your property… but they generally don’t shoot women.”

I didn’t believe her… so I took the eraser end of my pencil and erased her clothes. She was, in fact, a man!

“I don’t believe this,” I said. “Do you get away with this trick often?”

“I never seem to get away with it,” he said sadly. “In fact, there was a house full of Bubbas that I tried to rob unsuccessfully two months ago… and now the pregnancy test kit says I’m pregnant.”

I gave him all the money I had (about $0.37), some spare clothes I had meant to give to Goodwill, and sent him on his way.

The dog bit him on the way out.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, pen and ink

Tagged as cartoon, goofiness, humor, paffooney, pen and ink

April 7, 2015 · 11:44 am

Milestones

Okay, now I have gone and done it… 500 times I have written something and posted it on WordPress. I have officially crossed into that territory known as obsessive-compulsive writing. I blogged before when I was a substitute teacher waiting for classroom wounds to heal back in 2005-2007 (Oh, and landing a new teaching job after the Wicked Witch of Creek Valley made me temporarily radioactive… another story for another day). I blogged on Xanga. I have shared blogs on Google+ and Facebook as well, but nowhere have I ever piled up this much foo-bah and wildly wasted wordage as I have here. So, why am I doing it? Because I care about writing… I need to do it every day… and just like I taught English students for 31 years in middle school and high school, the circle of writing is not complete if you don’t share it. I had to close a lot of circles to get where I am now.

There are other things I have accomplished as well. I have paffoonied all over my blog with cartoons and drawings and scribbles and foofy drivel. I have made up words like “foofy” and “paffooney” and made them a regular part of a Mickian lexicon. (Mickian = distinctly a part of the overall Mickey Universe, or Mickiverse, if you will.) I have stunk up the place with numerous word-farts in the form of parenthetic expressions (set off with parenthesis) (and I bet you thought that was due to random brain spasms occurring in all the wrong places rather than a thought-out part of a conscious style… well, you may have been right about that.) I have shared the artwork and literature and movies and even the music that I love with you, hoping to pass on some of the same infatuations that informed my inner thought-life and made me the mess that I am.

Let me briefly re-use some of my artwork that has been posted here to give you a cruel aftertaste of what I have been up to here in this blog;

So far all this blogging and posting has lead to a lot of me getting spread across tiny slices of the internet like warm, squishy butter on super-absorbent toast. So far it doesn’t seem that the taste of it has seriously offended anyone’s palate. One never knows, however, what tomorrow will bring. What will I post tomorrow? I have no idea. But unless I drop dead tonight, I will post tomorrow. I have made it my goal to post every single day of 2015. I have not let down yet, four months in… so you should really brace yourself. You may have to endure a lot more.

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Filed under aliens, announcement, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as 501st post, announcement, blog writing, excuses, goofiness, humor, Paffoonies, Why I blog

April 1, 2015 · 11:36 am

A Collection of Sunrises

I made the horrible mistake yesterday of revealing the true nature of my hideous mental condition that leads to never-ending collecting of a long list of collections that probably will become a black hole of collecting from its own gravitas and stretch on into infinity. (Yeah. I know… you can see right through my phony over-blown exaggerations that consist mainly of stringing lots of science-y sounding adjectives together. Don’t get all smug about it.)

I did not, however, reveal the newest collection. So today I open my stupid writer mouth and another sacred secret pops out. Since retiring from teaching last June, I have been collecting sunrises.

I know it is a silly, sentimental,, goofy-sort-of self-pitying thing, and I also know that is probably not “normal” from an abnormal psychology viewpoint, but don’t call the loon-catchers just yet. Wait till I reveal my delusional quasi-religious reasons for doing it.

I am retired now from a profession I truly loved. I have a full pension now because Texans Republicans are not completely on their toes about taking benefits away from people who don’t earn them by trading stocks and bonds, running a corporation for maximum profits, or inheriting billions because Daddy did one or both of the previous things for you. They let my pension slip by unaltered on a grandfather clause because I’ve been teaching since a time when education was actually a respected, value-producing industry that rewarded those who did the actual work (This really only occurred in the middle 1990’s when the world was briefly too sane to be Republican.) I can’t do the job any more for crippling health reasons. I am lucky to have a good pension, but not lucky enough to be able to use it for very long. Hence, the interest in sunrises. Every single one is a miracle.

You may have already noticed that most of my sunrises in this collection are taken in the same park. It is where the dog walks me every morning in order to keep my heart pumping. She wants to keep me alive so the food dish keeps getting refilled, and so someone will still be able to bag and dispose of her daily poops. (I swear, that dog is a champion pooper. Three times her own weight in poops every single day.) I also can’t sleep as much as I used to. Five hours a night is about the maximum that arthritis pain, COPD, and diabetes allows me. School trained me to get up early because my last job was a thirty-mile commute one way and classes started at 7:30 a.m. I really began noticing on my morning drive how beautiful city sunrises can be thanks to the colors produced by exotic pollutants.

So, I keep adding to this collection of sunrises because each one is a reminder that a loving God is still being generous with me, and I still get at least one more day. See? I warned you there was crackpot religious sentiment in this post. Now you can call the loony-catchers. But hopefully, they won’t catch me until after sunrise.

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Filed under collecting, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as collecting, goofiness, humor, philosophy, photo Paffooney, self pity

March 31, 2015 · 11:33 am

Hoarding Disorder

I am writing this post today to celebrate two things. My doctor’s visit today not only came back with positive post-op results, but it was free. And while I waited at Walmart for my prescription to be filled at the pharmacy, I found the two Equestria Girls that finish my collection. I spent the co-pay that I didn’t have to pay on Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy (I made that rhyme without a try!) Yay me!

But I have also come to the sobering realization that my collecting mania may actually be a form of mental illness. After all, my daughter is now 13 and not really interested in My Little Pony any longer. That excuse no longer flies. My wife has lost interest in collecting also (although she still collects clothes and shoes with a gusto that shames Imelda Marcos.)

So why do I do this collecting thing so relentlessly? Is it a serious mental disorder. As always I turned to the internet to diagnose myself with life-threatening conditions based on one, or possibly two symptoms. I may be doomed. What I found was an explanation of Hoarding Disorder.

Yes, I inherited it from Grandma Beyer. She hoarded all sorts of stuff in her little house in Mason City, Iowa. In her basement, when they cleaned out the house, she still had wrapping paper from Christmases in the 1930’s. It was in stacks. neatly folded and ready to be re-used. According to the Psychology Today website article about extreme collecting, one of the first signs of the disorder is the inability to part with personal possessions no matter their actual value. Never in all the years we spent Christmases together did I ever notice Grandma re-using wrapping paper. She actually kept that stuff for the memories they invoked and the sentimental value they held for her. My mother ended up throwing out all that wrapping paper when the house was sold.

Another indicator is the extreme cluttering of the home, to the point of rendering living spaces unlivable. One glance at the upstairs hallway sends shivers down my weak little hoarder’s spine.

There are any number of things that might concern a psychiatrist in this hallway. Of course, the blocked door in the back is where the old non-working air-conditioner is stashed, so there is no room in there for stuffing more stuff. This picture reveals that I have a vast collection of collections… not merely one. I collect stuffed toys, HO model railroad stuff and trains, Pez dispensers, stamps, coins, comic books (in the boxes in the back corner under the stuffed toys), and books… gobs, and gobs, and gobs of books! (“Gobs” is Iowegian for “lots”, not “sailors”.) In fact, the door on the left is actually the door to the library.

A quick scan of Toonerville along the tops of the bookshelves reveals the full extent of my madness. Here you see HO-sized buildings, most of which I painted myself or built from kits. You also see the Pez dispensers that suck money out of my pockets at $1.50 a shot. My trains have been around for many years. I shared that obsession with my father (Grandma Beyer’s eldest son) when I was a boy and most of these trains were either gifts from him, or purchased with allowance. (I haven’t bought anything new in seven years.)

So, the evidence makes it clear. One day soon I will be locked up somewhere in a padded room. I hope, at least, that my children still like me well enough to sneak in Pez dispensers when they come to visit.

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Filed under autobiography, doll collecting, humor

Tagged as autobiography, collecting, doll collecting, goofiness, humor, My Little Pony, Pez, photo Paffooney

March 28, 2015 · 3:20 pm

Picture Tricks

I have discovered things about being an artist by blogging. I have discovered things by learning from other artists. I have also discovered things by trial and error. I have also discovered things by random acts of God. So let me share some of the ill-gotten picture secrets that I have added to my vast bag of useless incunabula-juice squeezed out with my arcane-secret juicer and internet blogger good luck.

#1. Save everything arty… as you see above, I have three different pictures of my Catch a Falling Star character Dorin Dobbs, all made from the same pen and ink line drawing. All the color is digital paint from my computer’s own paint program. Simple and cheap to do. Save functions multiply the pretty.

#2. Splice stuff together and make new stuff… I have the cheapest possible photo-shop program, but using its entire $7 value every time I paste with it, I am able to create new art out of old.

New art out of old;

#3. Weave things together to create unity… My art is not for its own sake. I am not Picasso or Van Gogh. My art is very much tied to the stories I tell as a writer of Young Adult novels. (Snow Babies is awaiting its turn with the editors of PDMI LLC Publishers.)

#4. Promote the art and writing of others… I have spent a ridiculous amount of internet time stalking artists like Loish and sharing their work on my blog. Writers too. I do my little book reports in order to connect the reading and the literary influences I have completed (or stolen from) and show where much of my own style and je nais se quois comes from. If the artist or writer is still living and notices what I have done, they will often return the favor (hopefully, if they don’t find my work to be an offense against the gods of art). If they can’t return the favor (because they are quite dead or thoroughly disgusted by me), I have at least associated my work with theirs in the minds of my readers,

#5. It’s all about digital photography… In order to share my colored-pencil menagerie of live Paffoonies on the internet, I have to get better at photography. I have taken far more photos of drawings in the last two years than I have drawn drawings. That has not been a life-long way of things. I love color, and poor photography skills turn out various shades of gray. Sunlight? Incandescent? Fluorescent? I haven’t discovered that secret yet, but it will never be uncovered if I don;t keep trying.

#5. Find connections that help pull your work together in one big, messy bundle… Facebook, WordPress, and Deviant-Art are all better forums if you can connect them. I did this by labeling everything Mickey with a meaningless made-up word that no one else in their right mind would use. The word is Paffooney.

A picture search on Google using the words “Beyer Paffooney” gives you an almost complete gallery of my artwork and nonsense. Googling the word itself yields a link to a plethora of my old blogs. Do you not know what plethora means? Try it and you will learn that very good word.

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Filed under artwork, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, drawings, goofiness, humor, marketing tricks, novel writing, paffooney, sharing artwork

March 23, 2015 · 12:05 pm

Talk Like Popeye

I have long identified with Popeye. Let me review that notion by re-posting a bit of an old post in which I explain while talking like Popeye;

I am Popeye, I sez, because I just am… Yeah, that’s right, I yam what I yam.

First of all, I looks like Popeye. I has that cleft in me chin, very little hair left on me ol’ head, and I gots the same squinky eye (what squinky eye?). I has had that same squinky eye since I wuz a teenager and got kicked in the eye doin’ sandlot football (bettern’ sandlot high divin’, fer sure!). I also has them same bulgy arms, the ones that bulge in the forearm and is incredibobble thin on the upper arms.

Second of all, I has Popeye Spinach-strength. I look weak and scrawny, but I is a lot tuffer than I looks. I go into classrooms full of wild, crazed middle schoolers, and grabs their attention, tells ’em what’s what, and makes ’em woik. (Woik is a voib, and that means I is woikin’ when I makes ’em do it.) I kin stands ridicule and kids what will remarks on the hair in me ears and me squinky eye. I tells ’em that the scar on me face was did by a bloke with a knife (which it were, cause I had skin cancer and the doctor used a knife to get it off). I has taken all kinds of nasty punches from life (diabetes, blood-pressure problems, prostatitis, arthritis) and I still keeps comin’ back fer more. In fact, I can winds up me arm and give that ol’ Devil a good Twisker Sock right in the kisser.

Third of all, I has a typical Popeye Sweet Patootie. My Island Girl Wife is like Olive Oyl in very many ways. She is always tellin’ me what to do. She compares me to ol’ Bluto. She panics and flails her arms when there’s a crisis. And she expects me to always save the day and never says “thank you” after.

So, I mean it when I sez “I am Popeye”. I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!

See? I kin talk like Popeye because in many ways I AM him… He of the mangled-mouth vocabubobulary created by Elzie Crisler Segar on January 17th, 1929 for his comic strip Thimble Theater for King Features Syndicate. He doesn’t talk right because his brain is so full of goodness and spinach that he has no room left for spelling and pronunskiation. Ak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak…. Popeye is just a simple sailor, and has been for 94 years. He expresses himself horribly, but only in the very best of ways. So when I mangle a word on purpose… or by happy accident… it is just me honoring that old one-eyed sailor. It is not me just being a stupid addle-pated blarney goon who don’t knows how to talk right.

Comic strip from comicskingdom.com

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Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as adventure, cartoons, goofiness, humor, language tricks, lies, paffooney, talk like popeye

March 21, 2015 · 2:08 pm

Why I Play With Dolls… erm… Action Figures

My daughter the Princess and I went to Toys R Us this morning to spend a little of the money I had earned by proofreading a technical paper for a grad student. I bought a My Little Pony Equestria Girl named Rarity (I already have the pony, I just needed the girl to add to the collection.) I also bought a Minecraft sheep thing that the Princess promptly named Jed. Apparently, in the Minecraft game online, if you name your sheep Jed, it turns rainbow colors. And I know I didn’t slip by you the fact that the Pony Girl was my toy. In this post I intend to explain to you why I play with little girls’ toys… and hem and haw… and rationalize… and lie… because it is really not what it seems.

It all began in 1965, on my ninth birthday, because I had discovered in the Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog the first Action Figure, G.I. Joe, and I begged and begged and begged it for my birthday. There were four different flavors of G.I. Joe to choose from, representing the four branches of the U.S. Military. You could get either a sailor from the Navy, a soldier from the Army or Marines, or a pilot from the Air Force. Of course, I was wild about the Air Force, but I was clever enough to ask for a sailor Joe because my father was a Korean Conflict Veteran who had been in the Navy on board the USS Hornet aircraft carrier. Dad actually liked the idea and got the Navy Frog Man uniform to go along with it. I could change Joe’s clothes and make him a cool undersea adventurer. It only took a half hour to change him from a sailor into a frog man, and another half hour to change him out of his swim fins and wet suit back into a sailor. It was a doll with sets of clothes to change him into just like my younger sisters’ Barbie and Tammy dolls. Wait… what? I had been tricked into playing with dolls? It is like I lost my official man card even before I earned it… or even before I knew what it was.

Oh, well… it was all about the stories anyway. Yes, I was a story-teller even then. I built a submarine out of my Erector Set (a cherished toy from a previous Christmas) and my Joe led adventures through the vast undersea areas of our parents’ bedroom using Barbie (actually a Midge doll) and Tammy (little sister’s knock-off imitation Barbie doll) as crew. We added to the stories and adventures as time went on, and birthdays and Christmases passed, and we accumulated more dolls. I added Fritz, a Soldiers of the World G.I. Joe from Germany, an Air Force Pilot Joe, and an Astronaut Joe. My sister Nanette added a Francie doll, a Christie (the first African-American Barbie), and a G.I. Joe nurse. Little sister Maggie added a Francie of her own, a regular Barbie, and a Skipper doll to the submarine crew. And then the stories went through the roof when I got my sweaty little hands on Captain Action and his Super-hero costumes!

Captain Action was the creation of the now defunct Ideal Toy Company as an answer to the incredible success of G.I. Joe. You could take the basic Captain Action figure (seen above on the far right… this is the actual first figure… what’s left of him. The right hand is long gone. He has no fore arms. The uniform that he is wearing is not his original. It is basically holding his severed body parts together. I did successfully re-attach the head) and put him in a new uniform to turn him into Batman or Superman or… Aquaman! perfect for submarine adventures with sisters!

In the 1990’s my parents gave me the box of my old G.I. Joes. It was like a re-awakening of childhood passions. Several of my Joes were in terrible shape because my little brother and his semi-simian deviant friends had used fire-crackers on them a-la-Sid from Toy Story. I began cleaning them and restoring them. And then the internet happened. Old guys like me that grew up with these classic toys were now trying to recapture their youth by buying and selling the toys on E-bay. Seriously, check out this price for vintage Captain Action stuff (mint in box);

Aquaman on E-Bay (Oops! That $2000 toy that you can’t even play with has already sold!)

Collecting and trading dolls has become a fascinating hobby and potentially profitable (at least until age and death and bankruptcy winnow out all the old crazy guys like me who collect this sort of stuff). And why the added obsession with Barbies and things like My Little Pony dolls? Well, my sisters’ dolls had all been kept in a metal box. Attics in Texas can reach 600+ degrees Fahrenheit in the Summer. Have you ever seen a melted Barbie? Nostalgia made me do it… that, and having a daughter… well, that’s my story, anyway. And I am sticking to it.

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Filed under doll collecting, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as doll collecting, goofiness, humor, photo Paffooney, playing with toys, strange hobbies, toys

March 15, 2015 · 1:59 pm

Cardboard Castles

After a long, lonely week by myself, unable to go with my family to Florida for Spring Break due to poor health, my isolation ended suddenly as they returned early. I woke up to find them already here yesterday morning. They were tired from travelling, having arrived in the middle of the night, and so they needed to sleep in… and I was suffering horrible cabin fever. It mattered little, though, that I longed to get out. I was still ill and unable to breathe outside of my sealed bedroom. My arthritic back ached and I needed to lie in bed on the heating pad for the better part of a Saturday. So, what could I do but use my creative talents to take me on a journey into imagination. I built a castle.

I used an old computer program I previously found at Half-Price Books, the big superstore thing on Northwest Highway in Dallas. I printed out castle parts on white paper with colored ink. I gathered pieces of reusable cardboard I had been saving for the purpose. I began to cut and paste and tape.

I nearly forgot the most important step. I put on a Dr. Who DVD I snagged at Walmart. It was An Adventure is Space and Time starring David Bradley (who was playing William Hartnell who was the first Dr. Who, so it was a movie about an actor playing a part in a BBC fantasy series in the 1960’s played by another actor who looked like the original actor… I mean, it was a story about telling a story and it was the true story of the telling… Oh, I give up! You figure it out.) (That was the second longest parenthetic expression I have ever written, by the way.) It also had a full four episode adventure from the very first Dr. Who story, An Unearthly Child, starring the real William Hartnell. So I watched and cut and taped and pasted and built castle all day.

It begins to get exciting as the pieces fit together and it actually starts to look like a castle. Of course, once it was finished, I had to play with the dang thing. I am old, and this is my second childhood after all.