Tag Archives: goofiness

Welcome to Animal Town

Animal Town

This is Wildcat Street in AnimalTown.  It is a cartoon setting where some of my stranger dreamy-time cartoon stories take place.  One of my magical tomes is a self-created cartoon dreamworld where the plot is my life story told through the cartoon interpretations of my dreams.  AnimalTown is only one of the many settings from that long and graphically goofy tale.  There is also ClownTown, the Pirates’ Nest, Monster Mansion, Toon City, Crumpwell’s Wild West Ranch, and the Toonworld Space Port, along with other weird and wacky corners of my imagination’s geography.  I am thinking of expanding my blog to include web cartoons in story form… and if I do, I have a few wowser-oonie stories to share set here in AnimalTown.  It is a place run mostly by the prominent Moosewinkle family, headed by Mayor Moosewinkle, Judge Roy Moosewinkle, and prominent and incompetent attorney Woolbinkle J. Moosewinkle.  (There is obviously no connection what-so-ever with the cartoons I watched as a kid.  Surely those could not affect my dreams.)  The various stores and businesses in downtown AnimalTown all have to try to stay in business with stiff competition from Walrusmart, which is rumored to be secretly controlled by pirates.

mANDYHere is AnimalTown resident and sometime teenage know-it-all, Mandy Panda the panda-girl with panda-child Henry Panda, they are both immigrants from the distant Pandalore Islands where they originally spoke the Pandalog language.

I actually teach here in AnimalTown (in my dreams, I mean), and I do it in my rabbit incarnation, Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.

Mr. R Rabbit

So here is a classroom scene with me doing my wonderful teaching with my gigantic magical pencil.  (I sometimes refer to the magical pencil as Larry… but everybody knows only crazy people name their pencils.)

Teacher

So, let us see what happens when a crazy person dreams cartoon dreams and draws them down to blog on his blog with repetitive repetition of the same tired jokes and jolly paffoonery.

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Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney

Hydra Hair

No, this isn’t a post about the Avengers… but that’s a cool idea.  I just haven’t seen the new movie yet.  I will… so be patient.  You probably don’t really need a lot of comic-book fan-boy love right now anyway…  That is such a nerd-need, and you are not a nerd… at least, I haven’t been corrected about nerd-things on my blog, which leads me to conclude there are no nerds reading my squishy-goofy-gallywumpas.  This post is about my daughter, the Princess.

PrincessSpecifically, this is a post about the Princess’ hair.  You see, the Princess was unfortunate enough to be exactly between two opposite extremes of hair-genes.  She inherited her mother’s thick, dark wire-hair, but the wild-hair, mind-of-its-own crazy go-every-direction hair she got from me.  She inherits the worst hair-features from both of us.  So how do you to tame your hair in the mornings when you have thick, unruly hair  that not only refuses to be tamed, but will willingly grab the brush out of your hand and throw it across the room?  Well, you apparently borrow your brother’s comb without permission and give the hair 500 rat-nest-dislodging yanks and then lose the comb so that your brother is mad at you for the rest of the day… I mean, the rest of the week… er, the month, the year… maybe the rest of the Princess’ life.

This morning;

Me;  “Please don’t eat your brother’s comb when you are finished doing that.  Put it back on the sink in the bathroom before we go to school.”  (This is a helpful dad-statement used every morning when I watch her battling the hair at the breakfast table, but inevitably the comb is missing the next time brother Henry looks for it.  She must eat it when my back is turned to go start the car.)

Princess;  “I will, Dad…  Geez….  But I can’t believe all the hair I have now on my pants and shirt.  How can I lose this much hair every day and not be bald?”

“Princess, you are really, really good at growing hair.”

“Oh, I know it.  In fact, I’m pretty sure when I pull out one hair, three grow back to take its place.”

“Wow!  That’s like mythological, or something.  Do you wake up in the night to find little Hercules-type guys climbing up on your pillow trying to cut your hair with swords?”

“Yeah, it keeps me awake at night.  But you know in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Books, the hydra has to be turned to stone or be burned with fire to defeat it.”  (I cannot, of course, argue this point as she has read all of the books and is an irrefutable expert on the subject of Rick Riordan’s mythology.)

“Oh, mercy!  You mean the little Hercules-guys are climbing on your pillow with torches?”

“Yes, but I got a bunch of little Minotaur-guys to fight them off, so my hair hasn’t been burned.”

“Well, that’s good…  but what about all the little cow patties they leave in your blankets?”

“Dad, hair problems are hard.   You can’t expect to have it all easy, right?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

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Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney

Why I Wear a Tinfoil Hat

You know by now if you have read what I’ve written, or been around me when people make the mistake of letting me talk about what I want to talk about, that I am a kook.  Yes, I believe things that you have been told that only crazy people believe.Davalon ad  Why would you want to read any more of that nonsense now?  Because it is true and it will impact our future.

I came into a wealth of secret knowledge when I wrote and published my first good novel, Catch a Falling Star.  Of course, like most of the things you research on the internet, ninety-nine per cent of everything is big, black rubber hoo-haw lies.  I researched a lot of things that I have always been fascinated by, but specifically I investigated UFO phenomenon.  I already followed author Stanton Friedman and knew who Bob Lazar was before starting my research, but I wanted to dig deeper and find the truth.  My novel, after all, is about close encounters of the third, fourth, and fifth kinds… including an invisible invasion of Earth from outer space.  I wanted to portray such events as alien contact and alien abduction as realistically as possible.  But then I found stuff like the Disclosure Project headed by Doctor Steven Greer.  Did you know he has been collecting eye-witness and whistle-blower information in written and video form since the 1990’s and presenting it to members of congress?  There is an immense database of information about contact with UFO’s and the government’s response to it that can be cross-referenced and even corroborates itself.  There come a point at which eye-witness testimony, even loony-sounding testimony, has to be accepted when there is a preponderance of evidence.

The thing that makes the case most strongly for me is the provable amount of cover-up and misdirection that the government has applied to this body of knowledge.  They are still doing it.  NASA footage and photographic records are open to the public and available online.  Lots of people have examined the wealth of evidence very closely and have found things that the government apparently overlooked.  There are also an even more impressive number of identified re-touched and faked photos of the Moon and Mars and especially the Earth from space.  Things have been removed so that we the people will not see.  Some nut-cases even believe we never actually went to the moon.  Some of the moon footage and photos are provably fake.  (But you can also spot the landing sites of the Apollo missions on the surface of the moon with some of the very good telescopes available now… The proof of our moon landings is there.  The stuff was redacted and faked for different reasons… a different cover-up.)

So, why does this matter?  Maybe we are better off being protected from this secret knowledge.  We are too fragile to take it.  There will be riots in the street and the economy will crash.  We are safer being ignorant of all of this.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…no!

It’s time we were given the straight poop (because everybody hates crooked poop… at least they should.)  Our world is dying from pollution and global warming, yet the alien technology can provide clean, free energy.  Rich people are exploiting the poor and the middle class and so much suffering occurs that doesn’t have to happen if we embrace the potential for taking our place in a galactic community that apparently already exists and that we are excluded from solely on the basis of how dangerous our own ignorance makes us.

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Filed under aliens, humor, Paffooney

Grandpa Futty Drives Again

In Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley comics there is one old flivver-driving fool named Grandpa Futty.  He is the slowest driver on the road.  Rarely does he go over the breakneck speed of two miles per hour.  He is so overly cautious, that if there are two lanes going his way, he takes the middle of the road and effectively moseys along in his putter-banger taking up both lanes.  What is that you say, young whipper-snapper?  You don’t know what a putter-banger is?  Great galloping goat galoshes!  It’s a car, dang it!  You see them all over the metroplex.  They are so ancient that when you start it up with the hand crank, the engine coughs and the muffler falls off in back.  They were purchased as a used car two decades ago.  The only thing more miraculous than the fact that the car still runs is the fact that the old goat driving it is still alive (though the local police routinely have to stop him to check and see if his heart is actually still beating.  If it isn’t they have to fight with him about dropping him off at the nearest funeral home.)

Sadie2

So, if you haven’t guessed already, this post is about the generically named drivers I refer to as a Grampa Futty, and they are the exact opposite of the Texas Killer Grandmas I wrote about yesterday. Believe it or not, I think I have graduated into the Grandpa Futty class of driver.  I can still see more than three feet in front of my car, but I do have a dumpy-lumpy body that hobbles around with a cane, and I do smell like Ben Gay Ointment and Vick’s Vapo-rub.  (…And no, you can’t say Ben Queer Ointment and have it mean the same thing, young whipper-snapper!  That joke is nearly as old as I am!)  I am not entirely in that category of driver, though, because I still curse them with gusto and interjections like “dang it!” whenever I am behind one of that breed.  And besides, the last time the cop stopped me to check my heartbeat, it was going strong.

Grandpa Futtys are a real road hazard in the obstacle-filled world of Texas city driving… if it were a video game like Super Mario Brothers, they would not be Bowser, but rather that annoying Koopa Troopa that you just can’t bounce on hard enough to get past.  They are in the way, endearingly cute in an ugly-old-fart sort of manner, and potentially deadly as they put you in line for the easy kill by the nearest Texas Killer Granny.  So I am seriously studying now how to avoid Grandpa Futty on the road next time I see him, and I am definitely studying how not to become him.

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Filed under cartoons, humor, Paffooney

A Year Full of Sick Days

Dr SeabreezA 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

How To Avoid Dropping Dead Like a Dunderhead

Pony party

 

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

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

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.cartooner me

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

Milestones

post-milestone-500-2xOkay, 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;

girl n birdtree time bannersuperchick_novelBeauty class Miss McoverLong Ago sunnyface2SpaceheartScraggles

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

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.

20150105_071346

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.

20150211_065343

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.

20150218_065853

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.

20150306_064749 20150317_072147

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.

20150330_070943[1] 20150330_070638[1]

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Filed under collecting, humor, photo paffoonies

Hoarding Disorder

Pinkie PieI 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.

Toyman's Hallway

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. Downtown Toonerville Downtown Toonerville2My 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.)

Pez Supers Pez Toons

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