Tag Archives: goofiness

We Are Not Alone

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The Photo Paffooney I have provided for today is one I have been sitting on and pondering over for several months now.  It isn’t the cloud formation that is troubling, it’s the light.  You see, the problem is, it was early morning.  The sun was in the east, not far above the horizon.  This picture shows two bright lights glowing behind the clouds in the southern sky.  So, what were they?  Lights that merely hovered there.  We are in the zone flown over both by DFW and Love field.  These weren’t airplanes.  I checked UFO reports continuously.  Three times unidentified objects were reported in the Dallas Fort-Worth area.  The reports were online, but not covered by local media, newspapers or TV.  In fact, they rather swiftly disappeared from You-Tube.  So, what does it all mean?

Well, you know I am a nut-case.  If you’ve read any of my tinfoil hat posts, you know I think the Roswell incident revolved around at least one crashed ship from another star system.  I also think the primary proof that we have that we are not the only intelligent beings in this universe is the very fact that the government has worked so hard to convince us that it is not so.   Liars tend to protest too much.  And there is an ever-increasing pool of whistle-blowers that have risked everything to come forward with tales of close encounters and government programs to conceal the science we have learned from back-engineered alien space-crafts.  You don’t have to believe me.  Look up the Disclosure Project and Dr. Steven Greer and Astronaut Edgar Mitchell.  Hear it in their own words on You-Tube.  I am a kook, but I’m not the only one… and some of them have impressive resumes.

Am I claiming, then, that my picture shows UFO’s from outer space?  Of course it doesn’t.  It is an unidentified phenomenon that would be easily explained if I just had a few more facts… like the amount of facts I have looked at that make me think that We Are Not Alone.

Not Alone

So, was the purpose of this post merely to remind you that I have an idiotic faith in flying saucers?  Not at all.  I am in the midst of week of total isolation at home.  My family went to Florida for Spring Break to visit my oldest son.  I stayed home with the dog (somebody has to feed her and pick up poop).  Actually, I am not well enough to travel and I convinced them that it would be okay to go without me.  And it is okay too.  I may be full of self pity and feeling lonely and blue right now like some sort of fool, but I am not alone.  By myself, sure, but not alone.  I got to thinking about all the people my life has touched over the years.  I have known teachers in four different school districts, people in five different communities, workers at QT where I buy my Big Q cup of Diet Coke every morning, family members by the freight-train-full, cousins, nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts, great aunts, grandparents long gone, and over 2,500 students who sat in my 31 years of classrooms.  I guess I know a few people, huh?  And none of them have truly left me… not even those who died.  As I continue to deteriorate and die… and continue to put my wealth of life experience into silly fictional forms, I realize they are all still with me.  It is the only real wealth a human being ever has.  I, like you, like all of us, am never alone.

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Filed under aliens, autobiography, being alone, Paffooney

Sanctuary

I am trying to hold everything together.  I have made my plans, including plans for dealing with irrational things that some people might do.  And so, it is time to go visit the rabbit people.

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The Rabbit people represent the people and personalities from my past, fortifying me with good memories and pleasant thoughts.  I depend on my interior mental life more and more as my body breaks down and my present life is more and more limited.

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The hero is a younger me, leading the way to places I have been before and ready to defend me with old truth.

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But there is no such thing as a perfect sanctuary.  No castle of willpower and mental toughness is ever impregnable.

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A thousand things now assail me.  Unpaid tax bills, surprise expenses, continued struggles with illness, and other horrible goblins of chance and bad fortune continue to hound me.

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The battle is not over.  I have not yet lost, though I have not won yet either.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, rabbit people

Rabbit People

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On days when I am still recovering from life-altering blows, I often try to find new realms, alternate realities to live in.  (Retreating into a fantasy world is one of the reasons she gave for leaving.)  And since, as a youth in Iowa, I raised rabbits for a 4-H project, I know rabbits better than I do human people.  Rabbits are people too.  So, I have been walking among the rabbit people.  Seriously, bunnies are better people than most human people.  They are not trying to profit off you.  They are not trying to get everything they can off you.  They are merely there to wiggle their whiskers, sniff for food, poop, gnaw on stuff, and make more bunnies.

Mr. R Rabbit

I often see myself as a rabbit person.  In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.

As a teacher, I am always pulling out carrots of irony and gnawing on the ends of them in front of students.  If they complain that eating food in class is supposed to be against the rules, I ask them, “Do you want a carrot of irony?”

“Oh, no, thank you sir.”

“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight.  You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”

“Oh, no sir,” they say.  “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”

And so, I taught on like that… like a rabbit, fast and frumious (a Jabberwocky sort of word), and never really bit anybody.  Teaching is like that.  You offer the good healthy stuff to nourish their little animal minds, and they always choose the junk food instead.

Millis

And so life goes on like that.  Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.

I have started on the final edit of my novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  One of the main characters in the book is Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit Millis.   During the course of the story about invading aliens, Secret Agent Robots from the CIA, and making friends when you need friends, Millis is turned into a rabbit-man by a lab accident.  He teaches Tommy that you don’t have to be human to be a good, caring, self-sacrificing person.  He also teaches him to eat his carrots and greens like a good boy should.

So, I will spend more time with the rabbit people and heal a little bit.  That is what you do with the tragedy that life brings you.  You spin it into whole cloth, making humor and poetry out of everything bad that happens… wrapping yourself up in a comforting blanket of lies (you can also call those fiction stories), and eating a little chicken soup on a cold day to heal your soul.  (Oh, I forget, rabbits often gag on chicken soup.  Let’s make that bean soup with carrot chunks.)

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Filed under humor, irony, Paffooney, rabbit people

“Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune”

Ra When I was a teenager and suffering from a terrible secret, I first began to see and hear invisible people.  I know this is not normal.  In fact, it comes under the heading of “wacko-stupid-maniac-loony”.   The first one was my friend the faun.  Now, for those of you who do not know, a faun is a mythological creature in the shape of a man (or possibly boy, or even little girl) with the legs and tail and horns of a goat (or possibly kid).  This creature is a sensual being in the Dionysian tradition.  Wine, women, and song so to speak.

When he first came to me it was a snowy winter’s night, long about December of my 17th year.  At that time I was still repressing the memory of what happened to me out behind the neighbor’s house when I was ten.  But I guess I knew I needed help in reaching out to others.  I was lonely and convinced that for some terrible unknown reason I was a horrible creature not worthy of love.  Then he came rapping at my window.  He was kneeling there in the snow, outside my upstairs bedroom window, on the roof of the front porch of the house, naked except for the goat fur on his legs.  But he wasn’t shivering.  After all, he wasn’t real.  No one but me would ever see him.  He was grinning at me.

“You aren’t going to leave me out here in the snow, are you, stupid?” he said.

“Who and what are you?” I asked, as I opened the window.  The snow was shining with a silvery, blue-white light that originated with the street light out in front of the house.

“I am Radasha,” he said.  “I am your faun… the part of you that feels things and needs things… the part of you you have stupidly been pretending doesn’t exist.”

All right, I know it sounds crazy.  But I needed him in my life.  Elwood P. Dowd had an invisible white rabbit.  Why couldn’t I have a faun?  And it was a very, very good thing.  He taught me how to laugh, and how to love… how to actually live.  And I know he has always been inside me, not really separate from me.  In many ways he is the real me.  But crazy people have their own set of priorities.  And when I was a confused teenager whose personal self-concept had been sexually violated by another, older boy… Radasha was mine.  An invisible friend to talk to.  One who could explain everything… make me laugh and make me happy.  And there is a sound to that.  Do you know the piece by Debussy that this post is titled after?  It is my favorite piece of music in all the world.  And it tells the sweet-sad story of Radasha and me.

Island Girl2z

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Architecture for Clowns

Try not to be upset with me for drawing a naked lady. You see, she is not really a lady, she is a caryatid, a stone pillar for holding up a building.  Besides, I have been recently very ill, and drawing naked ladies makes me happy, even though it is a sin and means I will probably burn in hell.  I am a hopeless sinner in this regard.  I got kicked off Pinterest for liking an oil painting of a naked lady.  I think it was a painting by William Adolphe Bouguereau.  How could I be so terrible?  You should check out my post about his sinful, horrible paintings so you can see how terrible I am for yourself. (Bouguereau)  carytidOf course, This post is not about naked ladies at all, so why am I fuming and ranting and telling all my darkest secrets about that?

This post is about architecture, about giving structure to things, about holding things together and holding things up.  Is it clever that I drew this picture of an ornate pillar and placed it in this post so it looks like it is standing on later paragraphs and holding up the introduction?  I find weird surrealist things like that help me write stuff that makes a few people laugh.  It helps me because I can focus on nonsensical side-stuff like that (mixed up with obscure puns and alliterations like “pillar” and “placed” that, when cooked together with goofy rhythms in over-long sentences end up sounding funnier than they really are), and then I can say stuff that is actually funny because I don’t realize how wrong, or weird, or silly some of these words I am futzing it all up with truly are.  (And I am amazed that the Pinterest police haven’t come and kicked me off WordPress for using a word like “futzing”, even though they don’t know what it means.  Heck, even the spell-checker didn’t object to the word!)

But someone like me who is trying to be funny needs structure more than anyone else you can think of.  Why?  Because the sad-clown-crying-on-the-inside is so very true.  The dark dips of depression… pain, illness, and more pain… family stress from others in my family who also suffer…  That’s what makes the laughing so very necessary.  You need the lighter stuff to fill up the room (somewhat like a really big fart) because you depend on the sheer buoyancy of it to lift the entire house up and keep it from sinking to the very center of the earth.  (And the stink of it can also help keep you awake when otherwise you might never get out of bed again)… (But please don’t light any matches around my house.)

So, in conclusion, this stuff I write does have basic structures, basic rules.  It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  It has a theme, a point that needs to be made,  And then it needs to end with some kind of a kicker line or punch line… because when that finally hits me square in the face (like a pie thrown by a pie-whacker clown), it helps me remember… I am still alive, and I can still laugh about it.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, surrealism

Goofy Days

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I struggled to get started today… weird clouds covered the pinks and purples of a Dallas dawn as I stumbled through walking the dog.  I think I mentioned before, I believe, that our goofy dog (who fortunately does not wear a hat and drive a car, so she is not a Goofy dog) has become a record-setting poop factory, pooping out five times a day and producing what I suspect is actually five times her own weight in doggy poo in a single day.   If only it were worth money!  I felt ill with an acrobatic stomach doing inner flip-flops while trying to transport twenty pounds of poop to the trash can.  My arthritis made my joints crackle and walking was a total pain.  But I made it.  I walked the dog… deposited the poop…made breakfast for two kids… eggs for one, sausage for the other (I am not so much a dad as I am a short-order cook at breakfast time)… I avoided talking about religion or politics… I dropped them both off at school… and then I went back to bed.   I woke up in time to hop in the car again and pick them up from their early release day.  And on early release days they don’t feed the kids even though they don’t release them until after the noon hour.  So rather than cook again… Taco Bueno!  It is overpriced and really bad for you… especially with an upset stomach… but, hey, we didn’t have much food left in the pantry anyway.  So, in spite of feeling like sudden death by heart attack would be a blessing… I made it through the morning of a weird and wacky, goofy, goofy day.  And now my work for the day was nominally done.  So I sat down and tried to think of a post for this blog.  (44 days in a row with at least one post, you know)  No luck.  I couldn’t think of anything to write.   And my schedule of ideas took way to much work to use on a goofy day.  So, I took a picture of my toys… some of them… and tried to tell myself that I could turn that into a worthy post.  The evidence is clear, however… I most certainly could not.

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Filed under goofiness, humor, photo paffoonies

Banned Breakfast-Table Talking

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At Mother’s breakfast table we were always encouraged to talk about stuff.  That was a given.  It was how families operated in the 60’s and 70’s.  Mom and Dad not only listened to the mindless drivel coming out of the childish mouths of me, my two sisters, and my stinky little brother, but they also tended to hold forth about things they wished to teach us. We learned Methodist-Church-flavored Christianity and Eisenhower-Republican values.  Ike had been president when I was born and got most of the credit for the post-war boom in the economy.  We were middle-class people with solid middle-class values.

And then I had the bad sense to grow up and start thinking for myself.  Nixon had let me down big-time when I was in high school.  I had defended him against my McGovern-leaning loony liberal friends.  My best friend was a preacher’s kid, a Methodist preacher’s kid.  His father actually believed in progressive nonsense about sex-education for children and helping to feed the poor.  And then Nixon turned out to be a liar, a coverer-upper, a cheat, and a bad-word-user.  I suspect, though my Dad never admitted it, that he may have voted for Carter over Ford.  It was my first time voting, and it actually felt good to use my vote to strike back at the party that betrayed my trust.

Religion, too.  In the late seventies a man named Carl Sagan put on a TV show called Cosmos.  The man bedazzled my father and I with Science.  He taught us that every molecule of us was composed of atoms that could only have been forged in the cosmic furnaces in the centers of stars.  He showed us how spectroscopy of the stars could show us what they were made of.  He showed us the meaning of Einstein’s special Theory of Relativity.  He pulled the universe together for us in a way that could not be undone.  And he did it without calling upon the name and blessings of God.  But he pointed out that we are connected to everything in the universe and everything is connected to us.  To me, that seemed to define God.  My religion was changing from Christianity to Saganism.  Of course, Mom heard that as “paganism”.  Breakfast table talking changed into early morning arguments.  We didn’t exactly throw chairs at each other, but some pretty heated and pretty large ideas went flying through the air.   Religion and politics became the banned topics at the breakfast table.

tedcruz  So that brings me to the Paffooney points for today.  This blog has turned into a place where a disobedient son, a horrible sort of “free-thinker” type of radical hippie pinko goofball, can talk about the loony-liberal progressive ideas that have taken over his good-little Eisenhower-Republican little-boy mind.    I spent the last post talking existentially about my religious beliefs.  My conservative, old-fashioned friends and family call me an atheist now, but I truly believe in God.  It’s just, I recognize the factors behind Christian myths.  I bow to the wisdom of Scientists like Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking… as well as hippie psychologists like Alan Watts… and literary heroes like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S, Lewis.

Will_Rogers_1922I am proud to be an Iowegian (a Mickian word for being from Iowa), yet my birth-State produces gawd-awful Tea Party politicians like Steve King and Joni Ernst.  The stuff that comes out of their mouths doesn’t even make good fertilizer.  But they are comedy gold.  Will Rogers would have pointed out that the jokes will write themselves.  All the humorist would have to do is consult the front page of the newspaper.  I also live in Texas where the debate over secession from the United States still goes on with new Governor Greg Abbott, a man who is a Rick Perry clone, except that he hasn’t bothered to put on glasses as much to make him smarter.  And Texans are looking forward to the next Republican president in 2016.  Both Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are running.  That doubles Texas’ chances, right?  With Global Warming not being accepted as a real thing, the need for giving all our money to the Koch brothers and the Walton family being recognized by both parties in Congress, and looming war with foreign nations that have the bad sense to be “Muslim in nature”, the future looks kinda bleak.   But it is a great time to be a humorist, and I am guessing I won’t be doing very much talking at the breakfast table for a while.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, politics, religion

Wisdom from the Outsider

There is so much left to be said before my time runs out.  Wisdom, whether hard won or acquired entirely through wit, bears a certain responsibility in the possession of it.  We are duty-bound as wizards, the masters of wisdom, to pass it on.mrFuture

Now, you certainly have every right to protest that I am not wise and I have no wisdom.  You are certainly right to point out that I am a doddering old fool that sits around the house all day in the midst of his poor-health-enforced retirement doing little beyond writing silly stories and drawing pictures of mostly naked cartoon girls.  I get that.  But the beginning of wisdom is the realization of how big everything is and how little I really know about anything.

Take for instance the question of where we came from and what our purpose is?  (And the question of why I put a question mark on that when it really wasn’t a question.)

I originally believed in the God of the Christians and in the promises of Jesus… everlasting life and an eternity of sitting on a cloud with a harp and…  Okay, it didn’t take me long to see the logical holes in that line of reasoning.  So much of that is fear of death and the need to believe that I am the center of all things, the most important person in existence.  The truth is I am only a tiny part of a nearly-infinitely-large universe.  And the universe is conscious… self aware.  How do I know this?  Because I am conscious and self-aware.  I am an infinitely tiny piece of the whole… but there are untold trillions of others just like me.   Mai LingAnd when I die… when this body ceases to function, as it already has a great deal of trouble doing, the parts that make up the individual creature and thought patterns I identify as me will be scattered to the far corners of everywhere to be gathered up once again and be something new.  All of mankind passes away.  Human beings and the planet Earth will one day be no more.  But that is not what matters.  There is so much more beyond the boundaries of what my limited eyesight can behold, and what my limited mind can comprehend.   I am made of star-stuff (just ask Neal DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan), and I am a part of the universe as a whole.  I am in no hurry to die.  Life is worth fighting through the pain for… but I do not fear death.  Like birth, it is only a stop along the way in a journey that, as far as I can tell, never ends.

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Filed under Paffooney, philosophy, wisdom

Saturday Science with Professor Mickey

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Not many words today…

Ate too much… feel bad  (a five-word poem about diabetes by a diabetic)

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, poem

Futterwacken

Yes, Futterwacken, the dipsy-doodah dance of the Mad Hatter.  That is what life has been for me of late.  This is my first school year in 33 years wherein I will not be teaching at all.  The two jobless school years in 2005 to 2007 saw me teaching a cappella without a safety net (in laymen’s terms, substitute teaching- where a good sub can be called at the last possible minute to fly across town to take the class from hell that the regular teacher can’t tame with a whip and a chair.  (Personal survival is entirely optional.) )  (Wow!  I never pulled off a parenthetic expression inside a parenthetic expression before.)  Being now in the eighth month of the Mad Tea Party of retired-teachery-ness, I have never truly been so free and schedule-lite before.  I have pulled off repairing siding and painting the house while being arthritic and extra-wobbly on an aluminum ladder.  I have registered two children for school three times (my son Henry in two different schools this school year).  I have written and completed three novels (The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, The Magical Miss Morgan, and Superchicken).  I have signed a contract to get one published in extreme slow-motion (Snow Babies).  And I have managed this blog with the latest accomplishment being 36 daily blog posts in a row and uncounted Paffooney pictures, both photographical and colored-pencilical.  I have invented three new words in this blog post alone (according to my computer spell-checker who was apparently an anal-retentive old-maid school teacher from the New England countryside in a past life.)  So, imagining myself as a Mad Hatter, dancing a disjointed dance where my head spins like a top, is not so far out after all.  Let me share with you one last wacky Paffooney choice for no particular reason…

aqua better

Or maybe this Paffooney was to honor the comic book artist Murphy Anderson who inspired it.  (Yeah!  I’m gonna go with that explanation).

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Filed under goofiness, humor, Paffooney