We went to Mason City, Iowa on July 6th to see the new statues in the downtown business area. This is a post shortened by the need for travel, but because a picture is worth a thousand words, this must be a nine thousand-word essay.
Tag Archives: humor
Beloved Books
While visiting home in Iowa, I re-connected with an old family friend. It was in the farmhouse upstairs bedroom where I was being quartered as a visitor. It was an it, not a him… a book, not a man. It was a very old book, published in 1938.
Yes, the Ittle Red H is a child’s picture-book. Of course the first time I saw it, it was titled The Little Red Hen . It was in much better shape then. I was a beginning reader back then. My mother and my two uncles were the first beginning readers who began reading this book. It was in very good shape after it passed on to my generation at grandpa and grandma’s house. Does that mean it was my fault that it got all child-chewed and doggedy-eared? There was, after all, my cousins’ kids, and my cousins’ grandkids in between there looking at the book and possibly eating it too.
Members of my family learned valuable lessons from this old book. We learned that you can tape pages back together as long as you retrieve the page-parts from the child’s mouth before they actually get swallowed and digested. We also learned that a Red Hen can still bake bread even though the top of her head has been removed.
Alternating pages were printed in black and white and pink ink. I can remember studying these pages for a long time and wondering why sometimes the duck and the goose were pink, and other times yellow, and other times black and white. I think that may have taught me that color doesn’t matter… it’s the character of the character that can be recognized in spite of pink ink. A very profound realization I do believe.
I also learned that ducks and geese are richer than chickens, as determined by the fine clothing and the fact that their noses are held high in the air. Monocles in duck’s eyes mean that ducks are supposed to be smarter than chickens too. Apparently if you are smart and rich, you don’t do any of the actual work, yet expect that you are going to get to eat the bread anyway when it it is baked.
You can tell by the many tools and the grouchy face on the Red Hen that she is a chicken and expected to do all the work, even though she has kids to support and is the same pink color as the duck and goose sometimes appear.
When the Red Hen is in full color, she’s kinda brown in color. That is certainly telling too.
I love the comical comics in the illustrations of this book. I traced them and copied them many times in my misspent youth.
Perhaps I have blathered on a bit too much. Maybe I should just shut up and show you the rest of this precious old book.
As I go back and edit and re-read, I am just guessing, but it may be easily apparent that I was watching the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup while writing this loopy post. But it is, after all, mainly about using my meager photography skills to preserve this beloved old book.
Filed under humor, old books, photo paffoonies
One True Thing
Sometimes I wonder why I write and what purpose it serves. And the fact that it is impossible to know the answer to things like that doesn’t even slow me down. The speculation-and-imagination machine chugs on, churning out all sorts of clever platitudes and sophomoric sayings that the editorial glands in my brain sometimes make me choke on. Purple paisley prose rolls out of my pen and curls and swirls across the page being more about the silly sounds and internal rhymes and alliterations than about the actual ideas. And I enjoy the process far more than you do.
Making connections is probably the most important process of the whole endeavor. Having returned home to Iowa for a week in July, I can testify that connecting your childhood to your recent past and your promising present is essential to determining both who you are and who you are supposed to be. The boy I was in the 60’s and 70’s is a key to understanding why I write what I do. I was smarter than a kid is supposed to be. A nerd is a target for verbal and physical abuse based on a shared feeling among those not as cerebral that it is somehow unfair to be smarter than ordinary folks. I learned to defend myself with wit and superior planning. I found it is possible to create an indispensable role for myself in practically any situation. I learned to be a good listener. I absorbed all the fascinating little nuances of personality and possibility that other people unintentionally exude. I learned to organize and prioritize and use all the other ize-es that help you structure reality to your liking. And I learned that it is possible, as a teacher, to pass the secrets of life and love and laughter on to others. Here is one true thing… The point of learning anything is to pass it on to others.
If you get nothing else at all out of this silly, meandering post of purple paisley prose, I hope it is that previous sentence. I delude myself into believing that all the experiences I have had and all the things I have learned can be wrapped up into pretty packages and given as gifts to coming generations. I strive to write with quality and make the ideas engaging and powerful. I am always experimenting with style. For example, this post is based on free-writing and associative thinking. I intended to create a “boneless” structure of gelatinous prose centered around one true thing. And I intentionally wrote it to resemble a blobby pile of mud in which the reader must dig for that nugget of gold. And I think I have succeeded in making it thoroughly muddy with random big words, loose connections that risk bursting the paragraph’s seams, and word eddies that could potentially explode the flow. If you have waded this far through the mess, then let me reward you with one more pointless Paffooney, re-posted like a pirate.
The Politics of Clowns
It is almost not fair to make fun of presidential candidates. They are making it so easy. If you can’t take anything but cheap shots at certain folks, then what value is in your words? Still, it is a temptation hard to resist.
So, I have spared no expense in hiring a couple of KlownTown’s finest to watch my every word, and keep me honest.
It is almost impossible to find a picture of Donald Trump on a good hair day.
1. Candidate Hair– The field of candidates on both sides of the divide is filled with marvelous examples of clown hair. I am left wondering how they achieve such effects. Assuming Rand Paul is not wearing a bad toupee, how does he get his hair to look like a squirrel who fell into a vat of yellow wood-stain shellac and then crawled out and died on his head? I think his father proved before him that too much Libertarian political purity has a profoundly pickling effect upon your head, and leads to making what hair you have growing out funny. Donald Trump obviously takes his hair off every morning and steam presses it on wrought-iron ironing boards in a thoroughly Republican flat-tax flattening sort of arm motion. It’s too bad he is in the habit of taking his hair off at the neck, because the ritual flattening is having a bad effect on the “maybe-I-shouldn’t-say-that-out-loud” centers in his brain. The Democrats are not immune to the clown-hair scourge either Bernie Sanders obviously uses my grandfather’s bald-guy low-maintenance approach to hair-styling. Step out of the shower, rub a towel across the top of your head, and you are ready to roll with that straight-talking brand of no-nonsense socialism that you can get by with because everyone is looking at how the towel Bozo-ed up your hair and distracts them from listening to your actual words. (Okay, the Klown Kops caught me. Bozo is not a legal verb.)
I bet you didn’t know that Ted Cruz went to Ringling Bros. Clown College for two years.
2. Candidate Words– Yes, the greater part of the clown-offences committed by candidates have to do with words. Some, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have a marvelous glibness that defies understanding. Cruz can go on talk shows and talk with two different tongues at the same moment. He is smart and Ivy-League-educated, but when he denies climate change he says he is not a scientist (which absolves him of using scientific reasoning in his arguments) but he says the science is not yet settled (which he routinely backs up with facts and statistics that are not true). Here is a noble statesman who is of Cuban descent and speaks no Spanish. He was born in Canada but renounced his Canadian citizenship so it wouldn’t interfere with his presidential aspirations. So, where the heck is he from, and why did we elect him in Texas? Even Republican Senator John McCain calls him a “wacko bird” for his combative Me-against-the-world political maneuverings. Who would possibly make a better president? At least, he is certainly capable of keeping the cartoonists and satirists happy. (The KlownTown Kops are reminding me that I have already passed 500 words and too much politics on the internet is a very bad thing… so maybe I must leave the rest of this topic for another day.)
Homely Art, Mom-Style
I am assuming, probably incorrectly, that you have seen enough of my art work to come to the conclusion that I am a bit of an artist. Amateur, of course. You have to make money at it to be professional. I used a great deal of my artistic abilities in the classroom as a teacher, and while you come eventually to an appreciation for that small sacrifice, you can’t really call that making money at it. And I am good enough at drawing to know where the mistakes are… the flubs and the flaws and the not-so-happy little accidents (I truly appreciate the genius of Bob Ross, and I know I am not Picasso or Da Vinci… but I can draw better than he ever could.) I know my artistic junk is kitschy junk in so many, many ways. But I believe that some of the best art is homely art… the art you keep in your house… not gallery quality, but irreplaceable to you yourself. And the point of this article (dreamed up while spending some alone time in my octagenarian mother’s house due to illness) is that I got my love of homely art from my mother’s house, the house I grew up in.
These two goofy dinos are an example of what I am talking about. These two revered family art objects were bought as greenware porcelain from a mold at an Austin pottery-art store. Mother fired them in her kiln. I painted them in acrylic. They are now living happy lives in my Mother’s dining room. Oh, and they are made to be displayed together like this;
Most of mother’s art gallery-like house is filled with items just like this. No value to the history of art. Not museum quality. No more important than any other item of homemade functions-more-as-a-token-of-love-for-the-person-who-gave-it artwork.
Let me show you more of the many wonderful grandma-treasures that fill my mother’s house.
This was our Grandma Beyer’s glass doo-dad cabinet that for many years held sacred glass gewgaws and thingamajigs from the the thirties and forties. Mom inherited it and put all new grandma-treasures in it.
The cabinet holds all manner of precious vacation souvenirs, graduation photos of my sisters and brother and I, weird animal salt-and-pepper shakers, candle holders, souvenir plates, Precious Moments figurines, Hummels, pictures of long-gone relatives, and a variety of other things that each has a story behind it, a long and lovely story of years and tears and fears and more years. It is a cabinet full of memories and celebrations. Collectibles and corny joke items. There is no price that ever could be put on it, and one day it will all be given away.
Mom has collections of stuff everywhere. Christmas stuff, Thanksgiving stuff, and stuff on display just because Mom likes it sort of stuff. Much of it is antique simply because the people are old and have kept this stuff long enough to make it antique. It is displayed in every available nook and cranny and corner of the house.
And, of course, what every visitor to Mom’s house most wants to see are the dolls.
She was a very talented porcelain doll maker.
The art that is most important of all in my mother’s house, though, are her greatest and most valuable creations. That would be US.
Filed under autobiography, doll collecting, humor, photo paffoonies
The Uncritical Critic
The Lyric Theater on Main Street, Belmond, Iowa
My family took me to the movies last night. We went to see Jurrassic World. We went to the local hometown theater in Belmond, a place that I first went to movies at in the 1960’s for I don’t remember what… well, I’m old… you can’t always remember early childhood when your old brain is clogged with fermenting memories and nostalgia on steroids. I saw Battle for the Planet of the Apes here. I saw Tarzan and the Valley of Gold here. Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Gnome-Mobile, The Love Bug… Disney movies, Christmas movies, musicals, cartoons, westerns… science fiction… This was an important feature of my Midwestern Iowegian childhood. I watched all kinds of movies here, and they were all the best movies I have ever seen. Even the really bad ones. Even Harum Scarum with Elvis Presley. I love movies with the uncritical heart of a seven-year-old boy.
I know in my stupid old head that some movies are better than others. I know enough about movie-making and story-telling to know that Jurassic Park was a better movie than Jurassic World. I know that these two movies are better than Jurassic Park, the Lost World and infinitely better than the hot mess that was Jurassic Park III. But I love them all. Formula or not. Consistent plot or not. Humor that is actually funny or simply sad enough to make you groan. I watch practically anything that flickers with an uncritical eye. I have never walked out of a movie theater before the Best Boy and Key Grip’s names have appeared in the credits. I would especially never walk out of this particular theater. Who I am is pretty much shaped by the movies I have seen..
Why does this poster-saurus want to eat the pretty red-head’s head?
And Jurassic World is a good movie. The characters are engaging. You are sucked into the drama to the point that if either of the two kids are eaten by dinosaurs, you will be totally devastated and may actually die in your seat because you have been jumping and flinching with every scare they get, and for at least part of the movie you are seeing everything through their eyes. And the heroic Chris Pratt character allows you to stride boldly through the dinosaur-infested jungle with deadly velociraptors at your side. You get to be a bit of a bad-ass… er… bad donkey, as you tackle the man-made monster dinosaur at the center of the monster-movie disaster. Movies are supposed to surprise you and give you something new. (But I don’t mind when the story hits certain predictable patterns and cliches.) This movie let me have the pleasant surprise of the villainous velociraptors of the first movie transforming into the heroes of this movie (but they did eat a few minor characters along the way… and one human villain… though I hope the poor velociraptor didn’t get a stomach ache from that icky old guy). If you are looking for a reliable movie review to gauge the quality of the movie, you probably shouldn’t be looking at this article. I am not really a critic. I love movies beyond the point where sanity, reason, and critical thinking can actually protect you from cinematic evils.
Filed under humor, movie review, photo paffoonies
Butterflies and Blossoms
A Red Admiral butterfly…
I am temporarily at home in Iowa, visiting the farm where my grandparents and great grandparents have owned the land and raised crops for over 100 years. My parents live there now in retirement, and while somebody else tends the corn and rents the land, they maintain the yard and grow flowers. Retirement is hip deep everywhere around the place. My old retired self and my wife and my kids are all descended upon them just like the butterfly who came to sample the purple flowers on the porch trellis. Little work gets done. My wife and eldest son have jobs and contribute to society still, but we retired folks putter and stutter and watch the butterflies flutter. We watch the kids and the flowers grow.
The Family Farm House
Watching stuff grow has always pretty much been what farming-family Iowegians do. Corn and soybeans, watermelon, pumpkins. cucumbers, string beans, sweet corn, pop corn, strawberries, potatoes… at one point or another I have helped to plant, tend, harvest, and eat all of those things… well, not seed corn and field soybeans… you can’t directly eat those… but you know what I am talking about, making things grow to feed myself and my family. There is satisfaction in working the land and making things grow… a fundamental feeling of achievement that helps us feel like we are not mere parasites, consuming and wasting and decimating… we build for the future rather than take maximum profit at the present moment. Farmers are the good guys.
Only, not so much any more. For our family farm, with three grandsons (of which I am one) available to do it, none of us have become farmers. The next generation after us includes no farmers either. So that fundamental feeling of achievement is basically a memory now. Only a memory and nothing more. Feeding the world has become somebody else’s problem now. We are watching the flowers grow.
Is there value in old farmers watching the flowers grow? Of course there is! The land is still functioning farm land. Iowa is still the breadbasket of America. We still feed the world. And we who own the land are at least providing the flowers and the nectar necessary to feed butterflies. The beauty, as well as the meaning and the metaphor, is there for anyone who wants to see it.
Filed under autobiography, farming, humor, photo paffoonies
Winning Easy
Now that Captain Action finally liberated my X-Box from the evil Dr. Evil who was holding it for ransom and not letting me play EA Sports Baseball ’04, I have been able to play Baseball ’04 again. (It happened in this blog; Dr. Evil’s Removable Brain) I have been playing this video game now with a passion, as you can plainly see. You are probably aware that the St. Louis Cardinals are my very favorite team in any and all sports. Notice, please that I have just pitched Matt Morris’ 30th victory against no defeats over stinky old steroid-fueled Roger Clemens. It was also his 9th shut out of the season. This is the first 30-game-winning season since Denny McLain in Detroit, in the 1968 season. I only had to replay the entire 2004 season 4 times to get there. Oh, and Albert Pujols has hit 114 home runs and Scott Rolen hit his 70th and 71st in this game. You are certainly smart enough to figure out by now that I have left the difficulty level of this game permanently set at the Rookie level. Hey, I’m old. I like easy wins.
A close-up of the Flower Wagon’s first bloom.
This is true in so many areas of my life. The flower wagon that I posted about on Friday is another evidence of my dedication to the philosophy of the easy win. It was a victory over many things… depression, tragedy, Texas gully-washers that keep on coming, the tragedy of an old toy that no longer gets played with… things where my decrepit old self with six incurable diseases needs desperately to win.
Flowers in our yard in general are a victory of sorts. This is Texas. A couple of summers back we were in a severe drought with like 99 days in a row of high temperatures of 100-plus. Flowers in June in Texas are a bit of a miracle. Good flower pictures recently taken are another miracle. My cell phone camera takes so much better pictures with all its automatic settings than my digital camera which cost twice as much, that it makes me wonder why I ever bothered with it.
A Yellow Rose of Texas in our yard.
Another yellow perennial that came up due to funky wet weather.
Of course, this is pictures the easy way because I am not trying to adjust the color balance (in spite of partial color-blindness), or the brightness compensation, all by my own little self with my modest-to-insignificant photography skills. (I am just skilled enough at photography to recognize a great work of art photographed by someone else, not skilled enough to take one myself.)
I am retired now. I have had a long hard career as a public school teacher, and I am working hard at being a good writer (professional or not) in retirement. I figure I deserve the odd easy win. Using my writing skills to tackle toxic ideas like prejudice and politics recently I was able to score some real points with some of my very conservative friends. I discovered by concentrating on the things they believe which I agree are very good things, I was able to make them consider a more liberal point of view, and not cling to Fox-News-sort-of faux-Fox-facts. I can even get them to laugh at things like saying “Fox-News-sort-of faux-Fox-facts” because it sounds funny even if you are only reading it silently in your head. It is an example of arguing towards an Easy Win, and I have become an addict.
Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies
Taking the Road Home
I was once offered a hundred dollars for this oil painting of State Highway 3 in Iowa. The art collector who offered it was a fellow teacher at the time. He didn’t really know much about painting. He collected wooden Santos, or carved saints from Mexico, and he had bought wooden carousel horses before. He was very knowledgeable about wooden sculpture from Mexico, but kind of a dithering old fool who was actually going blind at the time from cataracts when it came to other kinds of art. He wanted to encourage me as an artist, although he couldn’t really see the painting very well. I loved the old guy, but blind guys shouldn’t really be teachers (unless they have Daredevil level hearing skills), and they definitely shouldn’t try to evaluate art that they can’t see by touching. I was flattered, but also very happy I held on to the painting instead of selling it.
You see, this is literally the road home. Traveling west on Highway Three, you only have to go a couple more miles down this road to reach the little town where I grew up, Rowan, Iowa. And I am going home this week. My parents live on what used to be the Raymond Aldrich farm. Up ahead in the painting you turn right on the gravel road north to reach the connecting gravel room that takes you to Grandpa and Grandma’s farm house, where my parents, in their 80’s now live. In many ways it is a journey into the past. I have a class reunion of the Belmond High School Class of 1975 on July 3rd. I get to revisit the town where I grew up and the family farm which always used to be the center of my world even though we lived in a different house in the town of Rowan. My whole family of 5 is going along. My sisters and their families will also be there. It is worth the 700-plus mile trip, which we are doing today. Soon, the picture becomes reality. I thank my lucky stars I never sold it.
Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney
Goofball Conspiracy and Nuthouse Nonsense
If you read my blog more than just taking the passing flyby notice of the odd Paffooney picture, you may have noticed the fact that I have many unfortunate mental quirks basted in a flavorful sauce of vivid imagination and fatally high intelligence. I am too smart to live, most of the time, and so my mental quirk about constantly searching conspiracy information is probably a self-destructive attempt to get hold of seriously secret information that will probably get me killed. But conspiracy theories are dangerous in more than just the paranoid delusional way that somebody like Alex Jones always perceives it.
Since I already mentioned the Infowars rage-clown, let me talk a little bit about how Alex Jones is a truly dangerous force crying about sinister suppositories of conspiracy constantly… I do not follow the man. His website takes all kinds of conspiracy-type information and puts it through the grinder of his manic-orangutan persona and turns it all into a giant salad of poop and nuts covered in puree of mystery meat. The truth is sometimes in there, but all mangled and bunged-up. For instance, he claims that the Sandy Hook shooting of all those innocent children and heroic teachers was a false-flag operation by the government. He claims that no children were actually killed… the event was staged… The government is simply trying to turn public opinion against gun owners and wants to threaten Second Amendment rights. Gene Rosen, one of the people who heroically helped students fleeing from the Newtown shooting, was harassed by phone calls calling him a “government stooge”. Jones’ true believers are not smart enough to leave things like this alone. They take it upon themselves to press the matter and rub salt in the wounds. In fact, some Alex-Jones-true-believer criminal types stole the memorial for Grace McDonnell and Chase Kowalski, two seven-year-olds who died at Sandy Hook Elementary, because they didn’t actually exist… they weren’t actual children… and then they phoned those children’s parents to taunt them… all in the name of Infowars’ version of the truth.
Here is the article I used as the source for my information; Why Conspiracy Theories Aren’t Harmless Fun
These facts about conspiracy theories and the people involved in them make me physically ill over the fact that I am also a believer in some very prominent conspiracy theories. But unlike Alex Jones, I don’t pull things out of a Pandora’s box of paranoia and mental cesspools. I try very hard to site my sources and choose them critically. I believe that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, not by a lone gunman, and probably not by Lee Harvey Oswald at all. There was a massive conspiracy. I have dug into the roots of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. I know who Jim Garrison is… who Guy Bannister and Cord Meyer are… I know about the mysterious history of questionable deaths of witnesses to the shooting and where the efforts at cover-up become apparent enough to know that somebody powerful was behind the whole thing. But, although I think I know who and why… there is not enough evidence to name names and try to prosecute anyone. Kennedy’s death was an important blow to the architecture of my childhood. It combined with other terrible things to take away any chance I may have had to grow up innocent and happy. Pursuing the truth will haunt me for the rest of my days.
And there are other places where I want to believe. How about aliens? I wrote a comic novel or two about that. There is a source of endless comedy and clowns.
But I am a believer here also. The thing about Roswell and the numerous flying saucer incidents that have grown into an entire conspiracy subculture is that so much of it can be traced back to ingenuous and credible witnesses. Many of them not only had nothing to gain from lying, many of them lost their reputations, their careers, and sometimes even their lives because they tried to tell us truthfully what they witnessed.
I promised to back that sort of assertion up, so one of the sources of my belief is the astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon. Here is a video readily available on YouTube to let you hear it in his own words.
I apologize for dumping my strange obsessions on you simply to feed monsters lurking in my silly, questioning head. I have to make sense of the world for myself, and I do it here in writing. I pulled you in with the promise of humor, and while I may have salted this essay with a bit of that, I have basically tried to convince you of my pet conspiracies. Forgive me. For as long as I keep blogging (especially when I am trying to do it every day and need things to talk about) I will continue to try these same tricks. Watch me carefully. Hold me to a standard of truth that makes me better than Alex Jones.
Filed under aliens, conspiracy theory, humor
Catch a Falling Star 