Tag Archives: humor

April 9, 2015 · 11:36 am

Compassion and Stray Dogs

I think compassion, if it is describing something real, is not so much a quality people have as it is a behavior that they sometimes exhibit and desperately need to turn into a habit. I have learned this best, I believe, in my relationship with the family dog. Dogs do have a natural empathy and loving strength of character that you learn about when a dog owns you and decides she is willing to keep you around for giggles and kibble.

Here is Jade the dog relaxing on her couch which she is sometimes willing to share.

This dog came to us in the late evening one spring night. We were coming home from religious services, and we had to stop the van because there was a puppy directly in the road ahead. She just showed up in the headlights, all big head and big belly, not really capable of taking care of herself, or even keeping herself from getting run over by the very next car that came along. She couldn’t have been more than a month old, still a little unsteady when she walked. She had a collar and a name tag, along with shot tags. We figured someone had accidentally let her get out of the house to wander and probably wanted her back. Well, we were wrong. The animal shelter was willing to take her, but that meant the risk that, if no one claimed her, she would be euthanized with all the other strays. She was too cute and instantly-attached-to-us to run the risk of that happening. The name and vet tags gave us no leads. We didn’t have the names of either owners or the vet who gave her the shots. She had become ours by default. I now suspect that she got out of her cage at the nearby Petco and the employees who lost her immediately wrote her off as deceased. No employee ever came looking, and, of course, when asked no one knew anything about it.

Here Jade Beyer is busy using Henry’s computer. She has her own Facebook page and everything.

Of course, kids love dogs and always believe they should have one, so no amount of warning about the consequences would dissuade them. So, in the first few months we had her, she totally decorated the carpets in the house with dark brown and yellow-brown stains. The kids wondered, “How did that get there?” and when I showed them how to clean up and house-train the dog (supposed to be their duty… ended up mine), they all three said, “Eeuuww!”

These aren’t actually our parakeets. Ours are all deceased.

The next winter, the dog killed all our parakeets. It’s not what you think. She didn’t eat them or anything. But wintering in the garage because of Mom’s reaction to new carpet patterns was something the dog really didn’t like. So she scratched her way to freedom through the garage door. And she chose a bitter cold January day to do it. So, the birds froze to death. The dog, in her fur coat and newly free of the garage prison, was insanely happy.

So you have to learn to make sacrifices to be owned by a dog. But there are benefits, too. I am a grumpy old man now with numerous health problems. But the dog gets me out three or four times a day to exercise me. She pulls me along by her chain all around the park and exercises my lower back by making me constantly bend over and pick up poop. I have become an expert at working through the pain to swoop up poop in an old donut bag or Walmart sack. Did I ever tell you what an amazing pooper that dog is? Five times every day! Six if I take her out five times! She seems to be capable of producing triple her own weight in poop every day. I would’ve wondered how she managed so much more output than she had input, until I started noticing what things were missing from the pantry and what wrappers were stuck behind the couch.

And a dog loves you no matter what. I am the first person to feed her when we brought her into our house. so she obviously believes I am her mother. I get grumpy and cuff her on the ears for biting my fingers when I try to pet her, and she still wants to be petted (and be able to bite me) even more. I swear at her when we are walking, and she just grins at me. She believes dammitdog! is her second name. And if she doesn’t get to sleep in somebody’s bed at night she whines. That doggy bed we got for her is apparently only to be used for dragging over the top of the latest poop or pee stain. So, being owned by a dog teaches you compassion by making you practice it every single day.

Last image borrowed from the Facebook page; The Peanuts Movie

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Filed under 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as 1000 Voices for Compassion, compassion, dog stories, humor, pets, photo Paffooney, stray dogs, walking the dog

April 8, 2015 · 11:48 am

Work in Progress

The book I am writing at the present time is for the moment called Stardusters and Lizard Men. It follows the alien characters from Catch a Falling Star as they journey home after the failed invasion of Earth. They have with them three Earthers, humans born on Earth, who have come along on the journey because they have fallen in love with members of the alien Telleron race of amphibianoids. In this sample chapter, Davalon and the Telleron tadpoles, along with the Earther farm couple, the Morrells, who have been transformed into adults in child-like bodies, have made contact with a native lizard-person, a little lizard-girl named Sizzahl, and are trying to help save the dying planet of the lizard people. Galtorr Prime, the dying world the Tellerons accidentally arrived at, is war-torn and nearly stripped of its livable environment. Sizzahl is a child prodigy and is working inside the Bio-Dome of her late parents to try to solve the environmental crisis and save her planet.

Canto Twenty-Seven – In the Bio-Dome

The delicate creature was four-legged and long-necked. It looked a lot like Bambi to Alden if Bambi had been a reptilian creature with hexagonal violet-colored scales all over it. It had large indigo eyes that made it look fawn-like and vulnerable.

“It is called a zhar-doe,” said Sizzahl sadly. She was standing next to Alden and Gracie with the creature in front of them. She reached out and stroked the side of its Bambi-like head fondly. “It is the last of its kind, and when it dies, its species will be extinct.”

“Is Zahr-Doe its name?” Gracie asked.

“It is the species. Why would you give it a name? When we had vast herds of them, they were a domesticated food animal.”

“Will you eat this one?” asked Alden. He still had his hands clamped over his private parts, but he reached out with his left hand to touch the thing’s velvety-soft ear. It was an exquisitely beautiful creature.

“Only if it is a last resort. It is too beautiful and precious to be butchered without great need.” Sizzahl was petting the creature tenderly. Hard to believe it didn’t have a name already.

“Is there no way the species can be saved?” asked Gracie, stroking the creatures neck with both hands. Alden had loved Gracie since the moment he had first met her, but now, looking at her standing in the Bio-dome’s artificial forest of dying trees and plants petting the Bambi-thing, he noticed how lovely she looked as a completely nude young girl in the middle of a browning pastoral setting. He was attracted to her in spite of the fact that her body was now a child’s body, but it was so much more than that. Gracie’s simple, loving concern for a gentle creature of another world… well, it was looking more directly at what he knew to be Gracie’s soul than he had ever done before.

“I have the cloning technology at my finger tips,” said Sizzahl. “This place was my parents’ attempt to save our natural world from the predations of the greedy and ruthless creatures that dominated our society. But, the question becomes, should we save the species by cloning it if we cannot feed it and the new creatures will only starve, suffer, and die?”

“We brought you the plants you needed, didn’t we?” Alden asked.

“You did. I thought being on the space station would protect those plants and I could bring them here to grow new food sources.”

“Is something wrong with the plants?” Alden shivered, not with the cold of being completely naked in an alien place, but with a sudden fear that he already knew the answer to the question.

“They are all blighted and dying. I asked the Tellerons to verify it with the instruments, but I’m nearly certain.” Sizzahl was actually crying. Alden saw tears in her snake’s eyes. It was difficult to comprehend a lizard-person crying, but the little-girl alien was so human-like as she was crying…

Gracie, bless her Iowegian heart, wrapped both her arms around Sizzahl and held her in a comforting hug.

“My goodness, girl,” Gracie said, “You are warm and soft to hug. You are more like us than the Tellerons are.”

“My people are warm-blooded just like yours. We are not really reptiles, you know. We are more saurian… like your birds or your dinosaurs on planet Earth.”

“How do you know so much about Earth?” asked Alden.

“Well, I am a genius among my kind. I have what you would call an I.Q. of about 195 in the terms of your science on Earth. Besides, the alien visitors that used to come to our world, like the Sylvani or the Zeta Reticulans have brought specimens of your people here for study and to perform certain special tasks that aided in their off-world agendas.”

“Earth people have been to your planet before?” asked Gracie, cuddling the lizard-girl close to her warm heart.

“Oh, yes, and I imagine some of our people have been taken to your world too. The governments of both our planets have been contacted long, long ago by space-faring races.”

“Really?” Alden was skeptical. Walter Cronkite and Bryant Gumbel never said anything about aliens contacting the government. “Why haven’t we been told about this?”

“Judging by your television broadcasts, I believe your government believes the average person is too stupid and easily upset to comprehend the truth. Our leaders were like that for many years before your leaders even were told. There will come a crisis point one day, though, that people will have to find out. Here it came shortly before we started to destroy ourselves with unending war for profit.”

“You are going to save your planet, aren’t you, Sizzahl?” Gracie asked, suddenly seeming alarmed.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think they are not worth saving. Sometimes a people on a planet can become so self-centered and terrible that they don’t deserve to survive. The alien visitors gave up on us a few years ago and left.”

“We are alien visitors,” said Alden, “and we aren’t giving up on you yet.”

“You are not afraid I might eat you or take advantage of you?”

“Of course not,” said Gracie. She patted Sizzahl on the back in a way Alden knew was meant to be reassuring.

“I do want to take advantage of you, though.”

“Oh?” asked Gracie. “How?”

“Your DNA is somewhat compatible with my own. Not yours, Grace, because you are a simuloid now, not a real person. I want some of Alden’s DNA to use to make a fusion race, half Galtorrian, half Earth human.”

“You mean you want me to make babies with you?” Alden gasped.

“Not the way you think. I want to make them in a sealed jar and grow them in vats. I will just need samples of your blood and tissues. It doesn’t even need to hurt.”

Alden felt a bit shaken. Could he do that? Or was Sizzahl right to suggest her people deserved to go extinct? And what did she mean when she suggested Gracie wasn’t real?

At that moment, Davalon and Tanith came in looking sad. Both were naked. Both were holding each other’s hands.

“We have bad news,” said Tanith. “The plants we saved from the space station are all diseased according to the instruments.”

Sizzahl only nodded, then buried her scale-covered face in Gracie’s shoulder to cry more loudly.

*****

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 6, 2015 · 12:06 pm

The Mouse and His Child

Today’s animated cartoons are very sophisticated and technically superior to older fair like you might find on YouTube from… let’s say… 1977. As an artist and writer dedicated to didactic surrealism (yes, I know you probably have no earthly idea what those two words even mean, but that’s a review post for another day), I should probably look down my long critic’s nose at the story of A Mouse and His Child, from Sanrio Studios. I saw this bit of artwork in motion at the College-Town Theater in Ames, Iowa while attending Iowa State University. It is a dopey pre-Toy-Story story about a pair of wind-up toy mice who are designed to dance in circle and can do nothing more than that at the beginning of the movie. They are told at the outset that they can only do in life what they were designed to do… and nothing more. But then they spend the whole movie doing so very much more.

The artwork is very cartoony in ways that only an American who loves Japanese versions of American style can be. (Don’t try to tell me you didn’t recognize Sanrio as the “Hello Kitty” people.) It has classic animation voices in it. Peter Ustinov as the villain, Manny the Rat, Andy Devine as the frog… and more other classy actor-types than I can possibly remember.

The story is everything a cartoon movie should be. It is a quest to get rid of the wind-up key and be self-winding. It is a quest to choose your destiny for yourself… to make for yourself a family and have safety and love as all people should. There is also considerable danger. Young children will come away from this movie with many potential opportunities to develop nightmares from the images. It is also a quest to find a balance between the magic of the frog and the science of the Muskrat. In order to solve the mysteries of destiny, they have to look at a dog food label that has a picture of a dog grinning and holding a can of dog food with a label that shows a dog grinning and holding a… you get the idea, they have to see beyond the last visible dog. This movie makes sense in a way that poetry makes sense. You have opportunities presented to you make sense of it yourself. Like a good poem, you get out of it what you put into it. If you think about its meaning long enough, you will find something quite profound.

I have seen this movie now four times. I saw it in the theater in 1977. I saw it two years later on TV, on a Friday night. Then I re-discovered it on You-Tube this last February and I have watched it twice since. Every time I understand something new and wonderful from it. I have now made it my goal to find a copy of the Russel Hoban book and read that as well. You have to be a little crazy to like a movie the way I love this movie, but I have to tell you, I will be a little disappointed if nobody clicks on it to see if they like it too.

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Filed under humor, movie review

Tagged as animated cartoon, cartoon lover, humor, magic vs Science, movie review, surrealism, The Mouse and His Child

April 5, 2015 · 9:17 pm

First Novel Yuckishness

One of my biggest regrets as a writer is that I started doing it before I had any earthly idea how to do it well. I know as a former writing teacher that you have to start by starting and you learn to write better by writing. There is no substitute for that redundantly repetitive redundancy of practice. And that is the mistake I made with the first novel… not the first one I ever wrote… the first one I ever tried to get published. I finished slapping the stupid thing together in primarily superfluous paragraphs and short chapters, and then sent it off to a publisher before I lost all willpower to try. The mistake was in choosing a publisher that was revolutionizing the publishing industry with cheap-o flim-flam tricks. If you have ever considered Publish America as an option… don’t. They work well as a way to get your students published and excite them about writing, but you can send them a bag full of grocery lists and they will publish it, telling you they have no intention of changing your unique style… all editing is left up to you. It is a crap guarantee that guarantees crap, no matter how good a writer you are. If I had wasted one of my good babies on the venture, they would own the rights to it for seven years. They do diddly-do-dah to promote or market your book. Everything is up to the author. They don’t even read the book. They make some effort to contact your family and people who know you and hawk the book at ridiculous prices that I wouldn’t pay for Hemingway and are satisfied with the profits they make selling a dozen copies.

Now that the term of my contract is up, I have to decide what to do with this novel. It is a hog-slop mish-mash of words and weirdness that no one could every truly appreciate as literature. It is juvenile blather that I would be truly ashamed of if more people had bought it and wasted their time reading it. (I don’t regret my friends and relatives reading it. They deserve that fate for one thing or another over the years. No one is without sin.)

You can see that I have made some attempts already to adapt it into something somewhat more-or-less interesting by using my rights to adaptation to make it into a graphic novel (These panels are merely rough draft form. If I do this, it will end up in a much more finished, web-comic form.) I am able to reclaim the entire book as of October of 2014. I just haven’t decided yet if it is worth the effort.

It was a learning experience to do this Aeroquest book-like thing. I learned a lot about what not to do. But I did end up $12 dollars in the black from the experience. The second book was a much more expensive proposition. I paid I-Universe for editing, proofreading, and training in marketing and promotion. They took the time to teach me all the proper steps and how to work towards eventual success. They even set up this blog for me and trained me how to do it. But I had to pay them. At this point, three years later, I am still in the red with this book. And they never mention that to be a success as an Indie novelist, you have to write more than one of these danged novel-things. Hoo-boy! But I am on it. I will write to my last breath, and I guarantee you that I will tell some stories.

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as adventure, Aeroquest, artwork, autobiography, first novel, graphic novel, humor, ninjas, novel writing, Paffoonies, publishing regrets

April 4, 2015 · 2:09 pm

Comic Strips Can Make Me Cry

I have been a cartoon nut for a long, long time. I think it goes back to a time before I really have memories. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know who Cat in the Hat was, or that Pogo was a possum and Albert was an alligator, or that Daisy Mae constantly had to chase Lil’ Abner afore they could git hitched. And I have always known that cartoons and comic strip characters weren’t real. But there were a few times in life when comic strips made me cry. Am I really that much of pansy that I wilt in the face of cartoon tragedy? Yes. Whole-heartedly!

FunkyWinkerbean.com

Take for instance Tom Batiuk’s long-running spoof of teenagers and life in high school, Funky Winkerbean. One of the first things that makes this comic special is that the characters have lives that expand into the deepening depths behind the daily gag and four-panel strip. They grow and age. Les Moore (the geeky kid with the dark hair and nerd glasses, the character I most identified with) grew up to become an English teacher in the same high school where he had to deal with the issue of teen pregnancy. Lisa, the girl he liked, was pregnant. Les helped her go through the pregnancy and give the child up for adoption, and then eventually married Lisa. Les would go on to raise his daughter with Lisa and then have to live with the fact that the child Lisa gave away wanted to find his real mother.

The strip added layer after layer to the over-all story, making me feel like I knew these people. Funky turned his after-school job at Montoni’s Pizza into a partnership and a career as a restaurateur. Les would. like me, become a teacher and a writer. Crazy would go on to be a postman and… well, Crazy. And then the story added more layers by not always being funny. I cried when Wally Winkerbean stepped on the mine in Afghanistan and I thought he was dead. I cried again when Wally’s wife, Becky, moved on and married again. And then, there was what happened with Lisa…

The artist himself had a bout with cancer. He. like me, was turned into a cancer survivor. It chills the bones and changes you on the inside to have a doctor tell you that you have cancer and it is malignant. And it became a part of the story. Lisa became first a breast cancer survivor, and then… sadly… a victim. She died of cancer. Her husband, Les, took up the cause and started the Lisa’s Legacy Walk for the Cure which he pursued religiously every October. And Tom Batiuk made it real. You can donate real money to the real Lisa’s Legacy Fund. It is a cancer fund and fund-raising event that honors the struggle and death of a fictional character. It makes me cry again at this moment. They are real people to me, too, Tom.

…And it doesn’t end with Funky Winkerbean. Today’s re-blog of Stories From Around the World’s post does an absolutely wonderful job of encapsulating the essence of Lynn Johnston’s family comedy strip For Better or for Worse. This engaging story of a family who also grows up, changes, and shifts from one generation to the next also tore my heart out with the un-funny episode where the dog, Farley, saves youngest daughter April from drowning and then expires from the effort, dying a hero’s death. Another memory that causes me tears even today.

I do not regret reading comic strips. My life is richer for all the second-hand and third-hand experiences they have given me. Not just Popeye and Pogo and Beetle Baily making me laugh, but comic strips that make me weep as well.

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Filed under cartoons, comic strips, humor

Tagged as art criticism, cartoon, comic strips, Funky Winkerbean, humor, Lynn Johnston, pathos, Tom Batiuk

April 3, 2015 · 12:22 pm

Family Stories

If you’ve read any of my posts so far in my thousand-mile journey as a blogger, you have probably already noticed that when I write, I am definitely a story-teller. I can’t go a day without telling somebody a story. I usually tell lies when I write because I tell fiction stories. The names of the characters are never the real names. Sometimes the events are not the real events. That’s what fiction writers do. We tell lies. It can’t be helped. But in the midst of those lies, the truth usually comes out. The characters and events are shadows of what is real. But the feelings, the understandings, the moments of revelation… those are essential truth… the truth that fuels the very mind of God.

One important revelation happened to me yesterday, a black day that added to a long list of very black days that buffet me with heartache and worry as I struggle to raise children in a system designed to defeat me. We were in a local restaurant after a long day of school withdrawals and doctor’s visits, Henry, the Princess, and I. I won’t call the restaurant by name because that would give Taco Bueno free advertising that.they didn’t pay for… um, okay… that was a mistake. But I’ll probably remember to edit that out later… probably. Anyway, we were sitting at a booth in Taco Good-o waiting for our bean burritos, chips, and dip, and the Princess, whom you sorta see in the paffooney today, began telling me about Atlantis Alpha. It seems Alpha team is having trouble keeping all their members alive. The leader has a brother and a sister. She believes they have both been killed, but it turns out that the brother is actually alive… Well, you get the idea. The Princess is writing a script for an animated cartoon she means to produce in the future with her friends in Anime Club at school. It all sounds very tense and exciting. And it means that just like me, she is a story-teller, bent on relating something important through science fiction and fantasy.

I am just guessing here, but I believe the story-teller gene came from my Grandpa. He was my mother’s father and he was a farmer who could tell a funny story with the best of them. He used to tell us stories all the time about the infamous Dolly O’Malley and her husband, Shorty the dwarf. It was my understanding that these were real people. There were houses in the southeast corner of our little Iowa farm-town, the infamous Ghost House was one of them, that were collectively known as Dolly-ville because she had purchased all four at some point, probably with the idea of profiting off real estate, and had let them all collectively rot into ruin. But, as with most of my Grandpa’s stories, their sheer veracity was always in question. Not only did I get my penchant for changing names (and I have used no real names in this story… forget about the Taco Bueno thing), but I got my knack for embellishing to make it funnier from him too. The story I remember laughing about the hardest was the time that Dolly and Shorty had gotten into an argument about politics. Apparently Shorty was using a string of bad words against some stupid thing that President Truman had done, when Dolly, not known for using color-free language herself, got tired of his invective and physically threw him off the porch. Of course, the second or third time I heard that story, Shorty landed in the middle of the hog pen in the front yard, and being a small man, nearly drowned in pig poo. What can I say? I was maybe seven. Pig poo was funny. (I know I used a real name in this paragraph, but honestly, you don’t know it wasn’t really President Eisenhower.)

So let me tack on a hopelessly disconnected conclusion to give you the moral of the story. Story-telling, like the appreciation of pig-poo humor, runs in the genes. And I shouldn’t worry so much about those times when things go wrong for my children. They are story-tellers too, and can probably lie their way out of any dungeon of doom.

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Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as autobiography, clowns, family, grandpa, humor, Paffoonies, story-telling

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 29, 2015 · 1:34 pm

Art Self-Edited

I have been working at illustration and drawing for the majority of my life, but it took computer technology and digital photography to allow me to maximize the use of my abilities. Let me go through a couple of case in points.

The Red-Haired Girl picture is a good example of what I can do. I originally drew the picture to illustrate a Charlie Brown poem. Here is the poem if you don’t remember it. (A convenient excuse to re-post something and fill this post with words already written.)

Little Red-Haired Girl