Sometimes people break,
And then, they fall apart,
And it takes a jigsaw master,
To Puzzle back their heart.
And if a foot falls off,
Quite busted on Monday’s hump
They may be legless, headless, limp
And lying in a lump.
But no face is ever busted
To a point of no repair,
And lips are pasted back in place
With a smile that wasn’t there.
After a long, lonely week by myself, unable to go with my family to Florida for Spring Break due to poor health, my isolation ended suddenly as they returned early. I woke up to find them already here yesterday morning. They were tired from travelling, having arrived in the middle of the night, and so they needed to sleep in… and I was suffering horrible cabin fever. It mattered little, though, that I longed to get out. I was still ill and unable to breathe outside of my sealed bedroom. My arthritic back ached and I needed to lie in bed on the heating pad for the better part of a Saturday. So, what could I do but use my creative talents to take me on a journey into imagination. I built a castle.
I used an old computer program I previously found at Half-Price Books, the big superstore thing on Northwest Highway in Dallas. I printed out castle parts on white paper with colored ink. I gathered pieces of reusable cardboard I had been saving for the purpose. I began to cut and paste and tape.
I nearly forgot the most important step. I put on a Dr. Who DVD I snagged at Walmart. It was An Adventure is Space and Time starring David Bradley (who was playing William Hartnell who was the first Dr. Who, so it was a movie about an actor playing a part in a BBC fantasy series in the 1960’s played by another actor who looked like the original actor… I mean, it was a story about telling a story and it was the true story of the telling… Oh, I give up! You figure it out.) (That was the second longest parenthetic expression I have ever written, by the way.) It also had a full four episode adventure from the very first Dr. Who story, An Unearthly Child, starring the real William Hartnell. So I watched and cut and taped and pasted and built castle all day.
It begins to get exciting as the pieces fit together and it actually starts to look like a castle. Of course, once it was finished, I had to play with the dang thing. I am old, and this is my second childhood after all.
Now, if only I can figure out how to keep female vampires dressed in red from invading my castle.
Filed under humor, making cardboard castles, photo paffoonies
I have just finished the final edit of The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. PDMI may not be ready for another novel from me, but it is ready for an editor or beta reader to be looking at it. I will not be making any further changes because of my perception of the shape, style, and meaning of the novel. I need input to proceed. I need to advance to publication.
This novel is about a lot of things. It is science fiction. It is a time-travel and alien-contact story. But the thing it is really about, theme-wise, is friendship. It is about the friends we need, the friends we have, what makes a friend, and how you treat a friend. It is about love. It is about love that has nothing to do with sex. It is about love between boys and girls, about love between boys and other boys, about love between a man who has lost his wife and son and a boy who has lost his best friend, and even about the love between family members who love each other even when they disagree and don’t like each other very much. It is also about love between a boy and his rabbit and how it changes when the rabbit is turned into a rabbit-man by the time machine.
Okay, part of the reason that all sounds so terribly complex, is because of the structure I adopted for this novel. This novel is a unique sort of sequel to Catch a Falling Star. I call it a Prequel-Equal-Sequel because it takes place before, during, and after the events of the other book. The primary characters are also different. The main protagonists in the first book are only minor supporting characters in this book. The supporting characters from Catch a Falling Star, the inventor and bicycle-wheel engineer Orben Wallace, and his next-door neighbor boy, Timothy Kellogg (also the grand and glorious and ludicrously uproarious leader of the Norwall Pirates, a small-town liars club of country boys), have become the protagonists.
It was all a very complicated process to write, but also strangely fun and deeply engaging to do. I originally assumed because it was overly complex and facetious, that it was really not that good.
Re-reading and editing, though, has caused me to think that it actually a very good story. I know that it is not as good a piece of writing as either Snow Babies or Magical Miss Morgan, but it has a very significant part to play in the over-all story arc of my home-town novels. It develops critical characters like the two protagonists, Mike Murphy, Blueberry Bates, Cudgel Murphy, Mary and her daughter Dilsey Murphy, and, of course, Valerie Clarke. So, this is a sort of celebratory post. I have finished another project and must now move on to the phase where I must try to get it published and publicized, packaged and promoted.
Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
At dawn on Friday the 13th in the year of our Lord 1307 King Philip IV of France ordered Knights Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay and as many other members of the Order of Knights Templar as could be found in France to all be arrested. They were accused of crimes against God and the Catholic Church like spitting on the cross, indecent kissing, homosexual practices, and worshiping false idols. It was said they had found the mummified head of John the Baptist during their brief tenure as the rulers and defenders of Jerusalem. It was also said they used it in pagan rituals of black magic. The charges were assumed to be false, even by Philip, but through torture numerous Templars were forced to confess, and their confessions were accepted as evidence by Pope Clement. De Molay and the rest of the Templars in France were burned at the stake before the Vatican could mount an appeal (numerous Templars recanted their confessions as soon as they were out of the torture chamber). Templar property throughout France was seized and Philip’s war debts to the Templars were canceled. One suspects that this was a grand financial power-play worthy of a Bush family member. (Oh, no! Did I just say that in a post? Here comes the NSA.)
You know that historians generally do not credit the Templar story as the true origin of the Friday the 13th superstition. I’m not sure why they have trouble making that connection, but historians generally think that anything that is obvious to the common man can’t possibly be true. I suppose they may be right.
So, I sit here at home alone with my beloved family still Spring Breaking in Florida. It is raining outside. It is cool, almost cold. And I am contemplating sour luck.
One of the things I routinely do is work on a collection when I am feeling blue and subject to diabetic depression. It helps to be able to make a little progress in completing a set or something. Well, I made the mistake of trying to do that at Walmart. The Walton family have something in common with King Philip (and the Bush family) (Hackers added that last parenthetic expression, honest, NSA!). They know a little something about mercenary financial evil. Their empire was built on the backs of underpaid workers which they excuse by claiming they have to do that to keep offering “Always low prices”. But they use all kinds of cheap tricks to keep the big bucks rolling into big pockets and little bucks being sucked out of little pockets like mine. Case in point, I was trying to score another fix in my recent addle-brained Brony addiction by completing a set of Equestria Girls. On the bargain-clearance-sale table was the perfect thing. Pinkie Pie from the Rainbow Rocks series next to a price that said $11. Now, I don’t have Pinkie Pie. I have Rainbow Dash, Twilight Sparkle, and Apple Jack, but Pinkie Pie is the one every little girl (apparently just like this crazy old man) wants first. So, Bazinga! For the first time I could acquire Pinkie Pie and come in under the $20 dollar rule. But, wait just a minute! This is Walmart we are talking about here. The nearest price checker was broken and hadn’t been fixed in months. So I asked a working Walmart minion stocking the toy shelves where the nearest working price checker was. Of course, they didn’t have one anywhere in the store. But shelf-stockers carry a portable pricing gun, and she checked it for me. $21.97! It was actually the same price it would normally be on the shelves. (Granted it is a lower starting price than Toys-R-Us, but it still breaks the $20 rule.) The $11 price was coded for the Rainbow Dash doll that was sitting there next to the Pinkie Pie. They count on me being stupid enough to run to checkout with the wrong price in my head and gleefully pay the higher price without thinking or looking too closely. So I outfoxed them. Rainbow Dash was sitting there at the shelf-damaged, clearance-sale price and it was (after careful inspection) mint in box.
So, that is essentially my point today. Conservative and mega-fearful paranoid people like your usual conspiracy theorist and distrustful Tea-Party Republican would pull back with venom and recount their Second-Amendment rights. Not me. Life gives me lemons and I make… frosted lemon cheesecake with a dash of rainbow. Sure, I think the Bush family are secretly Nazis… but you are not paranoid if there really is a conspiracy and you’ve seen the evidence. But Friday the 13th can be a lucky day. Good things can happen if you make them happen and use the talents and intelligence that God granted you for that very purpose. (I confess, I used to listen to Norman Vincent Peale on the radio and I actually believed his crap about the power of positive thinking.) Let me show you a few more of my bargain-purchase collectible accomplishments;
I do realize that I posed these dolls on Radasha’s face and that I ought to have put old drawings away in their proper portfolio place, not leave them out on the drawing board. But, what do you think I am? Some sort of irresponsible goofy old cartoonist who gets too caught up with playing with dolls, or something? Please don’t answer that.
The Tinkerbell dolls were also from the bargain table, only one of them was priced correctly on the table. The rest are showing you Barbie dresses on dolls I rescued from Goodwill and a Re-Sale store. These are dolls that were naked, abused, and previously loved and played-with by some little girl (or possibly confused little boy). I have a soft spot for rescue dolls that went naked into charity work at the risk of ending up in the garbage bin. They remind me of me when I went into teaching.
Ah, the power of positive thinking! (And I didn’t just add that last sigh to get over the 1000 word goal, either.)
Filed under doll collecting, humor, photo paffoonies
Spring cleaning is how I have spent at least a portion of my lonely invalid’s Spring Break. I get to walk the dog and clean the house while my family is enjoying the somewhat chilly beaches of Florida’s panhandle. Well, it isn’t all misery. As I was cleaning in the library upstairs, I came across a set of drawings from the 1980’s that I had been looking everywhere for. You have no idea what kind of treasure exists under stuff until you start putting stuff in other places. I picked stuff up, and low and behold… treasure. How long since I last moved that stuff? I have no idea. Stuff moves around in the library constantly. Some of the books fly off the shelves in the middle of the night, I swear it. But this stuff wasn’t books, so it was becoming a permanent accretion of stuff. Not yet icky stuff, but it was painter stuff, brushes and oil paints and mixing bowls and acrylic paints and linseed oil and all kinds of stuff that can become very icky in an upstairs room in Texas with no air conditioning.
So, let me give you a look at what I found before I start trying to turn it into writer’s stuff and Paffooney posts.
This first picture is called Bobby, because Bobby Zeffer sat for the portrait of the boy. (You are aware that I don’t use people’s real names in my work. So, Bobby, if you read this post and see this picture, you will have to remember that it is really you.) (No chance of that, though. Bobby is not illiterate, but I know he hates to read.) I could also call it Horatio T. Dogg, because that is the name of the talking dog detective who smokes a pipe and wears a hat and was the main character of a mystery novel that became too silly to finish. It turned out to be one of those stories where I reached the point of having a Tyrannosaurus leap out of a wormhole and eat all the main characters. I gave up on that story rather abruptly.
The second picture is rather obviously Robert Newton playing the part of Long John Silver in the Disney version of Treasure Island. I was still in my twenties when I drew this. I was inspired to try my hand at further portraiture because the picture of Bobby turned out to actually look like him.
The third picture is the reason I was desperate to find these old drawings. It is one of my prescient pictures. I drew it in the 1980’s from an image that haunted my dreams as a young teacher. I later realized how remarkable it was while I was teaching in Cotulla in about 2000. The girl was in my seventh grade fifth period English class. I can’t tell you how many times I had to dig this picture out and stare at her face. Almost twenty years before, six or seven years before she was even born, I drew this girl, and it looks exactly like her. I became even more mystified by this portrait when the boy walked into my classroom last year. He was from Africa. Eritrea to be precise. He was a wonderful, soft-spoken, highly-intelligent boy with a deep Christian faith in God. I almost went crazy searching for this picture so I could compare what I had drawn to the real boy. It turns out he has a bit less hair in real life and a small scar above his left eye. How did I not see that in my dream?
The last picture was designed as a cover for my graphic novel Hidden Kingdom. I have recently revisited that project and I am thinking now more strongly than ever of trying to finish it. I can do a lot of drawing with my arthritic hands as long as I only do a little bit at a time. And this whole drawing thing, this raging addiction, has finally become fun again now that I am retired and have the time to do stuff. Not icky stuff… Treasure!
There are a number of really, really goofy facts about me that I will reveal in today’s post… No one is trying to blackmail me over these things, believe it or not. I have no money. And I have no reputation to protect. I am nobody. Just a silly, goofy, loony old nobody. But I have a few chuckles now and then at my own expense.
Revelation #1; The clown nose in the picture was a souvenir from Cirque du Soleil. We went to see them in a parking lot in Frisco, Texas. They had an actual circus tent. When I was five, I told my parents I wanted to be a clown when I grew up. Nobody believes me when I say it, but I achieved that goal. They say, “But you were a school teacher!”
And I say, “How is that different?”
Honestly, I have worn a clown nose and played harmonica in front of a classroom full of twelve-year-olds. I can make teenagers laugh so hard the principal has to check to make sure they are not gleefully setting me on fire or duct-taping me to the wall. (Duck-taping sounds funnier, but you have to be accurate when describing real events from modern schools.)
Revelation #2; I am a closet nudist.
I used to be associated with the AANR, a nudist/ naturist organization in the latter part of the 1980’s, I met the nudist publishers through stamp collecting and they tried to recruit me. I bought books and videos from them. I have actually been naked for an entire day… once. I knew nudists in Austin where a former girlfriend stayed over several weekends with her sister who lived in the clothing-optional apartment complex on Manor Road. I am not brave enough to walk around physically naked in front of people on a regular basis though. So, I am a closet nudist. Only a nudist in my closet. I get a lot of mileage out of naked jokes in my fiction, though, because, well… naked is funny.
Revelation #3; I keep scrapbooks filled with collages made of pictures from magazines, newspapers, photos I’ve taken, pictures I drew myself, poems, short snippets of things I find funny or ironic or autobiographically important, and secrets like I am sharing with you today. (The picture of Goofy seen here is one I colored myself from one of the old coloring books left over from my kids’ coloring book days. I hate to see unused coloring book pictures go to waste.) I call these my magical tomes because I use them as source material for the spells I weave in my fiction. I also use many of the images for drawing and painting as models. I also discovered I can borrow whole images and make new art using my cheap-o substitute photo-shop program.
Revelation #4; It is totally by accident that I have come to look like the most important character in Snow Babies, the novel that PDMI is slowly publishing for me. Catbird Sandman is an old hobo who wears a coat that has so many patches on it that it 
has become a patchwork crazy quilt. He wanders around the country, appreciating the world and its people, and using his considerable store of mysterious abilities to charm, help, and change people. He carries around a book, a well-worn copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and quotes from it, treating it like a sort of Bible-like source of spiritual wisdom. The character looks like Walt Whitman. And now, though not intentionally, so do I. I grew the beard and long hair because of psoriasis. It attacks me under the edge of my jaw line and all around the back of my head. It is easily scratched and bloodied, and then infected when someone cuts my hair or I try to shave. So I have given up that battle and gone all hippy-dippy. It sorta fits with the whole jobless, shiftless, former nudist sort of persona that I have been cultivating as an author.
So what is the equation Goofy Squared all about? Well, if you take the square root of the four Goofy revelations in this post, you come up with Goofy times two. So Goofy obviously equals one. And I think I have clearly proven that I am the goofy one.
I have to admit to having cheated on my first love. But I have come back now to be faithful from here on out. Last Summer I bought one of those free-refill cups at RaceTrac. But it was unfulfilling. You only get 20 oz. in the free refill cup. And the free refills expired at the end of July. So I have come back to the daily, or even twice daily, 32 oz. cup of Diet Coke from QT. You knew that’s what I meant, right?
I know all the employees at QT at least by sight if not by name. I don’t even have to tell them any more that the plastic cup I am using is a carefully saved and cleaned cup so that I deserve the refill price. (I am not a curmudgeon who has to save ten cents on every purchase. I do it to re-use and recycle and save the planet Earth from wasted plastic. Really I do.) They also know without my saying that even though it says “debit card” on the front, it works as credit. (Except for that one kinda stupid guy who only works the really late and really early shifts.) One of the workers there is a neighborhood kid that was in my class for two days when I was a substitute history teacher at Long Middle School nine years ago. He’s changed a lot from when I first knew him. He has turned from a goofy, bean-bodied twelve-year-old with big brown myopic eyes and a fly that never stayed zipped into a massive hulk of a twenty-one-year old service station associate worker. He doesn’t even realize that I knew him when…
Grandma, Henry, and the Princess on the Beach
…and I know it is kinda pathetic that I am now so limited in my contact with the rest of humanity, especially with the family away in Florida for Spring Break, me stuck at home with illness and a pooping dog, and being retired without any working-man’s daily duties any more, that a visit to QT is the highlight of my day. But it isn’t. The highlight occurs when I start writing. I enjoy laughing at my own funny-bits in this post, and the novel that I am working on… well, flights of fancy is putting it mildly. I have been up in World War I biplane, in the midst of a dogfight between a promising young Allied pilot for the Lafayette Escadrille and a German ace who represents evil incarnate and is being controlled by an evil alien-designed robot from the future. I also have been in the tunnels under Castle Sinistre, or Château Sinistre as it is known in the Somme. There I have been with the time-travelling heroes who are trying to rescue a rabbit-man created by an evolutionary science experiment gone wrong and an insane brother-in-law of the scientist who created the rabbit-man. My imagination breaks free of the stifling cage my old, lame body and my current life have become.
This little essay quite accurately reflects what I write and why I write it. Happy people and healthy people and normal people would all be on the beach instead of where I am now. They would never be home-bound Emily-Dickenson writer-people whose daily highlight is a cup of Diet Coke from QT But I am in the clouds now, somewhere over the rainbow, and I am content, because that’s the corner I’ve written myself into.
Filed under feeling sorry for myself, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
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.
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.
Filed under aliens, autobiography, being alone, Paffooney
It is truly amazing how little snow it takes to totally paralyze a city like Dallas. Chicago would be embarrassed to death at having to close school down on a sunshiny day with less than a foot of snow on the ground. But Dallas likes to build major roadways up into the air so freezing air can hit the underside as well as the upper side of roads that, once shut down by a hideous three-car five-death accident on sheets of super-slippery ice, totally prohibits movement from one side of the metroplex to the other.
I have considerable pain from my arthritis, and I am shut down most of the time anyway. But with the city closed around me, there is not much left to do but sit and write and make fun of southerners who can’t drive on snow because they don’t realize that speeds below seventy miles-per-hour do exist in the real world. I have had time to further work on the final edit of my novel, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. I also had time to submit my novel Magical Miss Morgan to the Chanticleer Book Reviews’ YA novel-writing contest called the Dante Rossetti Awards for Young Adult Fiction. 
I don’t have a head full of straw and really believe I am going to walk away with a top prize. But I did enter this contest before with Snow Babies, and that book made it into the final round. It will help my manuscript get published. Who knows? I may score something bigger than an Indie publisher this time around. Maybe I can get an agent. (Okay, there’s a little straw in there. I will have to clean more carefully next time.)
But old, broken, bed-ridden me with nothing but time to lay around and fiddle with the computer am definitely making good use of my snow day. I took pictures of the snow. I walked the dog in it. And I didn’t have to drive to any schools or school events. Hot dang! What a fine life.
Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, photo paffoonies
Be warned… this is one of those art things that people use to post naughty pictures on the internet. Some of my conservative Christian friends will tell you that the local art museum is one of the most atrocious sources of pornography and images of naked people you can find. It is a terrible thing. People being exposed to what people look like if they take their clothes off! How could I do such a dastardly thing as to draw people… naked?
It is difficult to rationalize my terrible crimes. I mean, the “Beauty and the Beast” picture is clearly the depiction of mental depravity and sex addiction from the mind of a fiend. There could be no other explanation of it, right? I mean, Beauty’s stark nakedness can’t possibly represent fearless innocence in the face of ugliness… or a compounding of meanings that have to do with the notion that true beauty exists also under the outward ugliness of the Beast. After all, I am a cartoonist. How dare I think that I have the same right to draw naked people as some great painter or long-dead artist?
It doesn’t count for anything that I had art training in college and sat through at least two courses in anatomy drawing where I not only drew skeletons and body parts and clothed people, but also sat down in front of live nude models (mostly fellow art students, but all were paid for modeling… I think I posted elsewhere about what happened when it was my turn to model… but I also think you have to search my posts yourself if you want to know more about that embarrassing episode).
I must also confess that I have had some experiences with naturists. Here we are talking about those crazy hippie-inspired folks who go camping in the wilderness with their kids, take off all their clothes, and go hiking and biking and playing volleyball in front of real bears. It was there that the artist in me first noticed there was a difference in anatomy, shape, color, and form between bare kids and bare adults. There are distinct differences between my pictures of Eve and Artemis here, based solely on the fact that one is an adult and the other a child.
I am not trying to depict something evil and horrible that will strike you in the eyes and corrupt your very soul. I am not a pornographer or a pervert when I create these drawings and share them with you. They really represent only about one per cent of all the drawings in my portfolio. They represent mainly my need to get the form and lighting right on the most fundamental level. They are an attempt to share something about what is like to be human. Being naked is a part of the life of everyone except the most monumental of prudes who don’t ever get naked and probably wear long underwear in the bathtub even in the summer. Let me end with the first paragraph of Kenneth Clark’s 1956 book, The Nude; a study in ideal form.
“The English language, with it’s elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word “nude” on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. In fact, the word was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the eighteenth century to persuade the artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central object of art.”
So, you see? I am not merely making excuses for posting naughty pictures on my blog. At least, not unless all artists are making the same excuses and there is a vast world-wide conspiracy to put pornography in every art museum… Conspiracy? Wait a minute… let me think about that some more.
Catch a Falling Star 