Here you see me doing some serious art-starting. I am working on ideas about how clowns can be compassionate. I am hoping this is true, because I am one… a clown, I mean. But I have some serious noodle and doodle work to do. So I will start with a doodle of Klown Kops from Klowntown’s finest. More will be explained later… and more will be doodled too.
Filed under clowns, compassion, doodle, humor, new projects, Paffooney Posts
The 1000 Voices Facebook initiative wants me to write about Compassion more. I am totally in favor of more compassion in the world. But how do I get there from the somewhat sarcastic and derisive author-voice I use to create humor on my blog?
Well, I do believe compassion and humor are not incompatible. In fact, I have good reason from the realm of personal experience to believe that compassion is the fertilizer most necessary to the ultimate flowering and bloom of wondrous things. (See, the Grammar Nazis did teach me to spell wondrous right!)
Let me start with a character analysis of a witch. Yes, you heard me correctly. Mazie Haire is a witch. She is a secondary character from my novel Snow Babies. Her sister, Jeanette Haire is also a witch. They are both cantankerous, people-hating old ladies who have lived their lives in spite-filled isolation. They don’t even like each other very much. They also both “have the knowing”. They can both use their prodigious powers of observation, insight, and imagination to know things about other people, even if they’ve only just met. Mazie has kept the town of Norwall gossiping for two decades at her uncanny ways and unpleasant presence.
During the killer blizzard that hits the little Iowa farm town, Jeanette Haire is riding the Trailways bus headed to surprise her elder sister Mazie with an unwelcome visit. The bus ends up in a ditch in white-out blizzard conditions. A young woman on the bus with Jeanette loses her newlywed husband in the storm. As they reach the little town (due to heroic actions on the part of at least one main character in the book) Jeanette offers to take the young woman in during her time of grief, even though the only shelter and solace she can offer is her sister’s house where she herself isn’t welcome. The young woman has lost everything in the world that matters to her. She is left to the mercy and compassion of witches. Will they actually help her? Or will they cook her and eat her? Well… I’m hoping you will buy the book to find out… If I can just get the thing actually published.
Today’s Paffooney is a portrait of Mazie, based not on the real-life character I knew as a boy, but taken from the face of a beautiful young model. In the book Mazie is made to recall the beauty of her youth. If you look carefully at the gimlet eyes of the sour old woman, you may be able to detect at least a smidgen of the clear-eyed beauty she once was. It is possible for any person, no matter how bilious or contrary they may have become, to connect with someone else by the heart when they realize the deeper connections they may possess without knowing it. Not every act of kindness is committed by a saint. Sometimes the sinner does the same. It turns out the two sister witches do not eat the young widow. They offer her instead… well… I already have my 500 words, so I will end here.
Filed under compassion, humor, Paffooney, witches
Yes, Futterwacken, the dipsy-doodah dance of the Mad Hatter. That is what life has been for me of late. This is my first school year in 33 years wherein I will not be teaching at all. The two jobless school years in 2005 to 2007 saw me teaching a cappella without a safety net (in laymen’s terms, substitute teaching- where a good sub can be called at the last possible minute to fly across town to take the class from hell that the regular teacher can’t tame with a whip and a chair. (Personal survival is entirely optional.) ) (Wow! I never pulled off a parenthetic expression inside a parenthetic expression before.) Being now in the eighth month of the Mad Tea Party of retired-teachery-ness, I have never truly been so free and schedule-lite before. I have pulled off repairing siding and painting the house while being arthritic and extra-wobbly on an aluminum ladder. I have registered two children for school three times (my son Henry in two different schools this school year). I have written and completed three novels (The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, The Magical Miss Morgan, and Superchicken). I have signed a contract to get one published in extreme slow-motion (Snow Babies). And I have managed this blog with the latest accomplishment being 36 daily blog posts in a row and uncounted Paffooney pictures, both photographical and colored-pencilical. I have invented three new words in this blog post alone (according to my computer spell-checker who was apparently an anal-retentive old-maid school teacher from the New England countryside in a past life.) So, imagining myself as a Mad Hatter, dancing a disjointed dance where my head spins like a top, is not so far out after all. Let me share with you one last wacky Paffooney choice for no particular reason…
Or maybe this Paffooney was to honor the comic book artist Murphy Anderson who inspired it. (Yeah! I’m gonna go with that explanation).
Okay, I know that is the squirreliest title possible, but it has been the squirreliest situation you can imagine. At the beginning of the year, the Texas school-rule system of shoot-from-the-hip-and-let-somebody-else-take-the-blame educational decisions pinched us into a small ball and tossed us into a basket where we didn’t deserve to be. My middle child was forced to repeat his eighth grade year of schooling because of last Spring’s hospital stay and missing the sacred State test that you must pass or forever after be shamed and classed as an ugly duckling in a world full of swans. He was dying of sheer boredom at having to re-take those classes. He is a gifted student with above-average intelligence and a super-power of asking his father questions so difficult and numerous that it makes his father’s head explode. (The exploded head is mine if my third-person-ness is confusing you). So, at the half year, we tried to get him into Creekview High School. We had a counselor on our side who had told my wife that Henry belonged in high school. Except, at enrollment time, we never got to talk to her. An assistant principal looked at the fact that he had not taken the sacred State test (tests, actually… you have to pass Reading, Math, Writing, Science, and History… all made harder by the State with every passing year) and told us to go back to middle school, do not pass Go, and do not collect 200 dollars. That cruelty was not unexpected. It is the way education works in Texas.
So, today we went to re-enroll him in the middle school. But the counselor from there, the very excellent counselor who was responsible for Henry last year, knew all the reasons that school was a bust for Henry last spring and also knew how wonderfully, intensely smart he really is. She insisted that the high school was the only right place for him. She contacted the higher administration on our behalf, and Henry’s former 6th grade principal, now assistant superintendent for the district, agreed. The decree was given and several good people who were in our corner were vindicated. And here’s the part that made me tear up. Henry got his wish to be in high school with the kids that were his friends in middle school last year. Miraculously… unexpectedly… the gods of Texas education decided to smile on my family for a change.
Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney
Yes, I am a mess… an unmitigated, ten-year-old-tuna-salad-sandwich-on-the-floor sort of mess. Cleaning is difficult. I have arthritis which makes movement difficult. I have diabetes which saps my energy and makes me constantly ill. I have four other incurable diseases as well, hypertension, BPH (benign prostatic hyperplasia), psoriasis, and COPD (chronic obstructed pulmonary disorder). I can’t move. I can’t breathe. And there are long periods of time when I can’t even think. I do have a great deal of free time, however, because I was forced to retire from teaching for physical reasons, and having 31 years of experience in the books gives me a full pension negotiated back in the eighties when teachers weren’t universally reviled as money-sponge parasites the way they are now. (Texas Education has always run on the philosophy that teachers can achieve way more for far less money if you are properly mean to them and bully them and make them worry about being fired for low test scores enough that they won’t stop to think and possibly remember that they also have rights as a human being). So my bedroom art-and-writing studio is total chaos. And I am beginning to believe that I must clean it before some part of the biomass absorbs enough magical energy to become sentient and eats me in the night.
I made a resolution to clean it. Of course, wifey won’t help me. She unreasonably points out that since I can no longer share a room because of my chronic pain and numerous ailments, the mess is all made by me and she has no guilt or shame coming to her from not cleaning it for me. She has her own mess and her own ailments to worry about. And I live with two of my three children still in the house, but both, unfortunately teenagers now, and both making twice or three times the mess that I do. They too unreasonably refuse to clean up any messes they didn’t specifically (and provably) make themselves. The dog actually helped with the old tuna sandwich thingy. I think she killed it and ate it while it was contemplating growing legs. But she has been little use to me for putting books back on shelves, picking up smelly socks (without eating them), and folding clean laundry.
So, it all boils down to me getting up the stiff resolve to do ten or fifteen minutes of cleaning at a time as many times a day as I can manage and cleaning it myself. Of course, I found a mysterious old bottle with some kind of imp in it. I have been rubbing it really, really hard and trying to make a genii appear. I can wish the room clean… right after the wish for a bazillion dollars and a brand-new teenage body… um, how many wishes do I get? I might like to turn wifey into a Jessica Alba clone. And I could use a new car… I need to keep looking under the bed. Maybe there are TWO bottles like that!
Maybe I shouldn’t be revealing what my inner sanctum looks like at the moment. Yes, that might be a huge mistake. But I am old and ill and nothing much really seems that big a deal any more. And, besides, I am looking forward to posting post-cleaning-frenzy pictures to impress you with how much everything has changed. (Yeah, that will happen.)
Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies
It has been more than a semester now that I have not been a teacher. I am missing it mightily. I even miss the yelling and screaming, the name-calling and the crazy-eyed threats against life and limb. And that’s just me. I miss what the kids always did too. This was driven home to me as I tried to move my middle child from one school to another. We were hoping to get a bit of a break on his placement. He is a gifted child with a penchant for bizarre and long-lasting obsessions. He has a talent for building huge, monumental structures in Minecraft. He is very computer-nerd and history-wonk. (Yes, I know those are not pure predicate adjectives, but I am a retired English teacher and just don’t care any more.) I was hoping they could overlook his burnout/blowout eighth-grade brain meltdown from the previous year and give him the chance to be a ninth grader for at least half a year. No. Arbitrary rules must be obeyed. (That isn’t even how she said it. More like, arbitrary rules MUST be obeyed). That meant of course that he has to continue to repeat the mindless indoctrination of year number 9, (eight numbered grades plus K), (And Pre-K, come to think of it.) Make that year number 10. No high school yet, though he is more than mature enough, intelligent enough, motivated enough, and sweet-natured enough. We are not loving and forgiving people. We are strict and by-the-book people! Forgive me, Lord. I am writing my own book. (In more ways than one.)
This is what we are doing wrong in Education;
1. We are putting people in boxes. (Little people. Kids mostly. We are calling those boxes things like ADHD, Special Education, trouble-maker, learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, disobedient, truant, and “in need of alternative education”… here meaning kid-prison.)
2. We are sealing those boxes with heavy-duty red tape. (Read special or remedial classes as waste-baskets for keeping the rabble and the riff-raff out of the good teachers’ hair.)
3. We are routinely handing those boxes to the box-bangers and package manglers. (The semi-incompetent teachers who have discipline problems because in teacher college nobody tells you what to do with the kid who sits in the corner and sings to himself instead of paying attention, or the girl who gets out of her seat every time the teacher turns his back to go flitting around the room like a bumble bee going flower to flower (except that it is a more hormonal attraction and goes boy to boy); or the competent teacher like me who incurs the principal’s disfavor for having classes that always make noise and are given such classes in boxes as a punishment because that kind of principal is too limited in intelligence to understand that those kinds of boxes are not really a punishment if you merely take a moment to examine the treasures they contain.)
4. We keep the boxes air-tight so that no oxygen or light gets in. (To suffocate learners under piles of worksheets and endless drill and practice is murder. We are killing the precious learners with boring stuff and teaching them to be zombies who all act alike and hate learning because their brains are rotted masses of goo.)
This is what we must do instead;
1. Open the boxes up again and thoroughly mix the contents. (The rich suburban parents will resent the heck out of having their precious honors student sitting in class next to the poor black kid from the projects, but studies show that both kinds of learners do better when they are mixed together.)
2. Notice, we don’t need two any more, because learners are already distributed to different and diverse boxes based on what they individually need and want to learn about and have talent for. Groups should be more like the Shakespeare-loving group or the talkative-socializing group or the Tinker-toy builders group or the vampire-literature-writing group and less like groups of kids all the same color or all the same culture or all the same age.
3. All the teachers need to be trained to handle all the possible… no, make that probable problems that may come up in the classroom. Every classroom needs a proven veteran teacher and an enthusiastic young apprentice teacher. Neither one should have to face the evil hordes alone. And most important of all, any teacher who doesn’t love working with kids (and doesn’t love the kids in a way that will not lead to a prison term) needs be utilized in some way other than as a classroom teacher.
4. Every classroom is a laboratory and every teacher is a creative and daring mad-scientist-type intent on trying new things and only re-doing things that really work well. Forget this nonsense about standard curriculum goals and common core curriculum. Those are only buzz words for suffocating learners and being too lazy to think on your feet in the middle of the every-day classroom battle in the on-going War on Ignorance.
Now you see… I have all the answers and I know everything. The only mystery is… why don’t more people listen to me?
My name is Skaggs. I am a cat. It is as simple as that. I have to tell you, life is not very fair to cats. In my last life I was an alley cat. I lived on rats that bred and thrived under the water tower in the alley behind the small-town post office. I was basically happy. You have heard the old expression, “happy as a cat”, right? I could kill and eat any rat I wanted at any time, no matter how big of a Mickey he thought he was. I was good at ripping out rat guts and breaking mouse spines. I was the baddest cat in the whole damn town.
But I had to share my alley with a dog. That Barky Bill was an insane killer canine that the owner of the local restaurant and bar kept chained behind his Main Street building to keep the rats away from the restaurant garbage. I hated that dog with a hate as great as a vampire has for the sun. (What’s that you say? You didn’t know that cats knew about vampires? Silly human, how little you know about the things that should truly scare you in the world. Cats, vampires, and Barky Bill are far more complicated issues in the world than you realize.) Anyway, needless to say, I teased that dog on a heavy chain leash for the better part of three years when one day, to my utter horror, I discovered he was loose at the same time that I was totally focused on catching and eating a beautiful gold-colored squirrel. I was so sure that the squirrel would be the finest thing that any cat had ever eaten, that I didn’t even notice, mainly because I had that squirrel right between my paws, toying with it before devouring it, that the dog was pouncing. Barky Bill bit clean through my neck. It was so shocking that even as I was being transported to life number seven, my severed head watched in confusion and fright as that ugly, smelly dog ate my finely tuned rat-catching body.
So, having been a bad, bad Leroy Brown sort of cat, I was sentenced to a next life with a crazy cat lady. Miss Velma Proddy owned at least fifty cats. I was reborn in an underwear drawer in her back bedroom, the one she kept for the company that she never had. My mother was the cat called Pinkie, even though she was a milk-white cat. My father was Proddy’s favorite, a tomcat called Tom Selleck. He would’ve killed and eaten me soon after I was born because my mother was not a very dominant fighter and alpha cats like Tom could always sense when a cat filled with pure evil is born. But Proddy was having none of that. She rounded up all the kittens and raised them in a blanket box in the corner of the kitchen near the stove. I owe that woman everything, which is why I don’t understand why she had to go and buy Pepe.
Pepe is more of a malnourished rat than a dog. Like a lot of Chihuahuas he trembles a lot, and he blinks at you with those big round eyes of his. Proddy thinks that everything he does is so cute. She carries him around like a prize possession or a human baby or something. In my past life I was a white cat like my mother. (Everyone knows that when a cowboy wears a white hat, it means he’s a good guy, but when a cat has white fur, it means that it is evil.) In this, my seventh incarnation, owing to the fact that my father was a gray tiger cat, I was a sort of white cat with gray tiger stripes. It meant I thought like a tiger. Pepe looked like a rat to me. Pepe was prey. Pepe was meat. I was going to eat him.
“You tell this story so scary, Señor Skaggs,” says Pepe, “you make me so afraid!”
“Shut up, stupid dog. I’m telling this. And you are not afraid. Remember what happened that time I tried to drown you in the toilet?”
“Si. I remember well. That time with the super-fancy drinking bowl.”
“I saw you trying to hold on to the plastic toilet seat and dip your tiny little tongue into the water that was too far below you to reach. Only your hind legs and stupid little tail were even visible.”
“Si! And you jumped up to smack me on my cute little behind and push me in. I remember.”
“But I was surprised that such a little dog could react so fast and leap so far.”
“Si, Señor. I jumped right on that handle and flushed it.”
“Just as I fell into the water. That would’ve been the start of number eight if Proddy hadn’t come along right then.”.
“Oh, you make me laugh so hard, Señor. And she was so mad at you for playing with the toilet!”
“And you remember the time I almost got you with that pot of boiling water and hard-boiled eggs?”
“Si, Señor. You got up on the kitchen counter right next to the stove. I was sitting on the floor in front of the stove sniffing up all the smell of the bacon. You tried to push the pot off the stove.”
“I still haven’t figured out how you planned it. The bald spots I have all around my front paws are still there from my fur catching on fire. You must’ve been sitting in the precise spot on the floor where I couldn’t knock the pot down on you without passing my paws through the flames.”
“You owe that one to Señora Proddy too. She had that fire extinguisher next to the stove. That saved you from being cooked cat-burgers. And you looked so funny when she almost drowned you in that white foamy stuff. Oh, you make me laugh so hard Señor.”
Well, I am guessing that I made my point by now. This little underfed rat of a dog is more evil than I am! The harder I try to kill and eat him, the more I suffer for it. And I still don’t know how he does it! He makes my life miserable. He needs to die.
“Oh, you make me laugh so hard, Señor!”
Filed under humor, Paffooney, short story
In the last episode of Expelling Evil, Grammar Nazis, we saw the Captain Action Hero-Action-Guy Team move into Mickey’s Library with the speed of a Republican in Congress when there is legislation to be passed. The heroes were prepared to battle Dr. Evil and evil Dr. Evil’s evil minions. Captain Carl Action had encountered and pacified the evil minion known as the Agent in Red. He found ways to capture and interrogate her that, while not the least bit effective, were something that he really, really enjoyed.
So Carl, taking his time… an entire week if you can believe it! decided to extend his interrogation even longer, in spite of chapped lips and the total absence of lip balm. It was then that Colonel Komma and his evil Grammar Nazis decided to move in and attack the foolish hero-guy with Blitzkrieg word war.
It was true. I went back to that post and looked it up. The word wondrous was spelled w-o-n-d-E-r-o-u-s! Stupid Captain Carl! How could he be so heroically stupid? He let my wonderful, nearly perfect, purple paisley prose get possessed by a common, ordinary spelling demon. The Grammar Nazis had him in an impossible position. And his only response to the terrible situation? He misuses an apostrophe, placing it on a plural noun that is not possessive!
Then, just as Colonel Komma moved in for the editorial kill, Captain Carl came up with the perfect defense. He used his super-power of super stupidity as a shield. He successfully argued that you cannot be defeated by editing of your poor grammar if you don’t understand what they are talking about. Fortunes of war were suddenly reversed!
Captain Carl was not the only Captain Action present. Captain Bill Newguy Action stepped in to disarm the Grammar Nazi with his famous whack-a-doo smacketty-smack punch. The Grammar Nazis were defeated by the hypocrisy of trying to correct English grammar with such a thick accent that they were actually forcing the cartoonist to misspell stuff on purpose to accurately represent the weird sounds in their Grammar Nazi speech balloons.
Colonel Komma was no longer the kapturing konqueror he was hoping to be. Instead he had become the kaptured kook. But Mickey was still no nearer to having his X-Box back for playing EA Sports Baseball ’04. Dr. Evil still had control of that.
Oh, noooooo! Again!
Filed under cartoons, doll collecting, humor, Paffooney
What is a Paffooney? A looney-tuney, full of goony-balloony-cartoony-buffooney? Well, obviously Paffooney is a word made up by me in the Suessian style, to rhyme and dance and sing for a while… Um, where was I going with this? Yeah. It is a word made up by me with three poetic beats in it, a suggestion of the buffoon, the cartoon, the looney tune, to be used to represent one of my wacky doodles set to words. I blog with that word in my tags to bring together a certain style of post that defines me as a writer and artist.
Some of my posts and Paffoonies help me to define myself and my mission in life. Here are a couple of examples of this kind of Paffooney post.
https://catchafallingstarbook.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/in-the-minds-eye/
Some of my posts use Paffooney pictures to promote a book I am working on and give insight into the creation of one of my babies, my silly stories, my liar’s tales about everything that is true in life.
https://catchafallingstarbook.wordpress.com/2014/11/16/miss-morgans-class/
https://catchafallingstarbook.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/my-latest-novel/
Some are simply silly humor posts, meant to make merry mirth and make you laugh a little laugh.
Still others describe and critique the things I read and see and that have an effect on me. Of course, critique is probably the wrong term. I only describe things I can really gush about. I don’t post about stuff I hate. Who has time for that?
And then there’s the kind of post I am doing now, about doodling something and waiting to see where the doodles take me.
Today’s Paffooney is a drawing of a dippy chihuahua, a potentially evil cat, and a pear-shaped rat. Where does this go from here? I honestly don’t even know. We must wait and see what the future brings. (Clearly I am trying to hook the foolish readers (who come to this blog just to see how dippy I can be) so that they will be thoroughly tempted to come back for more another day. And I have even pulled the trick of referencing other dippy posts that might make you click-sick enough to get totally lost in a Mickian maze of Paffooney Posts. I am such an evil genius that I even exploit myself sometimes.)
Filed under humor, Paffooney, Paffooney Posts
Here is the world where Stardusters and Lizardmen is set. It is the environmental nightmare known as the planet Galtorr Prime. It is the world where Sizzahl was born and where young George Jetson, the Telleron cadet from Xiar’s exploration command has to find a new place to colonize. I should explain that of the characters from this novel excerpt, George Jetson, Davalon, Brekka, Menolly, and Tanith are Telleron tadpoles, or children. Alden and Gracie Morrell are a middle-aged farm couple from Iowas that were turned back into children in a previous adventure. Let me share with you a Canto from this work in progress….
Canto Ten – Aboard Golden Wing Sixteen Near an Abandoned Space Station
Looking for interesting places to explore, the tadpole crew of Wing Sixteen spotted the abandoned orbital station before sensors could detect it. The sensors were set to find life-forms, lizard men in particular, and the instruments all said that none existed on the space platform. In fact, it was apparently devoid of all life but a few plants.
“Can you dock with that thing?” Tanith asked George Jetson.
“Of course I can. I am programmed to be the best wing pilot you have ever seen.”
“And you are programmed to be the most modest Telleron we have ever seen too,” said Brekka.
“Or maybe the one with the biggest gonopodium and the smallest brain,” said Menolly.
George just laughed as he focused his instruments on the docking bay.
“What’s a gonopodium?” Alden asked Davalon.
“Father, you would call it a penis,” said Davalon.
“Oh.” Alden’s forty-year-old sense of propriety turned his twelve-year-old face a bright crimson red.
“Why do you suppose there are no personnel on that station,” Tanith asked everyone in general.
“Maybe there is something wrong with it,” suggested Gracie Morrell. “Maybe they had to abandon ship.”
“Maybe,” said Davalon, looking carefully at the sensor monitor. “But I don’t see anything wrong with the on-board systems. They are all operating like they work perfectly. That station has air we can breathe, water we can drink, and no alarms are going off anywhere. It’s as if they abandoned a perfectly good station.”
“Well,” said George Jetson, “we can find the answer by going in and taking a look around.” He said that just as he pulled a control lever that thrust the wing forward to meet the docking ring and impacted the station so hard that everyone on board was knocked senseless.
“George! What did you just do?” Davalon asked from his new position prostrate on the floor of the control pit.
“Um, I meant to dock with the docking port, but it appears I may have embedded the wing in the side of the space station.”
“Oh, this can’t be good,” moaned Tanith, rubbing the greenish-brown knobby bruise that now blossomed on her pretty forehead.
Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
