Yep. Danged snake-men used to keep me awake as a kid. Kept checking under the bed… the closets… Could one of them swim through the plumbing and get into the upstairs toilet? One never knows. Drawing them was a way to make them go away.
Tag Archives: humor
Another Danged Stuffed Animal
One of the features of the stuffed animal collection I have been building since my first son was born is the random goofy animal that is hard to identify. This is a possible Cool Cat minus shades and beret.There are spots where something has been lost and corresponds to what is missing. However, he does not have the simpering smile that I would expect on the puss of that 60’s cartoon critter. He does have an appreciation for good literature.
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What Does Paffooney Mean?
You may have noticed the word “Paffooney” used in some of my posts. You may have been deceived into thinking it is some kind of real word. Sorry. It isn’t. It’s my own original made-up word for postable buffoonery, baloney, and goofiness… with accompanying picture. Yes, the picture is the key, though it may have no discernible connection to whatever the heck I happen to be writing about. It is an illustration for illustration’s sake… and a story for the sake of putting words with the picture. I confessed early in my blogging endeavors that I am basically a surrealist. I juxtapose disparate images and ideas and make meaning by forcing the relationship. Of course, you have no idea at all what I just said, and rightly so, because I tend to speak in college-art-history-meta-cognitive-gobblety-gook-speak, a language I first learned in college and have since banged into weird word-sculptures over the last thirty-three years by trying to explain things in a classroom to teenagers. (I love the job, but I do not recommend it for those with a loosening grip on sanity.)
So, here is the definition; Paffooney, proper noun, (Origin from a silly blogger’s head, consisting of Paff, meaning a silly cartoon sound effect, and fooney an even sillier derivation from buffoon and looney.) A silly picture and post combination caused by a brain fart or other gaseous anomaly inside Mickey’s head.
Forgive me, for I know my sins are many.
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Paffooney Wisdom
Life is like a cartoon car chase in one of Floyd Gottfredson’s 1930’s Mickey Mouse comic strips. No, really, it is! You never know what is going to happen in the next frame. Will the alien space craft scoop up Junior as he flies out of the rumble seat? Fifty-fifty chance, don’t you think? Will Crocko Diddly-Dial catch up and eat everybody in the car? Probably not if it was a G-rated comic strip… and it was.
The only control we have over life are the reactions we can manage as we go and bad things continue to happen to us. We are trapped by the cliff and the river, so we jump the car successfully across. If we are successful, we bounce onto the road on the other side, and Crocko falls into the river. Of course it is the road to nowhere and the chase only ends when the cartoon of life reaches the last panel.
Okay, so that all sounds very scary, and we must hope that Mickey is merely crazy, and not on to something real in this metaphorical thesis of mayhem. Yet, there is a way to effectively deal with the car chase. We need to treat it all as a cartoon, a comic book story, and simply laugh.
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The Thumb-Sucker
The Thumb-Sucker
Darkness surrounds us
As the nighttime moves in
And we feel overwhelmed
And burdened by sin
But comfort can come
From a place we’ve all been
Just open your mouth
And shove your thumb in
Our childhoods were happy
And made us all grin
And simple we were
With our little thumbs in
So as we’re all worried
And all feeling dumb
We can make it all better
By sucking our thumb
(Silly poems and blue cartoons are a specialty of mine. I’m no Ogden Nash, but I make it all rhyme.)
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Diz, Boz, the Bard, and Me
I wrote the other day about the fact that my writing is music in my head. Now, I realize there are probably a number of things wrong with my head, and Lord knows, it may truly need a good cleaning… er, well, not a brainwashing if that’s what you had in mind. No, what I need is to clarify the meaning of what I said, to restate in a less metaphorical and obscure way.
I have this insane notion that I am a good writer. Believe me, I am aware of the fact that every Indie author with a self-published novel has the same crazy fantasy right now. I imagine that my humor is like Mark Twain’s, my characterizations like Charles Dickens (Boz), my themes and insights like William Shakespeare (the Bard), and my creativity akin to that of Walt Disney (Diz).
I plan to write about it in a novel that used to be called The Little Boy Crooner, and now labors on under the title Sing Sad Songs… with Clowns. Don’t be fooled by the fact that I call this idea-thing a novel. It is not complete. There is no flesh on the bare bones. If it were one of the walking dead, it would not even qualify as a zombie. It is an animated skeleton. It is a notion about how words and ideas become and are transmitted by musical means.
The main character is a young boy named Francois Martin, the singing clown-boy in the Paffooney above. He is orphaned by a terrible car wreck in France, then sent to the only living relatives he has, who happen to live in Norwall, Iowa. Yes, that same goofy little farm town where I grew up and far too many of my novels are set. The Norwall Martins own the town tavern, where the bachelor head of the family, Victor (also known as the Vicar), is trying to make a go of it by putting in his bar a new-fangled bar-thing called karaoke.
As you’ve probably guessed, Francois, though he is awkward and unable to communicate in English, is a natural at singing karaoke. He puts on the clown paint and sings for his supper, and brings people into the bar from all across the State, and eventually the whole Midwest.
The clown images come through his connections to the Dreamlands… the same fantasy world of dreams alluded to in the novels of H.P. Lovecraft. Three clowns, Mr. Disney (Diz), Mr. Dickens (Boz), and Mr. Shakespeare (the Bard) help the boy and his American cousin Billy travel back and forth to the Dreamlands and learn to understand each other in ways that family members should. I should warn you, the new title reveals the fact that all dreams are not happy dreams and all endings are not happy endings. But we shall try… Diz, Boz, the Bard, and I.
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Why Sci-Fi?
In 1969, the summer after I had to travel to a new school in another town, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. I stayed up and awake that entire summer night, as did my whole family, watching everything the TV was able to show. I vowed to myself that summer that I, too, would one day walk on another world. My fantasy was, as I’m sure most thirteen-year-old boys in the entire world agreed, was to be the first Earth man to set foot on Mars.
I set out to get myself into the Air-Force Academy in Colorado Springs. We visited there during one of our yearly family tent-camping car trips. It was an elegant, pristine dream. But life has a way of putting needle holes in the balloons that make up the loftiest of dreams. I developed bursitis and eventually arthritis by the time I was eighteen. My eyes were always too myopic to ever become an astronaut. Then Challenger blew up. Reagan, who didn’t believe in the U.S. Government as a way to accomplish important things, or at least, didn’t believe in spending money for such things when that money didn’t go into the pockets of his rich friends, changed young boy’s dreams. Our trajectory towards Mars was slowed.
So, do you let dreams die? Never me. No, not I. I would still travel there. But I could not take my physical body. I would have to go by the ship of imagination. I would have to rely on the fantastic inner eye.
Some of my junior high English students and I took up role-playing games. We graduated from Dungeons and Dragons into the space fantasy game called Traveller. We fought space wars, built space colonies, absorbed Doctor Who, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and The Last Starfighter. All things were possible. With a role of the dice, you could save the universe. And so my novel Aeroquest was born.
Catch a Falling Star and all the stories I have percolating now continue that plan, that goal, that young boy’s dream of placing his feet on another world. Today’s Paffooney is a symptom of that illness, not an absolute definition of it. Young Buster Crabbe, if you can’t tell, is the human boy in the picture.
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Hear the Music
Hear the Music (a love poem)
The singer sings his song,
And wants the world to sing along,
Though the world has gone all wrong,
And the darkness stays too long.
The singer warms and croons,
Under bright romantic moons,
And carries hopeful tunes,
To the listening dolts and loons.
Can a song bring truth to light?
Can it help us win the fight?
Does it ease the world’s plight?
And set the wrongs aright?
Yes a song can save the world,
Though the truth must be unfurled,
And the listeners’ ears are twirled.
So the hurts will all be pearled.
Okay, okay… goofy poetry, I know. That’s the way I am. I have a goopy-sappy-goofy faith in the power of words. I call the chapters of my fiction Cantos because I believe them to be musical compositions and pieces of poetry. Ooh, what a goof that I am! But I really do believe that the words of a song, the stories in a book, or the beat of a poem can save lives, change worlds, and make all things better. Why would I believe that? Because words and ideas have power. And as I feel my mortality creeping nearer and nearer, I am feeling more and more power in my words. I almost have to burst into song like some sappy musical… like Camelot, like My Fair Lady, like Man of LaMancha. Like the stupid boy in the Paffooney, I have to sing. I have my impossible dreams.
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“A Portrait of Mark Twain”
Here is an old pencil drawing from 1980. It shows MT as an observer of all that country cornpone stuff that makes up his humor and written genius. It also shows the loyal dog that would dearly love to get his teeth into that piece of chicken.
November 21, 2013 · 2:38 am
Many, Many Murphys
In both the books Snow Babies and The Bicycle-Wheel Genius I used the characters of the Magnificent Murphy Clan to weave actual people from my past into my stories. The Murphys; Mary and Warren, Warren’s father Sean “Cudgel” Murphy, Mary’s and Warren’s kids, Danny, Dilsey, Mike, Little Sean, Daisy, Sarah, Thomas “Pumpkin” Murphy, and Baby Jane all live together in a small, four- bedroom house dubbed “Murphy Mansion”.
Here is a look at a Paffooney of the irrepressible Mary Murphy with daughter Dilsey, and Little Sean on her shoulders.,
And here is one of my anti-hero Pirates, Mike Murphy with his little girlfriend Blueberry Bates.
Mike has the distinction of being in all three of my Norwall Novels, a very rare character indeed. And, NO, that doesn’t mean that he is me just because we have the same first name… Okay, maybe a little bit me, but that’s just the nature of writing silly novels about adventures through time and space and farm-town Iowa. I’m hoping to make you curious enough to buy one of my books. Catch a Falling Star is available as a hardback, paperback, or e-book from Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and the link here to I-Universe. But I know you are far too smart for me, and I can never hook you just on the strength of my nerdy humor or my implausible Paffoonies. Here’s hoping a look at the Murphys will help.
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Catch a Falling Star 