Tag Archives: irony

February 2, 2023 · 2:48 am

Rabbit People

On days when I am still recovering from life-altering blows, I often try to find new realms, alternate realities to live in. (Retreating into a fantasy world is one of the reasons she gave for leaving.) And since, as a youth in Iowa, I raised rabbits for a 4-H project, I know rabbits better than I do human people. Rabbits are people too. So, I have been walking among the rabbit people. Seriously, bunnies are better people than most human people. They are not trying to profit off you. They are not trying to get everything they can off you. They are merely there to wiggle their whiskers, sniff for food, poop, gnaw on stuff, and make more bunnies.

I often see myself as a rabbit person. In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.

As a teacher, I am always pulling out carrots of irony and gnawing on the ends of them in front of students. If they complain that eating food in class is supposed to be against the rules, I ask them, “Do you want a carrot of irony?”

“Oh, no, thank you sir.”

“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight. You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”

“Oh, no sir,” they say. “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”

And so, I taught on like that… like a rabbit, fast and frumious (a Jabberwocky sort of word), and never really bit anybody. Teaching is like that. You offer the good healthy stuff to nourish their little animal minds, and they always choose the junk food instead.

And so life goes on like that. Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.

I have recently run a free-book promotion on The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.One of the main characters in the book is Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit Millis. During the course of the story about invading aliens, Secret Agent Robots from the CIA, and making friends when you need friends, Millis is turned into a rabbit-man by a lab accident. He teaches Tommy that you don’t have to be human to be a good, caring, self-sacrificing person. He also teaches him to eat his carrots and greens like a good boy should.

So, I will spend more time with the rabbit people and heal a little bit. That is what you do with the tragedy that life brings you. You spin it into whole cloth, making humor and poetry out of everything bad that happens… wrapping yourself up in a comforting blanket of lies (you can also call those fiction stories), and eating a little chicken soup on a cold day to heal your soul. (Oh, I forget, rabbits often gag on chicken soup. Let’s make that bean soup with carrot chunks.)

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Filed under humor, irony, Paffooney, rabbit people

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, drawings, goofiness, humor, irony, paffooney, rabbit people

July 11, 2022 · 3:33 pm

The Irony of Regular Blogging

This is an old artwork I have never shared before, except when I originally shared this post in 2016 and again in 2018. I can’t say it is my best work. But there it is.

There are many things that I have noticed about being a blogger that are the opposite of what you might expect. Let me list a few…

Listing stuff makes a daily post easier.
I have posted something on WordPress as a blogger every day for five hundred and eight straight days. I will try to hit two years in a row without missing a day for the second time.
Writing every day makes the ideas flow more easily rather than running out of ideas. The well refills faster than I can drink its waters constantly.
My most popular post is Be Naked More , which gets views practically every day, but including artistic nudes randomly in a post does not increase its views and popularity even when I put “naked” and “nude” in the tags.

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Reproducing artwork on a blog is difficult when you draw things too big for your little scanner/printer. No matter how good the camera and how bright the lighting, white becomes gray, and the sparkle and luster of good colored pencil color is lost.
Good writing becomes more about writing less. But it also has to be more carefully crafted. The more I brew prose in my black cauldron of a blog, the more it seems to boil down to poetry.
Readers don’t seem to object to metaphors and purple paisley prose as much as editors and book reviewers do.
I like writing purple paisley prose (overly-complicated grammatical structures with alliteration, metaphor, and asides that interrupt the flow like this one… taken to the extreme for humorous effect).

Art pieces can be manipulated and re-used or re-combined to make something new out of something old. Computers make art editing infinitely easier.
Most people don’t actually read your blog all the way through. Some just like it for the pictures. If you actually read this far, you can let me know with a smiley face in the comments.
There are many, many good writers on WordPress… as I am sure there are on other blog sites as well. I despair of being able to find and read them all. If you are reading this bullet point, you are probably one of the ones I have found and read and liked. Blogging becomes a mirror that shows you your own self more naked than naked… not just what is under your clothes, but what you look like to yourself in your own head. And the more you walk around WordPress naked like that, the more you want to show it all off. (How’s that for an idea that will pull in the readers from the lonely parts of Siberia?) 🙂

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Filed under blog posting, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, insight, irony, Paffooney

Tagged as blogging, blogging about blogging, humor, irony, Metacognition, naked, nude

February 7, 2022 · 2:30 pm

People All Have Worth

I know that you are probably immediately listing all the reasons that my title is totally wacky monkey-thinking in your head. And if you want to lay into me in the comments, you are more than welcome. But the reality is that teachers have to develop the mindset that all kids can learn and all people have value… no matter what. That can be hard to accept when you factor in how corrupted, warped, and badly-taught so many people have turned out to be. It honestly seems, sometimes, that when faced with the facts of how people act… being violent, or greedy, self-centered, thoughtless, un-caring, and willfully stupid… that they really don’t even have value to others if you kill them, let them rot, and try to use them as fertilizer. The plants you fertilize with that stuff will come up deformed.

But the Doctor I have pictured here, the Second Doctor played by Patrick Troughton always seemed to find Earth people delightful. Alien people too, for that matter, unless they were soulless mobile hate receptacles in robotic trash cans like the Daleks, or mindless machines powered by stolen human brains like the Cybermen. There is, indeed, music in every soul, even if some of it is a little bit discordant and awkward. And people are not born evil. The classic study done on Brazilian street kids showed that even with no resources to share and living empty, hopeless lives, the children helped one another, comforted one another, and refused to exploit one another. As a teacher you get to know every type that there is. And there are stupid kids (deprived of essential resources necessary to learning), and evil kids (lashing out at others for the pain inflicted upon them), and needy kids (who can never get enough of anything you might offer and always demand more, MORE, MORE!) Sometimes they drive you insane and make you want to resign and leave the country to go count penguins in Antarctica. But the Doctor is right. No matter what has been done to them, if you get to know them, and treat them as individual people rather than as problems… they are delightful!

So let me show you a few old drawings of people.

Cute people like Andrew here.

Or possibly stupid and goofy people who never get things right.

Or long-dead people who made their contributions long ago, and sacrificed everything to make our lives different… if not better.

Or young people who live and learn and hopefully love…

And try really hard at whatever they do… whether they have talent or not.

And hope and dream and play and laugh…

And sometimes hate… (but hopefully not too much)…

And can probably tell that I really like to draw people…

Because God made them all for a reason…

even if we will never find out what that reason is.

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Filed under art my Grandpa loved, humor, Paffooney, philosophy

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, humor, irony, love, Paffoonies, philosophy, teaching, wish-upon-a-starring

February 6, 2022 · 4:44 pm

“Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune”

When I was a teenager and suffering from a terrible secret, I first began to see and hear invisible people. I know this is not normal. In fact, it comes under the heading of “wacko-stupid-maniac-loony”. The first one was my friend the faun. Now, for those of you who do not know, a faun is a mythological creature in the shape of a man (or possibly boy, or even little girl) with the legs and tail and horns of a goat (or possibly kid). This creature is a sensual being in the Dionysian tradition. Wine, women, and song so to speak.

When he first came to me it was a snowy winter’s night, long about December of my 17th year. At that time I was still repressing the memory of what happened to me out behind the neighbor’s house when I was ten. But I guess I knew I needed help in reaching out to others. I was lonely and convinced that for some terrible unknown reason I was a horrible creature not worthy of love. Then he came rapping at my window. He was kneeling there in the snow, outside my upstairs bedroom window, on the roof of the front porch of the house, naked except for the goat fur on his legs. But he wasn’t shivering. After all, he wasn’t real. No one but me would ever see him. He was grinning at me.

“You aren’t going to leave me out here in the snow, are you, stupid?” he said.

“Who and what are you?” I asked, as I opened the window. The snow was shining with a silvery, blue-white light that originated with the street light out in front of the house.

“I am Radasha,” he said. “I am your faun… the part of you that feels things and needs things… the part of you you have stupidly been pretending doesn’t exist.”

All right, I know it sounds crazy. But I needed him in my life. Elwood P. Dowd had an invisible white rabbit. Why couldn’t I have a faun? And it was a very, very good thing. He taught me how to laugh, and how to love… how to actually live. And I know he has always been inside me, not really separate from me. In many ways he is the real me. But crazy people have their own set of priorities. And when I was a confused teenager whose personal self-concept had been sexually violated by another, older boy… Radasha was mine. An invisible friend to talk to. One who could explain everything… make me laugh and make me happy. And there is a sound to that. Do you know the piece by Debussy that this post is titled after? It is my favorite piece of music in all the world. And it tells the sweet-sad story of Radasha and me.

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Filed under classical music, Paffooney

Tagged as classical music, crazy people, goofiness, irony, love, Paffoonies

January 22, 2022 · 5:37 pm

Rabbit People

I often see myself as a rabbit person. In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.

“Oh, no, thank you sir.”

“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight. You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”

“Oh, no sir,” they say. “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”

And so life goes on like that. Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.

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Filed under humor, irony, Paffooney, rabbit people

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, drawings, goofiness, humor, irony, paffooney, rabbit people

January 13, 2022 · 2:15 pm

Time For Wasting

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When I was still alive and still teaching, maximizing and managing time was an incredibly important part of the day. You had to activate learners with an attention step, a lesson focus that grabbed them. Usually that had to follow a warm-up, something you got them to do as soon as you had smiled at them at the doorway, offered to shake their hand, and then pulled them into the classroom to do some work for you. fifteen minutes at the start of the class to rev up mental engines and get the gears turning… shake out the rust and the cobwebs that accumulate the instant the final bell rang in the previous class. I timed that part of class down to the second with my pocket watch… or phone in later years. Then, once the engines started, the focus is in place, you introduce the learning objective. Never more than ten minutes… timed to the second… you give the explanation, the road map of the day ahead, the instruction. Then for the next ten to fifteen minutes you let them discover stuff. In groups, with a partner, teacher to class, student to class, or (rarely) individually, they must apply what you pointed out and figure something out. It could be complicated, but probably it was simple. All answers are welcome and accepted… because all answers will be evaluated and you learn more from wrong answers than you do from correct guesses. Evaluation comes in the five to ten minutes at the end when you evaluate. “What have I learned today?” You try your hardest to pin something new to the mental note-board hanging on the brain walls of each and every student. Depending on how much or how few minutes you are given before the final bell kills the lesson for the day, you have to put the big pink ribbon on it. That tightly-wound lesson cycle goes on all day, repeated as many times as you have classes. In that time you have to be teacher, policeman, friend, devil’s advocate, entertainer, counselor, psychotherapist, chief explainer, and sometimes God. And you time it to the second by your pocket watch.

Teacher

I miss being the rabbit holding the BIG PENCIL. Now that I am retired, I am no longer on the clock… no longer subject to careful time management. My pocket watch is broken and lying in a box somewhere in my library. I live now in non-consecutive time periods of sleep and illness and writing and playing with dolls. I have entered a second childhood now. Not really a simple one because of diabetes and arthritis and COPD and psoriasis and all the other wonderful things that old age makes possible. But a childhood free of school politics and mandates from the school board and from the State. A childhood where I can once again dream and imagine and create and play. That’s what this post is if you haven’t already figured it out. I am playing with words and ideas. They are my toys. Toys like this one;

turtleboy

This, of course, is Tim, the turtleboy of irony, holding his magic flatiron that he uses for ironing out irony. He is flattening it out now with a cartoony Paffooney and wickedly waggled words. Ironically, I have often taught students to write just like this, making connections between words and pictures and ideas through free association and fast-writing. Have you learned anything from today’s retired-teacher post? If you did, it is ironic, because you were never meant to from the start.

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Filed under humor, irony, Paffooney, teaching, Uncategorized

Tagged as focus, goofiness, humor, irony, lesson cycle, paffooney, satire, teaching, time management, writing exercise

January 8, 2022 · 3:09 pm

Shakespeare Knows Fools

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The fact that Shakespeare was a master of the art of creating and mocking fools does not really help decide the question of who Shakespeare really was. A stage actor who owned a theater in Elizabethan times and apparently focused on being the bit player, the butler, the second man on the castle wall in the great plays, would certainly know enough of flim-flam, being a con man, or artfully throwing turds at kings and queens in ways that get rewarded rather than beheaded. But a nobleman who has unpopular and unwelcome-but-probably-wise insights into the back-stabbing-goings-on of the royal court of England would equally be capable of putting the most memorable of critiques of humanity into the mouth of the fool or the clown in the great stage-play of life. Even the most depressing and violent of the Shakespearean tragedies is enhanced and made pointed by the presence of the fool and the comic relief. In some ways everything that Shakespeare wrote was a comedy.

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Whoever Shakespeare was, he shared Mark Twain’s overall assessment of “That damned human race” and often declared all men fools in the eyes of the playwright. Puck’s observation on humanity is delivered about not only Bottom and the other poor players who carry on their vain attempts at performing Pyramus and Thisbe while Bottom magically wears the head of an ass, but also the easily fooled lovers who mistake their true loves for one another, and even the clueless mortal King Theseus of Athens.

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In the play within a play, Nick Bottom wants to be not only his own role, Pyramus the romantic lead, but argues that he should be Thisbe, the lion, and Pyramus all at once, making a satire of human nature and its overreaching ways that we could only pray Donald Trump will one day watch and magically understand. In fact, Shakespeare’s entire body of work is an extended investigation of foolishness versus wisdom, and with Shakespeare, the verdict always goes to the fool.

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The plays of William Shakespeare are filled with fools doing foolish things… and fools being accidentally wise. (Think Jacques in As You Like It giving his famous “All the world’s a stage” soliloquy in which he elucidates the seven ages of man.) There are fools too who prove to be wise. (Think of the ironic advice given by the jester Touchstone in As You Like It, or the pithy commentary of King Lear’s fool). The fools in Shakespeare’s work are not merely the comedy relief, but the main point that Shakespeare makes about humanity.

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Whoever the man was who wrote the plays of Shakespeare, he was someone who had a deep understanding of the basic irony underlying all of human life. And someone with that vital sense of the bittersweet, a philosophy of life that encompasses the highest heights and lowest depths that a soul can reach, is someone who has suffered as well as known great joy, someone who has experienced loss as often as profit, and has known real love as well as real hatred. It is the fool that Shakespeare shakes us by the neck with to make us recognize the fool in all of us which makes the plays resonate so deeply within us. It is watching the path of the fool unfolding that makes us shake our head and say to ourselves, “Yes, that is what life is really like.”

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Filed under clowns, comedians, conspiracy theory, foolishness, goofy thoughts, inspiration, philosophy, strange and wonderful ideas about life, William Shakespeare

Tagged as clowns, fools, irony, William Shakespeare

February 1, 2018 · 4:35 pm

Writer’s Block on a Thursday

The 1957 Pink and White Mercury of Imagination

I don’t have writer’s block. I can write as long as I can think and move my fingers on the keyboard to crystallize that thinking into words. The Pink and White Mercury of Imagination is always moving, either driving forward in the present and towards the future, or in reverse, rewriting the past. It is never parked.

But somewhere along the way today, the route got sidetracked onto a looping detour.

Hence, this car-themed drive through the idea-capturing process.

A picture of me reading painted long ago and not with me in the picture..

I started reading a new novel. It is a 500-plus-pager by Kate Morton called Distant Hours. It is a Gothic novel, but in a very different way from the one I am writing in The Baby Werewolf. That book starts as a first person narrative, and then flashes back to the past as a series of third person narratives focused on single characters per section. My novel is a first person narrative throughout, though told by three different narrators. It would make an interesting writing analysis post, but I haven’t read enough of that novel nor completed mine to a point where I can compare and contrast them. And those of you who get bored easily have already tuned out and just looked at the pictures by this point.

I also thought about writing a post about Uber-driving conversations and how that impacts the quality of my driver-service. But the best stuff there can’t be revealed without breaking confidences. Doctors, lawyers, bartenders, and Uber drivers are tasked with providing a touch of confidentiality.

I wanted to complain more about Trump and evil Republicans. But that gets far too tiring. And if the collection of my posts on WordPress is like a flower garden, the political rants I do are definitely the garden-choking weeds.

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A much better thing for my garden is to chase the flitting butterflies of near-perfect ideas with a butterfly net made of idea lists like this particular post.

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So, it is true that I never actually have writer’s block. I do get writer’s detours, writer’s delays, and writer’s just-not-satisfieds- with-those-ideas sorts of things. But not today. I made the problems the topic and the topic wrote itself.

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Filed under artists I admire, artwork, imagination, irony, Uncategorized, writing, writing humor

Tagged as irony, Will Eisner, writer's block, writer's tool box

April 26, 2017 · 11:22 am

Could Trump Actually Be Good For Liberals?

Yes, I did wash my mouth out with soap after saying that title out loud. But I can’t help thinking such strange thoughts. It is probably because Trump’s healthcare plans already have me off my meds.

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I hear you screaming at your WordPress Reader saying, “How can you possibly be thinking such un-Democratic and really dumb thoughts?”

Well, if you think about it… I mean, hit your head three times near the reasoning center of the brain with a really hard rock… some of the greatest things that have happened to mankind have come from the very worst things that ever happened.

Because of World War Two and Hitler, we ended up inventing computers, and we ended up with a space program because beating Hitler gave us Werner Von Braun and some of the best rocket science minds in Germany. Because LBJ felt guilty about helping the CIA murder Kennedy he enacted the Great Society and Civil Rights reforms that make up the best of Kennedy’s legacy. (What? You say that’s crazy conspiracy theory? Well, I have been hitting my own head with a rock.) In fact, the combination of Hitler and Kennedy’s assassination put men on the moon.

Yes, humanity needs really bad times to happen to force them to make changes for the better. And Trump is really bad times. He takes food away from school children and old home-bound people so he can play more golf at Mar-a-Lago on the taxpayers’ dime. (Well, actually, it costs significantly more than a dime.) He puts coal plant waste into rivers and the drinking water of millions. He cuts regulations so corporate polluters are free to pour more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and keep us all so toasty warm with global warming that our faces will eventually melt. (And can you imagine what beauty pageants will be like when the contestants no longer have faces? Mr. Trump will no longer even be anxious to make those un-announced tours of the dressing rooms.)

The only choice we will have for survival if we are not Walmart heirs or Koch brothers is to fight back and correct the situation. It is possible that enough people will wake up to the whole Trump trauma to take back the House of Representatives in 2018. Then the investigations can really begin. Trump is waking up a sleeping giant. The public is ready to start fighting back. Bill Nye the Science Guy is ready to throw some punches for science.

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Things that are necessary are never easy. It is by making too many easy choices that we got ourselves into this mess. There is a lot of stupidity and incompetence and badness out there to overcome now. And we must face it or it will kill us.

And it may be a good thing that Trump won the election. Hillary would’ve been a competent president and nothing would really have changed about the status quo. We would’ve continued to complacently allow Republicans to run the House and Senate and oppose even the most mild and wishy-washy things that President Hillary would’ve tried to get done. Now, the Trump backlash may propel us onward towards actual solutions to very real problems like climate change, excessive money in politics, ignorance among the voting public, and income inequality that is tipping us toward a new dark ages and a feudal-technological society.

So the big splash that Trump is sure to make might be a very good thing for liberals who hope to change things for the betterment of a majority of the people.

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