Tag Archives: novel characters

May 18, 2015 · 11:43 am

Farming Family

the ClarkesI have been working on the beginnings of the novel When the Captain Came Calling.  It is not the first draft.  It is the third entire re-write.  I wrote this as a graphic novel before graphic novels were an established form.  Then I tried to rewrite it as a traditional novel, and it is now coming into its YA novel form.  But I can’t begin to explain this novel-writing project without telling you about the Clarkes.  Yes, they are a very important Iowegian family who farm and are entirely fictional.  (Kids, what other words do you know that begin with the letter F?)  They are based, at least a tiny bit, on my own family when I was a kid, but very specific parts of it.  My Uncle Larry, mother’s older brother who is now gone (but never forgotten) was the inspiration for Dash Clarke.  Kyle Clarke, the father in the picture, is Dash’s younger brother… though he is not based on my other maternal uncle.  The daughter in the Paffooney picture, Valerie Clarke, is based on my own daughter combined with a girl I had a crush on in grade school and a girl who had a deeply felt crush on me when I was a young teacher.  The Clarkes are third generation farmers, just as my own family were back in the time this story is set.  Unlike my family, the Clarkes do not come out of the 80’s with their family farms intact.  What grandparents built, the sons lose hold of, and the world becomes a much sadder place because of it.  The story is about a lot of things in addition to a family losing their farm.  It is filled with magic, telling sea stories and other lies, and the truth behind both the magic  and the lies.

I posted this today because today is the day I finished the Paffooney illustration that started the post.  Here is what it looked like in progress;

pencil sketchClarkes

Paffooneys are a made-up thing by which I name the whole great glob of artwork and stories I have created that represent the never-ending music in my soul.  I am not a singer or a song-writer.  The only way these tunes come to life is through the toons which I ignorantly call the Paffoons because the loons have nothing on me.

Here is a cover mock-up for the novel which shows another picture of Valerie Clarke, the most beautiful little girl ever born in Norwall, Iowa (a phrase that her Uncle Dash christened her with when she was small, and it caught on with the entire town.)Voodoo Val cover

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May 8, 2015 · 12:10 pm

Sailing Through a Sea of Ideas

The LadyI have been steadily chipping away at my science fiction novel about planet-saving in a world crashing with biological and political disaster.  It is a comedy about the end of the world… though it is set on a distant planet that is not our world.  It is not the Earth.  It is the fictionalized world of David Icke’s reptilian aliens (for those of you crazy enough to follow loony-tunes tinfoil hat conspiracies with the same ironic gusto that I do).  I call this novel Stardusters and Space Lizards.  The world of the novel is accidentally being invaded by the Telleron aliens who starred in my novel Catch a Falling Star.   They find there a world that is undergoing massive biological crises caused by war using weapons of mass destruction and injudicious exploitation of the environment for the enrichment of the elite.  I know that sounds totally like Earth at present, but that is the purpose of a cautionary tale.  This is the planet of the lizard people, Galtorr Prime.

Sizzahl2

But by now you are aware of the fact that I am a tremendously un-focused divergent thinker, and I already have more stories in the works.  I fully intend to follow up this science fiction YA with a fantasy YA about the Norwall Pirates and South Seas Juju following an old sea captain born in Iowa all the way home from the mysterious island where he earned the curse of invisibility.  It will be called The Captain Came Home or other such nonsense similar to that.

Voodoo Val

The novel about the Captain who is invisible has as its main character Valerie Clarke, who was also a main character in the novel Snow Babies.  This novel is, however, set at a moment of time before the events of Snow Babies occur.

Never one to be satisfied with working on two novels at once, I have started a third.  I finally came up with a name for this story that has been in my head since the 1970’s when I first learned about autism and mental disorders that affect communication.  I am calling this one, for now, Fools and Their Toys.

Fools n Toys

This story is about Murray Dawes, a young man who can’t communicate with others due to autism that finally blossoms when a boy genius builds him a ventriloquist’s puppet in the form of a zebra’s head.  Through the puppet the young man finds he has an awful lot to say, and he begins to bring the world around to realizations of some pretty awful things.

To prove that I have been doing at least my 500 words a day, here is the lead that I created today for this third active writing project that I’ve added to the juggling session of three novels at once.

Fools and Their Toys

I know you will probably say this is totally unbelievable, that an inanimate object… or, rather, a puppet who is animated by others, cannot be the narrator of a story.  You are right, of course.  I can’t possibly be the author of this tale.  I am a modified sock puppet of a zebra with mechanically blinking eyes and mechanically enhanced mouth movements.  My head is full of cotton stuffing and old newspapers.  But I was cleverly put together by a genius, and given life by another.

You have to understand, the human mind is like a great complex Labyrinth where no man has ever mastered every single corridor.  Sometimes the most beautifully complex minds become lost or trapped in a dead-end corridor, never to find the light outside again.   But sometimes a special mind that was meant for special things is helped to find the light again… shown a trap door or a secret exit by another who has mastered at least a portion of the great, overly-complex dungeon.   And sometimes it is possible to slip past the Minotaur who guards the secrets of the Labyrinth and keeps us all from unlocking the magic.

Okay, I know that is barely 200 words by itself… but I do get 500 done per day.  I am writing two other books at the same time for gosh sakes!

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May 5, 2015 · 12:43 pm

Conversations With the Ghost of Miss M…

DSCN5148Beneath the old cottonwood tree there once stood a one-room school house.  My mother went to school there as a girl, a short walk from home along the Iowa country road.  Misty mornings on a road between cornfields and soybean fields can often conjure up ghosts.

I took this morning walk with the dog while I was visiting my old Iowegian home, and I was writing my fictional story Magical Miss Morgan in my head, not yet having had time to sit down and write.  I was reflecting on times long past and a school long gone, though Miss Morgan’s story is really about my own teaching experience.  Miss Morgan is in many ways me.  But I am not a female teacher.  I am a goofy old man.  So, why am I writing the main character as a female?

Well, the ghosts from the old school house heard that and decided to send an answer.

Miss Mennenga was my third grade and fourth grade teacher from the Rowan school.  The building I attended her classes in has been gone for thirty years.  Miss M herself has long since passed to the other side.  So when she appeared at the corner…  Yes, I know… I have said countless times that I don’t believe in ghosts, but she had the same flower-patterned dress, the glasses, the large, magnified brown eyes that could look into your soul and see all your secrets, yet love you enough to not tell them to anyone else.  Suddenly, I knew where the character of Miss Morgan had actually come from.  I also realized why I was drawn to teaching in the first place.  Teachers teach you more than just long division, lessons about the circulatory systems of frogs, and the Battle of Gettysburg…  They shape your soul.

“You remember getting in trouble for doing jokes in class when you were supposed to be studying your spelling words?”

“Yes, Miss M, but I didn’t make any noise.. they were pantomime jokes that I stole from watching Red Skelton on TV.”

“But you pulled your heart out of your chest and made it beat in your hand.  You had to know that was going to make the boys smirk and the girls giggle.”

“I did.  But making them happy was part of the reason God put me there.”

“But not during spelling.  I was trying to teach math to fourth graders.  You interrupted.”

“You made that point.  I still remember vividly.  You let me read the story to the class out loud afterwords.  You said I needed to use my talent for entertaining to help others learn, not distract them from learning.”

“I was very proud of the way you learned that lesson.”

“I tried very hard as a teacher to never miss a teachable moment like that.  It was part of the reason that God put you there.”

“And I did love to hear you read aloud to the class.  You were always such an expressive reader, Michael.  Do you remember what book it was?”

“It was Ribsy, by Beverly Cleary.   How could I have forgotten that until now?  You made me love reading out loud so much that I always did it in my own classes, at every opportunity.”

I remembered the smile above all else as the lingering image faded from my view through the eyes of memory.  She had a warm and loving smile.  I can only hope my goofy grin didn’t scare too many kids throughout my career.

10931430_1392374101067123_2624334665191497015_n I needed a post for 1000 Voices that was about reconnecting with someone.  I could’ve used any number of real life examples from everything that has happened to me since poor health forced me to retire from teaching  I could’ve written any number of things that would not make me feel all sad and goopy about retiring and would not make me cry at my keyboard again like I am doing now… like I did all through that silly novel I wrote… even during the funny parts.  But I had to choose this.  A debt had to be paid.  I love you, Miss M… and I had to pay it forward.

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March 11, 2015 · 4:51 pm

Goofy Squared

Mickeynose

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.lil hunter2

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.

Goof  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 Catbird Mehas 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.

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March 6, 2015 · 1:49 pm

What I Have Learned by Writing

DSCN7060

I have been doing an edit on a completed novel called The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, and I have discovered that I have grown quite a bit as a writer since I first began practicing the craft.  This particular story has been rattling around in my brain since 1977.  The mad scientist who is the title character, Orben Wallace, is based loosely on me.  It is also to some degree a favorite science teacher from high school mixed up with a rather eccentric college professor whose bizarre nature led, apparently, to some really profound insights about the scientific reasoning process and how a person thinks rationally.  From this character recipe I have learned the scientific method of experimenting, observing, theorizing, and testing theories works in all areas of life, including the complex mess that is our social life and relationship muddle.  Order can be imposed on chaos, and even when chaos is not controlled, it can still be tamed.

I have learned also a thing of two about writing science fiction.  I have made this story very science-y by adding elements of time travel, UFO’s, and conspiracy theories… as well as genetics, nutrition, black holes, and history from 1916 (World War I).   I have done significant amounts of research because, even though the science is all about big, black, hoo-haw lies and prevarications, it sounds a lot more realistic and palatable if the science is right.

I have learned a few things about writing sequels and tie-ins.  This novel is technically a sequel to Catch a Falling Star.  No, that’s not right either.  It is a prequel-equal-sequel because it happens before, during, and after the previously published book.  I have learned to pick up scenes from the other book and rewrite them from the point of view of a different character than the story before.  The dialogue is already fixed, but the interpretations and commentary on everything is from a whole different perspective.  Not easy to do, but very enjoyable and educational.

I have learned that even though I am basically writing a comedy it also has to have its beautifully sweet-sad moments of melancholy to achieve balance and depth of theme.  Two beloved characters die in this book, whereas in Catch a Falling Star only the villain dies without getting a last-second resurrection at the end.  We do terrible things to our characters sometimes if it gives the book deeper meaning and resonance with reality.Millis 2

I do still slavishly rely on the ridiculous.   One of the characters in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius is a rabbit who bites a high-tech carrot attached to the time machine and morphs into a rabbit man.  Millis, the pet rabbit, is the second Paffooney I am repeating for this recycled sort of post.

I have also learned that by using my obsession with that which is surreal, I can actually write things that make me laugh even though I’ve read and re-read them ten times, and am now reading them again.  Humor comes from word-play and cleverness as well as from situations full of slapstick.

So, whether you can stand my purple paisley prose…or not, I am definitely working towards throwing a new novel out there… into the world of publishing… or am I throwing it at your head instead?

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January 26, 2015 · 3:13 pm

Galtorr Prime

Galtorr Prime

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.

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January 25, 2015 · 7:13 pm

Sizzahl

Sizzahl2

My writing time of late has been mostly absorbed by a Sci-fi novel, Stardusters and Lizardmen, a sequel to my novel about aliens invading Iowa, Catch a Falling Star.  It is not set on Earth.  It is a post-apocalyptic story about an Earth-like world and a civilization of lizardmen that have destroyed themselves by abusing their environment, wallowing in greedy politics, and fighting biologically manipulated war.

The Tellerons, who have failed to invade Earth, accidentally end up at the lizardmen’s planet and have to find a home, though they would rather find it anywhere else in the universe if they had a choice.

If the visitors from outer space, both Telleron and Earthmen are going to survive, their best hope is the character featured in the Paffooney.  Her name is Sizzahl.  She is very unusual in many ways.   She is a little-girl genius who is the only Galtorrian lizard-person on the whole planet who doesn’t eat meat.  She also is a scientist studying ecology and genetics, hoping to bring her people back from the brink of extinction.  I like this character, and she is the reason that I have decided to follow this novel project through to the end.  I hope you like her too, even though she’s a dedicated nudist and hippie-style back-to-nature commie freak.

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January 14, 2015 · 5:55 pm

Work in Progress

Val inked up

Here is the straight poop.  (Wait a minute!  Not poop metaphors again!)  Okay, better idiomatic expression… Here is the truthful statement about work habits.  (Better!  But that was idiomatic not idiotic, right?)  Right.

Sometimes I mess up.  I am working slowly and steadily on the next story burning to be told, When the Captain Came Calling.  In the illustration I am working on, you can probably see the mess-ups already.  I very carefully blot my black ink pens when I am doing the pen and ink work.  Even ball point pens can blot.  I will admit I press entirely too hard on both ink pens and colored pencils.  I break a lot of colored lead and make a lot of black pens bleed.  I have arthritis in my hands and often push too hard because I am pushing back against the pain.  I can sometimes use a lighter touch with the colored pencil, the area being covered may require a more lightly penciled mark and have more paper whiteness showing through.  Black pen lines are never like that.  To get a steady, even line, I push with pressure to get things dark and full and even.  The pen that I was using had developed a leaky ball and had to be blotted with every use.  When it made the first smear, I changed to a new pen.  I cussed a little too.  (Cussing makes it better.  I learned that from Mark Twain.)  But I didn’t panic and throw the drawing out.  I can fix it up a bit when I add the color.  But the second pen I was using was a pen I switched out earlier for bleeding.  That’s how I got the second smear.  Dang me!  It almost ruined what I think is a very promising portrait of my main character Valerie Clarke.  (Valerie, whom you may remember from Snow Babies posts, is based on a girl I once had a crush on, and my own daughter, the Princess.)Mina & Val

Now, ink smears are not the only thing that had to be twisted and worked around to get this project underway and at least a little bit tamed.  The title was originally a problem.  I tried to call this story The Captain Came  because of the primary antagonist and the fact that he is returning from the South Seas to the little Iowa town of Norwall.   This was a problem because Captain Dettbarn was running from a bunch of psychotic little Juju men (animated Tiki idols) who were chasing him because he made the witch doctor’s chief’s daughter pregnant.  That made the title an R-rated joke that I hadn’t intended even before I considered this story a YA novel idea.

The Juju men themselves are problem.  In this time of unintended racism, I had to work on them to make them be something other than a racial stereotype.  They were not originally made entirely of wood.  I had to eliminate cartoonist’s shortcuts in depiction that made them look like little black men or little dark brown men.  They are of an indeterminate South Seas racial stock.  Their language is mostly Tagalog (because it is a language I have tried to learn due to Filipino relatives).  Their culture is mostly movie fiction that comes from the Captain’s own liar’s brain.  Most of the information about the witch doctor and the mysterious island come from the Captain’s logbook which is a work of fiction written by a drunkard with a vivid imagination.  So I am trying to be fair to a people and race that don’t actually exist outside of the story within the story.  Whew!  I’ve got to stop explaining complicated things now before my brain melts.  Smoke is already coming out of my ears and making it hard to see here in my studio.

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January 6, 2015 · 7:52 pm

Fire Wisps

Garriss n Torchy

In the novel I just recently finished, The Magical Miss Morgan, there are several different kinds of fairies.  The fairies in the book may or may not really be there.  They are a part of the magic the teacher, who is the main character, uses to be a superior teacher.  She engages the imaginations of her students and they love her for it.  Still, an important part of the plot revolves around a small group of fairies intent on a quest meant to save their fairy kingdom called Tellosia from a take-over attempt by evil fairies.  One of the main character fairies is the fire wisp, Garriss, seen here with his little brother Torchy.  Fire wisps are fairies made of elemental magic, so they can be fire, water, wind, and stone.  They are made of the element they represent, and so, with a brain made of fire they are not terribly smart.  They do, however, have very warm hearts, which Garriss proves to Miss Morgan, to Blueberry Bates, and to all the school children who dare to believe in fairies and fairy magic.  Garriss is totally contained by fire magic, and therefore doesn’t set the teacher’s desk on fire when he walks on it.  In fact, the only way he can burn anything is through the cone of fire spell written on his hands.  And even then, since he is not very bright (in a mental capacity), he has to be allowed to use it by his fairy friends, Silkie, the Storybook fairy, and Donner the Pixie.

This Paffooney is the first one I drew of any of the fairy characters in Miss Morgan’s story, but it is not the last.  I intend to draw more of them in the coming days.

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January 1, 2015 · 4:19 pm

Stupid People

20150101_120254

It is generally considered an insult to call someone “stupid”.

Okay, I get that.  I am not without feelings on the subject.   Stupid people have feelings just like I do.  But if I have to live with “nerd”, “geekazoid”, “brainiac”, and “four-eyes”, I am thinking they don’t have to be more sensitive than I am.

Truthfully, life as a mentally gifted person of no color is a bit of trial even if people don’t generally understand that.    I have an I.Q. in the range of 155, (calculated from my ACT and SAT scores using standard statistical analysis, give or take 5% for margin of error due to the nature of the calculation… am I scaring you yet?)  I had trouble fitting in with my peers as a child.  I related better to older people rather than my appropriate age group, and until my best friend, a preacher’s kid, moved to town when I was nine, I really had no friends and was routinely picked on and preyed upon by other kids.  It was so bad that I was making C’s and D’s in school primarily because I didn’t want to be identified as smart.  Once the eye doctor hung black horn-rimmed glasses on my face, my fate as a socially doomed uber-nerd was sealed.  And my friend Mark, who would grow up to become an actuary with mathematical gifts, moved away when I was a freshman in high school.  I had to help stupid people with homework and class work… I was required to endure threats, bribes, and tearful pleas to help athletes cheat on tests.  Bullies made me tie their shoes and endure endless jokes about the size of my private parts.  Life was terrible until I decided to go out for high school football.  I was small and thin and probably doomed as I made the team, but I had a secret weapon.  I understood almost instinctually that angles, trajectories, and leverage can make the difference over sheer muscle power.  During one football drill where we had to pick up and carry our partner for five yards, I was matched with the big offensive tight end, George Merlock, who outweighed me by almost a hundred pounds and was literally Incredible Hulk-like in football pads.  I simply used my shoulder on the proper spot under his armpit and lifted with my legs.  I picked him up and carried him for twenty yards when some of the other players who were bigger and stronger than me couldn’t even lift him.  After that moment, I was never bullied again.  For one thing, I impressed George so much that he would’ve killed them for even looking at me cross-eyed.  Life got better.  A cheerleader asked me out on a date (though I said no because I thought they were still making fun of me… which I later learned I was mistaken about and I had accidentally hurt her feelings).

So what does that whole long-winded whiffle-story of my misspent youth have to do with stupid people?  Well, I am one.  (Doesn’t the cheerleader thing prove that?)  Smart people can be stupid more often than your average ordinary Joe.   A character like Sheldon Cooper on Big Bang Theory is funny because his intelligence and his social abilities are so wildly mismatched that he often makes totally stupid geekazoid mistakes.

Harker

But there are also stupid people who are actually not smart.  Writing humor has taught me to draw upon the experiences of people I have known who were less than knowledgeable.  People with lower than normal I.Q.’s.  Life has taught me to value and even love people like that.  In my novel Snow Babies, at least one of the clown characters is a stupid person.   Harker Dawes is an inept businessman in the process of destroying a successful business that he bought from one of the town’s most beloved and respected elders.  He immobilizes himself with super glue.   He gets nailed to a poster board with a nail gun.  Accidents and near-fatal pratfalls are his trademark.  And yet, he is a sympathetic and loveable character.  He is generous to a fault.  He has a simple, good heart.  Practically everything he does is a mistake, and yet, people grow fond of him and help him out because they appreciate his innate goodness and value as a person.

So, I really think calling someone stupid can be a sort of compliment.  Forrest Gump calls himself stupid, but that character from Winston Groom’s novels and the award-winning movie of the same name is really a very wise and lovely man, though he is not smart.  I have to say that I really no longer resent being called stupid, because no matter how smart I actually am, stupid is sort of a compliment.  (But how about climate-change deniers, Texas politicians, and anybody who believes what they say on Fox News, you say?  They are not stupid.  That is willful ignorance.  It may take a whole other post to make that difference clear.)

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