This is Poppy
Poppy is happy
But Poppy is also sloppy
So he is a sloppy happy Poppy
And being sloppy can make him droppy
So he is a sloppy droppy happy Poppy
And Poppy calls his baseball bat a boppy
And he dropped the boppy on his foot
So sloppy droppy happy Poppy became hoppy
He was a sloppy droppy happy but hoppy Poppy because of the boppy.
And his hat is becoming floppy… er, what’s that disgusted look on your face?
Okay, maybe I better stoppy.
Birds are always talking,
And birds are always squawking,
And they are using bird-words,
These are the words I heard.
Twitter-pated – this word comes from the owl in Bambi and means not being able to think straight because you’re in love.
Aviary – is a great big bird house, big enough to fly around in
Feather-dusted – to you and me it means clean, to a bird it means the feathers are dirty
Bird-brained – don’t be insulted if a bird calls you this. It is a compliment.
Fume-fluttered – you gotta fly and get away from that bad smell.
Wing-walking – it’s how you get from here to there if you’re a bird… Duh!
Wakka wakka – it’s those dang ducks again, always telling jokes!
Egg-zactly – as precise and perfect as an egg.
Coo-coo-karoo – that stupid rooster wants us to get up again at daybreak. It’s like a bird can never sleep in!
Clucker butter – Can you believe that KFC place? Butter on improperly cremated dead chickens (ah, well, they were only chickens after all).
Now that you have less than one per cent of the bird vocabulary, please don’t try to tell me what they are saying. I really don’t want to know!
Yesterday I revealed that I have no earthly clue how to be a best-selling author with a blog and a brand and all those other things that marketing racketeers keep pettifogging at me about. I may not know anything about marketing and being an author, but I do know how to be a writer. I have learned to say things flat out when they are on my mind and I know how to do the two essential things that a writer has to know how to do… I can practice writing every day, and I can read.
If you are one of those few who actually read my blog regularly, you may remember some talk about the classic novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Believe it or not, I know how to read and understand great books. You can find me on Goodreads.com to see some of the wonderful things I have been reading, and to decide if you might like them too. If you are not on Goodreads already, why not? That is now your next assignment, young reader. Oops. You know what they say, “Old English teachers never die, they just lose their class.”
Today’s little self-imposed book report is about a book that I read my senior year in high school, 1975. It is called The Other by Thomas Tryon. It is a book that was made into a movie. The author is also a Hollywood actor that has been in many films. He wrote the screenplay for the movie version. But I have to tell you, the movie pales in comparison to the book itself. Movies simply cannot give you the rich depth of atmosphere and the delicate psychological nuances that a book can. Movies show you something. A book can explain something in detail. And that is a key difference.
Filed under book review, NOVEL WRITING
I thought that this silly poem needed to be re-posted because school is ending. The need for silliness is absolutely imperative. I also need to throw a few mooses… er… moosei… er… meese? How do you pluralize the word moose?
Life is as Hard as Bowling with a Moose (A Poem)
Life is like Moose Bowling,
Because…
In order to knock over all the pins,
And win…
You have to learn HOW TO THROW A MOOSE!
As the days count down, I have had to exercise my moose-throwing muscles more and more. Today I have five days left in my teaching career. So many precious kids I have to give up and never see again… So many teachers will tell you that every year the kids are getting worse and worse, and their attitudes are turning more sour, disrespectful, and violent. But those teachers don’t know the secret. You have to throw a moose or two at the problem. Real discipline is hard work. Harder than demanding that kids sit in rows and be silent… heads down and pens scratching away. You have to actually talk to kids and learn who they are… what they feel is important… what their problems are, and what they want you to do about them. You have to be honest, give them a hook or two to draw them into the whole learning thing. You have to actually care.
So, I do. I care. And I let them talk. It’s a moose that has to be tossed.
The comment was made this morning that you have to keep them working right up until the end of the year. Doing no formal lessons in class is actually a lot harder and more risky than continuing to plod through the textbook. But in five more days there are no more classes, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks… school’s out forever. I haven’t done any lessons since two weeks ago. Grades are in the gradebook. I have been showing kids my favorite movies. Especially movies from the eighties. (Truthfully, I have not been well enough to actually teach. My body aches and I can’t breathe very well) I have been talking to kids about those movies… what they think about them, and what they think about life in general. Kids are telling me they are worried about my poor health. They say they are interested in my books and my writing, even though they don’t actually read just for pleasure and will never buy what I write… or even look at this blog. They tell me about their troubles, their hopes and dreams, their most significant relationships, and they tell me that they will miss me next year. Five days… will I make it through without breaking into tears? No, I won’t. I may not even try. That’s one moose too heavy to throw.
But I have no regrets. I have touched more than two thousand five hundred lives (a pretty close estimate… I don’t have a good enough memory to actually count.) They have touched my life in return. No other thing I could have done with my life would ever mean as much. Doctors save lives, but teachers shape real people. So what does it all mean? I mean, really? It means I have thrown a lot of mooses… er… moosei… er… well, you know what I mean. And if my arms are growing weary, then it is for a very good reason.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, teaching
Going through my old drawing portfolio, I found my children’s book project from my undergrad college years. I have no idea now looking at the illustrations what the story was even about. I lost the actual story, and I never made a cover for it. But here is a look at old hopes and dreams and a way of seeing the world that begins; Once Upon a Time…
I have no earthly idea what the heck this story is even about, but I do like the pen and ink work, and probably couldn’t repeat it if I had to.
Filed under artwork, cartoony Paffooney, fairies, goofiness, humor, Uncategorized
I gave you fair warning. Pogo has been coming to Mickey’s Catch a Falling Star Blog for a while now. So, if you intended to avoid it, TOO BAD! You are here now in Okefenokee Swamp with Pogo and the gang, and subject to Mickey’s blog post about Walt Kelly and his creations.
Walt Kelly began his cartoon hall-of-fame career in 1936 at Walt Disney Studios. If you watch the credits in Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo, you will see Walt listed as an animator and Disney artist. In fact, he had almost as much influence on the Disney graphic style as Disney had on him. He resigned in 1941 to work at Dell Comics where he did projects like the Our Gang comics that you see Mickey smirking at here, the Uncle Wiggly comics, Raggedy Ann and Andy comics, and his very own creations like Pogo, which would go on to a life of its own in syndicated comics. He did not return to work at Disney, but always credited Disney with giving him the cartoon education he would need to reach the stratosphere.
ask.metafilter.com
Walt Kelly’s Earth Day comic
Pogo is an alternate universe that is uniquely Walt Kelly’s own. It expresses a wry philosophy and satirical overview of our society that is desperately needed in this time of destructive conservative politics and deniers of science and good sense.
maxriffner.com
Pogo himself is an every-man character that we are supposed to identify with the most. He is not the driver of plots and doings in the swamp, rather the victim and unfortunate experiencer of those unexpectable things. Life in Okefenokee is a long series of random events to make life mostly miserable but always interesting if approached with the right amount of Pogo-ism.
And Pogo was always filled with cute and cuddly as well as ridiculous.
As a boy, I depended on the comic section of the Sunday paper to make sense of the world for me. If I turned out slightly skewed and warped in certain ways, it is owing to the education I myself was given by Pogo, Lil Abner, Dagwood Bumstead, and all the other wizards from the Sunday funnies. There was, of course, probably no bigger influence on my art than the influence of Walt Kelly.
So what more can I say about Walt Kelly? I haven’t yet reached the daily goal of 500 words. And yet, the best way to conclude is to let Walt speak for himself through the beautiful art of Pogo.
Filed under cartoon review, cartoons, humor, Paffooney
I must make a confession about crippling depression,
Cause today I have the blues.
It requires a concession of time for regression,
And dark days enveloping all views.
There is no progression in a working profession,
Cause clouds leave me missing all news.
I start the procession of blue notes in session,
And all melodies tend to be blues.
Filed under Paffooney, pessimism, poem, Uncategorized
I don’t usually do portraits, but, as I believe I may have said on an older post, Red Skelton is like a god to me. Much of what I know about comedy, I learned from him back in the 60’s and early 70’s. I watched him religiously on Wednesday nights on both CBS and NBC (channels 5 from Mason City, Iowa, and 13 from Des Moines). He made me laugh. Sometimes he even made me cry. So I honor him now with a portrait (or insult him, depending on your opinion of my artwork) in a Paffooney of Red as Clem Kadiddlehopper, pride (or maybe village idiot) of Cornpone County, Tennessee.
Filed under Uncategorized
I have rather regularly been revising and editing old writing. One thing I have discovered is that I am capable of the most gawd-awful convoluted sentences filled with mangled metaphors and ideas that can only be followed while doing mental back-flips or managing miracles of interpretation. That last sentence is a perfect example of purple paisley prose. Paisley, in case you didn’t know this, is a printed pattern on clothing or other cloth that makes an intricate design out of the basic twisted teardrop shape borrowed from Persian art. The basic motif, the teardrop shape, is a leaf or vegetable design often referred to as the Persian pickle. I write like that. You can pick out the Persian pickles in this very paragraph. Alliterations, mangled metaphors, rhyming words, sound patterns, the occasional literary allusion, personification, bungles, jungles, and junk. “How can you actually write like that?” you ask. Easy. I think like that.
To make a point about mangled metaphors, let me visit a couple of recent scenes in novels I have been working on;
From The Bicycle Wheel Genius; page 189
Mike Murphy and Frosty Anderson sat at the kitchen table eating a batch of Orben’s pancakes, the twentieth try at pancakes, and nearly edible. Mike could eat anything with maple syrup on it… well, maybe not dog poop, but these were slightly better than dog poop.
From The Magical Miss Morgan; page 7
Blue looked at Mike and grinned. It was an impish and fully disarming grin. It made Mike do whatever Blue said, even being willing to eat a lump of dog poop if she asked him to, though she would never ask him to.
So, here’s the thing. Why is there a repetition of the dog-poop-eating metaphor? In one case it is Mike Murphy expressing in metaphorical terms his love of maple syrup. In the other, it is Mike Murphy expressing his love of Blueberry Bates’ dimpled grin. He is a somewhat unique character, but why would anybody associate love with eating dog poop? I don’t know. I just wrote the dang things.
I like to take a convoluted plot and complicate it with complex sentences and numerous running gags, with a seasoned-sauce of mangled metaphors poured on top like gravy. I will use sentences like this either to make you laugh, or give you a headache. I’m almost sure it is one of those. So if you have gotten this far in this post without a headache, then I guess it must be funny.
Filed under Uncategorized
This sofa-sized oil Paffooney is called the Road Home because it was painted from a photograph looking west on US Highway 3 towards Rowan, Iowa, the little town I grew up in. I painted it when I lived by myself in South Texas, believing that one day I would go back to Iowa to live out the rest of my life. Here’s where today’s post gets mortifyingly morbid. Yes, I know that last expression is repetitively repetitive, but that little bit of alliteration was necessary to lighten the load of this non-laughing part of my post. I am not going to make it. I am stuck in a North Dallas metroplex that I sincerely do not love. My kids are not done growing up there. I have family and roots there. I have them in Iowa, too, but like a Sioux warrior, I belong to my wife’s tribe once I married into it. I am old. I have six incurable diseases and I am a cancer survivor since 1983. Every day of life is a new miracle. but the miracles are running out. My COPD makes my chest hurt, and I have trouble breathing, especially at night. The house is rotting away around us, courtesy of the housing bubble we bought it in back in 2005. Doing what maintenance and repair that I can makes my arthritic body ache intolerably, more than Aleve can cure. I will not go back to drugs like Vioxx or Celebrex and let them kill me to enrich the pharmaceutical industry. My diabetes has made it almost impossible to eat without enduring a round of high blood sugar and nausea. I do not look forward to either insulin or the possibility of losing an arm or leg. So, if I get out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, it will probably be by curling up my toes and going bye-bye, followed by a cremation. I would like to have my ashes scattered in Iowa, but the family will probably find flush toilets much cheaper. Ah well… dark part done. Now for the part about going home.
The reason I feel uplifted, and crazily feel justified in calling this post “humor” is because I have already won my battle. I was a teacher for 31 years. I touched more than 2,500 lives, some of them profoundly. I have almost raised three wonderful, talented children. I have written and published three books, and if I can scratch out enough time, I have at least two more ready to be published. I have shared what little wisdom I have acquired along with a lot of really goofy artwork I have done in this blog, and, although I used to be the best author no one had ever read, people are actually reading and liking my books. In my stories, I have told about growing up in Iowa, about being a teacher, about being a friend, about being in love, about facing fear, and ultimately about being able to laugh about all of it. In my fiction, I have already gone home, repeatedly. When I get my cheapo flushing-funeral, that will not be me. I will be in the cornfields under the blue Iowa sky with a threat of thunderstorms in the distance. And while I may cry a little bit, because what is life worth without some of that? I will be mostly laughing and laughing and laughing. Because life may end in death, but nothing about it is sad if you don’t let it be. I like to delude myself into thinking the world is a little bit better now than when I got here, and I pretend that I have had something to do with that. The game is won. Everything else is just gravy! (Sorry about that. I do realize that gravy goes on mashed potatoes, not a game, but mangled metaphors are one of my specialties.)
Filed under Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 