Tag Archives: paffooney

September 1, 2023 · 1:18 am

Doofy Dog Doings

I noted before that I have so far used an alarming number of dog-poop jokes in my creative writing projects. (All right, two instances may not really be alarming, but it does indicate that I am thinking about dog poop way too much.) I guess the reason for it is that I have a dog, and she is not a genius dog. She is smarter than I can cope with, but she only beats me at chess once out of every thirty games. She inspired today’s Paffooney, so let me show you the picture before I tell you everything that is wrong with my little dog.

Okay, my dog looks nothing like this. She is a Cardigan Corgi, a dog bred to chase and kill barn rats, or to protect the baby’s crib when the adults are not in the room. She is highly possessive, and she considers me her property. So, here’s where the dog poop comes in. I have to walk her twice a day, and I have to take a Walmart bag with me to pick up the poop in the park (even though it is obvious that no one else in our neighborhood does it despite the posted law). And it turns out that this is not enough to keep her from pooping in the house. The little poop factory can make as many as five times in one day. And even worse, she will poop in punishment if we commit the crime of leaving her alone to go somewhere. We get back from the dollar movie and she has pooped on the dining room carpet, or in front of my bedroom door, somewhere where she knows I will see it and get mad. She doesn’t care if she gets punished in return. She is satisfied if she made her point. So I am drowning in dog poop on a daily basis. It’s no wonder it’s on my mind and I end up writing about it. God help me, of all the things to have on your mind, I have dog poop on mine!

If you are wondering about the rat in the picture, there is a rat part to my doggy nightmare. We live near a city park where there are lots of storm drains and rain gutters for rats to inhabit. And there are throngs of rats. When we kept the dog in the yard on a chain, the rats would come by daily to laugh at her before coming into the house and gnawing rat holes into the walls and ceilings and eat the glues out of the spines of many of my books. So rats are a part of the reason she now gets to live in the house. My wife goes ballistic from seeing or hearing rats. But I think they still laugh at her as they come in anyway. It’s just that they stay quieter with her around and my wife doesn’t see or hear them. So, it would be problem solved if only the poop problem would go away.

Here’s her actual portrait. Sorry if it is too scary for children and the faint of heart.

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Tagged as artwork, colored marker, Dog poop, dogs, drawing, humor, paffooney, pen and ink

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The Girl With the Red Bird

This is a Paffooney I have had in my portfolio for many years. Is it a miracle that it looks so much like my daughter the Princess? Yes! Most definitely. I drew this before I got married, more than twenty years ago. Yet, it looks so much like the Princess that my flabber is completely gasted.

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August 13, 2023 · 1:46 am

August 9, 2023 · 12:34 am

The Family That Slays Trolls Together…

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As a family, we play Dungeons and Dragons. Well, all of us, that is, except Mom. It’s basically against her religion and means the Jehovah’s Witness version of Hell for us. (Which is a spiritual condition where God refuses to talk to you, and play checkers with you, and then you die.) But let’s not discuss that here. I don’t need her to start thinking about reasons to divorce me. She accepts that it is a thing we do and like and keep mostly to ourselves. (I just rolled a 15 on a twenty-sided dice to succeed in that charm-enemy spell and avert disaster.)

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As a family we have chosen to use the Eberron campaign available from Wizards of the Coast, the company that now publishes all official D&D stuff. It is a medieval/Renaissance sort of setting where magic is every-day common and takes the place of science in the real world.

I get to be game master and creator of the basic plots and stories. My three kids, Dorin, Henry, and the Princess are the player characters who interact with the world and determine the outcomes of the adventures through the rolling of Dungeon Dice.

I want to assure you at this point that my eldest son does not actually have a watermelon for a head. Maybe metaphorically, but he is easily the smartest and most likely to be a leader of my three kids. His character routinely pursues ideas like replacing his arms with magical metal arms, or grafting additional arms on his body. He has chosen the phoenix to be the symbol on his personal flag and coat of arms, but his artifice roll to create the magical ship’s flag turned out to make it look more like a pigeon that someone set on fire. (You have to watch out for those rolls of “1” on a 20-sided dice.)

Henry, my middle child, likes to play a halfling. The little hobbit-like character is the one called upon to disarm all the tiger traps and poison-arrow traps that line the dungeon tunnels ahead. He is a problem-solver in real life. And he wants to be an architect. In D&D games, he is often the first one to run up to danger and look it in the blood-shot eye.

Every D&D group needs a wizard or some other magic-user. Ours has Mira, the Kalashtar mind- wizard. My daughter’s character can use mind powers to float in the air, pick up and throw things with her mind alone, and figure out ways to do things using as little physical effort as possible. Oh, and she loves to eat chocolate. (The character, I mean… or is it actually the daughter? I don’t know. It is sometimes hard to tell them apart.)

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In our last adventure, we went to investigate the evil doings going in Evernight Keep, a castle in the country of Aundair. We were able to not only defeat the evil mind-flayer, Dr. Zorgo, who had turned everyone into golems in the castle, but also to win the castle and the title of the Duke of Passage. Now that they own a castle, my little band of adventurers will have to defend it, and I know of one old game master who will definitely throw all kinds of evil challenges at them.

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Tagged as Dungeons and Dragons, family, humor, paffooney

August 8, 2023 · 1:01 am

The Many People That Are Me

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Yes, I am a wizard. That is a complicated thing to say. It is complicated because a wizard has to be a wise man, and wisdom has to begin with the idea that you know practically nothing about anything… but you can find out. So one version of me has to be my wizard D&D character, the wizard Eli Tragedy. This is because I know practically nothing about anything… but I am willing to not be stupid and look stuff up before I tell you anything and pretend it is a wise thing to say.

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I have been thinking about who I am because I want to re-do my About the Author page. And that leads to the difficulty of explaining who Mickey actually is. You see, I am actually lots of different people in my head. Mickey is the cartoonist, the humorist, the clown. He is not the every-day me. He is the goofy and foofy and lovey-to-drawie part of me. And yes, I know some of those are not real words. Mickey is like that. He speaks Mickian Goof Speak. I have no control over that part of him. I am not certain where this Mickey-part of my soul originated, but it may be the result of too much TV when I was a kid.

And of course there is the Teacher-Me, Reluctant Rabbit, the person who stood in front of groups of twelve-thirteen-and-fourteen-year-olds for three decades and tap-danced, told stories, stood on my head, and begged them to internalize at least a lesson or two of what I tried to teach them.

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Teacher

And the wizard part of me was just barely wise enough to realize that a teacher can open doors, but you can’t shove a kid through. They have to take the critical learning step themselves. They have to want to learn something. But even though they actually do the learning themselves, they will come back to me in later years saying, “Oh, thank you, you taught me so much!” when really all I did was be a guide on the side and stayed out of their way.

And, of course, there is the Cowboy Me. I live in Texas. I was a Belmond Bronco in high school, but I became a Cotulla Cowboy for 24 years of my teaching career. I ended up as a Naaman Forest Ranger. I have worn the hat a lot in my life, being as much of a straight shooter as the Shakiest Gun In The West can be, always trying to shoot the six-guns out of the bad guy’s hands rather than shoot people.

So how do I explain a thing like that? Probably the way I just did it (ironically). I should use Paffoonies I have created over time and waffle about stupid stuff that might make people laugh when they realize how self-contradictory it is. And I should say it like I mean it… because I probably do.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, Mickey, Paffooney, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Uncategorized

Tagged as artwork, autobiography, goofiness, humor, Mickey, paffooney

August 4, 2023 · 1:10 am

The Uncritical Critic Likes to Read Books Too!

I told you before that I make a lousy movie critic because I watch anything and everything and like most of it. You don’t believe me? You can look it up through this link; The Uncritical Critic

I hate to tell you this, but it is almost exactly the same for books too.

The Paffooney is an illustration for a proposed collaboration on a children’s book. My friend and fellow author Stuart R. West (Stuart’s Blogspot about Aliens) had a story about three kids taking a balloon ride when they accidentally gave the goldfish bubble gum to chew ignoring their mother’s warning that dire consequences would follow. He decided the project was too ridiculous to follow through on, or at least my Paffooney power wasn’t up to making sense of his brilliant literature, and the book did not happen. And I am sorry about that because I couldn’t wait to find out how it turns out. I love weird and wild stories of all kinds. And, unfortunately, I love them uncritically.

So, what kind of books would a goofy uncritical critic actually recommend? Let me lay some bookishness on ya then.

Here is the review I wrote for Goodreads on Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.

I have always felt, since the day I first picked up a copy of Mort by Terry Pratchett, that he was an absolute genius at humor-and-satire style fantasy fiction. In fact, he is a genius compared to any author in any genre. He has a mind that belongs up there with Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and William Faulkner… or down there as the case may well be. This book is one of his best, though that is a list that includes most of his Discworld novels.
Amazing Maurice is a magically enhanced cat with multiple magically enhanced mice for minions. And the cat has stumbled on a sure fire money-making scheme that completely encompasses the myth of Pied Piper of Hamlin. In fact, it puts the myth in a blender, turns it on high, and even forgets to secure the lid. It is funny, heartwarming, and changes the way you look at mice and evil cats.
This is a book to be read more than once and laughed at for the rest of your life.

You see what I mean? I uncritically praise books that make me laugh and think deeply about things at the same time. It is as if I don’t have any standards at all if something is brilliantly written and makes a deep and influential impression on me.

Here’s another book that I love so much I can’t be properly critical when I reread it. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I cannot help but be taken in by the unrequited love the dissolute lawyer Sydney Carton had for the beautiful refugee from the French Revolution, Lucy Manette. Tragic love stories melt my old heart. And I can’t help but root for Charles Darnay as well, even though I know what’s going to happen in Paris at the Bastille because I have read this book three times and seen the Ronald Coleman movie five times. I also love the comical side characters like Jerry Cruncher the grave-robber and hired man as well as Miss Pross, the undefeatable champion of Miss Lucy and key opposer to mad Madam Defarge.

I simply cannot be talked out of praising the books I read… and especially the books I love. I am totally uncritical as a reader, foolishly only looking for things I like about a book. Real critics are supposed to read a book and make faces that remind you of look on my little brother’s face when I had to help him use an outhouse for the first time. (Oh, what a lovely smell that was!) (And I mean that sarcastically!) Real critics are supposed to tell you what they hated about the book and what was done in such a juvenile and unprofessional way that it spoiled all other books forever. That’s right isn’t it? Real critics are supposed to do that? Maybe I am glad I’m not a real critic.

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Tagged as Amazing Maurice, book review, Charles Dickens, humor, paffooney, Tale of Two Cities, Terry Pratchett

August 2, 2023 · 12:15 am

Being and Artistry

Being an artist is a matter of genetics, luck, and loads of practice. I began drawing when I was only four or five years old. I drew skulls and skeletons, crocodiles and deer on everything. My kindergarten and first grade teachers were constantly gritting their teeth over the marked-up margins of every workbook and worksheet. I drew and colored on everything. I eventually got rather good, drawing in pencil, crayon, ink, and as you see here, colored pencil. I loved to draw the people and things around me. I also drew the things of my imagination. I drew my best girl, Alicia, and I drew the half-cobra half-man that lived in the secret cavern under our house. I drew a picture of the house across the underpass from Grandma Mary’s house. I drew cardinals, and I drew Snoopy cartoons. I drew my sports heroes in football and hockey, Donny Anderson and Gordie Howe. I drew monsters with fangs and fuzzy animals with huge soulful eyes. I still draw and it’s mostly the same things that I drew when I was a child. I will post more of the drawings here in the near future to dazzle you with my talents and ridiculous sense of the absurd.

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Tagged as autobiography, colored pencil, drawing, humor, paffooney, surrealism

July 9, 2023 · 1:27 am

Polyticks

political insanity

People are people, no matter how wrong…

And it isn’t a good thing to argue too long.

My friend is a “Can” from the Republic of Cans,

Who says all the poor people are just bad hu-mans.

And he really believes it, even though he’s not dumb,

‘Cuz he thinks climbing ladders using one of his thumbs,

Is how all people manage to be worthy and good,

And lazy bad people choose to fail like soft wood.

And though he’s not seen that old ladder of mine,

Or the ladders of people with one rung in nine,

He’s thoroughly convinced that all ladders are fair,

And it’s all their own fault if they fall through the air.

Yes, people are people, no matter how wrong…

And it isn’t a good thing to argue so long.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee member Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asserts an objection to Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a Democratic sponsor of the long-stalled Keystone XL pipeline bill, as the committee met to advance the controversial project, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2015, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Sanders, who sits with the Democrats, wanted an amendment to put Congress on the record about their beliefs on climates change and whether they agree with the international scientific community that climate change is real or not. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

I have a good friend who’ll do Demos of Crats,

And screech about equity like an army of cats.

He thinks we should pay for all college and school,

And use our tax money as a leveling tool.

He thinks we can make the rich pay for our dreams

And make life all breakfast of sugars and creams.

And maybe he can and maybe he can’t…

Make sense of the subject of his long, drawn-out rant,

But they’ll never pay it and he will get Berned,

Because they never part with what they think they have earned.

But, people are people, no matter how wrong…

And it isn’t a good thing to argue so long.

In conclusion I think the thinks that I think

Are carefully measured and really don’t stink,

But don’t take good thinking to toss in dump,

Or sooner or later… it’s President Trump!

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Tagged as Democrats, Donald Trump, goofiness, humor, paffooney, poetry, politics, Republicans

July 7, 2023 · 1:29 am

Doodle-Bop!

Sometimes the only thing you really want out of life is just to get by. You get tired of always having to climb the danged highest mountain. You get tired of trying to swim the danged deepest sea.

16750_102844509741181_100000468961606_71393_6278100_n Sometimes all you want to do is doodle-bop!… To draw in pen and ink and post your derfiest doofenwacky doodles so you can just make your way through another danged day.

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You aim a lot for different, and undeniably original… because no one thinks like you… certainly no one who is real and has a real brain. You are gifted with an “other-ness”, a sing-songy simpering something that makes you want to doodle and do what no man has done before. (Does that sentence exist anywhere else in all of literature? Even if there is some alternate dimension with infinite monkeys typing on infinite typewriters? What’s a typewriter, you say? Danged millennials!)

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I really can’t help it, you know. I was a middle school teacher for 24 years. That sort of thing has mental health consequences. And if you wring the sponges in your stupid old brain hard enough and long enough… doodle-bop! comes out.

Turtle boy’s magic iron of irony!!!

And you have to wonder why some of the stuff that is in your stupid old head is even in there. Why is it that sometimes the words “Argyle socks are filled with rocks” are drifting through the vast empty spaces in the logic centers of your brain? There has to be a reason for everything, doesn’t there?

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I do believe I have made myself chuckle at least a dozen chuck-tacular times in the chuck-a-tational crafting of this cheddar-cheesy post. But it only really counts if I can make you girlishly giggle or guy-like guffaw with my word-munching and cartoony paffoonies.

The terror-filled cartoon car chase that is life as usual.

You may have noticed that everything is black and white, even though it doesn’t have to be. Good versus evil, hot versus cold, everything can be divided up simplistically… but the really profound part of simplicity is vibrating reverberations of complexity that lie just underneath. Words have meaning, even though they are just a bunch of crooked squiggles marked on a page. (Yes, I know… “or typed on a computer screen”. Danged millennials!)

4th Dimension

And so, this is my doodle-bop! Probably not the doodliest or the boppiest doodle-bop! I could have bopped… but there it is. I have made it through another sorta creative post without losing my mind… Honest! I did not lose it. It is merely temporarily misplaced for a moment. It will be back in its proper place tomorrow… probably.

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Tagged as artwork, goofiness, humor, paffooney, pen and ink

July 6, 2023 · 2:28 am

Spotted Trains

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I have had a practically life-long fascination with trains. Where did that come from? It came from a Methodist minister who once upon a time saved my life.

Reverend Louis Aiken (in the cowboy hat) was a lover of HO model trains, as well as country music… and, of course, God.

My best friend growing up was a PK, a preacher’s kid. And as we hung out and played games and got into imaginatively horrible trouble, we invariably wound up in the basement of the parsonage where his father kept his HO train layout. I learned lessons of life in that basement in more than one way. I have to explain all of that somewhere down line. But for now, I have to limit the topic to what I learned about trains. They are a link to our past. They are everywhere. And they do far more for us than merely make us cuss while sitting and endlessly waiting at the railroad crossing.

When visiting Dows, we absolutely had to stop and take pictures at the train station.

This is, by my best guess, an SD40 locomotive parked at the restored train station in Dows, Iowa.

Spotting trains to take pictures of, gawk at, and totally make cow-eyes over has become a way of life to me. When visiting Iowa, especially Mason City, Iowa, we always have to stop at the engine on display in East Park.

When I was a kid, this old iron horse was not fenced in to protect it from kids, weather, and other destructive forces. Now, however, it is fully restored and given its own roof. This is a 2-8-2 steam engine with two little wheels in front, eight big wheels in the middle, and two little wheels at the back (not counting wheels on the coal tender). I have ridden on trains pulled by such a behemoth. I love to watch the monkey gears grind on the sides of the wheels forcing steam power into the surge down the tracks. And I can’t help being a total train nut. Of course I don’t deny being more than one kind of nut. But being a mixed nut is another post for another day.

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Tagged as HO model train, humor, Iowa, paffooney, photo Paffooney, train station, Trains

July 5, 2023 · 12:52 am

What Do Martians Look Like?

As Catch a Falling Star was a science-fictiony sort of comedy, one of the questions that I have pursued in internet research is the one I have presented here in the title of this picture-and-Paffooney-filled post. Seriously, the image search of Google’s answer to that question is enough to make you snort milk through the old nostrils as you sort through them while stupidly drinking a glass of milk. The milky nose-snorts are the reason I have not sited picture sources on this post. Cleaning the computer screen took too long. I have merely randomly snatched and pirated pictures. The only picture of a Martian presented here created by me are these two;

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I admit to being surprised by my actual research into the whole question of whether or not we have ever been visited by intelligent life from the stars beyond the sky. While I have not found proof that aliens exist, I have discovered there is actual proof that the government, and NASA in particular, have covered something up. And it goes beyond Area 51 defense research. But now that I have got the attention of the NSA and the Men in Black, this post is only filled with a collage of the unreal, made-up, and mostly silly.

Malevolent Martians;