Tag Archives: paffooney

May 1, 2016 · 3:21 pm

The Doorway Straight Ahead

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I just finished watching the last episode of the ABC dramatic television series, Lost. I watched every single episode of every single season they ever made of that show. And here’s a major spoiler. Everybody dies. Yes. No one gets through that TV series, or through life itself, without facing death at least once. And everybody has a last encounter with it where they don’t win. Except they do.

In my Paffooney above, the door straight ahead is the doorway home. This Paffooney oil painting is called Poppa Comes Home. I am hoping that is how it will be for me. I painted this picture before I had a wife and three kids. So how did I know? Or did I simply make it come true? Is that what the final doorway is all about? You make it be the doorway you want it to be? The truth is, I will probably find out before long. I retired from teaching in rather spectacularly poor health. I’m not sure I really expected to last this long. And I may live another twenty years. But probably not. The thing is, when the door is finally directly in front of me, I will fear not. I will simply open it and pass through. I am at peace. I have lived a good life. I was a teacher. I touched more than 2000 separate lives through my various classrooms over the course of 31 years. I succeeded some, I failed some, I cried some, and I laughed a lot. It all means a lot to me.

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As I write this now, I have spent most of the day sealed up in my room, on my bed with my laptop, suffering quite a lot with arthritis pain. Most of my days since retirement have been very much the same. My body, especially my joints, is wearing out. But endurance brings wisdom. Overcoming pain and the depression caused by pain provides me a deep, abiding faith and confidence in myself. I don’t know if I believe in Heaven, but I am sure there is no hell. God does not punish for a life completed, no matter how badly you may have lived it. And if I die, if the human race goes extinct, if our planet is destroyed, even if our entire galaxy winks out in the never-ending darkness of eternity, we have all accomplished a miracle just by the fact of our existence. The final doorway is the door home. I have no doubt.

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Filed under autobiography, Paffooney, philosophy

Tagged as artwork, facing death, faith, paffooney, philosophy

April 30, 2016 · 2:42 pm

Animal Town in Daylight

This is a place I explore in cartoons and daydreams. It is a little town known as Animal Town for fairly obvious reasons. It is populated by silly anthropomorphic animals who wear clothes and keep naked people as pets.

Animal Town is one of the all-time silliest places to visit in the cartoon dreamland of Fantastica.

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Mandy Panda and little brother Dandy are my constant companions and guides when I tour the dangerous streets of wild Animal Town. In my cartoons, Mandy is an immigrant from the Pandalore Islands. She is also the cartoon version of my wife.

Three of the Town’s most important head monkeys.

It was Mandy who introduced me to the government officials who run Animal Town. Judge Moosewinkle is the head of the Animal Town court system. He is a hanging judge, so I am very careful about littering and loitering when I am in town.

Constable Geoffrey Giraffe does all the arresting and police work. He used to work in a toy store, but quit his job there when he couldn’t get them to stop writing the R backwards on all their signs. Grammar infractions annoy him more than any other crime.

Linus the Kitten-Hearted is the mayor of Animal Town. They wanted to crown him as king, but he always says that’s only for when he’s in the jungle. In town he prefers to be a democratically elected leader. Of course, if you refuse to vote for him, he might eat you.

Most of my dreams in Animal Town are about the school there.

Yes, this is a yearbook picture from Animal Town Elementary School.

Miss Ancient’s Class of 5th graders is usually rather rowdy and difficult. You may have noticed there is a bare bear in the old buzzard’s class. The fact is, the bears in Animal Town are all naturists and refuse to wear clothes. This disturbs poor Miss
Ancient greatly, and it is therefore a real godsend that a fig leaf just happened to be drifting down through the air at the time this picture was made. Bobby Bare is not shy, but some things are better not put into a cartoon.

Yes, this is another yearbook picture. And I am in it twice, since Mr. Reluctant Rabbit is also me.

As a visitor to Animal Town, Cissy Bare took me to Mr. Rabbit’s class as her pet for show and tell. She is also a bare bear, and she also benefited from a passing leaf at picture time. You may notice students putting rabbit ears behind each other’s heads in pictures… something that human children do too in real life. But when I study this picture, I can’t help but think that maybe Mr. Rabbit started it. Now, Animal Town is located in Fantastica, a part of the Dreamlands. So that sort of explains how I ended up in school naked. My dreams are like that. You are in school in the middle of lessons before you realize that haven’t got a single stitch of clothing on.

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When I am inevitably charged with public indecency for being in school naked, I can turn to Animal Town lawyer Woolbinkle Moosewinkle. He is totally incompetent and not very bright, but unlike most of the animals, he is friendly and on my side. Spot Firedog is a Dalmatian who knows how to use a newspaper. He is a reporter, publisher, and all-around good dog. He wrote an expose on me being naked in the Animal Town Elementary school.

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Big Bull Beefalo runs the local hamburger emporium, which might seem like collusion to cannabalism, but Bull is a very gentle and very large soul. He is himself a vegetarian, but he is a gifted fry cook and chef. I can go to his restaurant when I get out of jail, though hopefully not as food.

So, Animal Town is a very different kind of place. It is the result of dreams and goofiness and uncontrolled spurts of cartoonist creativity. It is a cartoon sort of place where spontaneous and random humor happens.

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Filed under cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, characters, comic strips, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink, Uncategorized

Tagged as Animal Town, cartoons, Dreamlands, Fantastica, humor, paffooney

April 25, 2016 · 2:45 am

Oopsie… I forgetted

My last post was about the movie Jungle Book and how happy I was at the beauty of that movie which fulfilled my childhood love affair with that story. But I failed to share my own Paffoonies created from the story of the boy raised by wolves in the Seonee Hills.

So here they are… although they are late;

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This last one is a picture from a page in my wizardly tome of picture magic. The poem is called “Nobody Knows Why” and is interpreted here in case you can’t read the Mickian script in the Paffooney. Here is the text of the poem;

Nobody Knows Why

The world turns

And I must die

And ‘morrow comes

And Russians spy

And Doo-dahs Doo-dah

And Blueberry pie

And Monkeys shake

When they hear a Lie!

The mysteries in the meaning of this poem is supposed to remain a mystery. It is from a magical tome that belongs to a wizard. So, for all I know, it could be a very dangerous incantation. So don’t you dare try to figure it out. You don’t want to be a Monkey, do you?

Doodle Day

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If you do art, then you also doodle. Really! No matter how hard you may try to keep it a secret, you doodle, and people all know it. So, since the secret is out… Here are some of my doodles. This jester-sort-of-half-white-clown was a doodle yesterday while watching TV… something I do with my hands while my mind is doing something else.

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Here’s another doodle… same day, different piece of paper, different TV show.

But not all doodles are meandering swirls and girls. I have a whole book of home-made cartoons that start with a blank page and end up with a page that furthers whatever curious cartoon story I am trying to make. Here are a few examples of that.

Now, I know your doodles probably look nothing like mine. My doodles are seriously demented. I have doodled enough that I have seriously worry about going blind. And my doodles are influenced by a lifetime of bad arty-habits. But they do give me practice. They also help me think. They relieve stress. And they make an easy and somewhat racy post.

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Filed under artwork, cartoons, doodle, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as art practice, cartoons, doodles, humor, paffooney

April 20, 2016 · 7:22 pm

Mr. Lucky

Self Portrait vxv

Sometimes everything goes wrong. That, of course, is something that happens more often than the times when everything goes right. Lately I have had the fortune to experience the more common of those two sometimes.

My most recent publisher, the one that was supposed to publish Snow Babies, underwent a reduction in capacity and financial difficulties. They had to reorganize and reduce their commitments. That meant they could no longer publish any of my other novels. It apparently also means that they will no longer fulfill the publishing contract on Snow Babies. Bummer.

My new car, a Ford Fiesta that I bought from Enterprise Rental Car to replace my old Ford Fiesta that was unceremoniously killed by a passing motorist as it sat in front of my house, is now in the shop with it’s own hoof and mouth disease. While picking up kids from school, I hit a pothole on a Dallas street. Not just any pothole, but a huge camouflaged cavern of a pothole capable of taking a huge bite out of the right front wheel. I was not speeding. I did not do anything wrong but drive in place I have driven a hundred times previously… though this time it was after torrential rain and a bit of nasty hail that I had no way of knowing made potholes bigger and angrier and more horrible. I am surprised that it didn’t eat any other cars in the moderate traffic I was surrounded by. But I initially thought that once a passing motorist, younger and more pothole savvy than me, did the good Samaritan act of helping me change the tire, that I would only have to get the tire fixed or replaced and would be happily on my way again. No such luck. Not only was the tire ruined, but also the rim it was mounted on, and possibly the undercarriage of the car. It was going to cost at least the $500 deductible from my insurance company, unless something even worse happened that they couldn’t see without looking at their bank books a little harder. And I had to get another rental car in the mean time. But, of course, the recent hail storm not only had most of the rental cars rented, but the rental companies had lost cars to hail damage as well. I was stuck with a rather expensive Dodge Challenger that the car insurance can’t completely pay for. And I have no place to park it if the hail decides to revisit us this week. Double bummer.

And, of course, it doesn’t end there. Having kids in school is a challenge, especially this time of year with high-stakes testing going on. I can’t give you particulars because some things have to remain private, but even really bright kids like mine, the children of two teachers, can be subject to test-anxiety and failure and the resulting depression which can prove fatal if not taken seriously enough. Triple damn ding-dang bummer!

But we can’t let bad luck be the end-all of the story. I am a pessimist by nature. Nothing has happened to me recently that took me by surprise. I am always expecting the worst to happen, and life rarely disappoints me on that score. So I am not floored by these randomly-occurring sucker punches. Rather, I am given that shot of anger and adrenaline needed to pick myself up and start fighting back.

class Miss Mcover

I have my novel Magical Miss Morgan almost ready to submit to another publisher that I found through a friend, with a couple of backup publishers to send it to after it is rejected the first time. I have researched three possibilities so far.

I talked to the insurance agent today to stop the hemorrhaging of money down the drain of car repairs, and though I have taken a pretty good-sized cannon shot in this battle, it will not sink my little pirate ship.

And a conference with principal and teacher and student and parent solved a lot of the other problem. It can be an advantage to a kid to have a teacher as a parent. We tend to know how everything works, and we speak the secret language of Edjumacation to help get things actually done.

So, no worries, man. Even though all my luck is bad luck, I am still lucky… since there is a lot of it.

April Showers

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I have always believed the point of April showers was to bring May flowers. But the showers this April are merely making the flowers wet, since they are already here.

Last night was like that. Drippy rain followed by thundershowers… quaking in safety as the world gets wet.

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I worry about global warming and the possible end of life on Earth. But flowers each spring are a hopeful sign. The world is renewing itself after the winter of our discontent. In fact, a couple of years ago, the daffodils came out in February and got frozen to death in the week following their bold attempt to bloom early. It just goes to prove that daffodils are the dumbest of all flowers. I drew a portrait of one of them. Daffy O’Dill posed for this shortly before his fateful encounter with the weed whacker.

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But pictures of the flowers in our yard are like the pictures of sunrises that I collect. As I get older and enter the late winter months of my little life, they give me hope and consolation. I hate to think that when my life ends the rest of humanity will soon follow. Pessimists like me have good reason to think such things might be the case. But there is also reason for hope. Flowers are a sign of hope. Flowers are a sign that life renews itself. Flowers bloom, and the bees come, and seeds develop, and everything continues to grow. Flowers make God smile.

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So, the rain came down, and in spite of possible hail and thunderstorms, wind and possible tornadoes, there are flowers. In fact, look at this humongous rose growing in our neighbor’s tree. If it actually came from outer space, it may be very well looking to eat us… eat our evil dentist at the very least. And I found a novel way to get another good post out of my flower pictures.

Signs

Fools n Toys

Signs, by their very nature, are powerful. They give you direction. They tell you what to do… and what not to do. They control you and control others.

Richard and Victor Martin were sitting at the table in front of the stage they had just finished constructing at the center of Martin’s Bar and Grille. It had turned into something of a gift from heaven to have the young cousin from France living with them. When he put the clown paint on his face and sang karaoke, people came from several counties away to hear it. They also brought their money and their thirst with them. The brothers had labored for two days to build the stage and make better use of the unexpected gift that came with taking in their uncle’s orphaned son.

“Have a beer, brother. You have earned it,” said Richard to his older brother.

“Generous of you. Especially since it is my bar and my beer to begin with.”

At that moment they both noticed the balding young man standing at the bar with his zebra hand puppet on his right arm.

“We’re not open for business yet,” Victor said. “The bar is still closed.”

“You are going to have give the dummy here a Kewpie Cola,” said the zebra puppet. “We can’t do anything but stand here and look at the sign until you give him one. He does have enough money to pay for it.”

“What? What are you talking about?” asked Victor. He looked at the young man, Murray Dawes, standing and looking up at the antique Kewpie Cola sign that Victor had hung as a decoration over the bar.

“It says, Drink a Kewpie Cola Today!” the puppet said. Victor did not see the young man’s mouth moving, but he had heard the boy had a gift for ventriloquism even though he was autistic and hardly ever spoke. “Murray always does everything signs tell him to. His mother told him signs tell us to do things for our own good.”

“So if he reads it on a sign he has to do it?” asked Richard.

“Yes,” said the zebra puppet. “You wouldn’t believe how long we have to stand and wait in front of that stop sign on the west end of Main Street. Every time we pass it he has to do what it says until he feels safe.”

Both men laughed.

Crooner “The fool’s mother constantly puts a sign on his bedroom door that says, Clean your room! So he has to do it every day before he can do anything else. One day he decided he didn’t want to clean his room that day, and he made a sign himself. It said, Don’t put any signs on this door! He put it on his bedroom door. But then he read what it said and had to take it down again.”

“That’s pretty funny,” said Richard.

“Yeah,” said Victor. “Do you think you could do that ventriloquist thing on stage? We’d pay you to do it for our customers.”

“You have to understand,” said the zebra puppet, “that Murray is very shy. He won’t be very talkative on stage. I would have to do all of the talking.”

“If you can do it and be that funny, I think it will work,” said Victor.

“You have a deal. But every time we get on the stage, you will have to put a sign on the wall for Murray to read.”

“What would the sign have to say? Break a leg or something?”

“Not unless you want him to fall down and hurt himself. It should only say, Believe in yourself… and be funny!”

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, satire, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as artwork, fiction, Fools and Their Toys, goofiness, humor, paffooney, Short short

March 11, 2016 · 4:18 pm

Happiness

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It took a while. I started this blog in 2013. But I have built it up gradually. And now I have reached the point that my publisher’s publicity expert said I should reach in a few months. My novel is not doing nearly as well. My high-priced consultants (high-priced for me because I have no money) want me to spend more money to try again to get the novel noticed. What I have actually noticed is that they are making a helluva lot more money than I am. I am resolved now to do it on my own. I will find my own way in marketing, or fail on my own. I don’t need to be paying anybody to help me fail. I am doing that quite well on my own. And I have reason to think this blog might be succeeding. The I-Universe marketing team cannot legitimately claim to have anything at all to do with that. I thank them for what they have taught me about the business. They taught me that no one really wants to help me but me myself. They are in it for the money. And like unsuccessful authors everywhere, I have begun telling myself, it is not about the money… especially not money for them.

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Filed under announcement, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as blogging, humor, marketing your writing, paffooney

March 2, 2016 · 4:31 pm

Internet Lies About Mickey

Mickey

The truth is sometimes Mickey tells lies. For instance, the title of this post is intended to lure you in with expectations of a juicy something that doesn’t actually exist. There is no controversy on the internet over this particular Mickey. He hasn’t done a very good job of keeping it secret that he tells a lot of lies. In fact, most of the most embarrassing and terrible secret things that he had been keeping secret for going on sixty years are now published in this blog. Talk about a life being an open book!

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Of course, being a lover of internet conspiracies and ufo’s and junk, there is always that other Mickey to talk about. Yes, Disney has generated its share of conspiracy theories.

Everyone on the internet knows, for instance, that when Walt Disney died, he had his body frozen cryogenically so that he could be re-animated once a cure for his lung cancer was found. Of course, Snopes.com already did the investigation on it and brought out the fact that not only was Disney cremated with full documentation of the process, the first cryogenic freezing of a human being didn’t occur until a year after his death. This lie about Mickey’s dad, then is easily debunked. See, the internet lies about Mickey!

Of course, the notion that Disney was a racist and a Nazi and worked with the CIA are much harder to disprove.

A character from the original version of Fantasia that doesn’t help Mickey’s image.

Most heads of super-wealthy corporations are by nature fascists. The dictatorial style and oppressive oligarchic command structures of fascism organically grew out of business practices. Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan were also Nazis. And, of course, no one believes me when I start in on the Disney/alien connection. After all, what’s with alien beings in Escape from Witch Mountain, Lilo and Stitch, and even Chicken Little? I may have some more conspiracy-theory investigating to do.

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So, let me assure you that lies about Mickey are actually lies. The thing about Mickey’s dream in the 1960’s of seeing Annette Funicello naked is a lie… er, probably. The notion that Mickey trained himself to be a cartoonist by copying Disney characters like Carl Barks’ ducks are… err… um… lies… maybe. Well, anyway, the point is… don’t spread lies on the internet about Mickey. That’s my job.

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Filed under cartoons, conspiracy theory, Disney, humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as Annette Funicello, conspiracy theory, Disney, humor, lies, paffooney, Walt Disney

February 26, 2016 · 4:45 pm

The Oubliette

Every Dungeons and Dragons player, especially game masters, know about the oubliette. In the foundations of towers in the castles of the French you often find a windowless room with the only entrance in the ceiling. It is a dark hole where you throw captives you want to simply forget. In fact, the name comes from the word in Middle French, “oublier” which translates to “forget”. Now, of course, as a former school teacher, I know about oubliettes. I have been in one more than once. I have tossed bad kids in there more than once. But the thing I had to learn about “forget holes” is that there is always a way out.

Eli Tragedy

I had a principal who decided I had betrayed him because he overheard me talking sympathetically to a teacher he had been berating for asking that he discipline students she sent to him for disruptive behavior. He overheard me saying that he would be more understanding if he tried to manage a class himself once in a while. For my indiscretion he took away my gifted class and gave me in its place a class composed entirely of students who had been repeatedly sent to him by teachers for being disruptive and unmanageable. It was a class from hell. Really… from hell… Satan’s stepson was the first student he put in that class. I was told I would have to discipline them entirely without help from him. But as tough as it is teaching twenty dysfunctional learners at once with no outside help, it was do-able. In fact, I liked some of the kids in that class. (Hated some too, though, because you can’t always like every kid no matter how crappy they act.) I didn’t manage to teach them much English. They all spoke Skuggboy fluently the whole time. But I did endure. In fact, when that principal was suddenly jobless two-thirds of the way through the year and replaced by a new principal, I got a chance to get some back. She overhead Satan’s stepson doing his comic stand-up routine in response to my specific directions and came in to remind him who was in charge in the classroom and who deserved respect. That reminder lasted for a good fifteen minutes and was a prelude to a parent-principal conference that same afternoon. I saw his evil smile turned upside down for the first time that school year.

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Whenever I put a student in the oubliette (asked them to stand outside the classroom door until I could talk to them about their bad behavior) I never left them there more than five minutes. I would quickly give the class the directions they needed to continue on their own, and then I would go out to execute the prisoner. It usually was an explanation of how I wanted them to behave, and then giving them a choice, whether they wanted to go back in and do the right thing, or they wanted to visit the office with a written explanation by me of exactly what they did wrong. Even though nothing would probably happen to them in the office, they rarely chose that option.

So, there is always a way out… but there are many forms of the oubliette, and no one is immune to being sent there.

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Filed under forgiveness, humor, Paffooney, teaching

Tagged as autobiography, humor, oubliette, paffooney, students, teacher discipline, teaching

Tag Archives: paffooney

The Doorway Straight Ahead

Animal Town in Daylight

Oopsie… I forgetted

Doodle Day

Mr. Lucky

April Showers

Signs

Happiness

Internet Lies About Mickey

The Oubliette

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