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
Today I am updating a comic in my Vault. So if you wish to see the entire comic as it exists so far on WordPress, then here it is; The Atlas of Fantastica.
These are the updated pages;
So now I have shared with you my nightmares about banks and finances. Happy pirate dreams, and don’t take any wooden dahblooens!
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.
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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.
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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
Here is a syllogism to explain Jesus logic;
Here is another.
You can draw your own conclusions about the mathematics of believing in religion. I have no qualms about letting others believe whatever they want to believe about the universe, its purpose, and who made it. I think it is very pompous and self-serving to think you are qualified, either from science or faith, to say you know the absolute truth about those things and others must accept your logical conclusions. Here is my own pompous and self-serving opinion. There is a God. I know this because I talk to Him daily. He speaks to me through signs and resonances and Bible-reading and feelings. But, here’s the rub; I have hoarding disorder and diabetic depression and other mental illnesses. Since I am crazy, you probably shouldn’t believe the voices in my head that I listen to. But I get comfort from my belief in God. Christianity teaches that we should love one another. This, I think, is the most important truth we can possibly accept. Part of loving others is not condemning them for what they believe and trying to impose my beliefs upon them. God, to me, is everything that there is. The universe around me is vast and complicated. I will never know even a half a grain of sand worth of all the knowledge wrapped up in grains of sand on all the beaches on all the planets in the universe. But the universe is alive and self-aware because I am alive and self-aware, and I am part of the universe. And here’s the kicker, my conclusions about life, the universe, and everything make no more sense than the Jesus logic I presented at the outset. After all, I am provably crazy.
I was recently half-bullied and half-convinced that cleaning up and cutting hair and beard would make me feel better over all in spite of six incurable diseases and the ravages of old age. Well, I fell for that line of reasoning in spite of my lovely reddish-purple psoriasis patches and flaking skin on my face and back of my neck. And, the added push came from a possibly brief respite from facial and neck patches. Things are mostly healed up in the parts you can see. So, now, my wife says I look twenty years younger. (Of course, she probably thought I looked about a hundred and thirty-five with the long hair and beard.)
So, see for yourself what I look like now. It is scary to contemplate. I look almost normal. What kind of protection is that for society in general? Now mothers can’s say to their children, “Let’s go over here, farther away from that creepy old fellow.” There is danger that they might come close enough to hear me tell a joke. Don’t believe me? You should’ve seen the look on the face of that young mother from India who overheard me tell my kids at Walmart, “Milk prices have gone higher than gas prices here. They must have changed to using gas-powered cows for milk.” Really! You’ve should have seen the expression on her face as she heard me say that. It was like she had tasted some of the milk from gas-powered cows. And it got even worse when she overheard my kids agree with me. She was sure that I was an absolute danger to the educational health of her little happy brown children.
I am not certain that I can stay the way I am at the moment. Being a spotty-faced old man again doesn’t have a lot of appeal. But I am not sure I want to go back to Mr. Hairy again, either. I liked the author’s beard and the Gandalf hair, but it had drawbacks of its own too. I shall try this new me for now, and do the best I can to stay this way. So be warned, keep your kids out of earshot. You wouldn’t want to have any of them laugh themselves to death.
Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney
“What will future people think of our culture if the only archaeological artifact they have to go by is a spork?” Henry asked over Ramen noodles.
“A spork?” asked Mom.
“You know, one of those spoon/fork thingies, the plastic ones?”
“It won’t be a problem,” I said. “In the far future the people will all be cockroaches. They will know what a spork is because of racial memory.”
“Euuw!” said Mom. “Not cockroaches!”
“Yes,” said the Princess, “cockroaches can survive nuclear winter… They said in school that they are radioactive-proof.”
“I don’t think they can ever become intelligent,” said Mom. “They don’t die when you cut their head off. Um, well, they don’t die until they starve to death because they have no mouth to eat with.”
“But nuclear winter will make food harder to find eventually, and the smarter cockroaches will evolve,” I suggested.
“I don’t believe in evolution,” Mom said.
The kids looked at me and grinned, shaking their heads.
“And if it is true, they will run out of food with all the people and animals dead,” the Princess suggested.
“Ah, the cockroach population will boom with all the dead things to eat, and the rotted stuff will grow mutated plants and fungus that they can learn to farm,” I said.
“And the smart ones can eat the stupid ones,” said Henry. “There will be lots and lots of those.”
“So we are all agreed that cockroaches will rule the earth, and it won’t matter if they know what a spork is or not, right?” I concluded. So we basically solved the problem of repopulating the Earth after Armageddon. Of course, Mom is a Jehovah’s Witness, and believes in a Paradise on Earth for forever, so we wish her well getting along with the evolved cockroach civilization.
Okay, like, my name is Jade Beyer. I know I look like a dog, but my family lets me be a people sometimes. They let me eat enough people food from their table to turn into one of them. You know, like, all fat and unhealthy and some stuff. So, since Mickey is being lazy today, he said I could write his blog for him. It won’t be very long because it is taking forever to pick out the right keys with my nose. And my nose is bif… I mean big enough to hit the wrong key sometimes. So I have to edif caretully and ofren.
My family does a lot of funny stuff I can tell about. Like how they pee. They go in my extra drinking places. You know, the white things with the extra funky tasting water. Why are you not laughing about that? Don’t you get it? The house is full of carpets where they could pee and mark their territory with their scents. But they would rather just pee where I drink. I don’t get it. And why is Mickey yelling at me that I can’t write about that? I just did, didn’t I?
But besides that I can tell you about my Momma. Mickey is my Momma. Why do I say that even though Mickey is a man? Well, when I was a wee little puppy and my family found me in the street, Mickey was the first one to pick me up and hold me. He was the first one to feed me. He says I must have “imprinted” on him as baby animals sometimes do. And that’s why he’s my Momma. I love him best. Even when he is grumpy and mad at me. I chew up a lot of his stuff because it smells like him and I love him so very much.
I am writing this today because Mickey is busy shaving off his face fur. He found some old pictures of himself for yesterday’s post, and it made him wonder if he could look anything like that again. I tried to chew the old pictures so I could love them even better, but he just got mad at me and swatted me on the ears. He said I could show you the old pictures, and not eat them. So here they are before the temptation gets to me;
Wasn’t he a goofy-looking kid? I like him better with glasses. I tasted his glasses once, but not the ones in the picture, the ones he is wearing now. His face doesn’t look anything like the third grade pictures any more. I would very much like to lick that little-boy face with the same tongue I use to lick my own butt, but Mickey says he’s glad I can’t because that kid was dumb enough to let a dog lick his face. Apparently when people get older, you just can’t lick them as much. It just makes them grumpy.
Filed under family dog, humor, Paffooney
I am nearing the completion of my novel Snow Babies. The editor, Jessie Cornwell, sent it back to me with the third read-through completed. I am now closing in on a completed final draft ready to go to print. And I am posting this post to acknowledge that the character of the hobo with the quilted jacket for a coat is indeed me. Well, as close to being me as a fictional character who may or may not be an angel can come. I admit I am probably not as good as Lucky Catbird Sandman is good.
But I am a man who is basically a Walt Whitman-type poet-y sort of man in a cartoony sort of way. That is what the Catbird really is.
He wears a coat of many colors which is made up of many varicolored patches. Each patch in the crazy quilt of his coat stands for a memory of the many people he has known and the problems he has solved. He helps the main character of the story, a small-town Iowa girl named Valerie Clarke, as her little town is besieged by a terrible blizzard. The Trailways bus is stranded near the town, and on the bus are four orphan boys, running away to nowhere and desperately needing the intervention of the angels to help them escape the lives they’ve left behind. Catbird spins miracles out of random things and random snatches of Walt Whitman’s poetry. He carries around a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and he quotes from it like a Bible. So, he is a me-character because he was born in my goofy brain and represents no real person living or dead. He is more of a literary device than a man… just like me. And that is notable because all the other players in the story are based on real people that I have known, either in Iowa or Texas, real people who have been a significant part of my real life.
I believe this is why the novel is the most important thing I have ever written. It is because, if I ever found any real worthy wisdom to spread around like jam on bread, it is to be found in this book. It is the best thing I have ever written and published. At least, so far. And the mysterious stranger character, the man in the coat of many colors, Catbird… is me. Judge for yourself if I am not like him.
Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, Snow Babies, writing humor
Well, I almost got a ticket in a school zone this morning. The sun was in my eyes and I was driving a steady 31 miles an hour in a twenty mile per hour zone. Fortunately the young officer apparently was fooled by my decrepit old man act (which I do incredibly well because I have had arthritis for forty years and I look like death warmed over in the morning… and I am not actually acting). I was let off with a warning and threats of a beating next time. Portents of bad times continue. I have another oil change warning light on my dashboard even though I just had the old Ford Fiesta at the dealer last week, having the engine put back in because Walmart blew it up. The conspiracy theorist in me was noticing particularly odd-shaped contrails in the skies over Garland and East Dallas. I have been told by fellow conspiracy theorists that the guvvamint is spraying nano-particles in the upper atmosphere to fix global warming so they don’t have to admit it exists and was caused by aliens. And I can believe these tinfoil hatters because they showed me proof that the CIA has altered their DNA with fluoridated water. Nobody could have that pointy of a pin-head without guvvamint help. So life continues to treat me the way Bugs Bunny treats Elmer Fudd. And I feel slapped silly.
But here’s the important thing;
Followed by;
And then;
So you can see that I haven’t given up yet. My flower petals burst with color. And the seeds that I have planted continue to grow and blossom anew.
I have been working on final edits for my novel Snow Babies. I have also been struggling with diabetes, arthritis, and COPD. At the same time, I have been writing up a storm on my blog and posting all kinds of incredibly goofy and somewhat creative stuff. So today is a break without leaving a hole in my goal of posting a blog post every single day of 2015. I have to go all the way to Balch Springs, Texas today for a flag football game. So, if you are disappointed with this meager post, go back and look at any of the other recent posts you may have missed. I’m not saying they are worth the effort, but wasting your time is what I do.
Filed under NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, writing humor
Catch a Falling Star 