I’m not bragging. I know it is not that much. But it’s more than twice what I had at the start of 2014.
Tag Archives: paffooney
More Powerful than a Locomotive
There is an old saying… “What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.”
I have an addendum to add… “If what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, then I must be Superman!”
Lying here now in pain after having surgery this morning, that is exactly what I have been telling myself. No more Kryptonite today, thank you.
I may have mentioned before on this blog that I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor since 1983. (If I haven’t mentioned it before, then it was only because I mistook complaining loudly and relentlessly about it for mentioning.) I have arthritis, diabetes, COPD, hypertension, psoriasis, and benign prostatic hyperplasia. Two of those diseases ganged up on me recently. I had a sebaceous cyst on my lower back that had gotten infected because psoriasis had flaked skin off the top of it until there was an ulcerated infected hole there and it caused me enough pain to prevent sleeping. (I know you didn’t really want to know about that… but. then, neither did I).
I got the thing surgically excised (whacked off with scalpel and scissors) and had the hole sewn back together with a few butterfly Band Aids slapped on the top. I had been given a topical anesthetic that deadened the nerves while I was being carved up, but wears off shortly after and then all the pain that has been saved up comes rushing back to fill the void. The doctor said I could take aspirin, but I have a big bottle of Aleve next to the bed for arthritis, and my body is so used to the medicine that I might just as easily have taken a sugar pill for the same effect. (Of course then my diabetes would come knocking on my brain.) So, I am in pain.
But less than an hour after surgery, I had to go in to the counselor’s office at school and discuss for 45 minutes the life-and-death future consequences of the schooling of one of three kids. It is no kind of chicken barbecue or country fair to have to explain to a school official everything you have been doing to solve the life-or-death problem for the kiddo while pain medication is wearing off and anesthetic is wearing off and patience is wearing off and mental acuity is disappearing faster than a rabbit-man can teach irony to middle-schoolers…. wait, what? Perhaps I should rest now and let the medicine do its work.
Naw, can’t do that. I’m Superman.
But, wait… wasn’t I Popeye just yesterday? Who the heck am I really? A goofy old writer-guy, most likely.
Talk Like Popeye
I have long identified with Popeye. Let me review that notion by re-posting a bit of an old post in which I explain while talking like Popeye;
I am Popeye, I sez, because I just am… Yeah, that’s right, I yam what I yam.
First of all, I looks like Popeye. I has that cleft in me chin, very little hair left on me ol’ head, and I gots the same squinky eye (what squinky eye?). I has had that same squinky eye since I wuz a teenager and got kicked in the eye doin’ sandlot football (bettern’ sandlot high divin’, fer sure!). I also has them same bulgy arms, the ones that bulge in the forearm and is incredibobble thin on the upper arms.
Second of all, I has Popeye Spinach-strength. I look weak and scrawny, but I is a lot tuffer than I looks. I go into classrooms full of wild, crazed middle schoolers, and grabs their attention, tells ’em what’s what, and makes ’em woik. (Woik is a voib, and that means I is woikin’ when I makes ’em do it.) I kin stands ridicule and kids what will remarks on the hair in me ears and me squinky eye. I tells ’em that the scar on me face was did by a bloke with a knife (which it were, cause I had skin cancer and the doctor used a knife to get it off). I has taken all kinds of nasty punches from life (diabetes, blood-pressure problems, prostatitis, arthritis) and I still keeps comin’ back fer more. In fact, I can winds up me arm and give that ol’ Devil a good Twisker Sock right in the kisser.
Third of all, I has a typical Popeye Sweet Patootie. My Island Girl Wife is like Olive Oyl in very many ways. She is always tellin’ me what to do. She compares me to ol’ Bluto. She panics and flails her arms when there’s a crisis. And she expects me to always save the day and never says “thank you” after.
So, I mean it when I sez “I am Popeye”. I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam!
See? I kin talk like Popeye because in many ways I AM him… He of the mangled-mouth vocabubobulary created by Elzie Crisler Segar on January 17th, 1929 for his comic strip Thimble Theater for King Features Syndicate. He doesn’t talk right because his brain is so full of goodness and spinach that he has no room left for spelling and pronunskiation. Ak-ak-ak-ak-ak-ak…. Popeye is just a simple sailor, and has been for 94 years. He expresses himself horribly, but only in the very best of ways. So when I mangle a word on purpose… or by happy accident… it is just me honoring that old one-eyed sailor. It is not me just being a stupid addle-pated blarney goon who don’t knows how to talk right.
Comic strip from comicskingdom.com
Dreary Days and Darklords
Al Capp was a genius. And he knows precisely how it goes. And no one describes it better. Storm clouds float directly over my little square head (I am a Midwestern German-American, and they all have cubes for heads… both literally and figuratively.) Anywhere I wander, disaster surely follows. The last few days have been an absolute and unrelenting disaster. And I can’t tell you all the details because it would compromise other people’s privacy. But I can say that no lightning stings worse than the lightning bolts thrown by aggressively profit-conscious health insurance companies. I will not name the hated company here because they will surely raise my premiums, but I hate them with a hatred more hateful than red-hot iron-grate-hate. I went to a doctor’s office yesterday, a doctor I was seeing for the first time because the new insurance company handling retired Teachers in Texas didn’t like the old doctor. The old doctor was too good and got paid too well for insurance to approve him. So I asked them to recommend a new doctor, a specialist of the right brand to replace the old doctor. They gave me a name and I made the appointment. I was told this new doctor was in-network. I got there and started filling out a small hill of paperwork that required all my personal numerology and the atomic number of several specific elements… and my shoe size. (And this was not a foot doctor.) As I was littering the doctor’s office with filled crossword puzzles of numbers, hard-to-spell drug names, and private information, I was called up to the receptionist’s desk and informed that the insurance company said that while the doctor was in-network, she was not in-plan. The specific plan I bought (chosen from a list of one) only uses doctors associated with Baylor Hospital in Carrollton… and this new doctor was associated with Methodist Hospital in Plano. I could only see this new doctor if I paid 100% of the fee. Being an independently wealthy retired school teacher on a fixed income, I had to decline that honor. This of course is not the only hyoomillagration (Popeye’s word for it, not mine… another explanation that requires another post and another day) that the last few days would bring. Having half a year’s salary as a working school teacher and half a year’s salary as a doddering retired person fully capable only of puttering and nuttering, the income tax situation tipped heavily in the government’s favor.. I had to pay almost $2000 dollars on the taxes that I filed through Turbotax on Monday. I was proud of getting the taxes done early, but saddened at the sudden deflation of my savings account to the condition of totally-flattened-balloon-hood. Worse yet, Turbotax sends bills under the name INTUIT, which I didn’t recognize on my bank statement. It took the Wells Fargo fraud expert all of ten seconds to figure out the mistake I made, which was two minutes and ten seconds after the previous banker I had talked to irreversibly closed my bank account and issued a new bank card and account number which will take two weeks to come in the mail. Now I couldn’t pay that doctor even if I wanted to. And there were other things biting my bum as well. The electronic car key is out of battery juice and I must now unlock it by hand. The dog is currently on another in a long line of poop-and-pee-in-the-house-sprees. I have a benign growth on my back that the other doctor I actually got to see this week says needs to come off by next week. It is hurting constantly and keeps me from sleeping. I am Joe Btfsplk this week for no reason that I know of and mad wizards are persecuting me relentlessly.
Goofy Squared
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.
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.
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 
has 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.
Blue Monday Visit to the QT
I have to admit to having cheated on my first love. But I have come back now to be faithful from here on out. Last Summer I bought one of those free-refill cups at RaceTrac. But it was unfulfilling. You only get 20 oz. in the free refill cup. And the free refills expired at the end of July. So I have come back to the daily, or even twice daily, 32 oz. cup of Diet Coke from QT. You knew that’s what I meant, right?
I know all the employees at QT at least by sight if not by name. I don’t even have to tell them any more that the plastic cup I am using is a carefully saved and cleaned cup so that I deserve the refill price. (I am not a curmudgeon who has to save ten cents on every purchase. I do it to re-use and recycle and save the planet Earth from wasted plastic. Really I do.) They also know without my saying that even though it says “debit card” on the front, it works as credit. (Except for that one kinda stupid guy who only works the really late and really early shifts.) One of the workers there is a neighborhood kid that was in my class for two days when I was a substitute history teacher at Long Middle School nine years ago. He’s changed a lot from when I first knew him. He has turned from a goofy, bean-bodied twelve-year-old with big brown myopic eyes and a fly that never stayed zipped into a massive hulk of a twenty-one-year old service station associate worker. He doesn’t even realize that I knew him when…
Grandma, Henry, and the Princess on the Beach
…and I know it is kinda pathetic that I am now so limited in my contact with the rest of humanity, especially with the family away in Florida for Spring Break, me stuck at home with illness and a pooping dog, and being retired without any working-man’s daily duties any more, that a visit to QT is the highlight of my day. But it isn’t. The highlight occurs when I start writing. I enjoy laughing at my own funny-bits in this post, and the novel that I am working on… well, flights of fancy is putting it mildly. I have been up in World War I biplane, in the midst of a dogfight between a promising young Allied pilot for the Lafayette Escadrille and a German ace who represents evil incarnate and is being controlled by an evil alien-designed robot from the future. I also have been in the tunnels under Castle Sinistre, or Château Sinistre as it is known in the Somme. There I have been with the time-travelling heroes who are trying to rescue a rabbit-man created by an evolutionary science experiment gone wrong and an insane brother-in-law of the scientist who created the rabbit-man. My imagination breaks free of the stifling cage my old, lame body and my current life have become.
This little essay quite accurately reflects what I write and why I write it. Happy people and healthy people and normal people would all be on the beach instead of where I am now. They would never be home-bound Emily-Dickenson writer-people whose daily highlight is a cup of Diet Coke from QT But I am in the clouds now, somewhere over the rainbow, and I am content, because that’s the corner I’ve written myself into.
Filed under feeling sorry for myself, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
We Are Not Alone
The Photo Paffooney I have provided for today is one I have been sitting on and pondering over for several months now. It isn’t the cloud formation that is troubling, it’s the light. You see, the problem is, it was early morning. The sun was in the east, not far above the horizon. This picture shows two bright lights glowing behind the clouds in the southern sky. So, what were they? Lights that merely hovered there. We are in the zone flown over both by DFW and Love field. These weren’t airplanes. I checked UFO reports continuously. Three times unidentified objects were reported in the Dallas Fort-Worth area. The reports were online, but not covered by local media, newspapers or TV. In fact, they rather swiftly disappeared from You-Tube. So, what does it all mean?
Well, you know I am a nut-case. If you’ve read any of my tinfoil hat posts, you know I think the Roswell incident revolved around at least one crashed ship from another star system. I also think the primary proof that we have that we are not the only intelligent beings in this universe is the very fact that the government has worked so hard to convince us that it is not so. Liars tend to protest too much. And there is an ever-increasing pool of whistle-blowers that have risked everything to come forward with tales of close encounters and government programs to conceal the science we have learned from back-engineered alien space-crafts. You don’t have to believe me. Look up the Disclosure Project and Dr. Steven Greer and Astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Hear it in their own words on You-Tube. I am a kook, but I’m not the only one… and some of them have impressive resumes.
Am I claiming, then, that my picture shows UFO’s from outer space? Of course it doesn’t. It is an unidentified phenomenon that would be easily explained if I just had a few more facts… like the amount of facts I have looked at that make me think that We Are Not Alone.
So, was the purpose of this post merely to remind you that I have an idiotic faith in flying saucers? Not at all. I am in the midst of week of total isolation at home. My family went to Florida for Spring Break to visit my oldest son. I stayed home with the dog (somebody has to feed her and pick up poop). Actually, I am not well enough to travel and I convinced them that it would be okay to go without me. And it is okay too. I may be full of self pity and feeling lonely and blue right now like some sort of fool, but I am not alone. By myself, sure, but not alone. I got to thinking about all the people my life has touched over the years. I have known teachers in four different school districts, people in five different communities, workers at QT where I buy my Big Q cup of Diet Coke every morning, family members by the freight-train-full, cousins, nieces, nephews, uncles, aunts, great aunts, grandparents long gone, and over 2,500 students who sat in my 31 years of classrooms. I guess I know a few people, huh? And none of them have truly left me… not even those who died. As I continue to deteriorate and die… and continue to put my wealth of life experience into silly fictional forms, I realize they are all still with me. It is the only real wealth a human being ever has. I, like you, like all of us, am never alone.
Filed under aliens, autobiography, being alone, Paffooney
Rabbit People
On days when I am still recovering from life-altering blows, I often try to find new realms, alternate realities to live in. (Retreating into a fantasy world is one of the reasons she gave for leaving.) And since, as a youth in Iowa, I raised rabbits for a 4-H project, I know rabbits better than I do human people. Rabbits are people too. So, I have been walking among the rabbit people. Seriously, bunnies are better people than most human people. They are not trying to profit off you. They are not trying to get everything they can off you. They are merely there to wiggle their whiskers, sniff for food, poop, gnaw on stuff, and make more bunnies.
I often see myself as a rabbit person. In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.
As a teacher, I am always pulling out carrots of irony and gnawing on the ends of them in front of students. If they complain that eating food in class is supposed to be against the rules, I ask them, “Do you want a carrot of irony?”
“Oh, no, thank you sir.”
“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight. You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”
“Oh, no sir,” they say. “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”
And so, I taught on like that… like a rabbit, fast and frumious (a Jabberwocky sort of word), and never really bit anybody. Teaching is like that. You offer the good healthy stuff to nourish their little animal minds, and they always choose the junk food instead.
And so life goes on like that. Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.
I have started on the final edit of my novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. One of the main characters in the book is Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit Millis. During the course of the story about invading aliens, Secret Agent Robots from the CIA, and making friends when you need friends, Millis is turned into a rabbit-man by a lab accident. He teaches Tommy that you don’t have to be human to be a good, caring, self-sacrificing person. He also teaches him to eat his carrots and greens like a good boy should.
So, I will spend more time with the rabbit people and heal a little bit. That is what you do with the tragedy that life brings you. You spin it into whole cloth, making humor and poetry out of everything bad that happens… wrapping yourself up in a comforting blanket of lies (you can also call those fiction stories), and eating a little chicken soup on a cold day to heal your soul. (Oh, I forget, rabbits often gag on chicken soup. Let’s make that bean soup with carrot chunks.)
Filed under humor, irony, Paffooney, rabbit people
Why Space-girls Come from Iowa
Yes, Iowa is a State with very little going on. Not overly populated. Not a center of arts and culture and the avant garde. In fact, it is a State so literally boring that it is a perfect place for someone like me with cancer of the imagination to live. I grew up in the town of Rowan, Iowa. 275 people if you count the squirrels (and believe me, some of the squirrels are premium corn-nuts). I confess to peopling the place with the characters and creatures that welled up from the crazy, dark depths of my imagination. Yes, they were real people, but the things I knew about their secret lives as international spies and alien invaders masquerading as humans were probably not provably accurate.
There was a time when alien potato people gave me an embryo to guard that would be raised as a human being. When I showed it to my friends, they claimed it was a carved potato with spherical-headed pins for eyes. Now how were they going to pass off a carved potato as a human being when they wanted him to take his place as a Russian cosmonaut to interfere with the space programs of two countries? And how did they expect a twelve-year-old boy to make a carved potato grow up to look and act like a human being? Alien potato people never adequately explain themselves.
And Iowa girls are something else that you have to see to believe. Are they pretty? Well, I went to Moo-U, Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Why did they always call it Moo U. or Cow College? Well, more than one of my friends told me that it wasn’t because it was an agriculture and mechanics sort of college. Oh, it was definitely that. But they suggested all the girls at Moo U. were fat and desperate and at college to get an M.R.S. degree with a specialty in ball-and-chain. I must admit to being chased by a couple of cow-shaped co-eds, but I always found Iowa girls to be absolutely fascinating. I always imagined them in bikinis and nearly nude, even though, with Iowa weather, there is really only about fifteen minutes a year in August when you could really say we had bikini weather.
I was thirteen in 1969 when Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. My dreams were space fantasies. My connections with alien invaders were nearly exposed by the potato-people’s embryo snafu, but most of my day-dreams took me to Mars alongside Alicia Stewart, the prettiest girl in my sixth-grade classroom. She was always wearing a bikini when we explored Mars… usually underneath her space suit… her see-through glass-and-plastic space suit.
So, as I claimed in the the title, space-girls come from Iowa. At least, in my mind they do. In my feverish retro teen-aged imagination they do. And if I can continue to successfully put fiction into print before I die, you will probably see a lot more of them.
Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney
Time Marches On
My life is rather fragile at this point. I have recently been ill with a virus. For me, as a COPD sufferer, that can be fatal. My lungs will easily clog and become a serious case of pneumonia. A virus like that will probably be the death of me. I don’t have the money it takes to go to the emergency room. Medical costs have perched my finances over the edge of the chasm of bankruptcy. Caught on a couple of tree roots, my ability to pay for anything dangles over the abyss. The next emergency will be my last… a conscious decision. Man, my blog is a real hoot so far, huh?
But as cold and rainy weather moves in… I am at peace. I have been at war all my life long. I have fought the war against ignorance by being a school teacher. I have fought to make a life for my family, and though financial security is not a part of that, I can testify that my three kids are creative and wonderful people that will survive and make me proud. And my written work, novels and this very blog, are complete enough to secure my legacy of ideas, beliefs, and wisdom to be passed on.
Now, I know that this all sounds like a depressed person saying goodbye. In some ways that is what it is. But it is not something to be worried over. I am not depressed. I am on medication to prevent debilitating depression. I have helped members of my family overcome depression. I am a warrior, and I know how to strike back against the darkness. I will not take my own life. I am, in fact, very good at survival. Thirty-two years ago I beat malignant melanoma. I have six incurable diseases that I have successfully juggled and dealt with for years. There is no humiliating thing or gruesome test that doctors haven’t either inflicted upon me or allowed me to narrowly avoid. I may continue to struggle on for many years. If I am saying goodbye in this post, it is only a just-in-case goodbye. It is really more of a statement that I believe I have achieved what a person needs to achieve in life to be successful. I have completed a quest. When I was a gawky doofus of an Iowegian teenager, I made a vow to be a wizard. I wanted to learn and share wisdom. I believe I have done so. I am wise enough to know that no man lives forever, and with all the factors arrayed against me, I know what comes next. So, I apologize for no humor in this post. But the Toy Soldier Paffooney in this post inspires me. The forced march continues… and it will not end until the soldiers can no longer put one more foot forward.
Filed under inspiration, Paffooney, philosophy
Catch a Falling Star 