Tag Archives: Paffoonies

June 4, 2015 · 12:12 pm

Building Castle Walls

Some people might say I was born in the wrong century. I love castles and knights and everything medieval. Of course, the Dungeons and Dragons part of my life, my twenties and early thirties (1980’s and 1990’s) only made the situation worse. I am cursed by a desire to build castle walls.

I mean both figuratively and literally, of course. I have blogged already about incessant cardboard constructions that I can’t help but build and add to my ever-increasing set of Dungeons and Dragons toys. And always it is for the sake of the story. I love not only making the castle walls and castle buildings, but also the castle people. It flows in an unbroken stream of goofiness from cardboard and paper to brick and wooden towers and finally to knights and wizards and commoners and goblins. It takes all kinds to fill a kingdom.

Figuratively, I keep hoping to build ramparts against the coming enemies that I know are lurking, waiting to attack and take my life. I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor. I had two benign lumps removed from my body this school year. I can no longer teach because of health. I can’t supplement my retirement income, because part-time jobs I can physically do are either too distant to travel to or simply not available. The Dire Wolf of Poverty and the Grim Reaper are both sniffing around my barbican, looking for the way inside the castle.

But I continue to people my castle with new and fascinating folk. Endless elves and half-elves, were-creatures, and halflings all take up residence in my imaginary castles. They take over my art, my house, and sometimes… even this blog.

These are just a few of the interesting folks I’ve invited into my house and my life through the windows of my imagination.

And the most fascinating thing about this whole castle-building thing is that it touches my life in so many places. I am sincerely addicted to castle-building games on Facebook like Magecraft and Stormfall.

I have used those moments when I am waiting for things… telephone calls to insurance offices that put me on endless hold, those times after midnight when body aches wake me and I can’t get back to sleep, winding down after doing whatever yard work or house work that I can, and even when I am in the pre-writing stage letting ideas percolate. I came up with this lame idea for a blog while watching my troops take down marauders in Magecraft. And these games let me people the castles too.

So I spend a good share of my days now building and mending castle walls. Of course, I know the enemies I am trying to defend against are both undeterred and unimpressed by castle walls. They are immune to my vain attempts at constructing defenses. But even though the darkness looms on the horizon, I still have some of my bright, shining day left. And there is something majestic about castles with towers and walls.

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Filed under humor, making cardboard castles, Paffooney

Tagged as castles, Dungeons and Dragons, humor, medieval stuff, metaphor, obsessions, Paffoonies

June 3, 2015 · 11:25 am

Blog Happy

At the outset of 2015, back on January 1st, I made a plan to blog every single day of the year. Now in June I am nearing the halfway point and I haven’t missed a single day. I was worried at the outset that I would quickly run out of ideas or have to re-post a lot of old writing. But I hammered out a goal of writing 500 words every day… not rough draft words, but polished words that were as near to finished writing as I can get without obsessive-compulsive editing and the post-traumatic stress syndrome that causes. I found out that the more I write, the more the well refills with fresh prose needing to be drawn out in my daily bucket-full.

I am supposing that it doesn’t hurt that I have been in poor health and spend a lot of my day in bed where I do the writing. You have more time to write when you are limited in what you can do every day. For instance, wasting a day water-skiing is not really an option. Neither is mountain-climbing, tennis-playing, race-running. and acrobatic maneuvers in a space-plane. Well, I actually do some of that last thing… but only in my science fiction stories. Moose-chasing, pun-hunting, time-travelling, working elaborate voodoo spells, and swashbuckling are the things I really do… and I do them in my imagination.

It also really doesn’t hurt my overall goals that I am a cartoonist and I draw constantly. It gives me plenty of visual punch punch to fill up spaces between paragraphs, and I have real, honest-to-god professional writer friends that say the visuals are a key to good blogging now and in the near future. People respond more to the pictures than the prose.

I really can draw upon my life for topics. I recently read an article that claims stress and uncertainty in day-to-day life fuels creativity and writing efficacy. So that is good news for me. The house is falling apart. The weather has gone from a serious five-year drought to record spring rainfall. The ground our house is built on is shifting with the transition from shriveled to soaked like a sponge. So the foundation is cracking and the rafters will soon be landing on our heads. The flower garden that is the yard is turning into more of a jungle. I am in no condition health-wise to mow and maintain, but the city will fine us a lot of money I don’t have if I don’t do something to curb the jungle’s enthusiastic spread. And of course the dog produces five times her weight in dog poop every day. (Here’s that disturbing thing about poop references turning up in my posts again.) But the exercise I am forced to get from dealing with those problems on a daily basis is probably keeping my heart going and keeping me alive. And, besides, ranting about troubles is a source of humor and gives me something to write about.

Now, I started blogging in 2013 because my publisher at the time, I-Universe, told me it was a necessary part of marketing my book. They neglected to tell me that I would be the only one marketing my books and that I would probably never see a penny of profit in my lifetime from writing, but that’s the breaks, ain’t it? There is a very good chance that, even though I have been published more than once, and though editors say my writing is good, my books will never be read widely during my lifetime. I may get discovered along the way given enough time and endurance… but I may just be writing books for my own satisfaction and reading pleasure. It is the nature of the beast in this day and age that being a good writer and a mediocre marketer is a recipe for failure, while being a poor writer and a good marketer yields success. So, while irony is having its way with me, I would just like to say… blogging is now where I find my happiness… and thank you for reading my blog.

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as blog writing, humor, irony, novel writing, Paffoonies

June 2, 2015 · 11:33 am

Telling Lies

Every day of my life I have dealt with lies. After all, I was a public school teacher for 31 years and taught middle school for 24 of those years.

“Please excuse Mauricio from writing the essay today. He was chopping ham for me yesterday and his hand got numb.”

“I have to go to the bathroom at 8:05, Teacher! Not 8:10 or 8:00! And no girl will be waiting by the water fountain… oh, ye, vato!”

“Can’t you see I have to go home sick? I have purple spots all over my face! It is just a coincidence I was drawing hearts on my notebook with a purple marker.”

But now the classroom is quiet. I am retired.

Okay, I know, the first part of that is a lie. The classroom is not quiet. I am retired and don’t go there any more. Some other teacher (or long-term substitute after the rookie teacher ran out screaming after the first week of school) is now listening to the lies.

So, nothing but the truth now, right? Who is around during the day to tell me lies? The dog? Well, yes… when she wants to go outside and pretends the poop and pee are bursting out of her, but really only wants to sniff the street lamp and all the male dogs who have peed there.

But there is also me. Yes, me! I am working at being a writer now… so I tell myself lies… and not little ones, either. Whole episodes of my past have come pouring out in my stories… and I am not always the good guy or the main character in the tale. Sometimes I was the villain, the mistake-maker, or the fool. I’m definitely not perfect now, nor was I then, but I’m a writer now. I can change it. I tell lies. I can make it work out in ways that never happened in real life.

I put lies in this blog. For instance, I may have suggested, a few posts back, that because of psoriasis in my usually-covered region, I sit around naked all day when I type this post. Not true. I suggested that for comedy value at the time. Well, it’s mostly not true. I don’t know how much you know about severe-plaque psoriasis, but it only flares up at times. Some days, like today, a half hour in a steaming hot Sitz-bath with extra salt allows me to wear clothes for quite a while after. So I merely exaggerated because I thought making you picture plump and pasty-skinned old me sitting around nude and typing a blog was funny… but… okay, maybe that was just weird. Still, a good lie is always at least twelve cents better than the ugly truth. (I must note, the truth of this paragraph has changed since I originally wrote this post. Now I am more of a nudist and enjoy being naked while I type. But that now being a lie does not spoil the point of this essay.)

And the fact that my stories are filled with little-boy liars, giant rabbit-men who can talk and cook vegetables like people, and invading invisible alien frog-people, derives naturally from the fact that I have been a highly imaginative liar since childhood. Just ask any of my grade school classmates. I used to make them believe there was an evil clone Michael out there somewhere trying really, really hard to get me in trouble. I told them that I was in contact with a race of blue-colored people that lived in an underground world deep beneath our little Iowa town. I even showed them the knotty old stump that was the doorway to the tunnel that led to the Blue World. Of course, the key was never available when I showed them. And my friends were not completely gullible. In fact, I suspect that once in a while, they knew I was… lying.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, telling lies

Tagged as autobiography, blogging, colored pencil, humor, Paffoonies, telling lies, writing

May 28, 2015 · 12:11 pm

Pirates Sell Insurance as an Act of Evil

It is now official. I hate health insurance companies more than I hate the high cost of health care. I appreciate the emergency room that saved my son’s life a year ago in February. But I am still trying to pay for it. I am practically bankrupted by five ER visits in the last four years. Only one of those was mine. Health insurance does not approve ER costs for a whole list of health problems. And that was a better insurance than we have this school year.

In order to get my son out of the Health Facility that the ER sent him to, I had to arrange a doctor and a therapist before they would even discuss releasing him. I did that. My son reached a level of recovery that they could have authorized his release after one three-day weekend, but of course, the kept him for ten days… all of which I had to pay for out of pocket at hospital rates. The doctor I arranged for saw my son every three months after that to maintain his recovery and prescribe the best possible medicine. He was one of the best doctors in his field and he helped immensely. The therapist was even more helpful, being able to teach my son how to handle the symptoms and complications of his condition. He was also worth his weight in gold.

But then the State of Texas decided the health insurance that teachers got through their school districts on State funding’s dime was much too good. The wise and noble Emperor Perry of Texas decided to hand State employee health care over to Faetna ( a fake name that rhymes precisely with the corporation’s real name if you just drop the letter F). Wonderful doctor does not even deal with the pirates of Faetna. They swing into any and all health care situations on boarding ropes and slash at anything that moves with their cutlasses of problem-making. So I had to get a new doctor. The doctors in this particular field of medicine are not abundant to begin with. Aetna… er, I mean Faetna, decided that we could only use doctors that were associated with the same hospital where we visited the ER. Well, I asked them to give me names of the doctors who qualified. I got three names. I made an appointment. We were filling out the paperwork in the doctor’s office twenty minutes before seeing the doctor. The receptionist interrupted after I had half-way finished the mountainous paperwork to tell me the insurance had rejected payment. This doctor that THEY had recommended to me was not a part of the approved network. They took Faetna insurance, but Faetna refused to pay. The same day I called the other doctors on the list. No doctor recommended to me by the insurance company was part of the required plan. There were no doctors in the city who did qualify.

Okay. It can’t get worse. We still had the therapist who was working miracles for my son. He took Faetna insurance. There was no problem there, right? But wait. The pirate captains of Faetna took another look. They started rejecting his claims too. Soon there was a huge yellow envelope full of demands for clinical records to justify the need for the therapist. I went to the ER, to the wonderful doctor, to the hospital in Denton where they were still taking my money away from me, and to the therapist himself. We gathered documents. The lovely hospital charged me $50 for paperwork and made me drive all the way there to Denton twice to accomplish it. I got all the materials compiled, overnighted them to the insurance company’s disapproval department, and everything should’ve been fine. But. of course, it wasn’t. The claims for services were denied. I am expected to pay out of pocket. They found no clinical evidence that the services were essential and they insisted I pay the bills without help from them.

So, I am left marveling at the ingenuity of the insurance-pirate racket. Every month we pay for all five us, hefty premiums because we have health issues that need to be prepared for, and when the problems arise, and we ask them to pay their promised share… we have issues, and we get denied. I have been shanghaied by the pirates of Aetna… er, I mean Faetna.

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Filed under angry rant, humor, pen and ink paffoonies

Tagged as angry rant, humor, insurance, outrage, Paffoonies, pen and ink, Pirates

May 24, 2015 · 4:06 pm

Notes from the 70’s; the Master Plan

I have wanted to be a writer and cartoonist from childhood onward. I didn’t really begin in earnest until the last few years of my teaching career with retirement looming directly ahead. Now I have made the leap off the cliff. I retired a year ago. I did everything short of bankruptcy to put my accounts in order, and transformed myself into a starving artist. I have a full retirement from Texas, subject to a grandfather clause (no relation to the Santa Clause) that allows me to receive enough money to live on for the rest of my life (thanks to the trick of being a teacher back before George W. Bush and Rick Perry came along to pillage Texas education and reduce what they pay those lazy, lousy teachers for their lifetimes of service). Of course, I must try to limit my expenditures as much as possible, because… well, it is a teacher’s pension.

But my plan from the 70’s, begun in high school and carried out through college and my teaching career has allowed me to stay on track to create something massive and complex. My story ideas have been collected over time and are all based on a very simple rule… “Everything is connected.” Every story I now labor to put into prose mentions other stories and has story fishhooks in it to catch readers and pull them into something else. Most of my work is set in farm-town Iowa in the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s. I made them all a part of the 20th Century on purpose because the personalities the characters are all based on were a part of my life then. Certain elements run through all the stories. Let me explain a few.

1. Some characters appear in many stories (sometimes as a main character, and more often as a supporting character. The French boy who sings karaoke beautifully and makes his cousin’s bar business a success by entertaining people there appears in two stories that happen at about the same time. Both of those stories are still waiting to be written. Tim Kellogg appears in my stories from the time he is but a twinkle in his parents’ eyes until he becomes the leader of the infamous boys’ gang of liars called the Norwall Pirates.

2. Most of the stories are centered around members of the Norwall Pirates. They are a group of small town boys dedicated to adventure, telling lies, and seeing girls naked. Much of the magic, science fiction, fantasy elements, and just plain hallucinations in my stories are the fault of boys who tell stories and lies so well that sometimes they believe them themselves.

3. Character arcs that begin in one book will often continue in another. Sometimes I go back in time and explain something that happened much earlier. The Pirate’s club first appears in my novel Catch a Falling Star set in 1990. The origin of the club is told about in Superchicken, a novel I have blogged about, but not yet published. That story happens in 1974. Valerie Clarke is introduced in the novel PDMI Publishing LLC is currently working on, Snow Babies, which takes place in Winter of 1984. She is the leader of the Pirates in the finished, but not yet submitted novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. That story spans 1988 to 1991.

4. Much of my nuttiness was originally created in the 1970’s. Even though the stories were given a setting much later, all the illustrated Paffoonies I have dropped into this post were drawn in 1977 and 1978. I keep these cartoon character model sheets in one of my magical tomes, the Norwall Book, a loose-leaf binder full of drawings and junk carefully preserved in plastic page-protector sheets.

So, this is all the proof that my leap off that cliff into retirement will either make a very big splash or hit the rocks very hard. It will be very something. And I hope to live to see it… especially to get all of the stories I can possibly finish written and published… with a ghost of a hope that my own drawings, cartoons, and illustrations will count for something. So, now my plan is revealed. Let the enemies plan their counter-moves, and may the devil not move the water at the bottom of the cliff.

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Filed under humor, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as big plans, cartoons, colored pencil, humor, novel characters, novel writing, old art, Paffoonies, pen and ink

May 22, 2015 · 11:27 am

Visiting Tellosia

In the novel I recently entered in the Chanticleer Reviews YA Novel-Writing contest, I used the fairy kingdom of Tellosia to be the land of the little people integrated into hometown Iowa. As part of my cartoon stories page, I intend to take up the tale of The Hidden Kingdom once again and expand and complete it. I will post it as a web comic on Word Press. I know I can’t make money giving it away for free… but I hope to have my stories and cartoons read a little bit more through the buzz I hope this generates. And perhaps Petit Zam can come up with some fairy magic that will help… so I can cast a spell on you.

Here is installment one of The Hidden Kingdom;

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Filed under cartoons, Paffooney, web comic

Tagged as adventure, artwork, cartoon, fairies, paffooney cartoony, Paffoonies, pen and ink, web comic

May 18, 2015 · 11:43 am

Farming Family

I have been working on the beginnings of the novel When the Captain Came Calling. It is not the first draft. It is the third entire re-write. I wrote this as a graphic novel before graphic novels were an established form. Then I tried to rewrite it as a traditional novel, and it is now coming into its YA novel form. But I can’t begin to explain this novel-writing project without telling you about the Clarkes. Yes, they are a very important Iowegian family who farm and are entirely fictional. (Kids, what other words do you know that begin with the letter F?) They are based, at least a tiny bit, on my own family when I was a kid, but very specific parts of it. My Uncle Larry, mother’s older brother who is now gone (but never forgotten) was the inspiration for Dash Clarke. Kyle Clarke, the father in the picture, is Dash’s younger brother… though he is not based on my other maternal uncle. The daughter in the Paffooney picture, Valerie Clarke, is based on my own daughter combined with a girl I had a crush on in grade school and a girl who had a deeply felt crush on me when I was a young teacher. The Clarkes are third generation farmers, just as my own family were back in the time this story is set. Unlike my family, the Clarkes do not come out of the 80’s with their family farms intact. What grandparents built, the sons lose hold of, and the world becomes a much sadder place because of it. The story is about a lot of things in addition to a family losing their farm. It is filled with magic, telling sea stories and other lies, and the truth behind both the magic and the lies.

I posted this today because today is the day I finished the Paffooney illustration that started the post. Here is what it looked like in progress;

Paffooneys are a made-up thing by which I name the whole great glob of artwork and stories I have created that represent the never-ending music in my soul. I am not a singer or a song-writer. The only way these tunes come to life is through the toons which I ignorantly call the Paffoons because the loons have nothing on me.

Here is a cover mock-up for the novel which shows another picture of Valerie Clarke, the most beautiful little girl ever born in Norwall, Iowa (a phrase that her Uncle Dash christened her with when she was small, and it caught on with the entire town.)

Animal Town and Clowns

There is a place in the cartoon part of my brain where the dream-stories of Fantastica take place. I am trying to get my goofiness all lined up to produce a more finished cartoon saga using all the goof-gas and whooey that I have stored up in that squirrel-den I call my mind. I prepared a setting already… a single set that already showed you what Animal Town looks like, where all the people are anthropomorphized animals. Here it is again to refresh your memory.

Animal Town is just one place in the larger Toon World of my silly imaginings. There are many more. I intend to draw these toons in what I call “Clown Noir”… that is, the drawings will be in pen and ink, filmed in black and white and red… especially red for noses. Got the idea? I hope I haven’t spoiled the joke already. Spoiled jokes are kinda like spoiled milk; they make you want to put a clothespin on your nose (and that kinda hurts, so it becomes harder to laugh.)

I also wanted to introduce a few of the denizens of Fantastica. (That’s denizens, not Dennis’ sons, because I used to think all the people that lived in one place somehow became the children of Dennis, but then Dennis told me that just ain’t so!)

Rugs Rabbity is a class of cartoon character I like to call a hero. I know what it looks like. I probably did steal the character from Warner Brothers, but filtered through my dreams Rugs becomes something else other than pure Bugs. He is, after all, a parody of a parody, and when that turns all parrot-y then we are looking at un-punny puns. Makes you want to put another clothespin on your nose, doesn’t it?”

And here are two more parrots that I hope you will recognize and copyright lawyers will not. They are much more insane and destructive than their counterparts from Mr. Prizney.

But cartoon dreams are not all animalized, and not all borrowed from elsewhere. I am capable of making up my own characters too that don’t satirize and plagiarize and turn me into a toon-thief. If you visit Crumpwell’s Wild West Ranch, there are one-of-a-kind characters that you might meet there too.

Flash Crumpwell is a hero character also. But unlike Rugs, he is a little dim in the light-bulb-lighting department.

Handsome Harry has always got his face covered somehow, because, after all, if you are so good-looking that women always faint at your feet and men always shoot you on sight, life can become a little too interesting. All in all, as a villain, he would rather just blow stuff up!

Princess Doe-Eyes is the real ruler of the Bignose Tribe, because, after all, she has a tiny nose, and her father is chief because his nose is the biggest in the tribe, but he can’t really see over it or around it… and when you’re in charge, that can kinda get in the way. Davy Crickett is an Indian fighter from the old days, but he cannot bring himself to fight with the Princess or her Bignose Tribe. He much prefers to play with her.

And we must certainly not forget the clowns. Here are a couple of Clown villains (as if we need more reasons to be afraid of clowns!)

The Messmaster is a Clown who loves a good pie fight. He will whirl and hurl and get you in the face with a strawberry or blueberry or Ray Bradbury pie (those Sci-Fi pies can get particularly messy and smelly… Clothespin number three… and it is getting hard to breathe.)

Badnose is an even more evil Clown bad-guy. I can’t begin to explain why his nose is so bad.

Lastly, let me share a scene with you from the rough draft of The Clown Town Caper, a detective story starring Detective Squiggy and Little Mickey (my dream-self).

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Filed under action figures, cartoons, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink

Tagged as cartoon characters, cartoon-making, cartoons, goofiness, humor, Paffoonies, pen and ink, plagiarism, rough drafts, Sci-Fi pie, Unforgivable acts of humor

May 8, 2015 · 12:10 pm

Sailing Through a Sea of Ideas

I have been steadily chipping away at my science fiction novel about planet-saving in a world crashing with biological and political disaster. It is a comedy about the end of the world… though it is set on a distant planet that is not our world. It is not the Earth. It is the fictionalized world of David Icke’s reptilian aliens (for those of you crazy enough to follow loony-tunes tinfoil hat conspiracies with the same ironic gusto that I do). I call this novel Stardusters and Space Lizards. The world of the novel is accidentally being invaded by the Telleron aliens who starred in my novel Catch a Falling Star. They find there a world that is undergoing massive biological crises caused by war using weapons of mass destruction and injudicious exploitation of the environment for the enrichment of the elite. I know that sounds totally like Earth at present, but that is the purpose of a cautionary tale. This is the planet of the lizard people, Galtorr Prime.

But by now you are aware of the fact that I am a tremendously un-focused divergent thinker, and I already have more stories in the works. I fully intend to follow up this science fiction YA with a fantasy YA about the Norwall Pirates and South Seas Juju following an old sea captain born in Iowa all the way home from the mysterious island where he earned the curse of invisibility. It will be called The Captain Came Home or other such nonsense similar to that.

The novel about the Captain who is invisible has as its main character Valerie Clarke, who was also a main character in the novel Snow Babies. This novel is, however, set at a moment of time before the events of Snow Babies occur.

Never one to be satisfied with working on two novels at once, I have started a third. I finally came up with a name for this story that has been in my head since the 1970’s when I first learned about autism and mental disorders that affect communication. I am calling this one, for now, Fools and Their Toys.

This story is about Murray Dawes, a young man who can’t communicate with others due to autism that finally blossoms when a boy genius builds him a ventriloquist’s puppet in the form of a zebra’s head. Through the puppet the young man finds he has an awful lot to say, and he begins to bring the world around to realizations of some pretty awful things.

To prove that I have been doing at least my 500 words a day, here is the lead that I created today for this third active writing project that I’ve added to the juggling session of three novels at once.

Fools and Their Toys

I know you will probably say this is totally unbelievable, that an inanimate object… or, rather, a puppet who is animated by others, cannot be the narrator of a story. You are right, of course. I can’t possibly be the author of this tale. I am a modified sock puppet of a zebra with mechanically blinking eyes and mechanically enhanced mouth movements. My head is full of cotton stuffing and old newspapers. But I was cleverly put together by a genius, and given life by another.

You have to understand, the human mind is like a great complex Labyrinth where no man has ever mastered every single corridor. Sometimes the most beautifully complex minds become lost or trapped in a dead-end corridor, never to find the light outside again. But sometimes a special mind that was meant for special things is helped to find the light again… shown a trap door or a secret exit by another who has mastered at least a portion of the great, overly-complex dungeon. And sometimes it is possible to slip past the Minotaur who guards the secrets of the Labyrinth and keeps us all from unlocking the magic.

Okay, I know that is barely 200 words by itself… but I do get 500 done per day. I am writing two other books at the same time for gosh sakes!

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, autism, colored pencil, divergent thinking, humor, invisibility, juggling novels, novel characters, novel writing, Paffoonies, story ideas

May 7, 2015 · 12:06 pm

My Classroom Gallery

Since beginning my career as a teacher in the 80’s, I have always had respect for student artwork. Often, I have had more respect than the artist did, as many of these artworks I have collected were retrieved from the trash can or the classroom floor. I collected these works of art, got students to sign them whenever it was possible, and always accepted any time the students offered to give me a doodle as a gift. I put them all in my old blue binder, itself a gift from a student, and called it my Classroom Gallery. Let me show you a few of the treasures I have hoarded over the years.

I do believe some of these artworks were intended to grease the wheels of justice and keep certain artists out of trouble… especially when they weren’t actually listening to my wonderful teaching. This example is one of many that put my name and reputation in large fancy letters made with scented markers.

Sometimes, however, I detected a more truthful take on things when I un-wadded masterpieces from the trash can. They would reveal a slightly different sentiment, though usually only a temporary one.

I also found a lot of masterpieces that were imitations of other things in their lives, things that meant more to them than English lessons, at least for that moment.