Tag Archives: photo Paffooney

April 17, 2015 · 12:44 pm

Writer’s Block

I have always maintained that I do not experience writer’s block. I mean, the words always flow. Sure, it may be garbage and word-sludge, but I can always get something down. Yet, the past three days have been a struggle.

You see, I have been working on a sci-fi comedy novel called Stardusters and Space Lizards. On Monday one of the main characters, a green-skinned alien girl named Brekka was swallowed by a man-eating plant. In another scene the explorers Farbick and Starbright, both green-skinned Tellerons like Brekka, were surrounded by hungry lizard children from the planet Galtorr Prime. And those lizard children were armed with weapons of war. Mortal danger all around for characters I have grown fond of… and this story is supposed to be humor… not grisly-death-sort-of horror sci-fi. So, my simple and somewhat stupid brain had to come up with two different salvation solutions at once. I think I may have broken something in the area of the creative mental spigot.

It is essential for me to accomplish writing in a timely fashion. I waited through the duration of my entire teaching career to become a published author. Thirty one years’ worth of stories collected, stories plotted out, and stories percolated in my brain with nothing but a future hope of getting written down to endure upon. I started writing books when I lost my teaching job with the Wicked Witch of Creek Valley. I began trying to get published, and I took up regular composition on a daily basis for the last seven years of my teaching career as an ESL teacher in a large Garland High School. But my teaching time was limited by my six incurable diseases. (Don’t ask me what they are, since my writing time is precious and I have already wasted too much thinking time on disease and disaster elsewhere in this goofy blog… You can look it up.) Spring of 2014 saw me retiring as a public school teacher. I have a pension… enough to keep myself and my children alive, but the couple dozen novel-length stories in my head still have to be told, if not for money, then to keep my goofy old head from swelling up with them and exploding. So I seriously got down to the business of writing. Catch a Falling Star, a novel about the alien Tellerons invading my home town in Iowa was published in 2012. I entered a writing contest that same year with the manuscript of Snow Babies, which made it to the final round before finishing out of the prizes. I found a publisher willing to publish it without making me pay for the publication and signed a contract for the novel. I entered Magical Miss Morgan in the same Young Adult novel contest this month. I also have Superchicken and The Bicycle-Wheel Genius finished as manuscripts and I am looking to get them published as well. I am making progress. But here’s the big butt… er, I mean the big but… I don’t know how much longer God will give me to work on these silly symphonies of wonderful words in wacky packages. I need to finish and market as much as I can in as short a time as I can.

That is what makes writer’s block so unthinkable. I do not have the time to be out of ideas.

But I am not out of ideas. Brekka was spit out because her species of alien left a bad taste in the mouth of the man-eating plant. And Farbick figured out how to make synthetic meat with a material synthesizer, feeding all the lizard children until they were too full to eat his girlfriend Starbright. I just had to take the time to figure out the solutions. And one can’t actually say I have writer’s block because I wrote longer than usual posts in this blog on each of those empty-headed days I was searching through mental filing cabinets. So, I guess I don’t have writer’s block. Well… never mind.

For those of you wondering what’s with all the goofy flower-photos… here’s a picture of Brekka and Menolly dancing… so you don’t ask that.

Apple Blossom Time

When you get to be old and burdened with deteriorating health like I am, you appreciate the renewal of spring with a new intensity. This year has been like that. Cold weather and dehydrating cold were worse this winter than I can remember… especially since I feel it in the marrow of my bones now more than ever before. But the inevitable rebirth did eventually come. The apple tree my wife planted in the hope that Texas heat would not destroy it is putting out more blossoms than ever before.

The first flowers to put out their winter-weary heads this year were relatively stupid daffodils. They came out in February only a day before an ice storm came along to slay them for their daffy dunderheadedness. I didn’t take their demise very well. I suffered a lot this winter and was looking for the sun with desperation.

But then, in March, dandelions poked out their bright, dandy heads and decided to stay.

And, though we have had plenty of wet weather and rain, the flowers apparently all had a big meeting and decided the time had come to make their yearly assault and wrench the world out of the hands of Jack Frost and his icy minions.

Wisteria began climbing the back corner of the house. They like to spread their purple majesty out over the area by the cracked and derelict swimming pool. It is moist and shaded out there, somewhat protected from our cruel Texas sun.

My wife’s bed of roses, both red and yellow marched out into the open air and began to dance gently in the wind like grand ladies decked out in their Easter best , showing off their color and their sass for all the world to see.

I am coming back now too… less seriously depressed. I completed a doll collection last week. The educational problems my children were facing are now seemingly straightening out. It is a time of rebirth… happiness… and flowers. My smile has returned.

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Tagged as apple blossoms, flowers, happiness, humor, metaphor, photo Paffooney, poetry, rebirth, wisteria

April 10, 2015 · 12:24 pm

Completing a Collection

I was foolish enough to share with you all in my post “The Quest for Pinkie Pie” that my insane Hoarder’s Disorder has led me into a world full of Bronies

This is a really terrible first fan art of My Little Pony. I gave Pinkie Pie insane cereal killer eyes, and Rainbow Dash is too fat to fly.

(seriously maladjusted men who watch My Little Pony; Friendship is Magic and love it, making fan art and buying dolls). I have been on a quest to put together a complete set of MLP’s and an accompanying set of Equestria Girls (ponies put through a magic portal that turns them into teenage mutant horse-girls).

I have been making steady progress since my mother sent me $50 in a gift card for Christmas and I blew it all on ponies. I would like to report that I have finally brought this terrible mental illness thing to a proper conclusion. (And, no, I did not explain the problem to a psychiatrist or anything.) I completed the collection. Now I no longer have to buy any more of the terrible things.

I was able to find Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy both together on the bargain shelf at Walmart. Both were less than fifteen dollars. Together they didn’t bust my monthly maximum. So I put together the entire set of twelve and the compulsion has begun to dissipate.

Now the only thing left to do is play with them.

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Tagged as colored pencil, doll collecting, humor, My Little Pony, Paffoonies, photo Paffooney

April 9, 2015 · 11:36 am

Compassion and Stray Dogs

I think compassion, if it is describing something real, is not so much a quality people have as it is a behavior that they sometimes exhibit and desperately need to turn into a habit. I have learned this best, I believe, in my relationship with the family dog. Dogs do have a natural empathy and loving strength of character that you learn about when a dog owns you and decides she is willing to keep you around for giggles and kibble.

Here is Jade the dog relaxing on her couch which she is sometimes willing to share.

This dog came to us in the late evening one spring night. We were coming home from religious services, and we had to stop the van because there was a puppy directly in the road ahead. She just showed up in the headlights, all big head and big belly, not really capable of taking care of herself, or even keeping herself from getting run over by the very next car that came along. She couldn’t have been more than a month old, still a little unsteady when she walked. She had a collar and a name tag, along with shot tags. We figured someone had accidentally let her get out of the house to wander and probably wanted her back. Well, we were wrong. The animal shelter was willing to take her, but that meant the risk that, if no one claimed her, she would be euthanized with all the other strays. She was too cute and instantly-attached-to-us to run the risk of that happening. The name and vet tags gave us no leads. We didn’t have the names of either owners or the vet who gave her the shots. She had become ours by default. I now suspect that she got out of her cage at the nearby Petco and the employees who lost her immediately wrote her off as deceased. No employee ever came looking, and, of course, when asked no one knew anything about it.

Here Jade Beyer is busy using Henry’s computer. She has her own Facebook page and everything.

Of course, kids love dogs and always believe they should have one, so no amount of warning about the consequences would dissuade them. So, in the first few months we had her, she totally decorated the carpets in the house with dark brown and yellow-brown stains. The kids wondered, “How did that get there?” and when I showed them how to clean up and house-train the dog (supposed to be their duty… ended up mine), they all three said, “Eeuuww!”

These aren’t actually our parakeets. Ours are all deceased.

The next winter, the dog killed all our parakeets. It’s not what you think. She didn’t eat them or anything. But wintering in the garage because of Mom’s reaction to new carpet patterns was something the dog really didn’t like. So she scratched her way to freedom through the garage door. And she chose a bitter cold January day to do it. So, the birds froze to death. The dog, in her fur coat and newly free of the garage prison, was insanely happy.

So you have to learn to make sacrifices to be owned by a dog. But there are benefits, too. I am a grumpy old man now with numerous health problems. But the dog gets me out three or four times a day to exercise me. She pulls me along by her chain all around the park and exercises my lower back by making me constantly bend over and pick up poop. I have become an expert at working through the pain to swoop up poop in an old donut bag or Walmart sack. Did I ever tell you what an amazing pooper that dog is? Five times every day! Six if I take her out five times! She seems to be capable of producing triple her own weight in poop every day. I would’ve wondered how she managed so much more output than she had input, until I started noticing what things were missing from the pantry and what wrappers were stuck behind the couch.

And a dog loves you no matter what. I am the first person to feed her when we brought her into our house. so she obviously believes I am her mother. I get grumpy and cuff her on the ears for biting my fingers when I try to pet her, and she still wants to be petted (and be able to bite me) even more. I swear at her when we are walking, and she just grins at me. She believes dammitdog! is her second name. And if she doesn’t get to sleep in somebody’s bed at night she whines. That doggy bed we got for her is apparently only to be used for dragging over the top of the latest poop or pee stain. So, being owned by a dog teaches you compassion by making you practice it every single day.

Last image borrowed from the Facebook page; The Peanuts Movie

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Filed under 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as 1000 Voices for Compassion, compassion, dog stories, humor, pets, photo Paffooney, stray dogs, walking the dog

April 1, 2015 · 11:36 am

A Collection of Sunrises

I made the horrible mistake yesterday of revealing the true nature of my hideous mental condition that leads to never-ending collecting of a long list of collections that probably will become a black hole of collecting from its own gravitas and stretch on into infinity. (Yeah. I know… you can see right through my phony over-blown exaggerations that consist mainly of stringing lots of science-y sounding adjectives together. Don’t get all smug about it.)

I did not, however, reveal the newest collection. So today I open my stupid writer mouth and another sacred secret pops out. Since retiring from teaching last June, I have been collecting sunrises.

I know it is a silly, sentimental,, goofy-sort-of self-pitying thing, and I also know that is probably not “normal” from an abnormal psychology viewpoint, but don’t call the loon-catchers just yet. Wait till I reveal my delusional quasi-religious reasons for doing it.

I am retired now from a profession I truly loved. I have a full pension now because Texans Republicans are not completely on their toes about taking benefits away from people who don’t earn them by trading stocks and bonds, running a corporation for maximum profits, or inheriting billions because Daddy did one or both of the previous things for you. They let my pension slip by unaltered on a grandfather clause because I’ve been teaching since a time when education was actually a respected, value-producing industry that rewarded those who did the actual work (This really only occurred in the middle 1990’s when the world was briefly too sane to be Republican.) I can’t do the job any more for crippling health reasons. I am lucky to have a good pension, but not lucky enough to be able to use it for very long. Hence, the interest in sunrises. Every single one is a miracle.

You may have already noticed that most of my sunrises in this collection are taken in the same park. It is where the dog walks me every morning in order to keep my heart pumping. She wants to keep me alive so the food dish keeps getting refilled, and so someone will still be able to bag and dispose of her daily poops. (I swear, that dog is a champion pooper. Three times her own weight in poops every single day.) I also can’t sleep as much as I used to. Five hours a night is about the maximum that arthritis pain, COPD, and diabetes allows me. School trained me to get up early because my last job was a thirty-mile commute one way and classes started at 7:30 a.m. I really began noticing on my morning drive how beautiful city sunrises can be thanks to the colors produced by exotic pollutants.

So, I keep adding to this collection of sunrises because each one is a reminder that a loving God is still being generous with me, and I still get at least one more day. See? I warned you there was crackpot religious sentiment in this post. Now you can call the loony-catchers. But hopefully, they won’t catch me until after sunrise.

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Tagged as collecting, goofiness, humor, philosophy, photo Paffooney, self pity

March 31, 2015 · 11:33 am

Hoarding Disorder

I am writing this post today to celebrate two things. My doctor’s visit today not only came back with positive post-op results, but it was free. And while I waited at Walmart for my prescription to be filled at the pharmacy, I found the two Equestria Girls that finish my collection. I spent the co-pay that I didn’t have to pay on Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy (I made that rhyme without a try!) Yay me!

But I have also come to the sobering realization that my collecting mania may actually be a form of mental illness. After all, my daughter is now 13 and not really interested in My Little Pony any longer. That excuse no longer flies. My wife has lost interest in collecting also (although she still collects clothes and shoes with a gusto that shames Imelda Marcos.)

So why do I do this collecting thing so relentlessly? Is it a serious mental disorder. As always I turned to the internet to diagnose myself with life-threatening conditions based on one, or possibly two symptoms. I may be doomed. What I found was an explanation of Hoarding Disorder.

Yes, I inherited it from Grandma Beyer. She hoarded all sorts of stuff in her little house in Mason City, Iowa. In her basement, when they cleaned out the house, she still had wrapping paper from Christmases in the 1930’s. It was in stacks. neatly folded and ready to be re-used. According to the Psychology Today website article about extreme collecting, one of the first signs of the disorder is the inability to part with personal possessions no matter their actual value. Never in all the years we spent Christmases together did I ever notice Grandma re-using wrapping paper. She actually kept that stuff for the memories they invoked and the sentimental value they held for her. My mother ended up throwing out all that wrapping paper when the house was sold.

Another indicator is the extreme cluttering of the home, to the point of rendering living spaces unlivable. One glance at the upstairs hallway sends shivers down my weak little hoarder’s spine.

There are any number of things that might concern a psychiatrist in this hallway. Of course, the blocked door in the back is where the old non-working air-conditioner is stashed, so there is no room in there for stuffing more stuff. This picture reveals that I have a vast collection of collections… not merely one. I collect stuffed toys, HO model railroad stuff and trains, Pez dispensers, stamps, coins, comic books (in the boxes in the back corner under the stuffed toys), and books… gobs, and gobs, and gobs of books! (“Gobs” is Iowegian for “lots”, not “sailors”.) In fact, the door on the left is actually the door to the library.

A quick scan of Toonerville along the tops of the bookshelves reveals the full extent of my madness. Here you see HO-sized buildings, most of which I painted myself or built from kits. You also see the Pez dispensers that suck money out of my pockets at $1.50 a shot. My trains have been around for many years. I shared that obsession with my father (Grandma Beyer’s eldest son) when I was a boy and most of these trains were either gifts from him, or purchased with allowance. (I haven’t bought anything new in seven years.)

So, the evidence makes it clear. One day soon I will be locked up somewhere in a padded room. I hope, at least, that my children still like me well enough to sneak in Pez dispensers when they come to visit.

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Tagged as autobiography, collecting, doll collecting, goofiness, humor, My Little Pony, Pez, photo Paffooney

March 27, 2015 · 1:54 pm

Finding Answers with the Right Questions

Yesterday I burbled purple paisley prose all over the page and, in trying to answer the question “Why do I Blog?”, only managed to come up with a lame sort of “I don’t know.” but I also referenced Douglas Adams’ answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything which turned out to be 42. You see, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy we learn that the Earth is nothing but an alien-designed supercomputer run by highly intelligent mice to find the actual question that goes with that ultimate answer. Unfortunately, after the planet Earth is destroyed by Vogons to make way for an interstellar bypass, the question is put on hold. That’s really what I did yesterday. I put the question on hold.

But today, feeling ill and a little blue, I decided to percolate the old teapot of wisdom one more time to see if I could find an answer in the tea leaves. I am not a well sort of individual. As I have posted before, I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor since 1983. Every day I wake up to a new dawn is a bit of a miracle. But the sand is running out of the hourglass. There are things I have to put right, and blogging is a way to do that.

In this photo Paffooney I am sharing one of my recent miracle sunrises. 6:55 looking East from the Greenbelt in the middle of Carrollton, Texas. The dog exercises me every morning in order to keep me alive on the off chance that I will drop some bacon on the floor one morning in the near future. She also uses me to bag up poop so she can stay out of trouble with the city.

Every morning is like that now. I am retired. That is a less-painful way of saying “waiting to drop dead”. I spend a good portion of my day now alone and able to write and think and not do very much else. So what I write and think has to be the real work that I am doing now to justify the amount of food I eat and air I breathe (and bacon I drop as the dog has just reminded me.) I have recently finished two novels. I have a novel waiting to be published, with a contract and everything at a small, but very real publisher. I have two books already in the marketplace, Catch a Falling Star and Aeroquest. You can find them and ignore them on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com just like everyone else has been doing. The books are what I am technically blogging about. I am blogging by command of I-Universe publishing. But that’s not really why I am doing it. There is so much more to it than that.

Here’s the realist’s assessment of my writing… it has become a very expensive and time-consuming hobby that eats up my remaining days like a ravenous wolf. At the rate I am going, I will not live to see the day when my writing finds wide-spread acceptance. I have the word of professional editors and other writers that my work is very well-written, and there was a time in my life when I might’ve made a decent living at it like Terry Brooks or R. A. Salvatore. There was a time when good books found a publisher. Now, there is the little problem of a world teeming with books all clamoring for notice of their own. I am generally ignored by the masses. The local library didn’t even put the gift copy of my book, paid for with my own money, on their shelves. They didn’t give it back, either. My time is not yet, and my audience is probably made up of people not born yet. Maybe they simply don’t exist.

But all those mulched-up and melancholy things I have said about my writing amount to nothing in the face of the question, “why are you still bothering to blog?” Truthfully, in the past few months I have made myself laugh and made myself cry by writing and telling stories… by mangling metaphors and propagating purple paisley prose… by blogging. And I really don’t care if no one ever reads my blog full of blather and allusive alliterations. They exist. They are real. And I have offered them to the world. Why do I blog? I still don’t have any idea.

These are the very first flowers that bloomed in our neighborhood this year that didn’t die a horrible death by freezing. Sure, they are only common dandelions and many think of them as weeds… but they are also proof that for now the sun continues to shine and possibilities continue to bloom.

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Tagged as artwork, blogging, dog-walking, foolishness, humor, novel writing, Paffoonies, philosophy, photo Paffooney

March 26, 2015 · 12:18 pm

The Meaning of 42

I get goofy ideas for blog posts when I am reading other blog posts, when I am reading books, and when I am letting television suck the smart out of my brain cells. I was first inspired by reading this blog post from In My Cluttered Attic. He was talking about why he chooses to blog in the face of a plethora of common-sense reasons not to. “Good idea for my own blog post!” said the insane voice that inhabits the dark space behind my mind’s own creative filing cabinet #42 in the second dungeon under my memory. I immediately filed the idea away in that cabinet because the cabinet was close at the time and I might never find it again later. Then I leaped to a post by The Off Key of Life in which I found a beautiful song beautifully sung that made me trip over another file cabinet that was behind the mechanical letter-sorting machine on the stairway landing to the sub-basement of the second dungeon.

Some old memories spilled out on the stone steps because I used to sing that song to my three babies when I rocked them to sleep twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, and thirteen years ago. That song, and “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Disney’s Pinocchio. Both of those songs are about one day finding the key to happiness… or possibly the key to understanding… but definitely about the search for the key. I always believed that those songs would give my children sweet dreams… and I prayed that the songs would never become the source of nightmares.

And then I was watching Hulu, an episode of Arrow in which Oliver Queen must decide on the reason why he was doing the whole superhero-vigilante thing and risking his life constantly. Unfortunately I didn’t find the file box that has superheroes in it that I was looking for in hallway leading to Area 51 in the upper dungeon. But I knew the topic was going to be “Why I Blog”. That settled, I began to write and paste in all sorts of random stuff.

“What is the meaning of 42?” you ask? How clever of you to ask that! In Douglas Adams’ seminal series of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books

42 is revealed to be the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Practically everything that he adds to that epic trilogy of five-or-so books is basically random. And yet, it is not. He is telling us about the apparent randomness of Life, the Universe, and Everything while carefully explaining how all this random madness that is Everything actually fits together in a very random-mad way. There is a certain asymmetrical symmetry about it all that has a certain contradictory sort of beauty, if you get what I mean. (A certain ugly beauty if you don’t get what I mean.)

So why do I blog? Good question. I don’t really have an answer to it. I blog because my first publisher told me I had to do it to promote my book, Catch a Falling Star. My book has netted me $28 so far, as long as I am not fool enough to start subtracting all the money I have spent trying to advertise and promote my book. I’m not fool enough. I stay out of that corridor in the maze of my complicated little mind. I blog because I can share all the private drawings and poems and insane nonsense that fills the filing cabinets in my mind without paying a hefty psychiatrist’s fee. Your underwear drawer needs to be aired out once in a while even if you do remember to wash your underwear. And it is liberating to walk around figuratively naked in front of an audience that potentially includes little old church ladies, God, and everybody. I blog because writing is something that I do, have always done, and will continue to do until they put my smelly corpse in a pine box and bury it under the garbage pile out back. All that scribbling has to count for something sometime. And maybe that sometime is now. If you are one of those poor souls suffering from Serial-Mickey’s-Blog-Reading Disorder (a condition the CDC has taken to labeling SMBRD… not to be confused with small-bird flu), and you actually read the posts and look at all the random junk piled into those mad paragraphs, you may just accidentally stumble across that key we have all been searching for for eons… and unlike the majority of the world, you will be giggling insanely for a reason!

A Maker of Books

For an awfully long time I have been filling blank pages with junk and goofy stuff and saving it in book form. I think it began when I was a Junior in high school. At least, that is the oldest of the homemade books I could find. I fill these handmade and factory-made blank books with stories, drawings, poems, clipped pictures, nonsense, secrets, shamelessly plagiarized gunk, and anything and everything. At 58 and one half years of age, I have been doing this insane thing for a very long time and have quite a pile of it. The above is my Tales of Fantastica, a cartoon journey into my own dreams and personal life.

I believe, based on physical evidence that the first collected writing I have done is in my Journal, Rage. It is called that because I named it after a Dylan Thomas poem in which he “raged against the dying of the light” because he was venting on the subject of his father’s death and the dread of living a life without being allowed to really be alive… to really live. I wanted to write down everything I noticed about being alive… my hopes, my fears, my dreams as fully as I could remember them… and it became, over time, quite ripe and fertile, as stored garbage usually will. I was able to use it as a source for other stuff. I have at least nine volumes of this journal composed over a period of twenty-some years… before I started depositing my daily dose of words and interior monologues in other places.

My old drawing notebook goes all the way back to 5th grade. I saved almost every drawing and doodle I did as a grade-school-and-middle-school doodler. It has some of my very first cartoons and bird drawings and monsters that I filled my quiet hours in childhood with instead of doing the homework I was supposed to be doing.

In college, specifically Cow College… Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, I first began putting stories into novel form. These I kept in binders and neatbooks that I had to illustrate the covers of with my own story-specific logos.

Here is the first manuscript of Superchicken, the first manuscript that I actually finished and followed all the way through with.

This book-maker-mania followed me even into the classroom. I collected classroom drawings from students, either as gifts from them or confiscated from them and put them into the binder I call my Gallery. This will make an interesting post of its own in the near future.

And I am still not cured of making my own covers, even though I am now trying to make them into traditionally publlished books. Here is the cover for Superchicken.

I suppose I will never really be cured of this mental aberration for as long as I still live. I don’t know what my heirs will do with them when they are finally rid of me once and for all. But it is all something I don’t regret doing. And besides, I couldn’t help it.

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Tagged as book making, foolishness, garbage, novel writing, photo Paffooney, scrap booking, writing process

March 22, 2015 · 2:58 pm

The Quest for Pinkie Pie

The day before yesterday I wrote a post for 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion that basically tore my heart out. It made me relive one of my worst defeats as a teacher who cares about teaching and students. I have to admit that I spent an awful lot of time crying the past three days. But I am not a sorrowful Sad-Sack with a sourpuss’ simpering sarcastic smile. Not I. I come back from downers by doing silly stuff… kinda like over-dosing on alliteration in that S-filled sentence. So what silly stuff am I up to after a triple-down darkness-dealing downer like the one from that post? (When Compassion Fails) I took up the Quest for Pinkie Pie.

I borrowed the My Little Pony image above from Jessica Ann Hughes whose very eloquent post laments the series update as a sexualization of the thirty-year-old toy franchise in the newer series, My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic.

But I have to argue that it doesn’t sexualize anything beyond the surface. After all, these ponies are really little girls that have charming little-girl personalities and act in stories that have little-to-nothing to do with sex. Yes, I have seen the wedding episode where Twilight Sparkle’s big brother gets married, but that episode is about trusting your own instincts when something seems wrong. If somebody like me is getting sexual vibes from that cartoon, then something is seriously wrong and that somebody should seek therapy to avoid becoming some kind of pedophile. I mean, it is important to self-censor. When I was getting a soda at QT this afternoon, I was happy to see two pretty girls in short pants for the first time in a long time. Texas weather has been rainy and dreary for the past few weeks and the sun has finally come out. But… wait a minute! Why am I looking at middle school girls’ legs? I am a miserable, broken-down, spotty old man. And I have been busily watching this My Little Pony show on YouTube where all these little girl ponies are walking around naked all the time! But, am I not over-reacting? Yes, the ponies have big eyes and shortened muzzles… but I haven’t been obsessing about ponies because of hormone imbalances or something. I thought the whole Brony thing was ridiculous up until a very short time ago. I mean, grown men watching a cartoon about little-girl ponies and singing the songs and buying the toys and wearing ponies on T-shirts. Is there therapy for that? I am hoping so… because I think I’m going to need it.

My doll-collecting mental illness began, as I tried to explain and tell lies about yesterday, when I was a child who had been given dolls for birthdays and Christmas (I meant to say Action Figures… No! Really!) and only really had sisters to play with at home (my little brother was eight years younger than me, and my friends from school lived in the country, miles away from town on farms.)

As a young man, I regained my dolls… I mean Action Figures, and tried to restore them (not play with them… I never said play with them). When I got married, my wife and I actively began collecting them. She was initially charmed by my love for my old pieces of plastic. We began looking for what was out there. Captain Action and G.I. Joes for me, Barbies for her. When she lost interest (or found a cure for that particular mental aberration), I kept on. The rules for collecting included; Twelve inch tall figures. Never pay more than $20 for a toy. Never spend more than $50 a month. Find rare dolls for little money. Rescue dolls who somebody once loved and played with, or that are on the verge of the ignominious end to be found in the department-store dumpster.

Rainbow Dash started me down the slippery slope to Brony-ism. I just happened to find, on an after-Christmas clearance table at Walmart with all the other damaged toys that didn’t realistically survive the seasonal play-with-it-in-the-store-while- mommy-shops damage, a cheap and forlorn Rainbow Dash with extra hair. She looked at me with those big, sad eyes and pleaded with me to buy her and save her from the dumpster (or the sadistic little girl that would buy and dismember her because she was just a cheap thing from Walmart). I’m too stupid to resist.

Then I began examining my purchase because I didn’t really know what it was… the Brony-thing warning lights were going off somewhere in the back of my goofy-old-man head, but it took some research before I learned what Equestria Girls were and that there were six of them. Six of them! A set of six to collect! But also the original ponies! A set of twelve!

And the disease had me.

So, here you see the tangible evidence that I am acutely infected. Brony-itis? Possibly. Fatal? Hopefully not. If you’re counting, they still are not all here. Apple Jack, Rarity, Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash as Equestria Girls. Apple Jack, Rarity, Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, and Pinkie Pie as ponies. But no Fluttershy at all. And… what’s this? No Pinkie Pie? The most popular pony with little girls, I could not find her in Equestria Girl form? Well, I could… but not for under $20. I went shopping at Toys R Us yesterday with the Princess in tow. We bought toys, but no Pinkie Pie for less than twenty one. And this collection represents $14 in January, $30 in February, and $25 already this month. I’m guessing the rules might save me from this disease yet. Does that mean no Pinkie Pie ever? Well, I watch the stupid cartoons incessantly now on YouTube… I’ve learned that Friendship is Magic and as long as you can remain true to your friends, you can overcome almost all of life’s problems… together… with love. And Pinkie Pie is totally random… and funny… and everyone’s friend. There are good lessons being taught to little girls and old men who watch these things. Pinkie Pie’s is probably the most important one of all… So Pinkie is my favorite. I haven’t found her yet in a way that stays within the rules, but I am not some creepy old man who breaks the rules. I have the rest of my life to complete this quest.

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Filed under doll collecting, goofiness, humor

Tagged as Bronies, doll collecting, humor, My Little Pony, photo Paffooney, Pinkie Pie, playing with dolls, satire, the quest

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