Tag Archives: photo Paffooney

March 8, 2015 · 5:16 pm

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.

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Filed under aliens, autobiography, being alone, Paffooney

Tagged as aliens, goofiness, humor, paffooney, philosophy, photo Paffooney, tinfoil hats

March 5, 2015 · 3:59 pm

Snow Day Again… In March?

It is truly amazing how little snow it takes to totally paralyze a city like Dallas. Chicago would be embarrassed to death at having to close school down on a sunshiny day with less than a foot of snow on the ground. But Dallas likes to build major roadways up into the air so freezing air can hit the underside as well as the upper side of roads that, once shut down by a hideous three-car five-death accident on sheets of super-slippery ice, totally prohibits movement from one side of the metroplex to the other.

I have considerable pain from my arthritis, and I am shut down most of the time anyway. But with the city closed around me, there is not much left to do but sit and write and make fun of southerners who can’t drive on snow because they don’t realize that speeds below seventy miles-per-hour do exist in the real world. I have had time to further work on the final edit of my novel, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. I also had time to submit my novel Magical Miss Morgan to the Chanticleer Book Reviews’ YA novel-writing contest called the Dante Rossetti Awards for Young Adult Fiction.

I don’t have a head full of straw and really believe I am going to walk away with a top prize. But I did enter this contest before with Snow Babies, and that book made it into the final round. It will help my manuscript get published. Who knows? I may score something bigger than an Indie publisher this time around. Maybe I can get an agent. (Okay, there’s a little straw in there. I will have to clean more carefully next time.)

But old, broken, bed-ridden me with nothing but time to lay around and fiddle with the computer am definitely making good use of my snow day. I took pictures of the snow. I walked the dog in it. And I didn’t have to drive to any schools or school events. Hot dang! What a fine life.

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Filed under humor, NOVEL WRITING, photo paffoonies

Tagged as humor, novel writing, photo Paffooney, snow days, Texans in snow, writing contests

March 3, 2015 · 12:09 pm

Fantasy Worlds

If you saw my post yesterday, you have probably already noticed I am not in love with the real world (and for those of you who naturally assume every conspiracy theorist is a nut job, I don’t love the world as I perceive it through my goofy senses). So what is the alternative? How about the world of the imagination?

Like many youths of the late 70’s and early 80’s, I trained my imagination with the Dungeons and Dragons game from Gary Gygax and TSR. I played first with my brother and two sisters, then with kids from the school where I first taught (middle schoolers when I taught them, but mostly high schoolers when they played in the vast worlds of my dungeon-master’s imagination). I first started buying and painting metal miniatures. Later I supplemented them with plastic figures, paper cut-outs, maps, and dungeon tiles.

I can now lay out a pretty impressive scene to play out the stories that I and my three goofy kids love to spin. Of course, you know that, although I lay out the potential story as the dungeon master, the players each pick a character and input their own directions and choices through that character’s point of view.

The characters face the monsters and problems they must overcome, and they must decide when to hit it, when to kill it, or when to try to charm her way through it.

After the monsters are dead you have to choose again. Do you cut up the dead Cyclops and eat it? Do you accept the gold from the princess who is thanking you for saving her and her children? Do you kill the bratty kids and take all their gold earrings and arm bands? Of course, the DM tries to squelch option three.

And then you gather up the group again in the castle courtyard, and away you go. Another adventure. Another problem to solve. It is so much easier than car repairs and school schedules and dealing with a dog that is a walking poop and spare-hair factory. Dungeons and Dragons life is so much more heroic and fulfilling than real life.

And then Mom shows up and says the game is over for today. Time to wash the dishes, vacuum the carpet downstairs, and walk the dang pooping dog. “Go away, Mom! We are busy learning about the important things in life.”

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Filed under Dungeons and Dragons, humor, photo paffoonies

Tagged as Dungeons and Dragons, humor, irony, photo Paffooney, playing games, real life sucks

February 23, 2015 · 4:23 pm

Snow Day 2015

Snow panic has hit the Dallas area. Schools are all canceled. Idiots are out ramming their cars together on the freeways. TV reports plead for Texans to stay off the roads if travel is not actually necessary. We are snowed in by a light dusting of snow and a serious patina of ice.

We Iowegians transplanted to Texas laugh at storms like this. It should not stop school. I drove through worse than this last year when I still worked for the only school district who refused to cancel school on an icy, snowy day over a year ago. But, a break to daily plans is a welcome thing, except possibly for the fact that you are stuck in the house with family all day with nothing to do. Hopefully we can stand the togetherness.

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February 21, 2015 · 8:02 pm

The Dog-Walk

Yes, I will admit to walking the dog for all the wrong reasons… I take her to prevent more poop piling up in the house on the living room carpet, but that’s just the most obvious reason that my wife and kids truly believe is the only reason. The truth is more sinister. When life goes against me (like my recent trouble with anti-teacher policies in Texas and the scourge known as insurance pirates) I take the dog out for walks so I can stumble and grumble and swear at the dog.

I took my camera along on this walk because I needed something to post for today even though I am all grumbly and rumbly and not ready to write. As we were taking off, I noticed my wife’s daffodils had sprung up to look around, confused by the warmer, wetter weather than we normally get during the time of year when Dallas is known for freezing Superbowls solid.

Daffodils, like most Texas residents, are a little naive and a little too ready to think only good things can happen to them because they are white and relatively wealthy and very Republican, living in the State at the center of the universe.

Then the second one pops out. Like any other Texans, two together make the average IQ in the room drop. Opinions get tossed back and forth to snowball into masses of prejudice against Mexicans crossing the border, too many black folks, too many people on food stamps eating up all the profits, and other massively bright blossoms of bigotry. Sometimes they watch Fox News together and get really dangerous. But fortunately, when two or more fear-charged brain-cells come in close proximity to each other (a feat that requires at least five Republicans) they begin to develop an electro-magnetic sixth sense and begin to perceive truth on the far perimeter.

The forecast in North Texas for this coming week is for a strong chance of severe winter weather (for North Texas that is the code for a slight chance of snow). So, I got a good laugh at daffodil expense. But, I guess I don’t really hope they die an icy death. I’m just grumpy because sometimes my life just doesn’t progress very well.

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Tagged as daffodil ditziness, grumpiness, humor, photo Paffooney, Republicans, swearing at the dog, Texas traumatics

February 18, 2015 · 1:02 pm

On a Frosty Morning

Yes, there was frost on the ground in the Dallas suburbs today. A bit of fog too. And I mean that both literally and figuratively, in a very Robert Frost-ian sort of way. The air was clean and cold and crisp for a change. I could see, hear, breathe, and think well for a change in this gawd-awful city of death and decay. It was poetically, virtually, and monumentally a moment of clarity… such clarity that only three adjectives could possibly be enough to provide the complex understanding of my Robert Frost moment.

My typical apology for living, and for writing this, and for making you read it comes in the second paragraph today. You have to forgive me for being so much of an English teacher. Do you know who Robert Frost is? Frost is a great american poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times in the 20th Century. Does that really tell you who Frost is? Of course not. Only this does;

The Road Not Taken

a poem by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,,
And that has made all the difference.

Yes, like Robert Frost, I took the road less traveled by in life. Having a gift for creative writing, drawing cartoons, and generally being seriously silly and obtuse (and claiming that meant I was funny), I chose to not be a novelist and cartoonist when I was young. I chose to be a school teacher. Of course, if you pin me down and ask me, requiring me to answer before you let me up, and threatening to spit on my nose if I don’t answer, I will tell you that God really decided I needed to be a teacher. After all, I developed arthritis that effected how often and how long I could spend drawing. I had the usual novelist’s problem of a keen awareness of how to write, and no real life experiences to write about. But even though it was a holy mission from God, it was my own decision to become a teacher.

And look what I got from it. This is a picture of Freddy. I started this picture in 1986, drawing the portrait from a photo and from real life. Freddy was a vato loco from Cotulla. He is the sort of kid that teachers dread. He is the kind that if you let him sit in the back of the room, he will shoot spit-wads into the girls’ hair… but if you put him up front, he is constantly putting on a show, a stand-up-sit-down-again comedy routine for the entire classroom. And I had the honor of being his favorite teacher both in his seventh and eighth grade years. He made me laugh almost as much as he was laughing at me. He claimed he was a Mexican even though he was born in the U.S. and has always lived in the U.S. and if he goes to Mexico, they won’t understand his Texican version of Spanish without an interpreter. (Now, you probably already know that I never use real names of people I write about in order to protect the innocent… or in Freddy’s case the only-mildly-guilty. But I haven’t actually revealed his name in this post. Alfredo Giovanni is such a common name in Texas that you will never be able to find him through research. And Alfredo Giovanni is a name I made up anyway.) By the time I actually put the color on this picture, Freddy will no longer look even remotely like this. He’s in his late forties and Hispanic. He probably weighs at least ten times what his tiny self did back in 1986. But I was honored to know him and teach him, even though I have more than a few gray hairs on my head that he specifically caused.

And that brings me to my final movement in this classical opus. Here is the difference I have made by choosing the path I chose. Now that poor health has forced me to retire from teaching, and I have a limited time left to me to pick up the novelist/cartoonist thing again, I have done so with passion and insight that I would not otherwise have had. I have crafted a novel in The Magical Miss Morgan based entirely on my experiences as a classroom teacher. It is the best thing I have ever written in my life. And one of the main characters, the rapscallion leader of the Pirates’ Club, Timothy Kellogg… is Freddy in fictional form. Oh, it is true that the character is the son of a high school English teacher in my story, and he does have a lot in common with my own oldest son… but he is actually Freddy. The things he does and says (translated from Texican into Iowegian) and thinks and feels, are all Freddy. And how do I know what Freddy thinks and feels? Come on! I was Freddy’s favorite teacher. There is no way I would still be alive and sane unless I could read minds.

Two roads diverge on a frosty morning pathway in the park… One over the bridge into an entirely different life that I didn’t choose… and one that leads straight on into the new dawn… whatever the consequences of following it.

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Tagged as colored pencil, humor, Paffoonies, pen and ink, philosphy, photo Paffooney, poetry, Robert Frost, teaching

February 11, 2015 · 1:49 pm

Goofy Days

I struggled to get started today… weird clouds covered the pinks and purples of a Dallas dawn as I stumbled through walking the dog. I think I mentioned before, I believe, that our goofy dog (who fortunately does not wear a hat and drive a car, so she is not a Goofy dog) has become a record-setting poop factory, pooping out five times a day and producing what I suspect is actually five times her own weight in doggy poo in a single day. If only it were worth money! I felt ill with an acrobatic stomach doing inner flip-flops while trying to transport twenty pounds of poop to the trash can. My arthritis made my joints crackle and walking was a total pain. But I made it. I walked the dog… deposited the poop…made breakfast for two kids… eggs for one, sausage for the other (I am not so much a dad as I am a short-order cook at breakfast time)… I avoided talking about religion or politics… I dropped them both off at school… and then I went back to bed. I woke up in time to hop in the car again and pick them up from their early release day. And on early release days they don’t feed the kids even though they don’t release them until after the noon hour. So rather than cook again… Taco Bueno! It is overpriced and really bad for you… especially with an upset stomach… but, hey, we didn’t have much food left in the pantry anyway. So, in spite of feeling like sudden death by heart attack would be a blessing… I made it through the morning of a weird and wacky, goofy, goofy day. And now my work for the day was nominally done. So I sat down and tried to think of a post for this blog. (44 days in a row with at least one post, you know) No luck. I couldn’t think of anything to write. And my schedule of ideas took way to much work to use on a goofy day. So, I took a picture of my toys… some of them… and tried to tell myself that I could turn that into a worthy post. The evidence is clear, however… I most certainly could not.

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Tagged as goofiness, humor, photo Paffooney

February 1, 2015 · 3:37 pm

Clean Gene the Cleaning Genii

Yes, I am a mess… an unmitigated, ten-year-old-tuna-salad-sandwich-on-the-floor sort of mess. Cleaning is difficult. I have arthritis which makes movement difficult. I have diabetes which saps my energy and makes me constantly ill. I have four other incurable diseases as well, hypertension, BPH (benign prostatic hyperplasia), psoriasis, and COPD (chronic obstructed pulmonary disorder). I can’t move. I can’t breathe. And there are long periods of time when I can’t even think. I do have a great deal of free time, however, because I was forced to retire from teaching for physical reasons, and having 31 years of experience in the books gives me a full pension negotiated back in the eighties when teachers weren’t universally reviled as money-sponge parasites the way they are now. (Texas Education has always run on the philosophy that teachers can achieve way more for far less money if you are properly mean to them and bully them and make them worry about being fired for low test scores enough that they won’t stop to think and possibly remember that they also have rights as a human being). So my bedroom art-and-writing studio is total chaos. And I am beginning to believe that I must clean it before some part of the biomass absorbs enough magical energy to become sentient and eats me in the night.

I made a resolution to clean it. Of course, wifey won’t help me. She unreasonably points out that since I can no longer share a room because of my chronic pain and numerous ailments, the mess is all made by me and she has no guilt or shame coming to her from not cleaning it for me. She has her own mess and her own ailments to worry about. And I live with two of my three children still in the house, but both, unfortunately teenagers now, and both making twice or three times the mess that I do. They too unreasonably refuse to clean up any messes they didn’t specifically (and provably) make themselves. The dog actually helped with the old tuna sandwich thingy. I think she killed it and ate it while it was contemplating growing legs. But she has been little use to me for putting books back on shelves, picking up smelly socks (without eating them), and folding clean laundry.

So, it all boils down to me getting up the stiff resolve to do ten or fifteen minutes of cleaning at a time as many times a day as I can manage and cleaning it myself. Of course, I found a mysterious old bottle with some kind of imp in it. I have been rubbing it really, really hard and trying to make a genii appear. I can wish the room clean… right after the wish for a bazillion dollars and a brand-new teenage body… um, how many wishes do I get? I might like to turn wifey into a Jessica Alba clone. And I could use a new car… I need to keep looking under the bed. Maybe there are TWO bottles like that!

Maybe I shouldn’t be revealing what my inner sanctum looks like at the moment. Yes, that might be a huge mistake. But I am old and ill and nothing much really seems that big a deal any more. And, besides, I am looking forward to posting post-cleaning-frenzy pictures to impress you with how much everything has changed. (Yeah, that will happen.)

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Tagged as action figures, chaos and mess, goofiness, humor, my sanctum sanctorum, photo Paffooney, resolutions I won't keep

January 29, 2015 · 6:23 pm

Expelling Evil (But Only If You Can Overcome Spelling Trouble) Part Two

In the last episode of Expelling Evil, Grammar Nazis, we saw the Captain Action Hero-Action-Guy Team move into Mickey’s Library with the speed of a Republican in Congress when there is legislation to be passed. The heroes were prepared to battle Dr. Evil and evil Dr. Evil’s evil minions. Captain Carl Action had encountered and pacified the evil minion known as the Agent in Red. He found ways to capture and interrogate her that, while not the least bit effective, were something that he really, really enjoyed.

So Carl, taking his time… an entire week if you can believe it! decided to extend his interrogation even longer, in spite of chapped lips and the total absence of lip balm. It was then that Colonel Komma and his evil Grammar Nazis decided to move in and attack the foolish hero-guy with Blitzkrieg word war.

It was true. I went back to that post and looked it up. The word wondrous was spelled w-o-n-d-E-r-o-u-s! Stupid Captain Carl! How could he be so heroically stupid? He let my wonderful, nearly perfect, purple paisley prose get possessed by a common, ordinary spelling demon. The Grammar Nazis had him in an impossible position. And his only response to the terrible situation? He misuses an apostrophe, placing it on a plural noun that is not possessive!

Then, just as Colonel Komma moved in for the editorial kill, Captain Carl came up with the perfect defense. He used his super-power of super stupidity as a shield. He successfully argued that you cannot be defeated by editing of your poor grammar if you don’t understand what they are talking about. Fortunes of war were suddenly reversed!

Captain Carl was not the only Captain Action present. Captain Bill Newguy Action stepped in to disarm the Grammar Nazi with his famous whack-a-doo smacketty-smack punch. The Grammar Nazis were defeated by the hypocrisy of trying to correct English grammar with such a thick accent that they were actually forcing the cartoonist to misspell stuff on purpose to accurately represent the weird sounds in their Grammar Nazi speech balloons.

Colonel Komma was no longer the kapturing konqueror he was hoping to be. Instead he had become the kaptured kook. But Mickey was still no nearer to having his X-Box back for playing EA Sports Baseball ’04. Dr. Evil still had control of that.