Tag Archives: satire

October 5, 2013 · 8:05 pm

Star Dancing with Lizard People

Image

 

the picture above : Davalon and Farbick near Mars (by Leah Cim Reyeb)

I am constantly bubbling over with ridiculous ideas and dreams.  After writing the book Catch a Falling Star, I was asked by an editor what happens next to some of the characters.  The Morrell family, changed into children, travel into space with the Tellerons aboard Xiar’s Base Ship.  Harmony Castille, the elderly church lady who falls in love with the Telleron Commander Biznap marries him and travels with the aliens too.  The task; find a new home world and start a mixed civilization.  Since the aliens have no inherent religion or morality, it falls to the humans on board to make Christian values the norm for the Telleron frog people.  That is a challenge old church ladies can’t resist, but also can’t manage without help.

So what can I do with this story?  Where can it go?  I am trying to build my work in fiction around certain rules or boundaries that will give it the consistency and power that I need to achieve with my work.  Well, the biggest rule is that all my stories have to fit like puzzle pieces into the entire picture, an imaginary history of the universe centered on the little town where I grew up.  Space empires in the future, time travelers popping in and out freely, and imaginary breakthroughs in physics, astrophysics, and various sciences cannot be allowed to interfere with the unified history of the future of the galaxy.  I know how silly this sounds, but silly rules inform the under-structure of all reality.  How else can you explain things like the politics of Texas?  Further, I adhere to other silly rules.  It must be science fiction or fantasy.  It must also be humor.  And the most important characters are always children.

So what will this book I am planning be like?  Well, first of all, there must be strong elements of science fiction.  Of course, silly me, my heroes are on a starship looking for a new home-world.  You can’t get too much more science-fictiony than that.  But I have been overwhelmed with internet researches of late into the looniest of the internet conspiracy theories.  Besides my obsessions with who killed JFK and what really happened on 9/11, I have also found cartoon characters like Alex Jones (the conspiracy world’s version of Elmer Fudd on PCP and prodded to ridiculous levels of vitriolic-aggressive anger management failures) speaking about lizard men from outer space who have taken to controlling our government by shape-changing and masquerading as Hilary Clinton.  Whew!  Humor is a breeze!  All I have to do is set my lost space-colony down on the hostile, warlike world of the space lizards, the world of Galtorr Prime.  The science fiction is then firmly grounded in the pseudo-science of paranoid madmen.  And, joyfully, further research into the lizard people trying to take over earth will be justified by the creation of this book.  Who knows?  I may actually uncover their secrets in real life!

The humor, as I already indicated, is built in.  Warlike lizards who want only to conquer and destroy!  And don’t forget, this will be set on their war-torn home world.  The satire is set.  I will be writing political satire about Republicans and Democrats.  Hot dang!  And I can depict crazy folk who would gleefully destroy their own government and their own environment in order to spite their worst enemies, who are thankfully not us, but themselves.  I can continue to describe the battle between good and evil in my book in the same religious terms I have always tried to use.  It is not good against evil as much as it is Love against Heartlessness.   All good comedy, from Mark Twain, to Charles Dickens, to Terry Pratchett, to Douglas Adams, is precisely about that.  (Of course it will mean more of the run-on sentences, multi-adjectival descriptions, and infantile allusions and metaphors that I always use in my signature purple-paisley prose.)

And finally, I have the characters already fairly well set.  Davalon, the boy Telleron explorer, his nestmate/sister Tanith, their friend and mentor Farbick, Davalon’s adopted child-parents Alden and Gracie Morell, and the crew of Xiar the Slightly Irregular’s whole wacky starship are already living and arguing in my head.  Of course, the moldy underwear and dirty dishes in my head are not a particularly good thing.  When will fictional characters ever learn to clean up after themselves?  Only time will tell.

So there you have it, an entire book idea that came into being in the last week and a half.  It will be interesting to chronicle the progression and creation of it.  Will it actually get written?  Will it take twenty-two years the way Catch a Falling Star did?   Will it be worth doing more with than merely writing it and then burning it to save future generations from reading it and burdening themselves with the corrosive insanity it will most likely cause?  Well, please, don’t bet any actual money on it.  Imaginary or funny-money will be good enough.  

 

3 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

September 7, 2013 · 9:05 pm

Clowns

When you are small, there is something intimidating about a man in strange clothes and a garish pattern of white and red and blue all over his face.  What is he hiding?  What does he want?  Why does he squeeze off a blast from that ridiculous little horn with the big red squeeze bulb right in your little-boy face?   His big floppy shoes suggest monstrous feet.  Why does he have such a big mouth with red paint all around it?  “The better to eat you with, my dear!”

But clowns have a purpose for those of us who are no longer frightened little boys.  They parody our actions and exaggerate everything.  They look like us, sound like us, and behave like us if only we are able to look at ourselves times twelve or thirteen.  They are essential to our lives and our happiness.  Why, you ask?  Because, my friend, we should never take ourselves too seriously.  If we look at life only through serious eyes, we will never get enough of weeping.  When we blow up too many balloons with our face painted on them, balloons of self-importance, as serious adults are wont to do, then we need to find the maniac with the pin.  He’s not always a professional with face paint and floppy shoes.  Sometimes he is the mailman, the local grocer, or even your deadbeat brother-in-law.  But the point is, no matter how scary he sometimes seems, we all depend on the clown.  We all need the foolishness of the most foolish among us.  It keeps us sane.

Why then did I have to take it upon myself to give the world clowns?  After all, that is precisely what I am doing as a writer.  I am physically miserable with my six incurable diseases.  I have diabetes, arthritis, hyper tension, psoriasis, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder, and I have a prostate the size of a cantaloupe.    I can’t walk without a cane.  I can’t breathe while I’m walking.  I can’t pee without pain.  I can’t draw as much as I’d like. And soon I will have to retire from teaching… the single greatest thing I ever did with my foolish little life.  Oh, and every night while I’m trying to sleep, I itch the top layer of skin off all my most sensitive anatomical parts thanks to the gift of psoriasis.  I have every reason to just curl up in a ball and cry.  But that’s not what a clown does.  A clown picks himself up and dusts off that rusty tin can that he keeps his sense of humor in.  A clown looks at the world around him and sees all the really absurd things that are there.  He looks at the way high school students act.  He sees politicians like Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate.  He sees injustice, moronic balloons with Ted Cruz’s face on them getting bigger and bigger and presidential, people on Texas roadways turning road rage into performance art, and even the contradictory things his wife says to him in little cartoon speech balloons that never seem to agree with each other and fight back and forth until they fill up the entire Cartoon Panel of Real Life.  The clown sharpens that sense of humor, that crooked little pin, until it is balloon-popping razor sharp.  It suddenly becomes time to pop a few balloons.

There are clowns in my writing not just because I like to write humor, but because it is the only way I can truly fight back.  I must crack a few jokes.  I must take a few metaphors and push them and pull them until they are so out of shape they form a picture of Ted Cruz’s face.  I must puncture things and blow things up.  I must toss sarcasm-berry  pies at Ted Cruz’s face.  (Actually, I love Ted Cruz.   What wannabe humorist wouldn’t?  He’s such an easy target.)  I must mock things and ape people.  I must sock things and grape people… waitaminnit!  Grape people?  Is that what a one-eyed, one-horned, giant purple people eater eats?  I must do all the funny foolish things that a foolish funny clown can do to make the tears turn to laughter and pain to be ignored.  Ted Cruz to be ignored too, if possible.

I have a riff or two to do on the clown heroes who inspire me.  Red Skelton, Milton Berle, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and even Charlie Chaplin.  But maybe that has to wait for another day… another post.  As teachers and other clowns must always be aware, the attention span of the audience wears out quickly.  If you have read this far, you are getting sleepy… sleepy (Michael Beyer is the funniest writer you ever read and you will not remember that I am the one who told you so).

Image

 

The clown in the picture is NOT Ted Cruz.  Shame on you for thinking that.

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

May 30, 2013 · 12:24 am

Goobers and Gomers

Image

I posted previously about how some classrooms in public schools have the same qualities as the city zoo.  As I rattled off some of the more dangerous beasts, I happened to mention gomers in passing.  I failed to actually talk about them at that time.  This was not a mere oversight or foolish mistake.  This was a shameless hook meant to bait you like a sunfish in spring and bring you with a gaping mouth to this prissy post.

Gomers and goobers are not rare animals, but scarce enough to go unnoticed by those who don’t watch the classroom like a hawk.  (Hawks and sunfish?  Is that a subliminal connection of some sort?  I think not.)  As you have probably guessed if you are amazingly old and out of date like me, or had no clue at all about it because you never pay attention to anything from the world before you were born when everything was in black and white, gomers and goobers are named after the Pyles from Mayberry.  Gomer Pyle and his cousin Goober, gas station mechanics and avid drinkers of grape Nehi, are the loveable bumpkins who can only say the dumbest things at just the right time to completely skewer the psyches of all the Sergeant Carters and Andy Taylors of the world.  These would be the halfwit wits that always snipe verbally from the back corners of the room whenever they think someone is being dim and dumb, especially if they suspect the person is being dimmer and dumber than they are, and especially special if that person just happens to be the teacher.

These patriotic little rubes are the ones that say the pledge to the flag, and the pledge to Emperor Perry’s Great State of Texas, with such great feeling and pride, yet manage to call each other queers and steers, and sock each other on the arms during the moment of silence.  They are FFA geeks who like farming because they get to see animals breeding (farmer porn).  They are Republicans because their fathers are, and firmly believe that all our lives will be better if we reduce the government and give more money and tax breaks to rich people.  Of course, they only mean the national government, because there is something sacred about Emperor Perry’s Republic of Texas, and we need more of that kind of red state hogpoop.  Who doesn’t want to see red hogs?  Especially while they are breeding!

Image

I don’t mean it to sound like I hate gomers and goobers.  They are actually kinda sweet and naive most of the time.  They are all, “Aw, shucks, Miss Luanne, you sure is purdy!” and “I do not agree with any dang liberal thing you say, think, or even think about thinking, Mr. B, but I will defend to the death your right to utter that liberal commie bull puckie!”  And they always add, “But don’t forget that my second amendment rights are the most important rights in the whole constitution because it means I can sleep with a BIG DAMN GUN under my pillow.”  Sure.  Sweet, but they can kill you without a second amendment thought.

So, now I’ve gone and done it.  I’ve alienated almost everybody who loves Emperor Perry’s Great State of Texas because we don’t tax the rich or, God forbid, businesses, and life will be so much better if we give all our money to rich guys and own a BIG DAMN GUN (in all capitals)!

Never the less, gomers and goobers are real animals.  We need to learn their habits and sounds from the handy field guide, and get ready to have an even better ol’ Bubba-time when we get to the monkey house.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , ,