Tag Archives: wisdom

March 11, 2015 · 4:51 pm

Goofy Squared

There are a number of really, really goofy facts about me that I will reveal in today’s post… No one is trying to blackmail me over these things, believe it or not. I have no money. And I have no reputation to protect. I am nobody. Just a silly, goofy, loony old nobody. But I have a few chuckles now and then at my own expense.

Revelation #1; The clown nose in the picture was a souvenir from Cirque du Soleil. We went to see them in a parking lot in Frisco, Texas. They had an actual circus tent. When I was five, I told my parents I wanted to be a clown when I grew up. Nobody believes me when I say it, but I achieved that goal. They say, “But you were a school teacher!”

And I say, “How is that different?”

Honestly, I have worn a clown nose and played harmonica in front of a classroom full of twelve-year-olds. I can make teenagers laugh so hard the principal has to check to make sure they are not gleefully setting me on fire or duct-taping me to the wall. (Duck-taping sounds funnier, but you have to be accurate when describing real events from modern schools.)

Revelation #2; I am a closet nudist.

I used to be associated with the AANR, a nudist/ naturist organization in the latter part of the 1980’s, I met the nudist publishers through stamp collecting and they tried to recruit me. I bought books and videos from them. I have actually been naked for an entire day… once. I knew nudists in Austin where a former girlfriend stayed over several weekends with her sister who lived in the clothing-optional apartment complex on Manor Road. I am not brave enough to walk around physically naked in front of people on a regular basis though. So, I am a closet nudist. Only a nudist in my closet. I get a lot of mileage out of naked jokes in my fiction, though, because, well… naked is funny.

Revelation #3; I keep scrapbooks filled with collages made of pictures from magazines, newspapers, photos I’ve taken, pictures I drew myself, poems, short snippets of things I find funny or ironic or autobiographically important, and secrets like I am sharing with you today. (The picture of Goofy seen here is one I colored myself from one of the old coloring books left over from my kids’ coloring book days. I hate to see unused coloring book pictures go to waste.) I call these my magical tomes because I use them as source material for the spells I weave in my fiction. I also use many of the images for drawing and painting as models. I also discovered I can borrow whole images and make new art using my cheap-o substitute photo-shop program.

Revelation #4; It is totally by accident that I have come to look like the most important character in Snow Babies, the novel that PDMI is slowly publishing for me. Catbird Sandman is an old hobo who wears a coat that has so many patches on it that it has become a patchwork crazy quilt. He wanders around the country, appreciating the world and its people, and using his considerable store of mysterious abilities to charm, help, and change people. He carries around a book, a well-worn copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and quotes from it, treating it like a sort of Bible-like source of spiritual wisdom. The character looks like Walt Whitman. And now, though not intentionally, so do I. I grew the beard and long hair because of psoriasis. It attacks me under the edge of my jaw line and all around the back of my head. It is easily scratched and bloodied, and then infected when someone cuts my hair or I try to shave. So I have given up that battle and gone all hippy-dippy. It sorta fits with the whole jobless, shiftless, former nudist sort of persona that I have been cultivating as an author.

So what is the equation Goofy Squared all about? Well, if you take the square root of the four Goofy revelations in this post, you come up with Goofy times two. So Goofy obviously equals one. And I think I have clearly proven that I am the goofy one.

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Filed under artwork, goofiness, humor, Paffooney

Tagged as artwork, autobiography, clowns, humor, novel characters, paffooney, teaching, wisdom

February 9, 2015 · 1:21 pm

Wisdom from the Outsider

There is so much left to be said before my time runs out. Wisdom, whether hard won or acquired entirely through wit, bears a certain responsibility in the possession of it. We are duty-bound as wizards, the masters of wisdom, to pass it on.

Now, you certainly have every right to protest that I am not wise and I have no wisdom. You are certainly right to point out that I am a doddering old fool that sits around the house all day in the midst of his poor-health-enforced retirement doing little beyond writing silly stories and drawing pictures of mostly naked cartoon girls. I get that. But the beginning of wisdom is the realization of how big everything is and how little I really know about anything.

Take for instance the question of where we came from and what our purpose is? (And the question of why I put a question mark on that when it really wasn’t a question.)

I originally believed in the God of the Christians and in the promises of Jesus… everlasting life and an eternity of sitting on a cloud with a harp and… Okay, it didn’t take me long to see the logical holes in that line of reasoning. So much of that is fear of death and the need to believe that I am the center of all things, the most important person in existence. The truth is I am only a tiny part of a nearly-infinitely-large universe. And the universe is conscious… self aware. How do I know this? Because I am conscious and self-aware. I am an infinitely tiny piece of the whole… but there are untold trillions of others just like me. And when I die… when this body ceases to function, as it already has a great deal of trouble doing, the parts that make up the individual creature and thought patterns I identify as me will be scattered to the far corners of everywhere to be gathered up once again and be something new. All of mankind passes away. Human beings and the planet Earth will one day be no more. But that is not what matters. There is so much more beyond the boundaries of what my limited eyesight can behold, and what my limited mind can comprehend. I am made of star-stuff (just ask Neal DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan), and I am a part of the universe as a whole. I am in no hurry to die. Life is worth fighting through the pain for… but I do not fear death. Like birth, it is only a stop along the way in a journey that, as far as I can tell, never ends.

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Filed under Paffooney, philosophy, wisdom

Tagged as drawings, goofiness, Paffoonies, philosphy, wisdom

January 19, 2015 · 4:50 pm

Making Memes Again

Okay, I know it is a fool’s pursuit. You try to create epigrammatic quotes, sayings, and tidbits of wisdom to post on Facebook and then you hope people will click on “like” and “share”. You hope it goes viral. It is a striving after wind to paraphrase Ecclesiastes. But I do it anyway. After all, isn’t everything a writer does striving after wind? The chances of reaching a larger audience and touching a great many hearts are microscopically insignificant. I have reached a point in my writing career where I am actually, finally able to reach readers. People really do read my blog, my Facebook pages, and occasionally, my novels. I actually do score one or two hits on the heart of a reader once in a while. Is it worth it? Will I ever make any money at it? Yes… followed by probably not. I have managed to leave a footprint on the internet, something that was not possible during all those years of writing and drawing and then storing the work away in boxes and portfolios in the bedroom closets. If you want to see the shape of that footprint, do a Google image search on the words “Beyer Paffooney“. The spread of pictures and links is as impressive as that of real artists and writers (and by real I mean those who are well enough known to actually make some money at it.) Today’s Paffooney is a teacher-meme that should be syrupy cute enough to attract a like or two. I have no illusions about being a master of this new art-form, but I have investigated and studied it just enough to make feeble novice attempts. And so what if no one ever notices? I am posting my heart and wit and wisdom online in ways that will make some of it last beyond the scope of my physical life. Therein lies at least a portion of my immortality.

Here’s a link for the “Google Beyer Paffooney” thing;

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1600&bih=732&q=beyer+paffooney&oq=beyer+paffooney&gs_l=img.3…1935.7232.0.8091.15.3.0.12.12.0.64.166.3.3.0.msedr…0…1ac.1.61.img..12.3.166.C5lIUlYGDz8#imgdii=_

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Tagged as artwork, humor, making memes, Meme, paffooney, philosophy, wisdom

December 19, 2014 · 9:22 pm

The Truest of Magicks

Okay, life is like this; you are born, a lot of dumb stuff happens that you are mostly not in control of, you suffer a little bit, you are happy a little bit, and then you die. That is a pretty gloomy prospect, and most of us spend our entire lives obsessing over it, examining it with microscopes, doctoring it with needles and potions and chainsaws, trying to make it last a little longer, wailing and complaining about our sorry allotment, and wasting what little time we have. So what secret exists that could ever make a difference? Could ever open up our eyes… even just a tiny bit?

The secret, as far as I can tell (and I am certainly one of the dumber and more random among you because I am cursed with insight and wisdom won through suffering and making huge mistakes), is reading the right books.

I am not alone in this sort of thinking. There are those who believe that if you gather the best books together into a personal library and read them, they add experiences and knowledge to your life that you would not otherwise have. (Of course, one must acknowledge, especially if you read fiction, that most books are filled with lies and misinformation, and some, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus leaps to mind, might leave you stupider than you were when you started.) It deepens, broadens, and intensely colors the experience of life.

People who read books a lot… really read them, and re-read them, and collect them, and study them, and think about and write about them… are called wizards. Wizards are wise men. It is what the word means. Being one does not make you better than anyone else. In fact, wizards are generally weaker than normal men. It comes from all that ruining of eyes and fuddling up brains with too much thinking. You don’t want a wizard to back you up in a fist fight. You will certainly lose. And you don’t want a wizard to tell you how live your life. They are not good role models. But if a wizard tells a story, you should listen. Because if you really listen, and the wizard is really wise, you can expand the borders of your life, and push on nearer to immortality.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, wisdom, wizards

Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, drawings, humor, magic, Paffoonies, philosophy, reading, wisdom, wizards

September 25, 2014 · 12:18 am

Making a Meme

Trying to do social media marketing for my book tends to be a lot of sharing of memes. (Is that pronounced “Meeems” or “Meemees”?) I borrow stuff from others and post it based on my values, my politics, and my notions of what is wisdom. But the stuff that’s out there is wild and woolly, strange and fool-y. Quotes from authors and figures I respect are not actually things they said. Some of the memes are positively hateful and negative. I believe in gentle humor… things that make you laugh because they reveal unexpected truth. I don’t like insulting and degrading things. I could call Rush Limbaugh or Ted Cruz names. They make that very easy. But I don’t find that junk funny. So, I decided to try making what I think is a good meme.

There it is. I made that. Share it, or throw up about it, I have no control over that. I have no clue what makes something like that go viral or trend or whatever else they call it.

More Paffooney Progress!

As you can see, I made a tiny bit of progress over yesterday… but in many different ways. I got my son to finish his week’s worth of online school despite his not being completely well. I got the fake shutters off the windows on the wall where the city is expecting me to put up new siding so the house doesn’t shame the neighborhood. (I wonder if they threaten the other shabby yards and houses in the neighborhood with fines, or am I just special?) I got the dog to choke down 30 per cent of her heart-worm pill. And I added the keyboard and a tiny bit of Chopin to the Paffooney.

Why is the piano player naked, you ask? (Well, really you don’t ask, that was really me. But I have to connect the idea somehow, don’t I? Don’t answer that.) The piano player, like all writers, story-tellers, performers, artists, and other motley fools must put something of herself or himself into the piece. It has to be the true self, the inner self, the often private self. Having been the victim of sexual abuse as a child, the fear of being naked and vulnerable like that is nearly overwhelming. And yet, in a very metaphorical way, it is what I am compelled to do. (What? You can stop screaming. I’m not going to take my clothes off, if that’s what you’re afraid of. I know how horrifying that thought is.) I am only baring what I feel about the creative process. I am writing that part near the end of The Bicycle-Wheel Genius (the fool novel project I am now working on) where the bad guy must be defeated, the good must be made clear and maybe win out, and somebody dies or does something else irretrievably sad. I did it in Catch a Falling Star. I did it again with a major character in Snow Babies. And now, one of the characters that I have created and loved will die at the climax of this novel. A resolution and a death at the end of the tale, just like some cheap Robert Altman movie. How can you possibly have a comedy where nobody dies at the end? Wait, am I doing something wrong here? Who knows?

So that is the meat of this Paffooney process. I give you the drawing, even though it is not complete. I give you the ideas, even though they are half-formed and goofy as heck. A naked piano player… and, I don’t know if you can see it yet, a tiger swallowtail butterfly. The butterfly will be naked too.

Students and Teachers

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Tagged as artwork, colored pencil, drawing, paffooney, teachers and students, wisdom

July 1, 2014 · 7:22 pm

Norman Rockwell

When I was a boy in the 1960’s I looked forward to Grandma Aldrich’s Saturday Evening Post arriving at the end of her farm lane in the mailbox. We were at Grandpa and Grandma’s farm north of town almost every day. I often went to get the mail. This one magazine was supremely important to me, not because I liked to read the articles, that was too much like school, but because of the wonderful pictures on the cover. Norman Rockwell had established himself by that time as THE cover artist. He wasn’t on every single issue, but he was on most. And the world inside his paintings was filled with the kind of gentle humor, beautiful color, and wisdom tempered by love that I wanted to imitate. I wanted to paint just like that… and if I couldn’t, then I would find a way to tell stories in words the same way I saw them in his oils. I could gush more about the humble painter from New England, but I think it would serve my love of his work more just to show you what I mean;

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Tagged as Art heroes, cover art, humor, love, Norman Rockwell, oil paintings, Saturday Evening Post, wisdom

June 17, 2014 · 4:40 pm

Colored Pencil Magic

I left high school determined to become a wizard. I know how foolish that sounds. The beginning of wisdom is learning how big a fool I naturally am. So, having learned that I am a little fool (after years of humbling experience I know better than to call myself big), I had to pursue arcane knowledge and magic spells to become a wizard. I began to experiment with all kinds of ideas and all sorts of media. But it was the humble colored pencil where I discovered the most arcane power.

Let me tell you about how I cast a recent magic spell.

As with any wizard work, it begins with a book, a tome of significance discovered in the course of a book-finding quest. It was a book that I found in a Goodwill store, an antique book that describes in children’s book form how an archeologist uncovered the life and ultimate demise of a place in the distant past called Pueblo Bonito.

I learned about the place and the people, especially the children because, after all, that’s who the book was written for. So, the next step was to pull together the puzzle pieces I needed for a little bit of Paffooney magic. Paffooney, you may recall, is a magical made-up nonsense word useful for artistic incantations. I consulted a book that I myself created, a scrapbook of poems, snippets, and visual ideas. I call it Rage after the Dylan Thomas poem about raging against the dying of the light. It is full of scraps and pictures that I can use as models.

I sketched out the plan in light pencil, too light to really pick up in the photo. When I begin the detail work, I take it area by area, starting with the most important piece, the primary figure’s face.

As I moved along, I had to color in the primary figure first trying to carefully create a light-source pattern mostly consistent with my model. It is coming from near-noonday sun shining down into the Pueblo from the top right of the frame.

I discovered when it was too late that I missed the proper proportion on the right arm. I gave the poor girl a Popeye arm. But she will just have to live with the deformity. At least I didn’t goof as badly as Victor Frankenstein did on his creation.

The figure needed to be completed first since the the light patterns in the background would have to be keyed to it in a way that keeps those elements pushed back into the depths of the picture.

The background will contain three more figures, the two child figures will be more obscured than the main figure and far less detailed. The adult figure will be a mere shadow in the darkness of the Pueblo walls. A touch of blue sky will finish it all and give it primary completeness (red, yellow, and blue in a picture make it feel complete because these are the primary colors of paint).

I am left with the completed spell, a Paffooney I call “Pueblo Bonito”. I signed my name backwards, dated it, and now it is time to look at the finished spell and let its gentle magic work on my soul.