Tag Archives: wisdom

July 5, 2015 · 1:27 pm

One True Thing

Sometimes I wonder why I write and what purpose it serves.  And the fact that it is impossible to know the answer to things like that doesn’t even slow me down.  The speculation-and-imagination machine chugs on, churning out all sorts of clever platitudes and sophomoric sayings that the editorial glands in my brain sometimes make me choke on.  Purple paisley prose rolls out of my pen and curls and swirls across the page being more about the silly sounds and internal rhymes and alliterations than about the actual ideas.  And I enjoy the process far more than you do.

newwkid

Making connections is probably the most important process of the whole endeavor.  Having returned home to Iowa for a week in July, I can testify that connecting your childhood to your recent past and your promising present is essential to determining both who you are and who you are supposed to be.  The boy I was in the 60’s and 70’s is a key to understanding why I write what I do.  I was smarter than a kid is supposed to be.  A nerd is a target for verbal and physical abuse based on a shared feeling among those not as cerebral that it is somehow unfair to be smarter than ordinary folks.  I learned to defend myself with wit and superior planning.  I found it is possible to create an indispensable role for myself in practically any situation.  I learned to be a good listener.  I absorbed all the fascinating little nuances of personality and possibility that other people unintentionally exude.  I learned to organize and prioritize and use all the other ize-es that help you structure reality to your liking.  And I learned that it is possible, as a teacher, to pass the secrets of life and love and laughter on to others.  Here is one true thing… The point of learning anything is to pass it on to others.

Skater girl

If you get nothing else at all out of this silly, meandering post of purple paisley prose, I hope it is that previous sentence.  I delude myself into believing that all the experiences I have had and all the things I have learned can be wrapped up into pretty packages and given as gifts to coming generations.  I strive to write with quality and make the ideas engaging and powerful.  I am always experimenting with style.  For example, this post is based on free-writing and associative thinking.  I intended to create a “boneless” structure of gelatinous prose centered around one true thing.  And I intentionally wrote it to resemble a blobby pile of mud in which the reader must dig for that nugget of gold.  And I think I have succeeded in making it thoroughly muddy with random big words, loose connections that risk bursting the paragraph’s seams, and word eddies that could potentially explode the flow.  If you have waded this far through the mess, then let me reward you with one more pointless Paffooney, re-posted like a pirate.

Blue and Mike in color

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May 16, 2015 · 1:58 pm

Teacher-Wise

So, does this title have more than one meaning?  Of course it does.  This post is about being a teacher and having wisdom.  And I know you will immediately think, “You dumb guy!  I know teachers who aren’t wise at all!  Some teachers are stupid!”

namaste_out_of_control_cover

You are especially saying that if you are a student.

You are not wrong, either.  Some teachers have no business being teachers.  It is especially difficult to find good science and math teachers.  After all, those who are good at math and science can make so much more money in the private sector, that they would have to be born to be a teacher… and realize it, to go into teaching.  There are very good science and math teachers out there, but many of them are wilting under the weight of a difficult job being made constantly harder by social pressures like truly dumb people who say things like, “You can’t solve our education problem by throwing money at it!”  I guarantee no one has ever thrown money at the problem.  If teachers were paid what they were worth so that we could retain good, competent teachers, you would see education make an amazing amount of progress in a very short time.  What Wall Street firm fails to pay their star players what they are worth?  Do bankers and lawyers get punished for doing a good job by asking them to produce more with fewer resources for less pay?  Those folks in finance and law always pay the price for the best because that always produces the best result.  If you want schools to routinely produce critical thinkers and problem-solvers, why would you complain that we are spending too much money per kid?  Of course, there are those with the money and the power (especially in Texas) who really don’t want more students coming out of schools with the ability to think and decide for themselves.   Smart people are harder to control and make a profit from. (Out of Control is a book they don’t want you to read.)

class Miss M2

So now I have totally proved the point that smart people who are looking out for their own interests should never go into teaching.  Still, among the unwashed, unloved, and incompetent that do make the mistake of going into teaching, there is still a great deal of learning and gaining of wisdom going on.  After all, if a fool like me can become a good teacher, anybody can do it.  You just have to learn a few bits of wisdom the hard way that have very little to do with what we call “common sense”.

As Dr. Tsabary points out in the book I plastered on the front of this post, discipline is not what you think.  We all remember that teacher we had that nobody listened to.  She was always yelling at us.  She made threats.  She punished us.  And even the good kids in class would shoot spitwads at the back of her head.  Why did we not respect and learn from this teacher?  Because she never learned these profound truths.

1.  Kids are people.  They want to be treated with respect and even love.  Their ideas matter as much, if not more than the teacher’s ideas.  Good teachers will;

a. Get to know every kid in their class as a human being, knowing what they believe in, what they care about, where they come from, and who they think they are.

b. Ask them questions.  They will never have an original idea if you do not make them think.  They have insights and creativity and strengths as well as weaknesses, bad behavior, and wrong ideas.  You have to emphasize the former and minimize the latter.

c.  Laughing and talking in the classroom is evidence of learning.  Quietly filling out worksheets is evidence of ignorance, and most likely the ignorance of the teacher.

2.  Tests don’t matter.  This is always true for these reasons;

a.  Tests are a comparison, and nothing is gained by comparing kids.  Comparing the scores of my bilingual kids in South Texas with upper class rich kids in Chicago and college-bound kids in Tokyo has no value.  Their lives are completely different and so are their needs.  If we don’t score as well on the tests as the kids in Tokyo, what difference will that make to what time the train arrives in the station in Paris?  (Especially if Pierre has chosen the bullet train that goes south at a rate of 200 miles per hour.  No trains in Texas go that fast without crashing and blowing up.)

b.  If I spend time in class teaching students how to read and making them practice reading critically, they will do just as well as the kids who drilled extensively from specially made State materials preparing for the test on the reading and vocabulary portions.  The only way that outcome changes is by cheating and giving them the actual test questions before the test.  (I should point out that teachers caught doing this last thing are shot in Texas and buried in a box full of rattlesnakes.  Dang old teachers, anyhow!)

I know I started this little post by convincing you that I am not wise, and very probably mentally unbalanced.  And now that I have made my arguments, you know for sure.  But over time, there is wisdom to be learned from being a teacher.  You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true.  (I don’t know how many times I used that phrase out loud in a classroom over 31 years, but I am guessing you couldn’t count them on fingers even if you used the hands of every kid I ever had as a student.)

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May 14, 2015 · 12:10 pm

Wide-Eyed Wonder

bad dayThere is no doubt about it, being a writer is like getting naked in public.  It never used to really sink in before I published books, and when no one read my writing or listened to me when I talked.  Suddenly, I am being read… and even… frighteningly, being believed.Creativity

I now have 678 followers, a number of whom actually read and comment on my posts.  I do my best to entertain and make them laugh, but it is the nature of real writing that the contents of my life as a whole spill out for all to see.  I try to keep private things private, but it is becoming more and more obvious that I need a much bigger purple teddy bear.  Readers of my blog know that I was a public school teacher for thirty-one years.  They also know that I did not want to leave that job, but I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor, and my health let me down.  They may also know that I was the victim of a sexual predator when I was a child and recovery has taken a lifetime… in fact, it is still going on.  They may know that my family life has become difficult because health issues affect an entire family, especially when the costs of care are turned into gigantic scary monsters by an increasingly greedy and corrupt health-care industry (not doctors and nurses. mind you, but the higher-ups who really make all the money off drugs, tech, and insurance.)   There are no longer skeletons in my closet.  All my darkest secrets become fuel for writing and bubble out of my cauldron, transforming into butterflies, who may have started as worms, but have worked themselves into filigreed winged creatures that flit about in the sunlight.  I turned one of my most horrible experiences into a post for https://www.facebook.com/groups/1000Speak/.  It was the story of Ruben Vela, and it was about my inability to prevent a tragedy.  Here is the link; When Compassion Fails.  Gobs of sobs from readers in the comment section.  I usually try to make them laugh… but crying is a part of the reading game too.

And where are the Trolls?  I see them on the internet everywhere.  I know other bloggers who have cut off comments because of Trolls.  They don’t seem to come around me with their leg-breaking, gut-busting insults and four-letter-wordy mayhem.  Do I not deserve that as much as anybody else?  But I know better than to actually wish for what I don’t really want.  It is okay, Trolls, if you decide you’d rather apply the soul-crushing efforts elsewhere.

The point is, while I have always wanted to be a writer and have some experience with naturists and nudists, I have never before now had to come to terms with dancing naked in the sunlight in front of God and everybody… but continuing to write means dealing with it now.

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March 11, 2015 · 4:51 pm

Goofy Squared

Mickeynose

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.lil hunter2

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.

Goof  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 Catbird Mehas 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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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.mrFuture

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.   Mai LingAnd 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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January 19, 2015 · 4:50 pm

Making Memes Again

class Miss M2

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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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?

Zoric

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.

Eli Tragedy

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.

Skorpio

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.

Ice Alchemist

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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.

tigers2

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.

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September 15, 2014 · 1:35 am

More Paffooney Progress!

DSCN5279

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.

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August 31, 2014 · 2:36 am

Students and Teachers

students in color

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