Tag Archives: writing

Synesthesia (Part One; French Blue Monday)

This link will help you understand Synesthesia

Francois spotlight

Yes, Mondays are blue.  Specifically French blue.  Every day of the week has its own color.  Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre,  Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue.  I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints.  I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head.  I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world.  I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name.  It is called synesthesia.

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It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”.  When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence.  I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns.  Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns.  It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color.  Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word.  But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue.  It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”.  And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.

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Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.

I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do.  I certainly was.  I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue.  My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing.  I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word.  I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there.  But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true.   The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded.  I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls.  My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters.  She is left handed and also gifted at drawing.  I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.

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Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.

Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about.  But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about.  And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases.  It is not a bad condition to have.  In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing.  I could use some good for a change.  Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway.  (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).

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Animal Town in Daylight

This is a place I explore in cartoons and daydreams.  It is a little town known as Animal Town for fairly obvious reasons.  It is populated by silly anthropomorphic animals who wear clothes and keep naked people as pets.

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Animal Town is one of the all-time silliest places to visit in the cartoon dreamland of Fantastica.

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Mandy Panda and little brother Dandy are my constant companions and guides when I tour the dangerous streets of wild Animal Town.  In my cartoons, Mandy is an immigrant from the Pandalore Islands.  She is also the cartoon version of my wife.

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Three of the Town’s most important head monkeys.

It was Mandy who introduced me to the government officials who run Animal Town.  Judge Moosewinkle is the head of the Animal Town court system.  He is a hanging judge, so I am very careful about littering and loitering when I am in town.

Constable Geoffrey Giraffe does all the arresting and police work.  He used to work in a toy store, but quit his job there when he couldn’t get them to stop writing the R backwards on all their signs.  Grammar infractions annoy him more than any other crime.

Linus the Kitten-Hearted is the mayor of Animal Town.  They wanted to crown him as king, but he always says that’s only for when he’s in the jungle.  In town he prefers to be a democratically elected leader.  Of course, if you refuse to vote for him, he might eat you.

Most of my dreams in Animal Town are about the school there.

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                                                                                                                                                         Yes, this is a yearbook picture from Animal Town Elementary School.

Miss Ancient’s Class of 5th graders is usually rather rowdy and difficult.  You may have noticed there is a bare bear in the old buzzard’s class.  The fact is, the bears in Animal Town are all naturists and refuse to wear clothes.  This disturbs poor Miss
Ancient greatly, and it is therefore a real godsend that a fig leaf just happened to be drifting down through the air at the time this picture was made.  Bobby Bare is not shy, but some things are better not put into a cartoon.

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                                                                                                                                                   Yes, this is another yearbook picture. And I am in it twice, since Mr. Reluctant Rabbit is also me.

As a visitor to Animal Town, Cissy Bare took me to Mr. Rabbit’s class as her pet for show and tell.  She is also a bare bear, and she also benefited from a passing leaf at picture time. You may notice students putting rabbit ears behind each other’s heads in pictures… something that human children do too in real life.  But when I study this picture, I can’t help but think that maybe Mr. Rabbit started it.  Now, Animal Town is located in Fantastica, a part of the Dreamlands.  So that sort of explains how I ended up in school naked.  My dreams are like that.  You are in school in the middle of lessons before you realize that haven’t got a single stitch of clothing on.

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When I am inevitably charged with public indecency for being in school naked, I can turn to Animal Town lawyer Woolbinkle Moosewinkle.  He is totally incompetent and not very bright, but unlike most of the animals, he is friendly and on my side.  Spot Firedog is a Dalmatian who knows how to use a newspaper.  He is a reporter, publisher, and all-around good dog.  He wrote an expose on me being naked in the Animal Town Elementary school.

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Big Bull Beefalo runs the local hamburger emporium, which might seem like collusion to cannabalism, but Bull is a very gentle and very large soul.  He is himself a vegetarian, but he is a gifted fry cook and chef.  I can go to his restaurant when I get out of jail, though hopefully not as food.

So, Animal Town is a very different kind of place.  It is the result of dreams and goofiness and uncontrolled spurts of cartoonist creativity.  It is a cartoon sort of place where spontaneous and random humor happens.

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Writer’s Block

I have always contended that I don’t have writer’s block. But some days, especially if I am not feeling well, I have writer’s lethargy. I can be slow to come up with the next thing. Writing can become bogged down and I am easily distracted or lose focus and have to return to what I was trying to do previously.

There is evidence that I have often had that kind of problem frequently on this blog. One thing I do to overcome writer’s lethargy is suddenly start thinking about how you can overcome writer’s block. What are the strategies that help me overcome it?

I often resort to “kickstart statements.” These are surprising or deep-left-field items that give the old brain a shot of adrenaline. The picture of the girl with the message blackboard is that kind of kickstarter. I never could have used that thing in any kind of social-media post when I was still employed as a teacher. It has the potential to generate parent complaints and administrative thoughts about evaluations and contract cancellations. But there really are kids who have thoughts like that in your classroom, and I know because not only was I a kid like that myself, I used it as an optional journal topic for writing practice, and, boy! do they ever catch fire when they can write about something like that and they know only the teacher is ever going to read it. It is the way I learned how many of my students had ever been to a nude beach in Corpus Christi or Lake Travis (Hippy Hollow.)

I can also look around the room, or scroll through my media library on WordPress and find an image or an item that generates ideas, responses, and even stories. I scrolled through to find this image of the Gummi Bear, who was a brief internet sensation on YouTube a few years ago coming from German CGI cartoons that illustrated earworm music with dancing green gummy bears. There’s a lot a goofy writer like me can run away with inspired by a nonsense thing like that.

It is also possible to generate new ideas by deconstructing a metaphor in as humorous and convoluted a way as possible. This word-food thing is the result of writer’s lethargy of a while back.

Of course, there is always the ranting factor. This, I think, is a go-to method used by stand-up comedians. They will pick something that is deeply bugging them, like the rats that inhabit my attic and walls during a winter that hasn’t yet completely gone. And they start listing all the ways they can make funny stories about the time the rat appeared on the bathroom floor tiles while my daughter was on the toilet, or the time the dog killed a rat that was in the trap already, but not dead enough not to bite back with the dog’s nose conveniently within the reach of rat teeth. And then they can rant onward about how disgusting rats are. And how can anyone look at a rat face and think they are cute? You look at that evil, beady-eyed face and you don’t think Mickey Mouse, you think plague, disease, the Black Death, and how much the Bank of America lawyer who sued you looks just like that.

So, you can see that generating ideas is easy. And you can write something interesting even on days when you can’t think of anything … quickly. When you have, not writer’s block, but writer’s lethargy.

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The April Fool

I am a fool. I am a fool who tells stories. The stories are made up of lies about things that never happened to people who don’t really exist. But I am good at it. I have had a few successes with a few readers. I have even won awards that don’t translate into earning any money. Ah, well. A fool gets what he deserves. And though they are lies… my stories are always about things that should be true. You can tell the real truth with real lies.

Grandma Gretel in this book is based on a real woman and holocaust survivor I knew as a boy. It is one of my best books because I tell lies about the twin girls who told me they were nudists, a brave old grandma who survived Nazis in World War II, and fairies I believed in as a child and once were real to me.

Another book that I consider one of my best is full of lies about fairies and a teacher I once knew whose classes were more like her own children than mere students, even though she never had a child of her own. And she faced troubles in keeping her job that teachers actually face in the modern classroom.
I consider this one to be the finest story I have ever composed. It is full of lies about a killer blizzard that I experienced two different times in my childhood. Once in grade school and once in high school. And the children who survive this blizzard are all based on kids I actually taught during my teaching career. Definitely filled with lies, but lies that bare the scars of real experiences.

These are all book links to Amazon, just in case you are fool enough to want to buy any of these lies. You can’t go wrong reading wisdom from a fool who doesn’t know anything. Knowing you know nothing is the beginning of wisdom.

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Pushing Through the Weeds

I am in the last years of my life. There is no question about that. Ten more years of life is probably out of reach. I had another passing-out episode in the car today… after parking. I probably fell asleep again rather than having a stroke or succumbing to Parkinson’s or something. But in the super-vivid dream I had, I was somebody else rather than me. A past life? A future life? It seemed like so much more than a dream. It does comfort me, though. I don’t believe in receiving the resurrection in return for chanting the right nonsense for Christ just to make Yahweh happy. Allah-Jehovah-Zeus is a dyspeptic. selfish, and needlessly angry god, and so, is probably not real. But the universe is alive. Existence, once established, is not erased by death. I will go on. As a part of everything. Not still as me. But Mickey exists and always will. Time, space, and energy are all relative. Mickey will always be real.

I won’t have to live too much longer to finish my poetry book. It will be a good thing, even though it will be lost in a veritable sea of books and published things that vaguely resemble actual books. Publishers now don’t publish and promote books. They charge the foolish masses to print books and take the majority of the money for any books that are sold. They are willing to take an author’s money for things like incompetent editing, lame promotional efforts, setting up websites, and talking a lot. They are not willing to actually help authors, even good ones, without first drinking the blood of the people who really create the stories. Here’s my backhanded praise for Amazon KDP. At least it’s free if you are willing to do all the work yourself. But I have 23 books already out there. Soon 24. And the accomplishment is in making the story come to life on the printed page, or the e-book. I am a real author. Nothing else matters. My stories are told, and occasionally read.

And telling stories based on actual life experiences… even though they are filled with fantasy images and jokes, is a matter of running naked through the old neighborhood, letting all the old church ladies and former teachers and friends see all your darkest secrets revealed. It’s all a revelation. It even helps you to see what you yourself mean in the big picture of the universe. Nothing can stop you but death.

Don’t think of this as a lament. It is definitely not that. Instead, I am pushing through the final weeds at the edge of the jungle, about to enter the Savannah of Solace and dance naked in the sunshine.

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Writing Myself To Life

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I have been working on my novel The Baby Werewolf, and I am now in the final phase, working on the climax and crisis point.  And I surprised myself.  The killer monologues to the main characters who have now become his intended next victims.  I have played this out over and over in the twenty-two years I have been writing this book.  Last night, for the first time ever, the hero character laughs in this scene instead of the cringing fear that had always been there before.

How is such a thing possible?  What changed?  I have been writing and rewriting this story since 1996.  But it goes much deeper and darker than that.  This story went on my have-to-write list in 1966 when an older, stronger boy who lived near my home trapped me in a place out-of-sight of others and stripped me, gaining some horrible kind of pleasure by inflicting pain on my private parts.  Recovery from that has taken half a century.  The recovery itself probably explains why I struggled so long to pull this story together in a finished form.

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There are things about my writing life that are undeniable.  First of all, I have to write.  There is really no other choice for me.  My mind will never know rest or peace without being able to spin out the paragraphs and essays and stories that make it possible to know those things.  Nothing is real if I can’t write it out.  Secondly, I am a humorist.  If I can never be funny at all, can never write a joke, then I will descend into madness.  My sense of humor not only shields me and serves as my suit of armor, it heals me when I suffer psychic wounds.  This book is a horror story, but like many of the best horror stories, it relies on humor to drive every scene and knit the plot together.  And it was a breakthrough for me to have the hero character laugh instead of cringe in the critical scene.  It allows me to live again.  And love again.  And the real monster that caused this book to be, is now forgiven.  The world continues to turn.  The picture is now complete.  And soon, the novel will be too.

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D&D Under The Sea

Scan63One of the fascinating features of a table-top role-playing game is the freedom it gives you to go where you could never go in real life.  In Dungeons and Dragons we have taken the campaign under the waves among the water-breathers.

Of course, it is a little daunting to venture into a place where you cannot even breathe.  But this is fantasy we are talking about.  So, the solution is… magic.  A feet-to-fins spell can make you into a mer-person.  You can not only swim with the fish, you can be one.

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Nemo the water-breathing sea-elf is modeling how fantasy technology can aid with the adventure.  Unable to breathe out of the water, Nemo has been able to adventure in the surface world by wearing a sealed sea helmet that provides the water he needs to breathe and keep him properly hydrated.  Such a helmet, with an air-producing spell inside it instead of water-making can be used for air-breathers under the sea.

 

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Under the sea things are different in fundamental ways.  You don’t walk or tun, you swim.  You don’t ride a horse, you are pulled through the water by a hippocanthus.  You are not stuck to a two-dimensional plane.  You can move easily through the water up and down as well as right and left, forward and back.

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Sea captain Elora Bynam, gnome aquamancer, can take air-breathers where they want to go in her submarine.  She knows the undersea kingdoms as well as any air-breather in all of the lands.

And, of course, there have to be villains.  The arch-lich Orco is a good example (that is, good example of something evil).

This former Mer-king has been infested with dark magic since his death and re-animation.  He holds sway now in the evil kingdom of Black Reef.  Elora can take you there for a price.20160530_144830

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But we had fun playing underwater campaigns in D & D.  We spent weeks  searching drowned ruins.  We even found a sea ghost.  Charlotte is a little girl drowned by evil pirates and changed into a ghost.  She is bound to a magic jar and can serve as a guide through places where no living being dares go alone.

So we have spent all this game time in the depths of exotic seas.  And the ironic thing is, we didn’t even get a little bit wet.

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Nudist Bookery

Many of my stories feature naked people due to my many encounters with nudism and naturism. Here are some of my books popular with the nude and proud set.

This book is about an old woman who is a storyteller and maker of magical gingerbread cookies. She is a Holocaust survivor, possibly also a witch, and once upon a time… a nudist.
This is a comedy horror story about a boy with a genetic condition that makes him look like a werewolf, another boy who wants to be his friend no matter how dangerous it is to be that, and a girl who is a nudist and wants all of her friends to be nudists and enjoy that too. Oh, and there is a strong possibility that the story contains a real werewolf as well.
This is a science fiction book about traveling through time… though not with a time machine… but rather, by being immortal. Young Icarus Jones is immortal. The girl who pursues him may also be immortal… because she claims to be a red dragon. And the Chinese wizard following both of them is even worse. He’s not immortal. He’s undead. And there is at least one nudist in this story too.
This boy is an outsider. Somebody who longs to be a part of the closely-knit group of kids in a small Iowa farm town where he is the only new kid. He tries to fit in. But he finds he has to learn how to be a superhero the hard way, new friend by new friend. And he may even end up having to become a nudist to accomplish it.

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Recent Acts of Mickian Bookery

This is a look at some of the books Mickey has most recently published.

This was my first book which is a book-length essay about a single topic. It is about why my personal character arc in this life led me to become a nudist. It contains some philosophy, some humorous stories, and a big helping of autobiographical nonsense. Mickey claims he was inspired to write this by Mark Twain’s Autobiography. I am pretty sure I can’t argue that because I think Mickey is actually me.

This book was completed during the pandemic. It is a fairytale involving three-inch-tall fairies in their many forms. It is also a satire of Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but don’t tell Disney that. I don’t need to be sued. It is satire. And I don’t have any money anyway. I’m a retired teacher.

This is a science fiction novella starring the irrepressible orphan, Cissy Moonskipper. The first story in the series is basically a shipwreck story, Robinson Crusoe set on a space freighter. Cissy has lost the last adult in her family and the ship’s crew while the family spaceship is in uncharted space. She not only can’t fly the ship, or figure out how to get back to the space she knows, but there are pirates somewhere near.

Mickey published this book at the beginning of the pandemic. It is the story of Devon Martinez, a boy escaping from a family tragedy and having to live in a new place with his stepmother and father. But the new place is a Texas residential nudist park. And he has twin stepsisters now that he has never met, and will have to live with wearing no clothes at all for the first time since he was a baby.

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A Poet Called William Shakespeare

Who was William Shakespeare?

If you’re sure you know, then let me shake your world.

We know who Mark Twain was. Sam Clemens never kept that a secret.

Shakesspere, Shakysper, Shaxpeer, Schakespeire, Shackper, Shexpere, Shaxkspere and Shakspeyre.

All of these refer to our boy WIlly in the records of the time.

Even those that he misspelled when he signed them himself.

If you believe he was the glovemaker’s son, the theater owner, and the character actor

Who lived in a house in Blackfriars, London, and grew up in Stratford on Avon,

I will not disrespect you for your beliefs.

But that man, if he was the greatest of all poets, owned no library of his own,

Nor had such a thing available,

Nor ever left the area of Southern England where his entire life was lived,

Nor evidenced any sort of formal schooling beyond the earliest schooling.

Reading English and Latin at the King’s School of Stratford,

Though nothing beyond the age of fourteen.

These things we are mostly sure of;

Ben Jonson knew the real William Shakespeare.

The real William Shakespeare knew Christopher Marlowe,

And the patron of his poem books, the Earl of Southhampton,

Probably knew the real Bill too.

What we know about the real William Shakespeare comes from his work.

This was perhaps the most literate man who ever lived.

Thirty-seven plays, 154 Sonnets, and two narrative poems

Demonstrate he knew the Italian countryside,

He knew the ways of European courts, especially the English court.

He understood points of English law.

He accurately portrayed emotions like depression, hatred, love, and madness.

He knew the stories of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Othello the Moor, and King Lear and his daughters,

Though he did not invent any of those stories collected from other lands.

So, who was William Shakespeare really?

Francis Bacon? Kit Marlowe raised from the dead? Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford?

Or a combination of men coordinated by Sir Francis Bacon’s secret plan?

We will never know for certain. But we can ask him through his work.

The iambic pentameter of William Shakespeare still lives and reveals the mind of Shakespeare.

Though the true name behind the pen name will never be revealed.

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