Doodlefox

While watching Netflix yesterday afternoon, a retirement activity that becomes the majority of my social life when the diabetes demons are eating me, I started doodling a fox.  It was a pencil doodle at first.  And I was not drawing from life.  I was drawing the fox in my head.  I suspect it was the fox from Antoine de Saint Exupery’s masterwork, The Little Prince.

Yes, that fox.  The wise one that knows about taming little princes, and loving them, and being reminded of them in the color of wheat fields.  I began to need that fox as my doodle pen uncovered him on the blank page.  There he was.  Surprised to see me.  Either he was leaping towards me in the picture, or falling down on me from the sky above.  I don’t know which.  But I realized I had to tame him by drawing him and making him as real as ever an imaginary fox could ever be.  You will notice he does not look like a real fox.  I did not draw him from a photograph, but from the cartoon eye in my mind where all Paffoonies come from.  And this was to be a profound Paffooney… a buffoony cartoony looney Paffooney.  It simply had to be, because that is precisely what I always doodle-do.

And so he was a fox.  He was my doodlefox.  I had tamed him.  And then I had to give him color.  And, of course, the color had to be orange-red.

And so, there is my fox.  Like the Little Prince’s fox he could tell me, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.  It is only with the heart that we can see rightly.”  And I put him in a post with lyrical and somewhat goofy words to give you a sense of what he means to me, in the same way one might explain what the thrill of the heart feels like when a butterfly’s wing brushes against the back of your hand.  Yes, to share the unknowable knowledge and the unfeelable feeling of a doodlefox.  A demonstration of precisely what a Paffooney is.

Reading Other Writers

Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else.  It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own.  You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.

And not every other writer is Robert Frost.  Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s  Gene Kelly.  There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding.  What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease?  And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter?  Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”?  I think it is.  Trolls are not smart.

I know people have to make an effort to understand me.  When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head.  In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it.   See what I did there?  It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense.  That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures.  If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire.  I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues.  But most people don’t.  Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.

 Of course, there is the opposite problem too.  Some writers are not hard to understand at all.  They only use simple sentences.  They only use ideas that lots of other people have used before.  You don’t have to think about what they write.  You only need to react.  They are the reasons that words like “trite”, “hackneyed”, “boring”, and “cliche” exist in English.  But simple, boring writing isn’t written by stupid people.  Hemingway is like that.  Pared down to the basics.  No frills.  Yet able to yield complex thoughts, insights, and relationships.

Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point.  For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom?  For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom?  Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub.  I know.  I tried to stuff her in there for this picture.  And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?

When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things.  I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well.  I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better.   And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words.  I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust.  Thank God for that!  And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot.  And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value.  It is always worth doing.

 

 

Hidden Kingdom (Chapter 2-adding page 9)

To see the complete Chapter 1, use the following link;https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2018/11/24/hidden-kingdom-chapter-1-complete/

An Unexpected Gift

This post is a movie review for Thor : Ragnarok , though I don’t really plan on talking about the movie very much.   It was an excellent comic book movie in the same tongue-in-cheek comedy tradition as Guardians of the Galaxy.   It made me laugh and made me cheer.   It was the best of that kind of movie.  But it wasn’t the most important thing that happened that night.

You see, I spent the weekend in the hospital thinking I had suffered a heart attack during the Thanksgiving holiday. I thought I was facing surgery at the very least.   I knew I might have had an appointment to play chess with the Grim Reaper.   It is a lot to worry about and drain all the fun out of life.

Well, one of the things that happened that day, Tuesday, my first full day out of the hospital and, hopefully, out of the woods over heart attacks, was that I received my new replacement bank card because my old one had a worn out, malfunctioning chip in it.  So, I took my three kids to the movie at the cheapest place we could find.  I tried to run my bank card for the payment, and it was summarily declined.  I had activated it previously during the day, and there was plenty of money in the account compared to the price, but it just wouldn’t take.  So I had to call Wells Fargo to find out whatever the new reason was for them to hate me.  It turned out that it had already been activated, but a glitch had caused it to decline the charge.  While I was talking to the girl from the Wells Fargo help desk, the lady who had gotten her and her husband’s tickets right before us put four tickets to the movie in my hand.

The middle-aged black couple had lingered by the ticket stand before going in to their movie just long enough to see a sad-looking old man with raggedy author’s beard and long Gandalf hair get turned down by the cheap-cinema ticket-taking teenager because the old coot’s one and only bank card was declined. They were moved to take matters into their own hands and paid for our tickets themselves.

That, you see, was the gift from my title.  Not so much that we got our movie tickets for free, but that the world still works that way.  There are still good people with empathetic and golden hearts willing to step in and do things to make the world a little bit better place.  The gift they gave me was the reassurance that, as bad and black as the world full of fascists that we have come to live in has become, it still has goodness and fellow feeling in it. People are still moved to pay things forward and make good on the promise to “love one another”.  I did not have a chance to thank them properly.  I was on the phone with Wells Fargo girl when it happened.  The only thing that couple got out of their good deed was thank-yous from my children and the knowledge that they had done something wonderful.  I plan to pay it forward as soon as I have the opportunity.  Not out of guilt or obligation, but because I need to be able to feel that feeling too at some point.

I do have one further gift to offer the world.

After we got home from the movie, I opened an email that contained the cover proof for my novel, Magical Miss Morgan.  Soon I will have that in print also if I can keep Page Publishing from messing it up at the last moments before printing.  It is a novel about what a good teacher is and does.  It is the second best thing I have ever written.

Sometimes the gifts that you most desperately need come in unexpected fashion.

A Space Filler Just to Keep It Going…

This short essay is here to keep my string of consecutive days with at least one post going.

This should be post number 260.

Cloudscapes

Once upon a time, the English poet and, I would argue, cartoonist, William Blake once said, “You look at the sky and see clouds, while I see the assembled heavenly host!”  This is why my literature class in college about the Romantic Poets of his day made him out to be a certifiable nutcase who probably belonged in in a mental institution.  (And back then, in the 1800’s, the sanitarium was a place where inconveniently crazy people went to die.)

Look at a couple of my cloudscapes.  Do you see angels?

Cloudscapes (a poem)

Blue and white and filled with light…

The cloudscape burns with angels…

And wholly bought with grace unsought…

I long to fly with angels…

Are they really there in the cloud-filled air?

I see them there, they’re angels!

So, there you have it.  I’m a loon.  I don’t even have the excuse of being a Romantic Poet and well-known for my poetry as a defense against the loony bin.  But as the matter stands, I am fully willing to accept the consequences.  Creativity has its price.  And, while you may not agree that I am somewhat creative, I am swimming in a vast ocean of perceived revelations that enriches me and fulfills me at the very same moment that it drains all the energy from my soul.  If that is not what it means to see angels… then I do not know anything of use to anyone but me.

The word “angel” (according to Wikipedia, the source of all true knowledge) comes to English via Late Latin and the word “angelus” which the Romans stole from the Greek  ἄγγελος ángelos,  The ángelos is the default Septuagint’s translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal’ākh denoting simply “messenger” without specifying its nature.  (Notice, I am giving full credit to Wikipedia because it is far more all-knowing than I.)

I have many atheistic and agnostic notions in my ultimate belief systems, but still, I claim to be a Christian and believe in God Jehovah… within limits.  I still communicate with God on a daily basis, and while I don’t publicly pray anymore (a notion promoted by the Biblical Jesus) I find answers to my questions and solutions to my problems from the observable universe around me.. the messengers of God.  So, now that I have fully rationalized being crazy as a loon, I am going to tell you where that craziness is taking me.  I started a new Paffooney for one of the books I am working on.  Here is the pencil sketch;

 

This will be a picture of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, the farmer Kyle Clarke.  In my fiction, Kyle loses his farm to the bank (in the Family Farm Crisis of the 1980’s) and believing himself incapable of any longer supporting his family, kills himself.  But the thing is, the love of his daughter transcends death for Kyle.  She is able to reconnect with him time and again because the angels work for her as well as for Kyle.  I may be loony and ill in real life, facing the Angel of Death myself, but I am not done doing God’s work… not yet… not for a long time to come.

The finished picture.

Drawing with AI Assistance

I find this to be a beautiful picture worth the time spent creating it. It is a digital doodle. That means I started with a simple doodle out of my head.

This is the original start, laid down on my computer tablet with a stylus and a digital art program called Drawing Pad Sketch Desk. It is a simpler drawing program than most digital artists use. My daughter recommends Krita. That is far more complex and sophisticated than I was ready to start with.

This is the rather ugly doodle scratched out with layout colors and basic shapes. Had this been colored pencil on paper, I would have wadded it up, shot it into a wastebasket, hopefully for three points, and started again. But the digital pad allows infinite and complete changes.

After fixing and fixing and fixing… and adding a rose in the hair… and something green to match the eyes, I came up with something I wanted to create a finished project out of. I did not take a screenshot of every little change, so you must imagine how I got here from Miss Ugly Puss.

Because of arthritis in my hands and creeping color blindness in my eyes, I use AI Mirror to reprocess my drawing and offer clean-up solutions. I don’t really like the rose that the program made out of my original drawing, so I changed it before the final. Then I used the Picsart AI Photo Editor to supply a background of roses. Thus, I reached the picture you see in the first Paffooney I posted here.

This leads you to my most recently published book on Amazon. A book full of evil poems that may effect your mind and heart, though hopefully in a good way. Black Magic via incantation.

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!”

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.)

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.)

NooNooPix

The first picture is a girl in her room with her toys and her fan-fiction novel notebook. Oh, and that puppy was intended to be a toy… but it looks real?

The old picture that fulfills the space in the plan here is a picture of Valerie Clarke and her daddy, Kyle. I also posted this one on Instagram.

Swimsuit girl fills the sexy space today. I get pictures on Instagram where they ask me to draw them.

My poetry book is now available on Amazon. The paperback version will be published soon.

Notes from the 70’s; the Master Plan

I have wanted to be a writer and cartoonist from childhood onward.  I didn’t really begin in earnest until the last few years of my teaching career with retirement looming directly ahead.  Now I have made the leap off the cliff.  I retired a year ago.  I did everything short of bankruptcy to put my accounts in order, and transformed myself into a starving artist.  I have a full retirement from Texas, subject to a grandfather clause (no relation to the Santa Clause) that allows me to receive enough money to live on for the rest of my life (thanks to the trick of being a teacher back before George W. Bush and Rick Perry came along to pillage Texas education and reduce what they pay those lazy, lousy teachers for their lifetimes of service).  Of course, I must try to limit my expenditures as much as possible, because… well, it is a teacher’s pension.

But my plan from the 70’s, begun in high school and carried out through college and my teaching career has allowed me to stay on track to create something massive and complex.  My story ideas have been collected over time and are all based on a very simple rule… “Everything is connected.”  Every story I now labor to put into prose mentions other stories and has story fishhooks in it to catch readers and pull them into something else.  Most of my work is set in farm-town Iowa in the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s.  I made them all a part of the 20th Century on purpose because the personalities the characters are all based on were a part of my life then.  Certain elements run through all the stories.  Let me explain a few.

1.  Some characters appear in many stories (sometimes as a main character, and more often as a supporting character.  The French boy who sings karaoke beautifully and makes his cousin’s bar business a success by entertaining people there appears in two stories that happen at about the same time.  Both of those stories are still waiting to be written.  Tim Kellogg appears in my stories from the time he is but a twinkle in his parents’ eyes until he becomes the leader of the infamous boys’ gang of liars called the Norwall Pirates.

2.  Most of the stories are centered around members of the Norwall Pirates.  They are a group of small town boys dedicated to adventure, telling lies, and seeing girls naked.  Much of the magic, science fiction, fantasy elements, and just plain hallucinations in my stories are the fault of boys who tell stories and lies so well that sometimes they believe them themselves.

3.  Character arcs that begin in one book will often continue in another.  Sometimes I go back in time and explain something that happened much earlier.  The Pirate’s club first appears in my novel Catch a Falling Star set in 1990.  The origin of the club is told about in Superchicken, a novel I have blogged about, but not yet published.  That story happens in 1974.  Valerie Clarke is introduced in the novel PDMI Publishing LLC is currently working on, Snow Babies,  which takes place in Winter of 1984.  She is the leader of the Pirates in the finished, but not yet submitted novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  That story spans 1988 to 1991.

4. Much of my nuttiness was originally created in the 1970’s.  Even though the stories were given a setting much later, all the illustrated Paffoonies I have dropped into this post were drawn in 1977 and 1978.  I keep these cartoon character model sheets in one of my magical tomes, the Norwall Book, a loose-leaf binder full of drawings and junk carefully preserved in plastic page-protector sheets.

So, this is all the proof that my leap off that cliff into retirement will either make a very big splash or hit the rocks very hard.  It will be very something.  And I hope to live to see it… especially to get all of the stories I can possibly finish written and published… with a ghost of a hope that my own drawings, cartoons, and illustrations will count for something.  So, now my plan is revealed.  Let the enemies plan their counter-moves, and may the devil not move the water at the bottom of the cliff.

Danse Macabre (the cartoon dance of death)

I would like to say going in that there are good reasons why young people can become obsessed with death and suffering and the color black and the dance towards the grave.  I danced that jig too when I was younger.  At age 22 my experience with sexual assault came back to me in dreams.  I thought they were only dream images, but as I continued to think about it and be tormented by it, I began to clearly recall the terrible things he did to me that I had been repressing for twelve years.  And I deal with traumatic experience with art for some crazy reason.  I took a week in 1981 to get all the horrid feelings out on paper.

You will notice the tombstone lists the date of death as being before my eleventh birthday in 1967.  That is when it happened.  It was not actually a sexual experience… it was torture.  He took my pants off and did things to my private parts to cause me intense pain.  And he even said to me that it was my own fault, that somehow I had told him that I wanted this horrible thing to happen.  For several years after I intentionally used the furnace in my home to make burn scars on my lower back and the back of my legs.  I believe now that I was hurting myself in order to extinguish sexual thoughts and feelings.  The worst thing he did to me was make me feel guilty about what happened.

When you go back to the art of the middle ages, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and other European artists both young and old, you see artists grappling with mortality, the fact that all people, including me, will die.   At times it can seem to the immature mind that death is the only possible escape from suffering.  This artwork comes from a time when I was contemplating exactly that.

If you are looking at this closely, you will see that I signed my name to it backwards.  I signed my art as Leah Cim Reyeb, or simply Leah Cim.  I put these four panels into my big black portfolio and never showed them to anybody until after my abuser passed away from a heart attack.  I don’t believe in Hell and I don’t believe in ghosts, so now, I finally feel safe about sharing this artwork with others.  The terrible secret is a secret no longer.  He can no longer reach out and hurt me any further.

I apologize for not being funny… even remotely funny… in this post.  Funny is probably not the appropriate thing for this post.  You may be wondering why I even bother to post it.  Isn’t this a private matter, best kept to myself?  You tell me.  This is a terrible thing that happened to me.  I am now honest about it in a way I could never be before.  I can explain it without worrying about any retribution by or against him.  I can finally forgive him.  I can overcome what happened and be the stronger for it.  And if you have read this far without being so revolted by it that you stopped reading and stopped following my blog, maybe you need to do the dance with me.  Is there something you need to overcome?  It can be overcome.  So dance with me… and rejoice.

Today’ Zart

“The Classroom Daydreamer”

“Ceremonial Attendee”

“Twins with their Pet Humans”

My Mother’s Dolls

Tom Sawyer without the straw hat, as created by Lois Beyer

You may already know about my doll-collecting mania.  You may have already called the mental health people to come take care of the problem, and they just haven’t arrived at my door yet with the white coat that has the extra long sleeves.  But you may not know that my mother is a doll-maker and has something to do with my doll-collecting hoarding disorder.

In the early 1990’s my mother and I put our money together and bought a kiln while we were visiting my sister’s family out in California.  It wasn’t the most expensive model, but it wasn’t the cheapest, either.  We both had enough experience with ceramics that we didn’t want to buy a burning box that was merely going to blow our porcelain projects to kingdom come.  Mother had doll-making friends in Texas who taught her about firing greenware and glazing and porcelain paint and all the other arcane stuff you have to know to make expensive hand-made dolls.  Now, honestly, at the start we could’ve made some money at it selling to seriously ill doll collectors and other kooks, but we were not willing to part with our early art, and by the time we were ready to do more than just have an expensive hobby, everyone who would’ve paid money for the product was making their own.  So dreams of commercial success were supplanted by the hobbyist’s mania that made more and more charming little things to occasionally display at the county fair.

The two dolls I have left to share on my blog from that era were both crafted by my mother.  She lovingly fired the porcelain body parts, painted the faces by hand, and created the wardrobe on her Singer sewing machine.  I made some dolls too, but never with the wondrous craft and care that made my mother’s dolls beyond compare.

Tom Sawyer was originally a boy doll who was supposed to be able to hold a model train in his hands.  My mother had the pattern for the little engineer’s uniform and hat that she would use on another doll instead.  He is named after the Tom Sawyer clothing pattern that my mother bought and sewed together to dress him in.  He has a cloth and stuffing body underneath his clothes together with porcelain head, hands, and bare feet.

The other doll I have left to brag unctuously about is a doll named Nicole after the niece my wife and I have whom this doll bares a striking resemblance to.  She displays a beautiful little girl’s sun dress with quilted accent colors that my mother sewed from scratch with the help of a pattern she was truly fond of and used more than once.

These dolls were gifts to my wife and I, presented shortly after my mother bought out my share of the kiln when she retired and moved back to the frosty land of the Iowegians.  I haven’t kept them as thoroughly dusted and cobweb-free as they deserve because I have been a somewhat lazy and slovenly son… but I do love them almost as much as (and sometimes more depending on recent behavior) my own children.  (After all, porcelain kids rarely make a mess, overspend allowances, or hog the television too much.)

New Pic, Old Pic, New Again

“Dancing in a Dress that Twirls”

“The Princess is Out for a Ride” 1992

“The Girl with Auburn Hair”