Every day of my life I have dealt with lies. After all, I was a public school teacher for 31 years and taught middle school for 24 of those years.
“Please excuse Mauricio from writing the essay today. He was chopping ham for me yesterday and his hand got numb.”
“I have to go to the bathroom at 8:05, Teacher! Not 8:10 or 8:00! And no girl will be waiting by the water fountain… oh, ye, vato!”
“Can’t you see I have to go home sick? I have purple spots all over my face! It is just a coincidence I was drawing hearts on my notebook with a purple marker.”
But now the classroom is quiet. I am retired.
Okay, I know, the first part of that is a lie. The classroom is not quiet. I am retired and don’t go there any more. Some other teacher (or long-term substitute after the rookie teacher ran out screaming after the first week of school) is now listening to the lies.
So, nothing but the truth now, right? Who is around during the day to tell me lies? The dog? Well, yes… when she wants to go outside and pretends the poop and pee are bursting out of her, but really only wants to sniff the street lamp and all the male dogs who have peed there.
But there is also me. Yes, me! I am working at being a writer now… so I tell myself lies… and not little ones, either. Whole episodes of my past have come pouring out in my stories… and I am not always the good guy or the main character in the tale. Sometimes I was the villain, the mistake-maker, or the fool. I’m definitely not perfect now, nor was I then, but I’m a writer now. I can change it. I tell lies. I can make it work out in ways that never happened in real life.
I put lies in this blog. For instance, I may have suggested, a few posts back, that because of psoriasis in my usually-covered region, I sit around naked all day when I type this post. Not true. I suggested that for comedy value at the time. Well, it’s mostly not true. I don’t know how much you know about severe-plaque psoriasis, but it only flares up at times. Some days, like today, a half hour in a steaming hot Sitz-bath with extra salt allows me to wear clothes for quite a while after. So I merely exaggerated because I thought making you picture plump and pasty-skinned old me sitting around nude and typing a blog was funny… but… okay, maybe that was just weird. Still, a good lie is always at least twelve cents better than the ugly truth. (I must note, the truth of this paragraph has changed since I originally wrote this post. Now I am more of a nudist and enjoy being naked while I type. But that now being a lie does not spoil the point of this essay.)
And the fact that my stories are filled with little-boy liars, giant rabbit-men who can talk and cook vegetables like people, and invading invisible alien frog-people, derives naturally from the fact that I have been a highly imaginative liar since childhood. Just ask any of my grade school classmates. I used to make them believe there was an evil clone Michael out there somewhere trying really, really hard to get me in trouble. I told them that I was in contact with a race of blue-colored people that lived in an underground world deep beneath our little Iowa town. I even showed them the knotty old stump that was the doorway to the tunnel that led to the Blue World. Of course, the key was never available when I showed them. And my friends were not completely gullible. In fact, I suspect that once in a while, they knew I was… lying.























Stupid Is as Stupid Does
This post is a reprint of the time I set out to become a nudist since I was retired and no longer had to fear what it would do to my career as a teacher.
This is not a tribute to Winston Groom and his famous creation, Forrest Gump. This is an admission that when I have had very little sleep and lots of worry lines on my brow, I often do remarkably stupid things.
And sometimes, doing something monumentally stupid makes me feel better. You know, more a part of the stupid, meaningless, and goofy world around me. So, what stupid thing did I do? I joined a nudist organization’s website. Me, who freaks out when members of my own family happen to see me naked. And, you see, there is more to joining this organization than just signing up for some random thing on the internet where you get a lot of random emails. I had to submit nude photos of myself to be posted in community forums. And I may be able to write a blog for this website, which will mean taking some camping gear and actually going to the naturist club site near Dallas to experience the things I will be writing about… and probably making jokes about. But don’t be afraid of being subjected to the hideous torture of having to see me naked. In order to see any of that, you would have to join the organization yourself, and you are probably not as stupid as me. (But I am not telling you the name of the website anyway.)
This is a detail from an illustration based on Golding’s Lord of the Flies. But it is also a picture of me and a childhood friend from back in the skinny-dipping days, based on an old black-and-white photo.
You see, I have some real life experiences with nudists before this happened. I had a roommate in grad school who liked to go au naturel, and even was comfortable with me being in the room when his girlfriend was visiting. He was nude in the kitchen one time when my grandparents came to visit. It is a good thing my grandfather entered that room ahead of my grandmother. I also had a girlfriend in the eighties who had a sister living in the clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin, Texas. Every time we visited Austin, the city nearest where my parents lived, she would stay with her sister there and I would have to go in to fetch her whenever we had plans. Sometimes I was there just to visit. But always, since clothing was optional, I took that option. I did get used to being around naked people, though. I actually have nudist friends.
So, though I am not a nudist, I guess I already know a lot about how to be one. It is how I managed to stumble into this awkward arrangement.
I know I will never be able to get my wife to go along on this harrowing adventure. She refuses to even consider going nude in the house. She has to wear clothes to bed even though studies say that sleeping nude is good for you. I will be facing this basically naked and alone. And possible paid writing work will never make this worth it by itself.
But my photos are already posted and approved. My membership is a real thing. And I am not ready to shoot myself for this stupid decision. In fact, I will probably be less naked there than I have been here in this very blog where my every secret is laid bare and made fun of on a daily basis.
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Filed under battling depression, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, nudes, Paffooney, self pity, self portrait, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as bad decisions, humor, naturists and nudists, stupid stuff, stupidity