You reach a point after a hard month has lingered long where you have to eat the leftovers and accept what is. I faced challenges again like the bankruptcy in 2017 and the Covid pandemic in 2020. July and August in 2023 have been super hot and withering of both soul and resolve. When faced with such a situation, I need pie.
So here are some of the things left in my January file for use in this blog. The only reason they are here is because I have developed a tradition of repeating this post in times of trouble. Of course, updates are necessary. The pie I just had was a cherry pie, not the apple in the picture. The ideas have not been knitted together for any rational purpose.
This will be a crazy quilt blog post. But crazy quilts keep you just as warm in winter as any other kind. But at the end of this month, I need the crazy more than the quilt. I am having no trouble keeping warm at 108 degrees of real temperature today.
My once-newest Facebook friend is the daughter of my wife’s cousin. I have only known her as the sweet-faced little smiler at Filipino-American family gatherings who sometimes gets my attention by squirting me in the ear with a water gun. Her father is from Greece and teaches Math in San Antonio. Her mother, like my wife, is from the Philippines. I won’t tell you her real name, but we used to call her “Sweetie” because of her resemblance to the little pink Tweety-bird character from Tiny Toons Adventures. Since this bluebonnet picture was taken, she has graduated from high school and definitely become a worthy young adult, slightly older than my own daughter. I did once hold Sweetie in my lap as an infant.
I have also spent considerable time writing to and for nudists I have connected with through their various websites and on Twitter. These two lovely works of nude art were shared with me on Twitter. I have collected a number of nude pictures from Twitter nudists that I can’t use on WordPress because I am still entirely too modest to be the unrestrained naked person that some nudists are. I can’t really claim to be a complete nudist myself. But I do have stories to tell about naked people, and I have been working on them diligently. I have been working on a book-length essay called Naked Thinking, full of ideas and drawings about being naked and honestly open to the world. Whether I live long enough to publish it remains to be seen.
Of course, I still miss being a teacher. I was a teacher of English for 31 years. I taught reading and writing in English to over 2,000 kids. I also learned how to stare in Klingon. It is a useful skill for keeping students in line and keeping them from becoming a disappointment to the empire. I miss teaching kids, especially talkative kids. Far fewer people talk to me during a day of retirement than used to talk to me in a single class at school. Those interactions were precious.
And several things are just too confusing for my old brain to explain.
But I do like this picture I found on Facebook of Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor, playing with multiple kittens. I don’t know why, but it makes me happier.
Tom Baker with kittens all over him… It doesn’t get any better than that.
Catch a Falling Star 