Category Archives: artwork

October 29, 2021 · 3:28 pm

A Little Bit .Gif-fy… Not Goofy

Sometimes life gets a bit tough when you are old and diabetic and grumpy all the time… and your kids are still teenagers… and you have to spend four hours a day driving them to two different schools in two different Dallas suburbs… and it rains one day and swelters you in Texas heat the next… and the drive home occurs during rush hour… and you just can’t think beyond loud thoughts like; “Why does that stop light turn red right before I get there?” and “Why can’t somebody teach teenagers how to drive in a high school parking lot?!” and “Why is the sun so bright and in my eyes going BOTH DIRECTIONS?!?” and “Why is the worst driver in Texas always the one right in front of me?!?!!!”

And then you realize, you can’t think any more to make a decent post for your blog.  You are dead tired and out of ideas, though still able to type… even though you are apparently dead according to this sentence.  So what do you post?  You need some chocolate and iced tea for your brain.  And you decide it is better to come out of the closet for being .gif-goofy and collecting .gif’s.  You heard right.  I mean .gif’s.  I am not talking about peanut butter.  And I didn’t misspell goofs.  I mean those crazy moving things on the internet where the motion is repetitive and the promotion of the motion is mindless.  Yes, those moving-picture things called .gif’s.

Like this one;

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Rainbow Dash is really going after that guitar riff in this guitar-riff .gif!  And I didn’t steal this from Deviantart.  I stole it from somebody else who stole it from Deviantart.

And then I have an audience for her solo;

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And these .gif’s make me happy.  Happy like a frog;

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And why do these minor miracles of motion make me happy?  I don’t know.  But they do.

And I must not be the only one.  Somebody went to a great deal of work to create some of these:

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And one might wonder if it is an evil thing to be happy about being .gif-goofy.  But in my experience, they  only fascinate the eyes for a short while and alter my mood in goofy weird ways.

 

 

 

 

So now that I’m all goofed up, let me end with one more.

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So, now, these .gif’s have tamed me, and I am unique in all the world.

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October 28, 2021 · 6:11 pm

Are Fairytales Controversial?

The This is Poppinsparkle, the girl fairy. Paid a fair wage for posing nude for this portrait.

In some versions of Cinderella, her wicked stepsisters, at their wicked mother’s insistence, cut off parts of their feet in order to fit into the glass slipper. And then, the stupid Prince Charmhead doesn’t notice until talking doves and pidgeons point out on the way to Charmhead Castle, “There’s blood in the shoe!”

And of course the Prince is so dense that he goes through this particular ordeal twice with the two wicked stepsisters.

He doesn’t get it right until Cindy puts the slipper on without any blood spurting that gets noticed by talking birds.

Dang! Prince Charmhead is a real dumbhead. What kind of a local ruler would a man be if he picks the love of his life simply because she fits a shoe he likes?

But it is obvious that fairytales, especially the old ones that have been retold by a lot of fairly stupid people and changed with each new teller, deserve most of the criticism they receive.

My current work in progress is a fairytale (in that it is thoroughly infested by many kinds of fairies, mostly the little three-inch-or-smaller kind.) It is called The Necromancer’s Apprentice.

The book is a comedy, meant primarily to entertain and be funny, though. like Shakespeare’s comedies, it is intended to demonstrate themes of romance and love, and how they percolate emotionally in spite of obstacles (and the manipulations of evil fairies.)

But it will undoubtedly get criticized for its exploitation of fairies. Especially young girl fairies who agreed to pose nude for illustrations in the book.

This will not, however, be fully justified. I, as the artist, paid each nude fairy model a fair wage. Sure, it was mostly in pennies. But they are all between two and three inches in height. A penny is heavy and unwieldy for tiny arms to carry. And a penny buys a lot in Gerry-go-Gompert’s General Store for Sylphs, Elves, and Butterfly Children (no Gobbuluns allowed!)

Dollinglammer, also paid her weight in pennies for posing for this picture.

And it you consider the context of a fairytale trying to portray fairies as they really are, you have to remember that Butterfly Children normally don’t wear clothing because it interferes with the flight of delicate butterfly wings. And all forms of actual fairy-kind are immune to heat and cold, and don’t need clothing for those reasons.

On top of that, most fairies believe in naturism and nudism as a healthy lifestyle and don’t object when I write a novel that promotes that idea a little bit.

I was a little worried that this illustration from the book might be viewed as evidence of Sylph abuse. Derfentwinkle is a nude Sylph girl who chooses to be nude all the time. In the contect of the plot, this shows her temporarily imprisoned in the Harpy cage. She is, after all, the Apprentice from the book’s title and the servant of the evil necromancer. The good guys capture her and keep her in this cage until they are sure they can trust her, Derfie herself told me that she didn’t object to this picture since the Sorcerer Eli Trajedy and his apprentices Bob and Mickey treat her better than her master ever did.

So, once I am finished with this book, I am almost certain that it will be just as controversial as Little Red Riding Hood who climbs into Grandma’s bed with a big bad wolf, or Snow White who lives alone in the woods with seven little single men. But controversy can be a good thing for a story. Readers love a lurid tale. Even when the subjects are less than three inches tall.

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October 28, 2021 · 3:36 pm

Penguin Proverbs

Penguins

You know how creepy penguins in cartoons can be, right?  The Penguins of Madagascar are like a Mission-Impossible Team gone horribly wrong and transformed into penguins.  The penguin in Wallace and Gromit’s The Wrong Trousers disguised himself as a chicken to perform acts of pure evil.  Cartoonists all know that penguins are inherently creepy and evil.

I recently learned a hard lesson about penguins.  You know the joke, “What’s black and white and red all over?  A penguin with a sunburn.”  I told that joke one too many times.  Who knew the Dallas metroplex had so many loose penguins lurking around?  They are literally everywhere.  One of them overheard me.  And apparently they have vowed a sacred penguin vow that no penguin joke goes unpunished.

As I walked the dog this morning, I spotted creepy penguin eyes, about three pairs, looking at me from behind the bank of the creek bed in the park.  When I went to retrieve the empty recycle bins from the driveway, there they were again, looking at me over the top of the neighbor’s privacy fence.

“Penguins see the world in black and white,” said one of the Penguins.

“Except for purple ones,” added the purple one.

“Penguins can talk?” I tried unsuccessfully to ask.

“Penguins only talk in proverbs,” said one of the penguins.

“But the purple one gives the counterpoint,” said the purple one.

“The wisdom of penguins is always cold and harsh,” said one of the penguins.

“Except on days like this when it’s hot,” said the purple one.

“You should always listen to penguins,” said one of the penguins.

“Of course, people will think you are crazy if you do,” said the purple one.

“People who talk to penguins are headed for a nervous breakdown,” said one of the penguins.

“Unless you are a cartoonist.  Then it is probably normal behavior,” said the purple one.

“Is this all real?” I tried unsuccessfully to ask.

“Everyone knows that penguins are real,” said one of the penguins.

“But there are no purple penguins in nature,” said the purple one.

So, I sat down to write this post about penguins and their proverbs with a very disturbing thought in my little cartoonist’s head…  Why am I really writing about penguins today?  I really have nothing profound to say about penguin proverbs.  Especially profound penguin proverbs with a counterpoint by a purple penguin.  Maybe it is all merely a load of goofy silliness and a waste of my time.

“Writing about penguins is never a waste of time,” said one of the penguins.

“And if you believe that, I have some choice real estate in the Okefenokee Swamp I need to talk to you about,” added the purple one.

 

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October 26, 2021 · 5:38 pm

Musings on Manic Mumbles in My Mind

The voices in my head never stop mumbling. For the past year I have been having trouble with passing out while trying to write or draw or watch TV. And yet, scenes play out vividly in the theater of my mind while I am briefly unconscious. I’ve been to the doctor about it. But there is no cure for the yammerings of an unquiet thought-mill. The word-weavers keep weaving new sentences. The cloth-cutters keep snipping out patterns and themes. And the prose-sewers keep making essays and shirts and jeans. How did my mental-breakdown voices get stuck inside a garment mill?

The mutterings this morning have been about writing success. Do I dare think any of that has my name associated with it?

Well, my blog views have been up this week. And this morning my prayers have been answered for my book Sing Sad Songs. A reviewer defended my book as a legitimate 5-star novel, and refuted the charges that my book is somehow child-pornography. I have been needing some validation that my book, the product of my darkest secrets and the affirmation of my victory over personal pain, is worthy of being seen as a good book.

And, of course, I have been thinking a lot about the talking-dog story, the one about Horatio who smokes an imaginary meerschaum pipe and talks only to Bobby Niland, and solves murders committed on chickens by the evil Dr. Rattiarty, a really evil real rat.

I have been discussing it endlessly with my dog on our walks in the park for her to take care of her pooping in public. We argue endlessly about how to make the tale believable.

She says, “The thing you don’t seem to understand is that, in real life, dogs can’t talk.”

And I say, “Then how is it that we are even arguing at the moment?”

And she answers, “It’s all because you insist on listening continually to the voices in your head.”

And there is a considerable discussion going on in the faculty lounge of my mental monkey house about the fact that for so many years I had numerous opportunities to be a practicing nudist, and I ran away from it as something I should not do… Until I grew old and weak and gave in to the desire to become a naked man amongst socially nude naturists and now I am unable to physically do it in any way but in my imagination.

“You simply lack the resolve, Michael, to take the bull by the horns and tackle it,” said the Dean of Brain Studies.

“Well, of course he can’t do that!” exclaimed the Professor of Inappropriate Thoughts. “Mickey has no Moo-Wrestling muscles to manage the kind of bull fighting you suggest. The kind where he wrestles with bull-puckie.”

“Mike is a man who can make up his own mind,” said the Associate Professor of Metaphor Mixing. “He just has to stop listening to us.”

“Can you all just SHUT UP!!!” said the Teaching Assistant of Pragmatic Prattle. “We are just a Monkey-House faculty incapable of making any sense.”

So, I am taking the Teaching Assistant’s advice now, and I am closing this essay immediately.

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October 24, 2021 · 1:59 pm

The Nature of Our Better Angels

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I have friends and relatives that believe in angels.  Religious people who believe in the power of prayer and the love of God.  And I cannot say that I do not also believe.  But I also happen to believe that angels live among us.

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My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was, as far as I am concerned, an angel.  Born in the late 1800’s, she was a practical prairie farmer’s wife.  She knew how to make butter in a churn.  She knew how to treat bee stings and spider bites. She knew how to cook good, wholesome food that stuck to your ribs and kept you going until the next meal rolled around.  She knew how to cook on a wood-burning stove, and knew why you needed to keep corn cobs in a pile by the outhouse door.  Or, in the case of rich folks, why you needed to read the Sears catalog in the little room behind the cut-out crescent moon.

She also knew how to head a family.  She had seven kids and raised six of them up to adulthood.  She sent a son off to World War II.  She had nine grandchildren and more great grandchildren, of which I was one of the not-so-great ones, than I can even count on two hands and two feet, the toes of which I can’t always see.  Great great grandchildren were even greater.  Tell me you can’t believe she was a messenger from God, always knowing God’s will, and making the future happen with a steady hand, and eyes that brooked no nonsense from lie-telling boys.

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Mother Mendiola was an angel too.  I met her at my first school, Frank Newman Junior High in Cotulla, Texas.  She was the seventh grade Life Science teacher.  She had been a nun before becoming a teacher, and she was a single lady her whole life.  But she was a natural mother figure to the children in her classes.  She’s the one who taught me how to talk to fatherless boys, engage them in learning about things that excited them, and become a lifelong mentor to them, willing to help them with life’s problems even long after they had graduated from both junior high and high school.  She was not only a mother to students, but she nurtured other teachers as well.  She showed Alice and I how to talk to Hispanic kids even though we were both so white we almost glowed in the dark.  She went to bat for kids who got in trouble with the principal, and even those who sometimes got into trouble with the law.  She had a way of holding her hand out to kids and encouraging them to place their troubles in it.  She even helped pregnant young girls with wise counsel and a loving, accepting heart, even when they were seriously in the wrong.  When they talk about being an “advocate for kids” in educational conferences, they always make me picture her and her methods.  I can still see her in my mind’s eye with clenched fists on her hips and saying, “I am tired of it, and it will get better NOW!”  And it always got better.  Because she was an angel.  She had the power of the love of God behind her every action and motivation.  It still makes me weep to remember she is gone now.  She got her wings and flew on to other things a long time ago now.

Some people may call it a blasphemy for me to say that these people, no matter how good and critically important they were, could really be angels.  But I have to say it.  I have to believe it.  I know this because I saw them do these things, with my own two eyes, and how could they not be messengers from God?  I convinces me that I need to work at becoming an angel too.

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October 24, 2021 · 1:42 pm

Debussy Reverie

Some Sunday thoughts require the right music.

Some Sunday thoughts actually are music.

rev·er·ie

/ˈrev(ə)rē/

noun

  • 1.a state of being pleasantly lost in one’s thoughts; a daydream:”a knock on the door broke her reverie“

Powered by Oxford Dictionaries

I had originally thought to call this post “A Walk with God.” But that would probably offend my Christian friends and alienate my Jehovah’s Witness wife. It would bother my intellectual atheist friends too. Because they know I claim to be a Christian Existentialist, in other words, “an atheist who believes in God.” Agnostics are agnostics because they literally know they don’t know what is true and what is merely made up by men. And not knowing offends most people in the Western world.

But Debussy’s Reverie is a quiet walk in the sacred woods, the forest of as-yet-uncovered truths.

And that is what I need today. A quiet walk in the woods… when no literal woods are available.

This pandemic has been hard on me. I am a prisoner in my room at home most days. My soul is in darkness, knowing that the end could be right around the corner. I am susceptible to the disease. It didn’t slay me on its first visit to the house, but that doesn’t mean it can’t get me on the second or third visit. Health experts are expecting a resurgence of up to 3,000 deaths per day before the end of the year. If I am relying on luck to avoid it, luck will run out.

I am not afraid to die. I have no regrets. But I have been in a reverie about what has been in the past, what might have been, and what yet may be… if only I am granted the time.

And, as always, I feel like I have writing yet to do. I am about to finish The Wizard in his Keep. And I have stories beyond that to complete if I may.

But the most important thing right now is having time to think. Time for Reverie. And reflections upon the great symphony of life as it continues to play on… with or without me.

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October 23, 2021 · 2:15 pm

Art to Help Me Be Happy

Some of the drawings and paintings I do, I do because they make me happy. I know it’s more noble if I do it to make you, the viewer, happy. But part of making art is that you are making it for your own needs. Art is therapy. Often, art is love. This picture of Shannon (not her real name) makes me happy. She was a student I loved, (only in the legal, Platonic sense.)

This one makes me happy. I drew it on a day I needed to laugh. And I laugh a little even now when I look at it.

This one is also a smirkable smirk-maker.

I drew this on a day when I was lonely.

This one tickles me on many levels.

These Telleron, temporary Martians helped me start my publishing career with the publication of Catch a Falling Star.

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And pretty girls can make me happy too.

Especially naked ones.

And I mean drawing them, not what was in your evil mind.

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October 22, 2021 · 1:57 pm

What Stupid People Think About

Let me begin by reminding you that the only head I have to explore as an example of what I am talking about in this essay is my own stupid head.

So, this is not an insult post. This is self-deprecating humor. And therefore, the contents of your own stupid head are completely safe.

Now, there is considerable evidence in the books already that Mickey is not, and has not been, particularly stupid for a large portion of his time on earth. He got college scholarships based on his ACT and SAT scores to get his undergraduate degree for free (in the 1970’s when it was significantly cheaper than now). And he has been both a teacher in a gifted program and the middle-school coordinator of that same gifted program. So, Mickey has effectively fooled everybody into thinking he is not stupid. But consider for a moment where the laughs come from when watching Stephen Urkel on TV, or the four nerds from Big Bang Theory. Smart people do stupid things and are very awkward at times, proving that, no matter how smart they are, smart people are capable of being quite stupid.

What, then, is the stupid thinking in Mickey’s stupid head?

Well, there are a number of things. Mickey is, as you may know if you read any of his nudity blogs, obsessed with nakedness. He was assaulted as a child in a way that caused him to be afraid of nudity and slow-developing in sexuality. As he grew older, he had to compensate for this lack of natural development. So, he has reached an age where his brain stupidly rejects guard-rails when talking about nudity and sex. He has convinced himself that he wants to be a nudist, and writes about nudity constantly, as evidenced by this very paragraph. When Mark Twain was in his seventies, he did leave the house without remembering to wear clothes more than once. The neighbors did not compliment him for doing that. That and worse is probably in Mickey’s near future.

And sex, as a subject sloshing around in a brain awash with hormones and other nightmare chemical imbalances, leads to a rash of stupid decisions. Of course, Mickey is old and has had chronic prostatitis long enough to eliminate the possibility of making a stupid decision about infidelity since those body parts don’t actually work anymore, but it leads to buying numerous things sold by marketers using sex as a way to sell things. Cabinets full of hair gel and cologne and Herbalife products that can never be used up is the result. And the wife is frustrated with the foods Mickey is constantly addicted to. “Why so much chips and salsa, Mickey?” Chips and salsa? Hubba hubba!

And Mickey’s old brain, full of a vast quantity of useless trivia-type knowledge, random wisdom floating around in a disconnected fashion, and prejudices formed by a bizarre obsession with things like nudism, Disney movies, comic books, model trains, and doll-collecting, becomes strangely creative. He begins to believe weird things.

For example, he thinks rabbits, if they were suddenly transformed into people, would make better people than people ever do. They are mostly quiet most of the time. They eat an all-vegetable, healthy diet. And they don’t vote Republican.

He obsessively also thinks about how his mind is working and how thinking about thinking is likely to improve thinking. He even realizes that the map of his head, provided above, doesn’t accurately reflect the many branching corridors and dead-end hallways of his actually-complicated-yet-stupid mind. He thinks that thinking too much about thinking makes you stupid.

I have illustrated this entire piece without uploading any new art… What a stupid thing is that?

And finally, Mickey is left with a sense of wonder about how it is entirely possible that everybody is stupid at least part of the time. And he wonders what possible things that you, dear reader, are thinking about that you consider at least somewhat stupid? You are welcome to tell him in the comments. But remember, this post is about stupid thoughts in Mickey’s head. You are perfectly free not to worry about your own stupidity.

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October 20, 2021 · 10:12 pm

It is Natural to be Nude

I have probably lost a lot of followers on both Twitter and WordPress by associating myself with the idea of being a nudist. A couple of my novels that have nudist characters in them or scenes where characters have no clothes on have received some hostile blow-back. I have gotten bad reviews on books that otherwise receive excellent reviews. Of course, this is because any suggestion of nudity or sensuality is perceived as pornography, especially when my best books involve young teen characters.

The general opinion seems to be that nudity is evil. “If God wanted us to be naked, He wouldn’t have had us born with a full suit of clothes on,” they say. Nudity equals sex. Because Queen Victoria said so.

The general opinion is not my opinion. But to avoid being censured or fired as a public school teacher, I had to hide the fact that I have been struggling all my life with a desire to live without clothes on. And now that I am retired, due to poor health, I keep running into roadblocks to actually practice being a nudist. I can really only freely be that in fiction stories.

Being a victim of a sexual assault when I was a ten-year-old boy helps me to understand female book reviewers who are hyper-sensitive to any suggestion that children and sex are being linked together. I spent years being traumatized in PE locker rooms when boys who were larger than me saw me in the showers. And trying to get out of taking the showers had consequences that included having to tell someone why I couldn’t stand the idea. And the only way I could do that would’ve been by lying. I dared not tell the truth. My father died in 2020 and my mother died last month. And neither of them knew what happened to me in a neighborhood back yard in 1966. I never found a way to tell them, and they didn’t ever read this blog. I console myself in th knowledge that, not knowing anything about it meant they enjoyed happier lives. It was not something that anyone could’ve done anything about after the fact. My attacker was dead before I ever talked about it openly.

But my journey towards being a nudist was in many ways critical to healing the mental scars of that old trauma. I used to shudder at the idea of taking my clothes off when I visited the clothing-optional apartment complex on Manor Road in Austin, Texas. My girlfriend’s sister lived there with her husband and child. I sat around a living room full of naked people with my clothes on, learning to accept them for the way they were. And they had no problem accepting me, even though I was using the clothing option. I learned that nudists are more open and honest about everything. And the place was no beauty contest. You were presented with many different variations of human anatomy. And I didn’t go blind or become a sex fiend.

The pictures in this post, nude males all, do not represent any sort of latent homosexuality in me. In fact, I am completely heterosexual with a wife and three kids. I have had gay friends and students of both persuasions. And I have no problems with them at all. These pictures are not about any kind of sexual experience. Instead they represent my own personal quest to have a healthy and positive body-image of myself in my own stupid head. I had to teach myself over time that I was not a naked prey animal, doomed to be preyed upon by those who are stronger and more predatory. These images are meant to show that I am normal, and not hideous inside my own head. They show me for the child that I wished I could’ve been. Naked, yet unafraid.

And all of this primal-scream therapy that I am finally admitting to has become a major theme in my work, writing comic adventures in young-adult novels.

Writing about these things in some of my books led to becoming a part of a community of writers who are also nudists and write fiction centered around nudist characters. I was invited to take part in a story-writing project by Ted Bun and Will Forest. This book of holiday stories will be coming out in November.

So, even if it loses me readers and gets my artwork gawked at by perverts on the internet, I will continue to take nudism to be a very good and healthy thing. I will continue to try to be a nudist for whatever time I can in the time I have left. Being nude is natural… just the way I was born into this world.

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October 17, 2021 · 4:38 pm

What God Wants from This Crazy World

Tobias and the Angel : Francisco De Goya

So, by what right do I make any assumptions about what God actually wants? I am, after all, arguably an atheist, definitely agnostic, and probably just as stupid as anyone else you could possibly name about the subject of God and His plan… except for Kenneth Copeland and Pat Robertson and every other religious-con-man-snake-oil merchant. Oh, and Tucker Carlson who knows pretty well what Satan wants, but not God… if there is one.

But I can see the hand of God in world events of late as clearly as anyone you can name. No exceptions there.

With the recent quadruple-spiked pandemic, the resulting recession, the insurrection by the criminal former president, and our headlong rush into climate-change apocalypse, any idiot can tell that God is itching to do some serious smiting. Yes, smiting, that unhappy word for getting smashed to death by Thor’s Hammer.

Tucker Carlson has been revealing what somebody with pretty big wings wants to happen nightly on his Fox News Spews broadcasts. He wants almost all of the money in the world to go to Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and all those closest billionaires who want to overtake Bezos or Musk. The God Tucker serves wants the rich to get richer, and everyone else to die or become totally subserviant to the rich.

And the government Tucker’s God has put in place are actively carrying out that God’s commands as Stephen Fry explains.

The zealots who swarm from Trump rally to Trump rally continue to insist that Trump is God’s choice to be their leader, and they must take election results, success, and even life away from Democrats, liberals, socialists, and anybody else who thinks Biden is actually president.-And if their agenda makes climate change accelerate, or causes nuclear war with China, then it will turn out the way they want. They will be in paradise with their God while the rest of us communist-heathens and liberals will burn in Hell for trying to help poor people and wanting to take tax cuts and guns away from the chosen people.

So, I don’t actually know what God wants in these crazy times. But there are people who insist that they do. And it is messy and painful. And I sincerely hope they are wrong.

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