So, President Cheetoh-Head is threatening to use nukes to blow up the world in response to threats by Supreme Leader Fat-boy Jong Un. Maybe I have even less time than I thought I did to get my work out there for others to see. I am resigned to dying in total obscurity as a writer. Which is entirely okay. But I have some things to show you that have not already been seen.
This is a picture that has been in my folder in the closet since 1978. It is a part of a cartoon story that would later become Hidden Kingdom.
I haven’t been hiding things so much because I am ashamed of them, though you can see some amateurish flaws in my work, but more because I simply haven’t taken time to use these particular pictures.
I bought this toy from the Wonder Woman movie, horse and doll, for under $20.
This toy purchase photo from a week ago was a buy I made to feel better after learning that I was going to have to declare bankruptcy. I thought about using it in a blog before now, but never found the right time.
This picture of Jade Beyer watching the outside world full of edible cats and sniffable stinks was taken while eating some ice cream. She was in a funk about not being offered any, and there were people out there using her favorite park across the street. She boofed at them until I scolded her for barking too much.
I found a sheet of school pictures from the late eighties when I was a much younger man, looking a little bit like Harry Potter who hadn’t even been published yet.
I cropped it to make a better self-portrait of the way I once looked in school, wearing a tie as a teacher, and gray suspenders because I was a fool.
And then I enhanced it using a phone-camera app recommended to me by Vietnamese immigrant school girls. It made me look even more like an older Harry Potter.
So, there you have it. Secrets revealed. Pictures never before seen in public. And I am not now totally ashamed… just mostly.
Who am I? What is my name? Mickey? Michael? Mike? The Bavarian? Dr. Seabreez? The Happy Pessimist? The Fool?
Yes, all of those.
I winterized the Eggplant house. I turned the Easter Bunny out front into a snowman. Why did I do that? So I could live there peacefully? In a purple house made out of a weird vegetable that I can’t stand to eat? Of course I did.
My own house is still in peril. We have not yet gotten the pool removed. I worked hard on it and repaired it to the point that it could actually hold water. But the electrical repairs cost more than removing the pool. The house was wired incorrectly when the pool was put in some time in the 70’s, long before I lived here. So I tried to get a loan to cover the cost of the pool repair. I was denied twice. My credit rating is too far into the toilet.
This is not a self portrait, though I am not saying I am not a nerd.
My credit rating went south because Bank of America sued me, and I can’t afford to pay what they demand and still have money for the mortgage, food, and, well, I have already stopped taking any medicine the doctor wants me to take for the rest of my life. I talked to a lawyer yesterday and paid him the retainer to represent me in a Chapter 13 bankruptcy. I lose what credit I had left.
But, sad sack though I am, I still believe in the future. There is still hope. Joy to be had. Songs to sing. Clowns to be. I still have my red foam nose.
I was thinking of going back to the nudist park on Saturday when more people would be there. But it is going to rain Saturday. Naked in the rain from a thunder-shower is not a good thing for nutty naked me. So maybe not. Sitting nude alone in my room has already helped my psoriasis sores dry and heal, so maybe I don’t have to go be embarrassed with other fools in order to feel better. I am a poverty-stricken idiot, but I am still a basically happy person.
So… This is me… again. I get to decide myself who I am and what I am worth. Not bankers. Not lawyers. Not other fools. Just me. This is me.
Sometimes you have to fly in big circles waiting for terrible things to pass. If you don’t wait… if you rush in unprepared… then you go down in flames.
The problem is that the pirates from Bank of America finally came through with their offer to settle my debt. Sixty per cent of $13,000 in four payments over the next four months. I have an appointment tomorrow to talk with my lawyer about bankruptcy. It is expensive in this country to become poor. And if you are poor, you have no other option. At least, if I can manage three more bankruptcies by the time I’m 70, I will be qualified to run for president.
Life is definitely a lot like Moose Bowling. It is a simple game. In order to win, you only have to knock down all ten pins in one throw. The hard part is that you have to throw a moose to knock the pins down. Did you know that the average weight of an adult moose is 1800 pounds, or 820 kilograms? That’s a lot of moose meat to fling with my arthritic 60-year-old moose-throwing muscles. My flabber is totally gasted by that.
So, as I swiftly rise from prosperity to poverty, the ultimate fate of most old school teachers, it is probably a good thing that I have decided to become a nudist. At least I will save money on buying clothes.
Well, I still can’t believe it, but I went ahead and did it. Did what you ask? Especially did what that makes me put the word idiot in the title you ask, after reflecting for a moment? Well, I did tell you I agreed to write for a naturist website about the first time visiting a nudist park. And, well… as nervous and as fearful and as willing to run and hide somewhere that the idea made me, especially with my splotchy-spotted psoriasis skin, I went.
Yes, the nearby nudist park is called Bluebonnet. It is located between Decatur and Alvord, Texas. I had to call ahead and make an arrangement to be met at the gate and escorted in to the office to sign up for a day visit. I had to call at least a day ahead of time. I debated with myself for hours before I dialed that number. Actually, once I took the step of calling in, it seemed all down hill from there. My feet just sorta took me there, aided by my little car of course. If you have read about my crazy adventures in nudity on this blog, you know that I have been around nudists and naturists before. But I was never the one willing to be naked in the presence of others before, especially not people I didn’t already know as well as I know family members. Stark naked in front of people! And some of them are female!!!
The front gate suggests I am entering a different world!
My knees felt like jelly as I reached the gate. But there was no reason to turn around and go an hour and a half back home without at least trying. So I called and they opened the gate.
The lady office manager was from the Philippines just like my wife. She was easy to talk to and made me feel comfortable as we talked about my visit. We were both wearing clothes at that point, not a hard thing at all to accomplish. So I paid a reasonable price and was given the run down on expected behaviors and rules. This wasn’t some madhouse orgy site or such nonsense as that. It was actually a family-oriented naturist club. They expect you to act like any other camper in any other campground, just acting that way with no clothes on.
Here’s a picture of the two swimming pools by the clubhouse to prove I actually went in. Didn’t think I could actually do it, did you? I didn’t have to worry about the no-pictures of other guests rule because it was 104 degrees Fahrenheit on Friday when I visited. No sensible people were out naked in the sun. In all I only met three other nudists, the office manager and two gentlemen who weren’t much younger than me. Everybody was pleasant and very encouraging. No mention was made of my spotty old carcass, not even by me. That kind of thing apparently never comes up. They did all encourage me to enjoy the club and come back often enough to become a member. I actually found being naked to be quite pleasant. I hiked in the woods where it was shady. I sat by the pool in the shade, and eventually swam. I think I promised you before I would never inflict a picture of my naked spotted old carcass on you. And I will hold myself to that promise now… even if I didn’t make that promise before. I will, however, use a cartoon of brand new nudist Mickey to give you an idea of the nightmares you could be having if I didn’t keep that promise.
So now I can write my naturist blog and tell other nudists all about my first time as a nudist at Bluebonnet Naturist Resort in Texas. And the craziest thing of all is, I am actually beginning to think about going back and doing it again. What is wrong with me?
When you know someone has an imaginary friend, something like Elwood’s six-foot invisible rabbit called Harvey, don’t you immediately think that person is crazy? I do. But I have imaginary people as friends. I think most writers do. So am I crazy? Probably. But hopefully it is a good kind of crazy.
It began with imaginary friends from books. The Cat in the Hat was my friend. Jim Hawkins was my friend, as was Mowgli and all the members of the Swiss Family Robinson. They entered my dreams and my daydreams. I told them my troubles the same way I listened to theirs through their stories.
I began to have imaginary friends that came from my own imagination too.
I used to tell my mere human friends about my friend Davalon from outer space. I told them that he was real and secretly visited me at night to talk about being able to learn about humans on earth by walking around invisibly and watching them. I got so involved with these stories that my sixth grade class began saying, “Michael is from Mars.”
When I was a teenager, I began having conversations with a faun. His name was Radasha. He was a creature from Greek Myth, a sensual Dionysian creature who, in his child body, was both younger than me and way older than me. I didn’t realize until much later in life that he was the result of my repressed memories of a childhood sexual assault that I was the victim of. I could talk to him about my fear of nakedness. I could tell him about my blossoming interests in naked girls and their bodies. I could talk to him about all the things I was somehow too terrified to talk to my male friends about, even though none of them had the same reluctance to discuss sex. Ra was imaginary. But he helped me heal.
Then the story-telling seriously began. I used Davalon as one of the main characters in my novel Catch a Falling Star. I created Torrie Brownfield, the baby werewolf to express the feelings I had as a boy about being a monster and secretly terrible and deformed. Torrie is a normal boy with a condition called hypertrichosis. I am working on The Baby Werewolfnow. And then there’s lovely Valerie Clarke. She is the main character of Snow Babies which is a finished novel, edited and proofread and ready to publish. It is I book I will have to find another way to publish since the recent death of PDMI Publishing. She is not a me-character, based on my own thoughts and feelings. She is based on former classmates and students who told me things that express the sadness and isolation of growing up female. So she is even more imaginary than my other characters.
They become real people to me. They have their own point of view. They talk to me and I learn things from them. But they are imaginary. So am I crazy? Yes… as a loon. And happy as Elwood P. Dowd to be that way.
You know how in movies and on TV they play a soundtrack behind the action of the show? And how, sometimes, if the movie or TV show is any good, it enhances and underscores whatever is happening to the main theme of story and the action that expresses it on the screen? Yeah, that. A complex idea that lies just under the surface of consciousness, a something that somebody sometime thought up that actually works and can work quite well. But why does it work?
Put as simply as I can say an idea that is so layered and complex, it is because that is how real life works. Yeah, there is music in the background of every life. It plays almost unnoticed until that point where you suddenly realize how it defines your very soul.
Through childhood and junior high and high school, I used to joke with my two sisters that every song that came on the radio was my favorite song, my theme song. Every new Beatles’ song, or Paul Revere and the Raiders’ song, or Elton John musical fantasy was the song that defined my entire life. Yes, I really was that fickle. But I was also responding to a sense that who I was had to change into something new as often as you heard a new song on the radio or bought a new record album. (Yes, I know some of you have no idea what that is, but I am a child of the 60’s and 70’s, and I make no excuse for that. So deal with it.)
I hope you have listened to some of the YouTube song-thingies I have added to this post. They are not picked at random. They are some of the key theme songs of my goofy, pointless, and fantastical life.
The Astroboy opening theme is here to represent my early childhood. When I had the courage of the irrepressible imagination of childhood. I soared with Astroboy through every black-and-white episode I could get hold of in the 60’s. At times it met getting out of bed early to catch it at 6:00 am, just after Channel 3 came on the air in the morning. At times it meant rushing home as soon as school let out because it came on only half an hour after the last bell, and the school was on the north end of Rowan, while home was as far south as the town went.
I really used to believe that I would grow up to lead a heroic life and make a name for myself that would inspire others to greatness too. We are uncommonly stupidly when we are children, and we need simplistic theme songs to wake us up to life gradually.
The Eagles provided the theme songs of my high school and college young manhood. Trying out life, at times boldly, and at most times timidly, I had to “Take It to the Limit” as often as I could manage. It turned out that due to irrepressible social awkwardness, my greatest presses against the walls of my existence were all academic in nature. We learn by doing… and failing… and trying again. The songs become more complex as they weave themselves into the background of your life story.
As a young teacher, shy and soft-spoken, it was impressed on me that discipline was about controlling behavior which you had to do by being stern and unyielding, good at rule-setting and handing down punishments. But with my goofy temperament and non-threatening clown face, I soon learned that that road only led to misery and heartache for both me and, more importantly, the students. In the 80’s I learned that you had to follow Bobby McFerrin’s philosophy of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. I learned that you don’t teach someone lasting lessons by pushing them from behind with paddles and switches, but by leading them forward with jokes and obvious joy in the lessons you are teaching.
Now that I have grown old and awful in the winter of my life, the songs that express my personal themes are classical music and complex with snowflakian symmetry and stark, cold beauty. I would talk about a few more particulars, but I am now well past 500 words, and if you don’t have the idea yet, I’m sorry, you are probably never going to hear that music yourself. But don’t worry… be happy.
The classic line from the visionary poet Theodore Roethke;
But the truth is, before you can BE you must first BECOME.
I know what you are probably thinking. “What is this idiot rambling on about now?”
Well, sometimes you simply have to spout a lot of love and hoo-haw and just pretend it means something. That is the core, I think, of what philosophy is all about.
But maybe a list of what I have already become will get the idea knitting itself together. You know, a list of the things I can already just BE.
I have already become college educated. I have a BA in English and an MAT in Education (Master of the Art of Teaching). Those letters my college years bestowed upon me are only an “N” short of being an anagram for BATMAN. So I have almost become BATMAN.
I have also finished becoming a teacher. In fact, I have spent 31 years becoming a teacher. I have gotten so teacherfied over the years that I am actually now becoming a retired teacher. I haven’t learned the art of retired teacher yet. It is still gonna take a bit of practice to start getting it right. But I can get a kid to sit down and shut up with just a look. I can read the mind of a glum-faced student and know we are about to have a bad day. And I always know when to tell a really awful joke so that the students know their only hope of keeping their lunch down and retaining their sanity is to ask me to please get back to today’s lesson. So I can BE that, at least in theory. I am still BECOMING retired.
Why-ever would I draw myself as a naked boy? I have inexplicably weird urges sometimes.
I am a living, breathing human being. I have been that now for sixty years and eight months. I have practiced it enough that I can BE that without even thinking about it. Well, not now, just most of the time I don’t have to think about it.
But I did make a huge mistake fairly recently in applying for a chance to be a blogger for an AANR-affiliated website. Yes, that’s right, the American Association for Nude Recreation. I signed on to write about being a nudist.
I am asked to write a review of the nearest naturist park, the Bluebonnet Naturist Park in Alvord, Texas. I am hoping to find a day for a day-visit that won’t find a lot of people there. Ummm. How did I get roped into BECOMING a nudist? Is it too late to back out now? Or would that be UNBECOMING?
But most of all, I have labored long and hard at BECOMING a real writer. I have two books already published. Aeroquest and Catch a Falling Star. You can find them both on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. But don’t buy Aeroquest. Those cheap burgle-binkies don’t deserve to make any more money off of me. I have another book coming out soon from Page Publishing, Magical Miss Morgan. It is a book I am really proud of, though these foofy publishers have done nothing to help it and a lot to mess it up for me.
But, I must admit, I have just finished reading Mitch Albom’s masterpiece, The Magic Strings of Frankie Pesto. It is a miraculous, engaging read that made me laugh and made me cry and made me fall in love with the story. And it is so far beyond what I can do that I must write a review on it, maybe tomorrow, and gush praises all over it. I can only dream of BEING a writer like that. It proves to me that I have a lot more BECOMING to work on. Sorry, Ted, I am just not there yet.
Yesterday I posted a long, sappy golly-yabber about things I had to tell you before I die. I had experienced chest pains in the night and was rather planning on dropping dead somewhere during the day yesterday.
But it didn’t happen. It was the same arthritis pain in the left side of my rib-cage that sent me to the cardiologist twice before. So this time I got by planning to be dead today, and then, happily, it turned out that this morning I am still here. See, pessimism works! You only get pleasant surprises that way.
But I really do believe that it is the trouble we have in life that makes life worth living. I have value as a human being because I can use my creativity, determination, and relatively unstable mental condition to take on any problem. And if I should happen to be defeated, like I was in my quest to save the swimming pool, then my barely sane and somewhat loopy work ethic simply moves me on to the next crappy Mickey trap to figure out how to get the cheese out of it without getting killed.
So I ain’t dead. In fact, I am still following my own personal yellow brick road. And while tomorrow is not guaranteed, I can still sing and dance like Ray Bolger and Judy Garland as I am off to see the wizard. And no, I don’t think I’m Judy Garland in that metaphor. At least… not most of the time.
I collect sunrises. The picture above is today’s, July 16th, 2017, looking east over the green belt park in Carrollton, Texas. Every new day is a miracle. I am sixty years and eight months old as of this sunrise. I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor since 1983. One of those diseases is diabetes, and I cannot afford to be put on insulin. There is no reason to believe I will have another sunrise tomorrow.
But I am not sad or angry. I am not afraid. I am thankful. I have lived a good life.
And here’s a secret nobody has probably ever told you before in these exact words; “Life is a miracle, and no matter how cruel it has been to you over time, or what terrible things have happened to you, the world is a better place because you have lived in it.”
Amazingly, those words apply even to Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. If you think about it, there was a backlash to all the misery, suffering, grief and death they caused. In a backhanded way, bad people make us come together, find the strength in ourselves to resist evil, and make the world better in ways it couldn’t have been if there had been no challenge or reason to do it. Think of all the heroes like Oscar Schindler that Hitler’s persecution of Jews created. Think of all the times a Satanic figure like Manson made you shudder when you confronted the darkness in your own soul, and how it made you vow to be a better person than he was. And how you kept that vow.
It seems I may have become a nudist in my doddering old age. I signed up to blog for a nudist website associated with the AANR (American Association of Nude Recreation) and suddenly I have nudist friends who are encouraging me to take all my clothes off and go camping in spite of my little pink psoriasis spots. I haven’t actually gone naked camping yet, despite the invitations. But if I continue to blog about it, I will end up having to. Even though the pay per article is pretty paltry. Hmm. I still might not. But you can’t be any more naked with no clothes on than you are when you bare your soul by writing. If you have actually read my blog, you have seen things that are well beneath the very skin of me… all the way to heart and bone. And here is the secret I must impart about all of that nakedness stuff; “People are actually naked all the time. Clothes merely make us think that we are not.”
Here’s a really important thing I have to tell you. I was a middle school teacher and actually loved it. Don’t tell the people at the Institute for Keeping Crazy People Off the Streets. They are probably still looking for me. Though I have reason to believe they may also be entirely imaginary. Teaching middle school kids will do that to you. I was an English teacher for 31 years in Texas public schools. I taught kids to read. I taught kids to write. I taught kids to laugh at Mark Twain’s story about a jumping frog and the people who bet on them. I taught kids to be amazed at the ways and words of William Shakespeare, to see language and stories as poetry and music and the “stuff that dreams are made of”. I taught them that Socrates supposedly invented school the way we do it now with teachers using the Socratic method. So I suppose, realistically, you would have to say that I taught over a thousand kids in South Texas to sincerely hate Socrates. But here’s a secret I must also tell you before I can die; “When it comes to learning about love and life and laughter, they taught me so much more than I could possibly have taught them. I loved being their teacher for the too-brief time it was my privilege to be that.”
And there you have it. Three things I had to tell you in case I croak before sunrise tomorrow. I am not saying that is what will happen. Only that it could happen. But there is wisdom in telling secrets and not carrying them with you to the grave. Or was I supposed to admit that it is actually foolishness? Now I’m not sure any more. But it is one of those.
Yes, it is the bottom of the ninth. I am up to bat, but down by a half dozen runs. How do I pull it out of the fire? My fat, I mean. I am busy mixing and mangling metaphors again.
I tried a bit of nude pool repair today. I got one crack secured and plugged. I spent about fifty per cent of the time wearing only sunscreen. It was hot. I got done as much as I could. And then it rained. So only one run in the eighth. I sealed at least part of one crack. But there are twenty-three still to go. And I have to make the pool hold water by the 9th of July. And it is supposed to rain again tomorrow. I suppose doing this as a fool naturist is stupid and self-defeating, but it was cooler in the hot Texas sun. I don’t think I will be doing that foolishness in public after all. But fixing the pool is not completely impossible. Just mostly.
I took a hit to my numbers on this blog by not posting for three days. But I published multiples in order to get caught up, and people are reading and liking them although they are full of the same nudist nonsense I have been pursuing for a week now.
But I am six runs behind. My fat behind may have gotten slightly sunburned. I need to score seven in the bottom of the ninth. Can it be done? Possibly. But I need to bare down and concentrate on the pitches coming over the plate.
Catch a Falling Star 
This Is Me… Again
Who am I? What is my name? Mickey? Michael? Mike? The Bavarian? Dr. Seabreez? The Happy Pessimist? The Fool?
Yes, all of those.
I winterized the Eggplant house. I turned the Easter Bunny out front into a snowman. Why did I do that? So I could live there peacefully? In a purple house made out of a weird vegetable that I can’t stand to eat? Of course I did.
My own house is still in peril. We have not yet gotten the pool removed. I worked hard on it and repaired it to the point that it could actually hold water. But the electrical repairs cost more than removing the pool. The house was wired incorrectly when the pool was put in some time in the 70’s, long before I lived here. So I tried to get a loan to cover the cost of the pool repair. I was denied twice. My credit rating is too far into the toilet.
This is not a self portrait, though I am not saying I am not a nerd.
My credit rating went south because Bank of America sued me, and I can’t afford to pay what they demand and still have money for the mortgage, food, and, well, I have already stopped taking any medicine the doctor wants me to take for the rest of my life. I talked to a lawyer yesterday and paid him the retainer to represent me in a Chapter 13 bankruptcy. I lose what credit I had left.
But, sad sack though I am, I still believe in the future. There is still hope. Joy to be had. Songs to sing. Clowns to be. I still have my red foam nose.
I was thinking of going back to the nudist park on Saturday when more people would be there. But it is going to rain Saturday. Naked in the rain from a thunder-shower is not a good thing for nutty naked me. So maybe not. Sitting nude alone in my room has already helped my psoriasis sores dry and heal, so maybe I don’t have to go be embarrassed with other fools in order to feel better. I am a poverty-stricken idiot, but I am still a basically happy person.
So… This is me… again. I get to decide myself who I am and what I am worth. Not bankers. Not lawyers. Not other fools. Just me. This is me.
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Filed under autobiography, commentary, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney