(This old post from 2016 comes from a time when I owned a laptop with keys that would stick in place, especially with the zoom keys and delete key. It took me months to learn how to correct the problem.)
My computer is wearing out. It blew up the WordPress posting sight on my screen to where the letters in the title are once again an inch tall. The chances that it will suddenly wipe out everything I have typed and save a blank post over the whole thing almost instantly is making me tired. To combat the problem, I must constantly keep a backup copy on Microsoft Word, which may also grow or shrink for no apparent reason. It gets frustrating, and I am old, ill, and quite tired. But I am also only a month away from two entire years of posting every single day, a feat I am not ready to fail at this close to the end. So let me show something from my cartoon collections stolen from the internet at large.
From the Lola Bunny file;
From Movie Art;
From Hanna-Barbera Toons;
And these are all things I could’ve written a 500-word post about with unique and possibly yawn-inducing Mickian insights, but today I would rather not. Today I take the “picture is worth a thousand words” thing and give you 17,000 thousand words worth of not having to listen to me.
Chances are… I could wear a foolish grin, like a Johnny Mathis Moon in the sky…
I could waltz… all alone in a dark room, never seizing on the chances to fly…
But there’s a time… meant to let the summer in…
And love songs… all make me wonder… Why?
Silly, I know. But silly and surreal is how I go, how I deal with the time. A song in my head leads to rhythm and metaphor and rhyme. And it takes me from old winter and the waning of the moon… to the silly month of June… And my dancing shoes were never quite so spry.
Chances are… if you really read this, you will know I am depressed.
My life is all unfairly messed.
And I barely can get dressed…
To go tripping cross the floor, dancing awkwardly toward the door, ’cause I’m in need of so much more.
But in a poem I find it… the very reason that I rhymed it… like the crooning song that’s stuck in my old head…
I will catch it, and I’ll bind it, like a fool who hopes you’ll find it, and the treasure will be revealed before we’re dead…
Chances are… that you hear that silly tune, as it reels across the page in silent spread. And the song will slowly stop, as I dance a final hop, and the answer is brightly shining in my head.
To be perfectly honest, there was a time in my life when I would’ve argued this statement. I was a victim of an older boy when I was ten. Not raped. Sexually tortured. Neither one of us had any sort of orgasm. He subjected me to a lot of pain in a very private area of my body and told me he would hurt me more… or kill me if I screamed for help. Or told anybody afterwards. It made me repress the memory totally for the next twelve years of my life. I burned myself across my lower back repeatedly because of it until I was seventeen. I couldn’t tell anybody why. Not the doctor. Not the coach. Not my own mother. I didn’t remember. When I had suicidal thoughts in high school, I couldn’t explain to the counselor why. But I am lucky that I had friends who talked me out of it, even though they didn’t know this was what they were doing.
I know that this is not a humor post. It probably can’t be made funny. But, ironically, these sad facts are the reason I turned into a nudist in later life. I had to teach myself what it was that happened to me, why it made me hate myself and hate my body, and why not just nudity but sexuality also are not inherently bad things. I had to relearn love, especially for myself.
Apologies to Charles Schultz (Though Lucy probably would’ve said the same thing.)
I do look back on these things with a heavy touch of self-effacing humor. My transition from being an uptight coward about my own nudity to becoming someone comfortably nude at a nudist park (and being stared at from a distance by Charley and Lucy) was a very slow and gradual process. It is more fully explained in my non-fiction essay, Naked Thinking. But I have become someone who practices nudism in private at home (my wife and children know but don’t wish to participate.) I write fiction stories that include nudist characters. I also write blog posts like this one.
But my audience tends to be limited by a cultural fact about Americans. They are mostly afraid of and suspicious about being naked in the sight of others. Naturism is not porn. Being naked is not limited to being sexual. I like to draw naked boys and naked men because I like anatomy drawings of all kinds. I draw dogs, bears, and horses without putting pants on them. I am not a homosexual, though I have had homosexual students and friends in the past. I like drawing naked women and girls, but that does not make me a rapist or a child molester. But there are people who see my nude art who automatically register a protest. Facebook will reject this post just because it is about nudity. I don’t even have to show a bare butt, a female breast, or a penis. The words are enough to make Zuckerberg kvetch. I know this because Facebook has removed a number of my nudism essays for these same prudish reasons. WordPress stopped promising me ad revenue (which never came anyway) for these same reasons.
There are people in our society who think nudity is sinful and wrong, and they do not wish to allow me to talk about it, draw pictures about it, or even think about it (which hopefully the software doesn’t yet exist that allows them to regulate that.) The point is I have certain rights to express my thoughts in places like this that are built for it. And there are many like-minded nudists and naturists who think like I do. Learning to love my body instead of hating it helped me eventually get married and father children of my own. And I don’t throw any of my passions in the face of people who don’t want to know about them. You had to make an effort to come here and look at and read this. I didn’t force any of this on you. And in my experience, learning to let go of fears and be naked saved me from self-destruction. Forgive me for repeatedly trying to make that point in a very prudish, finger-wagging world.
Where do I begin? There are just too many ideas in this one topic to enumerate them all here. I just got scammed again in my bank account. A fake Microsoft account tried to rob me through my debit card number, and I have no idea how they got the number. I had to close both my debit card and checking account, with direct bill payments about to go out. I have to pray that the account changes go smoothly enough to make all the payments I owe. I am suffering from how the world sees me. Scammers must see me as the easiest possible mark.
I don’t know what the doctor thinks anymore. I seem to be going to the ER every two weeks. That and a week in the hospital mean that even with Medicare, I owe a lot of money. And who knows what President Pumpkinhead will do to the world economy in the meantime? This world seems to see me as a potential homeless person in a short amount of time. No chance that any of those folks will let me define myself.
But suffering builds character. And, damn! I have a lot of character. Want some of the extra?
Life for me has always been pretty much a long march into the darkness. I try to bring power and light and goodness with me as I march, but I know there is a final end to the journey, and it will not go smoothly. It will not end well. But I don’t see things the way other men do. I continue to fight the good fight, even though I will ultimately lose the war. “Rage! Rage against the dying of the light!” says the poet Dylan Thomas. The fight is everything. And I simply can’t be troubled with thinking about what lies over the last hill in this march toward the final battle.
I think, ultimately, that the important thing isn’t winning or losing. It is about who or what we have become on the inside. I find solace in being able to laugh at life. A lot of depressing things have been happening lately. It can make the laughing harder to manage. But if life is not joy at its heart, then what is it? And what makes it worth living?
“Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.” ― Lao Tzu
Thus it is… Lao Tzu is wise. The Tzu part of his name means “teacher”. So maybe I need to learn from him. There has to be a way forward, at least until the path ends.
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 started with two molars whose expensive crowns both broke during the pandemic. I went to a Vietnamese pirate dentist who extracted both ruined and infected molars. tortured me heavily during the three-week procedure and extracted $4000 out of my pocket because I had no dental insurance. That was followed by a trip to the ER for a kidney-stone crisis, a matter of $65 out of pocket, thanks to the $185 a month I pay for Medicare. And two months later, another trip to the ER for a deadly low heart rate resulted in a week in the hospital, a surgical implantation of a pacemaker, and finally another trip to the ER after getting out of the hospital due to dehydration. The out-of-pocket cost of the hospital will be only $500, thanks to Medicare. Of course, President Pumpkinhead may kill Medicare, too, before I actually get the bill. 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 68-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.
I woke this morning in excessive amounts of arthritis pain. My left elbow has not been working well for a month. My lower back is always painful after a restless night’s sleep. Neither of my knees is willing to do the basic job required of knees in the early morning when you first wake up. So I had to work joints back and forth to loosen them up despite the pain. I had to stretch parts where muscles were knotted up in protest to stretching. And it took me a half hour of painful work to get on my feet.
I have been psychologically in pain of late as well. Being a school teacher who dedicated his life to getting young people to work together and grow up and mature, I have been deeply distressed by both the police shootings of innocent black men and the massacre of policemen here in Dallas. My publishing goals have also hit a brick wall with recent rejections and cancelling of contracts. I need to curl up in a corner and lick my wounds.
When I was a child I relied on stuffed animals to make me feel better when I was sick and in pain. I had a toy tiger that was my constant companion. I had a couple of teddy bears, one a panda, the other Smokey the Bear. And there was a terrycloth pink elephant that I shared with my sisters. Like many children, I talked to the stuffed animals. Like a strange few other children, the stuffed animals would answer back. I think that plays a large part in explaining why I am a writer of fiction stories. I medicate my mind not with drugs, but by talking things out with imaginary people.
At this moment in time, when I am on the verge of being overwhelmed, it is a good thing that my hoarding disorder has caused me to collect stuffed toys. I have more than one magical teddy bear to turn to. Everything will be all right in the end.
No man is an island. John Donne the English poet stated that. And Ernest Hemingway quoted it… and wove it into his stories as a major theme… and proceeded to try to disprove it. We need other people. I married an island girl from the island of Luzon in the Philippines. She may have actually needed me too, though she will never admit it.
When I was a young junior high school teacher in the early eighties, they called me Mr. Gilligan. My classroom was known as Gilligan’s Island. This came about because a goofball student in the very first class on the very first day said, “You look like Gilligan’s Island!” By which he meant I reminded him of Bob Denver, the actor that played Gilligan. But as he said it, he was actually accusing me of being an island. And no man is an island. Thank you, Fabian, you were sorta dumb, but I loved you for it.
You see, being Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island was not a bad thing to be. It was who I was as a teacher. Nerdy, awkward, telling stories about when I was young, and my doofy friends like Skinny Mulligan. Being a teacher gave me an identity. And Gilligan was stranded on the Island with two beautiful single women, Mary Ann and Ginger. Not a bad thing to be. And I loved teaching and telling stories to kids who would later be the doofy students in new stories.
But we go through life searching for who we are and why we are here. Now that I am retired, and no longer a teacher… who am I now? We never really find the answer. Answers change over time. And so do I.
I may be suffering from the onset of… what’s that disease called? The one that makes you shake and be mentally confused about… what was I talking about? Oh, yes, I still can’t remember.
It disturbs me that I have difficulty recalling names that I used to rattle off the top of my head quite accurately when I was teaching and was a total master of all the useless trivia information in the universe.
Recently my daughter and number-one son were arguing with me about actors who played Superman. I successfully remembered TV Superman George Reeves who I watched as a pre-teen kid, and Christopher Reeve who I watched on the big screen as a college sophomore, and I even put the “s” at the end of the right one’s name. But I couldn’t remember the name of that new guy… No, not Brandon Routh from Superman Returns (apparently for only one movie), but that other new guy… from Man of Steel, and he was in the movie remake of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Number-One Son finally figured out who I meant by looking it up on his smartphone. Henry Cavill! Why couldn’t I remember that guy’s name? I recently watched him in the Witcher on Netflix. Henry gol-danged Cavill!!?
But then I ponder why there are some names and details I can’t seem to forget. Dawn Wells played Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island. But it wasn’t the actress’s name I could never forget. It was the sight of her belly button. When the series was on television on a night that didn’t conflict with watching Batman, I watched Mary Ann’s every movement and flounce and prance and twirl, and every banana cream or coconut cream pie she ever handed to Gilligan. At the ages of ten, eleven, and twelve I was mad to see a glimpse of her actual belly button. But not for the reason you think! I insisted to all my friends at school that I did NOT LIKE GIRLS! (Even though I actually did.) It was because I didn’t know if she had one. She wore revealing clothes and even bikini two-pieces on the show, and yet, it was always covered somehow. I remember every delicious detail of my too-close-to-the-TV inspection of Dawn Wells’ acting ability in black-and-white, and later, in syndication, in color. It was clear that somebody in the TV universe didn’t want me to see it. And maybe that is precisely why I can never forget it.
But, then again, I can’t remember this guy’s name. Yes, I know, Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. I even remember the two “d’s” in Addams. And I remember that he played the Kid when he was a little kid in Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Kid.
Yes, I honestly could not remember Jackie Coogan’s name until I looked up the Chaplin movie on Wikipedia.
It really bothers me that I cannot remember some things that I used to know really well. But given time I am able to remember that it is Parkinson’s Disease that my father has and may be causing my memory losses, and that the narrator-guy in the first picture I used in this post is Ludwig Von Drake, a character voiced by legendary cartoon voice actor Paul Frees. I am getting old. And forgetful. But how was I going to end this essay? I forget.
Fifty-eight years ago, when I was ten, the world was a very different place. Many people long for the time when they were young. They see it as a better, more innocent time. Not me. Childhood was both a blessing and a nightmare for me. I was creative and artistic and full of life. And my family encouraged that. But I was also a victim of a sexual assault and believed I had to keep a terrible secret even from my parents so that the world would not reject me as something horrible. We were on the way to the moon and the future looked bright. But President Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963, and Apollo 1 would end in a fiery tragedy in 1967. I look back with longing at many, many things, but I would never want to go back to that time and place without knowing everything I know now. I am grateful that I survived. But I remember the nightmares as vividly as I do the dreams.
As a teacher, I learned that childhood and young adulthood defines the adult. And the kid who is coddled and never faces the darkness is the one who becomes a total jerk or a criminal… or Donald Trump. I almost feel that the challenges we faced and the tragedies we overcame in our lives are the very things that made us strong and good and worthy.
When you are a boy growing up, hating girls on the outside and pining to get a look in the girls’ shower room on the inside, you can’t wait to grow up and get away from the horrors of being a child. Except, there are good things too. Tang, of course, wasn’t one of them. We drank it because the astronauts drank it, but it was so sweet and artificial that it tasted bitter in that oxymoronic way that only fake stuff can achieve. Quisp is nasty-tasting stuff too… but we begged for it because, well, the cartoon commercials were cool. I only ever choked down about two boxes of the vile stuff. You went to school a little queasy on mornings when you ate Quisp in milk for breakfast. But one box had a toy inside, and the other had an alien mask on the back that you could cut out, but not actually wear.
But when it comes down to how you end a goofy-times-ten-and-then-squared essay like this one, well, how do you tie a proper knot at the end of the thread? Maybe like this: It is a very hard thing to be a boy and then grow up to be a man. But I did it. And looking back on it, the pie was not my favorite flavor… but, hey! It was pie!
I recently posted about being synesthetic and discovering how I am different from normal people. Here is the post if you are interested.. Then I discovered that Kanye West is also synesthetic as he gushed some southern-fried crappie-doo about how wonderful he is as an artist because he sees the colors of his music. Well, now I don’t want that mental affliction any more. I don’t wish to be anything like him. Of course, it has to be incurable, doesn’t it.
Now I am wasting today’s post on another metacognative thinking-about-thinking style of paragraph pile when I could be rhapsodizing about the humor of Dave Barry or the wisdom of Robert Fulghum, the author of
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
I could be shamelessly promoting the work of artists whose works I love instead of examining the random filing cabinets in the back rooms of my stupid old head. But I can’t because I now need to explain myself to myself again. Self doubt and self examination are features of being an artist. We reach a point where we have to think about how we do what we do, because if you don’t know where the magic comes from, you might not be able to call on it the next time you need it.
I am a self-taught artist. I have had art classes in high school and college, but never professional art training. I know how to manipulate the rule of thirds, directional composition, movement, perspective, and lots of other artsy-craftsy techniques, but it is all a matter of trial and error and an instinct for repeating what works. I have had a good deal more professional training as a writer. But I do that mostly by instinct as well. Trained instinct. I have reached a point where my art is very complex and detailed. And I don’t mean to suggest there are no flaws. In fact, I am capable enough to see huge, glaring mistakes that really skew my original intent and make me feel hopelessly incompetent. But others who see it and don’t know the inner workings of the process can look past those mistakes and not even see them. Given enough time to look at my own work with new eyes, I am able to see at least some of what they see.
Now that I have totally wasted 500-plus words on goofy talking-to-myself, what have I really accomplished beyond boring you to death? What’s that you say? You are not dead yet? Well, that’s probably only because you looked at the pictures and didn’t read any of my sugar-noodle brain-scrapings in loosely paragraph-like form. And if you did read this awful post by a colorblind artist who doubts his own abilities, you probably didn’t learn anything from it. But that’s not the point. The point is, I care about doing this, and I need to do it right. And I managed to learn something… how to ramble and meander and make something that is either a hot mess… or something that vaguely resembles self-reflective art.
Catch a Falling Star 
Holding Patterns
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 started with two molars whose expensive crowns both broke during the pandemic. I went to a Vietnamese pirate dentist who extracted both ruined and infected molars. tortured me heavily during the three-week procedure and extracted $4000 out of my pocket because I had no dental insurance. That was followed by a trip to the ER for a kidney-stone crisis, a matter of $65 out of pocket, thanks to the $185 a month I pay for Medicare. And two months later, another trip to the ER for a deadly low heart rate resulted in a week in the hospital, a surgical implantation of a pacemaker, and finally another trip to the ER after getting out of the hospital due to dehydration. The out-of-pocket cost of the hospital will be only $500, thanks to Medicare. Of course, President Pumpkinhead may kill Medicare, too, before I actually get the bill. 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 68-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.
Leave a comment
Filed under angry rant, autobiography, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney
Tagged as alaska, canada, hiking, nature, travel