So the time came to make the planned return trip to the nudist park in Alvord, Texas. I was going to finally get to make my second visit to the place for the Labor Day holiday weekend. But once again it was not to be. My daughter caught a virus during her first week of school. She gave it to me and her brother. Of course, neither of them were planning to go along, and their mother would sooner find another husband than be naked in a place where other people would see. They all think I am nuts for wanting to go spend time with other naturists gadding about naked in the hot Texas sunshine. My wife wants me to get my head examined. She thinks all the stories about aliens from outer space may have gotten my head artificially replaced by the Men in Black.
And she may be totally correct in her assessment. She is a school teacher, after all. I, probably just like you, was carefully taught to never be seen naked in public because it is probably a sin, and it is definitely against the law, and it is very likely something only crazy people do on purpose. Never-the-less, I did it once as a writing assignment for a nudist website that told me the review was wonderful and they were definitely going to publish it, and as of this writing, over a year later, they still haven’t done so (though a rival website reblogged one of my nudist posts from this blog).
I have come to the idiotic conclusion, though, that nudism isn’t sinful if practiced around like-minded people who are also comfortably nude. I met and talked to nudists last year who were .very easy to get to know. They were likable and no prettier in the buff than I am myself (and with my psoriasis pink leopard spots I am pretty horrible to look at naked.) And the nudist park is not a place for sexual goings-on and sinful behavior. It is a family environment where some people bring their naked kids.
I remember enjoying being naked as a kid even though I had been taught that Jesus is ashamed by seeing my nudity even though he is always watching over me, even when I am in the bathtub. I remember one time when I was a pre-teen that I took my bicycle to the Bingham Park woods and rode it up and down the trails there completely naked. And even though I had been carefully taught how evil that was, the cool wind on my skin felt good, and it was glorious to listen to the birds sing in a green wood almost as if it were the Garden of Eden and I was Adam, the first man. (Hence the illustration of the bare bike boy.)
It seems to me, now that I am old, retired, and probably at least a little bit senile, that nakedness is really a form of innocence. I can tell you for a fact from being a parent and having, at one point, worked in a daycare center for ages five and below, that it is actually far easier to get a kid to go completely starkers than it is to get them to put on and comfortably wear clothes. Nakedness is natural. And if God had really wanted us to be naked all the time, then we wouldn’t have been born with a full suit of clothes on… er, wait… what? Nakedness is innocent. Anything bad that comes from it happens because of the things we have been taught about it as children. A more enlightened society would probably be naked more than we are, especially inside temperature-controlled sealed environments… like houses, cars, and even spaceships. Ah, yes, back to the Men in Black and possible head-switching again. Aliens in their saucers are apparently often naked. I wonder if Jesus is ashamed by their nudity too?
Anyway, I once again have failed to manage the planned nakedness I had been looking forward to. I have to settle for the indoor, sealed-environment form of nudity as I am too sick to get to the nudist park, and would promptly be arrested if I tried to walk around the neighborhood like that. But the failed evil plan did give me something to write about that at least makes me laugh. And it is an innocent laugh, not an evil one.
Ah, irony again! It ends up being anything but simple. You can write in simple, adjective-and-adverb-free sentences as Hemingway did, and still manage to convey deeply complicated and thoughtful ideas. One might even suggest that you can create poetic ideas in mere prose, dripping with layers of emotion, conflict, theme, and deeper implied meaning. You can also write prose in the intensely descriptive and convoluted style of a Charles Dickens with many complex sentences and pages-long paragraphs of detail, using comic juxtapositions of things, artfully revealing character development, and idiosyncratic dialogue all for comedic effect. Prose is a powerful and infinitely variable tool for creating meaning in words. Even when it is in the form of Mickian purple paisley prose that employs extra-wiggly sentence structure, pretzel-twisted ideas, and hyperbolically big words.
Catch a Falling Star 
How Mickey’s Brain Percolates
I tend to do a lot of thinking about thinking. I pay attention to what sources of input and images I use to bring the old brain to a boil. It is entirely possible to turn into a malevolent moron in this age of Trumpalump Twitter Twit-Tweets if you pay too much attention to its anger-inducing misinformation and rage-ranting. So I have to limit how much I think about calling Trump and the other elephant-heads names. I enjoy it, true, but I really don’t want to become a malevolent moron.
The anti-moron medicine comes in the form of remembering who I used to be and how problems were solved as an educator, mentor, and advocate for young people. I remember how the times I used name-calling and anger in place of problem-solving tended to only make the problem worse. If you deliberately brainstorm solutions to the problem instead, I have found that after you test several solutions and have them spectacularly fail, your persistance eventually yields a solution that works.
So when I think about how to proceed with the daily problems of life, especially the age-old question, “What the hell am I going to write about today?” I find that I tend to leap out of the box, think all around the outside landscape, and seize on something silly in a very round-about and experimental manner.
The things I choose to write about in book form are all based on my own real experiences. But I have the unfortunate gift for having an overdose-level vivid imagination. So my books are about fairies and ghosts and aliens as well as the kids I have taught, the people who raised me, and the people who have always surrounded me. I write about ideas in some depth, but always from a sideways viewpoint that reflects my beliefs in non-violence, rationality, and love.
My mind works like a match in a firecracker factory. But I try not to use it for evil. And now that I am done revealing the secret of how Mickey’s brain percolates, feel free to tell me how stupid it all is and call me whatever bad monkey-names you can think of for me. I can take it. And when I take it, I most likely will use it to make something surprisingly good. Mickey-brain tea… now there’s a weird, wild, and wonderful metaphorical brew.
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