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.
























































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.
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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Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, Mickey, Paffooney, satire, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as Metacognition