You know what a contradiction is, don’t you? It is whatever comes out of your wife’s mouth whenever you make a statement asserting that whatever you said is factually true. She will promptly and always explain to you how wrong you are… loudly… and in great detail. No matter if you happen to be provably right or not.
What’s that, you say? I’m wrong about that too? Of course, I am, dear. I only deserve the catfood cookies.
The fact is, if you raise your hand and give the teacher the correct answer often enough, you get a certain reputation amongst your classmates. Instead of continuing to call you, “dumbhead,” or “stupidhead,” or the simplified form of “caca-poo-poo-head” like they endearingly call everybody else, they begin calling you pejoratives like “Einstein,” or “Brainiac,” or “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” And they begin pointing out in detail everything that is wrong about you. How you dress… how you talk… especially how you laugh. You have become the enemy. You must be contradicted.
“You are wrong, Mickey!”
“So, I get to be Dumbhead again?”
“No. you are still “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” But you are wrong. We all think so, so that must be right.”
The truth is, Life itself is a contradiction. Considering the violence and hostility of the physical universe towards life, it is a miracle that anything at all is alive in the universe. The chaos of everything guarantees that if you are born into the miracle of life, then at some point, caused by a nearly infinite variety of possible aids to chaos, you will die. Order is whittled away into chaos. Civilizations fall eventually. Things die all the time.
But if all order must, by physical laws of the universe, be broken down into chaos, then, how is it that we have any order at all in the first place? Where does order come from? I’d give you a possible answer. But I would just be contradicted by the majority
Except for fundamentalist Christians who would say, “Let me think for a moment about why you are still wrong… and then I’ll tell you what I think the Bible says about why you are actually still wrong.”
One thing about being “only book-smart, but without common sense” that makes being contradicted all the time worth it, is that the more challenged the answers you come up with are, the more deeply you dig into them, and the more of a real-world understanding of why I am wrong about everything begins to make a bit more sense. Or not. Because I’m probably wrong in your estimation anyway.
Brekka the female Telleron Tadpole is accidentally eaten by the flesh-eating flower from outer space known as Lester (both heads seen here are actually Lester,) But Brekka’s species of amphibianoid alien is poisonous to him/her/or it. so he vomits her out again, having juiced her just enough to grant her telepathy with the plant and all its buds. They become best of friends. This scene comes from the novel Stardusters and Space Lizards.
Filch is a Dungeons and Dragons character from the 1980’s. He is a Gypsy, pickpocket, thief, trap-master, and all around disgusting twelve-year-old boy. (A sixth-grader if he ever went to school.)
He was a D&D rogue used as a character by a 16-year-old band nerd who went on to attend undergraduate college at Notre Dame.
This was the title banner first used on my novel-writing Tuesday posts.
My illustration of psoriasis/arthritis/eczema suffering.
October 2016
I told teacher stories in the fall of 2016, the second start of a school year after I retired. Randy was a pain in the posterior, extremely smart, and my biggest classroom clown. He saw the fins on the back of my Ford Torino and decided he would call me “Batman” my second year of teaching, 1982. In October he wore a Batman Halloween Mask (a cheap plastic one,) and before he could call me Batman, I addressed him in front of everyone, “I’m so glad you could attend my class today, Battyman, but you will need to go by your secret identity during class.” After that, Battyman was what the other 8th graders called him for the rest of the year.
Me as a teacher, holding the big pencil in front of ESL beasties.
Today I have a low-grade fever. A slight cough. No sign of Covid yet, and I am fully vaccinated. But I have been to Walmart without a mask and get regular flu regularly. And it could also be a sinus infection again due to high pollen counts and neighborhood grass-cutting.
But the truly frustrating thing is that I had planned to go tomorrow to Bluebonnet Nudist Park, give them a copy of my nudist novel, and meet some of the members of that establishment that I didn’t meet in 2017.
The frustrating thing is that this marks the fifth time that I had planned to go back to Bluebonnet for a second visit. And now the plans are canceled yet again by illness.
As ever, I remain mostly a closet nudist. Me being a nudist now in the twilight years of my life is mostly a joke I tell, only loosely based on reality.
Part of the problem is the fact that I simply waited too long in my life to give in to the urge to be a nudist. I was one from childhood onward, but always too afraid of the unknown to try it openly. Especially after being assaulted at the ripe old age of ten.
My real opportunity came when I had a girlfriend in the 1980’s whose sister lived with her husband and children in a clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin. I met nudists there fully committed to the lifestyle and who encouraged me to join the movement, even after I broke up with that girlfriend. There were limited opportunities to become a nudist then. A park near Houston, a park near San Antonio, a nude beach on Lake Travis (Hippie Hollow,) and clubs in the Austin area that met in members’ homes. I only ever visited those places with clothes on. I never actually tried it. And now that I am old, I regret the opportunities missed.
Now I am old and ill and unable to express my love of nudism and naturism except through art and fiction. Of course, it has always been a very visual-only experience for me. No touching was ever involved. Whatever sexual feelings there were were always sublimated and deeply buried or strictly controlled.
And, as always, I didn’t absolutely need to share these normally private sort of details, but it seems my art and writing make me far more naked to the world than walking around a nudist park ever could.
The vile Greek God of computer malfunctions, Sparkensputter Failtolodicuss, put his curse on this post yesterday as I almost had it completed. He waved his dead skunk, the symbol of his unique power, and made WordPress delete my work and instantly save the changes. I did some cussing and vowed to try and reassemble the post today. It was intended to be a continuation of Action Figure Cartoons, starring Captain Action. We shall see if Sparkensputter manages to thwart me again today. He is hell at thwarting.
So here is a brief and goofy explanation of what has happened so far. Captain Carl Action and the Action Guy Action Team defeated the evil Dr. Evil as he tried to take over Mickey’s library. You can find that whole mess in Mickey’s vault by clicking here.
Captain Carl Action not only defeated the evil Dr. Evil, he removed and stole Dr. Evil’s evil removable brain. So Emperor Ming of Mongo, an evil incarnation of the evil Dr. Evil, came up with a plan to retrieve the brain by un-boxing one of Mickey’s mint-in-box bargain bin dolls… er, action figures. You can review that whole mess here.
So, that brings us to today’s episode in the seemingly endless story of the sequel of a seemingly endless story.
Captain Carl Action has taken the evil brain of the evil Dr. Evil to the Action Guy Action Team Headquarters in the Fortress of Ineptitude, located on top of a useless computer in Mickey’s studio.
As seen in this dramatic scene, you can probably tell that the Action Guy Action Team Headquarters is run by the Captain Action Council, made up of Captain Action in his Flash Gordon costume, the mint-in-box Captain Victor Action, and the vintage Captain Action in his Steve Canyon costume. You can also probably tell by Steve Canyon’s goofy brain-eating bug comment that none of them are any brighter than Captain Carl Action. They have all decided to rely on the dolls of Mickey’s big-headed dolls collection. That decision also reeks of lack of brightness.
Captain Carl Action has once again delegated primary responsibility for the situation to a group of dolls who are very good at guarding Crackerjacks. It was fortunate that DC Comics recently released a new set of DC Super Hero Girls to attract Mickey’s collecting OCD. It meant that big-headed Supergirl was available now to be an actual super-powered guardian. Still, she had to find a strategy that would succeed. So she turned to her crackerjack team for advice.
Now, I hate to second-guess Supergirl, but why is she asking an evil bunny for advice? And how did an evil bunny even get on to a gig like being part of the big-headed dolls’ crackerjack team?
Shelf of Severed Heads?!!!? That doesn’t sound right.
Oh, my! This is really not looking good for our heroes. Stay tuned until next time… whenever the heck that is… same batty time, same batty channel. And phooey on you, Sparkensputter Failtolodicuss!
One of the biggest problems with being an action figure aficionado with raging hoarding disorder is the fact that every new dolly has it’s own personality… and sometimes its own evil agenda. Once you own too many of these things, especially the evil ones, it is no longer possible to properly pay attention to what they are up to.
The last installment of Action Figure Comics had the hero, Captain Action (specifically Captain Carl Action) thwarting the evil Doctor Evil by taking away his evil removable brain. (I know I use the word evil far too often in describing the evil Doctor Evil, but he is also repetitively redundant.) I had thought this Achilles’ heel of Dr. Evil’s… er, rather, this Achilles’ brain of the evil Doctor Evil was just too convenient a solution to the problem presented by this irrepressible evil bad guy. But as a rule I find ignorance is bliss. I know now that I was wrong. That was a terrible rule to follow. As a former teacher you are supposed to know that ignorance is not bliss… it is evil. After 31 years of fighting the War Against Ignorance in my classroom, you would think I would remember this. I should’ve been watching Emperor Ming of Mongo more closely… or should that be closlier? Battle scars from the War have left me unsure.
One has to recall that Evil Emperor Ming is really just another incarnation of the evil Doctor Evil under his mask… although not one with a removable brain. Notice that his minion, the evil Doctor Mindbender is no less evil when it comes to redundant use of the word “evil”… and he even commits the further sin of repetitively saying “no-good goody-goody”. “Ach! Ja! Evil use of bad grammar makes my battle scars hurt more!” cries the former teacher driven to write this hopeless drivel.
What’s this? He means to destroy the new bargain bin wrestler doll… I mean, action figure that I just bought? I had meant to keep that as a mint in box collector’s item until the lucha wrestling fans of Sin Cara are as old as I am now. Then I will find one of them with hoarding disorder and sell it for possibly eight dollars. I will have made a whole dollar by the time I’m 109!
Yes, I should’ve been watching that dang evil Emperor Ming more closely! Now he has ruined my mint-in-box action figure by taking it out of the box. What bad thing will he do next? Stay tuned to this goofy old blog. You never know, I may actually continue this story if I can keep better track of what these goofy little dolls are doing.
In the background of several of my novels, there lurk little people with magic powers. In this modern age of science they still exist, but are reduced in size to about three inches tall for the adults. As I am now working on a book set in their world, I am therefore using today’s post to elucidate what they are and categorize them a bit.
Butterfly Children is a nickname for the winged fairies. And most fairies not only have wings, but don’t wear clothing because, not only do shirts, jackets, jerkins, and such interfere with wings, but they, like me, prefer to be nude if possible.
The Butterfly Children are not really made of flesh and blood, but rather coherent magical energy. That is the reason they rarely become spellcasters themselves, but can lend their energies to the spell-casting Sylphs; witches, wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, liches, and some Storybooks.
They refer to us as “the Slow Ones” because we are easily fooled into not seeing them for what they are. They use concealing glammers to convince us that we are seeing a bug or a bird or a glare of sunlight instead of what they actually are. They also have the ability to allow slow ones to see them if they choose to voice the necessary spells. Some rare slow ones are able to see through their glammers and view them in spite of their wishes.
Sylphs and Elves : The Man-shaped Fey
Once, long ago, the Fey Children who looked human could pass themselves off as slow ones. The Elves, of course, had pointed ears to hide. But they looked like what we would call “regular people” because they were our size. But human science developed things that stop magical energies like brass or drain magical energies like iron and copper. The Fey became smaller and smaller. Things like discarded nails and lost pennies decreased the places where they could live and build homes.
Eli Tragedy (in the middle above) is an example of both an Elf (with pointed ears) and a magic-using Sorcerer. His apprentices, Bob and Mickey, are both Sylphs. Like Butterfly Children, many Sylphs would rather not wear clothes. Magic-using Sylphs and Elves learn to wear clothes because garments can be invested with protective spells.
Mickey is different than other Sylphs in that he has been bitten by a wererat and has been infected by lycanthropy. Since he is now an uncontrolled wererat, he constantly looks like a boy with a mouse head and tail, a fur-covered boy’s body, and paws instead of feet.
Sylphs can occur in many different non-manlike forms. The Mouse from Cornucopia is a Sylph in the form of an anthropomorphic mouse. Radasha, also seen to the left, is a Faun. Pixies, Nixies, Boggarts, Gremlins, Centaurs, Minotaurs, and other magical creatures have gotten far smaller since ancient times when human beings added greatly to the magical energy loose in the world through their imaginations, faiths, fears, nightmares, and dreams.
All of those magical creatures have odd and sometimes horrific shapes. You can see that in the insect-like Pixie to the right.
Storybooks : Immortals Amongst the Fey
The other Fey Children that need a special mention are the Storybooks like Silkie pictured in the acorn beret and leaf dress to the right. These lucky Sylphs, Elves, or other Fey Children who’ve been singled out by slow ones in their slow-ones’ books and literature are made magically immortal by the power of stories told by humans, especially those preserved by print. They no longer die. They can no longer be killed or grievously wounded.
General Tuffaney Swift is another good example of a Storybook. He exists as an immortal because some of his early adventures, were overheard and written down in stories about Tom Thumb. He was instrumental in bringing Grandma Gretel and her daughter, Anneliese, into the Fey World. She is responsible through her magical baking skills for the entire races of Gingerbread Children and Cookie Monsters.
So, there’s a brief overview of the Kingdom of Tellosia and the World of the Fey Children.
Every Dungeons and Dragons player, especially game masters, know about the oubliette. In the foundations of towers in the castles of the French you often find a windowless room with the only entrance in the ceiling. It is a dark hole where you throw captives you want to simply forget. In fact, the name comes from the word in Middle French, “oublier” which translates to “forget”. Now, of course, as a former school teacher, I know about oubliettes. I have been in one more than once. I have tossed bad kids in there more than once. But the thing I had to learn about “forget holes” is that there is always a way out.
I had a principal who decided I had betrayed him because he overheard me talking sympathetically to a teacher he had been berating for asking that he discipline students she sent to him for disruptive behavior. He overheard me saying that he would be more understanding if he tried to manage a class himself once in a while. For my indiscretion he took away my gifted class and gave me in its place a class composed entirely of students who had been repeatedly sent to him by teachers for being disruptive and unmanageable. It was a class from hell. Really… from hell… Satan’s stepson was the first student he put in that class. I was told I would have to discipline them entirely without help from him. But as tough as it is teaching twenty dysfunctional learners at once with no outside help, it was do-able. In fact, I liked some of the kids in that class. (Hated some too, though, because you can’t always like every kid no matter how crappy they act.) I didn’t manage to teach them much English. They all spoke Skuggboy fluently the whole time. But I did endure. In fact, when that principal was suddenly jobless two-thirds of the way through the year and replaced by a new principal, I got a chance to get some back. She overhead Satan’s stepson doing his comic stand-up routine in response to my specific directions and came in to remind him who was in charge in the classroom and who deserved respect. That reminder lasted for a good fifteen minutes and was a prelude to a parent-principal conference that same afternoon. I saw his evil smile turned upside down for the first time that school year.
Whenever I put a student in the oubliette (asked them to stand outside the classroom door until I could talk to them about their bad behavior) I never left them there more than five minutes. I would quickly give the class the directions they needed to continue on their own, and then I would go out to execute the prisoner. It usually was an explanation of how I wanted them to behave, and then giving them a choice, whether they wanted to go back in and do the right thing, or they wanted to visit the office with a written explanation by me of exactly what they did wrong. Even though nothing would probably happen to them in the office, they rarely chose that option.
So, there is always a way out… but there are many forms of the oubliette, and no one is immune to being sent there.
It was not the kind of ride in the country that I really wanted to take. The skeleton walked with a really random sort of limp-and-jerky motion that pitched me regularly out of my seat in the skull.
“Kackenfurchtbar, can’t you control these stupid bones better than this?” I asked the little moron severed demon-head.
“Derfentwinkle, you expect too much! All I am is a head. I have to control this entire skeleton with phantom muscles made out of what little demon telekinesis I have left in my broken little skull.”
“Kronomarke put you under my control and this pile of loosely connected bones is what you are supposed to be in control of.”
“I am doing the skunky best I flipping can!”
I know, I know… You did hear that right. One of the few actual spells the dorky necromancer taught me was how to turn demon swearwords into euphemisms. My name is actually Derfentwinkle. I am a two-and-a-half-inch tall Sylph, six-slow-one-years old, but all the Fey children tend to age two years for every one year a human child would age. So, I am a girl Sylph on the verge of becoming a Sylvan woman.
After the last jolt, I picked myself up and sat back on the pile of dandelion blossoms that I used as a seat to look out on the cornfield we were trying to navigate through. The left eye socket of the empty human skull had a hole through the back that Kronomarke had carved out to serve as a pilot’s window. Being a severed head, Kack needed to see out of the skeleton through my eyes.
“All I can see is corn,” Kack complained.
“Well, you don’t want me to make you walk out on the gravel road, do you?”
“Kronomarke says that the last apprentice did that and got blown to pieces by a slow-one farm hand with a shottygun. That doesn’t sound like a good thing that we might want to happen to us.”
“Shottygun?”
“It’s like a slow-one magic wand. It throws lots of high-speed pebbles at you at very high speed.”
“Did the apprentice survive that?”
“Why do you think the master had to kidnap you?”
“Slow ones are not used to seeing walking skeletons, are they?”
“No, definitely not.”
“Look, we are coming out of the cornfield. Straight ahead is the slow-one village named Norwall.” I pointed as I said it, but the gesture meant nothing to the stupid severed head.
“Good, good. We have almost reached Cair Tellos. It is built into the willow tree on the north side of town.”
“But that thing straight ahead that we have to cross is the Shiggway Drei.”
“Don’t use the gobbellun name for it. Call it Highway Three in English,” Kack said smugly.
“Right. When we cross the thing the zoomdahs ride on… er, the cars drive on… we will be seen by everyone. Including farm hands with shottyguns.”
“But the reason we are walking in an animated human skeleton is that it scares humans as well as the Fey children. We will scare them out of our path.”
At that moment, the walking skeleton we were trying to steer into the human village stumbled into the fence around the cornfield. The fence was made with two strands of barbed wire along the top.
The skull was pitched forward at such an angle that I was nearly vaulted out of the eyehole. “Pull us back a bit, Kack. We’re getting tangled in the barbed wire.”
“Isn’t it called bobbed wire?”
“Only by the dumbest slow-ones I’ve seen. They have to be the dumbest ones if I know English gooder than they do.”
Kack used his magical mind-strings to pull the puppet skeleton upright again. But as we climbed over the fence, the barbs in the wire pulled at the ghost-flesh and ligaments that held the bones together. A lower leg popped off, and Kack had to make the skeleton hop on one leg bone as it reached down, retrieved the leg, and popped it back on the dismembered knee joint.
Then we stumbled across the pavement, hurrying the last twenty yards because a big, big truck zoomdah came roaring at us from the west.
Lurching into town and spinning over another fence, we found ourselves in a field of soybeans. We stumbled on towards the abandoned school yard where the willow tree stood.
Two human boys, each towering at least four feet in the air, were playing a ball-tossing game on the old ball-tossing field.
“Ah! The zombie apocalypse has started!” cried one slow-one.
“Bobby, that’s just a skeleton, like the one that killed you in the Swords and Sorcerer’s game last night. They are only six-hit-point monsters. We could kill it with our baseball bat.”
I was personally very alarmed. I did not know that slow ones had any control-bat spells. And I had never heard of the species known as a baseball bat.
“No! Let’s go get your brother and his squirrel rifle. Zombies are dangerous!”
“We’re doomed now, aren’t we?” I asked Kack.
“Probably. You should’ve worn that armor the necromancer gave you.”
“Nonsense! I’m a Sylph, not an Elf. Sylphs are meant by the god Pan to be naked. Especially the female ones.” I know they only gave me the armor to protect me, but I wasn’t feeling like wearing anything at the moment that I wasn’t willing to die in.
“Well, turn towards the willow tree. If we must die, let’s go out fighting.”
We turned the skeleton towards the tree with the fairy castle in it. We started to run. We were doomed.
I returned from my trip to Iowa to attend my mother’s funeral to find a Twitter friend has given me a few glowing reviews on books I was not expecting to earn any reviews at all with.
Gerardo Cisneros is a nudist from Twitter who not only reads and enjoys my nudist-related stories, but my other books, including YA novels as well.
Gerardo Cisneros-S.@gcs_nudista Nudist since 1996, founding and former Board Member of the Federación Nudista de México, A.C.; AANR member since 2000. #NormalisingNaturism#NormalizingNaturism
He retweets my Twitter blatherings and promotions and does a lot to help promote my work. The review on Catch a Falling Star was really unexpected. That book, still under contract with I-Universe, is over-priced even in e-book form. Gerardo does a better job of promoting my work than the I-Universe publicists that I had to pay for their work ever did.
Amazingly he even read these two books in their proper sequence, a thing no one else has ever done despite a few of my books having sequels and companion books.
He even read and reviewed the messy first novel I ever completed while still being a teacher in deep South Texas.
Horatio T. Dogg, Super Sleuth is the novella I most recently published.
I write novels because it allows me to deal with the deepest, darkest things in my life. I have trauma as a sexual assault victim from my childhood. I have lost loved ones. I have been a long-time teacher of middle-school-aged kids. Some of whom I grew to love deeply with only the most proper of teacher-child connections possible. I have lost some kids that I loved to violence, accidents, suicide, and one to AIDS. I have been on the dark doorstep of suicidal thoughts more than once myself. I have been broke and broken and bankrupt and mortified. And all of that makes me write novels with humor, imagination, poignance, and love. I have labored hard to turn darkness into light.
And it all becomes worth it when I connect with a reader and give them something of myself that brings a smile to their face. Or a truly heartfelt tear to their eye, because that can be a beautiful, artful thing too.
Gerardo CIsneros, Ted Bun, and other Twitter nudists have done more to fulfill my purpose in life than even my other literary Twitter friends and publishing acquaintances. I am blessed with wonderful readers.
The book I have been using as a demonstration of my writing process, showing you the second edit of each chapter at one chapter per week, is now finished. It is also published and available on Amazon.
The book is a novella, meaning it is only about 15,000 words. I have not shown you the last few chapters on Tuesdays, but if you have been reading every chapter in order, it isn’t too much to expect to charge you 99 cents to get the whole thing from Amazon, is it? Not everything in life is free. At least, not in my experience.
The next Tuesday offer will be The Necromancer’s Apprentice, either another novella, or a short comic fantasy novel.
Catch a Falling Star 
Contradictions
You know what a contradiction is, don’t you? It is whatever comes out of your wife’s mouth whenever you make a statement asserting that whatever you said is factually true. She will promptly and always explain to you how wrong you are… loudly… and in great detail. No matter if you happen to be provably right or not.
What’s that, you say? I’m wrong about that too? Of course, I am, dear. I only deserve the catfood cookies.
The fact is, if you raise your hand and give the teacher the correct answer often enough, you get a certain reputation amongst your classmates. Instead of continuing to call you, “dumbhead,” or “stupidhead,” or the simplified form of “caca-poo-poo-head” like they endearingly call everybody else, they begin calling you pejoratives like “Einstein,” or “Brainiac,” or “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” And they begin pointing out in detail everything that is wrong about you. How you dress… how you talk… especially how you laugh. You have become the enemy. You must be contradicted.
“You are wrong, Mickey!”
“So, I get to be Dumbhead again?”
“No. you are still “Supernerd, taah tah taaah!” But you are wrong. We all think so, so that must be right.”
The truth is, Life itself is a contradiction. Considering the violence and hostility of the physical universe towards life, it is a miracle that anything at all is alive in the universe. The chaos of everything guarantees that if you are born into the miracle of life, then at some point, caused by a nearly infinite variety of possible aids to chaos, you will die. Order is whittled away into chaos. Civilizations fall eventually. Things die all the time.
But if all order must, by physical laws of the universe, be broken down into chaos, then, how is it that we have any order at all in the first place? Where does order come from? I’d give you a possible answer. But I would just be contradicted by the majority
Except for fundamentalist Christians who would say, “Let me think for a moment about why you are still wrong… and then I’ll tell you what I think the Bible says about why you are actually still wrong.”
One thing about being “only book-smart, but without common sense” that makes being contradicted all the time worth it, is that the more challenged the answers you come up with are, the more deeply you dig into them, and the more of a real-world understanding of why I am wrong about everything begins to make a bit more sense. Or not. Because I’m probably wrong in your estimation anyway.
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