Category Archives: humor

August 23, 2022 · 2:32 am

AeroQuest 5… Canto 145

Canto 145 – Senators and Senate Stuff

The biggest debate in the arguing about forming the New Star League had been about which planet was the best place to host the capitol of the newly formed multi-star government.  The idea had formed around the planet Don’t Go Here, which was entirely too provincial and had never had a space-faring tech level before.  In spite of its sentient orbiting space port, the Ancient construct known as Frieda, retrieved from the device made by the Ancients called the Crown of Stars, it was determined that the planetary system was simply not equipped to be an interstellar capitol.

Tron Blastarr, leader of the pirate space forces establishing the new union of solar systems, wanted his home base of Outpost to be the new capitol, but the main inhabited planet, Outpost itself, was an airless rock with no room for much beyond Nebulon colonies and military installations.

Xavier Tkriashav, the political leader who had brought all the worlds of the Psion exiles and the Lupin pirate hordes into the union wanted his home world of Zarane to be the capitol.  But that world did not really have a central enough location to work well.

So, the leaders, meeting on the centralized world of Gaijin with its hybrid Gaijinese people and relatively high tech level, decided to build the new capitol in the city of Kiro on the planet Gaijin. 

Tkriashav and the bald immortal Dr. Naylund Smith both retired to the Gaijinese tea garden behind Dr. Smith’s house with their cups of steaming white-stork tea.

“Well, Dr. Smith, it seems that everybody got what they wanted in the meeting.  The constitution is practically written already.”

“Yes, you, it seems, got the choicest position, making yourself Senator Prime.”

The turbaned Zaranian smiled.  “You will be my Number Two, so you will succeed me if anything happens.”

“Yes, but it was not a looked-for opportunity.  I have other matters that urgently demand my time.”  Dr. Smith stared into his cup of tea.

“But you are an immortal.  Surely if anyone has all the time they will ever need to do anything, it is you.”

“I go on living practically no matter what happens to my body, it is true.  But my precious daughter is not immortal.  Even now, Sara is with Ged Aero on a mission she may not return alive from.”

“But she’s only one of how many children you have sired over your three-thousand-year-plus lifetime?”

“She may be only one of many, but they are all gone now in the well of time, and I vowed that her mother would be the very last woman I ever loved and then outlived.  That kind of loss is taxing to the soul.”

 “Yes, the sentiment is certainly understandable.  But it is a great thing we are undertaking.  Never before have so many different sentient species come together to form an interstellar planetary alliance.  We have always been ruled in the past by the members of the Earther Human Race and the  Human-Galtorrian Fusion Race.  But now there are the Molluscan M’uduai Race, the Japanese/Sylvani Race we are now calling the Gaijinese, the Psion Race of Zarane and her sister worlds of the Old Psion Empire, the Pale Humans of the Geonee Race, the deep-space Nebulon Race, the Lupins, and the Dion Saurian People, as well as all the Genetically Altered Races of the Faulkner Genetics Worlds.”

“An impressive list to be sure.  But can they hold together as one people with common interests in this new government?”

“I don’t see why you would doubt it?”

“Maybe because of the endless warring and race-hatred of the many human races.  You know how the Imperium is.  Zombie like Mechanoids, dead bodies brought back to life artificially are the backbone of their armies, space marines, space navy, and special forces.  The ruling elite see all alien races as expendable and exploitable.  They don’t even treat Dions and M’uduai as worthy of being called people.  And they enslave and exterminate Nebulons and Lupins.”

“Yes, and we are not them.  We are not Imperials.  We will hold ourselves to a higher standard.”

“You have no idea how often I have heard that same sort of pronouncement come out of the mouths of well-meaning world rulers and empire builders.  It almost never goes the way they see it in their glorious visions.”

“It will be different this time.  The Prophecy of Xhan says it will be so.”

“I too have studied the prophecy, Xavier.  I have also studied much too much history firsthand to have your confidence.”

The younger man smiled and softly slapped the old immortal on the back.  “Fear not.  There is much in the Prophecy of the White Spider yet to be realized.  We are making history.  But it is history that is foretold and will certainly come true.”

“It will if Ged Aero succeeds in his quest.  And it will if the space forces on our side can get it all together to fight off evil old Admiral Tang, and the darker forces behind him.  You would be wise to prepare for at least some parts of your prophecy not to come true in the way you are expecting.”

There was no doubting that Dr. Smith had a point.  And even Xavier’s clairvoyant Psion abilities couldn’t remove the darker clouds from among all the cumulus constructs of the possibilities that lay ahead.

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August 22, 2022 · 7:18 pm

550 on a Bad Weather Day

Mickey prefers to be red. In fact, during baseball season, Cardinal Nation Red. But on this day when he has reached 550 days in a row with at least one post, Mickey is blue. Blue with the rain and the pain and the failure to gain, not Toronto Blue Jays blue.

Mickey is lost at sea when it comes to the question, “What should I write about today, tomorrow, and the day after that?” He had some big ideas to write about… but they seem to be too big for his little head to really get around.

He wanted to write something about sex and sexuality and sex education. But you already know why he’s a clueless idiot on this particular topic. His sex life was screwed up at ten and further messed over by religious teachings, and even more religious teachings when he tried to change his religion. So, he really has no wisdom to share on the matter. He is better off sticking within his innocent little pre-pubescent mindset where he can be perpetually no more controversial than a twelve-year-old. But by now you have probably learned enough about Mickey to know that he is enough of a real writer to not be able to stay within the safe zone. You will probably be pretty upset with him over some post in the near future. (I know that is partly wrong too. Being upset is never pretty.)

This weekend he actually had an uptick in views on WordPress, probably due to making the Twitter Nudists aware of his post called, “Why I Need to Be Naked.” They went and read it and looked at the pictures and told Mickey via Twitter that it was good (apparently not realizing you can Like things on WordPress.) And they also looked through his old posts for the other nudist things on Catch a Falling Star. “Free to Be Naked” and “Nudist Notions” got dug up and read again and again. And I should warn you, more nudists than ever are following Mickey on Twitter now. He will probably bore you with more nudist-friendly stuff.

Now that Mickey is finally clear of bankruptcy, he started buying and collecting dolls again. Chilly Willy is not a plastic doll, but the rest of these are new since the bankruptcy ended. There is a good chance he will write about this subject again too, though clearly, it is a sign that his mental stability is going South fast. Old coots on Medicare should probably not be playing with dolls so much.

But Mickey is still blue, though he longs to be red. Arthritis pain, diabetic problems like sores, memory loss, and low blood sugar all work on his mood in very bad ways. But you never know when the sun will come out again. And, since we have been scorched by hot weather for more than a month, a little cool blue might be better than red hot anyway.

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August 22, 2022 · 3:27 am

The World is a B-Movie

Yes, I am saying the world I live in is a low-budget commercial movie made without literary or artistic pretensions. You know, the kind where movie makers learn their craft, taking big risks with smaller consequences, and making the world of their picture reflect their heart rather than the producer’s lust for money.

Mostly what I am talking about are the movies I remember from late-night Saturday TV in black and white (regardless of whether or not the movie was made in Technicolor) and the less-risky as well as more-likely-good Saturday matinees on Channel 3. Movies made in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. They were perfect, of course, for the forbidden Midnight Movie on the show called Gravesend Manor. I had to sneak downstairs to watch it on Saturday nights with the volume turned way down low. (Not that Mom and Dad didn’t know. Well, maybe they didn’t know how many of those I watched completely naked… maybe.)

I watched this one when I was twelve, late night on an October Saturday. I had a bed-sheet with me to pull over my head at the scariest parts. Frankenstein was a crashed astronaut brought back to life by the magic of space radiation. He was uglier than sin, but still the hero of the movie, saving the Earth from invading guys in gorilla suits and scary masks (none of which looked like the movie poster.)

This one, starring James Whitmore, a really good B-Movie actor, was about giant ants coming up from the sewers and the underground to eat the city.

I would end up watching it again twenty years later when I was wearing clothes and not alone in the dark house lit only by a black-and-white TV screen.

I realized on the second viewing that it was actually a pretty good movie in spite of cheesy special effects. And I realized too that I had learned from James Whitmore’s hero character that, in times of crisis, you have to run towards the trouble rather than away from it, a thing that I used several times in my teaching career with fights and tornadoes and even rattlesnakes visiting the school campus looking to eat a seventh-grader or something (though it was a bad idea for the snake even if it had been successful.)

This one, of course, taught me that monsters liked to carry off pretty girls in bikinis. And not just on the poster, either. But it was the hero that got the girl, not the monster. This movie taught me that it sucks to be the monster. Though it also taught me that it was a good movie to take your pajamas off for and watch naked when you are thirteen.

But not all B-movies had to be watched late night on Saturdays. This movie was one of the first ones that I got to go to the movie theater to see by myself. (My sisters and little brother were still too young and got nightmares too easily to see such a movie.) It came out when I was in my teens and Mom and Dad began thinking of me as an adult once… or even possibly twice in a month.

And not all B-movies were monster movies, gangster movies, and westerns. Some, like a lot of Danny Kaye’s movies, were movies my Dad and my grandparents were more than happy to watch with me. I saw this one in both black-and-white and color. And I learned from this that it was okay to take advantage of happy accidents, like a case of mistaken identity, and using your wits, your creative singing ability, and your inexplicable good luck to win the day for everybody but the bad guys armed only with your good sense of humor.

And some of the best movies I have ever seen, judging by what I learned about movies as literature from Professor Loring Silet in his Modern Film Class at Iowa State University, are by their nature B-movies.

I am using movie posters in this blog post only from movies I have personally seen. (And I admit that not all of them are strictly “good” movies according to Professor Silet, but I like them all.)

Feel free to tell me in the comments if you have seen any of these movies yourself. I am open to all opinions, comments, and confessions.

This one is based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
I saw this one in college. You had to be 18 at the time to even buy a ticket.
I actually think that this is one of the best movies ever made. It will always make my own personal top-ten list.

I live in a B-movie world. The production values around me are not the top-dollar ones. But the stories are entertaining. The real-life heroes still run towards the problem. And it still sucks to be the monster. But it has always been worth the price of the ticket. And during my time on Earth here, even in 2020, I plan on staying till the end of the picture. I go nowhere until I see the Best Boy’s name in the end credits. And maybe not even then.

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Filed under art criticism, heroes, humor, monsters, movie review, strange and wonderful ideas about life, TV as literature, TV review

August 20, 2022 · 5:28 pm

Drawings that use Metaphors

Ah, Reluctant Rabbit using the big pencil in the front of the classroom. What could that be a metaphor for? How about teaching kids by showing them how? You teach writing by writing in front of the class, talking out loud about your process, editing yourself, and polishing your writing in front of those who need to learn those skills.

So, here is the metaphor in action. Me teaching 7th graders.

Is an avatar not a metaphor for me?

Mr. Dickens, Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Disney, and Mr. Poe… do I really need to explain this metaphor?
If the horns are the metaphors, what does that say about my boys?
What’s the meaning of the metaphors here?
Foolish bravery, positive thinking, and terrible circumstances (That’s not a parachute in his backpack, it’s the picnic lunch he would share with Gretchen after the mission.)

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August 19, 2022 · 2:04 pm

How NOT to Tell a Story – Part Two

Yesterday, in Part 1, I tried to convince you that, “You should never take too long a time writing a story” because I have written some twenty-plus-year-long novels that took me forever to write, and I am an unsuccessful writer. So, you should not do things the way I did. (Some might accuse me of trying to use a little too much irony, claiming I am a bit too obscure about what I am actually telling you that you should actually do… But, remember, I advised you not to take advice from Mickey. And you need irony in your diet anyway to avoid irony-poor tired blood.) Therefore I am going to advise you further that, “You should never make your characters too complex and interesting.”

After all, there are Mickian characters that are literally blue with red patches on their cheeks that absorb harmful gamma radiation and make those characters immune to radiation sickness from exposure in deep space. You don’t want to make readers so curious about a character that they waste time reading more and more closely to discover more about that character.

Junior Aero, the alien Nebulon boy in the AeroQuest stories is just one example. Not only is he a member of an alien race that are belittled as “Space Smurfs” and treated to racial bigotry based on skin color and not being able to speak English at first, but he is also gifted with mental “Psion powers” that allow him to telepathically read computer minds, even the sentient and intelligent ones.

And some of my characters are green with shark-like fins on their heads. They were born on Starships and orbiting artificial satellites like the one going around Barnard’s Star. They are like George Jetson here, named after his father, Xiar’s, favorite Earther cartoon show character from the 60’s. Not only is he a green-skinned amphibious humanoid life-form from a different star system, he learns a lot about himself in the adventure he has in the novel Stardusters and Space Lizards. He goes from being a narcissistic space-pilot wannabee into becoming a humble crash survivor and expedition leader who helps save an entire planet from ecological disaster. And he even gets a girlfriend out of the deal in Menolly his nestmate and fellow survivor.

Characters like that are far too interesting and developed to be good for your reputation as a serious producer of money-making fiction stories. And you certainly don’t want to waste time on developing the same characters in multiple books.

I used the character of Valerie Clarke in the book When the Captain Came Calling as an eleven-year-old protagonist who loses her father and has to rely on older kids and good friends to save herself from depression and the trash-pits of despair.

I used her again as a main character in Snow Babies where she befriends a mysterious stranger and also finds a runaway boy who makes her think seriously about life and young love, all in the middle of a deadly blizzard.

She’s also in the book Sing Sad Songs where she learns to negotiate love with a boy who also lost a parent, in fact, both parents and a twin sister, in a car crash that made him a lonely orphan. She not only has to face the loss of her own loved ones, but has to help somebody else to face the same thing, in fact, more than one other somebody.

She’s also a character in The Bicycle-Wheel Genius and Fools and Their Toys.

It is unthinkable to use a character that much and make her grow and change in so many different ways. She should be used only once in a simple and clear way. Like, maybe, Mark Twain’s use of Huckleberry Finn.

Huck, as a character was only used in the books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective… and… never mind. Forget I even said anything about Huck Finn. In fact, maybe this whole post is so ironic it’s making my story-teller gears all rusty. Never-the-less, let me threaten you with a possible part three.

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Filed under characters, goofiness, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, writing teacher

August 18, 2022 · 2:29 am

How NOT to Tell a Story

If you have come to my blog in hopes of gleaning some key advice about how to write novels or tell a story, then the wisest advice I can give you is, “Do not take any advice Mickey gives seriously.” He used to be a writing teacher in public schools. That is true. But he is also the writer of weird surrealistic novels full of purple paisley prose. And he is not a successful novelist like Steven King or J.K. Rowling. His writing advice is probably only worth ca-ca poo-poo.

So, let me tell you how NOT to write a novel.

Each of the novels I have written and displayed here took me more than twenty years from the moment I conceived of the idea, through plotting, rough drafts, revisions, re-plotting, expanding the story, to finally publishing them in 2017, 2018, and 2019. I developed the stories from real people, real events, and real themes that were a part of my life and added to each of the stories as time passed. So, obviously, you should never take too long a time writing a story. It is true that Snow Babies is the best novel I have ever written, and I count Sing Sad Songs, The Baby Werewolf, and When the Captain Came Calling among my best work. And I only spent one year in the writing of Aeroquest, which is, ironically, the worst thing I have ever written. So, you can see that following any advice Mickey might give you about taking your time with writing is obviously worthless. I took too long writing and publishing my best books, and that is why I will die a penniless, unknown writer.

But I admit to having even more bad advice to warn you not to take. More, I think, than I can put into this one post. So, I will Part-Two this particular essay and take up the topic again in the very near future. Or forget all about it completely. It has to be one of those.

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Filed under feeling sorry for myself, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, surrealism, writing teacher

August 17, 2022 · 8:42 pm

Treading Water

This is about being a writer, not a swimmer. But in a way, it is also about not drowning.

I have achieved some success as a writer. But my development economically is stagnant and I am treading water in the sea of money where sharks are circling intending to eat any value I may create.

I have, of course, created some value. If I had published my 21 books 25 years ago, and I had a contract with a major publishing house, I would be doing as well as some of the authors you see occasionally making best-seller lists today. I am not saying I would be a million-dollar celebrity author like Stephen King, James Patterson, or J. K. Rowling, but I would be a full-time writer making a decent living at it. I am not bragging. I have had a lot of literary education, and I know from input from professional editors and former employees of the major publishing houses that my skills as a storyteller are as good as, or even better than many of the traditionally-published authors today. I stood next to Terry Brooks (author of Sword of Shannara) in a MacDonald’s waiting for my Big Mac in Corpus Christi one time in the 1980s. As former English teachers both, we have a lot in common. But he started publishing in the 1970s, and he only taught for a couple of years. I taught for 31 years and only began seriously trying to get published in 2007.

Obviously, the publishing industry changed in the time between meeting Terry Brooks and getting published myself. Back then the major publishing houses were the gate-keepers, taking submissions and winnowing out the chaff to find the diamonds in the rough (Yes, that is a mixed metaphor, but either I don’t really care about that anymore, or somewhere along the way I have actually found a diamond or two growing alongside the grains of wheat.) If you wrote well enough to win a contract, they would offer you a standard twenty-thousand-dollar signing bonus and a book contract that would guarantee standard royalties for the duration of the book’s life in print. You would then be committed to whatever promotional book tours, lectures, and signings the publisher thought would be most effective, and your next book would have to be offered to them first. Of course, my first book would’ve been a commercial flop from the get-go, although that would probably not be the book I succeeded in publishing first.

Things no longer work like that. When I successfully got the first yes from a publisher in 2007, it was from Publish America. That was a total scam. They paid me one dollar to publish my book Aeroquest. But that wasn’t the scam part. They did publish the book, and they did pay me a dollar. But their attempt to make money did not come from that. I was supposed to do all my own editing and proofreading. They would do the formatting and the marketing. I had to compile a list of family and friends to receive a promotional letter. The only attempts they made to sell copies of my book were to those people on my list. They added typos to the final form of my book and then offered to fix all of that for a hefty fee. They made a couple of hundred dollars doing that. I got a total of six dollars in profits for myself. Publish America was sued out of existence in 2014, the same year that my contract with them was up and I got back the publishing rights to the book.

So, then, I vowed I was going to submit to a publishing house that was still open to submissions, and I found I-Universe which was an imprint for Penguin Books. I submitted a manuscript that they tepidly loved and agreed to publish, for a fee. It was explained to me that, in order to compete with things like Amazon, the traditional publishers were also putting more on their authors in order to guarantee they could still produce profits for shareholders and eliminate the risk from flops the way traditional publishing had always had to weather them. I would have to pay my own editors (company-provided professionals who were actually worth what they cost, I learned a lot from them.) I would also have to participate in and pay for marketing efforts. All told, it ended up costing me about five thousand dollars. And the pre-made cover they forced on me has no real connection to the story itself. (Nowhere in the comedy about aliens invading a small town in Iowa did any silhouette girl fly a kite at night. The girl characters were all green, fin-headed aliens.)

I didn’t feel as cheated by I-Universe even though I spent a lot more money with them. My book ended up winning two awards from them, Editor’s Choice and Rising Star Awards. And I learned everything I know about the publishing world from the good people I worked with. They were square with me, telling me that the traditional publishing business was dying, and they were all worried about their own jobs going away. They keyed me in on how to effectively open and present a good fictional story. They started me writing this blog, and they would’ve included me in many more marketing ventures to make my book profitable if I hadn’t gone bankrupt in 2017 and had sworn off paying them more money in 2014. They still try to get me to invest more money in marketing schemes. They hate seeing my award-winning book sit unprofitably unmarketed. But the total earnings in royalties that book has made is only sixteen dollars, and they will not cut my first royalties check until that reaches $25. Not gonna happen.

Then I killed a publisher with my next well-written book. PDMI Publishing LLC was enthusiastic about publishing my snowstorm opus, a comedy about orphans freezing to death in a small town (or, actually only almost freezing to death, to be less snarky about it.) But as I finished that book with a rookie editor that the firm had newly hired, they had to go out of business from losing too much money in a single year. They were not the only publisher to collapse financially in 2016.

So, my publishing solution was to turn to Amazon, slayer of traditional and small publishers alike.

With Amazon KDP I am free to publish anything and everything I want to publish. But I have to do everything myself. Writing, editing, formatting, proofreading, illustrating, designing book covers, and marketing are all entirely up to me. There are many successful authors on Amazon. Some of them even make more money than they spend. Amazon pays you monthly royalties, even if you only make two cents because somebody read four pages of one of your books that month on Kindle Unlimited.

But Amazon can freeze or delete your account for any reason at any time. And some of those decisions are made more by algorithm than any actual reader of your books. They can accuse you even of plagiarizing your own books if you are not careful. The whole scheme behind KDP is to do none of the work themselves, but pay out as little of the profits as possible to the authors and keep as much easy money as the scheme can generate.

So, I am a published author… for now. Writing whatever the hell I want and not caring much about whether I make any money or not. That’s not the point of being an author. You can’t be a starving artist if you are not actually an artist… and you can’t be one without starving either.

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August 17, 2022 · 1:31 am

Aunt Minnie’s Love Seat

This is a story about an innocuous piece of furniture in Great Aunt Minnie Efram’s house.  It was a little brown loveseat with carved wooden monster feet.

romance12

As the story begins, the little loveseat was sitting in the parlor in front of the small black and white television.  During the monthly Efram family card party, the love seat was the only place for the two of them to spend the evening.  But he was ten and he hated girls.  He had a reputation with the guys at school as a girl hater, and he couldn’t have it known that he was sitting on a loveseat with Uncle Henry’s stepdaughter, the one the guys all said they had seen eating her own boogers.

She was also ten, and in his class at school.  She liked to watch him more than any of the other boys.  But she didn’t know why.  She liked unicorns and the color pink, but she also kinda liked the way boys looked at her when she wore shorts.  And she liked seeing him in PE class at school, wearing shorts.  He was athletic and often won games in PE.

minnie1a

After two years of monthly card parties happening during at least three different months every year at Aunt Minnie’s place, he had discovered that girls didn’t actually smell bad, and this one actually listened when he talked about playing football, and how it made him feel when he scored the seventy-five-yard touchdown.  In fact, the more he talked about football, and the closer they sat to each other, the better she seemed to smell.  He liked that smell.

She liked that he didn’t only pay attention to her at the card parties anymore.  He actually said, “Hi” in public.  And she liked his smile, even when he got braces.  He let her pick the shows they watched on the old black and white television while seated on the loveseat.  She actually worked up the nerve to tell him that she had told Jane at school to ask him if he liked her, and stupid Jane had completely forgotten to ask him, or maybe Jane was just too chicken to ask him and used the excuse that she forgot.

He said that if she liked him, he liked her.  But if she didn’t, he didn’t either.  “Like” her, he meant.  Which he did because she did.

min1a

After two more years and six more card parties worth of scootching behinds closer together on the old loveseat, something different had happened.  And it was about time too.  Aunt Minnie had bought a puppy, and that not only was a bad thing for the seven cats that lived with old Minnie, but it was hard on the loveseat too.  One of the little couch’s monster feet was lost, and the numerous instances of terrified cat claws digging in were beginning to have an effect on the upholstery.  And that danged dog wizzled everywhere.  The loveseat had one purpose in life, and it didn’t want to give in to wear and tear before achieving that purpose.

min11a

But the very next year brought disaster.  He apparently told the members of the freshman football team that something had happened on that old love seat that really hadn’t happened.  The football team was impressed because they all thought she was pretty hot stuff, and he was generally thought of as a lame-o dweeb.  She heard about it from Jane who heard about it from Nanette’s boyfriend who was on the team.  And she got mad.  How dare he say something like that when it wasn’t true?

In January of that year, Aunt Minnie passed away in her sleep.  The loveseat was sold at auction to a farmer who liked to do re-upholstery as a hobby.  It got re-done in red velvet and leather with wheels replacing the wooden monster feet and sold to a car dealer in Des Moines who placed it in the lobby show-room for customers to sit on.

But the story has a happy ending.  She would later make his locker room lie into the truth on Prom Night (fortunately with protection) and then went on to marry him when they both were sophomores in college.   Of course, it wasn’t always, “They lived happily ever after,” because they didn’t.  They got divorced once and got re-married shortly after… to each other.  They had three kids.  And the loveseat didn’t ever learn any of that.  Because it was a loveseat.  You didn’t really think loveseats could know anything, did you?

 

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Filed under finding love, goofy thoughts, humor, nostalgia, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life

August 16, 2022 · 1:41 am

AeroQuest 5… Scherzo 14

Scherzo 14 – Spaceheart Joins the Space Opera

She was the size and shape of a blond-haired human girl of about fourteen years of age.  She wore one of those tech-level 25 armored space bikinis, and Dr. Hooey had to admit she looked pretty appealing in it.

“So, they issued you that armored bikini instead of the usual Time Knight’s eccentric, colorful costume?”

“Oh, yes, by my special request,” said the girl.  “It’s fully functional as a space suit, putting atmosphere around me inside an electromagnetic bubble that will also shield me from radiation, lasers, micro-meteors, blades, microwaves, nuclear blasts, and even slug-thrower bullets.”

“Ahem, yes…”  Hooey wasn’t sure whether he should be harsh with his evaluation, or just charmed with her natural enthusiasm.  Her enthusiasm alone was of a kind that could defeat space criminals, evade alien attacks, and charm world leaders.  And that happy grin could certainly kill a grizzly bear at thirty paces.  “Prepared for practically anything, aren’t we?”

“Well, being prepared is the key to everything you have accomplished Dr. Hooey.  I studied you carefully while I was in the academy.  You more than any other Time Knight we discussed.  I prayed to the Seven Goddesses of the Pleiades that I would be chosen to be your companion on this next journey through time.”

“Ahem… your name is Spaceheart, I believe?”

“Yes.  That is definitely my preferred moniker of the moment.”

“I suppose I can’t just call you Becky or Alice or something?”

“No, please.  I like Spaceheart.  It is a cool pulp-fiction sort of science-fictiony name.”

Hooey almost said, “Ahem” again, but he was running out, so he decided to save the last few for later.

“So, one of the main jobs of the time-travel companion is the keeping of order inside the time-ship.”

Spaceheart looked around at the mess inside the Star Wars.  She shuddered.  Wires were hanging from the dark space where the ceiling allegedly was supposed to be.  Burnt panels covered the control console with melted buttons, charred thing-a-majiggs, and a grossly detached doodle-ma-whoop.  You couldn’t make the chronometric time jumps without a re-attached doodle-ma-whoop.  And you would need to replace every single thing-a-majigg in order to prevent the Time Knights inside the ship from prematurely aging or turning back into babies.  A glitch in either direction could pop you out of existence without warning.

“It got damaged a bit with that last mission, huh?”

“Oh, yes.  It actually killed me, so that I had to reboot myself with an entirely new and better-looking reincarnation.”

“But, the Lizard Lady was successful before she died?”

“Well, technically…  Um, she’s not actually dead yet at this time… er, the relative dimension in time and space she currently inhabits.”

“Oh, that’s interesting…”

“Yes, um… she’s in position to help us win the battle at Outpost.  So, our job is mainly to correct whatever goes wrong with the ancient device that Ged Aero is trying to send to another universe.”-

“I guess I better get started on the clean-up and repair procedures.”

“Ahem… yes, I didn’t mean to use up that one, but if you don’t mind… I would like to pull up a lawn chair and watch you work.  Um, you are going to wear that armored bikini, right?”

“Um, yes…?”

“Can I take pictures too?”

Spaceheart smiled at the dirty old man who turned younger again.

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Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction

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August 15, 2022 · 8:28 pm

Why I Need to be Naked

Yes, I am a nudist. I am a member of the AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation). I have been publicly naked in places where other naked people are, and I will do that again if I can. But, if you are wondering why in the heck I want to be that, well, maybe I need to explain. Maybe, even, if you aren’t wondering that.

I have spent a lifetime overcoming childhood trauma. At the age of ten I was grabbed by an older boy, dragged off to a hidden place, de-pants, warned not to yell or tell anybody ever about what had happened, implying he would seriously hurt or kill me, and then he gave himself pleasure by twisting my private parts, making me hurt while being forbidden to call for help.

What does that have to do with being a nudist? Well, as you can probably imagine, what remained of my childhood and all of my puberty was turned into a nightmare. I shut down the memory of the incident as a defense mechanism, but it was still with me to the point that I would wet my pants during seventh grade classes rather than risk going to the bathroom in a school where there were eighth grade boys bigger than me. PE showers after class were a nightmare I wasn’t allowed to avoid. I not only had to conceal my privates as much as possible, but also the burn scars on my back that I gave myself as a punishment for any sexual urges I might have experienced. I lost the ability to be comfortably naked anywhere that I might’ve been seen by others, especially girls. This was a horrible, self-hating sort of thing that brought me to the brink of suicide in high school. Thank god for the Methodist minister who provided me with actual sex education and my friend Ronny who talked me out of killing myself without ever knowing that that is what he was doing.

I missed out on a key time in my development as a boy when others get an unmolested chance to wrestle with their own sexuality and identity. I had to struggle with the things I learned about child molestation. Of particular concern was the notion that victims of sexual molestation can grow up to be molesters. And a good deal of religious education tries to make you believe homosexuality was a grievous sin that could cause you an eternity in Hell. I spent too many hours fearing I would become exactly what I didn’t want to be.

But starting when the Reverend Aiken taught me about the biological science behind the facts of life, I began learning the truth about sexuality and what had happened to me.

I fully remembered the whole of my childhood trauma when I began studying human sexuality in college (and I mean book-learning, not the kind of hands-on practice that went on in the dorms.) I learned that those who become abusers after being abused were mostly children who were routinely molested, not the one-time-only sort of assault that I endured. I was not set up mentally to become some sort of sexual predator or pedophile. Instead, I was drawn to a career path in education where I could use what I had learned to prevent such things from happening. I did not try to have my abuser arrested and punished for two reasons. One, because I was still vulnerable and reporting that you had been assaulted like that was probably even harder at that time for a boy than it was for a girl. And it was hell to be a girl confessing to having been raped. But also two, because I knew my abuser was married and had children, and I had never heard any other reports of him having done such a thing to anyone else. It wasn’t for him that I didn’t report him. My family and his family were friends. They were good people whether he was or not. And protecting them is the reason I still will not name him as the person who assaulted me. Now that he is dead, and I have forgiven him, no one needs to know.

I need to be naked now in the telling of these inner secrets that no one but me knew for so many years. I need to not be shy about any of this. Primarily because anyone who has ever undergone such a thing as I did can benefit from knowing what I went through and survived in spite of. That factual nakedness is here in these paragraphs for anyone who needs to see it. It is the naked truth.

The first person I told about what happened to me at ten was the former girlfriend who actually introduced me to nudism and naturism. She was a coworker in the Cotulla school district who, like me, had family living at the time in the Austin, Texas area. We would spend weekends in the Austin area with me staying at my parents’ house in the Austin suburbs, and her staying with her sister’s family at a clothing-optional apartment house on Manor Road in downtown Austin. We would enjoy seeing the sights in Austin, taking in the available nightlife, restaurants, and things to do in the 1980s. We also enjoyed time spent with family. Of course, the uncomfortable thing was that spending time with her family meant being surrounded by naked people. They allowed me to remain within the clothing option, but they worked on me and reasoned with me about why trying nude living was a good thing.

They made it clear how being nude leads to many good and healthy things. Sunshine provides Vitamin D which is necessary to be happy and fend off depression. They made it clear how being naked makes it easier to trust others and feel trusted by them. You learn, even with clothes on, that you should connect with people eye to eye. Genitals were never the focus of your attention, and practicing that relieved a lot of the body-horror my ten-year-old mind had imposed on my soul.

They say that dolphins, living completely naked in the oceans are surrounded their whole lives by sensory joy and a zest for life unmatched by most humans. And they also say being a nudist wrapped only in sunshine and gentle breezes is nearly the same thing.

So, I eventually tried it for myself. (Only after I retired from teaching, though, as many parents and principals would not be particularly keen about a nudist English teacher teaching their precious ones.)

My wife is not overjoyed with my choice to be a nudist. It’s not so much that she disapproves, but she is completely devoted to a religion that does. And my children are embarrassed by it and don’t want to talk about it. But it has become a good thing in my life never-the-less.

I have learned to accept my body as it is, and my past experiences as they are. I know I am not a homosexual, though I also know it is not an evil thing to be one. I know I am not a sex-fiend or a pedophile because I have committed no crime that would make those labels apply to me. I haven’t, in fact, ever committed a crime that I was aware of. I am aware of the beauties, especially in art, of the nude human form. I am also aware, having seen other nudists, that no amount of wrinkled or saggy or freckled or sunburnt or boney or fat actually takes away from that inherent beauty. I like to draw naked people, as you have often seen in this blog. But I am not the sort of nudist who has to show you constant nude photos of myself. I am not an exhibitionist or an advocate of nudism that thinks his own nudity is the best advertisement there is for being naked.

But I need to be naked. Naked stories, naked essays, naked confessions, naked pictures… because being naked is a good thing to be.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, nudes, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life