Barbie’s little sister, Stacy, is an incredible nerd (for a plastic doll from Mickey’s doll collection.) She is constantly using one of the laptops to keep up with the latest news in Science. Lately, she has been thrilled to see pictures start rolling in from the James Webb Space Telescope, the superior imaging system to its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
You may have noticed that Stacy surfs the internet in the nude. She is not a porn-obsessed pervert or anything. She simply found research online that indicated that nudists are happier in many ways than people who are addicted to always wearing clothes. She joined the AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation,) found a local landed nudist club to join and discovered how lovely it is to play in the sunshiny air totally bare.
If you knew Stacy the way I know Stacy, you would realize she now has a real dilemma. She is very intelligent… but her head is made of plastic, and so it stubbornly resists compromises once an idea has found its way inside.
This is called internal conflict. But never fear. Stacy is highly intelligent, smarter than Skipper, and even smarter than her oldest sister Barbie. This is why she is the only sister so dedicated to nudism.
So, Barbie pointed out to Stacy that, being made of plastic, exposure to outer space will simply freeze her solid. And as long as she avoids getting dropped by a doofus while she’s frozen and brittle, and she gets thawed out slowly enough at the end of the journey, she should be fine. Now, all she has to do is convince Mickey to sell her to an astronaut who is not a doofus but is just goofy enough to take a doll into outer space. So, now Stacy is researching non-doofus goofy astronauts online, further preventing Mickey from writing something dumb.
Catch a Falling Star 
Self-Reflection
Every writer, whether he or she writes fiction or non-fiction, is really writing about themselves. The product originates within the self. So, that self has to gaze into the mirror from time to time.
So, the question for today is, who, or possibly what, is Mickey?
I have been posting stuff every day for a few years now, and in that time, I have been much-visited on WordPress. Maybe not much-read, but then, you cannot actually tell if somebody read it or not. Most probably look only at the pictures. And, since I am also an artist of sorts, that can also be a good thing. Though, just like most artists, my nude studies are more popular than the pieces I value the most. But unless the looker makes a comment or leaves a “like”, you really have no idea if they read or understood any of the words I wrote. And you have no idea what they feel about the art. Maybe they just happened to click on one of my nudes while surfing for porn.
I rarely get below 50 views of something in my blog every day. The last three days were 86 views, 124 views yesterday, and 88 views already today. My blog has definitely picked up pace over the length of the coronavirus quarantine. But no definable reason seems obvious. Some of my posts are polished work, but Robin is right when he says today’s post is merely fishing with the process, which is true almost every day.
As a person I am quirky and filled with flaws, pearls of wisdom that result from clam-like dealing with flaws, strange metaphors that shine the pearls, and obsessions like the one I have with nudism that leaves me properly dressed for diving for pearls.
I have demonstrated throughout my life that I have an interest in and experience with nudism, though not the boldness to parade my naked self before the world outside of the writing that I do. I also spent most of my bachelorhood dating reading teachers and teachers’ aides, finally settling down and marrying another English teacher. I completed a thirty-one year career as an English teacher, which means I spent a lot of time teaching writing and reading to kids who were ages 12 to 18. Twenty-four of those years were spent in the middle school monkey house. And all of that led to being so mentally damaged that I wasn’t good for much beyond becoming a writer of YA novels or possibly subbing for other mentally-damaged teachers in middle schools around our house.
A real telling feature of what I have become is the fact that most of the characters I write about in my fiction are somehow a reflection of me. Milt Morgan, seen to the left, is illustrated here with a picture of me as a ten-year-old wearing a purple derby. Yes, I was that kind of geeky nerd.
And most of the plots are based around things that happened to me as a child, a youth, or a young teacher. Many of the events in the stories actually happened to me, though the telling and retelling of them are largely twisted around and reshaped. And I am aware of all the fairies, aliens, werewolves, and clowns that inhabit my stories. Though I would argue that they were real too in an imaginative and metaphorical way.
So, here now is a finished post of Mickey staring into the metaphorical mirror and trying in vain to define the real Michael, an impossible, but not unworthy task.
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