I was a boy back when the milk man still came around in his blue-and-white panel truck delivering bottles of milk with Elsie the Cow on them. I don’t remember clearly because I was only 4 years old back when I first became aware of being a boy in this world instead of being something else living somewhere else.
There were many things I didn’t know or understand back then. But one thing I did know, was that I loved Elsie the Cow. And why would a farm boy love a cartoon cow? There were many not-so-sensible reasons.
For one thing, Elsie the Cow reminded me of June Lockhart, Lassie’s mom and the mom from Lost in Space.
Lassie’s Mom, June Lockhart
It may be that June Lockhart’s eyes reminded me of Elsie’s eyes, being large, soul-full eyes with large black eye lashes. It may be that she starred in a TV commercial for Borden’s milk in which Elsie winked at me at the end of the commercial.
Or maybe it was because Elsie had calves and was a mom. And June Lockhart was Lassie’s mom and the mom of Will Robinson, so I associated both of them with my mom, and thus with each other.
Elsie gave you milk to drink and was always taking care of you in that way. Milk was good for you, after all. My own mom was a registered nurse. So they were alike in that way too.
And she was constantly defending you against the bulls in your life. She stood up to Elmer to protect her daughter more than once. Of course, her son was usually guilty of whatever he was accused of, but she still loved him and kept Elmer from making his “hamburger” threats a reality.
And you can see in numerous ad illustrations that Elsie’s family were basically nudists. Although she often wore an apron, she was bare otherwise. And though her daughter often wore skirts and her son wore shorts, Elmer was always naked. And that didn’t surprise me, because no cow I knew from the farm wore clothes either. From very early in my life I was always fascinated by nakedness, and I would’ve become a nudist as a youngster if it hadn’t been soundly discouraged by family and society in general.
Proof that Elsie’s family lived the nude life.
Puppets from a Borden’s commercial
So there are many reasons why I have always loved Elsie the Cow. And it all boils down to the love of drinking milk and that appealing cartoon character who constantly asked you to drink more.
One of the side “benefits” of having diabetes is that it often comes with an extra helping of diabetic depression. I had the blues really bad this week. I am not the only member of my family suffering.
So, what do you do about it?
Or, rather, what does a goofy idiot like me do about it?
Especially on a windy day when the air is saturated with pollen and other lovely things that I am absolutely, toxically allergic to?
Well, for one thing, I used the word toxically in this post because it is a funny-sounding adverb that I love to use even though the spell-checker hates it, no matter how I spell or misspell it.
And I bought a kite.
Yes, it is a cheap Walmart kite that has a picture of Superman on it that looks more like Superboy after taking too much kryptonite-based cough syrup for his own super allergies.
But I used to buy or make paper diamond kites just like this one when I was a boy in Iowa to battle the blues in windy spring weather. One time I got one so high in the sky at my uncle’s east pasture that it was nothing more than a speck in the sky using two spools of string and one borrowed ball of yarn from my mother’s knitting basket. It is a way of battling blue meanies.
And I bought more chocolate-covered peanuts. The chocolate brings you up, and the peanut protein keeps you from crashing your blood sugar. I have weathered more than one Blue Meanie attack with m&m’s peanuts.
And I used the 1957 Pink and White Mercury of Imagination to bring my novel, The Baby Werewolf,home. I wrote the last chapter Monday night in the grip of dark depression, and writing something, and writing it well, makes me a little bit happier.
And I have collected a lot of naked pictures of nudists off Twitter. Who knew that you could find and communicate with such a large number of naked-in-the-sunshine nuts on social media? It is nice to find other nude-minded naturists in a place that I thought only had naked porn until I started blogging on naturist social media. Being naked in mind and body makes me happier than I ever thought it would.
And besides being bare, I also like butterflies and books and baseball and birds, (the Cardinals have started baseball season remember) and the end of winter. “I just remember of few of my favorite things, and then I don’t feel so bad!” Oh, and I like musical movies like The Sound of Music too.
The monsters of deep, dark depression are being defeated as we speak.
You reach a point after a hard month has lingered long where you have to eat the leftovers and accept what is. I faced challenges again like the bankruptcy in 2017 and the Covid pandemic in 2020. July and August in 2023 have been super hot and withering of both soul and resolve. When faced with such a situation, I need pie.
So here are some of the things left in my January file for use in this blog. The only reason they are here is because I have developed a tradition of repeating this post in times of trouble. Of course, updates are necessary. The pie I just had was a cherry pie, not the apple in the picture. The ideas have not been knitted together for any rational purpose.
This will be a crazy quilt blog post. But crazy quilts keep you just as warm in winter as any other kind. But at the end of this month, I need the crazy more than the quilt. I am having no trouble keeping warm at 108 degrees of real temperature today.
My once-newest Facebook friend is the daughter of my wife’s cousin. I have only known her as the sweet-faced little smiler at Filipino-American family gatherings who sometimes gets my attention by squirting me in the ear with a water gun. Her father is from Greece and teaches Math in San Antonio. Her mother, like my wife, is from the Philippines. I won’t tell you her real name, but we used to call her “Sweetie” because of her resemblance to the little pink Tweety-bird character from Tiny Toons Adventures. Since this bluebonnet picture was taken, she has graduated from high school and definitely become a worthy young adult, slightly older than my own daughter. I did once hold Sweetie in my lap as an infant.
I have also spent considerable time writing to and for nudists I have connected with through their various websites and on Twitter. These two lovely works of nude art were shared with me on Twitter. I have collected a number of nude pictures from Twitter nudists that I can’t use on WordPress because I am still entirely too modest to be the unrestrained naked person that some nudists are. I can’t really claim to be a complete nudist myself. But I do have stories to tell about naked people, and I have been working on them diligently. I have been working on a book-length essay called Naked Thinking, full of ideas and drawings about being naked and honestly open to the world. Whether I live long enough to publish it remains to be seen.
Of course, I still miss being a teacher. I was a teacher of English for 31 years. I taught reading and writing in English to over 2,000 kids. I also learned how to stare in Klingon. It is a useful skill for keeping students in line and keeping them from becoming a disappointment to the empire. I miss teaching kids, especially talkative kids. Far fewer people talk to me during a day of retirement than used to talk to me in a single class at school. Those interactions were precious.
And several things are just too confusing for my old brain to explain.
But I do like this picture I found on Facebook of Tom Baker, the 4th Doctor, playing with multiple kittens. I don’t know why, but it makes me happier.
Tom Baker with kittens all over him… It doesn’t get any better than that.
Here is a collage that represents one of my hoarding-disorder collecting diseases enabled by the internet. The rules for this collection are basically;
Only photographs.
Only human bodies, or people parts.
Only artistically created people parts made of non-people stuff.
Naked is not only allowed, but preferred.
This is a porcelain doll, not a real girl… just so you know I didn’t break any rules.
The point is, art is a depiction of us. No matter how you create it, what it visually portrays is a reflection, like the one in the bathroom mirror every morning. Beautiful, grotesque, sexy, repulsive, adorable, or disturbing… it is who we are. The point is also, it allows me to point, click, and save and create a collection that I don’t have to hide from my wife. Because, well, you know… it’s art.
To be clear, I will have to write a post called Naked Experience to go with this post. It is a William Blake style of thing. You know, that English Romantic Poet guy who was into drawing naked people even more than me? The writer of Songs of Innocence and Experience? You know, this stuff;
Well, maybe you don’t know. But Blake gave the world the metaphor of the innocent lamb and the tyger of experience (tyger is his spelling, not mine, and it didn’t blow up the spell checker, even though it made the thing unhappy with me again). There is a certain something I have learned about nakedness that I mean to innocently convey. I learned it from anatomy drawing class and spending time with nudists. Naked is not evil. Naked is not pornography. Nakedness, itself, is a very good thing.
At this point the avid clothing-wearers among you are probably saying to yourself, “This guy is nuts! If God had wanted us to be nude, then we wouldn’t have been born with clothes on.” And I must admit, I cannot argue with logic like that.
But on a more serious note, I believe nudity is a fundamentally essential part of the nature of art. After all, pictures of naked people are a central part of what people have been drawing since they first started etching them with charcoal on cavern walls. And all art, including this blog, is about the human experience. What it means to be human. What it feels like to be alive on this Earth and able to feel.
And there is nothing sinister and immoral in drawing nudes to portray that fact. I am trying to show metaphorically the music of existence, the pace, the symmetry, the musical score… It isn’t focused on the private bits, what some call the naughty parts, even when those things are present in the picture. “How dare that naughty Mickey show the naked back end of that butterfly! It ought to have pants on at least!” Yes, I am making a mockery of that outrage itself. I am not a pornographer. These pictures were not created to engender any prurient interests. These pictures are part of Blake’s lamb. They will not bite you. Though blue-nosed people who wish to control what others think may very well bite me for daring to say so.
I have posted a lot of writing and artwork on this blog that I held for the longest time to be completely private and personal. I hardly ever showed any of it to anybody before I posted it here. But I am old. I no longer have secrets. I am capable of telling you everything even though I have never met most of you in real life. And I have no shame. I have become comfortable with emotional and intellectual nudity. And when I am dead, the body I have kept hidden from the world for so long will be no more. It’s just a thought. It’s a naked thought. And it is completely innocent.
Today’s sermon is a further attempt by Mickey to say something coherent about religion. I am trying to be a humor writer, and religion is a difficult topic to commit acts of humor against. People do not take it well when you put the heat of thoughtful questions to the personal mythology that they adhere to. They are afraid it might all burn away and leave them with nothing. It is the main reason nobody plays George Carlin’s comedy albums in church. And my atheist friends and acquaintances always get upset when I slip and make a statement like, “Atheism is a religion too. After all, it is a difficult act of sincere faith to believe in nothing.”
But religion is important enough to being human that it merits some daily and, at the minimum, weekly attendance to the fundamental ideas of it. After all, what is the reason we always have had and still have some form of religion?
Religion serves an important function in the lives of human beings. It is the guiding principal that keeps us from wigging out, being self-destructive, or going on a killing spree. Religion sniffs out the borders of our behavior. It gives us a sense of where the lines are that you should not cross. Of course, by itself, religion is not enough to save us from ourselves. It only provides the warning. The girl who hears the admonition from the pastor to not have sex before getting married can still go ahead and have four children before reaching the age of eighteen. Religion does not (or rather, it should not) provide the punishment for crossing the line. It just gives us the warning about the consequences.
I like the metaphor that Joseph Campbell always used in his insightful books about mythology. He suggests that if our lives are the hardware, our shared myths are like the software that makes it operate properly.
Our religious software has to be used with caution, however. Because, just as George Carlin so often used to gleefully shout, “Religion can be stupid enough to really hurt you.” It is hard to deny the truth of that statement with things like the Westboro Baptist Church, the Spanish Inquisition, Salem Witch Trials, and the Methodist Church Ladies who saw your kid running around naked in the yard.
But there is a reason that some religious extremes are dangerous and counter to the basic purposes of religion. There is reason why more atheists are generated by the Catholics, Baptists, and other fundamentalist religions than by more tolerant sects like the Midwestern Methodists and the New-Age Crystal-wavers. Intolerance. If you are too insistent that your religious way is the only path, and all others burn in Hell, then you have taken religion too far into its own dark corners and scary, deep crevices.
There are many acceptable forms of religion that have many good things to offer. I have never been bullied by a true believer of the Buddhist faith. Christians, if they are tolerant, believe in a religion founded on love and forgiveness. Nudists are sun-worshipers who believe in positive body images, communion with nature, and freedom of self-expression. Quackatoons believe in the power of Donald-Duck cartoons to make you wise and capable of laughing at anything. Okay, I haven’t actually established that last religion in the real world. But it could happen, in the very near future. We are going to need it if Donald Trump (not Donald Duck) gets reelected in November.
But the simple point of all this is simply that… we need religion. There is a spiritual aspect to all human thinking, and especially when interacting with others. We need to keep it simple enough for even the most simple people among us to guide their lives and their children’s lives with it. And yet, we need to also be tolerant enough to suffer fools like me to think they are atheists who believe in God.
So, to put it in simple terms, “Here endeth the lesson.”
This post is a reprint of the time I set out to become a nudist since I was retired and no longer had to fear what it would do to my career as a teacher.
This is not a tribute to Winston Groom and his famous creation, Forrest Gump. This is an admission that when I have had very little sleep and lots of worry lines on my brow, I often do remarkably stupid things.
And sometimes, doing something monumentally stupid makes me feel better. You know, more a part of the stupid, meaningless, and goofy world around me. So, what stupid thing did I do? I joined a nudist organization’s website. Me, who freaks out when members of my own family happen to see me naked. And, you see, there is more to joining this organization than just signing up for some random thing on the internet where you get a lot of random emails. I had to submit nude photos of myself to be posted in community forums. And I may be able to write a blog for this website, which will mean taking some camping gear and actually going to the naturist club site near Dallas to experience the things I will be writing about… and probably making jokes about. But don’t be afraid of being subjected to the hideous torture of having to see me naked. In order to see any of that, you would have to join the organization yourself, and you are probably not as stupid as me. (But I am not telling you the name of the website anyway.)
This is a detail from an illustration based on Golding’s Lord of the Flies. But it is also a picture of me and a childhood friend from back in the skinny-dipping days, based on an old black-and-white photo.
You see, I have some real life experiences with nudists before this happened. I had a roommate in grad school who liked to go au naturel, and even was comfortable with me being in the room when his girlfriend was visiting. He was nude in the kitchen one time when my grandparents came to visit. It is a good thing my grandfather entered that room ahead of my grandmother. I also had a girlfriend in the eighties who had a sister living in the clothing-optional apartment complex in Austin, Texas. Every time we visited Austin, the city nearest where my parents lived, she would stay with her sister there and I would have to go in to fetch her whenever we had plans. Sometimes I was there just to visit. But always, since clothing was optional, I took that option. I did get used to being around naked people, though. I actually have nudist friends.
So, though I am not a nudist, I guess I already know a lot about how to be one. It is how I managed to stumble into this awkward arrangement.
I know I will never be able to get my wife to go along on this harrowing adventure. She refuses to even consider going nude in the house. She has to wear clothes to bed even though studies say that sleeping nude is good for you. I will be facing this basically naked and alone. And possible paid writing work will never make this worth it by itself.
But my photos are already posted and approved. My membership is a real thing. And I am not ready to shoot myself for this stupid decision. In fact, I will probably be less naked there than I have been here in this very blog where my every secret is laid bare and made fun of on a daily basis.
It is a magic word for the Wizards in White to use, and failure to acquire it before you do what you do makes you an evil sorcerer without a soul. The word is consent.
con·sent
noun
permission for something to happen or agreement to do something. “no change may be made without the consent of all the partners” Similar: agreement, assent, concurrence, accord, permission, authorization, sanction, leave, clearance, acquiescence, acceptance, approval, seal of approval, stamp of approval. imprimatur, backing, endorsement, confirmation, support, favor, good wishes, go-ahead, thumbs up, green light, OK, approbation Opposite: dissent
verb
give permission for something to happen. “he consented to a search by a detective” Similar: agree, to assent, to allow, give permission for, sanction, accept
Hopefully, she is getting permission to draw the people she is putting in her pictures before sharing them with the world. If the person you are drawing is a real person, you have to have their consent to use their image. If I am drawing a real person, I am careful to get consent. Of course, if I am drawing out of my head, using one of those little wooden pose models, or just making it up straight out of my head, imaginary consent is pretty much superfluous. (Superfluous… a very good word. But you should look it up before you use it so that you use it correctly. Much as this article does with the word consent.)
Both of the characters in the cartoon are made up. The first lady, the pirate Zorah the Seawitch, is a re-interpretation of a George Perez comic-book character (being an altered image that looks like the original only in pose and proportions, it essentially becomes my own creation.)
The portrait at the left of Naomi, was made from a photograph given to me by the girl herself, asking me to draw her as I saw her. This was consent. I not only gave her the first original, she expressly knew that I have a blog where I have posted such pictures before.
Of course, Naomi herself told me it doesn’t look enough like her that her friends would recognize her without help. And she did not give me permission to reveal her actual name. I made the name Naomi up for the portrait, using one letter that is the same as the first letter of her last name, and I will not reveal which letter that is. Thus, I have a sort of consent for calling the portrait by the name I call it.
This young lady consented to her boyfriend about having this picture drawn before she consented to posing.
Being a naturist or nudist requires a good deal of knowledge about consent. If you carry a camera around on your phone in a nudist park or naturist club, you have to understand you don’t have consent to take pictures of anybody without express permission… or written permission if you are in any way planning to publish it or put it on the internet. You also don’t have permission to stand around and stare at other nudists, just as they don’t have automatic consent to stare at you. Or laugh at you, unless you give consent by laughing about yourself first.
But the thing that makes the word consent a powerful magic word, is when somebody realizes using a little bit of common sense (which is actually an oxymoron because sense is not common and what the common man believes is true is rarely good sense) that this word needs to be taught in sex education classes (another oxymoron because nobody can teach sex education anymore due to the fact that the average ox who votes for the school board members is a moron and never had sex education himself but has a religion that tells him that he should reject any attempts to make his kids smarter as loudly as possible.)
In my own case, as a victim of a sexual assault by an older boy at the age of ten, I did not know about consent. And neither did my attacker. I did not give any consent to having my testicles twisted at the same time I was forbidden to scream in pain. And because I did not give consent, it was a crime, even for someone who wasn’t yet legally an adult, like him. Neither of us knew that I could say no legally and he had to stop. I was too traumatized to let myself remember what he did to me for another twelve years so he got away with it completely. It would’ve helped if I had known a little bit about what he was doing to me and why. And what my rights were supposed to be. And it wouldn’t have hurt if somebody had told him that what he was doing was wrong.
Kids need to know at a really early age more than just about bees pollinating flowers and birds singing to attract a mate for some serious egg laying. They need to know about consent. And what people should not do without consent. Or even with consent if it is forced, coerced, achieved through trickery, or not valued in court because you were under-aged when he did what he did.
Teaching consent as a part of sex education is an important enough idea that I will need to come back to it again later.
The Cobble Sisters, Shelly and Sherry were raised as nudists. At home they are always naked. They wish they could be naked everywhere they go.
Naked thinking as the main idea of this post is about more than taking all your clothes off like the Cobble Sisters do. It is about allowing yourself to think anything it is possible to think about no matter how others might react. And then publishing this thinking, sharing the uncloaked thoughts no matter what they are about. I know that some of you will probably read no further than this. But others will read on because, like me, they are attracted to the notion of the truth laid bare. They want to see it, no matter how much shock and ugliness is being risked. And don’t worry that I am going to post pictures of my own naked carcass because the naked truth about that is that I am not a very social nudist like the Cobbles, especially not Sherry, and I am certainly not an exhibitionist.
I will, however, show you artwork that is not in any way pornographic, but does show you the private parts of people both real and imaginary who do feel like sharing their naked truth visually. (And also, hopefully, tastefully. However, that is entirely up to the whims and prejudices of the viewer.)
At this point in the on-going story of Mickey’s incredibly awkward notions of nudism and naturism, I am totally going to share with you the distressing and undressed topics that my essay collection will attempt to lay bare. I know some things about being a survivor of sexual assault. And also as a result of that first distressing thing, I can also lay bare the truth about being suicidal, struggling with sexual identity, and the need for sex education before such things can befall mere children.
As a school teacher, I have learned a great deal about students’ thoughts about sexuality. I have heard stories straight from the students’ own words, both verbally and in writing, about dealing with homosexuality, transgenderism, body image, and relationships. I won’t reveal anybody’s actual names, but I can lay bare the facts as they were presented to me. A whole lot of naked ugliness, gracefulness, and even on rare occasions, beauty.
And I have naked thoughts about how I believe these things might actually be dealt with in the future, the how-tos and whens of sex education, how society might benefit from laxer rules about public nudity, how schools might be beneficially conducted in the nude, and other wacky notions that might get me banned in Florida and Texas, but might also be worth at least thinking about.
Basically not porn, even though the red panda is naked.
Thinking realistically about the times we are living in, I do know that Mickey-thoughts about nudity and naturism are a potential place for things to go way wrong, especially when books are being banned and schoolteachers can be fired for thinking that students should know about Rosa Parks, Roberto Clemente, and Harvey Milk. But I am old, and have practically no time left to me to get into “good trouble” for the good of the people and institutions I care about. And I am retired, so they can’t fire me. And having one of my books banned would probably be really good for me as an author. So, there is that. And besides, with my art, I hope to prove that the nude human body can be beautiful… even if it’s ugly.
Catch a Falling Star 
Naked Innocence
To be clear, I will have to write a post called Naked Experience to go with this post. It is a William Blake style of thing. You know, that English Romantic Poet guy who was into drawing naked people even more than me? The writer of Songs of Innocence and Experience? You know, this stuff;
Well, maybe you don’t know. But Blake gave the world the metaphor of the innocent lamb and the tyger of experience (tyger is his spelling, not mine, and it didn’t blow up the spell checker, even though it made the thing unhappy with me again). There is a certain something I have learned about nakedness that I mean to innocently convey. I learned it from anatomy drawing class and spending time with nudists. Naked is not evil. Naked is not pornography. Nakedness, itself, is a very good thing.
At this point the avid clothing-wearers among you are probably saying to yourself, “This guy is nuts! If God had wanted us to be nude, then we wouldn’t have been born with clothes on.” And I must admit, I cannot argue with logic like that.
But on a more serious note, I believe nudity is a fundamentally essential part of the nature of art. After all, pictures of naked people are a central part of what people have been drawing since they first started etching them with charcoal on cavern walls. And all art, including this blog, is about the human experience. What it means to be human. What it feels like to be alive on this Earth and able to feel.
And there is nothing sinister and immoral in drawing nudes to portray that fact. I am trying to show metaphorically the music of existence, the pace, the symmetry, the musical score… It isn’t focused on the private bits, what some call the naughty parts, even when those things are present in the picture. “How dare that naughty Mickey show the naked back end of that butterfly! It ought to have pants on at least!” Yes, I am making a mockery of that outrage itself. I am not a pornographer. These pictures were not created to engender any prurient interests. These pictures are part of Blake’s lamb. They will not bite you. Though blue-nosed people who wish to control what others think may very well bite me for daring to say so.
I have posted a lot of writing and artwork on this blog that I held for the longest time to be completely private and personal. I hardly ever showed any of it to anybody before I posted it here. But I am old. I no longer have secrets. I am capable of telling you everything even though I have never met most of you in real life. And I have no shame. I have become comfortable with emotional and intellectual nudity. And when I am dead, the body I have kept hidden from the world for so long will be no more. It’s just a thought. It’s a naked thought. And it is completely innocent.
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Filed under artists I admire, artwork, commentary, humor, nudes, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as nudes, William Blake