Who is really qualified to judge people? The Bible says only God makes that judgement. But who tells us what God’s judgement actually is? Especially if Nietzsche is right about God being dead?
Prudes
Not long ago I posted a short-short story about me wanting to see girls get naked while we were kite flying, and then, by verbal tricks backfiring, I ended up being the only one flying the kite while naked. I look back on that story now with laughter about my own personal foibles. But if I am completely honest, the church ladies with gray hair, wagging fingers, and tongues that are even waggier… Well, I am glad that the ones I knew as a boy are all now dead and can’t possibly read that story and shame me all over again.
And I know that I draw an awful lot of pictures and write an awful lot of stories that involve naked children. As a survivor of a traumatic sexual assault when I was ten (a thing that happened after the kite story was already in the past) there is a level of discomfort over recognizing that trend in myself. Not because I became a sexual predator of children. I clearly did not. I still am determined to prevent such things from happening in any way I can, though in retirement I no longer have access to children to talk with to find out about bad things that may be happening in their lives.
Derfentwinkle and Anneliese in my current work in progress, fairies both.
I write stories in which there are kid characters who are naked at times. Sometimes because of curiosity and developing sexuality, sometimes because of growing up in a nudist household, sometimes in their dreams, taking baths, and many other normal functions where clothing is optional. In The Baby Werewolf novel, I included a character who was trying to exploit a young nudist girl to make child pornography. He was the kind of predator I have always resolved to be against, and the book is intended to make readers aware of that kind of dangerous person and recognize where the opportunities to avoid such people lie.
And some of the nude young characters I create like the two fairy girls depicted in the illustration from The Necromancer’s Apprentice merely represent the liberating feeling you can get from embracing your own nude self, a thing my attacker deprived me of during childhood through trauma and fear.
I, as an adult human being, fully accept readers’ rights to be critical of my work and make prudish judgements about my writing. I don’t like that one critic of The Baby Werewolf who said things about my work being creepy for the wrong reasons (it is a horror story after all) and suggesting that maybe I as the author am bad and villainous instead of feeling that way about the villain of the story. It was fiction, not my personal life story. The villain character is not me.
But prudes being prudish and judgmental can do more damage than just hurting an author’s feelings.
I have had two students that I know of who were transexual.
One was raised a boy because he was born with a penis, but in grade school was discovered to have a womb and ovaries. I didn’t know such a condition existed until I saw an episode of Marcus Welby MD in the 70’s about a young boy who had to transition because he was actually a girl. The child in my class was from a poor Hispanic family that didn’t understand the problem and couldn’t really afford to deal with it. The prudes, judgemental as always, were not kind. This he/she hermaphrodite was forced to grow up as a flamboyantly gay male even though he was capable of physically changing into a woman who could conceive a child. I followed his development for as long as I was able. I did spend one long and awkward evening talking to him/her about his/her crush on me. I could’ve gotten the prude finger-wag over that strange conference too, if anybody had bothered to care about that poor child. I certainly wasn’t going to kiss him, and I had to send him home at the end of that discussion because of what he/she wanted from me. I suspect there were other men who took advantage of him/her. But I wasn’t close enough to help him in any real way. And I lost touch soon after he/she left my class. Based on that bizarre discussion we had, I have no confidence at all that the poor child is still alive. Nobody seemed to care about this child That is the most tragic of things teachers sometimes have to deal with.
The other trans student I had in class for a year was a girl as far as she was concerned. It was not a question open for debate. She was quiet and a good student. She only had a couple of friends, but they were good friends and stood by her. At the time she was in my middle school class, she already had breasts thanks to hormone therapy. By now she has probably transitioned by surgical means. Her life was a lot easier than the boy with ovaries. But prudes in Texas abound and provide a lot of sour fruit.
I personally find it offensive that anyone would deny either of these two people the use of whatever restroom was comfortable for them.
What gives the typical prude the right to pass judgement on anyone else’s behavior? Prudes can cause repression of natural behaviors for the benefit for no one but themselves. I find prudishness to be reprehensible. But the rub is… being judgemental about that makes me a prude too.
I try never to be judgemental. I would much rather accept everyone for who they are, or who they think they are, than rely on what I think they are. And I do listen when others judge me. I have changed things in my books and drawings because of observations my others. And I take everything seriously… especially comedy.
When conservative cultural warriors, Twitter Trolls, or dyspeptic gasbags like Rush Limbaugh call you a “Special Snowflake”, I have discovered, to my chagrin, that they don’t mean it as a compliment. In their self-centered, egotistical world you have to be as emotionally tough and able to “take it” as they believe (somewhat erroneously to my way of thinking) they themselves are. They have no time for political correctness, safe spaces, or, apparently, manners polite enough not to get you killed on the mean streets where they never go. Being a retired school teacher who was once in charge of fragile young psyches trying to negotiate a cruel Darwinian world, I think I disagree with them.
Have you ever tried to draw a snowflake? Believe me, it is difficult. Snowflakes are hexagonal star-shapes with enough lace and filigrees in them to make it a nightmare to draw it with painfully arthritic hands. The one above took me an hour with ruler and compass and colored pencils, and it still doesn’t look as good as a first grader can create with scissors and folded paper. Much better to use a computer program to spit them out with mathematical precision and fractal beauty. That’s how all the tiny ones in the background were created. But even a computer can’t recreate the fragile, complicated beauty of real snowflakes.
You see how the fragile crystalline structures will break in spots, melt in spots, attach to others, and get warped or misshapen? That is the reason no two snowflakes are alike, even though they all come from the same basic mathematically precise patterns generated by ice crystals. Life changes each one in a different way.
And that, of course, is the reason this essay is really about people rather than mere physical artifacts of cold weather. Our fragilities and frailties are earned, and they make us who we are. I have a squinky eye like Popeye from playing baseball and getting hit by a pitch. I have a big toe that won’t bend from playing football. They both represent mistakes that I learned from the hard way.
As a teacher, I learned that bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders are very real things. I lost a job once to one of those. And I spent a long night talking someone out of suicide one horrible December. Forgive me, I had to take fifteen minutes just there to cry again. I guess I am just a “special snowflake”. But the point is, those things are real. People really are destroyed by them sometimes. And they deserve any effort I can make to protect them or help them make it through the night.
But people are like snowflakes. They are all complex. They are all beautiful in some way. They are all different. No two are exactly the same.
And I really think boorish bastards have no right to insist that we need to take safe spaces and sanctuaries away from them. Every snowflake has worth. Winter snow leaves moisture for seedlings to get their start every spring. If you are a farmer, you should know this and appreciate snowflakes. And snowflakes can be fascinating. Even goofy ones like me.
I mean no disrespect to the bright spirit of Jane Austin by titling this thusly. But I do have an evil itch to confront these never-ending gremlins of public behavior. There is a need to regularly chastise the shoulder demons with the red suits, horns, and little red pitchforks. And if we listened more to the shoulder angels with the white robes, halos, and harps we would be talking these things out more carefully and logically with a view to how other people besides our bilious little little lizard-brains are affected.
Part One… Prejudice
Kim Fields from The Facts of Life
When I started teaching in the 1980’s in South Texas, a popular TV show watched by many of my students was The Facts of Life. It was about a girls’ boarding school, specifically, one house mother and her charges. Not a very realistic depiction of the reality of schools in the 1980’s. But even though real house mothers would probably have at least 25 more girls to worry about and drive her insane than this TV version did, it did have a feature that gave me hope as a teacher. This show had a girl of color, something that kind of school, even in the north, would have less of than the 20% representation in this show. And, miraculously, through all the weekly girl-dilemmas for a harried house mouther to deal with, and the occasional social-issue shows, that one black girl was treated as just one of the girls. No more important nor any less important than any of the other girls. That was an ideal to strive for in the world of education.
The character of Tootie (Dorothy “Tootie” Ramsey played by Kim Fields) was a perky and positive character, sweet and charming, and possessing a high degree of emotional intelligence. I remember wishing I had more students like that. But I did have a number of girls exactly like that, though they were Hispanic and Anglo. We had no “black” families in Cotulla, Texas during the 80’s, and only two families and one teacher in the entire 23 years I taught there.
But prejudice is not about what color a kid is. Or what color any human being is. As a teacher, I learned early on that you have to try to love every kid you are given no matter what their personal details are.
I remember teachers saying that, “Black kids are noisier than any other group, and more likely to be aggressive.” Or they also tried to convince me that, “Hispanic kids are too mature for their age and become sexually active sooner in life than they should.” Of course, there were usually examples they were talking about. But those examples weren’t proof that the prejudice is based on reality. They were proof that generalizations based on race, first language, or culture are potentially hurtful. I could point to examples that might indicate that, “White kids are more likely to say racist things than non-white kids are.” That is also an unfounded conclusion that is easily disproven by a majority of examples.
The real problems a teacher has dealing with students don’t come from any prejudicial generalizations. They come from students having to endure things outside of the classroom including poverty, homelessness, physical and emotional abuse at home, malnutrition, or untreated mental or medical conditions. And sometimes the misbehavior is caused by the teacher forgetting or skipping the essential practices necessary to controlling the classroom environment.
Everybody has prejudices. My favorite color is red. I favor it almost always whenever I have a free choice among colors to use. But the problem with prejudices is how we act on them. If I burn down my neighbor’s house because he painted it green rather than red, then I have been morally reprehensible. Not racism, but still an evil act based on my prejudice.
The teenager who got away with hunting protesters and killing two white ones in Wisconsin with a “self-defense” verdict is guilty of acting on a prejudice that people who are protesting a racially motivated police shooting are properly and justifiably shot and killed for protesting in favor of their side of the controversy. He crossed a State line to a community he did not live in to be involved in that opportunity to kill someone he disagreed with using his illegally purchased AR-15 even though the victims were unarmed. Maybe you can’t prove racism. But how about prejudice against protesters who believe they shouldn’t be killed for their beliefs?
In Texas the conservatives are using a hatred and an anti-Critical Race Theory law to exert their racism in Texas schools. The Southlake School District has fired a beloved principal because he had the poor judgement to be married to a white woman and speak his mind in an email about being against the killing of George Floyd. Apparently he was guilty of promoting Critical Race Theory in the school even though Critical Race Theory is a law-school process for examining systemic racism in law enforcement. That, of course, is NOT taught in any Texas grade school, middle school, or high school. He was actually fired for having the opinion (while black) that George Floyd should not have been killed by policemen in Minnesota. They are transparently acting on their racism and proving the need for law schools to continue examining Critical Race Theory. Their excuse is that white kids are being taught to feel guilty of the atrocities their ancestors committed because of racism. So, apparently, how black kids feel about the same things don’t counr.
Through prejudices, teachers will no longer be able to teach tolerance during Black History Month in February. The novel Beloved by Toni Morrison can no longer be taught in high schools. The book Ruby Bridges wrote about her experience with integrating the white grade school in Little Rock, Arkansas can no longer be taught in history classes.
Explain to me why this fundamentally racist prejudice is to be tolerated! But be warned, my personal prejudices are telling me to protest this crap. And you can’t fire me for having taught these things in the past since I am now retired from teaching. You’ll just have to get a teenager with an AR-15 to kill me.
If I look for the essential action shots in my art to find pictures that illustrate “Adventure” I am frustrated to find that I am much more a maker of static portraits than comic book action scenes.
Again I go back to artwork done for Saturday role-playing games, a thing which I started doing in 1981. It filled my life for a time. And it also taught me to be a teacher. After all, the DM (Dungeon Master, or Game Master) has to be a story-teller and a master explainer… just like a school teacher.
A Dungeons and Dragons picture from 1981. A Shaitan Rider, a villain from 1982.The Giant Sorcerer’s Hand, a monster from the 2011 family game.A heroine-ally and her pet werewolf.The father of mys son’s player character was found at the end of an adventure. He is apparently me with fewer legs.An enemy necromancerTwo versions of the same weretigerThis unused non-player character would become a novel character in 2019.Some characters are borrowed directly from TVSome characters are kept around as potential instant player characters.
“Mickey, why can’t you be more serious the way smart people are?”
“Well, now, my dear, I think I take humor very seriously.”
“How can you say that? You never seem to be serious for more than a few seconds in a row.”
“I can say it in a high, squeaky, falsetto voice so I sound like Mickey Mouse.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“I can also burp it… well, maybe not so much since I was in junior high.”
“I distinctly remember getting in trouble in Mrs. Mennenga’s third grade class in school for pantomiming pulling my beating heart out of my chest and accidentally dropping it on the floor. She lectured me about being more studious. But I made Alicia sitting in the row beside me laugh. It was all worth it. And the teacher was right. I don’t remember anything from the lesson on adding fractions we were supposed to be doing. But I remember that laugh. It is one precious piece of the golden treasure I put in the treasure chest of memories I keep stored in my heart.”
“I always listened to the words Groucho Marx was saying, even though he said them awfully fast and sneaky-like. I listened to the words. Other characters didn’t seem to listen to him. He didn’t seem to listen to them. Yet, how could he respond like he did if he really wasn’t listening? In his answers were always golden bits of wisdom. Other people laughed at his jokes when the laugh track told them to. I laughed when I understood the wisdom.”
“Laughing is a way of showing understanding. Laughing is a way of making yourself feel good. Laughing is good for your brain and your heart and your soul. So, I want to laugh more. I need to laugh more. I love to laugh.”
I have known nudists for a long time, since the 1980’s in fact. I have recently dabbled my toes in the cold waters of being a nudist myself. I did work on pool cracks this past summer while naked. I made one visit to a nudist park and actually got naked in front of strangers who were also naked. It is a certain kind of crazy connection to nature, my self, and the bare selves of others to be a nudist, even if it is for only a few hours. I used to think nudists were crazy people. But I have begun to understand in ways that are hard to understand. And being a novelist, that was bound to creep into the piles of supposedly wise understanding that goes into the creation of novels. I say “supposedly wise” because wisdom is simply the lipstick on the pig of ridiculous human experiences.
The Cobble family appeared first in my novel, Superchicken. It is a semi-autobiographical novel that uses some of my real life experiences and the real life experiences of boys I either grew up with or taught, mixed in with bizarre fantasy adventures that came from my perceptions of life as an adult. So the Cobble family really represent my encounters with nudism and the semi-sane people known as nudists. Particularly important to the story are the Cobble Sisters, twins Sherry and Shelly, who fully embrace the idea of being nudists and try to get other characters to not only approve of the behavior, but share in it. Sherry is the more forward of the two, more willing to be seen naked by the boys in her school and in her little Iowa farm town. Shelly is the quieter of the two, a bit more shy and a lot more focused on the love of one particular boy.
In fact, the Cobble Sisters are based on real life twin blond girls from my recollections of the past. The Cobble farm is out along the Iowa River and just north of Highway Three in Iowa. It is a real place where real twin girls lived when I was a boy. They were blond and pretty and outgoing. But they were not actually nudists. There was another pair of twin blond girls from my first two years of teaching who actually provided the somewhat aggressively sensual personalities of the Cobble Sisters. The real nudists I knew were mostly in Texas.
The sisters appear in more than one of the novels I have written or am in the process of writing. They appear for the second time in the novel Recipes for Gingerbread Children which I finished writing in 2016. They are also a part of the novel I am working on now, The Baby Werewolf. That last is probably the main reason they are on my mind this morning. Writing a humorous horror story about werewolves, nudists, pornographers, and real wolves is a lot more complex and difficult than it sounds. But it is hopefully doable. And my nudist characters are all basically representative of the idea that all honest and straight-forward people are metaphorically naked all the time. That’s the thing about those nudist twins. They don’t hide anything. Not their most private bits, and certainly not what they are thinking at any given time.
So as I continue to struggle with revealing myself as a writer… and possibly as a nudist as well, I will count on the Cobble Sisters to make certain important points about life and love and laughter… and how you can have all three while walking around naked.
Both novels discussed in this old post are now available from Amazon in self-published, finished form.
I start today with nothing in my head to write about. I guess I can say that with regularity most days of the writing week. Sundays in particular are filled with no useful ideas of any kind. But I have a certain talent for spinning. As Rumpelstiltskin had a talent for spinning straw into gold, I take the simple threads of ideas leaking out of my ears and spin them into yarns that become whole stories-full of something to say. And it is not something out of mere nothing. There is magic in spinning wheels. They take something ordinary and incomplete, and turn it into substantial threads useful for further weaving.
Of course the spinning wheel is just a metaphor here for the craft of writing. And it is a craft, requiring definable skills that go well beyond merely knowing some words and how to spell them.
My own original illustration.
The first skill is, of course, idea generation. You have to come up with the central notion to concoct the potion. In this case today, that is, of course, the metaphor of using the writing process as a spinning wheel for turning straw into gold. But once that is wound onto the spindle, you begin to spin yarn only if you follow the correct procedure. Structuring the essay or story is the next critical skill.
Since this is a didactic essay about the writing process I opened it with a strong lead that defined the purpose of the essay and explained the central metaphor. Then I proceeded to break down the basic skills for writing an essay with orderly explanations of them, laced with distracting images to keep you from dying of boredom while reading this, a very real danger that may actually have killed a large number of the students in my writing classes over the years (although they still appeared to be alive on the outside).
My mother’s spinning wheel, used to make threads for use in porcelain doll-making, and as a prop for displaying dolls.
As I proceed through the essay, I am stopping constantly to revise and edit, makeing sure to correct errors and grammar, as well as spending fifteen minutes searching for the picture of my mother’s spinning wheel used directly above. Notice, too, I deliberately left the spelling-error typo of “making” to emphasize the idea that revising and proof-reading are two different things that often occur at the same time, though they are very different skills.
And as I reach the conclusion, it may be obvious that my spinning wheel of thought today spun out some pure gold. Or, more likely, it may have spun out useless and boring drehk. Or boring average stuff. But I used the spinning wheel correctly regardless of your opinion of the sparkle of my gold.
I hated having to lead the girl, Derfentwinkle I think her name was, on a leash like a fairy-dog or a June beetle. It was cruel. But I also wanted her to live even though we were supposed to kill her.
But the girl was quiet and never once tried to resist being led. We took her to the magic lab where the Harpy cage was kept.
Harpies are foul creatures, among the worst of the gobbulun hordes in the Unseely Court. The one we held as prisoner for a week, Queen Duurt was her name, spread bad smells all around the cage. She kept trying to get hold of Mickey every single time he was tasked with feeding her. I’m sure if he hadn’t been quick enough at dropping the food into the cage, she’d have caught him by a wererat paw and pulled him close enough to bite his head. I was glad when they executed her and put her in the cookpots. She didn’t even make good meat to feed to the fairy creatures we kept as pets.
“Eeuw! This place smells horrible,” the girl said as Master Eli prodded her to go into the cage.
“You probably won’t be in there very long,” Master Eli said. “If you are no smarter than I think you are and don’t know anything about the necromancer’s lair, then we’ll have you cut up and boiling in the cookpots before you have time to get used to the smell.”
She looked at him with a hard stare that gave me neck prickles like a good ghost story told by a creepy bard.
“Master? Are we allowed to take her out of the cage sometimes?” Mickey asked.
“Learning magical sex positions?” I asked Mickey.
“She’s a dark one’s plaything, Mickey. You let her out, she’ll probably eat you rather than make love to you.”
“So, does that mean I have permission?”
“Knock yourself out, kid.”
Of course, Master Eli didn’t really mean that. He just had that kind of sense of humor. He would expect me to stop Mickey from doing detestable things.
“And, Bob, since you will be the one cleaning the mess up when something goes wrong… Be sure they are both dead before you turn them into beetle chow.”
“Yes, sir.” That part he probably did mean.
Master Eli left the room before I had secured the lock on the cage. Mickey was looking at me with that pathetic beg-eye of his.
“No, Mickey. You can not take her out and do bad things to her.”
“Why not, Bob? We don’t get many chances to learn about sex.”
“Because she’s a Sylph just like us. And she has to be treated with the respect due to a young lady. Not used as your dirty plaything.”
“Bob, I’m sorry you’re not very smart. I know we have to make allowances for you not being old enough to understand about physical love.”
“Mickey, we can’t because…”
“Really?” she said through the bars. “If the mouse-man wants to kiss me, I’m okay with that.”
“Oh, wow!” cried Mickey as he lunged for the cage, puckered lips leading the way.
I quickly grabbed the Mickey-stick that Master Eli left in the lab for just this very reason, and I hit him as hard as I could in the back of the head, laying him out cold on the floor… out of reach from the cage by mere inches.
“What did you do that for, quiet boy.”
“For his own good. You were going to grab him and possibly kill him trying to get out of the cage.”
“Why do you let them tell you that you’re not smart? You are too smart for me. Take your clothes off and come over to the bars, and I will happily give you what the mouse wanted. No tricks, either. I need some of that before you all kill me.”
“I only do what the master tells me to do. He’s a powerful sorcerer, and he knows how to handle tricky prisoners like you.”
She looked down at the floor of the cage, and I thought I saw tears forming in the corners of her dark eyes.
“You know the Master won’t kill you if you tell him what he wants to know about the necromancer.”
“Oh, I intend to tell him everything and then some. I do not love the Lord who sent me here to die. But I have no confidence that you won’t kill me anyway.”’
“No, he wouldn’t do that. The master does not deal with others in any openly cruel manner. He wants you for some reason more than just what you can tell him about your evil master.”
“What happened to the last prisoner that was in this cage?”
I didn’t really want to tell her about Duurt. That was a five-inch-tall monster with no redeemable qualities.
“We cut her up and boiled her to make pet food. She was an evil Harpy, and she killed many fairies before we captured her.”
“How do you know I am not evil like that? Or maybe I killed lots of people too.”
“You are not. I can tell just by looking.”
She looked at me with those dark eyes. It made my neck hairs prickle again, ever so slightly.
“You are cute, quiet boy. I’d be willing to tell you anything you want to know.”
“Really? Why did you attack Cair Tellos, then?”
“No choice. Kronomarke forced me to.”
“Even though you knew it was a suicide mission?”
“There are others whose lives mean more to me than my own, and he has power over them.”
“And he won’t hurt them after you are dead?”
At that moment Mickey groaned and sat up, rubbing his sore head. “Why’d you do that, Bob?”
“I was hoping to convince you to help me save them. But that was before I knew that everyone was a court jester in Cair Tellos,” she said to me, ignoring Mickey.
Before I could reply to either of them, Master Eli came back into the lab with a plastic bottle, one that was a stolen piece from the doll house of the old lady who lived on the eastern edge of the Slow Ones’ town. The bottle was filled with smoke. And two reddish eyes peered at us through the smoke in the bottle.
Master Eli gave the bottle directly to the girl.
“What’s this?”
“That’s Kackenfurchtbar, turned into a bottle imp by alchemy. Did you know his name translates to “Horrible Poop?”
“Hmm, well, he is a demon. It would have to mean something pretty icky.”
“Why did you give that demon back to her?” I asked.
“Because I control it by his demon’s name now. And it is technically transformed into a lie-detector for the time being. As long as it is in the cage with her, she cannot tell us a lie without it telling us the truth of it.”
“Oh, crumbs!” she said softly, while still being emphatic enough to deserve an exclamation point when I wrote about it in my journal later.
Mickey was a bean-headed child, so he is the perfect person to nattate this essay.
Children don’t always hear and understand perfectly what grown-up people tell them. So it was with me and the term “human bean.” My parents were repeatedly saying that I was a “human being” like all other “human beings.” But I, of course. insisted on hearing that I was a “human bean.”
It made perfect sense to me. Mom was always saying to me at every meal, “Michael, eat your beans. Before you can leave the table you must clean your plate. So, eat ALL of your beans.”
Great Grandma always told me, “You are what you eat.”
And I believed her. That meant that more than fifty percent of me was made entirely of beans.
But Great Grandma told me that beans were protein and you needed protein to build muscles. And you also needed protein for your brain to think with.
So, I was a human bean.
And as a budding artist, I noticed things. I had visual proof.
.People like me who were bean-heads tended to be smarter people than those whose heads were flat-on top or flat in the back. It made sense. A bean-shaped head had more room in the back for brains. And that meant that bean-headed Mr. Greenjeans was actually smarter than round-headed Captain Kangaroo. And some bean-headed people were really good at basketball. John Havlicek and Wilt Chamberlin were better basketball players than the New York Knicks had, probably because they were smarter. with their bean brains.
And as a child with a bean-shaped body, I had proof that I wasn’t just “full of beans” as Great Grandma said, I was MADE of beans. That meant the fat parts of my bean-body were actually pure muscle.
One day I was out in a pasture at Uncle Larry’s farm flying my box kite, the one I made myself with only a little help from my dad.
As I was flying it high enough to be seen from far away, two girls I knew from school and lived nearby came up to me to admire my kite as it flew.
Coraline Bigsby was a couple months older than me and a grade ahead of me in school. Alicia Stewart was a couple months younger than me and in my second-grade class.
“Wow,” said Alicia. “I have never seen a kite like that fly so high. How did you get it up there?”
I was probably blushing as I answered, since I secretly had a crush on her, the prettiest girl in our school. “I know the magic secrets to get it to fly like that.”
“Could you let us try?” Coraline asked. She was blonder and plumper than Alicia, but still generally a nice girl.
I handed Coraline the kite string. Almost instantly the wind died down and the kite floated gently down to the pasture grass.
The two girls both were instantly sorry that they had been the cause of my kite coming down. But no matter which one held the kite and which one held the string, they couldn’t get it up in the air again.
“Okay, Mike, what’s the magic secret to getting it to fly?” said Coraline, frustrated.
I, of course, with my great bean-brain, decided it was the perfect time to tell an evil lie. “This kite will only go up if you reduce wind resistance by taking off all your clothes.”
“My parents would kill me, if I did that,” said Coraline. “It is a bad thing to do.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Alicia, “But I’m way too shy to take my clothes off in front of a boy.”
“You didn’t do that to get it up the first time, Mike. You’re lying to us.” Coraline was getting mad.
“Yes, I did. You two weren’t here then. I put my clothes back on before you got here.”
“There isn’t any reason to do it that way anyway. What’s the advantage of being naked?” Coraline growled.
“Your clothes block the wind that’s needed to make the box kite fly. That’s what’s different about box kites.”
“Why don’t you show us, Michael. That will prove you are telling the truth,” said Alicia.
My eight-year-old bean brain began to panic. I was putting my own foot into the evil trap I tried to set. Okay, maybe not precisely my foot. I had to let them uncover my lie, or I had to uncover everything else.
Coraline was glaring at me. Alicia was smiling.
Well, you made your own horrible situation come to pass, Mickey. What are you going to do?
When I first took them all off and put back on my shoes, Coraline covered her eyes and Alicia blushed, but smiled as she watched everything I did. I was worried what they would say when I couldn’t get the kite back up in the breeze. But it almost immediately caught the wind and went up even higher than before. They were both happy to hold the string for a short time. But when I asked them if they would use my magic method to get it back up, they both declined. They were perfectly happy to stand next to me while I flew the kite in my bean-body birthday suit. They giggled a lot and looked at me more than they looked at the kite. But they were both happy with how that day went.
Catch a Falling Star 
Prudes and Prejudices (Part 2)
Who is really qualified to judge people? The Bible says only God makes that judgement. But who tells us what God’s judgement actually is? Especially if Nietzsche is right about God being dead?
Prudes
Not long ago I posted a short-short story about me wanting to see girls get naked while we were kite flying, and then, by verbal tricks backfiring, I ended up being the only one flying the kite while naked. I look back on that story now with laughter about my own personal foibles. But if I am completely honest, the church ladies with gray hair, wagging fingers, and tongues that are even waggier… Well, I am glad that the ones I knew as a boy are all now dead and can’t possibly read that story and shame me all over again.
And I know that I draw an awful lot of pictures and write an awful lot of stories that involve naked children. As a survivor of a traumatic sexual assault when I was ten (a thing that happened after the kite story was already in the past) there is a level of discomfort over recognizing that trend in myself. Not because I became a sexual predator of children. I clearly did not. I still am determined to prevent such things from happening in any way I can, though in retirement I no longer have access to children to talk with to find out about bad things that may be happening in their lives.
I write stories in which there are kid characters who are naked at times. Sometimes because of curiosity and developing sexuality, sometimes because of growing up in a nudist household, sometimes in their dreams, taking baths, and many other normal functions where clothing is optional. In The Baby Werewolf novel, I included a character who was trying to exploit a young nudist girl to make child pornography. He was the kind of predator I have always resolved to be against, and the book is intended to make readers aware of that kind of dangerous person and recognize where the opportunities to avoid such people lie.
And some of the nude young characters I create like the two fairy girls depicted in the illustration from The Necromancer’s Apprentice merely represent the liberating feeling you can get from embracing your own nude self, a thing my attacker deprived me of during childhood through trauma and fear.
I, as an adult human being, fully accept readers’ rights to be critical of my work and make prudish judgements about my writing. I don’t like that one critic of The Baby Werewolf who said things about my work being creepy for the wrong reasons (it is a horror story after all) and suggesting that maybe I as the author am bad and villainous instead of feeling that way about the villain of the story. It was fiction, not my personal life story. The villain character is not me.
But prudes being prudish and judgmental can do more damage than just hurting an author’s feelings.
I have had two students that I know of who were transexual.
One was raised a boy because he was born with a penis, but in grade school was discovered to have a womb and ovaries. I didn’t know such a condition existed until I saw an episode of Marcus Welby MD in the 70’s about a young boy who had to transition because he was actually a girl. The child in my class was from a poor Hispanic family that didn’t understand the problem and couldn’t really afford to deal with it. The prudes, judgemental as always, were not kind. This he/she hermaphrodite was forced to grow up as a flamboyantly gay male even though he was capable of physically changing into a woman who could conceive a child. I followed his development for as long as I was able. I did spend one long and awkward evening talking to him/her about his/her crush on me. I could’ve gotten the prude finger-wag over that strange conference too, if anybody had bothered to care about that poor child. I certainly wasn’t going to kiss him, and I had to send him home at the end of that discussion because of what he/she wanted from me. I suspect there were other men who took advantage of him/her. But I wasn’t close enough to help him in any real way. And I lost touch soon after he/she left my class. Based on that bizarre discussion we had, I have no confidence at all that the poor child is still alive. Nobody seemed to care about this child That is the most tragic of things teachers sometimes have to deal with.
The other trans student I had in class for a year was a girl as far as she was concerned. It was not a question open for debate. She was quiet and a good student. She only had a couple of friends, but they were good friends and stood by her. At the time she was in my middle school class, she already had breasts thanks to hormone therapy. By now she has probably transitioned by surgical means. Her life was a lot easier than the boy with ovaries. But prudes in Texas abound and provide a lot of sour fruit.
I personally find it offensive that anyone would deny either of these two people the use of whatever restroom was comfortable for them.
What gives the typical prude the right to pass judgement on anyone else’s behavior? Prudes can cause repression of natural behaviors for the benefit for no one but themselves. I find prudishness to be reprehensible. But the rub is… being judgemental about that makes me a prude too.
I try never to be judgemental. I would much rather accept everyone for who they are, or who they think they are, than rely on what I think they are. And I do listen when others judge me. I have changed things in my books and drawings because of observations my others. And I take everything seriously… especially comedy.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, nudes, Paffooney