Adagio 4 – Don’t Go Here
I have to tell you, brilliant as I am, I will probably never figure out the reasons for the existence of things like the Bedrock Culture of the planet, Don’t Go Here. I do know that the first colony that archeologists uncovered from there was a back-to-nature group that had a weird religion that insisted they reject all modern technology. After a number of years, their culture began to be inundated with marooned starship passengers by the Stardog Corsairs. It was claimed that the only entertainment that had been left to them were a handful of cartoon holovids and one holovid player. The Flintstones took on a kind of religious significance among the growing population of the planet.
Evidence clearly indicates that the first colonists were Galtorrian refugees from the planet Dionysus. They were a group of Galtorr/Human Fusions, Earthers, and a group of humanoid saurians known as Dions on Dionysus. You know what that mix looks like, right? Lizard men and half-lizard-men with humans mixed in. They brought with them saurian pets and work animals of the kind usually referred to in Galactic English as the dinosaurs. They also brought numerous Dionysian plants.
Now, Dions are not accustomed to wearing clothing anywhere but in space. They have natural scale armor and even their private parts and prehensile tails are covered by living leather and scales. That’s a fashion choice that makes me cringe a little. The humans who came with them were dedicated to the idea that it was only right to wear as little clothing as they could get away with in honor of their Dion friends. Even the primitive monkey people who were brought along as slaves, those peculiar furry pygmies known as Lemurians, were taught to wear nothing beyond the occasional synthetic fur.
I guess it only made sense when this back-to-nature group with their cartoonish ways and chosen primitive lifestyle were mixed with castaways from all over, and marooned spacers stripped of all tech gear, they were bound to mutate into a blended culture unlike any that had grown up anywhere else.
For clothing, a few electrical material synthesizers were created from scrounged parts of the scuttled colonial ships. Thus, synthetic furs could be manufactured for clothing, since organic material was plentiful, but furred animals didn’t exist on the planet. Synthesized stone-foam wads could be easily hollowed out to make stone homes that looked almost exactly like the homes in the Flintstones holovids.
The fake orange furs with black triangles on them came to be known as Fredsuits. White fur dresses became known as Wilma Skins. Blue fur went into Bettypelts, and Brown was for Barneysuits. Bam-Bam Shorts and Pebblespelts, also known as Bonehead Skins, rounded out the major styles. Fred, Wilma, Barney, Betty, Pebbles and Bam-Bam became the most common names chosen by colonists and castaways alike. They began to distinguish themselves from one another by adding numbers to their names. Most ridiculous of all, the most common vehicle developed by the highly imitative culture was the foot-powered car. They gave up all practical value in order to imitate the cartoon show.
By the time the Aero Brothers arrived, the culture of the planet Don’t Go Here had degenerated into something unparalleled in history and monumentally silly.
And, of course, I have hoarding disorder so bad that I can’t resist starting new collections of dolls when toy-makers are putting out the new stuff at Christmas, even though the Princess has thoroughly outgrown dolls. And I am not alone in having hoarding disorder. While we were cleaning bedrooms, my daughter found a fluffy rug that would be perfect for the bathroom. But no. My wife is saving it. It has to stay folded and put away where it won’t get dirty. We have closets stuffed full of clothing and other stuff that is rarely or never used. And I do not dare throw any of it out or move it to anyplace else. I can move my stuff, not hers.
‘There are dolls everywhere in my room, so any attempt to clean starts with picking them up off the floor and putting them somewhere safer. These four are now living behind the TV. I just wish they would stay put for a while and quit leaping off shelves when they come alive after midnight every night.
Catch a Falling Star 
Body Image Advice for Truly Ugly People
Yes, I, of all people, should probably not be trying to give advice to ugly people. I have some wisdom about ugliness to share, but only by participation in the world as a member of that class of people that ordinary folk would really, really, extremely importantly not want to see naked. I am not Boris Karloff’s Mummy unwrapped, but I am in no way pretty under my clothes.
So why would anybody with six incurable diseases, one of which is a skin disease that involves reddish pink bleedy spots, ever contemplate becoming a nudist?
Well, horrible as I am, I have had a lifelong yearning for a life lived naked. I recently found an online quiz thing that asked the question, “Should you become a nudist?” Here is the result it gave me;
So, apparently, I have nudist tendencies. I have been concealing a long-standing desire to throw off all my clothes and walk around naked all the time. And I have been doing it all my life. But I am not some mentally ill pervert, or even an exhibitionist. I just have an innate feeling, as I suspect most people do, that I was meant to live a more natural life wearing only the things that God clothed me with. When I think of myself naked, I try to think of myself more like the boy I have drawn here to picture the feelings I have about nudity;
There is a certain innocence and rightness involved in being nude. I don’t generally push it in people’s faces. I don’t plaster a bunch of naked pictures of myself on the internet. Some nudists do. I see a lot of naked people on Twitter now that I have written articles for nudist blogs and joined a couple of nudist websites. But they are not Playboy magazine nudes. They are more often than not the slightly overweight, blobby sort of people that look like oddly bulbous stacks of uncooked pancake dough. They are the kind of unfettered and unashamed personal body images that go a long way toward making me feel better about my fat old blobby-spotty self. If people like that can be proud of their naked form, then my bugged-out eyes help convince my stupid head that I could do it too.
I have been to a nudist park precisely one time. As chronicled in this blog last July, I visited the Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. I have been naked in the presence of other naked people. And it really is a liberating experience. Being seen naked by naked girls is not nearly as soul-crushingly embarrassing as I once believed. Especially since being a nudist is in no way about sex. In fact, lewd behavior of any kind gets you kicked out of a nudist park faster than if you were doing the same thing at the Ballpark at Arlington for a Texas Rangers baseball game. (Most of those lewd dudes, admittedly, were fueled more by alcohol than hormones.) Those people at the nudist park did not look at me, scream in horror, and run away. They looked me in the eye, smiled, and talked to me as if I were the same as they are.
So my advice to sincerely ugly people, based on my own experiences as a bug-ugly human being is… become a nudist. Learn to accept your whole ugly, horrible self as an ordinary human being with no artificial veneer. Do not cover up who you actually are. Then, you may begin to see that what you always thought of as ugliness and horribleness is really beauty and grace and healthy human-ness.
Leave a comment
Filed under commentary, empathy, goofy thoughts, healing, humor, mental health, nudes, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as Bluebonnet nudist park, body image, humor, nudists